Gnoll Thread - Psychic Gnolls Edition

My gnolls actually are just one of local species that live in forests and plains, specialise in hunting creatures and being druids....Aggressive druids. Females are dominant and they are more akin to stripped hyenas and not spotted ones.
But notable feature of mine is that they can be hired easily by most races and in the lore have been used to help hunt down last orcs in the regions players play in, using hit and run to brake up the main force, while the last remaining army was crushed by a group of boars collected by a mad kobold hunter...

Okay, we have the 4e Ecology of the Gnoll in handy, easy-to-upload format here on Veeky Forums. Can anyone do the same with the Sociology of the Flind? No, I don't remember what issue that's in.

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Pseudodicks don't penetrate, they get penetrated.

They are more like prolapsed vaginas than dicks.

Fun fact; in Mystara's "The Orcs of Thar", the gnolls not only became playable for the first time, but were given the scientific name of "Canis Erectus", with three sub-species; Meridionum (brown-furred, black mohawk, prefers desert areas), Septentrionum (dark brown with red spots, white mohawk, common in northern regions) and Hilaris (light brown with black spots and snout, giggles before attacking).

>When you encounter the Gay Gnoll Mansweat cave in the bandit camp in Baldurs Gate

That was an encounter that seemed strange at the time, and has only gotten stranger since.

I don't really use gnolls, but I do enjoy the idea of a dogman empire. I'm making the Gnoll or Hyena caste of the empire the slavemasters, crafters, and merchants to keep with the theme of Gnolls.

>gnolls are basically hyena-folk
>usually never have vulture-folk as their major competitors/rivals

In fact, the only vulture folk I can remember in D&D period are the Nagpa of Mystara and the Aarakocra of Athas/Dark Sun.

Hmm... I wonder... maybe I can use vulture-folk in my setting as sometimes allies, sometimes enemies to my jackalfolk/gnoll alliance?

They could fill such a role, maybe as competitors in some ways as both animals are scavengers. Or allies due to vultures having greater range of detection via flight and bird of prey eyesight. Another possibly competitive aspect is that while vultures and hyenas both help to curb the spread of disease with their scavenging, vultures tend to be more effective at it.

I'm using them as nomads that travel the desert, riding segnosaurs, hunting earth elementals to harvest for metal, stone, and jewels to trade with the local Egyptian crocodilemen.

See Nagpa- actual fucking mini Lords of Change who did the exact same thing Tzeentch did with his staff- cursed to be angry animal people with self-image issues and a free custom staff.

Um... what?

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How should I portray the Gnolls in Keep on the Borderlands? Savage maneaters? Willing to negotiate? Skittish animals?

Savage maneaters who are willing to negotiate.

They do things that 'civilized' peoples think are disgusting and barbaric because, to them, it makes sense to do so, but are actually perfectly rational with internally consistent reasons for doing what they do and are perfectly willing to talk and compromise.

Being proud of your warriors and not having a cultural taboo against eating people isn't mutually exclusive with being rational and reasonable or even friendly.

No idea what that is, but Gnolls follow a sort of template of communication relative to actual hyena behaviour with establishing one's dominance over one another- something which changes so much it's hard to keep track of- the idea behind it is that a Gnolls talks shit to another Gnoll, and the other Talks shit back, stating name, tribe ID, titles, and how they're going to fuck each other up respectively, then at some point a conclusion is reached through possible alternate routes of communication, if not, it ends up being solved by some manner of combat.

Basically, they literally act like internet tough guys to communicate- unless the Flinds show up, slap them with their pseudopenises, summons a ghoul, and tells them to fuck off, because they carry the weight, balls and murderlust of their Demon Lord with them via show of a holy symbol.

Of course, this is all relational to their given threshold of intelligence- the stupider ones, next to having shit vocabulary are just "annoying evil canonfodder Demihuman No#X" that act closer to the like of cannon-fodder gnolls in Baldurs gate- just out for a fight-

The actual organized ones have flinds at the top with a king and his dangerous harem, managing gnolls around wherever they're based. Each one has a tribe, and a totem, which is literally a fucking racial power that gives them a the Ranger Class's favoured enemy feat- and they earn prestige by hunting that totem- something which greatly affects the numbers and the livihood of that tribe- Yeenoghu basically had this idea of setting up specialists for killing and slaughter, kind of like a Native american buffallo hunt thing but for certain tribes out to kill a specific totem- something that affects sociability, and quality of given Gnolls- with the addition of the fact that though rare, Gnolls are sometimes taken out of one totem tribe to be promoted to another- so there's a bit of eugenics here.

