# Kobold Mammaries?



## David Adams (Jan 2, 2012)

Okay, so. This is an _endless_ source of debate amongst gamers, but I want to know what other authors (and readers) think.

I'm currently working on a fantasy/D&D/Pathfinder novel starring a kobold and set in an original world. I'm at the stage where I want to be talking to a cover artist.

Kobolds, being runty lizard-dragon people, look something like this:









(image by Wizards of the Coast)

But, well, my story has a _female_ kobold. Now, kobolds are reptilian and explicitly lay eggs. Therefore, logic dictates that they don't have mammaries (that's boobies).

However... without hair, eyelashes, humanoid hips, or mammaries it's hard to tell that the kobold is female. So sometimes they are drawn like this:












Spoiler



The Kobold Queen, from _The Koboldnomicon_. Thanks to Bards and Sages for the link in another thread!



This one has hair and pseudo-eyelashes, which I'm not going to have since I picture them reptilian enough that they don't have those.

Note that Wizards of the coast made Dragonborn, basically human sized kobolds, boobified in the latest (poorly received) edition of their game as seen here:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/124/dragonbornfemalebs1.jpg
(direct linking avoided due to host preference)

Which while logically a bit strange is, I have to admit, more obviously female.

Thusly I ask: Boobies? No boobies? Does it matter if it's a distinctly female protagonist or not, especially from a reader's point of view? What should I tell my cover artist?

Will I get one-starred because "It's a dude on the cover but a chick in the story!"? Conversely, will I get one-starred for brestifying (my word of the day!) the unbreastifiable?

Or am I being really ridiculous and just tell him to draw what he likes?

Disclaimer: before anyone asks, yes you can use D&D/Pathfinder stuff because it is (mostly) OGL or Open Gaming Licence. Note that their game worlds are not, so I won't be using them.


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## Greer (Sep 24, 2011)

What about just going with more feminine clothing and maybe some jewellery that would indicate your character is a chick? And maybe give her a figure that's a touch softer than the others (if there's more than one character on the cover) but without giving her actual breasts.


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## Millard (Jun 13, 2011)

Problem solved.


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## wraylewis (Jan 1, 2012)

I agree.

No boobies on a lizard.

I'd concentrate primarily on feminine eyes and a softer mouth. Finish off with softer body.


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## Sean Patrick Fox (Dec 3, 2011)

Not to throw a wrench in the works, but I've never thought of kobolds as lizard-like creatures. In my mind, and the depictions of them I've seen, they're vicious-looking furry beasts that run on all fours. But maybe I've played too many MMOs.


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## davidhburton (Mar 11, 2010)

My take on kobolds has always been more in the line of what's in Germanic folklore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobold


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## Kathelm (Sep 27, 2010)

My understanding is that kobolds are only reptilian in D&D (and D&D based fiction).  If you want them to be reptiles but give them mammaries, you'd have to justify it.  Really, it's not ridiculous.  Most reptiles don't have a social/family structure, so the young are really just tiny versions of adults.  You could, however, treat them as an evolutionary link between mammals and reptiles (and that's hardly a stretch, given where mammals came from) that somehow survived.  Then you can give them features of both mammals and reptiles, to wit, a family structure and nursing the young.

Or, if you're not attached to the reptile version, just make them mammals to begin with.


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## Millard (Jun 13, 2011)

Kathelm said:


> If you want them to be reptiles but give them mammaries, you'd have to justify it.


Implants.

*taps side of nose*


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## David Adams (Jan 2, 2012)

Millard said:


> Implants.
> 
> *taps side of nose*


A perverted wizard did it?

All good feedback guys. Seems slightly leaning towards no boobiefication. I'll see how it goes for a couple of days then send out emails.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

If you get trashed in reviews about there being no boobs on the female kobold on your cover, I think that's going to say a lot more about the reviewer than your actual book and cover


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## Guest (Feb 13, 2012)

Not even apes and primates have fleshy sacs hanging from their chests.


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## S.A. Mulraney (May 20, 2011)

David "Half-Orc" Dalglish said:


> If you get trashed in reviews about there being no boobs on the female kobold on your cover, I think that's going to say a lot more about the reviewer than your actual book and cover


^This 

Can I just say that when I first saw the title of the thread, I immediately assumed it was an attention getter and not an actual, legit conversation regarding said topic. Bonus forum points.


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## Hans Cummings (May 16, 2011)

I had this artwork http://hccummings.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/kaledelilahfinal-charreed.jpg (hyperlinked 'cause it's really too big to post here) by Char Reed commissioned for promotional purposes for my novel, _Wings of Twilight_. Two of the main characters are small reptilian creatures called "draks" (very similar to kobolds). Now, in the artwork, the only difference between these two is there coloration (other than external adornments), but I made sure in the text it was clear which was male and which was female (they're twins). If you look closely, the one on the left has ribbon tied to her horns (I wrote her as a girly-girl). That's about the only visual evidence of her gender.

If such creatures existed in the real world, they'd be able to tell who was male and who was female, regardless if us humans could. I guess, what I'm trying to say in a roundabout way is: no reptilian boobies.


