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Villain: Risallis the Trespasser

It’s his murder fantasy, you’re just living in it

Setup: Few but the most dedicated scholars would remember the name Risallis, a knight from the courts of elven immortals that once ventured through the mortal realm performing heroic deeds back when heroism was largely measured by how many people you could slaughter in the name of your king/personal ambition. With no enemies left to challenge him at home, Rissallis became a mystic, learning to cast his consciousness out into the astral sea in search of dangers greater than could be faced in the physical world. 

While most astral travelers project a version of their idealized self while journeying the plane of thought, Risallis’s power, already titanic ego, and long disconnection from the limits of reality led to him becoming something very much else: a faceless collosus that stalked the planes, slaughtering heedlesly as it went. 

Adventure Hooks: 

While almost no one remembers his mortal self, scholars and travelers of the planes are well aware of the monster Risallis has become, and the grisly monuments he leaves behind. Any blood shed by Risallis’s spear refuses to coagulate, instead forming into tree-like forms and eventually gathering together as surreal red forests at the sight of his massacres. These sites often have names like “the wounded weald”, “The Bleeding Forest” “ or simply “ The Red Groves”. Players may encounter one of these red groves and the strange creatures that come to dwell within them, or while traveling across the planes they may find themselves as the Trespasser’s next quarry, forcing them to scramble for a portal or hiding space in order to avoid his attention. 

Risallis hunts with no fear of death, as his titan form is merely a mental projection, and being slain while out in the plains merely forces him to jump back to his original vessel. Millienia away in other worlds however has seen Risallis’s body mummify, sustained only by the mystic arts and elven immortality. If the party can slay the faceless beast, they may be able to trace his spirit back to it’s point of origin, break into the ancient elven shrine he’s interred at, and finish the bastard once and for all. 

Living nightmares known as Quori surround Risallis, feeding off the fear of his victims and acting as the trespasser’s hunting hounds, scenting out new prey and even drawing him to new worlds. Those affected by these malicious spirits often find themselves dreaming of the red groves, and may work unwitting rituals to make them manifest in the waking world. Risallis enters new realities through these workings, and cults or mystics that invoke such rites are invariably the Trespasser’s first victims. 

The Tresspasser goes nowhere without his spear, as the formless red bident not only strikes his targets like some limitless ballista, but flies back into his hand just as readily, wreaking destruction both ways. This weapon is merely an echo of the relic still clutched in the ancient warrior’s mummified hand, one given to him during his days by the god of spears himself. In many ways, Risallis’s current fate is a result of the compulsion forced upon him by this artifact’s divine influence, any any that wrest it from his grasp will have to contend with the same intrusive itch to shed blood. 

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Do you have any advice on making easier puzzles? I LOVE puzzles, I grew up with adventure games where sometimes why something was the correct solution wasn’t obvious and I loved it because it made me think outside the box. My players … they suck at puzzles. They’re missing so many encounters and loot so they’re under level and under prepared half the time. They aren’t exploring or learning anything about the world. But I haven’t found a good way to tone them down without handholding them.

DM Tip: Puzzling it Out

While puzzles seem almost quintessential to the d&d experience, one of my greatest criticisms of how the game is currently handled is that there's almost no advice available to dungeonmasters about how they should go about designing or running puzzle encounters to maximize the fun at their table. We've got vague ideas about riddle doors, big setpiece traps, and clever envriomental mechanisms from the media we consume, but no idea how to translate those things into a format that works well in TRPGs.

Part of the problem is that there's no head's up display or physical feedback in a game of imagination like d&d: players are purely at the whims of the DM and what information they're willing/capable of providing, forcing everyone to spend a lot of time asking clarifying questions or trying out options that won't work. This grinds sessions to a halt, as not only do players need to figure out how to solve the puzzle, but spend twice as long figuring out what the puzzle is on top of figuring out if there even IS a puzzle in the first place.

Below the cut I'm going to give specific advice about how you as a DM can be better about implementing puzzles for your players in game:

My number 1 piece of advice for running a puzzle is to be OBVIOUS about it: Hint at the mechanisms involved when you initially describe the room and make them do something when the players poke at them. One of the greatest tools I've given to my party is letting them ask " what's the puzzle here?", at which point you describe the goal of the puzzle, the problem that they're faced with, and the different options they can interact with. You can keep some things out of the description, hidden or missing imputs, broken mechanisms that need improvisation or repair, but if you can be perfectly clear with what the puzzle is at the beginning , the party can dedicate their brains to trying to solve it from the get go, rather than spending most of their time at the table poking around in the dark. When they've done what you need them to do, make it obvious: have the door pop open, play the zelda "puzzle solved" sound, scream " YOU'VE SOLVED MY FIENDISH PUZZLE" in the dorkiest wizard voice you can manage, anything to let them save time and get back to the rest of the session.

No skill checks during puzzles: nothing's more annoying than knowing the answer to something and then being forced to try and retry because the dice aren't being kind. Players likewise shouldn't need perception checks to figure out basic elements of a puzzle's functionality anymore than they should need to roll to figure out if a door blocking their way is locked. The one exception to this is when they've devised a bullshit way to circumvent the challenge that's too flimsy to work on its own and needs a bit of the luck-gods blessing on order to work.

Puzzles eat up session time, so if you want to get things done this session use them as gates for optional content. Alternatively, Consider introducing a puzzle at the end of a session giving the party a whole week to think about solutions to get past it. People are generally really bad at problemsolving under pressure, and there's no reason your precious game time should be sacrificed just because the group doesn't feel like doing verbal trial and error for three hours.

General Puzzle tips

Everything I wrote in my post about “Proactive DM Voice” applies to running puzzles, you want to point your party at the problem give them an understanding that time is limited and that their decisions matter.

When they attempt a solution, tell them why it seems not to be working and if the reason is because they’re missing something, tell them that they’re missing something.

To make your puzzles more interesting without making them complex is to have them missing pieces, either intentionally sabotaged or simply broken from long years of neglect. This lets you highlight two advantages d&d has over other puzzle games: improvisation and exploration. Having your players come up with wild solutions is half the fun of including puzzles in your games. 

On the note of exploration, try to include atleast two different solutions to every puzzle somewhere nearby, whether they be lost parts for the puzzle or a means of bruteforcing the barrier it would normally unlock. This lets your players feel smart, even if its not the exact sort of smart the puzzle’s original builder would have intended.

One of the best ways to use puzzles is to use them to double up on dungeon rooms: placing a fight or other challenge in the same chamber as the puzzle to add a more interesting backdrop.

If your party is really stuck on something, rather than letting them make an intelligence check to know the answer, describe how the mechanism of the trap works and ask how they think they’d get past it/break it. Looking under the hood like this does give them a leg up, but still requires enough problemsolving to make them feel smart.

Environmental puzzles:

These are going to be your bread and butter for most ruined or abandoned dungeons, created either by intention or because objects in the environment landed just so to create a knot that the party now needs to untangle

Rather than letting your party flounder on something that isn’t solvable never be afraid to say  “That doesn't seem to do anything right now” or “looks like you’re missing a piece before you can make this work”. It’s videogamy, but your players will thank you for respecting thier time.