Anyhow, Gnolls are fundamentally lazy and because of the Sub/Dom thought patterns- they're brainlet Nietzsche level- but as this is related to Hyena behaviour- they got this rare system of actual adoption- where if a gnoll of some high rank loses someone important to them, to an aggressor they get recompensation through getting the prepatrator to be effectively raised as a gnoll in every respect- I forget why this is done, but basically the unlucky fuck gets caught in a position where they've got to prove they can be Gnolls by understanding the given mentality or wind up dead in the constraints of gnoll social order.

This said, if the party encounters a Flind, just sodomize them with their own Flindbar- it's simply something, that they, as the higher breed, can never recover from, and it effectively denies them their own proving ground of talking shit to one another communication, because you made them your bitch.

Or you can feed them carrion- or fuck with their heads by screwing with how they acknowledge sub/dom roles.

youtube.com/watch?v=qIjgIQweeYA
This guy pretty much gets the whole idea down- minus the Demonic influece or the fact that Gnolls look less and less anthrobait and more like someone shoved a half of a hyena into half of a torso of a man with the huntched back and everything, but that whole thing fell through translation so now, nobody knows if a Gnolls is meant to be hunchbacked, aesthetically anthro, or have literal crash bandicoot character proportions, like how Flinds went from "Larger Gnoll/different hyene breed template to" Skipped Leg Day Tiny the Tiger tier to DemonRoids, and other stuff.

Also, they did lack sexual features once, but the market demands titties, so now you know which ones are female.

You do know that gnoll art used to look like this? Not exactly the hunch-backed horrors you're describing.

Big issue is how do you want to play them? The reason that the 4e Playing Gnolls gets shilled so much in these threads is because it really provides a strong outlook of how they think and function, which is a neat mix of real hyena traits and fiendish influence.

Check it out and see if it's useful.

I'm on about a thing where the elderly ones are the hunchbacked more of the half a hyena's body on a mans body thing mentioned in the ecology of the flinf (I think) and now, it's all over the place.

Is that...?

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Perhaps; Nagpa did appear in Mystara the year after The Dark Crystal came out in theatres, to my knowledge...

I know what the Nagpa are. I just don't understand the context behind

So, weird question, but this is the gnoll thread; striped hyenas have a lot of associations with sexual & fertility magic in African folklore. What about adding some of that to a non-evil gnoll race?

Can easily wander into magical realm territory.

That said, you could have it that the locals seek out Gnoll hedge witches and mages for curealls and charms for strong children and blessings for newborns. Could use it as a point of contention for those not used to it:
>A Gnoll hedge witch from a foreign kngdom where this practice originates has set up shop by the local villiage not used to them, frightening villiagers when she approaches them to offer her services
>Missionaries have come to spread their teachings and are harassing the local Gnolls, trying to prevent the locals from seeking out the Gnolls' services

hahaha bump

Heck, I once considered basically using gnolls as something akin to Ravenloft's Vistani - nomadic wanderers who were shrouded in mystery, spooky but not necessarily evil, who roamed the planes scavenging occult secrets and arcane lore, and trading what they knew for their own benefits.

Does this make sense to any user?

Heck ya, sounds good.

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Currently playing a gnoll in a kitchen-sink, in the setting the Gnoll race is fairly civilized and most don't even worship Yeenoghu any more, a couple hundred years ago the entire race was subjugated and enslaved by sand Giants, with constant small uprisings that get crushed maintaining a sort of status quo.

My character is a slave who found the head of a flail while tilling a field, saw it as a sign from Yeenoghu and escaped. So far it's been the most Beta gnoll imaginable. Basically roll over and support any idiotic decision the self-appointed party leader makes. Recently though the leader (human barbarian) took water way over his head and got cursed by a skeleton Lord of some kind, aging him to the point where the character was retired.
So now my gnoll is semi-reluctantly taking up the mantle and trying as hard as possible to be a good leader. I even bought a whip as a personal reminder of who's in charge.

The end game dream goal would be to return home and incite a REAL rebellion, because obviously the Gnoll race have grown weak and soft in their ways, and revitalizing Yeenoghu worship is the only way the Gnolls can be freed from their tyranny.

You're not wrong. That's not a gnoll, that's a werehyena.

Though she is "married" to a gnoll tribe leader and has a gnoll daughter. Which perfectly answers certain questions about the relationship of gnolls and werehyenas, and what happens if they bone. You get more gnolls.

Also apparently gnolls can be big tittied too.

That sort of explains the Caesarian scars, I've seen the picture many times before but never known the context.

Source for this? I mean, I know it's a Pathfinder book, but which one?