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## Guest (Feb 13, 2012)

"The Kobold Queen" is a little joke. There is a short story in The Koboldnomicon called "Love Slave of the Kobold Queen" where the Kobold leader is a sorcerer who uses magic to make herself appear more appealing to a hapless adventure that gets captured. So I asked the artist to create a "sexy kobold" and that was what he came up with.

But in all seriousness, this is a situation I had with the _Races of Neiyar: Krakodons_ supplement. They are draconic race. The first preliminary sketches the artist came back with had boobs on the female Krakodons. I told him that was not going to work because it is an egg-laying reptilian race. But at first he couldn't figure out how to differentiate the males from the females. After some back and forth, he gave the females a sleeker, more serpentine look while the males had a bulkier, more muscular built.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

Chick gamer with a good bit of pen-n-paper experience, though the past few years has, sadly, been all computer role-playing.

That said - I never thought of kobolds reptilian. Strange. I always thought of them as humanoid, but kind of rattish. That's still not something that's going to be prone to boobies. Hrrrm. My kneejerk reaction was to say I'd prefer to see human femininity. Then I thought that would be weird. In thinking about other games, though, take WoW, for instance - one of the reasons I don't play a tauren is because the females are so NOT feminine. So, ummm, yeah, I'm thinking boobs and hair and such on your kobold...









* Female tauren would be MUCH more popular if they all looked like this. :nods:


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## Wren Emerson (Jan 15, 2011)

I'm another that has always pictured Kobolds more like the WoW version. 

I think that it's worth considering whether you think boob having Kobolds on the cover would sell more books than androgynous females would. Write your characters however you want in the story itself, but it couldn't hurt to entice readers with a sexy, curvy woman. 

As a female, I respond better to attractive women (even attractive lizard people women) than I do to less attractive ones. I can't speak for every other reader out there, but I don't think it's a coincidence that there are so many anthropomorphized animals out there with banging bodies. You don't see may pictures of mammals that accurately depict them with 6 or 8 pairs of boobs. It's always a lioness or rabbit or something with a perfect pair of perky breasts (and sometimes a penis, but that's a whole other fetish). 

If your cover artist doesn't mind sketching out both a female with and without breasts, it would probably be worth a look to see which you prefer.


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## Kent Kelly (Feb 12, 2011)

No bewbs on either classic or Meepo-era D&D kobolds, as they're reptilian and lay eggs.

*uber-geek bonus round follows*

HOWEVER, I do recall on one of the ENWorld chat threads (IX) that Gary Gygax stated that Dave Sutherland in 1976 went too far with the reptilian/scaly meme, and that Gygax wasn't envisioning kobolds that way at all. Quotes are as follows (bolding emphasis mine):

"Well, all I worked from was Germanic folklore about the forest "little people" called kobolds. All the rest of the material in the game I made up to suit what i deemed as the needs of it. In short, the D&D kobolds are mostly the whole cloth of my imagination."

"I thought of kobolds as humanoid, but with green complexion due to their forest habitat and *skin that was rough and scaly even though they were mammalian*."

"It was indeed Dave Sutherland that decided to give the kobolds a dog-like visage, likely because I had described gnolls as hyena-like. I had actually originally envisaged them as *more impish countenance, but I went along with the depiction*, as it made no difference to the game's play."

"[Kobolds] are Germanic forest and mine "spirits," that is *goblinesque creatures*."

**

And there you have it! KOBOLD FEMALES CAN HAVE BEWBS.

Rejoice.


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## SBJones (Jun 13, 2011)

You could just use head shots and go with softer and more angular features and not worry about if it should have boobs or not.


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## Gregory Lynn (Aug 9, 2011)

Who says the difference has to be obvious or even visible at all?

If you're as successful as you want to be, you're going to be one-starred for something anyway.

I don't know if it's appropriate to the tale but you could just picture her with eggs to make the point.

Hell, I am now wondering what kind of story you could make out of a species of creatures that couldn't tell if other members of their species were male or female. I think it would certainly make an interesting backdrop if you wanted to comment on gender roles. Of course, you'd also have to come up with some mechanism for reproduction that is easy enough that the inability to determine who you should be boinking wouldn't be an evolutionary dead end.


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## A. S. Warwick (Jan 14, 2011)

The most recent edition of D&D wasn't that poorly received - I preferred it to the broken mess that was the previous edition, where unless you were a spellcaster you were a torchbearer for them.

But onto kobolds - I have a soft spot form them after playing one of them as a monk in the most recent edition. I'm thinking of incorporating them into my fantasy settings somehow.

Should they have breasts? Its fantasy - anything is possible. It is a staple of the genre to stick breasts on every intelligent species. Sci-fi does the same - otherwise how would we know if the alien Kirk was making out with was female or not? Lizardmen pretty much always have breasts, and indeed so do many other humanoid animals - you just need to check out the Non-Mammal Mammaries page over on tvtropes to see that.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Look, if Skyrim could do it, why not you?









Don't get all wrapped up in something that 90% of readers won't even bat an eye over. Worst thing that happens is someone reviews the book and stars a debate, and that actually isn't bad because that might draw more eyes and more readers.

I, personally, always pictured kobolds as warm-blooded vaguely mammalian creatures who happened to have some lizard features like scales and snouts. Everyone is going to picture them slightly differently.


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