One of the best ways to give your party an advantage when dealing with environmental puzzles is to take the central mechanic of the puzzle and have them encounter a simplified version of it early on. Puzzle about getting an elevator unstuck? Have them do the same to a freight crane for a minor loot drop. Puzzle about draining the water from a flooded chamber? Have them empty a massive barrel so they can reach the keys inside.

If you want to be particularly devious, consider chaining environmental puzzles, making the ones they encounter earlier in the dungeon reliant on the solving of others deeper in. That gives you an excuse to reuse dungeon rooms, as the party circles back to play with the toys you’d previously singled out for later.

Riddles

Riddles are better suited to games with the fey than for locked doors, as anyone trying to keep someone out of their chambers would be better served with an actual lock or password than 

The exception to this rule is “linguistic gap” riddles, where a knowledgeable partymember is making a translation from instructions on how to get past the obstacle but due to age and cultural difference the translation doesn’t exactly match up: navigating a cave by “heeding the unseen serpent” and following the sound of rushing water, or “follow pelor’s patient gaze” to see where the sun points to at a particular time of day.  

If you must have riddles, use them as hints rather than obstacles, pointing out secret caches of supplies or secret passages that let the party skip past other barriers. That lets them feel smart for figuring out a shortcut, while still giving them the main road of progress to follow if they get stuck. 

Riddles also work when the architect is trying to prove that they’re smarter than the intruder, Riddler style, or wants to leave behind a false clue that leads them into a greater trap.

As a design consideration consider having the awnser show up as a physical thing somewhere in the dungeon, even if it’s just a representation the party can spot, or evidence that it once existed there. People’s brains are better at drawing connections then they are at coming up with random ideas, so figuring out that “all in armor never clinking/never thirsty always drinking” pertains to a fish is a lot easier if the party noticed a lot of fish in the fountain frescos a few rooms back.

Traps

I like to think that there’s two kinds of traps, death traps, and slap traps. With the former being large indiana jones style setpieces where the players desperately need to escape, and the latter being a minor hazard that softens the party up before an actual fight. 

Deathtraps are like boss encounters, and can be run either in tandem with a fight or as a sort of environmental puzzle on their own. Given that the architect probably didn’t intend for intruders to escape the method the party uses will likely be improvised, letting them feel extra clever for surviving, rather than simply lucky. 

Slaptraps are either best deployed as an ongoing navigation challenge , or as an unexpected threat introduced into another encounter. The days of random 20ft pits in the middle of hallways are a dark and godless time and we should not return to them

Traps that don’t have someone maintaining them will either break or leave behind bodies which attract scavengers. These are important signposting to a delving party that a trap might be coming up, so be sure to include them before you unleash a new trap on them. 

An old bit of advice Traps are put in places where the dungeon’s architect/current owner doesn’t want people to go, and as such arn’t likely to be in populated sections. 

I’m tremendously fond of Dael Kingsmill’s “Click” system, which turn traps from a random suckerpunch into a tense problemsolving encounter. TLDR: When a trap is triggered the party hears a loud “click” , and has a moment to do one thing in response. This action might grant them advantage or disadvantage, or fully negate the trap’s effects on them depending on what they chose as compared with how the trap hits them. It’s important to pair these sorts of traps with a dungeon room that has some details in it, so the party can guess in advance what the trap is.

Mazes, Codes, and Physical Puzzles

Despite how essential they seem to the genre, don’t try to run these sorts of obstacles by way of actually having your players solve them. They take too long and there’s too much of a chance for miscommunication to get in the way of progress. I’ve killed far too many of my sessions dead by throwing one of these in front of my party and expecting them to solve it then and there. Consider instead using my minigame rules to simulate the trial and error of working out something complex.

Art

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Adventure: Death on the Tide

Setup: Everyone knows that a necromancer has taken up residence in the dilapidated abbey along the coast, the difficulty is in getting there. The waters surrounding the temple are usually too choppy to risk a boat, and the thin path to the temple’s front gate is only traversable for a brief period at low tide. To make matters worse, the path is patrolled by the necromancer’s strongest creation, a hulking brute of armor and stitched together bodies known as a skaab. No simple wall of dead flesh, the Skaab fights with all the skill of its constituant condavers, and between its plates and its lack of lungs can fight tirelessly in the whelming surf . To get inside the temple and begin rooting out the evil that dwells there, the party will have to time their approach just so, or risk being delayed by the undead guardian and swallowed by the surging waves.

Adventure Hooks: 

One of the necromancers creations washed up near a fishing village and went on a rampage. thankfully incomplete and damaged by its time in the water, no one was seriously injured before the horror was put down, but the horror of the attack was enough to inspire a few village rowdies to head off to the abbey with pitchforks and torches at the ready. Thus expedition went poorly, and now the families of this would be mob want their relations bodies returned before the necromancer can do something grotesque with them.

While exploring the non-ruined portions of the dungeon, the party find dozens of bodies in coffin like crates, packed in with hay and saltcured like meat sent out to market. Evidently the necromancer has someone providing them with bodies, someone with the resources to make a whole lot of people disappear without a second glance. 

If the party trips one of the many alarms and looks like they’re going to be able to cut through the tide of lesser skaabs garrisoned throughout the abbey, the necromancer will trigger a failsafe that will destroy their lab and set fire to much of the structure in the process. Our heroes will have to quickly decide between perusing through the worst of the fire to try and catch up, or fleeing back the way they came as the dungeon fills with strangling smoke. 

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Adventure: A Taxing Journey

Remember you dolts, the longer we spend stuck in this mud wallow the longer it’ll be to you get paid. So put your backs into it and PUSH. 

A state is only as strong as the defenses for its taxation apparatus, which bodes poorly for the kingdom as the players are pressed into service for an overburdened treasury shipment. Supplied with secondhand arms and asked to protect an armored wagon lumbering low with treasure, there are several reasons they might sign up for an uncomfortable and dangerous march through the woods and the kingdom’s unmaintained roads. 

Adventure Hooks: 

The players were attempting to gain political favor, and have taken on the burden of guarding the taxwagon in hopes of being seen as dutiful servants of the crown. More likely though, escorting the tax shipment is likely to be a favor they’re force do do to get on the good side of a distrustful noble. This does however give you the excuse of getting them to a new settlement, opening up a whole new hub of adventures. 

If you’re looking for a quick and dirty opening adventure, have the party be recent recruits to a mercenary company which has been contracted to provide the treasury with guards. Normally this mission would be reserved for some trusted agents of the organization, but something predatory has been stalking the roads of late, and the newly minted mercenaries members came suspiciously recommended by guild upper management.  As management sees it, they can use the threat of the beast to negotiate better rates from the treasury, as well as a cushy retrieval contract should the beast slaughter all the current guards and make off  with the loot. 

What better cover for a thief than one who’s supposed to be protecting from thieves ? with some false identification the crew has been assigned to guard duty. Now if only they can protect the cargo and their ruse long enough to get the wagon to where they can heist it. 

Further Adventures: 

The crown’s unwillingness to pay its garrisons has resulted in a force of soldiers that were left to go brigand up in the hills. They’ve been attacking treasury shipments, which has justified the players as extra security. Far more than seeing themselves enriched, these brigands are planning something with their stolen treasure. What could their purpose be? 