Rivals Guide. Features a bunch of different adventurer groups and their gear, feats, and extra stuff you can throw at your party or take to use elsewhere.

>>dem abortion/c-section scars

not a furry but damn, do I find those hot on "women"
(for a girl is but a girl without one)

Many thinks. A pity they depict human/gnoll relationships as inherently wrong, but at least there are hints of some genuine affection (albeit twisted because, y'know, they're both Evil) between them.

If I recall, that character is a worshiper of an evil fertility goddess. Scars from giving birth to things that claw their way out are considered a sign of importance.

Yeah, Lamashtu has replaced Yeenoghu as the gnollish patron deity in Pathfinder. Weirdly, they're still described as very patriarchal as a species in all of the sourcebooks.

What are good gods for gnolls to worship if they're not an evil race, anyway?

Anybody?

Wicked Fantasy had some interesting stuff in that regard. Gnolls consider the sun to be an insane, homicidal god bent on burning the world to death, and it's only through the continued efforts of the moons (born from the sun and a primordial goddess the sun slew in a rage) chasing him off that the world isn't incinerated. Consequently, gnolls are also nocturnal, largely because it sucks moving about during the day in the areas they frequent.

Agreed; the Dach'youn of Wicked Fantasy are one of my favorite alternate gnolls. If only because they're the only alternate gnolls that still can be recognized as gnolls that I know of.

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Up to a certain point. A lot of people pointed out how that was kind of weird for a spotted hyena race who worshipped a female creator god, and they've been trying to make them more matriarchal since then.

Well, there's the various good gods of D&D, and the nature gods of D&D. In Races of the Wild for 3.5 they worship Obad-hai the Greyhawk god of wilderness. In Eberron some turn instead to ancestor worship through piles of stones made to resemble ancient idols instead of the Dark Six or the various demon lords.

For my own world I wanted each race to have its own pantheon, so I stole a bunch from the webcomic Digger and made a bunch up.
She-Is-Fiercer, is the creator goddess and mother of all gnolls, who tore away the males power during the birth of First Child. The archetypal matriarch, she towers over everyone but Blood-On-Snow.
Mother-Of-Earthquakes is the goddess of the earth and its riches along with construction, a short but strong hyena woman with a dour attitude and a love of gold. Pray to her to make sure your home is sturdy, and that she wont knock it down when angry. (dwarf analog for hyenas)
Blood-On-Snow is the god of death and winter, basically a ginger gnoll with red spots and a mohawk, and the palest white fur and pink skin. He was the first gnoll to walk the Path of Darkness into the Bonelands.

Hunts-the-Sky whose domain is birds and the hunt, Skin-Painter who knows the secret language of the soul and paints it on his skin (Truenaming magic and tattoo artistry), Speaks-To-Trees the slender woman who knows the secrets of all plants (elf analog and druid god), Fire-Keeper who tends the hearth and home and knows the means of shaping Earthquakes metals (an archetypal male hyena, knows how to craft and tends to the home).

And a bunch more I haven't made yet or don't remember since I lost my giant file of them on an old hard drive.

Wicked Fantasy is legit, i'm sad I never got to play it though. The rats, goblins, and halflings were my favorite.

I honestly thought the Gobowins were a daft idea, and I didn't like the Elves or Dwarves much, but the Orks, Dach'youn, Roddun, Gnomes and Halflings were all great stuff.

I could take or leave the Elves and Dwarves, but everything else was perfect for me. Every time I tried to run a game it kinda fell apart, and now my group has abandoned Pathfinder for greener pastures, unfortunately.

Could always steal the fluff for different systems, though.

Those are some pretty interesting deities. I should use those as inspiration for my own gnolls.

The evil part of the pantheon consists of three gods and several demon lords. the Eaten, the Glutton and the Mother of Monsters. The Eaten was the original archetypal male, called He-Is until he tried to dominate She-Is during the birth of First Child, resulting in First Child's death during the fight. For the crime of killing another gnoll and the first child his name was Eaten and he became a nonperson. He represent the sins of Pride and Greed.

The glutton is Yeenoghu and the child of the Eaten and the Monster Mother. A diseased sickly thing, half gnoll and half demon. A layabout who forces others into gathering food and such for himself, he delights in all the worst carnal actions. He represents Gluttony and Sloth.

The Mother of Monsters is Lamashtu, a demon lord and goddess of monsters who seduced the Eaten, wishing to take some of the essence of gnolls for herself. She is Lust and Envy.

All of them express some form of Wrath, an all consuming anger that expresses itself as willing to hurt and kill without any sense of proportion for any perceived slight or hurt.

Definitely appropriate, and a nice homage to the D&D and PF canons.

