Because it's been a while since we had one.
Honest question: have you ever changed gnolls from the bog-standard "ravening hordes of mindless demon worshippers" mold? Or is 5e's depiction of them pretty much everything you wanted out of them?
Gnoll Thread
Noah Morris
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
theoi.com
ancient-origins.net
en.wikisource.org
en.wikipedia.org
orthodoxartsjournal.org
twitter.com
Angel Fisher
Related query; would you consider this interpretation of gnolls to be "magical realm"?
Gnolls reign over their own empire in the "not!Africa" region; a tropical and arid land of savannahs and open scrubland. Their "hat" is "Decadent But Dangerous Easterners"; their empire is built on a combination of martial skill, trade in luxuries (fine metal work, gems, drugs, black magic).
The gnolls worship a pantheon of "dark gods", somewhere between demon princes who've chilled out on the whole "destroy everything" rhetoric and lesser gods. Chief of the pack is Lamashtu, who fits the "Dark Mother" godly archetype - wicked and lusty chief goddess with powers over nature and fertility. The lesser gods in the pantheon are focused on roles such as war, various forms of hedonism (gluttony, carnality, drug-use, fine art, excess decoration), and magic.
Driving philosophy of the gnolls is hedonism: the purpose of life is to seek pleasure and indulge yourself. They lean strongly as a race towards Chaotic Neutral; self-centered, impulsive and lazy, but not inherently hostile towards other races as a matter of default. A typical gnoll wants to throw parties where she can lounge around on silk divans wearing shiny jewelry whilst eating and drinking herself into a stupor, not destroy cities and eat live babies.
Justin Hall
cont due to length:
Technically, gnolls are matriarchal, as the females are bigger and stronger than the males and claim this represents the nature/blessing of Lamashtu herself. In practice, the prevalance of necromantic talents amongst the males means that many males exert open political power, as the empire depends on them to run things.
See, the empire's workforce is built on necromancy on a massive scale. Armies of skeletons, bone golems and other skeletal undead form the grunt labor that keeps the empire running by doing all the boring task.
The empire also makes heavy use of conventional slavery. As such slaves are required to do tasks that require independent thought and finesse, however, they are not as oppressed and downtrodden as they might be. A living slave is a valuable piece of property and treated as such. It's even possible for a slave to win freedom through loyalty and skill.
With none of the traditional constraints on drugs, alchemy or magic, the gnoll empire is a hotbed of black market trade and a veritable mecca for necromancers, warlocks and jaded hedonists.
Although its existence rankles many of the more hardline goodly faiths, the gnoll empire goes unchallenged because of its legitimate trade and because, so far, the other kingdoms have accepted it's better to have them content and lazy than roused to savage wars of vengeance; unlike hobgoblins, they're not particularly ambitious conquerors and so acts of aggression are comparatively rare.
Julian Nguyen
This is now a kobold thread.
Post kobolds.
Hunter Foster
>Or is 5e's depiction of them pretty much everything you wanted out of them?
This.
They're slavering tribes of demon worshippers. They aren't mindless.
Nicholas Phillips
On an aside, the last time there was a thread like this, there was a PDF posted about a "Chainmail Setting", from back in 3.5, due to gnolls being a major faction? I couldn't grab it because my shit-tier connection couldn't download the PDFs for some reason - anybody still got that?
Landon Hernandez
>have you ever changed gnolls from the bog-standard "ravening hordes of mindless demon worshippers" mold?
In a setting I ran a while back, gnolls were a slave race of one of the larger human empires. Originally, according to legends, they were the ravening horde of mindless Yeenoghu worshippers, until Yeenoghu pissed off the Sun god, who commanded his worshippers to invade the Abyss and put it to the sword.
After defeating Yeenoghu in combat the Sun swallowed him whole, where he's been trapped for eons, burning for all eternity, forgotten by everyone. His entire race was enslaved and made soldiers for the human empire. In the present day no one remembers how or why gnolls became the empire's soldiers, it's just kind of how things have always been.
Because of that, peoples' perception of them has changed from evil barbaric monsters to noble defenders of humanity, or tyrannical conquerers if you live outside the empire.
Easton Garcia
You're mad. Why do we have a gnoll thread every other day? Why gnolls? Why are you people so obsessed with fucking gnolls?
Anthony Gomez
bullshit.
gnolls forever!
Jeremiah Gonzalez
>Honest question: have you ever changed gnolls from the bog-standard "ravening hordes of mindless demon worshippers" mold?
I don't have any race of "ravening hordes of mindless demon worshippers" in my games. The existence of such a race doesn't sit well with my core beliefs.