Amazon Races/Culture-Building

Long story short, what are good races to give the "Amazon" treatment in D&D, and what are good ways to make them make sense without being too blatantly magical realmy?

In particular, what are good ideas for "Amazonian" goddesses? Pic sort of related.

Anthropomorphic hyenas?

Golems. There's only one sex of them because the race was purposely created like that. They're larger and stronger than average because of the tall slabs of granite they were created from and due to the sculptor's skill in detailing fine and pronounced muscularity in their craft.

To start things off, the few pitiful concepts I've had so far...

Gnolls with a "Neo-Stygian" motif; corrupt, hedonistic, decadent empire in the not!Arabia/Egypt region. Worship centered on dark gods of pleasure and black magic; the bigger, buffer females do the fighting, males are masters of magic and do the necromancy, conjuration and enchantment that keeps the empire running. Big on indentured servitude and practical necromancy. Trade forbidden delights and exotic goods with those willing to barter with them.

Stormfury Orcs: Matriarchal tribe of female orcs who rose up against the traditional order of things after uniting in worship of a powerful goddess of storms. Plains dwellers who worship a pantheon headed by their "Storm Queen" and incorporating storm spirits and typhoon dragons. Fiercely independent, they've actually taken to trading with humans because, with every conventional orc tribe out there as their enemies, they can't afford the conflict. Reproduce "amazon style"; nicely with the human men, full-on murder-abuse with orc men.

Daughters of the Earth: An all-female race of dwarves created by an Earth Mother type goddess instead of a Smith God. Honor her through their tending to the earth and working of its bounty. More magically inclined than standard dwarves.

Sun Elves: Essentially a cross between D&D's elves and Warhammer's Amazons; once a female religious order of magical knight-protectors, they were stranded in their savage homeland when the elven empire broke apart, and have gone...peculiar... through elven generations of isolation. Have actually harnessed a combination of elven magitek and reagents from the deep jungle to achieve parthenogenic reproduction, but it's side-effects of the process that are making them so feral and savage-tempered.

>Make the setting a jungle or islands
>Make everybody tall and muscled
Done

warrior galateas?

They probably won't have a nice personality though

Wait, do you want an all-female species, or just one where the hunters and fighters are exclusively female? The former can be handwaved and then they don't have a choice but to be Amazons, but the latter implies their sexual dimorphism is the reverse of other humanoids, or else they're denying reality and handicapping themselves.
If their women really ARE taller, stronger and braver than their men on average, and we assume they evolved naturally, then those traits were selected for in women more so than in men. This does not make sense for humans, who generally treat men as the expendable gender, being extreme K-strategist with long and painful gestation. A human tribe that lost half of its men can repopulate much faster than one that lost half of its women. If your Amazonian race puts women in roles that risk sudden death, you need them to reproduce in a way that makes women the expendable gender, or else they wouldn't get to have such inhuman sexual dimorphism through natural selection. I believe that means R-strategist, although I'm not an expert.
You also can't base them on lions, and I know someone is going to bring this up in defense, because the male lions are still stronger, they're just specialized to fight other male lions (note how this results in one breeding male for multiple breeding females) while the females do the hunting. They also give birth in litters which helps offset female deaths, and can hunt just as well while pregnant unlike humans.
TL;DR you can't have Amazons in a two-gender humanoid species as a purely cultural thing.

>TL;DR you can't have Amazons in a two-gender humanoid species as a purely cultural thing.

Of course you can. This is fucking fantasy. If you can buy swordsmen splitting boulders in half with their swords and running all day in plate armor, if you can buy somebody waving their hands and turning reality inside out by conjuring fireballs and lightning bolts, then you can buy women NOT being gimped by the hands of reality.

Gods, whatever happened to Veeky Forums saying "when realism impedes upon the fantastical, in a fantasy setting, then FUCK REALISM"?

Not everyone wants to play in "shit-smeared grimdark neo-Medieval Europe historical fantasy game #27834".

>swordsmen splitting boulders with half with swords
Nigga, that shit never happens with martials in D&D, despite the fact that high level martials should be like hercules or some shit.

Attack roll vs. Inanimate Object, beat object's Hardness, do enough damage - destroyed boulder. You could do that in AD&D or in 3e, it's just few people ever bothered.

With the right build, you could shoulder-barge your way through the average stone wall like the Koolaid Man.

what about hyenas ?
basically gnolls

or parthenogenesis ? (female can get pregnant by themselves, basically cloning). Either take a reptilian/fish-like race (ah ! you though there was actually male dragon/lizardmen/lamia/mermaid ? you fools !), or some human tribe who was blessed/cursed by the goddess of love/fertility/whatever

>women NOT being gimped by the hands of reality
That's just another way of saying women NOT being hindered by sexual dimorphism or deterred from high-risk jobs as a consequence of how humans reproduce. It's taking a part of reality you don't like and saying that doesn't apply in your setting. In that sense we agree.
If they are biologically similar to humans, but they treat women as the expendable gender, they're outright insane. Even cavemen with no concept of natural selection understand this.

This

Also Amazons have a long standing rivalry with Valkyries who are not rally a race but all the Female warriors who died in battle or with honor become Valkyries in the after life.

