Gnolls and other Savages

I just use Gnolls and other regional races as replacements for their Earth equivalents.

So Gnolls would be Savannah peoples, but frankly there isn't much going for that, so make them the Egyptians of your setting.

Orcs and goblins are always 100% evil or pawns of evil assholes in my setting because my players want high fantasy and high fantasy is what I like delivering.
Not everything have to be 2deep4u clever retrospective on society ills or what you pissed you off at the moment.

I don't get it why you don't simply use humans for that and use the monster races for more unique purposes (like forest/ruin dwellers) in your setting.

>t. kid who doesn't understand high-fantasy

>Likes having humans do everything civilized and every monster is just 100% pure evil shitbags that live in shitty holes in the ground

SUPREMELY unique world you got going there

For me:

Goblinoids are wicked and mischevious creatures with fey origins. While not always evil, they are cowardly and selfish.

Orcs have origins in being created by a demon lord, but were able to fight back and loosen it's grip on them, making them a sort of mongrel race of beings, some raiders, some mercenaries. They're not 100 evil.

Gnolls are wicked, savage, creations of a demon and are a literal plague that roams the dark continent.

I was there for that thread.

They were nice ideas but I liked my murdergnolls just fine

>I never use "evil" or "good" races.

Me either in my setting Gnolls are the main inhabitants of my "middle eastern" mixed with some egyptian (ancient trap filled tombs with mummies) for good measure. Their bazaars usually have some neat shit in em.

Well, if you don't mind looking at some non-Eurocentric mythology:

>In Ethiopia, it is traditionally believed that every blacksmith, whose trade is hereditary, is really a wizard or witch with the power to change into a hyena. These blacksmith werehyenas are believed to rob graves at midnight and are referred to as bouda (also spelled buda). They are viewed with suspicion by most countrymen. Belief in the bouda is also present in Sudan, Tanzania and Morocco where some among the Berber people regard the bouda as a man or woman who nightly turns into a hyena and resumes human shape at dawn.
>In the folklore of western Sudanic peoples, there is a hybrid creature, a human who is nightly transformed into a cannibalistic monster that terrorizes people, especially lovers. The creature is often portrayed as a magically powerful healer, blacksmith, or woodcutter in its human form, but recognizable through signs like a hairy body, red and gleaming eyes and a nasal voice.

With this in mind you could probably get away with Gnolls filling the roll of artisans / casters in a Savage Race setting.

Oh shit that's actually really cool.
>Gnoll craftsmanship is actually incredibly good.
>Even with simpler, less refined materials Gnolls can forge some of the strongest weapons and armor in the lands.
>Countless Orcish Warchiefs, Troll Chieftains, and even Drow Assasins have gone to war with Gnoll-ish arms and armor to great effect.

>Rumours have it that Selyna Greywing, Elven Queen counts a Gnoll-made saber among her most valuable possessions.
>Completely unfounded and slanderous rumors, I assure you.

I like gnolls. They're a breath of fresh air from orcs and goblins, at least to me they feel very unique.

When I use them, I like to fluff a small pantheon - take some existing gods, bring back some old ones, make up some nature spirits - so there's a strong religious reason for inter-tribal warfare that PCs can encourage or pick allying tribes if they chose to. And this is something that works well for most settings, I think - they're still brutish raiders, but they're about as evil as any other brutish raiders, and can be included as enemies or neutral parties or even PCs at will. They make odd but not quite unfitting Native Americans, Africans, or vague desert tribes, or even just European barbarians. And honestly, as evil as they can be, I make them funny. I think humor is sorely lacking in games sometimes, and having a race that is pretty much a dog (I know it's not, but still) can be provide some fun moments of idiocy that's a bit more fun from animal things than from orcs.

There's been more of a demon push with them, and I don't fully like that. Mostly because I've been burned by Warhammer and just about everything getting explained with Chaos. Why is it it that in a magical world where almost every other monster and magical creature just vaguely exists, the gnoll gets picked out to be the demon descended? It feels cheap, and I'm not willing to put in the work to make more demon-descended creatures to make it feel less out of place.

