Well, it's not D&D, but I have just published a game called "Ukagaho" over on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow in which goblins are not only inhuman, they're inhumane. Voracious little bipedal desert pirahnas, they need no reason to kill you other than you look tasty. They attack en masse and will even devour your bones. Young goblins prove their bravery (and maliciousness) to their clans by sneaking into people houses in the middle of the night and pinching babies just to make them cry and keep the family from sleeping. While this sounds innocent enough, the stealth skills they hone during this practice teaches them for later on, when they start entering houses and stealing children for their "grand feasts", which are always gruesome. They will swarm an adult to feed a clan, and will try to take down an entire caravan for a truly big celebration to feed a whole tribe but generally only torment and kill seniors witout eating them because they're too leathery.
I've also included a beast that considers goblins a delicacy just to keep their numbers in check...
Well, I think I'll go for one of the classic monsters in DnD, why not?
Beholders- Beholders are born a hundred or so at a time. Of these hundreds only 5-15 will survive, as they immediatly start trying to kill each other. The one who defeats more of its siblings than any other is the Nest Leader, and will often grow up to be a Tyrant or another high ranking Beholder. The others will probably be Eyes of Flame or other low ranking Beholders. The parent leaves immediatly once the Beholders are born. The Nest leader takes its* siblings out at once. The siblings follow it, and they attack in packs, swarming over their chosen prey once they have rendered it unconcious. Once these beholder packs are fully grown, they hold a tourney of sorts. The Nest Leader captures all of its siblings and tries to force them to stay, submissive to it. The rest try to break free, one at a time. If they are powerful enough to do so then they go out on their own. Those that fail must continue to follow their nest leader until death, which is why high level beholders sometimes have lower level ones working for them.
*Beholders are asexual. Only nest leaders can reproduce, and they do so through a ritual that requires them to kill and eat one of their siblings, so if they fail at the competition they cannot reproduce. Beholder gestation is thought to take about 4 months.
Going out of your way to break the game and then complaining that it is broken is like beating a wall with a sledge hammer for an hour and then claiming its a bad wall.
It is an insult to a dwarf to serve unprepared food. To do so implies that craftsmanship would be wasted on the diner. To serve fresh fruit to a guest would be no better than to dress him in uncured, rotting hides and quarter him in an unworked cave.
Similarly, no self respecting dwarf sleeps in a cave without first making at least some gesture toward working the stone. A hammer and chisel are essential camping gear for a dwarf in the wild dark. Traditionally, the cave is signed by the camper - in addition to satisfying the camper's self esteem, it might also assist his family in the recovery of his remains.
If you're not proud enough to exhibit your handiwork on your own face, you can't be trusted to make anything handsome or durable. A trimmed and plaited beard is a mark of craftsmanship and identity, and to allow another hand at your beard is to lie about what you can make and thus who you are. To be without a beard is to declare that you are capable of producing nothing, that you are nothing. Those races denied beards by the gods are not to be trusted. (Besides, I saw one of 'em picking grapes right off a vine and eating 'em in front of gods and everybody! Silky-fingered heathens, the lot of them.)
"When Friday comes, we'll all call rats fish." D&D Outsider
Anyone want to give some more monsters a go? The kobolds were great!
18. While telepathic verbalisation is more than adequate for purposes of communication, illithids find it dissatisfying and unreliable in matters of even minor importance. The carefully-chosen, deliberately-broadcast thoughts of telepathy lack genuine emotion or content, and are just as potentially false as the carefully-chosen, deliberately-spoken words of more mundane language. To a race for whom thoughts themselves are a kind of food, telepathy is a thin, tasteless substitute for vital, nourishing thoughts. To an illithid, the only thoughts truly worth hearing are those backed by powerful emotion and sensation.
It is for this reason that torture is, to mind flayers, a social convention which borders upon the casual. Agony and terror are the easiest strong emotions for them to elicit, and they have no qualms whatsoever about doing so purely for the sake of enlivening psionic discourse. A mind flayer does not torture a victim in order to coerce their honesty with a promise of the pain's cessation; rather, a mind flayer does it so that the pain and anguish surging through the victim's mind will let the mind flayer really taste those words. Simple psionic speech lacks flavour, context, or meaning. The ragged surge of torturous agony, on the other hand, fills those mental words with vitality, with substance, and allows the truth or falseness of them to be 'tasted' as clearly as you or I taste salt or sugar.
This is not merely a test of veracity, however. An illithid being given an account of an event might wish to afflict the storyteller in order to give the tale a more visceral and 'real' feeling. In the illithid view, a subject is not truly speaking unless zie is screaming. There are even elaborate psionic patterns -- approximately their version of poetry or song -- based entirely upon the specific agonies inflicted upon the performer. An illithid bard is a rare beast indeed and occupies a far different place in society from the carefree entertainers of our culture.
Obviously, this torture is a one-way street in the hierarchies of illithids; one does not torture one's superior to enrich the conversation, one demonstrates one's obedience by receiving such torture. It's fairly common for an illithid to self-inflict pain, either through physical harm or psionic stimulus, in order to emphasize a particularly important statement, though truly powerful mind flayers will inflict agony upon someone else and psionically use that victim's suffering to bolster their own words.
