Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
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- She/Her
I guess dragon kings hatch from eggs, but those are also thematically dragons, not actually dragons, even if they are otherwise very elementally associated.
General Exalted Thread
They're weird reptile things that look like dragons. Eggs are totes apropes!
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
The definition of 'Human' in Creation is very flexible, but the mechanics-metaphor here is that when you Exalt, any mechanically meaningful mutations like sharp claws (combat statline), night vision and so on are removed unless you spend BP; this is largely a balance conceit, mind.
Note that this does *not* immediately make a beastman into a human, removing their tiger face or tail or anything. You can *look* as freaky as you want, but the more you deviate from 'human baseline' the stranger and more hoops you have to jump through during exaltation.
IIRC there are canonically a few beastmen tribes with their own Terrestrials.
Like those bat people in the mid-East( somewhere between the Scavenger Lands and the proper Far East) with a Wood(and/or Air?)-Aspected bloodline.
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Graypairofsocks
What is Grammar?
- Location
- earth
White wolf and Onyx path may have injected their fetishes into exalted, but that doesn't mean you need to as well.
- Location
- Singapore
Only negative and a couple specifically labeled* mutations have mandatory removal. Any mechanically relevant mutations need to be paid for with BP if you want to keep them. You can keep cosmetic ones all you want.
So if you want anime style cat ears you can have them but if you want them to give you better hearing you need to buy them with BP.
*Either due to being redundant with exalted powers or massively OP when combined.
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Arkievyes
- Location
- why should I
how is egg laying a fetish? how would that even work? why you gotta make it creepy, thats on you.seriously, hawkwoman lays eggs in the justice league batman beyond crossover. a children's cartoon. fuck off with your weird shit and quit trying to put it in my mouth because of your issues
harems are a fetish, egglaying is just logistics
they could also reproduce by budding or spores if that helps. or long lost 1st age cloning vats(but then you're gonna get twilights trying to build one)suppose I'd even settle for/accept the excessive pregnancy and recovery period being explained by dragonbloods having twins and triplets far more often than the human norm and being born healthier overall, although that doesn't make the primordial war lore any less stupid "we barely managed to squeeze in training between orgies...every 12 years" the only way to square 'no breeding camps' now with 'mass produced soldiers' then is to have something lost with high breeding that'd have sped things along. like being an egg laying subrace that originally got to skip all this downtime and replace the stupid elephant-seal harem thing
why would it? just make it a function of female dragonbloods so if you knock up mortals you get the shitty and pointlessly inconvenient/weird 15 month pregnancy, and make breeding weak enough they've lost it to time.
explain the term "lost eggs" then
dragonbloods have the same goofy habit of assigning themselves metaphorical dragon traits as game of throne nobility does for their mascots. obviously somebody thought, in setting, that dragons laid eggs or they wouldn't call them that.
could have sworn 3e devs said the exact opposite of that more than once
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- Location
- Singapore
Because, and i swear, themes matter, goddamit
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
edit: I misread the posts involved, but I'm leaving what I initially said up for posterity.
... You have simultaneously given a perfect example of what actually happened to create the term "lost egg" while missing it.
It's a play off them being dragon-blooded. This is also why the Realm military is organized into legions that break down into dragons, wings, talons, and scales. Jumping off your reference to GoT, someone calling Joffrey a lion cub because he's a young child of a Lannister doesn't mean anyone thinks he's literally a lion. It's a pun.
3e devs have said a lot of things. Some have made sense, some haven't.
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Arkievyes
- Location
- why should I
I know. but what I'm saying is that if it's so weird to think some kind of dragon would lay eggs in setting then that specific metaphor would never have happened. it was in reply to somebody saying nobody in setting would look at a dragon and think "i bet those things lay eggs" because they're known as spiritual beings that just naturally form when elementals get really big or whatever. which is a dumb argument to make because they also name random dinosaurs dragons. in setting. dinosaurs lay eggs, therefore something in setting that is called a dragon lays eggs. hence the term lost egg.
iirc most of the spirit dragons don't even have wings either but that doesn't stop people from knowing that dragons have wings and naming an army size after it.
I liked your post because I assume it was making fun of my incorrect overuse commas, otherwise I'm somewhat confused by what you were saying and would ask for clarification
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- Location
- Singapore
Because the terrestrial exalted are from the Elemental dragons, and get their powers from them.