Generally, in modern fantasy, Fey classification is reserved for creatures of the forest (often narrowed down further to "mammalian creatures of the forest") and - in a smattering of some works - "creatures of the sea". This scratches off the "Feywild did it" excuse.

Which is rather problematic as in the D&D setting once you get past "The Feywild did it" your options are generally: A wizard did it, a god did it, a curse did it, nature did it, the Hells did it.

I can understand that people will want an explanation for how things came to be, but I just kind of prefer the idea that the world is naturally a little magical and some things just show up. I don't need gods to explain where horses came from or something, you know?

From an in-universe perspective, people may not even know where things come from. They'd probably know only as far as what limited archaeology and written history could tell them.

I know it's being petty - no one feels limited when their tieflings come from Hell - but that's just now I feel.

>entire campaign is a "who dunnit" story

mite be cool

Not that guy, but that's honestly starting to swing around and become unique because of all the people deciding to make every monstrous race a beacon of hope and prosperity

I can get that, but I prefer the middle ground just for a little variety.

A few individual gnolls who are traders or mercenaries makes the world feel living instead of just 'all of this race is this,' and is interesting - it stands out like the scamp merchant in Morrowind. If they end up being backstabbing mercenaries or untrustworthy merchants, it's still interesting because of a twist, even if I could have seen it coming.

Nothing but mooks makes me less interested in why I'm killing them at all, and making them all paragons of hope and good makes me want to bash their faces in with a chair so I'm not railroaded into having to like everyone. If there's nothing that's ever going to surprise me or stand out, why bother? Granted if the rest of the game is somehow interesting in other ways it's fine, but it better be interesting. A little bit of chance for interest in a lot of places is never a bad way to set up a setting.

...

In my setting, gnolls used to be neutral hyenafolk servants of the wild-god of the hyenas, but then an archdemon ate their god, tried to command their obedience, and they ate him, absorbing his demonic soul into the bloodline of their race in order to keep it from escaping and reforming in hell. It gave them some cool powers, some bad curses, and a tendency towards evil. But because the demon ate their old god first, and then they ate him, they also ate what was left of their old god, so they also have potential for the druidic/shaman style magic of a wild god, and the capacity for good.

... Well, not good. Neutral. They have the capacity for neutral. They still have souls and free will so they can theoretically be good, but it's not likely.

I sorted them into different subraces based on what body part of the archdemon their ancestors ate, which each have different attributes and their own powers and curses, so their society has a caste thing going on. You have warrior-king leaders with demonic strength, full of rage and hunger for glory (and flesh), fighting each other all the time and swapping out over a merchant/craft/scholar caste, full of demonic cunning, who hunger to accumulate wealth and/or knowledge (and flesh), a labourer caste who have demonic endurance and appetites and hunger for base pleasures like sex and drugs and such (and for flesh), and a druidy priest caste who have the more divine powers from the old god but because their ancestors ate the demon's stomach to get that big helping of divine essence they also have a greater hunger for, you guessed, flesh. Specifically the flesh of a sentient being, preferably torn from their still-living body! And there are little mutanty wretches who got the bad luck draws on the demonic attributes gamble and form an absolute bottom kicks-in-the-head dirt caste, who mostly have curse stuff going on but sometimes have unique powers.

Talked about it in gnoll threads here before, I think.

That's pretty rad, gonna have to remember that.

Your method of creating settings is what led to pillars setting.
A lot of interesting idea but everything end up garbage because there is no strong focus on anything.

I used Gnolls as more of a historical plague that's long since ended; or happens in cycles, like the right conditions need to be around for the next Gnoll swarm.

