fbmf at [unixtime wrote:1149822254[/unixtime]]What are the odds that a Tome of Abberations is forthcoming?
Game On,
fbmf
What's coming next is
The Dungeonomicon: A Hard Look at D&D's Oldest Legacies. It's going to have some alternate rules for Fighters, Monks, and Thief Acrobats, as well as some tirades about D&D economics and social structures, and a rewrite of some of the spells and effects that don't work like Polymorph, Incorporeality, and Regeneration. But the main focus is on dungeons and why they exist
at all.
After that, we're going to do a couple more setups in an as-yet undetermined order:
- Tome of Virtue (Celestials, Heroes, the Upper Planes, Good)
- Book of Gears (Crafting, Vermin, Constructs, Illusions, Mindlessness)
- Tome of Trees (Fey, Plants, Enchantment, Social Skills, Bards)
- Races of War (Humanoids, Giants, Large Scale Conflicts, Powerful Player Races)
- Tome of Tiamat (Dragons, Elementals, Evokers, Druids)
Here's some excerpts:
The Dungeonomicon:Bad Money Drives Out Good: The Penalties of Paper:People from the modern world are generally pretty perplexed by this idea of handing back and forth actual metal as a medium of exchange. It is an undeniable truth in our lives that the idea of currency is just that: an
idea. As long as whatever I'm trading for goods and services can be traded for goods and services, it doesn't actually matter if the exchange commodity has any ascribed intrinsic worth. Paper descriptions of value or even ephemeral electronic representations are not only adequate, they're
convenient. But more than that, using valuable commodities as a medium of exchange inhibits the growth of the economy. As long as a certain portion of the wealth is locked up in currency, the economy is strangled coming and going: not only is there a completely arbitrary limit on how many goods and services can be exchanged (the gold supply), but there is also a limit on the kinds of industry and artistic expression that can occur (in that if you use gold for anything
but currency you're actually shrinking the money supply and producing negative GDP).
So… you're going to solve that by instituting a paper-based exchange system where initially the paper is exchangeable for gold and that eventually gets phased out when the Plebes realize that handing actual gold back and forth is inconvenient and dumb, right? Wrong. Remember that this is the Iron Age, and people haven't invented Nationalism yet. The cornerstone of the Greenback currency is a belief in the nation that prints it – and nations simply don't exist. You've got empires, and you've got kingdoms, and you've got tribes, and you've got unincorporated villages… and that's it as far as civilization goes. When you look at a map in D&D and a colored region has a name on it, that's the name of the
region. Possibly it's even the name of some guy
in the region. The point is, that it's not a country in the modern sense of the word, so if some new guy walks in who's bad enough the next cartographer will put
his name on the region instead.
And that means that "The Full Faith and Credit of the Kingdom of Daxall" is worth precisely
nothing. And while King Daxall can, through force of arms, take all the gold away from all the peasants and get them to trade pieces of paper for goods and services in its place – noone will actually
believe that the paper is currency. They're literally trading promises by King Daxall that he'll let them have their money back if they leave town. And since the serfs can't even leave town, even that promise is meaningless to them. A serf accepts paper for goods and services only because he'll be beheaded if he doesn't. The black market value of these pieces of paper is pretty close to zero. Worse, nearby governments will see this as a blatant attempt to sequester all the gold in King Daxall's pants and will probably declare war (in addition to the fact that noone outside the reach of King Daxall's pikemen will accept Daxall Dollars).
...
Dungeons: By the gods, why?Alright, we know that you love dungeons. We love them too, despite the fact that we’re pretty sure there is no good reason for the silly things. The average D&D game world is frankly incapable of the technology or manpower needed to build vast underground complexes. I mean, look at our own world history: aside from a single underground city in Turkey and a couple of pyramids and tombs, the ancient world took a pass on underground life. Even the old excuse of “Wizards can magic it up and they do it because its defensible” is a bit lame considering that we are talking about a world with
teleport and burrowing and ethereal travel; being underground is actually a liability since its harder to escape and people can drop the roof onto you, not to mention the incredible costs involved in doing it even if magic is available.