The journey to the next city is long and uncomfortable, which makes a stopover in a small village half way through the journey a boon to our footsore footmen. The villagers are friendly and the inkeeper offers the wagon guard hospitality at his establishment, where the drinks are cheap and the company is charming. In fact, the inkeeper has hatched a scheme with a few trusted companions to waylay the wagon’s watchmen, allowing their stableboy enough time to hitch up the horses and sneak the taxwagon out in the dead of night.  Should the party fall prey to the plotting of the peasantry, they’ll awake hungover, bound to their beds, and with the innkeep and all his ilk having fled along with their charge. 

Rain threatens to wash out the roads and carry away the wagon, so the party is forced to take shelter in a cave or risk loosing the horses and all the treasure they carry. The only trouble is that the cave is the current home of a stormsodden owlbear that is less than pleased the party has made camp in its den while it was out on a foraging expidtion.  With their backs against a wall and an enraged beast intent on pressing in, they’ll need to muster up some courage to fight one of the forest’s most dangerous creatures. 

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Dungeon: The Iron Cradle

Hooks:

Duke Tanrin Forsythe is building something, atleast that’s what the spymaters and the information brokers say, some secret project that requires enough metal to cause shortages in all his realm’s mines and foundries and a secret complex built in the mountains outside his duchy’s capital. Exactly what no one can say, because some unseen actor, possibly the duke himself has been silencing anyone that comes snooping around his secret project, which seems distinctly at odds with the Duke’s reputation as a kind, if fretful soul often disparaged by his peers in the court as spineless and deferring. One of these peers has need of the party: They’ve heard of a monster rampaging through the duke’s lands and want the heroes to go slay it, earning the duke’s confidence and report back with whatever they can learn of the goings-on in his duchy.

After downing the great beast, the main impediment to the party’s mission is a woman by the name of Tiphennia, who has the ability to spy through the eyes of animals and just so happens to be the duke’s unflinchingly loyal spymaster.  Though there’s a chance the party’s employer managed to warn them about the woman ahead of time, there’s a good chance they’ll be going in blind and end up getting a tail as soon as they’ve crossed over into Tanrin’s capital. If our heroes want to do any snooping it’ll be while playing hide and seek with a whole panoply of urban wildlife.

The party gets an unexpected lead when they end up witnessing a brawl between two old men in one of the city’s upper districts, unremarkable save for a fact that the pair happen to be a high level artificer and wizard respectively and seem to have no trouble unloading their various bags of (non-lethal) tricks in the other’s direction over the course of the fight. In between hurled accusations of “Hack” and “Flimflammer” they’re able to glean that the two men are fighting over whether or not some mechanism could work and are at such loggerheads they’ve no other option to come to blows about it. Some days later, the bruised and blackeyed artificer approaches them having heard of their exploits hunting the great beast. Introducing himself as the Duke’s chief mechanist Cosimo, He’s in need of an escort to an ancient machine filled dungeon some weeks travel away. This might just be the in the party needs to discover what the duke’s up to, but it will require a large detour and yet again putting their life at risk.

Tanrin had always been a fearful man, uncoordinated and accident prone in stark contrast with his two elder siblings, both brother and sister every bit the chevalier ideal of skill and daring his family prided itself upon, despite having long ascended to the rank of nobility where they had thousands to do the fighting for them. It was that same chivalric tradition that saw Tanrin elevated to his seat of privilege after it’d called both of his brave and foolhearty siblings to their deaths in successive wars, leaving their family’s lands in his trembling and unsure grip. Paradoxically it was this doubt that allowed the duchy of Alanath to flourish, seeking out experts to guide his decisions and govern in his stead, delegating power to those most worthy of it rather than trying to maintain a stranglehold on rule.

The fear never went away however,  and as his years on the throne wore on Tanrin was plagued more and more by dreams of war arriving on his doorstep, of being forced to march out and save his people with a trembling sword hand and faltering shield. It was then that he decided that Alanath should have a guardian, one who’s limbs would never tire, who’s mind and heart would know neither fear nor doubt, and so the Duke bent the engine of his administration to a great work, one that would see Analath protected for all time.

Steadfast is the name given to his vision, a metallic colossus capable of flattening armies beneath it’s weighty heel or from a distance with scouring rays of kinetic force. The project is a marvel, it is also a catastrophe and one of the greatest threats to peace across the entire continent. However much the duke would like to pretend that Steadfast would only be used for defence, it’s mere existence would shift the balance of power in the kingdom and invite all manner of reprisals from foreign realms.  For now though the giant is incomplete, waiting in its cradle for the finishing touches that will make it truly unstoppable.

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Dungeon: The Barrowheath

Setup: A blight has been spreading across the fields, plants growing wild and cancerous before crumbling away to ash, sickness spreading among people and livestock, and strange mutilations becoming increasingly common in any who travel at night. 

The origin if all this strangeness is a recently uncovered tomb, long sealed and forgotten since the age of the ancient magi kings: warlords who presided over a century of darkness and barbarism well over a millennia ago. Such barrows are cauldrons of the wretched and forbidden magics the magi-kings used to carve out their domains, secreted away so that their descendants might honor their horrific achievements while keeping their power from the hands of their enemies. 

Adventure hooks

The village healer has asked the party to help discovering the origin of a strange affliction their usual methods are incapable of curing.A courier passing along the roads at night was attacked, and is now losing his hair and hearing voices, where as a group of youths who went exploring the barrow have taken on an ashen palor and becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to return to the tomb. 

Historical curiosity: little is known about the old magi kings, and an institution of learing is willing to contract the party to aid in the tomb’s excivation.

This is the players land, sold to them in a crooked deal or gifted by an ungrateful patron.  While the spooky, lifeless aesthetic may suit some, a party that actually wants to cultivate the land for its true value need to cleanse the tomb and the blight it spreads.

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Villain:  Avhidrem, the Sculptor in Ivory

“ Hey, did anyone get hurt in that last skirmish? …There’s a lot of blood…. 

oh…. 

…oh its the walls….

Oh that’s infinitely worse”

-Nelegaine Nighteye, dungeon delver

Adventure Hooks: 

Folks traveling through the highlands have reported strange phenomenon, ranging from the feeling of being watched to disturbing abstract pictograms inked onto rocks with sanguine pigments. A rare few have even reported discovering patches of cliff or caves twisted into alien monuments, their base materials transmuted into the greasy-glossy texture of gristle covered bone. 

Ghost stories surrounding the old abbey tell of monks who refused to give up treasures to a marauding local lord, and so were sealed inside their hall and burned alive for their defiance. Occasionally, great lights are seen far out in the wilderness, which folk speculate are the still burning spirits of the holyfolk come to hold vigil over their own graves. 

Bloodied and frantic, a trapperwoman comes staggering into town, having run two nights and a day after encountering something horrifying while out checking her lines. She reports being chased at great speed by a spinning disk of stone, which as only slowed when it had to cut through rock or trees to hurl itself at her. She managed to lose it by getting it to bury itself half way into a solid granite cliff-face, wereafter she limped back to the settlement. She says that she encountered a faceless being while getting water from a brook near the edge of the foothills, but she had no time to process what she saw before it’d hurled a volley of stone needles her way, some of which are still buried in her flesh. No telling what happened to her hunting partner she left behind in her mad flight, but if the party investigates the strange construct, they’ll discover that it’s driven to seek the needles at the fastest speed available to it. 