So, honest question; can gnolls stand in for orcs, complete with the potential to be evil, neutral or even good as the DM desires?

If they can stand in for orcs... what about the existence of Half-Gnolls?

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...I'm not sure if that image is appropriate for my "Vistani Gnolls" concept, but it's a damn nice piece of work. Thanks for sharing.

If they're Good, you rob them of much of what makes them Gnolls, and you end up with domesticated hyena furries.
Individuals can be good, of course, but socially they'd probably always balance towards neutral.

As for half-gnolls, I think the end result would always be a gnoll. Depending on setting there's ALWAYS a lot of crossbreeding going on, from regular hyenas to werehyenas to demons, the end result is always a gnoll and looks mostly gnoll.

spitballing ideas:

in my setting, gnolls are an old race that is sometimes mistaken for another race of animal people, but gnolls are unique in that they are immune to curses, so they naturally tend to inhabit cursed areas that all other sentient races avoid. Gnolls are not immune to being killed by cursed creatures though, who grow very large and dangerous, so they tend to live in fortified settlements and have martial traditions. Some believe the gnolls are descended from cursed humans, giving way to their immunity to curses, while others believe they were involved with the curse gripping most of the lands. Neither is likely to be true. On the whole it is very rare for a human to encounter a gnoll, though before the curse spread throughout the land, forcing the humans away, trade occurred more occasionally. The primary Gnoll tribe had a long standing feud with the forest folk, but when the curse spread through the forests and the forest folk devolved into voilent rabid beastmen incapable of speech, the Gnolls no longer had any reason to toleate their presence and wiped them out. Gnolls also scavenge abandoned human towns sometimes, but they stay far away from the cities as the hordes of cursed humans within are very dangerous and can give chase for dozens of miles without tiring. Cursed humans sometimes also wield primitive and simple magics which, while a shadow of the delicate and complex spell crafts of the old human scholars, is more than a scavenger ever wants to deal with.

So, random thought; in a quarantined-off, zombie-infested wasteland of a former kingdom, ala Nazi Germany in Zombie Army Trilogy, does it make sense that gnolls might start colonizing the unwanted lands for themselves? After all, as far as they're concerned, zombies are basically meals that deliver themselves...

Eh, not really, in my opinion. As TVTropes puts it, Good Is Not Nice; the Playing Gnolls article really shows that even a Good gnoll is still a fairly savage and primal being who will probably intimidate those who don't understand her ways.

>orcs, complete with the potential to be evil, neutral or even good as the DM desires?

But orcs that have that potential suck, because why even call them orcs. And because if orcs are not always evil, you soon will be forced to invent more races of always evil cannon fodder.

So... uh... what makes them Good, then? That's more like something I'd identify as Neutral.

Simple; they deliberately work against evil. That's what being Good means in the World Axis. Whether they're Kordites who believe in using their strength to protect others, followers of the Raven Queen who hunt and eat undead. Spirit-followers who are determined to battle the aberrant hordes; being Good isn't a matter of personality, it's a matter of them willing to fight evil.

>followers of the Raven Queen who hunt and eat undead.
Okay, that's a pretty cool and workable idea. You've convinced me.

It's basically one of the things mentioned in Playing Gnolls, but I'm glad you like it.

So, anyone ever manage to split off that Sociology of the Flind article into its own PDF, the way that anons did for 4e's Playing Gnolls article?

So, AD&D's Sociology of the Flind vs. 4e's Playing Gnolls; which is better, and why?

So, everybody thinks of gnolls as just this ravening beasts, and that's fine too, but here's a crazy fact: in Ethipoian mythology, the werehyena (Bouda) is a skilled blacksmith.

So, what about making gnolls into the dark/crazy tech race? Borrow some aspects from Warhammer's Chaos Dwarves; daemon-binding, blood magic and other dark meldings of metal and sorcery are their stock-in-trade, allowing them to produce everything from incredibly deadly (if tainted) arms to full-blown demon-fuelled war machines?

gnoll flails and flindbar are pretty magic already

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Huh, are they from the same card game that gave us the Shin'hare?

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In a setting I did a while back...

Gnolls are mortal but demon-tainted shock troopers made from a collaboration between several demon lords for That Last Big Demonic Incursion. They were bred up out of captured hyena stock, which caught the attention of First Daughter, the nature spirit in charge of hyenas. Being a mean-spirited prankster, she sabotaged the control systems, sent some prophetic dreams, popped some popcorn, and sat down to watch the shit hit the fan. When the demonic incursion was turned back, she laughed her cruel laugh and turned to go. Realising her sort-of-children were following her, she walked out into the savanna for several months. When she finally turned to look at them, they immediately did the whole grovelling bit and asked for new orders.
So she spit on them and told them to fuck off and die; She's not a god, and certainly not THEIR god.