So here is what we suggest: dungeons have an actual magical purpose. By putting anything behind at least 40’ of solid, continuous material (like solid walls of dirt, stone, ice, or whatever, but not a forest of trees or rooms of furniture) the area is immune to unlimited-range or “longer than Long Range” spells like
Scrying and transportation magic like
dimensional door, teleport, the travel version of
gate, and other effects. You can use these magics inside a dungeon, but you also stopped by a 40’ solid, continuous material in a Line of Effect; this means you can use these effects inside a dungeon to bypass doors and walls, but entering and leaving the dungeon is a problem, and parts of the dungeon that have more than 30’ of material in the way between your position and the target of your effect will be effectively isolated from your position.
In summary, in a best-case scenario you can transport yourself to a dungeon, then bust in the entrance and enter the dungeon, then transport yourself to the place you want to be inside the dungeon. In a worse-case scenario, the dungeon designer will have built the dungeon in such a way that only someone aware of the layout can take full advantage of unlimited range or transportation spells like
teleports and
Scry, or even that most or all areas if the dungeon are inaccessible to these effects.
Of course, there are exceptions. The idea of permanent
portals, gates, or
teleport circles are just too common in DnD and too fun to just abandon. Permanent effects will continue to regardless of materials in the way, and will be the premier way to enter and leave dungeons, as well as the best way to move inside a dungeon.
By incorporating these changes in your DnD world, you are ensuring that players actually explore rooms in your dungeons that you have painstakingly built, you avoid all the problems with Scry-and-Die tactics, and you'll find that players actually care about dungeon geography. It also adds a bit to suspension of disbelief in your setting, which is only good for a cooperative storytelling game.
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Tome of Virtue Excerpt:High Adventure in… Ysgard!Ysgard is, as far as I can tell, a cautionary tale about gluttony. Or maybe it's a parable about how even well meaning Chaos is a terrible thing. The point is that on initial appearances Ysgard is a wonderful place. The forests are lush and inviting, the mountains vistas are expansive without being particularly dangerous, and best of all – as soon as you appear in Ysgard, a bunch of jovial and attractive people invite you to join them in a luxurious feast… and maybe more. On first glance, therefore, this place is all good. It's even all Good in that while you're here your wounds heal at an accelerated rate.
Here's the part that sucks: every single person in Ysgard is gruesomely and painfully killed every single day without fail, and then they are
True Resurrected in time to do it all again the next day. For those of you who saw the excellent final season of Angel, Ysgard is the special Hell Dimension that Gunn was condemned to when he betrayed his friends. You get a happy life in idyllic surroundings and it is cut horribly short by the agony of death
every single day.
So you might be wondering: How can D&D even happen in a world where death and life are equally meaningless and doled out in full to all participants on both sides? The answer lies in the fact that you can succeed or fail in a goal as an independent variable as to whether you are dead (just ask the practitioners of any major modern religion about the founding prophet of their religion). But it also lies in the fact that just because the plane
true resurrects your character every day, it doesn't mean you can't be killed in a permanent fashion.
Campaign seed: Capture the Flag: Here on Ysgard, it is an inescapable fact of life that you are going to be painfully disemboweled every day. But exactly
when that happens is different for each person each day. The plane makes sure you don't get out alive, but it doesn't keep a rigid schedule about these things. As such, it is entirely possible to accomplish things before you get killed each day and have your progress remain when you wake up again. Any task that you can accomplish in stages interspersed by being horribly killed on an irregular basis can be achieved if you put your mind to it. Things can be built or moved, places can be traveled to, secrets can be learned. Heck, if you put your mind to it, you might even be able to
get out of Ysgard.