Setup:  Enslaved for xer ability to open portals through the multiverse , the aberrant mage Avhidrem escaped xer captors only by wrecking their dimension hopping vessel and hightailing it into the wilderness. Now stranded in an ostensibly alien world, the mage works to find a way home without attracting the attention of the slavers who’d still see xem as valuable savage. 

A noble enough goal, but that desperate desire to avoid discovery means that Avhidrem sees any sapient creature that crosses into xer territory as a potential threat, and doggedly peruses them with an anxious terror, leading to crypid-style tales of being stalked through the highlands by a faceless entity, or outright disappearances when Avhidrem thinks they’ve learned too much. 

Avhidrem’s people, The Ossifian, come from a living world where there is less of a barrier between flesh and base matter and in an attempt to create an environment more conducive to xer magic, the aberrant mage has ended up creating a nightmarish landscape of bone-walls and blood-wax springs that wither and rot almost as soon as they come to completion. This geigeresque transformation of the land will slowly corrupt the local laylines, causing more mundane magics to go awry as this otherworldy influence creeps in. Healers especially may be effected, as more powerful restoratives magic will also force the subject to save vs the effects of temporary petrification. 

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Villain: Burinlaf Scornfiend, Duergar Captain. 

Adventure hooks: 

Working in secret, a coterie of Duergar agents assaulted a temple to the dwarven god of crafts, looting the treasury, slaying several revered priests, and making off with a dangerous artifact kept in the temple’s vault. The now ascendant elder priest ( far too young for the station) is wracked with grief at the loss of his elders, and looks to hire the party on a mission of vengeance. 

Fed up with being foiled by the party at every turn, one of the ongoing adventure’s villains recruits a company of underdark mercenaries to bolster their normally ineffective minions. These mercenaries work violence under cover darkness and with exacting efficiency, forcing the heroes back onto their toes when an easy victory would be otherwise assured. 

Peacetalks between two mountain clans have come to a grinding hault after the goliath lawkeeper who was acting as intermediary was kidnapped. Both sides blame one another, and with contacts on both sides of the conflict the party will be thrust into the role of negotiators and detectives if they hope to keep the peace. 

Setup:  While most would write Burinlaf off as yet another underdark warlord, any who met him would see that this Duergar is something different, speaking of battle the way a priest might speak of benediction, his eyes glowing like embers all the while. 

Burinlaf  leads a company of sellswords famed among evildooers for commanding a high price in exchange for the vicious tasks they undertake. Specalizing in lighting quick raids with high impact and collateral damage. Whether you want something stolen, an enemy assassinated, or a obstacle removed, Burinlaf’s mercs will get it done with a bodycount ten times the market rate. 

Burinlaf earned his “Scornfiend” moniker and his most distinctive scar on one such job, as he and his troops were contracted to do away with a particular firy dragon for the vast store of rubies it guarded. To quench the dragon’s armament melting breath, Buinlaf struck a deal with a devil for the cursed weapon “  Vartrdizmirak”, or more simply: the blade of black smoke, said to be able to drink up any supernatural flame, provided the wearer could stand the heat of all its previous meals. 

The infernal arms merchant was looking forward to the irony of watching the covetous warlord burn off his own hands trying to wield the cursed blade. What he was not counting on was for Burinlaf to come back with adamantine  gauntlets grafted to his now blackened bones that would allow him to wield the weapon he’d bargained for and channel its heat into yet more destructive power.  

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I really enjoyed your takes on Baphomet and Orcus as demon lords that might have plausible cults in the mortal world. I’ve gone through and attached similar reasonable-albeit-extreme spheres of influence for most of the other major demon lords I plan to incorporate, but the one I’m getting stuck on is Jubliex. What sort of portfolio or sphere could a giant thinking slime embody that a reasonable, very desperate mortal would choose to worship it? I’m hoping to keep it in a shape that would preserve its 5e statblock, but everything else is fair game.

Footnotes on Foes: Juiblex, Godsmidden

Juiblex touches on many of the same factors I mentioned in my recent revamp of Zuggtmoy: A "Fill in the Blank Baddie" that is 100% all slime all the time. This doesn't make them a really great villain, which wouldn't be a problem except Juiblex is up there with other demon princes as a pantheon of badguys you can base your late game campaign on. " Slime" isn't really that rich a thematic well to draw from compared to blood oaths, cruelty, or lies, now is it?

So here's my proposed revision: One part tar pit, one part garbage heap, Juiblex is a grotesque amalgamation of all that is unwanted by the gods, a cosmic dumping ground that has spontaneously developed a will of its own. Slithering through the lowest caverns of the underdark, the shadowfell, and the dead realms, bridging them together like a network of interdimensional sewer tunnels.

The actual "being" of Juiblex is dispersed across this septic sea, byproduct of the decay of dead gods, alchemical runoff, cursed artifacts, and innumerable corpses all being broken down and blending with one another into a primordial soup. Bereft of an actual "self", Juiblex experiences flashes of identity and cognition as its internal currents dredge up errant personality traits, with the remains of particularly resistant entities influencing its outlook and personality for decades or even centuries. Lacking anything resembling a cult, Juiblex’s regurgitated personality influences those who’s water it taints, with such blighted individuals feeling the will of the formless lord fermenting in the places between their own thoughts. This alien aliment sometimes progresses into full on possession, with the most dangerous cases retching up the component for a portal and opening up a new interdimensional wellspring for the princeps of ooze.

Hooks

While normally contained to the lower reaches of the multiverse, Juiblex's influence sometimes pours through in unexpected places, exuding half-digested horrors upon the face of the world like flotsam left on a beach after a tide. This might be a reason why so many sewers in great and ancient cities seem to spontaneously develop infestations of aberrations and oozes, as well as how relics from forgotten times might end up unleashed on the present. Those tho traverse these dank and fetid chambers might unwittingly seek to dredge Juiblex for more treasures, drawing a little more of the demon-ooze's influence into the world in the process.

Millennia after his defeat, a slain and mostly dissolved war god of has clawed his way to the top of the midden and has begun to direct the princeps of ooze with his desperate desire to get back at the gods that cast him down. Sowing a bit of sickness into the water supply of a military garrison, a cohort of fevered, delirious soldiers now marches through the countryside desecrating temples and raiding villages for supplies. Even if the party is able to route these foes, unless they discover the true nature of the affliction it’s very likely they’ll be fighting a mob of the common people that’ve caught the contagious dissent.

Seeking to avoid the barbarities of lesser folk, a conclave of elves established a city high atop a mountain, retreating into hedonistic indulgence and introspective study while their magic provided for every need. Something went wrong, the city’s water became tainted, and the conclave slowly succumbed to poison while the world below passed them by. Centuries after they were forgotten, the glacier that built up around their abandoned home is starting to melt, releasing their poisonous contents into the local watertable. Flooded mines, sickened townsfolk, and ravening monsters are sure to follow, all under the sway of a local manifestation of Juiblex that thinks it’s a clique of clever, highborn elvan socialites of a forgotten era, their egos and eccentricities all melded into one.

Art

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Magic Shop: The Ascendant Apothecary

“New lofty location: Same low prices!”