I'm actually playing a Gnoll in an Eberron game right now. He lives in Sharn, has a nice townhouse in Deathsgate, and is actually rather cultured, purely out of spite for all the humanoid elites--he knows that his mere presence at an opera, or in a fancy restaurant ruins it for a bunch of other people because even though he isn't doing anything wrong, they're still super uncomfortable being near a monster like him. Plus, he gets a really good meal or performance out of it. It's all upside.

Of course, he also participates in pit fights and likes to with Six Stones whenever Daask gets a match together, because he's from Droaam and those are things he grew up with, but it makes for an interesting range.

There's a Forgotten Realms trilogy featuring Erevis Cale that goes into Gnoll lore quite a bit but I can't remember exactly the name of it. Worth checking out I think.

I say make a world, and then make something in it. And a world that feels real isn't black and white.

Why should the setting itself have to focus on something? With a little luck and patience, you can make a setting that you can make large enough that you can narrow down the focus for whatever game you want to play. Guarding caravans? We can do that. Political shenanigans? Plenty of room. Delving into dungeons? I've thrown in a few. You want gnolls? I've got the kind that want to kill you, the kind that are wary of strangers but see value in shiny goods, and the odd kind that are actually versed (enough) in civilized ways to be mercenaries or try to swindle you. There's humorous high fantasy, there's grimdark grittiness, there's the banal inbetween. It's not that there aren't hard rules, but there's also wiggle room.

The difficult is to keep it from going 40k and keep it from swirling off into nothing, and I can't honestly say there's an answer to that beyond getting at least a fair portion of the setting down and keeping it there.

I like to play up Gnolls as hardcore hedonists. Sex, drugs, rock and roll baby.
(Think Lazier Orks)

Admittedly I like the Gnolls-As-Stellar-Craftsmen idea a lot so I might need to change things around a bit...

Minotaurs.

Discuss

Not me, but a while back I read (here?) about a gnoll PC.

Chaotic Evil Cleric. Worshipped the concept if Cities.
Wouldn't shut up about how great civilization and walls were.
Acted civilized, but would dropped the act on the head of a pin.

well to be fair Hyenas are basically what happens when you take a Feliform and make it as doglike as possible, so giving Gnolls dog behaviors isn't really all that inaccurate

also I generally have Gnolls be among the more neutral of the Monstrous Humanoids on a cultural level(few if any race is inherently good or evil, although some races do lean more towards chaos or law, and of course a culture for a given race can be good or evil, so it's more a matter of upbringing than anything inherent in their souls or blood)

definitely stealing this

>Gnolls are the dwarves of the Savage Races in terms of artistry and craftsmanship

How can this go down on the plains?
Are they smelting down meteors?

To be completely honest I never put much thought into Minotaurs.
I never thought of them as a race as much as a one-off monster.

How could a minotaur civ come to be anyways?

i don´t what else my gnolls have but there speak with an austrian acent

Humans make for really good savage creatures

They're making monster hunter gear out of dead giant monsters.
I'd stick minotaurs with the traditional smithing role.

Once honored scions of the old nature gods
Now monstrous relics of a backwards age

Like, fallout style raider gangs style or bandit clans?

Is this original lore?
Either way it's really cool and I'm probably gonna steal it.

Here are my setting notes on gnolls. Note: they're not evil at all, and I generally don't like the idea of evil races. Neither are they very savage, to be honest, so I'm not sure if my notes would be of any interest to you at all. But at least they're definitely gnolls.

Gnolls are marine-based nomads. They are the basic and most common menace at sea. While some of them settle along coastal crags and treacherous coves in certain parts of the world, particularly in Kond, which is believed to have been the site of an ancient gnoll kingdom a long time ago, the overwhelming majority of them are born at sea, spend their entire lives and die there. A fair amount of them never see any firm ground at all!

They travel around the oceans on small island sized wooden hulks made from the hulls of dozens of wrecked ships or boats stuck together. To enlarge these artificial islands and, consequently, their living space, the gnolls bind the hulls of the ships they capture or sink to them with ropes and grow a special sort of sea moss on these hulks that glues the ships together.

