DanielH wrote:My idea was a non-Speaker kobold, but I decided they are probably just slightly cognitively too unlike humans.
I don't think they are. Humans do come in 'aphasic', and beyond that the difference is almost entirely cultural.
You do run into the problem that they don't sleep alone, though, approximately ever. (Lurker is not representative at all, something like one in ten thousand kobolds of her species and culture is that independent, and even she only mostly tolerates it.) Even small groups are uncommon, and the lower bound for those is like four or five kobolds.
DanielH wrote:I think that many elves, if presented with a demand to choose and then an accusation of stalling (especially if that accusation came with the statement that “I See you” is not a question) would at least consider dropping into war manners.
I mean, at the point where someone has broken into your house and is sitting on you and addressing you in a vaguely threatening way, it's probably safe to assume that they don't care whether you See them or not and likewise would not care if you yourself declined to be Seen.
That too. But would that be immediately clear if you are groggy from having just been asleep?
And it doesn't matter much if the not-a-question statement is about Seeing or about how it would be interesting to know what the Shadow was doing or the purpose of choosing a card. Either way it might prompt you into War Manners if you weren’t there already.
Ezra wrote:Kobolds - well, we've seen Shadows in a group of two, maybe they can come in groups of five?
Interesting way to introduce a species to Shadopolis: Mass tarot them.
You could conceivably tarot a whole tribe at once, yes. They'd basically get random cards - if pointing or taking counts as picking, the more levelheaded ones would mostly end up with fool and empress ones - and the chief and Speaker(s) would be SO MAD. *chuckle*
Decently, for the most part; it's an anatomy swap, not 'you are now trans', and even the 30%-or-so of kobolds who do consider their reproductive anatomy relevant to their identity tend to care about it less than your average western-culture human does - they're already being installed in new random bodies, the extra change isn't a major thing on top of that in most cases.
Given that one of the available anomalies of the Fool card is basically Ranma, wouldn't that potentially remove a great deal of the "you are now the opposite biological sex" problem?