Setup:  While exploring a town in the highlands, the players come across a rather obvious crater at the edge of the settlement, obviously unnatural in origin. Asking around, they discover that the damage was caused when the town’s alchemist decided to pack up shop and leave town after one too many of his clients complained of unsatisfactory side effects in his creations. Though most thought him nothing more than a feckless swindler, the Alchemist Jashik Meuller, apparently managed enough magic to rip his shop and its surrounding anchorage free of the earth and have it float up into the mountains. Though the anger that nearly had Meuller chased out of town by a mob has long faded, his neighbors remember him with little fondness, instead spinning tall tales about al the mischief his creations caused. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Before he was a village apothecary, Meuller spent years as a traveling huckster attempting to use his middling magical power to charm the powerful into giving him patronage. Invariably one of his slapdash spells causes trouble, and the party are hired to seek him out in the hopes of putting right the chaos he inadvertently caused. Following rumors of his antics, the party eventually finds themselves at the edge of the crater left behind by his sudden departure: and the dangerous, chilly mountain they’ll have to climb if they want to finally track the man down. 

While traveling in the mountains, the party runs across a young woman gathering herbs and other small ingredients in the foothills. This is Jashik’s daughter Lisbyth, who’s spent the last ten out of her sixteen years following her father about from one scheme to the next. Unbothered by a life of constant change and frequent “misunderstandings”, she’s delighted to have someone new to talk to as she completes her chores. When it looks like a sudden storm may force the party to find shelter for the evening, Lisbyth suggests that they might shelter in her father’s shop and warm themselves by their hearth. 

The Strangely coloured clouds that’ve started drifting down from the mountain are getting a very mixed reception: No one minded the spiraling clouds which rained beautiful hues of light, and the glinting ones that drizzled pennies across the trade river was quite an event, but the pokadotted ones that hail needles, or the mottled sort that rain mice are ill received by the populace. These clouds are caused by the oblivious Jashik “evaporating” the remnants of his failed experiments with a newly built machine,  and someone needs to go up the mountain and inform him before he starts a truly disastrous period of trial and error. 

Keep reading

[dailyadventureprompts]

How would you handle a murder mystery in D&D? A lot of spells would make short work of most mysteries (speak with dead, zone of truth, various command spells, etc). Now of course those spells do have limitations but still.

Does the party you're currently running the adventure for have access to these abilities? No? Then don't sweat it. Part of leveling up is gaining access to abilities that let you circumvent certain types of adventure ( such as teleportation letting you skip minor travel). Mysteries are best run low level when the culprits are mortal with mortal motives.

Agatha Christie It: one of the hallmarks of detective fiction is that due to circumstances, all the suspects of the crime are bottled up in the same location, letting the detectives ( and audience) have a limited number of targets to chose from as they build up a case. Have your mysteries happen in isolated places with a limited number of variables to sort through.

Magic can only go so far. Any society that knows about magic is likely to have laws about when/how that magic can be used, especially in matters of law. Cornered your likely suspect and used dominate person to force out a confession? A) the party aren't lawmages recognized by the magistrate, that confession isn't reliable in court B) someone ensorcelled could be compelled to say anything, so enchantment isn't trustworthy. C) Using magic against someone in that way is tantamount to threatening them with a weapon, hope your party is prepared to also go to court.

A good mystery is all about piecing together incomplete information, meaning that no one person ( and thus no one spell) contains the complete truth. The dead person won't necessarily know what killed them, just who they suspect, and any good killer would know they needed an alibi/decoy in order to throw off witnesses. Having your party pick through these clues is the fundamental fun of solving mysteries.

Likewise, it's not enough to know that someone did the crime, the party has to PROVE it, which requires gathering more evidence than just a magically compelled confession. Sure a spellcaster could kit themselves out for solving crimes, but that just means the murderer is liable to take a swipe at them while the gang is split up and searching for clues.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Random Encounter: The Roving Abode

“ Come in, and don’t mind my friends, they’re just helping an old woman move house. Good help is so hard to find these days, and i seem to need more and more of it as the years go on. Be a darling and carry in some firewood won’t you? See, you’re learning to be helpful already. ” 

Setup: Every witch knows there is power in the land, but those who practice unscrupulous magic also know the danger in putting down roots, the risk of staying in one place too long and having the consequences of your dirty dealings come back to bite you in the form of a peasant mob or party of bumbling dogooders.  

Such is the case for Mrs. Gunny, a spiteful adept of the mystical arts who has remained near constantly on the move since folk learned of her bad habit in turning folks she disliked into livestock and selling them at market. Assisted by a team of faceless creatures composed of mud and matted fur, she moves her dwelling from village to village, looking to do a bit of transactional magic and bilk the locals into trading away trinkets, good fortunes, and a few stray years. 

Adventure Hooks: 

The party may encounter Mrs. Gunny purely on accident while trekking through the muddy backroads of the kingdom, or may hear rumors in the village tavern about a house that has suddenly appeared on the edge of the woods. Alternatively they may seek the practitioner out on purpose, in need of curses lived or omens read. Mrs. Gunny has no qualms about the services she may be asked to provide, and will gladly brew up potions or poisons provided the party is willing to pay. When the party invariably end up regretting their bargain ( they always will), they’ll find Mrs. Gunny having long moved on, her cottage warded against any kind of divination magic to force them to track her by hearsay. 

A noble courier stumbles into town babbling about being taken captive by a witch, her livery torn, her mind muddled and confused. On further interrogation the party realize this messenger is several decades late to deliver her message, and has spent the intervening decades as one of Mrs. Gunny’s “helpers” in repayment for one night of hospitality. Something managed to break her out of the curse, which means there’s a chance to rescue all of the towering brutes Gunny has transmogrified out of those who struck bad deals with her. 

One Day several of those towering brutes make their way into town, escorting a wretched redcap carrying a demand from the transient witch: Mrs. Gunny has lost her cat: Fleabite, and demands the townsfolk help search for it or the witch will have her near invunrable muscle rip their homes down board by board to look for it.  As it turns out, Fleabite is infact a kindhearted youth prophesized to be Mrs. Gunny’s doom, and polymoprhed into the form of an adorable, if neglected ginger tom so the old woman can keep an eye on him. 

Beyond packing her house with magical trinkets and extending her life a few years at a time, what Mrs. Gunny desires above all else is means to ascend beyond her mortal infirmity. All her stolen decades have been spent working on a spell that will transform her into a mighty Night Hag, but in order to complete it, she’ll need the aid of a skillful band of individuals either forced into her service or so morally bankrup so as to be willing to aid in the creation of a monster. Hovering around the edges of the early campaign, Mrs. Gunny will seek to put the party in her debt, then aim them at a series of deadly challenges to gather the ingredients necessary to fuel her ritual.     

[dailyadventureprompts]

How would you handle a murder mystery in D&D? A lot of spells would make short work of most mysteries (speak with dead, zone of truth, various command spells, etc). Now of course those spells do have limitations but still.

Does the party you're currently running the adventure for have access to these abilities? No? Then don't sweat it. Part of leveling up is gaining access to abilities that let you circumvent certain types of adventure ( such as teleportation letting you skip minor travel). Mysteries are best run low level when the culprits are mortal with mortal motives.

Agatha Christie It: one of the hallmarks of detective fiction is that due to circumstances, all the suspects of the crime are bottled up in the same location, letting the detectives ( and audience) have a limited number of targets to chose from as they build up a case. Have your mysteries happen in isolated places with a limited number of variables to sort through.