They drink purified seawater and herd schools of salmon and other fish which is their main source of food. Their favourite routine is raiding and pillaging, many well-protected sea caravans fell to hordes of gnolls on flimsy boats built from flotsam and armed with harpoons. They're also not above selling their skills as mercenaries to those who are ready to pay.

Gnoll colonies usually travel between large ports of the world, buying and selling exotic stuff from distant lands, much of which is stolen or pillaged, and much of the rest consists of fakes and fabrications. Many ports explicitly don't allow gnolls to set anchor because they're associated with stealing, spreading disease and kidnapping, which is not entirely unfounded.

As a culture based almost entirely on water, they have around fifty words in their language describing all the different kinds of it. They also have a great instinctive sense for the weather, which allows them to survive in the treacherous oceans. In spite of their thuggishness, gnolls are surprisingly cosmopolitan and have no reservations about offering jettisoned sailors and mutineers on the run a place in their floating colonies, provided that their skills are valuable to the clan.

Soothsayers are the most respected gnolls of all, they practically run the clans with their prophesies and predictions. Their skills are so impressive the even the ground dwellers often seek the advice of a gnoll soothsayer.

You wanna hear the story of hivemind minotaurs building hives from quark?

Last time gnolls came up in a campaign, a whole tribe got captured after a battle and my cleric of pelor converted them. They then became paladins, smiting evil and protecting the weak in the name of "pelor, the biggest shiny there is"

Pardon me?
That sounds incredible!
Post it!

Yeah, just pulled it out my ass vaguely based on a minotaur character I once played

It's from the same setting as the marine gnolls above.

Minotaurs inhabit the numerous gorges and ravines of Kuomai and the adjacent provinces, which are too narrow for humans to live there. Although they're mammals, their social structure and behaviour is most reminiscent of eusocial insects such as bees. Nearly all of them are male and serve as workers taking care of minotaur queens - gigantic cows with fabulous bosoms, whose milk is both sought after and highly addictive. They spend their days guarding the queens and reaping grass and flowers from their mountain pastures for them to eat.

Unlike the workers, the queens themselves have no anthropomorphic features, they're simply cows as large as dragons and nearly immobile. They have a very strong telepathic connection to all minotaurs in their colony and can easily mind control them if the need arises. All minotaurs are born from the queens in giant litters and feed only on their milk and assorted dairy products made from it. In addition to being very addictive, the minotaur milk has potent healing and magical properties, making it an important ingredient for many potions. Many adventurers attempt to obtain it, usually with catastrophic results.

The queens also act as memory storages by reading the minds of all the minotaurs in their colony and storing all the information they got. Individual minotaurs can then download the necessary skills or memories from the queen if necessary. That's how they can master a wide array of tasks in a really short time. However, they also forget any knowledge downloaded from the queen rather quickly - that is why they aren't all geniuses and masters of all trades.

Cannibalism obsessed culture, wild gods, demonic influence and deicide by worshippers. I like it.

The only minotaurs allowed to copulate with the queens are the drones, they're of a gigantic size in comparison to a normal minotaur, have a much more bovine appearance with a centauric lower body and much bigger, more prominent horns that they use to clash with each other to determine who will copulate with the queen. All minotaur younglings are born the same, what species they eventually grow into depends on the different sorts of milk that different younglings are fed, each sort contains specific hormones that determine their ontogenesis.

All minotaurs live in giant hexagonal hives that they build from quark made from the queen's milk, these hives are extremely labyrinthine and very easy for an adventurer to get lost inside. Apart from the minotaurs themselves, the hives are inhabited by casumarzu, giant maggots used by the minotaurs as pets and beasts of burden.

Before battle, minotaurs consume a special blue cheese that gives them berserker rage and incredibly strength. Although they're usually armed with caesti and buckler shields fused with gauntlets, they generally rely on their mighty horns in battle and put different caps on them, such as spearheads or axeheads, to make them even more effective as weapons.