Campaign Seed: Assassins of Ysgard: Some people need killing, and a lot of them end up in Ysgard where they will get more killing than most people see in a lifetime in just two days. But
some people are actually supposed to stay dead, and that's… hard to arrange on Ysgard. Not impossible of course, planar oases, petrification,
imprisonment, and barghests can all ensure that a man removed stays removed. There are interested parties that will pay substantial amounts for that kind of intervention.
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Tome of Trees Excerpt:Blood Flows Like Sap: Playable Races"
And that is why I had to make things so difficult for you, daughter. I simply had to see if you'd live through it."Many of the fey are roughly human sized, able (though not necessarily willing) to wear human clothes, able to use human weapons and tools, and all in all pretty capable of performing human actions in response to standard adventuring challenges. It is notable then, that despite the substantial
demand for fairy player characters and the basic playability of the
concept, that there isn't anything in D&D that is actually game mechanically playable. Dryads, Feytouched, Pixies, Nixies, Satyrs, and Sirines are all in high demand as PCs, and only overly harsh rules on playing "nonstandard" PCs stand between these players and the characters they want to play. What follows is a reimagining of some of the most playable Fey into rules that are game mechanically as well as conceptually playable within a D&D game.
The Fey Touched"
All my life, I have never fit in. Not in town, not in the forest. In some integral fashion I am unlike those around me, and I believe it is my fate to live and die alone."
WotC has made no secret of the fact that they like doing bad things to the bad touched races. But if there was one Bad Touched race that is
almost worth the level allowance, it would be the Fey Touched. Every one of them looks completely different, but they all have the same power set: spell-like
charm, and of course an Immunity to Mind Affecting effects. That goes a long way to being worth something, though of course there is no way you can survive as a character with a Level Allowance and a Constitution penalty – the very idea is absurd. So of course, the race has to be overhauled, because that just isn't reasonable.
Now if you're one of the people who wonders why a product of fairies and humans, who both conspicuously lack an immunity to mind affecting magic, would have an immunity to mind affecting magic – you aren't alone. That question comes up about as often as any other with regards to the fey touched. Of course, not all of those born to fey and human stock are immune to mind affecting magic, as you might expect from a group so diverse that some have bug parts and others are simply beautiful humans, while still others look like crazy rock men with teeth sticking out all kinds of places, the powers that a fey-touched is born with are extremely random. The powers of the fairies are more than a little bit chaotic in nature, and no two babes born to these couplings are the same. Unfortunately, these mulish offspring are also
interesting both in the general sense and, much more to their detriment, to other fairies in particular. The unmitigated interest of the fey is hard on a small child, so fey touched who are not immune to compulsion effects are going to find themselves at the bottom of a pond or jumping out of a tall tree long before they reach adulthood. Indeed, feytouched immune to compulsion effects are the only ones that ever reach maturity – the well meaning but deadly interest of the fairy family members simply weeds out any other possible results.
That's not an excuse for the package presented in the Fiend Folio as a whole, that's simply unplayable. But it's close. Here's our version:
Feytouched- Fey Type
- 30 foot movement rate
- Low-Light Vision
- +2 Dexterity, +2 Charisma, -2 Constitution. Feytouched are graceful and those which are not beautiful are terrifying, but they are fragile like flowers.
- Immunity to [Compulsion] Effects
- Magic Affinity: Every Feytouched is different, and marked by the signature magics of the fey in a different manner. Every Feytouched has one spell that can be used once per day as a spell-like ability. This spell is chosen at 1st level and cannot be changed. Any 1st level Illusion or Enchantment spell from the Sorcerer/Wizard list is fair game, and the sve DC is Charisma-based.
- Favored Class: Bard
- Feytouched speak Common and Sylvan. Bonus Languages may be selected from the following list:
Aquan, Auran, Elvish, Draconic, Dwarvish, Druidic, Goblin, Gnoll, Gnome, Halfling.