Magic can only go so far. Any society that knows about magic is likely to have laws about when/how that magic can be used, especially in matters of law. Cornered your likely suspect and used dominate person to force out a confession? A) the party aren't lawmages recognized by the magistrate, that confession isn't reliable in court B) someone ensorcelled could be compelled to say anything, so enchantment isn't trustworthy. C) Using magic against someone in that way is tantamount to threatening them with a weapon, hope your party is prepared to also go to court.

A good mystery is all about piecing together incomplete information, meaning that no one person ( and thus no one spell) contains the complete truth. The dead person won't necessarily know what killed them, just who they suspect, and any good killer would know they needed an alibi/decoy in order to throw off witnesses. Having your party pick through these clues is the fundamental fun of solving mysteries.

Likewise, it's not enough to know that someone did the crime, the party has to PROVE it, which requires gathering more evidence than just a magically compelled confession. Sure a spellcaster could kit themselves out for solving crimes, but that just means the murderer is liable to take a swipe at them while the gang is split up and searching for clues.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: Enlanis’ie, Kingdom of the Aurora The Stolen Kingdom

“And so did she travel into the north, to the lands unbeloved by her god of flower and field, to the kingdom of Elanis’ie, where the sky colors dance and the elderlings dwelt, where she scaled the parapets of ever-ice and sought out her mother, who had been born to the kingdom upon her shield, carried from the great battle of the age to seek healing in those immortal halls”

`The Ziiriad, transcription of oratory performance. 

Setup: There are places only spoken of in legend, destinations that can only be reached by heroes after suffering through a long road of trials and proving to both history and the gods above that they are worthy to behold those wonders.

Enlanis’ie was one if those places, a mythical kingdom of the farthest north built off aurora light and glacial ice, which existed only during the depths of polar night. Though it had appeared in innumerable tales over the centuries of its existance, it is most often thought of as a place of healing, where miraculous cures may be sought, or where figures of legend seek their long deserved rest. 

Seeking the expertise of an ancient hero, or perhaps an act of healing far beyond the skill of any mortal, the party traveled weeks into the polar expanse following the path of the auroras in the sky till they catch sight of the Enlanis’ie, or atleast it’s imposing glacial walls. Tall as any fortress but barren of any of the ephemeral spires that feature in so many stories of the impossible kingdom, the party will have to find a way through this foreboding ring of ice and explore the place where the kingdom once stood, 

Adventure Hooks: 

The party’s exploration of these great icy battlements is made no easier by the fact that a blizard has just rolled in, leaving the party no viable shelter besides the surrounding dungeon. Fending off polar beasts and those fey and arcane entities that once fed on the bountiful magic of the eternal aurora. 

Bypassing the walls leads the party to a vast exapnse somewhere between a snow covered quarry and a bombed out capital city, with eerie avenues of hollowed out foundations extending maybe two or three stories in the air before simply ending, stiarways projecting out into the open air connecting to nothing. Among these desolate structures the party will encounter loremaster Anisidora, a venerable elven hermit who wanders the remnants of her home with nothing but a lantern full of captured aurora light to guide her way. Immortal in the way of the most ancient elves, Anisidora is frostbitten and half feral from hunger, but an offer of food and a place by the fire might allow the party to discover the story of what exactly happened. 

To hear the loremaster tell it, this disastrous disappearance is the fault of one Siretiil Glassbinder, A covetous historian who grew tired of living in a technicolor dreamscape and endeavored to preserve the kingdom’s most magical sights in a medium that could not be distorted by the vagaries of the fey magic that gifted the city with all its miraculous properties . Driven by a love of her home that left no room for the opinions of others, Siretiil moved from simply recording and reproducing the wonders of Elanis’ie to outright catching them in prisms, eventually trapping the entire kingdom in a fractal gem that she still carries with her in a jealous madness. If the party presses, Anisidora will confess that Siretiil was her daughter and onetime apprentice, who broke with her mother over the same ideology that drove her to begin glassing sections of the city. Apparently Anisidora was the one thing about Enlanis’ie that she didn’t want to take with her.  Glassbinder could be anywhere in the feywild or material plane by this point, which means that the party will need to add several extra steps to finishing their quest. 

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: Torog, the Crawling King

But see, amid the mimic rout /  A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out  / The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs  /The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs  / In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all! / And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, /  Comes down with the rush of a storm,   While the angels, all pallid and wan, / Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” / And its hero, the Conqueror Worm. 

- Edger Allan Poe

An avatar of suffering and madness, the worm god Torog embodies the worst aspects of mortalkind’s relation to pain: both in the cruel supremacy of those who inflict it, and in the desperate degradation of those they inflict it upon.

There are many mythologies that explain why the king crawls, usually painting him as a great and terrible divinity of the dawn age who was broken in battle with some foe, imprisoned within the underdark and crushed beneath its ever shifting weight. There Torog lingers, suffering eternally save when someone inflicts suffering in his name. To these individuals Torog grants power, blasphemous secrets, the promise of endless indulgence to their heartless desires. One would think that only the most twisted and broken of souls would worship such a foul god, but the worm wriggles its way into the hearts of many as there is always profit and power to be had in the subjugation and exploration of others. From the slave driver to the industrialist to the prison warden to the residential school instructor, few actively understand that their cruelty is a form of worship, or what exactly that worship is feeding.

Hooks

Travelling into a decrepit castle for whatever reason adventurers do, the party makes its way to the actual dungeon part of the dungeon, discovering disused torture chambers and a single cell that still seems to be occupied by some poor wretch begging for release. This is a lure into one of Torog’s many prison realms, a realm the party will have to escape but not after being marked by the crawling king’s agents for further collection.

Grotesque monstrosities have been lurking about the city’s underbelly: shambling tangles of wormflesh that sprout from the wounds and ruptures of humanoid corpses. There seems to be no pattern in who these, until the party investigates and discovers that one of the vessels was a vagrant and petty criminal that was sentenced to a workhouse some years ago. There they find the workhouse is operated by a puritanical social reformer that places strict emphasis on cleanliness, obedience, and piety. All the corpses turn out to be those who stepped out of line and died as a result of her “discipline”, but it’s not until the party notices that her dutiful but bruisemarked husband shows the sign of infection that they realize that her abuse is what’s allowing the worms to take root.

While excavating the foundations for the duke’s new estate, a group of workers stumbled across an unsettling statue and altarspace buried low beneath the earth. The duke ordered the altar torn down and work to continue, and since then has not known peace. Terrible accidents befall everyone who was on the digging crew that day, and the duke’s dreams are full of the earth yawning open to swallow him and everything he knows. The heroes are hired to break whatever nightmare or curse is preventing the duke from sleeping, but must deal with their patron growing increasingly paranoid unhinged as Torog’s influence over him grows. Should the party not play their cards right, they might end up imprisoned by their employer just as a colossal worm breaks through the foundations and begins ravaging the castle.

