the biggest lie, i think, the internet perpetuates about D&D is that a skinny little twink of a bard just needs to roll a nat 20 to seduce a dragon
like a dragon…a creature with more wealth and power than any other creature on the planet…a creature who is easily an 11/10 when they deign to take humanoid form…would look at your skinny little 8 STR half-elf Bard whose own father doesn’t even love them and go…yeah I’d like to fuck that
Counterpoint, my good man:
Dragonsfuck
Dragons fuck, clearly, but not just any joe blow schmoe with a big Charisma stat. If I’m Joseph J Dragon sitting on a small hill of gold and jewels I’m not gonna waste my time boning every monsterfucking tiefling twink with a lyre. I would have standards.
Counter-counterpoint: dragons are SUPER horny
Counter-counter-counterpoint: even if dragons are SUPERhorny they’ve got better prospects than spindly little bards!!!! They could be off fucking cloud giants or beholders or planetars!!!! They could be having sex with kraken in the middle of the ocean or fire giants in the mouth of an erupting volcano!
There is a wealth of sexual excess and opportunity available to dragons; so much that they do not need to be slumming it with an adventurer who hasn’t washed his ass in a month and a half and is probably covered in kobold blood by the time they get to the dragon’s lair!
Seriously!!!
I don’t care how many times you cast Charm Monster, the Elder Dragon who has probably slept with more princesses than there are princedoms is not going to bite! When you have bedded the most beautiful mortals on the Prime Material Plane on a pile of gold and jewelry you are not gonna be looking twice at any MOTHERFUCKEr who can’t at least True Polymorph to make things interesting
triple-counterpoint:
you’re right but please shut up you are actively ruining my 10 strength half-elf twink bard’s sexual prospects with this post
OP is right and they should say it
Actually…
As we can see from this most excellent chart, dragons can and will fuck anything. Even humans do not compare. The only species that can match dragons for horny-ness is, in fact, nymphs.
Therefore your twinky-ass lil bard has as good a chance as anyone. Go forth and thot your way through your DM’s carefully planned Big Bad encounter and
Hey, biology nerds! I know you’re out there, lurking, knowing facts.
If you were watching an underground/mountain-dwelling humanoid species evolve, like say, fantasy dwarves, what biological traits would you expect them to develop that are unlike those of humans?
For that matter, what might tall, desert-dwelling elves look like? Or small, hill- and forest-dwelling hobbits? I’m trying to get to something a little more interesting than “tall human”, “beard human”, and “short human”.
Dwarves:
Tapetum Lucidum
Third eyelids, if they do a lot of digging. Related, ears and nostrils that can seal – keep that loose dirt out of the mucous membranes!
Beards? Try vibrissae, or electro-sensitive or motion-sensitive hairs
Low body temperature and poor thermoregulation when above ground – use it or loose it re: high metabolic costs, and your underground environment doesn’t swing wildly
Related: increased photosensitivity
A mechanism for torpor or severe reduction in metabolic activity. This is a common adaptation in cave-dwelling and fossorial mammals, probably related to the thermoregulation thing above, and also the low oxygen concentrations and irregular food sources than can be available underground. tl;dr dwarves can hibernate
Something Weird and Off about upper arms and shoulder joints and musculature – digging requires a bunch of morphological specialization of the upper arms to be remotely energy-efficient
The ability to do that terrifying mountain-goat thing where they can scale and balance on 90 sheer vertical cliff faces
Elves:
If it’s a hot desert, dial the elf-ears up to fennec proportions for excess heat venting. Sweating is an inefficient use of water. Panting is better for evaporative cooling.
Very long, very dark, very thick eyelashes
You can actually re-use the third-lid and sealable nostrils and ears mentioned for dwarves. Keeping out sand is important!
Tolkien-hobbit-equse feet: large, flat, with unusually thick soles, if they’re walking on hot, shifting sand.
Some animals will ‘cry’ excess salt through specialized glands near the eyes, to either fix salt balance (seagulls) or to avoid wasting water in urination (roadrunners). Your main goal re: desert adaptation is water conservation, which means figuring out how to avoid peeing whenever possible in many cases. Mammals usually will concentrate uric acid into a pellet or paste, but the idea of elves with bright-white, reflective salt-lines down their faces is Aesthetic™ as hell.
I’m gonna lean on bug biology here cuz why not.
Underground dwarves:
-specialization to oxygen levels at different depths (can’t move easily between them?)
-daily and seasonal thermoregulation via moving higher and lower in the ground (or even into sun-catching, above ground mounds or mountainsides)
-vibrational hearing/communication through substrate? vibrational prey-seeking
-farming of fungus/aphids/ etc on plant root structures
Desert-elves:
-strongly nocturnal or crepuscular (dusk and dawn) activity cycles
-sensitivity to UV light— can feel/see it with their skin. helps them stick to shadows.
-seal the fuck out of any avenue for water loss
-burrowing
-postural thermoregulation by holding body far away from heat reflecting ground in day, close to heat-retaining ground at night
-some beetles stick their butts up in the air and absorb water vapor that way, that’s pretty fun
-estivation (summer hibernation)
Forest Hobbits
-Thicker pelts (fur or skin) to deal with undergrowth
-Food gathering and underground food storage
-Hibernation in cold winters, extra fat gain during warm season
-Climbing/arboreal
Thank you! Fascinating hobbit thoughts. Also elves just…slouch at night.
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
shit just got creepy
Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.
So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.
And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.
Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?
How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.
How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.
How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?
And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?
How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…
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