I really like this. This entire thread is a fantastic idea.
I've got a few for Drow I've used to "fix" them in a recent setting (my players hate stereotypical Drow).
58 - Drow have no concept of justice. This might seem obvious given an Evil race dedicated to a Chaotic Evil deity of trickery, but it goes much deeper than that. Drow do not feel the urge to reciprocate harm done to themselves or (for those good-aligned Drow) others, or the concepts of guilt or karma. Evil Drow may seem very vengeful and petty on the surface, but this is in fact just a desire to not appear weak or vulnerable. Should the situation change so working with someone who has committed a serious crime against them is more profitable than not, they will do so without any lingering resentment, something that can appear quite odd to non-Drow.
This problem becomes much more serious when dealing with surface-dwelling, Good-aligned Drow. As they do not understand the concept of punishing the guilty, there have been incidents of inexperienced Drow adventurers turning on the grieving relatives of a murderer's victims when they try to enact justice, assuming they must also be deranged killers. Furthermore, they see no need to atone for past crimes, and will fight back as aggressively as against an evil opponent if someone tries to attack them over said past crimes (really, they don't understand that that opponent is not the same as a bandit who attacks them). Paladin orders and similar organizations that accept Drow usually require them to undergo special training to avoid problems like this.
59 - Drow live far deeper underground than Dwarves and without light sources outside of small rooms (mage studies, etc). As a result, most of them have never seen at distances more than the maximum of their darkvision. Furthermore, the Drow language (really a dialect of Elven) has a special word for open space beyond the limit of their darkvision, normally translated as "Dark Space". Drow are very nervous in the presence of dark space, as it could conceal many of the more monstrous and horrifying Underdark denizens who could make short work of them in very unpleasant fashions, and usually make their homes in small, winding tunnels as a result.
This is another problem that plagues Drow expatriates to the surface, as the ability to see long distances is something completely alien to them. The first thing a Drow will do after first visiting the surface, after letting their eyes adapt to the light, is be violently ill due to vertigo and stare at the ground. Combined with the lingering fears of dark space, this leads surface-dwelling Drow to acquire a unique mental disorder called Perspective Phobia, which is categorized by fear of looking at the sky and sometimes crippling agorophobia, along with general distrust and paranoia.
60 - All Eladrin, Elves, and Drow are far more Fey biologically than their humanlike (or Dwarflike, or Halflinglike) appearance would let on, and they do not suffer from the same sorts of biological issues that the non-Fey races deal with. Their appearance is not shaped by external or genetic factors, but by their emotions and personalities as they develop. Unhealthy habits will not impact their appearance, and also problems such as blood clots and cancer simply do not exist for them. Some scholars have actually proposed that these races only require food because they think they do, not to fulfill any physical requirement, as there have been stories of Elves surviving on a diet of nothing but wine for weeks on end.
(To clarify that last one, they do not have conscious control over their appearance, and certainly cannot cause rapid change)
61. Satyr, Centaurs, and Cyclopes may seem at-odds with what is expected of Fey, given the impressions Eladrin and Gnomes inspire. However, passion, emotion, raw instinct, a desperate need for independence: these are gifts or curses that all Fey must learn to harness, or allow to rule them.
A Gnome may be capable of fantastic intellect, and indeed they are crafty, but they are not content to bury themselves in books. They get stir crazy easily, and need revelry and entertainment as they need food and shelter. While most races can tolerate or even enjoy Gnomes for who they are, they aren't likely to inspire confidence in their discipline without being an exceptional Gnome. Theirs is a genius, but a mad genius.
Eladrin may be the more reserved and elegant of the Fey, but beneath that calm demeanor can lie a temper to match a Satyr's, or a sense of whimsy to match a Gnome's. They try to keep a handle on this fiery passion, and usually succeed, but their wildside can show in times of stress or if they choose to let it loose. That being said, they don't make a habit of it, since they feel their are expectations at times that they be the bastion of moderation in shows of emotions, particularly in times of crisis where their pain could further burden already distressed comrades.
(Counting up the un-numbered contributions, I put Breadley's at 64, so I'll continue accordingly.)
Crossposted from the No Love for the Gnomes [2.0] thread in Eberron: Eberron Lore. The original idea isn't mine; it arose between the musings of Sarlax and AvonRekaes. I'm just sharing my take on it as I responded in that thread.
That's a really interesting way to figure out non-human psycology. I've never thought about it in evolutionary terms, where gnomes have a different definition of "the fittest" than humans do. I could see gnome romances being long drawn-out affairs where the prospective mate proves his or her worth by scheming the counterparty into various romantic situations. The more subtle the schemer, the more attractive the gnome.
65. Hah! I like it! An entire society in which Hitch-style manipulation and trickery is considered the romantic ideal. The Zil idea of a romantic date is one which you don't even realize you're on until halfway through. Love notes which appear to be gibberish, or a shopping list, or even a headline, but are actually personally-encrypted missives using, say, your favourite poem as the key. Being treated exceptionally nicely by a number of strangers only to discover that they were all your suitor in disguise.