Stone women vs Ghost/Angel women

In all those cases it's NOT a purely cultural thing, there's a biological basis for it.
Perhaps I should have specified you can't have HUMANS (or a basically-human-with-pointy-ears race) who just arbitrarily decide that women are the expendable gender and completely invert gender roles because of political correctness or some shit.

Your mention of parthenogenesis explicitly does not apply to my argument, as I said, I quote:
>The former can be handwaved and then they don't have a choice but to be Amazons, but the latter
>THE FORMER (an all-female species) CAN BE HANDWAVED
>you can't have Amazons in a two-gender humanoid species as a purely cultural thing.
>TWO-GENDER
Did you even read?

Do you have to ask?

...In a thread talking about amazons, why would you not presume by default that the realism issues vis a vis female warriors have been ejected from the setting?

>without being too blatantly magical realmy?
They've pretty much always been used, even in myth, as an exotic fetish.

The classical, all-female amazons are probably about as close as you'll get to a not-too-blatant fetish race. And even then it's pretty fetish-y, since they operated in a sort of symbiotic way with an all-male tribe, complete with blind orgies for the sake of propagating themselves.

>X-Men in Asgard
This was the best X-Men story arc. Fine art too.

Why not treat Amazons like an all female Paladin Order/Religion?
Like all female Templars? You can have their own kingdoms etc.
What would you lose this way?

Personally speaking? Nothing; heck, I can easily see elves having all-female paladin/religious-swordmage orders, seeing as how they're a race that relies more on magic than on muscle anyway.

I mean, hell, isn't the Sorceress from Diablo II basically an Amazon Wizard in her fluff?

So, what are some possible ideas for amazon-friendly godesses? Surely, in a fantasy world that already rejects "-4 Str", you can have war goddesses, storm goddesses, etc who aren't all psycho-lesbians?

Any warrior goddess I would imagine.

I didn't know the default assumption was humans reproducing via stork.

Well, consider the real life example of Kali/Durga as the violent aspects of Shakti in Hinduism

>make sense without being too blatantly magical realmy?
Make them into giant Whiptail Lizards, without any typical mammalian sexual characteristics

>D&D
>Amazons
Wasn't the entire point of Amazons IRL that they were a rare sect of women that *Didn't* have the biological setbacks other women had that set's them apart from men, allowing them to breach the gap?

As D&D holds both sexes equally, there's no point to having them- as it isn't a setting where magical items or ingenuity make up for racial disparities any longer.

no?

they just rode on horses and shot bows and arrows and shit. They're scythians

Good stuff

Lizardfolk. Lizards and crocodiloans usually have larger females than males, and being egg laying they are effected less by pregnancy.

Lizardfolk women could be large sized, ogre-like beings that specialize in hunting while small or medium sized males raise animals and grow crops.

In my last setting Lizardfolk had a special affinity for giant bugs, often living in the same colonies as giant bees or giant ants. They harvested aphids or honey from the hive and in return helped protect it from invaders, as well as leading the workers to sources of food.

Really? Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I like all of those ides myself, but I'm really not sure how to expand upon them. Like, for the Sun Elves, assuming a 5e game, would they maybe be a unique subrace in terms of PC stats?

>That's just another way of saying women NOT being hindered by sexual dimorphism or deterred from high-risk jobs as a consequence of how humans reproduce.
Humans are only one race, the OP is specifically about other races. If spiders were sentient I can't imagine they would use men for fighting when their women are 80 times the size of men.

Even if you wanted physically oriented amazons you could always say that a goddess empowers her servants. When a woman becomes a paladin she grows a foot taller, her muscle mass doubles, and her skin becomes as tough as leather.

>I mean, hell, isn't the Sorceress from Diablo II basically an Amazon Wizard in her fluff?
Technically yes, she is from the Zann-Esu clan of mages, sources differ some say the clan "female dominated" others say "female only.", but it fits the description.

Practically speaking,no because canonically there is an established amazon society on the isle nations of Skovos where the amazon character (and Cassia the hero from Heroes of the storm) originates from.

Isn't the Zann-Esu actually the local mage-clan for Skovos, though? With the Amazon in Diablo 1 being from a renegade branch that migrated into the region where the first game takes place?

Just bring out the fanfiction and smut, please, I need it

No they are originated at Kehjistan which is in the desert a loosely middle-eastern themed culture It is also said that the witches that founded the Zann-esu disappeared into the eastern Jungles and became a super secret organization.

While the islands of Scovos are an ancient greek themed culture located at the far South west.

I like this idea.
>Wait, why do all the golems have big tits?
>Fuck you I'm a wizard, that's why.

>they tend to fall within similar height/weight ranges of men with similar strength
>amazons tend only give birth to females due to XY combinations getting rejected by the immune system
>culturally they enjoy fighting, rivalries of all kinds are to be expected (especially between friends)... are all very shy when it comes to any sort of romantic affairs
>they are usually sent off to adventure as a part of their rites to grow up
>adventure just means sending them off to learn life skills (and get a job, tends to be physical labor)
>stalking/kidnapping is not an uncommon story as to how a couple has gotten together during an amazon's adventure

You mean like Breath of the Wild's Gerudo? Where the "Voe and You" class has that one student who really sucks and you can feel the teacher's urge to dope-slap her?

...

...

Risa, how did you even pass the previous year?

Are we so sure that she *did* pass the previous year?

Also, are BoTW's Gerudo a perfectly good example of a decent Amazon culture in Veeky Forums's eyes?