Keep reading

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Villian: Abigos, Duke of Hell, and his Cult of War Eternal

…ruling 60 legions of demons. He discovers hidden things and knows the future of wars and how soldiers should meet. He also attracts the favor of lords, knights and other important persons…

-The Ars Goeta 

“I am war, you were made to serve me, to live in me, and die in me”

- War, Good Omens

Background:  Patron of warmongers, tyrants, and those who seek domination through right of conquest, the grand Duke Abigos (called also “The Final General” and “ Lord of War” ) and his eternal legions are feared across the planes for their strength, cruelty, and ever expanding reach. 

While some other devils are dedicated to punishing mortals for their sins or tempting them to the path of wickedness, Abigos cares only for the next battle, the next campaign, and the acquisition of the weapons, troops, and other means by which he may wage them. There is no peace on the horizon for the eternal legion, no final triumph, no point at which they will have “won”, there is only victory over the current foe, and the readying for the next excursion. While they may hold territory, they hold it only insofar as it holds tactical or logistical benefit to them, and the duke of conquest has been known to abandon whole planes previously subjugated to his will.  To Abigos and his followers all existence is an extended military operation, with objects or people only holding value insofar as they serve the war effort. 

Adventure Hooks:

The party may encounter Abigos’s influence in a number of forms, 

A party of revolutionaries on the verge of success may find their oppressor bolstered by infernal allies. Emissaries of the Final General seek out mortal commanders in the midst of intractable martial conflicts. Usually appearing disguised as mercenary captains, or battle mages willing to lend their talents, these agents almost universally side with entrenched power structures, as “bringing order” is seen as a universal good in the doctrines of Abigos’s followers.

Behind the scenes, groups or individuals who advocate for needless conflict are often unwitting fronts for the Cult of War eternal. When his agents help to win a conflict, they leverage their role as key allies into a position of influence within the newly reestablished state. From their vantage, they then begin to spread the Grand Duke’s ideology, tacitly cultivating battle-minded individuals through military academies or martial orders. Over decades, these war-blessed individuals are guided into positions of power, where their ingrained ideology can begin to shape their culture into a more tyrannical, conquest hungry one. 

Old Strongholds may still be patrolled by garrisons of demonic conscripts. Not one to spend his forces recklessly, the Final General does not have the time to micromanage every detachment of his endless regiments. Often mortal petitioners will bargain a tithe of souls or war-material in exchange for the services of a hellish retinue, and while their citadels may fall or their bloodlines perish, the deals stands. 

The Duergar Legions: Though the mercenary armies of the grey dwarves are loath to swear allegiance to any one patron ( that’s the point of being mercenaries after all), it is impossible to contest that their lifestyle, outlook, and entire ethos of constant martial pursuit aligns perfectly with that of Abigos. His cult flourishes among the Duergar encampments, promising a life of deathless conquest among the fiends and other horrors of Abigos’s army. 

[dailyadventureprompts]

I just read your Orcs reimagined and I loved it. An origin that I’ve been tossing around for Orcs in my own worlds is kind of stealing the mythological origin of the Klingons from Star Trek - they were created by gods a long time ago, but eventually they realized the gods were more trouble than they were worth and killed them.

I would love to see more Monsters Reimagined style pieces for Gnolls and Goblins and Drow and the ‘monstrous’ player races that are rooted in racism and colonialism

Monsters Reimagined: Gnolls

I wanted to follow up with gnolls specifically because they’re a case study in how d&d has tried to “fix” the issue of “monstrous humanoids” and the ethical concerns of “always chaotic evil” and ended up going the exact opposite direction of what they should have done, doubling down on the justifications for why they’re bad and why it’s alright to kill them rather than addressing 

TLDR: Rather than the psychoic killing machines they’re presented as currently, Gnolls should be the game’s consummate survivalists. Better equipped to live a more naturalistic lifestyle thanks to their numerous animalistic traits, they thrive in the outlands and harsh wilderness. Because living as hunter/scavenger/gatherers has worked out for them so well, Gnolls never really integrated in with the other agrarian-focused cultures, preferring to keep to the safety of the wilds rather than the frequently contested  farmlands, leading to a mutual unease and cultural barrier that both groups have to work to overcome. Gnolls have very few taboos about what is and is not “useful” and have been known to eat the bodies of fallen travelers when food is scarce, or dig up graves for the valuables stored inside. This has given Gnolls the reputation as cannibals and blasphemers, when really it’s only the hyenakin being practical. 

What’s Wrong:   As of 2nd edition, Gnolls were like just about any other monstrous humanoid dnd species, savage primitives who worshiped evil gods and participated in various acts of barbarism. Slavery and cannibalism were the things that typified the gnolls ( not that other monsters weren’t willing to engage in slavery and/or cannibalism) and they were decidedly cruel and lazy, capturing others because they thought work was demeaning ( which is a whole... crockpot of weird stereotypes that I’m not going to get into at the moment). This characterization continued up through 3rd edition and pathfinder, the latter of which substituted the gnoll’s cannibalism god for Lamashtu, “the mother of monsters”, who is said to have birthed most “savage humanoids” in her wretched womb ( again, don’t have time to get into that but YIKES). 

Then 5th edition crept around, and the gnolls took on a new flavor. They were decidedly MORE evil, MORE savage, LESS sapient, than previous versions, driven to endless slaughter by the voice of their demon-god Yeenoghu, practically demons in flesh themselves. They were remorseless killing machines who desired only chaos, to the point where I often saw them referred to as “Jokerlike” by gamer-bros who lacked the media comprehension required to relate them to any greater motivation. 

To explain why they went through this metamorphosis, I’m going to have to explain a little bit of gaming history, as well as d&d’s version of the trolley problem. Buckle in, this is going to get Pedantic...

First The history lesson: Because d&d had its roots in wargaming, enemy creatures in the monster manual were presented with a category called “Organization”, which told you how large the squad sizes of these creatures could/should be. Often these came with the chance to roll for additional troops, or have a leader who had advanced levels and special abilities. Problem was, for savage humanoids, these organization charts almost always included information about the demographics of a “monster” village, including how many non combatants and children there were in relation to how many fighters they had ( anywhere from 5-50%) 

Here’s an excerpt from the 2e monster manual: 

Habitat/Society: Gnolls are most often encountered underground or inside abandoned ruins. When above ground they operate primarily at night. Gnoll society is ruled by the strongest, using fear and intimidation. When found underground, they will have (30% chance) 1-3 trolls as guards and servants. Above ground they keep pets (65% of the time) such as 4-16 hyenas (80%) or 2-12 hyaenodons (20%) which can act as guards.

A gnoll lair will contain between 20 and 200 adult males. For every 20 gnolls, there will be a 3 Hit Die leader. If 100 or more are encountered there will also be a chieftain who has 4 Hit Dice, an Armor Class of 3, and who receives a +3 on his damage rolls due to his great strength. Further, each chieftain will be protected by 2-12 (2d6) elite warrior guards of 3 Hit Dice (AC 4, +2 damage).

In a lair, there will be females equal to half the number of males. Females are equal to males in combat, though not usually as well armed or armored. There will also be twice as many young as there are adults in the lair, but they do not fight. Gnolls always have at least 1 slave for every 10 adults in the lair, and may have many more.

Gnolls will work together with orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, and trolls. If encountered as a group, there must be a relative equality of strength. Otherwise the gnolls will kill and eat their partners (hunger comes before friendship or fear) or be killed and eaten by them. They dislike goblins, kobolds, giants, humans, demi-humans and any type of manual labor.

