So, one of the racial "factions" I have planned for my setting is a Gorgon Empire. As the title says, does this make sense as a culture?
The Gorgons inhabit a tropical region of swamps and jungles; allied with kobolds, they are dragon worshippers, claiming their reptilian visages mark them as the descendants and heirs of the long-lost dragon empire. A highly mutable species, they display many strange and varied subraces; even their eyebeams, their one universal power, are not consistent, with individuals capable of burning, freezing, poisoning, hypnotizing or petrifying with a gaze.
Secretly, what the gorgons have forgotten is that they are actually an off-shoot of the fallen elven empire; attempting to preserve their existence by tapping into dormant "springs" of draconic magic mutated them and drove them mad by overwhelming them with vestigial draconic memories, resulting in their becoming the race they are today.
Bentley Jones
Are Kobolds a major race too
Angel Lopez
Cue gorgon sex meme in 3... 2... 1...
William Anderson
I don't understand the question, what do you feel could not make sense about that?
Hunter Fisher
How many petrified statues do they have?
Michael James
Pretty much, yes. On the surface, they seem like the gorgons' minions - the truth is that they're actually running most of the empire's day-to-day business. The gorgons are powerful, but tend to be... eccentric.
Plus, the kobolds are what's actually left of the setting's dragons; they regard the gorgons as amusingly quirky adopted siblings, but keep that to themselves.
Nolan Howard
>adopted siblings So they know that gorgons aren't draconic? Do the other races in your setting respect the kobolds as an overall entity? If they do, why bother keeping the Gorgons around?
Parker Murphy
Don't really know; I guess I just figured the fact that it's bumping gorgons into a major racial faction, which isn't something you normally see in D&D?
Cameron Smith
It's your setting user you can do whatever you want with it. My faction has hobgoblins and thri-kreen as major players; as long as it's consistent with the rest of your world it'll work
James White
>I have planned for my setting is a Gorgon Empire. As the title says, does this make sense as a culture?
That guy wot did the Cyclops Civilization Quest a few years back did a Gorgon Empire.
They were a vaguely Aztec/Japanese combination: human sacrifices, shinto snake worship, silk dresses, etc.. But their main deal was they had an extremely strict caste system enforced by the fact that they reproduced asexually, so if your mom was a priestess you were automatically one too since you're just a clone of her.
I dunno, I thought it was surprisingly well put together for civ quest trash.
Luke Walker
Something Veeky Forums can maybe help me with: my plans for gorgons is that they're a highly mutable species, with lots of potential variations from the base template (which is taken from the Ravnican Gorgon, as seen in the OP). Can anyone suggest any alternatives to this list of mutations? * Snake-tail hair * Snake-heads hair * Wings * Multiple arms * Snake's tail instead of legs
Isaiah Peterson
Petrifying could be just be another way of describing mesmerizing, if you want to lessen the power level compared to baseline humans.
I had a set of eyebeam racial powers all written up in one of the 5e general threads, but I didn't save it and now it's lost.
Long story short, the "petrify" eyebeam, in a PC, just did Necrotic damage and Slowed for a turn, but if they killed their victim, the victim's body was petrified.
Cooper Hall
Varying degrees of snakeyness. Maybe with a Harry Potter style Basalisk as the extreme. The only thing linking them is their ability to turn people to stone.
Wyatt Morales
RO Medusa is bae
Juan Fisher
This is the part that makes less sense. If they form a society as a whole one race shouldn't be ignorant to what the other thinks. Treat it more like a noble/pesant relationship or maybe like bee queens that are more of slaves to society but they will be defended with the other bees lives
Matthew Rodriguez
I'd make gorgons a ruling class, few in number but sacred to the species they rule (lizarmen? gnolls? humans? apemen?)
Thomas Harris
I like it, but the variability of their beams reminds me more of beholders' eyes than draconic breath weapons. Perhaps they could be beholder-penanggals?
In either case, please tell me they can choose to turn their dread gaze on and off at will. If these medusae are stuck with their eye-powers on all the time like the classical Medusa or X-men's Cyclops, I do not imagine other races would ally with them into a nation-state. Killing everything you see results in either getting hunted by mirror-wielding knights, blindings just to even shop at the market or make public speechs (and being sniped at the podium by arrow-wielding knights) or solitary lifestyles instead of organized social structures.
David Lee
Pic unrelated.
In my setting, I did the same thing with Yuan-Ti. Long story short, 'Nagas' replace elves in my setting as the [we had a continental empire and the most advanced magic and science in the world while the other races were strughling with 'don't eat poop', but we got lazy and decadrnt and now we're living in the ruins of our ancestors' homes tryimg to pretend we're still relevant] race.
