Are Tengu (and others) oviparous?


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion

Silver Crusade

Are the Tengu oviparous?

From lore I've been able to glean that Lizardfolk and Gripli are oviparous. However I don't know if Tengu and Nagaji are.


According to James Jacobs, the answer is:

"Eggs. WARK!"


While it isn't binding answer for Pathfinder, in D&D Kenku (i.e. Tengu from times when getting a good Japanese dictionary with pronunciation and transliteration was hard) were egg-laying. Also, their eggs were tasty... (Eye Of Beholder).


2 people marked this as a favorite.

Halflings are oviparous, like any other monotreme.

Elves have pouches.


In golarion, humans are oviparous-- that's how dragons and demons and angels are able to fertilize human eggs and make all those bizarre races, right?


Drejk wrote:
...in from times when getting a good Japanese dictionary with pronunciation and transliteration was hard...

Really? My family has had one since before I was born (1963). I used it, and a newer Japanese-English Dictionary for all my translation work in the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG). I always knew that both kenku and kensai were wrong, as well as many other words, monster names and such throughout all the releases in D&D since 1e.

Kensai is supposed to be kensei, which means 'sword saint'.

Currently Pathfinder has yamabushi as some kind of mountain fighter for tengu, when yamabushi is a kind of ascetic monk whose purification riturals involve dangerous things in the mountains (like hanging over the edge of a cliff) - its a kind of priest that spends extended times in the mountains following a religious practice called Shugendo that was outlawed in Japan for most of its history.

Yamabushi is a priest of Shugendo, but a shugenja is just a worshipper and not a priest at all (which both OA and L5R got that wrong).

Pathfinder also still has kensai which as described above is still wrong.

In Japanese folklore, tengu do lay eggs.


I didn't knew about kensai. Now, as I am checking it is at least excusable mistake because it means (according to jisho.org dictionary) "man of ability, gifted man".

Actually, I think that L5R got kensai instead of kensei too.

I think that this mistake was caused by English (mis)pronunciation of "a" and "e" instead of correct Japanese.


Though its 3PP there is the Rite Publishing supplement for Kaidan, In the Company of Tengu, that uses the base tengu as per Bestiary, but delves further into the culture, social hierarchy, view on religion, view on sword mastery, family life, life cycle, racial creeds, then age/height/weight tables. Their preferred class options, 3 racial class archetypes, including a tengu-kensei (magus archetype) and at tengu-hatamoto (dire boar cavalier archetype), racial paragon class, tengu traits, and tengu feats.

If you're looking for real background information, gathered from actual folklore resources, there is no other book on tengu than this one. Read the reviews, it will tell you whether this is worth it or not.


In 2e AD&D they laid eggs. According to the Monstrous Compendium "A female lays 1-2 eggs per year."


While it makes a certain "sense," I don't see why tengu (and nagaji and lizardfolk) have to be oviparous or monotremes. They seem to be descended from avians, but there are significant physiological differences between ravens/crows and tengu that may not have occurred via natural evolution, especially in settings with demonstrable magic and deities. If placental viviparious tengu (and the others) breaks the GM's and players' immersion, perhaps they could be ovoviviparous instead?

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Lost Omens Campaign Setting / General Discussion / Are Tengu (and others) oviparous? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in General Discussion