They make their equipment from penicillith, colonies of microscopic mushrooms that grow on special sort of cheese. Penicillith is as hard as steel and much more resilient due to its fibrous structure.

It's cool and everything, but choosing minotaurs for this instead of pretty much anything else is deeply perplexing

>>minotaurs with axes attached to their horns.
This imagery is hilarious

I think it should be obvious that the setting doesn't take itself very seriously. It's very light-hearted and fairly comical in places.

You'd be surprised how many would write something like that and take it perfectly seriously, considering themselves a paragon of originality

Is it wrong that I see nothing wrong with that? Spelljammer comes to mind when I think of something with a completely ludicrous premise which is actually great fun. Though case could be made that Spelljammer doesn't take itself seriously either.

Yeah actually, if it's light hearted and meant to be goofy, all the more power to you.
It's still odd as hell though.

Why? I think it's a brilliant idea for a Minotaur racial weapon.

...

If I were to write Gnolls in my setting, I'd make them into three different subgroups, based on the spotted, the stripped and the brown hyenas.

The spotted gnolls form large, albeit primitive cities with very strict hierarchy and stratification. The cities proper are inhabited by females who are the core of the governemnt, culture, religion and everything. They have deep ties in the city they were born in and they very rarely leave. Every female inherits her mother's position in the society and usually learns her mother's trade. The city is divided into large factions based around prominent families and their matrons, the matrons often strive for dominance, but open fights are rare. The one ruling matron, the matriarch, is usually the strongest and the most ruthless of them, but she will also be the first to rush into battle and so matriarchs frequently die, and are instantly replaced by the second matron in the power hierarchy.

The females value motherhood, personal strength, familial ties and loyalty to their city. The males are seen as inferior, weak and too carefree, especially for parenthood. They inhabit the outskirts and borderlands, live a somewhat free life and don't have very strong ties to their city, but they are also forbidden from participating in the city politics. Young males usually leave their native cities and wander around looking for a city they could join. But even then they can leave again, or even live in a kind of double-citizenship, or even just stay stateless and continue to wander the savannahs in small bands. Almost all of the rare gnolls living in human cities are male mercenaries.

The head of their pantheon is the Mother Goddess, who is also associated with earth and water. The central myth is about her slaying a primordial fiery lion of chaos and conceiving children from his blood. Another prominent deity is the male god of wind and hunting. The Mother Goddess's dauther must chase him to take as husband, but he evades.

Fuck sake, I have lost my file on gnolls so here it is in the nutshell.

Mostly gnolls can be categorized into two groups. Tribes and caravaneers.

Tribal gnolls live their lives in their tribes. Ruled by the strongest male gnoll, but practically governed by council of matriarchal gnolls. Chieftain leads them in wars and council solves all kinds of practical and everyday problems. Gnoll tribes and their villages rarely grow bigger than few hundred gnolls as male and female gnolls that don't see any necessary tasks to be performed usually venture into adventures to gain glory and treasure to cement thier position in the tribe after they come back.

These gnolls form bands and mercenary companies. Universally liked for their eagerness to fight, they are wanted by all sides. Gnolls do not care if they get paid and get their share of loot who they fight.

Sometimes a strong gnoll chieftain unifies the tribes and goes to carve their own small kingdom, but usually after the chieftain is dead the kingdom splinters into warring tribes.

Caravan gnolls in turn roam the lands in their caravans. They are practically gypsies of the world. Their society runs just like their tribal cousin, but they are more open and understandable of the world around them due being on a move a lot.

Gnolls are nearly or just as smart as humans, but their biggest disadvantage is their hands. Not suitable for fine work, their crafts and creations are bit shoddy, but good quality. In terms of alignment they are chaotic neutral or lawful neutral depending on the tribe/caravan. Rarely not giving a shit about other races unless they have gold pr glory to be gained from it. They are not evil, but just savage.