The dragon is a motif, a mascot, a link, a symbol. The only similarity they have with the elemental dragons is their elemental powers. Not any draconic traits. Any abilities they have, is a human ability viewed through the lens of an element. And what of that gives you egg laying terrestrials?
The only exalted I would expect to lay eggs would be lunars or infernals. Lunars cause animals. Infernals cause Yozis.
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Arkievyes
- Location
- why should I
Violation of Rule 6 - If Your Post Gets This Fetish-Weird, Stop. 'uncontrollably horny elemental monstergirls that look 16 forever and demand you fill their glacially slow womb' Is A Bad Sign
what of that gives you 15 month pregnancies or turns you into a harem protagonist surrounded by uncontrollably horny elemental monstergirls that look 16 forever and demand you fill their glacially slow womb?(ca you get more creepily magical realm anonymous whitewolf freelancer? is this supposed to the the anime influence I've always heard exalted has?)
if gia can skew gender ratios and turn their sexdrive to 12 she could have found a more efficient reproductive system, or at the very least not broken the one humans started with by nearly doubling the gestation period and tacking on a decade long cooldown timer between single births.(which just so happens to also break her alleged harem plan to get around the female bottleneck on population growth and mass-produce an army)
it's silly no matter what
eggs are just somehow actually less silly. I'd consider that a failing by the writers more than an endorsement of eggs though.
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azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
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- He/They
Ah, I suppose that's my fault for skimming the posts involved in this argument because I didn't want to touch it. You are correct on this, there are creatures (mundane ones) called "dragons" in Creations.
Like river dragons (Exalted 1e core p317 and 318, Exalted 2e core p349,
(I don't know the in-setting reason for the naming scheme for Legion units, and I confess that it confuses me a little but it's neat so I'll accept it.)
So, yeah, dragons do, in fact, lay eggs in Creation, @Kaiya .
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All this proves is that you didn't try an image search for it.
If you value your virgin eyes then don't try it.
- Location
- Singapore
Violation of MDP - Posting 'This Totally Isn't Implying Porn!' Family Guy Clips Is Not Helping This Discussion. Don't Do This Again.
Hmm......
Here, my friends.
WHAT THE HELL MADE YOU THINK POSTING THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? -- STRYPGIA
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Arkievyes
- Location
- why should I
...did 3e corebook mean to say that poachers battle beastmen for precious furs and hides?
FUR IS MURDER beastmen are people too
FUR IS MURDER beastmen are people too
RedV
Refuelling
- Location
- Right here
Yes, but Autochthon could have included that functionality to improve the Terrestrials role as weapons and to ensure that the majority of first generation females did not sit out combat because "be fruitful and multiply"
It would be a good upgrade to Dragonblooded imo. Maybe not eggs, since that wouldn't allow for or would restrict the stories of Lost Eggs if everybody knew they hatched from eggs only, but something like (for Dragonblooded) romantic and sexual intimacies giving rise to "potential" which can then be borne by any Dragonblooded parent (or spirits in case of last resort; probably add charmtech to Presence/Lore/Linguistics to add members to "your family" for purposes of eggs)
In the case of wanting to have stories about pregnancy with Dragonblooded, perhaps actually going thru with the birth has some significance in that it makes laying destinies easier for Sidereals and so the Immaculate Order preaches that Dragons should conserve their essence like Hesiesh and lay like mortals to bear destined children or some horseshit which encourages people to have normal pregnancies if they don't have active duties for the additional chance of "destined heroism"
The main point is to have a system of childbirth where birthing doesn't neccesarily inconvenience female characters in a campaign and to avoid the bad design issues implied by the longer gestation period of DBs.
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but y tho?
No, seriously. But why though. I haven't seen anything to actually justify this weird obsession with eggs and getting Dragonblooded from anything that isn't "when a daddy loves a mummy very much, or both the daddy and the mummy forgot to take their maiden's tea".
Dragonblooded are made by normal human sex (or normal beastman sex), because Dragonblooded are the kind of heroes who are defined by their special heritage. They're the bastard sons of the last king who come into their special powers on their 20th birthday and have kung-fu fights against their spoiled, aristocratic half-siblings who call them "half-breeds". They're the aristocrats who obsess about marrying well and have a vast web of marriages like European royalty. They're the people whose power comes from the blood.
