Can satyrs be a viable PC race?

Full beastie boy or just boy with horns?

So nymphs would trend towards clerics and druids, maybe sorcerer too?

I can see satyrs filling a dex-based ranger role too.

I dunno, did OP ask for your warhammer bullshit or did he say satyrs?

I am OP

I'm not really too big on the mostly naked look, but finding satyrs wearing Ancient Greece style outfits isn't easy.

The bigger barbarian satyrs could possibly favor something like the Dacian falx as a weapon. Just a thought. If they're meant to be a more outsider culture it makes sense to give them foreign weapons.

They also didn't look like half goats either, those were fauns. Satyrs were human shaped with really shaggy legs, horse ears, and a horsetail. What the thread is dealing with is the more modern creature that has been a mix of the satyr and faun and has females, who were introduced several centuries ago.

Kind of like how kobolds aren't ugly little dudes that live under the floorboards or elves aren't sprite-fairies that cause strange illnesses. Pop culture will have its due.

Fauns are the ones with females

They're all make believe user

>elves aren't sprite-fairies that cause strange illnesses
That's right, they aren't.

Why not a middle ground?

I was thinking nomadic wheelers and dealers

not really trusted but charismatic and savvy enough to at least trade between the civilized and the savage races. Like if you wanted to know what was going on in the world you'd ask the next satyr group that moves through your village/city

What about gorgons, anons?

What about them?

The problem with Medusa Gorgon and the Minotaur is that they were very singular monsters in the myths, where as satyrs, centaurs, nymphs, etc were a proper species of spirit/people. There were loads of them.

If I make a satyr-like race for my world, forward or backwards knees?

Advantages/disadvantages for both.

Well firstly there are no backwards knees, just very high ankles

>forward or backwards knees?
Time for a lesson in anatomy. "backwards knees" is not a thing. The name for that type of leg is digitigrade, versus a humans (or bears or monkeys) plantigrade. What you are talking about is a digitigrade creatures ankle joint. Consult the following guide for reference on how the leg works. A satyr simply has legs like a goat.

Going back to mythology I think you'll find Satyrs are mono-gender too. As they're spirits/fey they don't have to make biological sense.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

But why such a difference? What are the advantages of one over the other? There must be a reason why some animals have evolved one way or the other.

Generally they run faster and have better maneuverability/dexterity.

It took ages for humans to figure out how to make our bone structure work.

For whatever reason unlike nymphs, satyrs did start getting female counterparts under the Romans. So while we can quibble about the original myths, in popular consciousness nymphs are always monogender while satyrs aren't.

"The primary advantages of a plantigrade foot are stability and weight-bearing ability; plantigrade feet have the largest surface area. The primary disadvantage of a plantigrade foot is speed. With more bones and joints in the foot, the leg is both shorter and heavier at the far end, which makes it difficult to move rapidly."

Big feet let you generate a lot of leverage from the ground in different body positions. It's useful if you need to be able to shift your weight around a lot and use upper limbs without being thrown off balance, something that really only human and a few other great apes do.

Plantigrade feet are better for bearing weight. Bears and humans have them, bears because they're fuckhuge and humans because they stand up straight, meaning all their weight bears directly down on their legs. This gives us a bunch of problems like spinal compression and faster joint deterioration because gravity is a bitch, but it would probably be worse if we were digitigrade instead. Stuff like elephants and rhinos cheat the system by technically being digitigrade but also having giant cushions under their feet.

You know its crazy how every vertebrate is basically using the same albeit heavily modded skeleton. We look so different on the outside but all our blueprints are roughly the same

That comes with animist religions, you get a myriad of minor spirits of various aspect.
Nymphs were fucking brutal in greek mythos,as likely to tear travellers apart and eat them than offer them a cup of vine.

Anyways, according to what I remember of greek mythos, unless you live in the garden of Eden, satyrs are fucking parasites. They are devout followers of Dyonisos and are explicitely stated to be good for nothing.
I would make them itinerant loners that bless small villages with abundant harvests in exchange to room and board, and maybe some stories/news from nearby places.
like the catfuckers in Dragon Pass

Depends on the nymph. Most were gentle and lovely, but those fucking maenads...you'd think agents of the god of revelry would be more friendly.

The god of revelry and madness. Don't forget that second part.

Dionysus' followers are one bad trip away from cannibalism.

How do you think dragons would look like with plantigrade feet? I've been wondering since I want to make the dragons in my setting less reliable on the physique of a cat and more on one of a bear or something.

All birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals are decedents of a mutated lobe-finned fish and share common features.

This, given the association between stayrs and Dionysus whose portfolio included madness which makes seem like the way to go.

Satyrs are very close to other races in the roles they play.

>Drunk
Dwarves
>Nature loving
Elves
>Horny
Humans

You could fluff you're own setting and build a better or more unique backstory, but I don't think ripping them directly from myth makes for an interesting player race.

TFW no Roman Legionnaire Satyr waifu.

Can someone explain to me why Tolkien and schlock fantasy took off and makes up the "default" setting when mythological settings are so much cooler?
An exclusively greek setting works as a standalone. Why did "orcs, elves, and dwarves" get popular but "satyr, nymphs,centaurs and demigods" did not? It's especially weird when you realize that greek stuff is required reading in school so everyone is at least somewhat familiar with it. Who actually read lord of the rings or drizzt novels?

Everyone mentioned weight already but I'll throw in that birds are very light and have hollow bones. Bald eagles are only 14lbs max. Sure ostriches are heavy as fuck but for flying birds they need to carry as less weight as possible. Even albatross can only take flight from the ground or water if the wind is right but after that they pretty much spend most of the year at sea and air.

Just one of the reasons why it doesn't matter what kind of wings you put on a horse doesn't mean it can fly.

Your typical dnd dragon is weird in that it has digitigrade hindlegs but plantigrade, hand-like forelegs. A fully plantigrade dragon might have a more heavy set build, maybe like those long necked sauropod dinosaurs. The red dragon from dungeon meshi struck me as something a plantigrade dragon would look like, even though in that it was digitigrade. You could also go a more reptilian route and make them like alligators, though keep in mind most reptiles have a splayed leg thing going on; their legs go outwards to the sides while in mammals the legs aim downwards. Dragons, of course, can be whatever the fuck you want.

Also, you could go real crazy and give dragons the wyvern walk and use their wings as forelegs, but keep their actual forelegs to use as manipulator arms

>but keep their actual forelegs to use as manipulator arms
kind of like a t-rex?

>Can satyrs be a viable PC race?
I see no reason why not.

>If so what would their culture and lifestyle look like, as well as their racial attributes (assuming 5th ed DnD)?
Well, they're fucking sex addicts. But we all know how Veeky Forums loves to water down mythos so I guess they're noble and misunderstood creatures who aren't really demons but look like demons so you can get your edgy anti-hero going?

>Curious because I'm building an Ancient Greece inspired setting
Then why do you need a playable race other than humans? Their whole mythos is about everything outside of Greece being strange and wonderous, and about folks leaving Greece (or sometimes remaining within Greece) to find weird and marvelous creatures and maybe fuck a god or two.

They have hand-like forelegs so they can manipulate objects. At the basic level, it's just sweeping big piles of treasure around in their horde, but they can also manipulate their toes enough to hook and snag small objects with a degree of finesse.

Serious alcohol production takes agriculture. Are they the indigenous nomads introduced to the firewater by another spreading culture? Are they the fallen race some god king created to populate his party city state and then abandoned?

that's not a satyr that's a faun

"inspired by" doesn't have to mean "clone of", though that's unfortunately quite common in the fantasy genre

>"inspired by" doesn't have to mean "clone of"
I'll flip that around on you: the only reason why we're doing the whole "multiple PC races" thing is because it has become RPG convention, probably derived from Tolkien though there may be some earlier source I'm unaware of. Actually going back to the historical mythos, most of the time these non-human creatures are treated as outlandish and at best given supporting roles.

If more fantasy authors "cloned" the source material rather than derivations of derivations of the source material, fantasy would be more interesting overall.

Some older games were based on mythologies such as Greek, Egyptian, etc.

My favorite of them would have to be Dark Age of Camelot. It includes A LOT of Greek mythology, including Atlantis, nereids, centaurs, etc, without including races such as orcs (though, Elves and Dwarves are included on opposing factions).

Its you user. Thats the reason.

Think about it. Someone tells you to make a character for a DND game they will be running, and youre going. To be figuring out how to make them fit in Middle Zealand, Not Greece, or India, or the Middle East.

Besides, the Narnia books are almost and popular and have all that stuff too. If you want it to be more popular, write your own.

>Can someone explain to me why Tolkien [...] took off?
Because Tolkien was a medievalist, very learned on Scandinavian folklore/mythos and an incredible autist who gave any character even passingly mentioned in LotR a deep and complex backstory. His knowledge of medieval Europe and Nordic mythos combined with his severe penchant for detail (imagine how much he would've fleshed out the world even more had he lived another decade) has inspired many and more or less redefined fantasy.