[2/2]
Also guess the quirk of spotted gnolls females' anatomy.

As for the stirped gnolls, they live in small tribes and practice primitive sorcery and black magic. They can inflict diceases, do some shapeshifting and they are resistant to poisons (all gnolls are, but the striped gnolls are almost immune).

The brown gnolls live in coastal semi-nomadic colonies and are pretty similar to the striped gnolls, but are generally less savage than other gnolls. Brown gnoll traders and craftsmen going to human cities to do business and then returning to their colonies are not unheard of.

The quirk is that they have spots.

>Nearly all of them are male and serve as workers taking care of minotaur queens - gigantic cows with fabulous bosoms
I don't want to hear this story anymore

Honestly I'd be tempted to make them sea-faring merchants, because the Minoan culture from whence the Minotaur's mythology comes was known as oneof if not the first mediterranean mercantile superpower.

Also it's a bit of a subversion of bullpeople being watershy, while also having waterbuffalo minotaurs being a thing, leading to subspecies variety of the Minotaur race.

In settings with gunpowder I usually change Gnolls from tribal bad guys to more refined mafia members.
Not species wide obviously but it's there.

You may want to check out this ancient setting called Dragonlance.

I'm not sure what you expected from a story involving quark hives.

>only mountains can be mined

Savage civilizations in the campaign I'm working on include.
>Gnolls: decent leather workers, and small pack hunters, often hired as mercenaries to attack carvans by rivalling corporations. That is, when they aren't doing it of there own accord
>Goblin: excellent silversmiths, decent enchanters. Ideally they create small communites,but they usally end up as large cities. They also farm a substance that would most likely be considered a drug.
>Orcs: Mongols. done.
>Scavern: rat people more or less in a symbiotic relationship with dwarfs, trading there own ad slaves for small land chunks within there empire, they also pay "protection"

>gnolls can only live on the plains

From an in universe perspective, there would more likely be legends/myths of where things came from, whether true or not.
So, in your setting, even if gnolls are natural, there'd be creation myths surrounding them, both their own and those of outsiders.

>Orcs: Mongols. done.
>Scavern
Lazy, man.

But proper central asian steppe orcs are fucking awesome.

And not tired and overused or anything at all.
Not to mention that simply lifting real world cultures is super lazy in any case.

That's not untrue, but I love the classic mongol depiction. I wanted to incorporate that, but not just say MONGOLIA MOTHA FUCKA

What about the others? How are they? Critique is welcome.

They're fine.

I've got mongolian orcs too. They're riding around on dinosaurs. Some have yurts on them.
It's a tribal/stone age setting, so it's savage races galore. There are the classics in addition (humans, halflings, gnomes, elves and RIP dwarves), but they're all various shades of tribal.

Alright, copy/pasting is bad.

However you can never go wrong if you take long, good looks at how real world cultures did things and handled certain problems and transport those concepts into the respective environment of your own setting.

Now as far as Mongol Orcs go, honestly I have never actually seen a precise transportation of this concept appear in any setting. Yes, I've seen "Marauding horde of dudes wearing furry hats and coming from a desert place" happen, but it's always either a complete oversimplifaction of evil barbarians or an equally oversimplified noble savage trope, so frankly I don't see where you're coming from.

It's about the same as saying "I don't like not!vikings in my setting because they're done to death" when in truth all viking/nordic fantasy tropes are conan-esque barbarians wearing fur-loincloths swinging around huge axes and thinking that unnecessary drunken brawls are a jolly good time.

Funnily enough, even that's been done.

Oh, I have no doubt about it. I wasn't trying to be particularly original at world creation, I was trying to do something that had flavour but still allowed my players to find their marks quickly.

>honestly I have never actually seen a precise transportation of this concept appear in any setting
Are you kidding me? It's probably the most popular depiction of orcs right after "primitive savages with just enough culture to wage wars"
>It's about the same as saying "I don't like not!vikings in my setting because they're done to death"
I'm guilty of saying that. But I hear what you're saying. Would people even recognise realistic Scandinavian inspired warriors without all the Wagnerian bullshit as Vikings? And would that be very interesting?