And given that a female Exalt is only actually inconvenienced by pregnancy at all for the last trimester (the fifth one), the solution there is to not compress your timescales so much and let your characters have odd seasons of downtime/dramatic scale actions. When your Dragonblooded PC is the satrap of a Threshold nation, she can have a child if she wants. And if the local barbarians get uppity about her breastfeeding in front of them, she can sneer at them and call them savages.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
i think the fascination with 'anything non-human' is that people have trouble imagining human as being Awesome. We're conditioned by media to believe that you have to be alien or quirky to come off as believably Super. It's why people want lots of 'techno' transhuman solar effects for lack of a better term. I'm not speaking of this thread or anyone in particular, just a trend I've noticed.
- Location
- Denmark
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- She/Her
No, stop.
You are fundamentally missing the forest for the trees, the Dragon-Blooded's creation has nothing to do with Autochthon or Gaia or whatever, their thematic role in the setting is that of the decadent nobles of the Blessed Isle and the wandering heroes of Lost Eggs and so on. They were later expounded upon, but the theme of 'super soldiers' actually came much later, they don't lay eggs because they're nobles and they're knights and should thus enable and tell those stories; they're the blessed bloodline of the king, by the grace of God or the special bloodline techniques of like idk Naruto. Giving them the ability to lay eggs is a murder and perversion of their themes that takes an impresssive amount of literalistic and reductionistic thought.
You're missing the point when you're just going "ah but the Dragon-Blooded only have pregnancies because it makes it easier for the Sidereals", it's already freakishly hard to put a destiny on an Exalt and that's for the exact reason that Sidereals don't turn everyone else into agency-less puppets of a multitude of destinies. Dragon-Blooded are not dragons, they are aristocrats, they are the blood of kings, they are secret bloodline techniques and taking this away from them deeply hurts them and encourages Terrestrial Breeding Camp Syndrome even more than already.
You may think you're doing female characters a service, but what you have... somehow failed to realize is that this merely increases the rate by which you get weird posts on the max amount of female Dragon-Blooded egg-birthing rates and honestly this is incredibly creepy so I'm just going to jump onwards.
The point is that pregnancy already doesn't inconvenience Dragon-Blooded, in fact that one of the signature characters was literally born while her mother was engaged in combat, after which she continued on fighting should probably tell you how valid that line of critique is.
If only some clever, handsome and intelligent (I also hear he's very good at what he does and is 10/10 best lawyer ever) wrote some kind of guide to Dragon-Blooded themes.
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Arkievyes
- Location
- why should I
Violation of Rule 4 - Dicing Up Others' Arguments Like This And Responding With 'y not?' Is Spaghetti Posting And Lazy. Stop.
not like, "dragonbloods hatch from eggs only, nondragonblood kids are born normally" but like "maybe some high breeding dragonblood females still have the ability to lay eggs, but if so the kid that hatches still might just be normal human just like it works now" in fact, probably nobody actually still can lay eggs or even remembers that dragonbloods used to literally do so. it's just slang to them at this point.
it's more about the ridiculousness of the first age than anything to do with lost eggs now, and it's really only about the "depleted progenerative essence" wog being silly when compared to "the first generation had a 999:1 female to male ratio to maximize breeding speeds" sidebar. any benefit from doing that is utterly destroyed by making them wait 12 years to do it again and only letting that one guy knock up 1 at a time anyway. also it was a dumb sidebar in the first place.
also it'd be mildly convenient and fixes somebody's complaint I skimmed a few pages ago about "it can't be a cultural reason, it needs to be a hard biological cap because otherwise female dbs need to explain not being home and pregnant".
I'm just making fun of the dragonblood's tacked on lore tidbits
what? how? it has next to nothing to do with that one way or the other
nah, that part would still happen either way. think lizards and birds not fish.
1 why not
2 because it somehow makes more sense than what the devs actually wrote in two separate editions both taken individually and vastly more so when combined.
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- Location
- Denmark
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- She/Her
That sidebar was added in second edition and has nothing to do with their original vision, and is frankly stupid because it encourages the view of the Dragon-Blooded as faceless elemental mooks.