>Can someone explain why [...] schlock fantasy took off?
Because Tolkien became popular, so why not rip off Tolkien? I mean, what made Tolkien great were certain elements in his story that can easily be ripped off, right? Not the study and dedication that went into writing the story, because that would be fucking stupid, right? Even better if you rip off rip-offs of rip-offs, resulting in the standard tropes we have today and almost nobody willingly deviates from in fear of alienating the audience that eats this shit up like hotcakes.

The penultimate question:
Elf ears or animal ears?

Interesting initially, but eventually we'd end up with the same clone degeneration we're seeing now. Really the issue is a lack of understanding of the source, so bits are lost with every cloning, with nothing to fill in or repair what's lost.

There's nothing wrong with humans only as a concept, but there's also nothing wrong with varied races. OP wants variety, and hopefully he has a narratively valid reason for it. Maybe he's not going for the greeks vs the world theme actual greeks were so fond of.

>but eventually we'd end up with the same clone degeneration we're seeing now
Why write anything at all then, if you risk it becoming the new standard everyone copypastes?

this is the real question and i vote maybe divide the two into subraces. have the animal eared ones be the more stong body ones, for classes like barbarian and such stated above and the elf eared ones more charisma focused.

Why do men risk anything? For the chance of success, because it's simply fun, etc. Maybe you'll be the one in a million creator who can take his inspirations and generate something amazing in it's own right. Tolkien managed it.

animal ears all the way

Also, multiple kinds of horns. Ram horns,
goat horns, ibex horns, anything up to antlers

More like a Tigrex, from Monster Hunter. Of course, they still have digitigrade hind legs, but their forelegs appear to be plantigrade.

I'LL TAKE ALL OF THEM!

I feel like monkeys shouldn't count as plantigrade. More like they have four manipulators that they're occassionally forced to walk on when there are no trees to climb

>If so what would their culture and lifestyle look like,
Swiss or french or austrian mountain folk, high altitude farmers

Wrong

misread that
>sex-based ranger role

I used maenads as part of the drow race in my setting. Regular nymphs had an arrangement with the elves where they were basically surrogate wombs for the nobility, who in exchange protected and propogated the trees they were bonded to. Maenads showed up and inverted the scenario, parasiting off the elves and using them to make more maenads or "matriarchs", turning them into slaves/dark elves

That's nice Mr President

If I'm remembering correctly Satyrs and Nymphs were essentially mates for one another. A Satyr would protect the Nymph and the Nymph would bear the Satyr's young.

The terminology is literally about how your feet interact with the ground. In this case they walk using the entire foot, which is literally the definition of plantigrade. If they only used their fingers, then it would be digitigrade, and if it was hoofed toe, then it would be unguligrade.

The term for locomotion through trees is brachiation, but doesn't cover what limbs are used since it doesn't matter.

ITT: Biology 1010

Captcha KILL SMART

Heh

Satyrs are blessed by the great one herself

Faun/Satyr are very charismatic. They drink a lot, fuck a lot, and make for great lovers, friends, companions, accomplices, anything. Anything social, they excel at, to the point where there's hate and racism against them exactly because of how handsome and well functioning they are. Wherever they are, they are in the top rung, except if the community around them hates them for their social prowess. Chad get out ree, etc. They don't make for great tacticians, and are slow to understand math, but are great feelers and at times good planners.

Their chest is generally normal skin, and their fur begins anywhere between their thighs and their waist.

I thought tolkiens motivation was partially inventing new lenguages (and giving them a place where they are spoken) and also making nothern folklore more popular. Like, everybody at least heard about greek stuff like the minotaur, but nobody gave a damn about dwarves and elves.

He wanted to make a pre-christian british mythology, though gave up after he realized the whole thing was packed with christian themes. But ultimately, yeah, he was just an autist that needed to make fictional histories to validate his fictional languages.

Kind of sue-ish

Tails or no tails?

Socially competent =/= Mary Sue

>to the point where there's hate and racism against them exactly because of how handsome and well functioning they are.

how dense do you have to be to not see the marry sue.

She just has the black goat, the satyr was Yog-Sothoth's boy.

How dense do you have to be to realize that mary sueishness depends on the context and style

she literally turns you into one if she deems you worthy
wilbur was more like a leech/dinosaur/bigfoot/italian

You can have a few different takes on satyrs.
IN a classic greek mythology setting, they most certainly are some kind of elves (living in harminy with nature) but with more carpe diem (if you will). Parties, pagan rituals that include music, dancing, drinking, eating and fucking, a race that is a bit secretive but not hostile towards other races.
That is, if you want to make them PCs with a proper society, because most legends portray them as serial rapists with little consideration for human life.

