Saurian race description

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ForestDragon
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by ForestDragon »

taptap wrote:
ForestDragon wrote:also, you say that females are warriors/hunters, yet mainline saurian warriors are surprisingly male :lol: :geek:
How do you tell? -> Stop thinking like a mammal!
well, then the unit typesssss need to ssssay ssssso :mrgreen:

ssssssssee? i am not thsssssinking like a mammal :mrgreen: i guessssss the developersssss need to add a new 'lizzzzard' gender
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skeptical_troll
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by skeptical_troll »

Eagle_11 wrote:Fatalistic in the extreme, Saurians believe all the events in a life can be predicted by the use of a complex form of astrology.
thinking of fatalistic astrologer saurians made me giggle. "Hey, what are the stars telling today?" "Oh, nothing new. Famine, plague and destruction, as usual. How depressing."
We really miss characters like this, in Wesnoth!

Anyway, I personally think it is always much more exciting to get to know about the Wesnoth world from the campaigns and what we can guess from them, rather then being taught in a wiki about tribal habits. I'd limit the description to a minimum, just my 2 cents.
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Sudipta
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Sudipta »

skeptical_troll wrote:Anyway, I personally think it is always much more exciting to get to know about the Wesnoth world from the campaigns and what we can guess from them, rather then being taught in a wiki about tribal habits. I'd limit the description to a minimum, just my 2 cents.
Seconded. From all the umc i've played, i'd say that i know more than enough about saurians. I don't need some "wiki" to tell me what they are.
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ForestDragon
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by ForestDragon »

Sudipta wrote:
skeptical_troll wrote:Anyway, I personally think it is always much more exciting to get to know about the Wesnoth world from the campaigns and what we can guess from them, rather then being taught in a wiki about tribal habits. I'd limit the description to a minimum, just my 2 cents.
Seconded. From all the umc i've played, i'd say that i know more than enough about saurians. I don't need some "wiki" to tell me what they are.
seconded too
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Eagle_11
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Eagle_11 »

Yepp, prolly should have left it with the first paragraph. :P

Idk where that 'saurians are female' thing comes from either, it simply stood on the wiki copied from, perhaps it was so at an early version of wesnoth ? Since that text had the word 'gender' used too often may have warped things trying to trim it down.

Long descriptions can be useful for fleshing out the setting, but yeah..
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ForestDragon
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by ForestDragon »

well, nagas have both genders that look same (to us, at least), maybe we can apply the same trait to saurians?
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Dugi
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Dugi »

ForestDragon wrote:well, nagas have both genders that look same (to us, at least), maybe we can apply the same trait to saurians?
Probably yes. Non-mammal species have no nipples or [acronym=Screw you, word filter, I can I write about biology when the moderators forbade me from tricking it?!]mammalian male reproductive appendages[/acronym] to tell one gender from another and only female humans have breasts that alter the shape of chest. Telling the gender of reptiles in real life is really hard, as far as I know, even veterinarians cannot distinguish them without a painful procedure or looking at DNA. They have good smell and can do it easily, but we aren't evolved to detect reptilian pheromones.
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Aldarisvet
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Aldarisvet »

Taptap has a female saurian skirmisher on his avatar according to wiki :lol: :lol: :lol:
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taptap
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by taptap »

Sexual dimorphism (size, either way) can still be a thing in reptiles, though. I thought this was the one point about saurians everyone agrees to. Saurians totally should have a description in the in game encyclopaedia, but it should be more than declaring them evil cannon fodder. That is just boring, why should we do this to the most lovely bobbing species unique to Wesnoth? Mainline lore has them hunted relentlessly by elves and humans at least, why not say so? The population pressure argument is rubbish, why should intelligent reptiles have trouble only hatching a limited number of eggs? It is not like they are mammals that have trouble organising effective birth control.
I am a Saurian Skirmisher: I'm a real pest, especially at night.
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ForestDragon
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by ForestDragon »

taptap wrote:Sexual dimorphism (size, either way) can still be a thing in reptiles, though. I thought this was the one point about saurians everyone agrees to. Saurians totally should have a description in the in game encyclopaedia, but it should be more than declaring them evil cannon fodder. That is just boring, why should we do this to the most lovely bobbing species unique to Wesnoth? Mainline lore has them hunted relentlessly by elves and humans at least, why not say so? The population pressure argument is rubbish, why should intelligent reptiles have trouble only hatching a limited number of eggs? It is not like they are mammals that have trouble organising effective birth control.
yeah, i agree on that
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Aldarisvet
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Aldarisvet »

Well in my campaign I did it strictly to wiki. Reflecting the fact that their prophets are male I made all augurs/healers heroes male and female skirmishers supposed to be recruitable ordinary meat :D
Also I reflected the fact of the high competition between tribes.
But they were not an evil and not a cannon folder, there were smart beings persuiting their own goals. I mean in the wiki they are not described as bandits that are eager for gold. It is that in mainline campaigns saurians presented only onesided, but I personally do not value mainline campaigns much.