- Level Adjustment: +0
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Tome of Tiamat Excerpt:Elementalist"Feel the wrath of the natural order you have angered!"Alignment: An prospective Elementalist must be of a neutral alignment (N, NG, NE, LN, or CN) in order to learn the secrets of Elementalism. Once a character already has at least one level of Elementalist, nothing prevents her from changing alignment.
Races: Every race has elementalists, but races that have more draconic heritage mixed in have decidedly
more elementalists. Dwarves have a natural affinity for stone and often choose the route of the Elementalist. Kobolds are naturally inclined towards elementalism and only jealous guarding of the secrets of elementalism by
Starting Gold: 4d4x10 gp (100 gold)
Starting Age: As Druid.
Hit Die: d6
Class Skills: The Elementalist's class skills (and the key ability for each skill) are Concentration (Con), Craft (Int), Decipher Script (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disable Device (Int), Escape Artist (Dex), Handle Animal (Cha), Heal (Wis), Intimidate (Cha), Knowledge (arcana) (Int), Knowledge (nature) (Int), Knowledge (the planes) (Int), Profession (Wis), Ride (Dex), Search (Int), and Spellcraft (Int).
Skills/Level: 4 + Intelligence Bonus
BAB: Poor (1/2),
Saves: Fort: Poor; Reflex: Poor; Will: Good
Level, Benefit1 Armored Casting,
Create Water 2 Elemental Survival
3 Advanced Learning
4 Create Air5 Elemental Faminilar, Advanced Learning
6 7 Resistance to Energy: 5, Advanced Learning
8 9 Create Fire, Advanced Learning
10 Timelessness
11 Advanced Learning, Elemental Traits
12 13 Resistance to Energy: 10, Advanced Learning
14 Create Wood15 Advanced Learning, Improved Summoning
16 Elemental Wildshape 1/day
17 Create Earth, Advanced Learning
18 Elemental Wildshape 2/day
19 Resistance to Energy: 15, Advanced Learning
20 Elemental Wildshape 3/day
All of the following are Class Features of the Elementalist class:
Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Elementalists are proficient with all simple weapons, as well as the scimitar, the battle axe, the trident, the pick (heavy and light), and the longbow (including composite longbows). Elementalists are proficient with light armor but not with shields of any kind.
Spellcasting: The Elementalist is an Arcane Spellcaster with the same spells per day progression as a Sorcerer. An Elementalist casts spells from the Elementalist Spell List (below). An Elementalist automatically knows every spell on her spell list. She can cast any spell she knows without preparing them ahead of time, provided that spell slots of an appropriate level are still available.
To cast an Elementalist spell, she must have an Intelligence at least equal to 10 + the Spell level. The DC of the Elementalist's spells is Wisdom based and the bonus spells are Intelligence based.
Create Water (Su): An Elementalist can create water as a standard action at will as the spell
create water with a caster level equal to her character level.
Armored Casting: An Elementalist casts arcane spells, but she is not affected by the arcane spell failure of any armor or shield she is proficient with. This ability only applies to her Elementalist spells, if she is able to cast any other arcane spells, they are affected by arcane spell failure normally.
Elemental Survival (Ex): An Elementalist of 2nd level or higher survives in elemental planes as easily as on the prime. Whenever on any elemental, paraelemental, or energy plane, she is able to ignore any harmful planar traits and moves through any of these planes without impediment.
Advanced Learning: At 3rd level and every two levels afterwards, the Elementalist may permanently add one spell to her spell list. This spell must be of a level she can already cast, and may not be of the Illusion or Necromancy school. Only spells from the Druid or Wu Jen spell list may be added in this way.
Create Air (Su): At 4th level an Elementalist can create air at will as if she was an open Bottle of Air.
Elemental Familiar: At 5th level, an Elementalist can acquire a familiar in the same manner as a Sorcerer. Unlike a Sorcerer, the Elementalist has only 5 choices for her familiar:
- Small Air Elemental: +2 to Tumble and Jump Checks.
