500 word challenge

[ACOS]

Anyway, gun to my head, if I was making Elan for a new edition I think it would look like this:

Elan

The Elan are synthetic Humans created by the Aboleth. They look like Humans, talk like Humans, and remember like Humans, but their insides are filled with yellow fluid and mysterious gelatinous globes and tubes. Their ultimate purpose is to live life on the surface world and ultimately return to be devoured by the memory fish that created them in order to transfer their experiences to the Aboleth.

Perhaps you should have a gun held to your head more often.

[MGuy]

Anyway, gun to my head, if I was making Elan for a new edition I think it would look like this:

Elan

The Elan are synthetic Humans created by the Aboleth. They look like Humans, talk like Humans, and remember like Humans, but their insides are filled with yellow fluid and mysterious gelatinous globes and tubes. Their ultimate purpose is to live life on the surface world and ultimately return to be devoured by the memory fish that created them in order to transfer their experiences to the Aboleth.

Perhaps you should have a gun held to your head more often.

I second that. I think this is one of my favorite write ups so far.

[Foxwarrior]

Giff are quite heavy, but are fairly buoyant, allowing them to float effortlessly in water even while asleep.

Tsk tsk tsk. Hippos have like two particularly interesting qualities: the first being that they're the most dangerous creature in Africa larger than a human, and the second being that they're specially evolved to sink so they can reach things on the bottoms of rivers more easily. The first is obviously not relevant.

[Username17]

Giff are quite heavy, but are fairly buoyant, allowing them to float effortlessly in water even while asleep.

Tsk tsk tsk. Hippos have like two particularly interesting qualities: the first being that they're the most dangerous creature in Africa larger than a human, and the second being that they're specially evolved to sink so they can reach things on the bottoms of rivers more easily. The first is obviously not relevant.

Hippo buoyancy is actually fascinating, in that they can float effortlessly for long periods and even sleep while floating, and they can also contract their lungs enough to sink and walk along the bottom. Their mix of high bone density and thick fat keeps their overall specific gravity almost exactly one, which means that by controlling their lung expansion they sink or float. Once they set themselves to "sink," they can't float again until they reach a source of air, so hippos normally walk along the bottom until they get to water shallow enough for them to raise their heads above water and inhale.

I simply happened to focus on the fact that they can sleep suspended in water, because I think that's more interesting for a humanoid than the ability to walk on the bottom of shallow lakes.

-Username17

[Prak]

Now I'm just imagining Fry with his bag of air.

[Username17]

How about Dark Ones

I second the Dark Ones. Let's solve that mystery.

Sure.

Dark Ones

The Dark Ones are actually two species. Most of the Dark Ones are small, pale, hooved creatures known as Creepers. The Creepers are closely related to Fauns, and counted among the Shadow Fey. The leaders of the Dark Ones are biologically Human, but as they are raised from infancy in darkness by the Creepers, they are pale of skin and steeped in magic. These leaders are called the Stalkers, and they are taught the most powerful magics of the Dark Ones. New Stalkers are rarely born in Dark One communities, and many only have a single Stalker. Sometimes Dark Ones go to the surface and kidnap an infant Human to exalt into their king. Dark Ones will leave something in the Human baby's place, usually either a gem or a doll but sometimes a baby of another race.

Dark Ones are masters of shadow and darkness protects them like shields of iron. While Creepers easily see in darkness from birth, the ability to see without light is taught to Stalkers as they grow, with most being able to see in total darkness by the age of five. Dark One magic calls upon the world of shadow to make grasping tendrils of chilling darkness to extinguish light and even perform minor labors. This form of simple shadow magic is ubiquitous among the Dark Ones, and is not considered exceptional. Functionally, every single person in a Dark One community is a Shadowcaster, though in almost all cases the strongest will be a Stalker.

Dark Ones hate light. It drives away their protections and hurts their eyes. Since Dark Ones do not ever employ light sources and live in the Underdark, few Dark Ones know the intricacies of calling on shadow magic from shadows on walls and floors, leaving them disoriented and powerless. Dark Ones do not use fire and cannot smelt metal ores. They have methods of using solid shadow to work metals, but must buy or steal all their starting materials. Dark One cuisine is never cooked, but they make good use of fermentation to create sterile foods. Finely sliced cave fish in vinegar and mashes of fermented beans are the main sources of protein in the Dark One diet.