Gnolls tell this story as a lesson to make your own way and choose and seize as you will, and though most shamans know the secret name of First Daughter, actually speaking it or calling upon her is seen as a dangerous and chancy. Hence, for many years scholars thought one of the main amalgamated deities the fragmented tribes and armies had created was simply named The Bitch.

The reason I like this frame (Hunched, long, beefy arms) is because of bows. Gnolls are generally written as taller than humans, but may or may not end up back at the same height due to hunching.
Imagine a longbow built for someone seven feet tall with those longass ape arms. It would be straight up absurd monster hunter tier.

Also consider that they get a bonus to strength in most D&D versions, and what they are shooting with is likely one of those ridiculous Composite Longbows which add strength bonuses to damage. Or if in PF, hornbows which are even deadlier with 2d6 damage instead of 1d8. Combine this with all the fun arrow types like exploding bone arrows that shred those standing nearby, and you can have all kinds of fun.

Gnolls as master archers; now that's a neat idea. Especially given how successful real hyenas are at hunting.

I'm currently running The Temple of Elemental Evil with B/X rules, and the party managed to find "disguises" that made them look like they belonged in the dungeon, which gave the Elf enough time to cast Charm Person on the Gnoll leader. The Gnoll instantly became the Elf's Best Friend™, and led his crew of 8 other Gnolls to help the party+hirelings (15 total) to lure off the evil cleric's human guards. They put them to sleep, slaughtered them, and then went on to feed the cleric and his lieutenant to the gnolls because they lost the initiative roll and there was no way in hell he was surviving 24 attacks in a round.

But aside from the charm person thing, they also doubled their pay, plus that again if the Gnolls helped them kill the evil cleric. Back in the old rules they had a monster reaction table, so there was a decent chance you could buy off, hire, or outright befriend the semi-/actually intelligent monsters. Gnolls are reasonably intelligent, so they'd be savage (like eating the cleric alive) but mercenary enough to work for or with a party of Good Guys.

That's if these aren't homebrew Gnolls. Mine are pretty bog standard classic, but if you can work out an interesting way to make them different, go for it.

Is there any logical explanation for why gnolls would prefer flails, flindbars, kusari and the like over more traditional weapons, or is it just because it's what their god happens to be using?

Cheapness and how impressive they look, I would assume. Also lack of lethality but potential for entangling/entrapping/etc. They want slaves before they want meat.

I always figured bows, knives, and teeth for main weapons- they're hunters that don't draw the line at prey being able to talk, they're not going to use impractical hunting shenanigans like a mace (Can you imagine trying to catch and beat a deer up enough to kill it with a mace?) unless it also shoots lasers or turns you invisible or something.

The biggest thing, I think, is that they're probably making as little of this as possible- just scavenging what victims drop and using it until it breaks, then picking up a new thing. You don't need to sharpen a flail.

They're probably easy to make, given how they're scavengers, and also because Yeenoghu has this "Dance of Carnage" Vibe going on, like a fight in motion with him is basically the sort of thing you'd see a Sith Lord like- Sheev do, or Jagi from Hokuto no ken.

Also A flail is like what, hard object linked to a handle via a chain or string and what have you- I think there's also the flaying aspect, which I think is a part of how they do sacrifices/whip/condition slaves- something in BG, and some other media sources.

Oh, and I think Yeenoghu got the flail from another Demon Lord he offed, so there's that too.

Also, Matriarchal society- at least- most of the time, if a tribe does not support a Flind population, so that's some stuff you'd find in similary with Drow, for example.

Did he steal it from Baphomet? I know he nicked the gnolls themselves from a semi-feral ghoul-lord-thing.

I'm actually doing this in a game. 3.5 survivor ranger archatype with a velociraptor animal companion. She's uses a beast of a mighty composit longbow. You need a +8 str mod to draw it. Serves her well when hunting game or beasts for her restaurant.

Nah, he nabbed the Gnolls from like- a deity in 1e who just so happened to be that fucking lazy that he just let it happen, and the Ghouls he gets from Doresain- who never really got coverage til 4e, but the Ghoul king used to be Orcus's dude and Orcus didn't get off his fat ass to fix that, because he was busy being dead/just came back from the events in Dead Gods 2e.

The weapon comes from a nondescript Demon Lord.

Depends on edition; in 4e, he made his flail from the remains of a god he killed and ate.

cool

Damn, beat me to it. Good on you user.