- Small Earth Elemental: +3 on Bullrush checks, whether the attacker or defender.
- Small Fire Elemental: +3 to Intimidate checks.
- Small Water Elemental: +4 bonus to Swim checks, you may take 10 on swim checks at any time.
- Small Wood Elemental: +2 to Survival and Climb checks.
Resistance to Energy (Ex): At 7th level, an Elementalist has accumulated an inherent resilience in the face of all manners of elemental adversity. She has an Energy Resistance of 5 against any form of energy damage she is exposed to. At 13th level, this general resistance increases to 10 points. At 19th level, the resistance increases to 15.
Create Fire (Su): At 9th level, an Elementalist can set a creature or object on fire at will as a standard action. The target must be within short range, and suffers 2d6 of fire damage every round until the fire is extinguished. A victim can attempt to extinguish itself as a full-round action by making a Reflex Save (DC 15). The flames, once begun, are non-magical.
Timeless: At 10th level, an Elementalist is infused with the uncompromising nature of the raw elements themselves. Se stops aging and never dies of old age.
Elemental Traits: At 11th level, an Elementalist attunes herself to a specific element, becoming in some way like the element of her choice:
- Air Elemental: Gains Air Mastery and a Flight Speed (perfect maneuverability) equal to her walking speed.
- Earth Elemental: Gains Earth Mastery, a 30 foot Tremor Sense, and a Burrowing Speed equal to half her walking speed.
- Fire Elemental: Gains Immunity to Fire, and her body immolates whenever desired inflicting an additional 4d6 of fire damage on any creature struck with her unarmed strikes or which strike her with an unarmed strike.
- Water Elemental: Gains Water Mastery, the [Aquatic] subtype, and a swim speed equal to her walking speed.
- Wood Elemental: Gains Immunity to Polymorphing, a 60 foot Woodsense, and a Climb Speed equal to her walking speed.
Create Wood (Su): At 14th level, an Elementalist can create a full sized tree as a standard action, as if using a Quaal's Feather Token (Tree). This is an at-will ability.
Elemental Wildshape (Su): At 16th level, the Elementalist can actually become an Elemental in a manner simply to wildshape. Once per day, an Elementalist can assume an Alternate Form of an Air Elemental, an Earth Elemental, a Fire Elemental, a Water Elemental, or a Wood Elemental as a standard action. The alternate form may be dismissed at will, but otherwise persists for 24 hours. Only True Elemental forms may be assumed, and the forms in question must be smaller than Elder (Small to Huge Size is acceptable). Every 2 levels, the Elemental Wildshape may be activated an extra time each day.
Create Earth (Su): At 17th level, an Elementalist can create a
wall of stone at any time as a standard action.
Elementalist Spell List:
0th level: Attune Form, Caltrops, Detect Magic, Detect Poison, Light,
1st level: Air Breathing, Entangle, Gust of Wind, Obscuring Mist, Pass Without Trace, Produce Flame, Speak With Plants, Stone Shatter, Summon Elemental I, Wall of Smoke, Water Breathing
2nd level: Binding Winds, Command Plants, Creeping Cold, Earth Bind, Earthen Grace, Fog Cloud, Heat Metal, Protection From Arrows, Soften Earth and Stones, Summon Elemental II*, Wall of Sand, Warp Wood, Wood Shape
3rd level: Blight, Control Water, Earth Reaver, Fire Shield, Fly, Plant Growth, Stone Shape, Stone Skin, Summon Elemental III*, Wall of Fire, Wall of Water, Wind Wall
4th level: Briar Web, Greater Stone Shape, Scry, Summon Elemental IV*, Wall of Stone,
5th level: Animate Plants, Move Earth, Stone Tell, Summon Elemental V*, Wall of Thorns,
6th level: Control Plants, Energy Immunity, Flesh to Stone, Stone to Flesh, Summon Elemental VI*,
7th level: Greater Scrying, Summon Elemental VII*, Transmute Rock to Lava,
8th level: Summon Elemental VIII*,
9th level: Elemental Swarm, Summon Elemental IX*, Summon Elemental Monolith,
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Book of Gears Excerpt:Why a Revision to the Crafting Rules?An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items. Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks – for a total of 31,200 gp at first level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money.
