Thaluikhain wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:09 am
Emerald wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:55 am
If the genders here are more related to the dragon colors, you have a situation where there's an obvious hierarchy of red > blue > green > black > white in terms of the power levels of the actual chromatic dragons
Bit off-topic, but while white dragons are obviously worse (no love for poor white dragons), black are second worse? I thought they were up there with red, with green and blue being a close second and white way behind. Though, may be out of date, if not totally wrong on this.
You're not alone in that impression, people do tend to lump red and black dragons together power-wise (probably because they're more common antagonists in adventures than green or blue ones, I'd bet), but if you look at their challenge ratings, hit dice, stat lines, caster level, etc. the rankings are pretty clear.
Prak wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 11:43 am
Wouldn't acidic saliva mean they hate mint, for the toothpaste and orange juice effect, since citrus fruits are acidic?
The toothpaste/orange juice interaction has nothing to do with mint, actually! It's all about the surfactants in the toothpaste, usually some variety of sodium sulfate, that enhances bitter flavors and downplays sweet ones regardless of the flavor of toothpaste in question.
Strongly-acidic saliva would have the same effect on fruits by reducing or replacing the sweetness (e.g. sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to produce carbon byproducts, so acid kobolds might find that apples taste like charcoal) and vegetables by enhancing the bitterness and tartness (e.g. vinegar washes lead to rapid fermentation, so every vegetable an acid kobold eats might end up tasting like kimchi).
</chemistry trivia>
Sir Neil wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:07 am
In the same vein as goblin->hobgoblin->bugbear, I have them pokevolve from kobold->lizardman->troll. (Trolls look like random plant monsters in 3e, but lizards can regenerate, so my trolls got reskinned as lizards and now all's right with the world.) They also come in both chromatic and metallic.
Huh, I've actually done something similar to that before, and for basically the same reason, but it was kobold -> dragonwrought kobold -> draconian -> troll -> half-dragon troll (not literally half-dragon, flavor-wise, but just more magical in the same way dragonwrought kobolds are to kobolds and ogre mages are to ogres), with the energy type that overcomes their regeneration being based on their own associated energy type (fire vs. cold and acid vs. electricity).
Prak wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:19 am
Dragon religion is weird. As I understand it, Tiamat is the mother of dragons, but usually only tied to chromatic dragons, and Bahamut the daddy of dragons, and tied specifically to metallic. Certainly they.. could have some divine explanation for Tiamat to be only the mother of chromatic dragons, and Bahamut the father of only the metallic dragons, but...
generally back when this lore was written, if there's a "mother of x" and a "father of x," they boned, and everything else is religion.
Harshax wrote: ↑Thu Jul 01, 2021 4:16 pm
To Prak’s other point about Bahumet and Tiamat. Being father or mother of dragons is just the gender they prefer to associate with. They both did sex-changing magic to make their children.
More specifically, "father of dragons" and "mother of dragons" are titles, not literal descriptions; they're more accurately the King of Metallic Dragons and Queen of Chromatic Dragons, as they've been described going all the way back to 1e. While they do produce many offspring of their respective families of dragons, they were not the ones who created those families originally--nor do they rule
all dragonkind; there are other draconic gods for other families of dragons, most notably Sardior for the gem dragons--as credit for that belongs to the single genderless dragon deity Io (also known as Asgorath, the World Serpent, and a few other names) who originally created dragons and their gods.