If you want to play them in a more traditionnal setting, I would argue that having them as a more nomad race would make more sense, since we already have the forest dwelling elves. Maybe they are artists and chamans who travel for miles and miles to share their way of enjoying life, maybe they are great craftsmen. Weirdly enough, I see them kind of like I see centaurs (except not agressive and less wise) : There are not a lot of them around but they have skills other races crave so most of them have a good confortable life teaching them and making great artifacts/objects/rituals for them. But I also view them as playful and enjoyable to be around...

>clipty-clop I'm so fucking stealthy!

Not even that guy but cmon.

The problem with gorgons is that they can't really have social interactions with other races. You could fix that by changing the race, but even then, the Gorgons in the legends don't have much personnality. Medusa is just a cursed rape victim with some pretty logical bitterness to her.
But I guess you could do that.

First, let's say the curse was diluted with the subsequent generations. They don't turn people to stone with their gaze, they are just very startling and fascintating. They have a special race ability which allows them to freeze people that see her for a few turns (augment that with levels) but it can only be used a few times per session.
Second, I think what would be interesting is making them pretty proficient in medical fields : they have snakes for hair, which certainly make venom and venom was used in diluted form to cure certain illnesses or as anti-venom (that's why the god of doctors has snakes as his favorite animals). They can be masterful assassins with poisons but seeing how their race come from such a horrifying background, I think they would want to redeem themselves by beeing skilled healers.
Third, they could have a really interesting way of thinking about gods and faith, especially in a fantasy setting with provable gods like ancient mythical Greece : they were cursed by a goddess for being raped by another god in a temple. That would be some reason to be pissed at them so I could very well see them think in a more scientific way. They know gods are real and can be helpful but they also know they can be spiteful and cruel so they rely on their knowledge rather than on religion.

Think of a mix between Sherlock Holmes' carthesian thinking and Dr Watson' kindness and mix of deadly/healing skills.

>D&D
I've ran and had two games where a player has played a Satyr

First game not so exciting. We were playing a toned down planescape, so I just re fluffed Bariaur to be Satyrs. - Not that the group or adventure was boring, but ... I read my group as not very imaginative correctly.
...Planescape blew their fucking minds let me tell you...

Second game was a little more weird. Planar-lite again. Satyrs were (reportedly?) to be the goofy comical characters in Greek plays- Satire coming from Satyr. Thus all Satyrs had a strange ability for comical or strange timing or tweaking the universe around them to let more "Comical" or playwright circumstances happen.
Weird yes, the player (and rest of the group) loved it.

I definetely would play that.

...

In my current low magic setting, they're called the Geiturfolk. They have a variety of horns, tend to be faster and slightly stronger than humans. Until recently, they were a slave race of the 5 Empires. They broke free during a recent pandemic and founded their own kingdom in a difficult to reach area encircled by mountains and fey woods. They are constantly skirmishing with the 5 Empires to free more of their people and just outright kill slavers. They are currently trying to negotiate an alliance with an island nation of industrialized humans for advanced weapons (early firearms and cheap steel).

Whatever you make out of it, you stupid shit.
Seriously, what the fuck is this thread about?
>Hi guys, I'm making a setting, please make it for me

I think it never before was suitable to say the following line:
Go fuck a goat.

So Pharika and the gorgons of Theros, then?

I'm not shitting on the idea. I actually like the spin on the concept WotC put on the gorgons, what with their emphasis on poison and medicine in equal measure.

Nobody mentioned that 4e had Satyr as a playable race.

I don't know what you're referencing there so no i'm not copying anything it's literally what first came to my mind about civilized gorgons.

In the MtG plane of Theros, the gorgons are servants of Pharika, the goddess of affliction. They hold the knowledge of all things medicinal and poisonous.

Depending on your setting and system, such a style of gorgon might well work as an option for player characters.

Humans have bigass femurs, huh?

Has there ever been a more useless person on Veeky Forums than you? Probably, but I'm struggling to think of one.

>If so what would their culture and lifestyle look like?
Lusty wine drunktards.

>Curious because I'm building an Ancient Greece inspired setting, and satyrs seem the most logical non-human race to add.
An easy way to add them is making them a wood elf reskin. This also works really well for centaurs.

You should consider centaurs instead.