Dark Ones are incredibly adept at stealth, and consider stealing from other people to be an art form. They will conduct trade, but only with reluctance. The only thing that is always “paid for” are Human babies, though the prices aren't normally negotiated with the parents and many families do not consider the exchanges fair. Dark One society highly prizes cut gems and worked metal, and Dark Ones bargain dearly for such items.

A well known Dark One ritual is the soul flash, which pulls a Dark One's soul back into a gem stored in the safety of their home when they die. Nothing remains of their body when this happens, and more powerful Dark Ones produce a more blinding and powerful burst of flame when their soul escapes.

-500 words

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Tortles.

[Darth Rabbitt]

Almost any humanoid monster from the 1e Fiend Folio you and AH reviewed, although I'd be most interested to see Xvart, Jermlaine, or Meazels.

[Prak]

A note on terminology for the Dark One entry- technically, any preparation of food for consumption is considered cooking, and, strictly, any process which congeals* carbohydrates or breaks down* proteins is definitely cooking, so fish in vinegar is cooking, as is fermentation

*disclaimer- I may have gotten those reversed, but the words themselves should be correct.

[Username17]

A note on terminology for the Dark One entry- technically, any preparation of food for consumption is considered cooking, and, strictly, any process which congeals* carbohydrates or breaks down* proteins is definitely cooking, so fish in vinegar is cooking, as is fermentation

*disclaimer- I may have gotten those reversed, but the words themselves should be correct.

Wikipedia disagrees with you:

This article is about the preparation of food by heating. For food preparation generally, see Food preparation.

Cooking or cookery is the art of preparing food for consumption with the use of heat.

Anyway...

Xvarts

I'm not sure Xvarts exist any more. They are Goblin/Kobold hybrids, which is why they basically look like Goblins with Kobold colored skin (which is to say: bright blue). But since 3rd edition, the Kobolds no longer have any mammalian traits and aren't able to interbreed with Goblins. Kobolds are small lizard people, and Goblins are small Goblinoids, and they aren't related and can't have close relatives.

4th edition re-imagined them as blue skinned degenerate Gnomes, but they don't even have the same name, just the same skin and eye color. The 4th edition thing is called a Xivort. But like almost every 4th edition re-imagining of a property, it's stupid and pointless.

Tortles

That's doable. The Tortles certainly don't suffer from a lack of source material. Fuck, that shit goes on and on. It's just that Tortles are things you're supposed to care about in Mystara and Red Steel, two settings which coincidentally you don't actually care about.

Turlekin: Tortles, Snappers, Crucians, and Kappa

The Turtlekin are a number of humanoid races which are collectively related to Dragon Turtles. They have turtle (or tortoise) like shells, but share the Dragon Turtle's preference for breathing water over air. Turtlekin walk upright on their hind legs and have hands that make for poor manual dexterity but excellent paddles and shovels. All Turtlekin carry water with them in order to facilitate breathing on land. Kappa are notable for carrying their water in a precarious external depression on top of their heads, while other Turtlekin have a more protected water pouch inside their shells.

Turtlekin are all excellent swimmers and appear on many different continents, and use technology similar to the races around them. The Crucians work iron similarly to the Bhuka, the Kappa have identical steel production techniques to the Bakemono, the Snappers have copper working abilities comparable to the lizardfolk, and the Tortles use just wood and bone like the Azurin.

The Crucians live in a harsh desert environment and use their water pouch as a source of drinking water in addition to a gill moistener. Their front shell is also notable weak, and they tend to hunch over like a crab when threatened. Crucians use oil based paints that can create designs on their shells that last for months or years, and most Crucian shells are highly decorated. Crucians can last over a week without water, but must eventually refilly their water pouch. Crucian culture considers Sphinxes to be Dragon Turtles of the sand, and worthy of respect and worship on those grounds. Sphinxes have not corrected this view.

The Kappa lose their water and become short of breath if the water spills out of their head depression. Kappa can stand straight up and down essentially indefinitely, and even sleep standing up. Kappa rarely travel far from the lakes and streams around which they make their homes. Kappa martial arts are well known and respected, and many warriors come to Kappa to learn of their bone breaking techniques and shield wall tactics. While not numerous, the Kappa are afforded limited autonomy within the Empire and are considered honorary Samurai for many purposes.

The Tortles have many coastal settlements and harvest the goods of the land and the sea. They carve wood and bone and shell, and make a tough but itchy rope and cloth out of fibers from the ocean. Tortles can pull their limbs and head entirely into their shells, and usually do so when injured. This is effective at deterring most of the beasts of the region from eating them, but is fairly useless as a defense against swords and spears. Tortles are a peaceful people, perhaps spurred by their disastrous record in war against other races.