Remember, these are specifically the stats for a gnoll LAIR not a village. People build villages, Gnolls ( being not people by default) cram their living space into the dungeon the party is delving, or the living space is itself a target for extermination in order to save the land from the blight of gnollish exitance. 

Skipping right over how the demographics don’t bear any resemblance to an actual hyena pack, lets look at the fact that there are TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN AS THERE ARE ADULTS, meaning that there are fuzzy families standing in the way between the murder-hobos and their treasure, and with each defender cut down, the party is creating scores of orphans. The book can cram in as many excuses as it wants about how these creatures are sadistic and terrible and bad for the environment, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re people, who according to the rules and greater lore of the game a) are capable of feeling pain and fear b) have souls, making them fully willed individuals and not simply animals . How then can their outright slaughter be a good thing? 

Well... lets look at some of d&d’s  inbuilt genocide apologia, and a classic session killing scenario that’s come to be known as the “baby monster dilemma”. 

First lets acknowledge that d&d is fictional, existing separate to but directly inspired by our reality. Lets also acknowledge that fictional events do not hold the same moral weight as events in our world, and that an author writing about a murder does not in any way share the guilt of say... a hitman.  

That said, a fictional work can still be said to express harmful ideas, even if the ideas only exist on a page. A movie is not racist because it has racism in it, it is racist because it reinforces the structures of racism, justifying the bigoted actions of others by helping to reinforce a worldview that directly harms others. 

For most of its history, d&d has said that racism is GOOD, by creating an innumerable number of monstrous “others” to serve as opposition to the heroes, and justifying that opposition both by the moral framework of its universe and by the inherent foulness of those foes.  In the same entry, Gnolls are described as “Evil”, “Preferring to eat sentient humanoids because they scream the most” and “ Hunting exhaustively to the point where the wilderness will take years to recover before they move on.” 

If gnolls are inherently evil and sadistic, the only dead gnoll is a good gnoll, and adventurers (goodguys by default) should not suffer one to live. 

This is how you end up in wild situations like the Baby Monster Dilemma, where characters like the paladin, who are compelled to do good and never allow an evil act ( in the earlier editions atleast) are forced to wrestle with the moral conundrum of what to do with all of those gnoll children they just orphaned. 

Leaving the Gnoll pups alone means that they will either starve to death, or grow up to do more evil in the future, 

Because like most monstrous humanoids, gnolls have inherently evil souls, and so adopting them and nurturing them to be good is doomed invariably to fail ( there are plenty of examples of this “call to evil” throughout d&d lore) 

Therefore the best answer is to slaughter them all on the spot, which lays somewhere between an act of genocide and Cruella D’Ville level of puppy murder, depending on your conception of gnoll sapience. 

This is why I say that d&d has genocide apologia baked into it. In the case of fighting a very common enemy the way the game wanted you to fight them, the mass murder of children is a morally sound decision that leaves the world a better place. The game creates a scenario where enacting genocide is good and makes “Kill the monsters, take their stuff” a primary progression mechanic. 

I don’t want to play a game that constructs elaborate setups to justify why it thinks genocide is ok, much less one that uses the same arguments that were used to justify IRL genocides within the past century. Because D&D happens to be the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and because I like the underlying mechanics so much, the lore is going to have to change quite a lot before I’m comfortable using it, and by the way things look ... it seems like a lot of other people are in the same position. 

Now with that in mind, lets look at how  WOTC tried to fix this and where they went wrong:

In order to make purging gnolls from the world justified, the writers of 4th and 5th edition tried to double down on gnoll’s evil traits, saying that they don’t have emotions, and even making them constantly demon possessed, under a species wide curse that compels them to ruin and rend and destroy with no thought for others.  By turning that monstrosity dial up all the way to 11 ( They’re so evil that not actively hunting them to extinction is a moral failing) the writers are trying to bulldoze past the baby monster conundrum by giving an objective answer,  Problem is, the gnolls are still, technically, people,  in possession of souls, families, and the ability to think and reason... the writers have just gone out of their way to create them in such a way that their evil invalidates all of that. 

I wouldn’t have a problem with it if gnolls were literally beasts, or monsters spat out of the pits of hell, or manifesting spontaneously from nature, but the problem is that they REMAIN intelligent humanoids. The current Monster manual describes them as a plague that descend without warning on civilized lands to slaughter and pillage and wander elsewhere looking for new places to raise, making nothing of lasting value and instead taking whatever they might need from the corpses of their victims. I can’t help but compare that to villainized depictions of displaced communities or nomadic peoples, scorned by those of more settled societies that may or may not be expanding out into the nomad’s territory. 

How we can make this better: Stripping the Gnolls down to their base concept as “ Hyena people” gives us quite a lot to work with while reimagining them. Hyenas are adaptable social creatures with a unique sexual hierarchy that you can spin out into a lot of interesting cultural dynamics out of ( go look up some hyena biology facts and tell me that’s not a goldmine for coming up with unique social patterns). Being strict carnivores means they miss out on the development that agriculture brings,   but their wider palate when it comes to what’s acceptable as meat ( scavenged carrion, insects) allows them to survive in much harsher climates, though likely with smaller numbers. Groups would be transitory, following the migration routes of the animals that they hunted, splitting up and gathering together based on the availability of the food supply. 

Though migratory, gnolls would likely be highly protective of these lands, as sustainable access to a highly limited foodsource would mean the difference between being able to stay with the route or being force to travel to unknown lands scavenging. Gnoll territory would likely clash with wolves, lions, and other large predators 

Gnolls could also perform a unique form of insect-agriculture, cultivating colonies of termites, crickets, and leaf-cutter ants throughout their territory to act as backup food storage. 

( Also this whole thing about gnolls keeping Hyenas as pets always bugged me. You don’t want pets that eat the same thing as you, gnolls would keep easily ) 

Gnoll culture would likely be eminently practical, with everyone expected to be able to cultivate different skills depending on the seasonal availability of food. This would lead to less specialization and stratification among the pack-members, as well as a network of mentor-apprentice relationships that would likely transcend individual packs. The best leatherworker would train leatherworkers from all allied packs, and this would foster a spirit of dependence and unity despite territorial separation. Gods of the hunt and weather would likely feature prominently, as well as dualistic gods of life and death, who the gnolls would thank for their random gifts of carrion. 

Like most of the “always chaotic evil” ancestries, I don’t mind keeping the monstrous aspects of the gnolls somewhere in the toolbox, and the idea of the “always hungry, always bloodthirsty” raiders that not even other evils will align with is an interesting menace to face. In the default Gnoll lore, the gnolls were created from hyenas who fed upon the carrion left behind by the rampaging demon-prince Yeeenoghu. With a simple twist, we instead have “The hungry ones” a cult or demonically influenced faction of gnolls who are a dark perversion of gnollish nature much in the same way that vampires are a dark reflection of humanity. Made up of outcasts from stable gnollish society, these wretches revere a carrion demon as none of their people’s other spirits will watch over them, and aim o fill their bellies as many times as possible before the wilds finally claim them ( think Mad-Max warboys) 

If you wanted to put a twist on it, have these hungry ones be the “first contact” point between your traditional fantasy cultures and the gnolls of the badlands, souring relations between both groups and feeding off the inevitable clash. 

Art