I would imagine that no culture in the world takes the concept of a 'secret admirer' as far as Zilargo; while rare, it's been known for two lovers to remain oblivious to one another's true identities even until their wedding night, peeling away one another's cover identities and false backgrounds as seductively as others might remove articles of clothing.
Perhaps the traditional means of marriage is to ensnare your significant other in some form of contract binding zie into matrimony. It's traditional always to leave your love some esoteric loophole by which to escape, be it though clever interpretation or some antiquated precedent. This is all tradition and ceremony, mind you; no more meaningful than our world's tradition of the bride's father 'giving her away', consent is obviously still respected no matter how clever the contract.
(I employ zie/zie/zir as a gender-neutral counterpart to he/him/his. Just a heads-up.)
Essentials definitely isn't for me as a player, and I feel that its design and implementation bear serious flaws which fill me with concern for the future of D&D, but I've come to the conclusion that it isn't going to destroy the game that I want to play. Indeed, I think that I could probably run a game for players using Essentials characters without it being much of a problem at all. Time will tell, I suppose.
66. As part of a dating ritual every year all participating drow men enter a competition to find out who is the greatest warriors, either through strength or wits, and while all bouts are officially considered non lethal to avoid the complete loss of the male population, many lead too the death and such victors are often seen as better potential suitors among the majority of the female population.
After the games the victors are visited with invitations of courtship or procreation from women seeking to strengthen their position in society or their bloodlines, when the man meets the woman it is considered good manners to show subservience to them to show one can control themselves, and that they know their place in the household, after the meeting is complete the man is free to leave, or if both parties wish it, stay as the part of a new marriage.
This tradition has come about due to the philosophy of the strong over the weak that is present in drow culture, and the choosing of weak men is considered detrimental to a houses reputation and continued power.
67. Warforged are perfectly capable of thinking and acting like real humans, experiencing self-determination and identifying themselves as having a perceived gender, but these warforged are treated as pariahs by their peers, and some will even try to kill these human-minded warforged out of fear that warforged self-determination is an infectious disease.
"True" warforged identify themselves as individuals only when it is important; otherwise, they are identified solely by what company, battalion, division, or other group to which they belong. In fact, the symbols that originally appeared on the foreheads of warforged were the coats of arms belonging to their commanders. The symbols were eventually intentionally corrupted as commanders acquired more than one division of warforged soldiers. "True" warforged follow the commands of their leaders unquestioningly, and the only reason that they were given sentience in the first place was so that they could assess combat situations and devise new strategies on-the-fly.
Warforged adventurers seek out non-warforged with whom to travel, out of fear that other warforged would try to kill them. Wandering warforged without a company are either disgraced survivors or possessed of self-determination, and both of these "disabilities" results in a death sentence to be carried out by proper warforged.
The original core books said that this was our game too. It doesn't feel like that anymore.
67. Warforged are perfectly capable of thinking and acting like real humans, experiencing self-determination and identifying themselves as having a perceived gender, but these warforged are treated as pariahs by their peers, and some will even try to kill these human-minded warforged out of fear that warforged self-determination is an infectious disease.
"True" warforged identify themselves as individuals only when it is important; otherwise, they are identified solely by what company, battalion, division, or other group to which they belong. In fact, the symbols that originally appeared on the foreheads of warforged were the coats of arms belonging to their commanders. The symbols were eventually intentionally corrupted as commanders acquired more than one division of warforged soldiers. "True" warforged follow the commands of their leaders unquestioningly, and the only reason that they were given sentience in the first place was so that they could assess combat situations and devise new strategies on-the-fly.
Warforged adventurers seek out non-warforged with whom to travel, out of fear that other warforged would try to kill them. Wandering warforged without a company are either disgraced survivors or possessed of self-determination, and both of these "disabilities" results in a death sentence to be carried out by proper warforged.
I could totally see this policy carried out by the followers of the Lord of Blades in Eberron. Seems like it just fights right with'em.
So as not to post without adding another idea of my own...
68.) It's not exactly a well kept secret that Deva have reincarnated hundreds of times over the face of the world. After being reincarnated, Deva usually can only recall vague flashes of their former lives. It is usually because of this that Devas, then pursue more cerebral arts like that of the Wizard, Avenger, or Psion. They hope that by training their minds enough, they will be able to access their complete memories from all other incarnations. Even if a Deva has some other goal in mind when studying arcane sigils or divine texts, this desire is always floating around in their subconscious.
69.) Some Deva, will leave clues for themselves to discover in their next incarnation. This is particularly true when a Deva is pursuing a goal that it knows will take several incarnations to reach. For example, if a Deva is trying to discover a way to take down an empire ruled by an evil dragon, it may spend one lifetime merely learning all about how dragons think, feel, and fight, leaving clues to the location of their research for their next incarnation to discover, so that they can use the knowledge gained to properly fight the dragon. When the goal is very momentous, like toppling a Demon Prince, it may take hundreds of incarnations to properly prepare for what the Deva has in store.
