Dragonborn were humans once- or perhaps orcs, or bugbears, or even goblins. So many centuries have passed since the descent of their Queen that it is no longer possible to be entirely certain what the root stock of the "Queen's Children" originally was. Different dragonborn vary so widely in appearance that it is difficult to tell where a trait recalls some other race and where it is simply the random chance of the dragonborn's birth.
Adult dragonborn vary in height beween five and seven feet, with most around six feet in height and a hundred and sixty pounds in weight. They are bipedal, warm-blooded, and humanoid in appearance. They mate in the human fashion, and after a five month gestation, the female lays a single egg- or occasionally as many as three. After three further months of warmth and tending, the egg hatches into an infant dragonborn much like a human child. The mother's milk sustains the infant until solid food can be taken, and thereafter the dragonborn matures at much the same rate as a human. They age and die at the same rate as do humans, though the process of death itself is colored by their religion and its beliefs.
Dragonborn vary widely in physical appearance. The majority have humanlike bodies covered with small scales in a single major color, usually reds, blacks, whites, blues, or greens. Their heads are normally draconic, albeit with slight differences in the dental structure that allow them to eat plant matter as well as fresh meat. Fingers and toes are usually possessed of short talons. Females tend to have darker, more muted coloring than males, though the difference is subtle to outsiders. Were it not for the breasts possessed by the females, it would be difficult for an outsider to tell the genders apart. Eyes tend to be reptilian and brightly-colored. Most offspring of two dragonbloods more strongly resemble one parent than another, and extensive mingling of colors is rare, albeit occasionally happens.
Not all dragonborn are so reptilian in appearance, however. Some appear almost human save for slight scaling, a tendency to hairlessness, and the slitted pupils of their eyes, while others exist in a continuum between the extremes. These "thinbloods" possess all the natural traits of the Queen's children, including the ability to exhale a gout of energy, but tend to suffer varying degrees of discrimination in dragonblooded society.
All dragonblooded are gifted with the ability to breathe out a cloud of noxious energy. While it requires several minutes of rest and focus to refresh the inner energies used to project the cloud, even the least physically imposing dragonblooded can be a dangerous enemy. There are five known types of "dragon breath" traditional to the Queen's children- a cloud of flame, a gust of killing frost, a spray of lightning, a mist of acidic spittle, and a fog of poisonous smoke. These breath weapons are commonly found among the red, white, blue, black, and green substrains of dragonblood, though intermarriage and crossbreeding has resulted in some blurring of those lines, and it is not impossible to find a red-scaled dragonblood exhaling icy wind against an enemy. Dragonborn are raised from birth to be very careful with their breath weapons, however, as dragonborn are in no way immune to the effects of another dragonborn's breath weapon.