The Snappers are called such because of their powerful jaws. Snapper communities are usually built in water. More warlike than other Turtlekin, the Snappers frequently raid and are raided by the Bullywugs and Lizardfolk that live near them.

-498 words

-Username17

[Prak]

A note on terminology for the Dark One entry- technically, any preparation of food for consumption is considered cooking, and, strictly, any process which congeals* carbohydrates or breaks down* proteins is definitely cooking, so fish in vinegar is cooking, as is fermentation

*disclaimer- I may have gotten those reversed, but the words themselves should be correct.

Wikipedia disagrees with you:

This article is about the preparation of food by heating. For food preparation generally, see Food preparation.

Cooking or cookery is the art of preparing food for consumption with the use of heat.

Yes, that is the main definition, but my culinary program disagrees with Wikipedia.

edit: look, I know my area of expertise is useless, but let me have it. We can't all be doctors and lawyers.

[Almaz]

Anyway, gun to my head, if I was making Elan for a new edition I think it would look like this:

Elan

The Elan are synthetic Humans created by the Aboleth. They look like Humans, talk like Humans, and remember like Humans, but their insides are filled with yellow fluid and mysterious gelatinous globes and tubes. Their ultimate purpose is to live life on the surface world and ultimately return to be devoured by the memory fish that created them in order to transfer their experiences to the Aboleth.

Perhaps you should have a gun held to your head more often.

I second that. I think this is one of my favorite write ups so far.

Thirded. While they are fairly bland as-presented in D&D, I did enjoy Elans as "weird psychically [re]created people" and this adds a whole lot more flavour to them without taking away any of the things to like about them. Well, I guess it has less wanking about redheads, but no one I played with cared much about that anyways. It was just the go-to race for "mysterious psychic person with obscure origins" which. . . this is exactly that, except times three.

[Koumei]

I thought Elan were there so that there could be freaky soulless gingers, but then I remembered that the game wasn't made by residents of the UK and that only seems to be a thing over there.

Aboleth-created personas with the "If you're a PC: you can probably resist the lure, and if not, hey, it's a plot hook that activates when the party can deal with an Aboleth*. Enjoy your automatic story element." is a pretty cool idea.

So... how about the spider people? I know WotC recently decided they should pokevolve, but how would you tie Ettercaps and Aranea into the world as an interesting actual part of it rather than as wandering spider-themed monsters?

*Which admittedly is "fucking never" if it's played to the hilt.

[hyzmarca]

Okay. Here's a challenge.

Nilbogs.

[ACOS]

Okay. Here's a challenge.

Nilbogs.

Exception: Races which were literally created in order to annoy people don't get this treatment. That means no Nilbogs or Gully Dwarves. Those things actually could get salvaged with new writeups, but they shouldn't be because they were created as insults and should be allowed to disappear.

[Shatner]

What about the flumph? They're a joke creature so hackneyed Order of the Stick turned their shame into a running joke.

I mean, it's a sentient, floating, lawful good jellyfish with eye stalks. That's a hard sell even without the word count limit.

[Almaz]

Thanks Frank, that is a lot less confusing than the RotW blurb. Personally, I probably wouldn't have the first ones been born from a single tree but like everything (trees, stones, bushes, lakes, grasslands, etc.) resulting in a variety of looks.

While cool from a thematic perspective, and it looks good on paper, its hell on art direction. You want a unified art design. This is not the same as "they all look the same" but you want your fey plant people to be identifiable as fey plant people when looked at. If they came from literally anything, you will rapidly create 1) the tendency to subtype even more atrociously than elves, and 2) almost-complete incoherence in appearance.

"But humans are varied!"
Yeah, and humans have years of training in recognizing other humans and even we still have difficulties discerning the niceties of people's phenotypes. You want people to do that for a fictional race with a barely-human body?

[Prak]

I thought Elan were there so that there could be freaky soulless gingers, but then I remembered that the game wasn't made by residents of the UK and that only seems to be a thing over there.

No, it's a thing here, too.

So... how about the spider people? I know WotC recently decided they should pokevolve, but how would you tie Ettercaps and Aranea into the world as an interesting actual part of it rather than as wandering spider-themed monsters?

I don't know about connecting them to the world, but I can see connecting them to one another might be interesting. Something like if an aranea is corrupted by alien magic it becomes an ettercap, aranea that spend x years in the magical radiation of the underdark become chitines, aranea who study enough magic become spellweavers... except interesting.