If the DM is willing to simply let players roll dice, have downtime, and purchase magic items of unlimited power, the game is already broken on first principles at first level using the PHB alone. If the DM wants to keep sanity going
at all, then something in that equation is going to have to go. Probably everything in that equation should go. As discussed in the Dungeonomicon, there is an inherent limit to what players could reasonably be expected to be able to purchase with pieces of gold, so to a very real extent crafting for money is simply multiplying the amount of low-level equipment you have – it doesn't particularly get you more powerful equipment. And of course there's no reason for players to be able to do all of this 9 to 5 working without having on-camera adventures. An adventure where you are running a silk factory and will make a bunch of money as soon as you can stop the goblin syndicate from extorting all your profits is pretty much the same as the adventure where you run off into a dungeon, fight the goblins, and take the money they stole from the silk merchants home in a sack.
So the nerfs on Crafting just aren't necessary. But what actually needs to change?
- Valuable Raw Materials Aren't Valuable: This is a part of the rules that makes me cry. Since the amount of value you make each day is based on the difficulty of working the material and not on the value of said material, there is no way for a goldsmith to stay in business. Gold is very easy to work and therefore the DC to work it is very low, and therefore a goldsmith makes very little in the way of finished product each week. A five pound gold candle holder is roughly four ounces and fits into the palm of your hand, but it'll take a master goldsmith (+10 Craft Bonus) almost a year to finish one (500 gp value, at DC 5 = 50 weeks).
- The Costs of Materials are WHAT? Remember that five pound gold candle holder? It's worth 500 gp and therefore requires 167 gp worth of materials to make it. But it's worth 250 gp just as a lump of gold. So you can buy things as raw materials and sell them as trade goods and make lots of money. The reverse happens when you make complex or finely worked items. A masterwork sword is made out of pretty much the same materials as a normal sword and is much more expensive because it's better made. But because the higher quality crafting will make it sell for more down the line, the cost of the materials goes up by a 100 gp. Where does that money go? What are you getting for 2 pounds of gold? Sure, maybe you get some better coal or something, but really, that doesn't even begin to cover it.
- Field Fortifications Cannot Happen: Even the simplest of traps (such as a bucket with some acid in it balanced on a partially open door) has a cost that is very high – in the hundreds of gp. That means even the most gifted craftsman is going to take weeks to boobytrap a room or lay down some field fortifications. When longbowmen want to hammer some stakes into the ground to protect themselves from the knight stampede that's going to come when the battle starts, the Craft rules essentially tell them that they can't do it. Which for those of us who have seen Henry V, seems unlikely.
- Risky and Illegal Trades are Pointless: Some products are expensive because producing them is risky (poison, flower arrangements from the Bane Mires). Some products are expensive because their production and sale is in some manner restricted by the authorities (shrunken dwarf heads, disrespectful puppets of the king). In the real world, people produce these things because they can charge inflated prices because of the risk. It's a gamble, where sometimes you make big money and sometimes you get killed by hydras or agents of King Ronard. But with craft times directly dependent upon resale value, these crafts are gambles where sometimes you make the same amount of money you would have making night stands, and sometimes you get killed by your own poison or Clerics of Torm.
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Races of War Excerpt:Borderlands of the Sahuagin: Sore WinnersThe first thing to understand about the Sahuagin is that they have already won. Completely. The surface of the world is about ¾ ocean and they own almost all of it. From the standpoint of the Sahuagin, the only places on the planet that have non-Sahuagin races in them are the stale crusts that they already had the presence of mind to cut off their sandwich. All of the non-Sahuagin races are all ghettoized. Even the other aquatic races have been marginalized to the point where they only get the brackish water (Locathah), the rocky shallows (merfolk), the underground darks (Kuo-Toans), or the muddy salt marshes (Lizardfolk). The
real real estate – the ocean and coastline – are pretty much the private playground of the Sahuagin.