Every race has their adepts that in some moment declare - stop to present this race as pure evil and cannon folder :D
A moment for some naga adept and some naga campaign is still in the future :lol:
Last edited by Aldarisvet on August 12th, 2016, 5:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Eagle_11
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Eagle_11 »

it should be more than declaring them evil cannon fodder.
Being presented as evil prolly stems from the fact they are chaotical - and that gets largely perceived as being evil, rather than possibly reflecting the fact unit is/prefers nocturnal/nighttime.

if you can present me how they could be of lawful/neutral alignment should able to rewrite the whole to be less boring clichee.
Mainline lore has them hunted relentlessly by elves and humans at least, why not say so?
Saurians stole elves' gold and have banded together with orcs against wesnoth, how does this make them victims ?
did i perceive right, is that what you are implying ?
The population pressure argument is rubbish, why should intelligent reptiles have trouble only hatching a limited number of eggs?
If you want an easy answer: Use of ice magic on eggs to slow down growth could be taboo based on religious superstitions.
Or there could be multiple(too much at once) hatching from one egg, etc.
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Dugi »

It is that in mainline campaigns saurians presented only onesided, but I personally do not value mainline campaigns much.
Maybe you could check out what is the difference between canon and fanon. What is in the game's current repository is true. If something contradicts something that clearly isn't just a personal interpretation of some character, it is some alternate universe. You are seriously reminding me of the Terminator fandom, they wrote tons of stuff about Terminator and Terminator 2, when Terminator 3 came out and contradicted with them, they called it non-cannon and unrelated to their precious first two films (together with Salvation and Genisys - so that the majority of franchise is not a part of the universe!).

In some cases, it's bad PR. The community around the Path of Exile game usually shows plot summaries and drafts of fanfic to authors who tell them what contradicts the plan for future or their interpretation, so that the fanfic would be official. Disney just disregarded all Star Wars fanon as rumours until they confirm it, which is quite bullying approach. Wesnoth is somewhere in the middle, its main problem is lack of a central narrative director due to the fluctuation of people.

I have written my description in order to explain why they fight others and are usually your enemies without conflicting mainline - they are not bandits, they just hate them and crave for revenge and getting back what was once theirs. That makes them hostile and mean. I am not trying to be pushy about it, but your approach is unsettling. I try to avoid contradictions with canon, also with any fanon I watch (mainly shadowmaster's works) and I try also to avoid clashes with anything else. When changes are made, I make changes to reflect it.
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Gyra_Solune
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Gyra_Solune »

My existing general description re-writing thread in this very forum section covered Saurians with a really really short and concise race description, but I am wondering if perhaps they should be a little more expanded on - at first I thought it was normal for minor races to have such short descs, but the one for trolls and woses is actually pretty comprehensive and I think it's more that mermen and nagas are a little lacking (especially since we have a pretty good merfolk campaign!)

The one proposed earlier is pretty comprehensive and interesting! But it'd definitely be the longest one around and it'd be sorta weird for Saurians, a relatively minor race that in canon just kinda runs around and bothers people and sticks with drakes at some point, to be detailed more thoroughly in their encyclopedia-ish entry than the more historically-critical and fleshed out humans and elves combined. I'll look into this more - seems there's a demand for much more in-depth canon on some of the more esoteric species in the game (sorta weird that actually there's not all too much established and that the stories neglect their more interesting species so!).

All things considered we really don't see as much of saurian society as I'd like, they just tend to show up, be a pest, and then leave. They likely act as bandits due to relative biological success and intellect compared to other creatures but they haven't gotten so organized and are still limited, so they know how to hold up travelers and are just now getting the grasp of greater infrastructure in places like Saurgrath. I'd liken them to what might've happened if we hadn't a Sahara and Mediterranean to get in the way of chimpanzees and gorillas and the like having avenues to expand into the more populous areas of classical civilization - they'd be a dangerous nuisance because they're close to being as clever as humans while being as adaptable and capable of using tools, and they might even have some odd localities where they congregate and form a weird society that proves difficult to really get rid of, but they'd always be at a disadvantage to human technological advancement and greater strategic capacity.
Last edited by Gyra_Solune on August 12th, 2016, 6:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Aldarisvet
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Re: Saurian race description

Post by Aldarisvet »

2 Dugi

You are going too far with your examples. I am not some orthodox or something like that. Just when I needed some detailed info about saurians for my campaign I found it in the wiki and found that saurians have unexpectedly interesting deep lore that is almost not reflected in mainline, or even contradicts mainline (in a gender theme). I think that all that prophet/astrology theme have good potential to be reflected in campaigns, but I do not know how with it in UMC however.
I've heard that bhuddists have special calendars so everything that must be started should be started in the appropriate day that priests determine, so that may be a theme to explore and to use for saurians too.
Also it would be good to find in the forum archives the original discussion about the nature of saurians, I suspect the info in the wiki is written in style that is close to Jetrel's.
When I found the original info about drakes I discovered that their caste system quite reminds me of starcraft's protoss.
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