Dragon's-Eye View: Re-imagining Kobolds
The new year kicks off with a monster that low-level parties everywhere love kicking, kobolds. There seems to be two camps on kobolds: one wants them to have a dog/rat-like look, while the other prefers the more recent draconic association. I guess it largely depends on whichever kobold you saw first (which for me, if you are not counting D&D, would have been the red blobs from Hydlide).
Though I owned the Basic set most of my earliest D&D memories stem from 2nd Edition, which mentions them having scaly skin, small horns, and a rat-like tail, but that is about it. No mention of an otherwise rat- or dog-like appearance, though if it were not for Tony DiTerlizzi's drawing—which I feel were the best in the book—I would have probably assumed a tiny, reptilian creature (especially because, yapping-language or no, not all animals make the noises you assume they would).
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| I have no idea. |
Maybe that is why I did not mind the change to their appearance in 3rd Edition, and in fact felt that it made them more visually interesting. I also enjoyed their new-found association with dragons, and have used this on numerous occasions to add young dragons to kobold lairs, flavor their spellcasters, and create champions and variants with more draconic properties, like breath weapons and wings.
Given all of this it is probably no surprise that I have almost no issues with Jon's mission statement. Almost.
First, I do not see why the eyes need to be particularly large. Does that mean that drow are going to have larger-than-normal eyes? Duergar? Darkvision is not a "real-world" thing, so unless the look fits the theme they are going for I would not bother adhering too closely.
While I like that they are sticking with the draconic essence, I think that WotC should go a step further and give them the same scale colors, horns, and crests that dragons have, something that I wished that they would have done this with the dragonborn (which, had they made dragonborn metallic-only could have made for a nice dichotomy...hint hint).
Some people are against the idea of prehensile tails, but I actually dig them, if for no other reason than it is not something I have really seen in D&D. I mean, tieflings could take the Clever Tail feat to nab items and make Thievery checks with them, so why not kobolds?
Given all of this it is probably no surprise that I have almost no issues with Jon's mission statement. Almost.
First, I do not see why the eyes need to be particularly large. Does that mean that drow are going to have larger-than-normal eyes? Duergar? Darkvision is not a "real-world" thing, so unless the look fits the theme they are going for I would not bother adhering too closely.
While I like that they are sticking with the draconic essence, I think that WotC should go a step further and give them the same scale colors, horns, and crests that dragons have, something that I wished that they would have done this with the dragonborn (which, had they made dragonborn metallic-only could have made for a nice dichotomy...hint hint).
Some people are against the idea of prehensile tails, but I actually dig them, if for no other reason than it is not something I have really seen in D&D. I mean, tieflings could take the Clever Tail feat to nab items and make Thievery checks with them, so why not kobolds?
I like the idea of draconic colours for kobolds and dragonborn so much that it's canon for our home game. I've taken a more liberal stance, allowing chromatic dragonborn and metallic kobolds, but they're vastly in the minority and are typically ostracized. I also allow the rare non-matching colour/metal to breath weapon for dragonborn, essentially just to give the players more freedom if they want it (both dragonborn characters have chosen corresponding metals and breaths, however).
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I've put in a good deal of effort to correlate dragonborn with Bahamut and kobolds with Tiamat.
DiTerlizzi kobolds all the way...
ReplyDelete@Svafa: Precisely. I just wish D&D had a better magic system to support kobolds with strong draconic bloodlines.
ReplyDelete@L DM: The drawing is all well and good, but I like the new stuff better. I think that a more mythologically accurate kobold would make for an interesting monster, however.
I do like kobolds being tied to dragons, because they are kind of iconic low level monsters...hey, it's dungeons and DRAGONS..kobolds more often than not would be the first exposure from any kind of dragonics for a new party of adventurers. It also given them more porpouse to be on higher level adventures like this, because they can end up being servants of a dragon and such. On my campaing that is on paragon tier, they still have their uses because of the antagonistic factions is a draconic army (Dragonborns and Dragons metallic and chromatic...they want to bring back Io), they use them in big quantities to swarm enemies and to infiltrate towns and buildings and sabotage them.
ReplyDelete