Individually, Sahuagin will kick your ass, and collectively they will kick the ass of any nation you happen to support. The combined populations of all other sapient races on any planet are less than the population of Sahuagin on that planet. The Sahuagin are also much smarter and better organized than you are so their cities are actually more productive than yours per person in addition to the fact that they have more cities than all the other races and their cities are more populous.
The Sahuagin mutate constantly, but are not inclined to Chaos. They just all have different appearances and capabilities. But every one of them is gifted with super intelligence and thick natural armor. The Sahuagin deep seers are some of the most gifted wizards on the planet and honestly have nothing better to do than just
scry on crap and tell the armies where there's some cool stuff to go loot. From time to timr the Sahuagin will come onto land to beat the living crap out of people and take control of important or valuable items. Then they take the spoils of war and drag it back under water, laughing the whole time.
Against this backdrop of crushing inferiority, how do the other races maintain? Most of them are fighting for stakes so small that they haven't even
noticed that the vast majority of the planet is owned and operated by brutally efficient fish men. But one race that certainly has noticed the power discrepancy is the race of elves most likely to be forgotten: the Sea Elves. They actually live in many of the same areas and have a war going with them.
Life is hard for a Sea Elf, because every one of them is born into a post-apocalyptic world where mutants run amok and hunt them for sport. But it's actually even worse than that because in addition to simply being physically and intellectually inferior to the Sahuagin like everyone else is – they are actually stupid and useless
even contrasted with the surface races. An average Sea Elf is as much the intellectual inferior to a Sahuagin as a Griffin is to a normal human. The Sahuagin consider the Sea Elves to be little more than animals, and they aren't wrong.
The Sea Elves keep surviving at all because they see farther than Sahuagin in low-light conditions (and are thus often able to
swim away from potential encounters with Sahuagin during the morning and twilight hours that Sea Elves leave their hidden nests), and also because every so often a Sahuagin gets born who looks exactly like a Sea Elf. These Sahuagin mutants, called Malenti, are a little bit worse than a normal Sahuagin in that they lack the rending claws. But they're still stronger and smarter than any Sea Elf that ever swam the 7 seas. So when these Malenti realize that they get a crap deal from Sahuagin society, they often as not run off to join the Sea Elves, where they almost immediately rise to positions of leadership. They also gain crap loads of experience very quickly because the odds are so stacked against them. In short, the reason that the Sea Elves still exist is that they actually are a splinter faction of Sahuagin that uses real sea elves as beasts of burden instead of simply hunting them like the more normal Sahuagin groups do.
And yet, despite the fact that the Sahuagin have
won at
everything, they still continue to fight the other races and take their children and stuff. Partly this is to feed the insatiable demands of their Baatezu masters, and partly this is because on some deep level the Sahuagin are convinced that it actually couldn't possibly be that easy. In addition to looking for bling and candy to take from the weaker races, the Deep Seers are also combing the world for the one thing that the Great Mothers are pretty sure exists somewhere: the hidden army that the other races are putting together to take the world back from the clutches of the Sahugin Empire. As far as anyone knows, it doesn't exist, but for some reason the Great Mothers keep insisting that the searching continue. Maybe they know something we don't?
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So yeah, looks like a week or two for the Dungeoomicon to be finished. It
will have a good hard look at some of our favorite Aberrations (Aboleth, Ilithid, Beholders). It will
not have a look at the aberrations that we don't give a damn about (avolokia, psurlons, skybleeders, darkweavers).
After that, we could really do any of those books, it would be up to some hand-raising which one we did next.
-Username17
