Dragonborn: Tipping the Scales - Species (E338)

So let's jump into dragonborn, uh, themes and lore and description and, and all that good stuff, and I just wanna say, I don't have much.

The Player's Handbook gives us very precious little, and if I can be honest, there's never been much.

Um, when you dig into some of the other, um, campaign settings or the 2014 Player's Handbook, there's really nothing in there to inspire much of anything, outside of kind of their traits and the physicality and, and what they can accomplish.

So the lore is really light.

So let me kinda summarize.

This is gonna be relatively quick after my verbal diarrhea in the cold open.

So dragonborn are what you would expect to see if you make a dragon person shaped.

Scales, horns, snouts, and bright eyes on top of essentially a biped.

No tail, no wings.

If you see a dragonborn with a tail and fleshy wings, you're looking at a half-dragon, and that could be a real problem, but they are not the same thing.

Dragonborn are one of the larger medium-sized playable races, sometimes standing as tall as seven feet.

Uh, it looks like from a quick glance at what I get for...

The, the information's fairly light in, um, in 5.5, the 2024 core books, but it looks like medium, like, tops out at eight feet tall.

So seven feet is pretty good considering most creatures are between five and six.

They have the coloration and general head shape of one of the 10 chromatic or metallic dragons from the Monster Manual, and we won't talk about dragonborn right now, but there is info in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons for five more kinds.

We actually had a whole freaking episode about that.

You can, you can find it on the playlist in, um, in our YouTube channel, or you can just check out the absolutely phenomenal and fantastic, uh, episode guide that Casey keeps updated all of the time.

So when it comes to their lore, no one knows where dragonborn came from, and they seem to not have kingdoms or settlements of their own, instead mingling with multicultural communities and finding small social groups of each other, unless, of course, a dragon is nearby, and then dragonborn of that ancestry might be drawn to them.

One of the big differences between dragonborn and their dragons, the, the true dragons, is that the true dragons tend to really dislike, uh, each other, and, um, that's really an understatement, um, when it comes to the metallic and chromatic, uh, divide.

That's not necessarily true for dragonborn, and just 'cause you have a green dragonborn doesn't mean they're evil.

Just 'cause you have a gold dragonborn doesn't mean they're good.

They just have that, that ancestry, essentially.

There are conflicting rumors about the origins of dragonborn, which to me just sounds like Wizards of the Coast not wanting to fucking commit, which drives me crazy.

The only consistent lore is that the ancestors of dragonborn hatched from dragon eggs.

After that, the stories vary wildly.