Guild Wars 2

It is mentioned in the wiki that the northern quaggan are the blue orca coloured ones, and the southern quaggan are the seafoam green ones, but I also have been noticing another rather interesting difference.

Northern quaggans wear ‘clothes’, those elaborate beaded harnesses and hats; while the southern quaggan go bare. Now, you could write that off as a regional thing, the ones from the north developed the style, the ones from the south didn’t, easy peasy.

Except… so far, all of the quaggans (that I’ve observed since I started paying attention) with some sort of authority- guards, varanoses (varonosii?), Pastkeeper, etc- are northern orca quaggans in beadwork.

Which makes you wonder, could the stated lore be (gasp) wrong? What if the colouring and clothing indicates social status or caste of some sort?

Or, what I assumed before I saw the north/south thing- age? With the spots being babies, the pale seafoam being adolescence, and the daarker orca colouring being adulthood.

(My cynical brain says, they just keep using the orca quaggan models for important quaggans, without thinking about it… It try not to listen to my cynical brain, it isn’t very interesting.)

Both groups both go bear and wear clothing. It’s just that more southern ones go bare while more northern ones wear clothing.

Quaggans are comfortable naked but wear clothing as a sign of individuality and pride. Normal quaggan clothing consists of scale-sequined head-pieces with long, beaded harnesses around the upper chest and arms. They often adorn themselves as well with water-resistant feathers of colorful shorebirds, making a gathering of quaggans a festive occasion.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Mostly_Harmless_Quaggan#Clothing_and_Equipment

And you apparently didn’t observe many southern quaggans. Every village (without fail as far as I’ve seen) has a varanos – they’re the village mayors – and there’s at least one pastkeeper for each (the northern one met during the personal storyline if you went with quaggan racial sympathy, the other is seen in Gendarran Fields). Pastkeepers are akin to the quaggan’s priests and historians. Both also have guards, as you’ll see many guards in the quaggan villages near Orr.

The young of both northern and southern quaggans have spots, so I don’t get what you are going at with the age bit.

There’s only two noticable differences other than adult skin color I’ve seen among the northern and southern quaggans:
1) Quaggan hatchling females from the south are pink, those from the north don’t seem to have pink hatchlings.
2) Northern quaggan cannot stand warm temperatures, and southern quaggans cannot stand cold temperatures. It’s an evolutionary trait.

Clothing aside, there are three basic models for adult quaggans- northern, southern male, and southern female. The northern ones are the darkest- the “orca coloring,”- the southern males are the lightest, with a barely noticeable greenish tinge along the back, and the southern females are in-between, with a blue-green coloration along the back, but not covering the whole of it, the way the northern quaggans’ coloration does. Eleri, I believe you mistook the southern quaggan females as northern quaggans. As to the clothing, for whatever reason the majority of southern quaggan males do not wear any, whereas most if not all of the southern females and both genders of the northern villages do.

that could be it, my monitor tends to be heavy on the blue, I could easily be mistaking females for northern.

I’d really like to know more of the quaggan backstory, beyond ‘krait drove them out’- more of their pre dragon culture, how hulking out (quaggan bash!) became a social embarassment, that sorta thing.

(Can you tell I grew up around anthropology?)