[Koumei]

Pretty sure Aranea are stronger than Ettercaps. At the very least, they're spellcasters. But yeah, I figure there's another case where 3-4 monsters can all fit in one write-up together.

[Prak]

Huh, so they are. Could be atrophy, or maybe etteraps "ascend" to become aranea if they lose their alienness.

[Username17]

There is no reason, at all, for there to be any fucking connection between Ettercaps and Araneas. There are actually two different creatures called an Aranea, one of which is one of the Spiderkin (along with Ploppéds and Rhagodessas) known for having a bulging head to keep its massive spider brain so it can cast its illusion spells and the other of which is a spider/human hybrid shapechanger that has a humanoid, spider, and demi-spider (that is to say: dryder) form. You'll note of course, that 3rd edition Araneas are already hybrids of those two creatures. Pretty much just the memorable traits of both creatures named Aranea stuck together.

So if you wanted Aranea to Pokevolve from other things, the obvious thing to do would be to have them pokevolve from the other spiderkin: Ploppéd -> Rhagodessa -> Aranea. If you wanted the Aranea to pokevole into other things, the "demi-spider" version of the Area already has additional forms to pokevole into: the Arashaeem and the Yeshom (I don't remember enough of how Red Steel works to tell you what the fuck the Yeshom did, but apparently they were 14th level inheritors, and that sounds pretty boss).

In short, you could make an entirely legitimate call for the Aranea being stage three of a five stage evolution chain, and absolutely none of those stages would be "Ettercap." The Ettercap/Aranea connection posited in James Wyatt's rant was stupid and pointless on a bunch of levels.

-Username17

[TiaC]

You could speculate a common ancestor for all the spider-monsters. Perhaps the work of Lolth?

[Username17]

You could speculate a common ancestor for all the spider-monsters. Perhaps the work of Lolth?

You could do that. But the fact is that there are really a lot of spider monsters, and frankly Lolth is involved in rather plenty of them. Dryders, Chwidenchas, Chitines, Choldriths, Myrlochars, and Yochlols are all broadly speaking "spider monsters" whose backstory is "Lolth did it." I don't think I'm covering all of them, and I'm certainly not covering all the monsters in Lolth's army (which include Draegloths and Lolth-Touched other not-directly-spider-monsters-monsters). Considering the five-level Spiderkin evolutionary chain, and planar spiders, phase spiders, ice spiders, fire spiders, and so on and so forth, I'm not sure that Lolth's army actually needs to be that big. Indeed, some spider monsters like the Retriever are already called out as working for another Demon Lord (in that case, Demogorgon).

If it was important to you that Ettercaps were related to another creature, the obvious choice would be a Lhosk. Because there are so many spider monsters in D&D that "kind of a gorilla with spider traits" actually describes two monsters.

Another big issue of course is that while a lot of the spider monsters from Brain Spiders to Hook Spiders and Sword Spiders are broadly speaking evil, not all of them are. Asteroid Spiders, Araneas, and even Dark and Crystal Spiders are all Neutral. So if you wanted to make Lolth the Demon Queen of (all of D&D's fucking) Spiders, you'd have to make "Demon Queens" a much more morally ambiguous thing. In order to declare all the Spider monsters to be Lolth-kin, you'd have to declare the Lolth faction to be a faction of green or blue dots rather than red dots - because there are indeed a lot of Spider Monsters that are not kill-on-sight. If they all get the Lolth rune on their heads, then having a Lolth rune has to be something compatible with walking into town and buying some supplies.

-Username17

[Prak]

If I were writing a game where all of the various spider monsters were associated with Lolth, I would just make Lolth "the mother of spiderkind" and say that some of the children don't call home much, but it's ok, because she's kind of an evil bitch. Of course this means things get complicated if you also want lolth to be the jilted lover of Corellion. Not impossible, just complicated.

It'd be something along the lines of how Lolth went throughout the multiverse laying eggs, and some found their way into the light of baleful signs and hatched into the ettercaps and some were laid in the Etheral plane and hatched into phase spiders, and some were laid on elemental planes and became fire/ice/crystal spiders, and some were laid on Acheronian battlefields and became sword spiders which were than taken to the material by mumblemumble, and some hatched under the full moon and became aranea who knew their mother's evil and became the largely benign aranea, and so on.

[radthemad4]

I don't see a need for common ancestry. Many species seem to be designed by gods or mad wizards and either of those could base their designs on the work of others. Also, convergent evolution is a thing.