D&D Beastfolk Races

So, if you like beastfolk races in your settings, do you ever let them be playable?

If yes, what races do you actually allow?

Oh I forgot one stipulation. You must have already played an existing character in the campaign with one of the regular races.

If your character dies, or you retire them after a while, you can start to get exotic with race choices.

Technically anything, but those beastmen races are not all sociable and nice folk, and have their own shit going on.

You can technically play a Gnoll. Your Gnoll's traits however would be around how fucking hungry you are all the time, how you can no qualms about eating intelligent humanoids, and how cool Yeenoghu is.

Favourites are Crow-men, Ratfolk, and Lizardmen..

>My Onu-Matoran Compatriot

>Aranea
They sound fucking weird.

>Rakasta
Too close to Rakshasa. Maybe Rakshasa are devil-twisted cat-people?

>Lupins.
I much prefer the French dog people. You can have all manner of character when you factor in breeds.

>Tortles.
They're neither mutants or ninjas. Pass.

>Ratfolk
Love them. Use them. I particular like the one iteration where they got smart and humanoid by eating human corpses.

>Vanara
Monkey people are meh.

>Minotaur
These are monsters. Flesh-eating monsters born from female cultists in their blasphemous rituals to the Demon Lord Baphomet.

>Gnolls.
Slavering, demon-worshipping, hungry, laughing. Hail Yeenoghu!

>Grippli.
Boring frog-people. Much prefer the Grungs from D&D 5e's Volo's Guide. They have a cool colourful poisonous treefrog deal going on.

I tend to run original settings, so the various D&D beastfolk races aren't even always in existence. Current setting has kobolds, kenku, and kitsune, but no catfolk, lizardfolk, gnolls, minotaurs, ratfolk, dogfolk, spiderfolk, or anything else. It also doesn't have elves, orcs, gnomes, or halflings, but does have a handful of original races, several of which were developed with input from the players.

If something exists as a sapient humanoid species with a limited lifespan, it is playable.

Pet peeves:
>Every nonhuman race has its own culture that is constant across all settlements of that race, no matter how far apart they are. Every human nation has a different culture.
>Nonhuman races are geographically limited, generally having only two possible homes. Humans show up on every continent, and in every possible biome.

I've long since replaced all non-humans with various beastfolk and demielementals.

>frog-people
>boring

That's it. I'm going to play poopoopeepee in the next game

No.

Frog people aren't boring. Grippli are boring. Grung do frog people better.

I'm fine with it if the shape/physiology is interesting. If it's just a human body with an animal head, that's nothing but cringy fetishes.
The flavor is pretty important too. I'm not completely against having them in a setting but you'll have to work quite a bit for it to be alright. [...]folk isn't a good trope. Make it yours.

In my current campaign, most (if not all) of the beastfolk races are playable. My GM seems to be really fond of more out-there beastfolk, like snapping turtles, vultures, naked mole rats, and axolotls.

I can dig it.
Maybe replace goblins with rat-folk.
Maybe replace elves with something like wise-owl folk, or ancient lizard men.

>tfw you'll never play a frog man cleric of Kek

Shadilay brother

How would you guys stat / imagine a trickster Frog God in a D&D setting?

Chaotic neutral?
God of randomness, chance, comedy (lulz),
Maybe minor domains like comfiness, schadenfreude, and hatred (normies)

The way I do it when I want tot use beastfolk is to refluff the creatures in the monster manual as corrupted, feral, and/or insane versions of their more civilized counterparts. To make this divide clearer, I try to find/make half-creature templates (i.e. half-minotaur) that weaken the civilized versions for player usage. This allows monster beastfolk to be more dangerous and gives a reason why you can find and fight their brethren without them caring.

literally Slaad
>Frog people
>Mostly Chaotic Neutral
>Reproduce by planting their eggs (memes) in people

i would post funny emes on 4chin and make dubs thread

Haven't run any games with a focus on beastfolk, but I'm very flexible with it. Just don't magical realm it and you will get very free hands to make a beast person. But you have to be aware that not everyone in the setting wants to associate with a talking kangaroo.

In my campaign world there are a three L1 PC-ready beastmen races; Ratlings, Satyr/Faun, and Minotaur calfs). Others are available at higher levels.

Don't Slaad spawn from some rock in Limbo?

>all these furries
>no lizardmen or kenku/crowthings
m8

Just play it up as human specieism

Stealing the gem from Slaad pepe's head and keeping him in bondage when

Depends on edition and setting, user

Do Kobolds count? If so then yes, Gnolls too, the rest are on a case by case basis.

This is why Gnolls are great they are more hyena than human.