There's nothing wrong with that at all, I was just pointing out because I loved this game.

>tribal gnomes
Just when you thought gnomes couldn't get more hilarious.

They're filling the fey/lots of magic race slot. They have a lot of druids, alliances with fey and/or elementals monsters, hate everything else, and trap their territory with magical runes and stones everywhere.

Precisely. Though I meant that they have strong jaws and huge molars.

Also I forgot to add that in their early childhood spotted gnoll kids go through a period of violent fighting that can result in death. Traditionally the mothers weren't supposed to interfere in these fights and if they tried to stop them it was seen as a sign of weakness, although nowadays most gnoll mothers do interfere to prevent death. Still any deaths in these fights are seen as sacred, and the soul of the killed is believed to merge with the soul of the killer, making them stronger.

Gnolls are seen as savage, brutal and cunning, and that's pretty much true. And yet humans often underestimate gnolls' intelligence, especially the spotted gnolls' talent for intrigue and ability to work together relying on subtle communication.

Now my gnolls are truly copypasted from the real spotted hyenas, which is just as bad as copying human cultures, but you can do that if what you copy isn't very well known.

Now you made me curious. Please point me towards Mongolian orcs.

As for actual scandis:

I believe the most interesting bit about them would be the paradoxical duality of a culture somewhere between ooga booga shamans innawoods and sophisticated, globalised merchants, and that Vikings are their own social class in a sense that they're professional raiders and vagabonds. It would definitely require some compromise for easy access, emphasising on seafaring and other naval expertise, and then building up from there.

Depending which bit is stronger, it would make sense to build the culture from its urban lifestyle or from the countryside, then make a step-by-step progression towards the other.

In this case, I guess playing up the tribal warrior bit is easier to digest because of the barbarian stereotype, so taking inspiration from rural area Scandinavian tribes and building the culture up from there could definitely pique some interest.

Although I haven't actually watched the show, "Vikings" does at least a more enthusiastic job of looking into Scandi culture of the time than prior productions and it definitely has its following.

I really liked how NV had some in-depth, well thought out raider clans. Made me really wish 3 or 4 had anything close to that. Feels like both games were wasted opportunities.

user delivers

I like gnolls with some of the theme from their first god of nature's vengeance, but still with the demonic corruption.
Hunting intelligent races almost exclusively. Using guerrilla tactics with traps and poison, bolas and nets and hit and run to wear enemies down. Not as skilled trap-makers as kobolds but good at throwing nasty surprises together quickly enough to intercept travelling prey they're tracking.
Capturing living prey whenever possible to torture and devour alive and use in bargaining and rituals to get demonic weaponry and tools.

You're a godsend.

Not to brag but I wrote that greentext, I could still bite my ass for not saving it earlier. So glad somebody else did!

>gnolls
>lame furries
>not tentacled monstrosities as Lord Dunsany originally conceived them

Being unique for the sake of unique is stupid and pathetic especially when you have to waste time on justifying things in your setting instead of moving on with the session and story.
Perhaps your group is different or you simply don't play tabletop, but people don't go and play tabletop with you just to spend a lot of time listening to you.
It's a hobby of mutual story telling and enjoyment, not just one retard get to hog everything and everyone else just playing the audience.

That sounds like a good prologue to an Aardwolf-centered story, similar to Watership Down.

I want to be taught how to craft fine weapons by a big Gnoll matriarch

Thank d&d and tolkien for establishing the current weird versions of monsters that most people are familiar with.

When will people stop saying Tolkien is at fault for modern author's laziness.

And even if his works have any part in that, it's just the names, because modern fantasy suffers from people building worlds and cultures with a rigid grid in mind so their races can fill gameplay niches, which is all D'n'D's fault when they started making templates to include every possible NPC monster into a playable race.