>Just play it up as human specieism
Doesn't really address the number of settings in which it's explicitly the case.

>ctrl+f "thri-kreen"
>0 results

dumb furries

>insect fuckers

That being said, where are the phraints?

I generally include Lizardfolk, Gnolls, Minotaurs, Kobolds, Ratfolk, and Thri-Keen in every game, tailored for a 1st level character if needed, unless one or more of them is functionally non-available. I have tweaked most of these races, or created a subrace to be a bit more plausible as sociable, and to differentiate them from the standard races they would overlap with. I inform players up-front that many of these races may not always receive the best treatment, and that they will have to work a bit harder to make their character believable, and that applies double if their backstory has "muh outcast" in any sense whatsoever. I have had a few furries, but honestly, they only really become a problem if you let them. If there are only a handful of Gnolls in civilized society, and most people react to a hyena-man hitting on them like a real person would, they either leave or settle in. The players I have had that have made incredible characters because of this have been more than worth the occasional shitter.

I sometimes toss in another race or two by setting, and I might further tweak a race for a player on request if they pitch a neat enough idea (One player's Gatorfolk twist to Lizardman springs to mind), but not usually.

I just thought of tweaking Warforged to be a Bionicle. Fuck. I need to do this now.

>checks the Forbidden Realms wiki
>Red and blue slaadi reproduce by infecting living hosts.
>The red do so by implanting eggs beneath their victim's skin which grow into a baby blue slaad that eats the host from within.
>The blue infect the host with a lycanthropy-like disease that slowly transforms them into a red slaad.

Well that's creepy and cool at least, there's no way this can turn weir...

>All those infected with this disease become female, regardless of previous gender.
>Whether the transformation is mental is unknown.

WHY IS FR STUFF ALWAYS THE MOST MAGICAL REALM SHIT POSSIBLE?! the fuck FR?!

>Pepe injects eggs into user
>user turns into a large, flabby creature that lives in an area of poor light
>user becomes ever more accepting of traps and feminine penis
>user eventually lures a "friend" to a board, thereby furthering the cycle
>And then we became the slaadi

Because Ed Greenwood was writing and publishing the setting long before the concept of "magical realm" had been identified and vilified.

I mix it up now and then based on places. I was reading up on kobolds and realized that as a lawful, community oriented group of short miners who like to craft stuff that I could easily have a group allied with dwarves.

In a group I had a small mountain range with dwarves living deep and high in the mountains while kobolds lived mainly at the foot of the mountains. They had a very business and respectful relationship with each other as they never really encroached on each others territories.

Not a lot of intermingling but I did have one dwarven smith who had a kobold apprentice.

Unless I'm running a published campaign setting, I'm providing my own list of "core" races, and at least half the published core races are out the door.

If I am running a published setting, what's playable depends on the themes and location of the campaign. No humans in a drow intrigue campaign.

If the players' races aren't integral to the campaign, they can play whatever fits, with whatever RP consequences make sense.

I've allowed everything from orcs to hobgoblins to minotaurs to lizardfolk to pseudo dragons to awakened animals to outsiders. I will make custom write-ups if I'm not satisfied with the availability or lack of such for my PCs.

I don't play with randos, so it works out just fine.

And in a breath of fire campaign, everything is animal people, but the number of animal people races will be limited to what exists in setting.

It all depends on the campaign.

It's fine.

However, I do have problem with just general substitution, since it just gives the generic elf/dwarves/etc. a funny suit instead of doing something funky.

Plus keeping verisimilitude is important.

Okay so going off my current list of "unusual races of the planes" for this homebrew:
Awakened Cats
Aarakocra (the bird people from Dark Sun)
Thri-Keen
Bariuar
Lamia
Moonoths (moth people, live on arcadia, worship the orb of Day & Night)
Khaasta (crocodile mercenaries from the Abyss)
Mushroom people who live in Pandemonium
And maybe Slaad.

Also a random roll table at some point for playing "beastfolk" (which goes alongside the roll table for tieflings and Aasimar)

Anything else needed to fill Y'all's weird desires?

Wait a second, if Slaad reproduce by planting eggs inside people or by disease vector... what the fuck even IS a female slaad? Or is that the wrong question, and is there no "male" slaad?

I include tortoise people in all my settings. And mandate that they cast spells by hurling empowered seashells.

the ability to present a racial write-up to the player based on their concept, rather than from a list.

If they ask "can I play a *monster type* *class type*" you try to say yes more often than no.

There are no male or female slaadi. Just slaadi.

because magical realm hate is something newfags do. It wasn't present in the old days.

But do they know kung fu?

Slaadi were invented by Charles Stross and presented in an article of White Dwarf magazine.