But see, amid the mimic rout / A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out / The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs /The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all! / And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall, / Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan, / Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” / And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
- Edger Allan Poe
An avatar of suffering and madness, the worm god Torog embodies the worst aspects of mortalkind’s relation to pain: both in the cruel supremacy of those who inflict it, and in the desperate degradation of those they inflict it upon.
There are many mythologies that explain why the king crawls, usually painting him as a great and terrible divinity of the dawn age who was broken in battle with some foe, imprisoned within the underdark and crushed beneath its ever shifting weight. There Torog lingers, suffering eternally save when someone inflicts suffering in his name. To these individuals Torog grants power, blasphemous secrets, the promise of endless indulgence to their heartless desires. One would think that only the most twisted and broken of souls would worship such a foul god, but the worm wriggles its way into the hearts of many as there is always profit and power to be had in the subjugation and exploration of others. From the slave driver to the industrialist to the prison warden to the residential school instructor, few actively understand that their cruelty is a form of worship, or what exactly that worship is feeding.
Hooks
Travelling into a decrepit castle for whatever reason adventurers do, the party makes its way to the actual dungeon part of the dungeon, discovering disused torture chambers and a single cell that still seems to be occupied by some poor wretch begging for release. This is a lure into one of Torog’s many prison realms, a realm the party will have to escape but not after being marked by the crawling king’s agents for further collection.
Grotesque monstrosities have been lurking about the city’s underbelly: shambling tangles of wormflesh that sprout from the wounds and ruptures of humanoid corpses. There seems to be no pattern in who these, until the party investigates and discovers that one of the vessels was a vagrant and petty criminal that was sentenced to a workhouse some years ago. There they find the workhouse is operated by a puritanical social reformer that places strict emphasis on cleanliness, obedience, and piety. All the corpses turn out to be those who stepped out of line and died as a result of her “discipline”, but it’s not until the party notices that her dutiful but bruisemarked husband shows the sign of infection that they realize that her abuse is what’s allowing the worms to take root.
While excavating the foundations for the duke’s new estate, a group of workers stumbled across an unsettling statue and altarspace buried low beneath the earth. The duke ordered the altar torn down and work to continue, and since then has not known peace. Terrible accidents befall everyone who was on the digging crew that day, and the duke’s dreams are full of the earth yawning open to swallow him and everything he knows. The heroes are hired to break whatever nightmare or curse is preventing the duke from sleeping, but must deal with their patron growing increasingly paranoid unhinged as Torog’s influence over him grows. Should the party not play their cards right, they might end up imprisoned by their employer just as a colossal worm breaks through the foundations and begins ravaging the castle.
An aside from the author: I think Torog might be one of the best gods ever produced by the the greater d&d think tank, as I fell in love with the Matt Mercer’s presentation of him during the second campaign of critical role. Iconic, Thematically rich, and Adaptable, he’s EVERYTHING you want from an evil god whether you have him as a central antagonist in a campaign or the slightest hint of worldbuilding.
As it turns out, Torog is one of the few exceptions to my “people don’t worship evil gods” rule, as the evil that Torog represents is so insidious and far ranging that worship for him can occur without the worshipper even acknowledging it. Every society has people that perpetuate cruelty and restrict the freedom of others, and those are all the prayers the wormgod might ever need.
Also, for your benefit, Here’s a grand listing of all my Torog inspired adventures
I would love to see a Monsters Reimagined on Yuan-Ti. I really like the aesthetic of snake humanoids, but the way they are described as “evil because they have no emotions by default” and the fact that they play into some of the worst mesoamerican stereotypes has always rubbed me the wrong way.
IMonsters Reimagined: Yuan-Ti
I'll admit that this one was a little bit of a challenge from a conceptual angle, in no small part because yuan-ti are one of d&d's many "monstrous humanoids" who's presence in the game is pretty much summed up by what kind of animal they are. Very specifically, they embody what western audiences THINK snakes represent: decadence, hedonism, scheming, coldness, eastern exoticism, mysticism, and evil. They are snake cultists, in that they are snakes who are part of a cult, and they are cultists who worship snakes, everything they do in the game is in some way related to cults and/or snakes, and that makes this post more of a full on reinvention than a simple reinterpretation.
That said, I love both challenges AND chances for me to give my opinion on things, so I'm happy to share my top to bottom thoughts on the serpentfolk beneath the cut. For now, the TLDR is that if you want to do something interesting with them, use the snake-cult transformation gimmick, but set it in the past, meaning that modern day Yuan-Ti are the descendants of heretics, visibly marked out as untrustworthy much in the same way that tieflings are. Some may lean in to this sinister reputation, while others attempt to hide it. Others use their hypnotic charm to carve out a place for themselves as courtiers, merchants, hucksters and influencers.
What's wrong: Much like orcs, Yuan-Ti were a pulp-adventure monster made to decouple tropes about exotic and sinister eastern spiritualities from any one particular culture. They were the default enemies to throw in if you needed fodder for a forgotten desert/jungle temple, and they rode the snake gimmick HARD, having traps, weapons, buildings, minions, cultures and religions all built around snakes. Yuan-ti culture went about as deep as finding an excuse to capture players and stick them to an altar for sacrifice, and most authors left it at that.
The more recent interpretation of Yuan-Ti ( present in Volo’s guide) paints them as a priestly faction of a bronze-age human empire that unlocked a process to transform themselves into a “more evolved” form. The transformation requires human sacrifice, but specifically makes them smarter, which creates a feedback loop where great technological and magical advancement leads to territorial expansion, which in term leads to more slaves to fuel the yuan-ti’s evolutionary process. I’m not going to lie, this is some great worldbuilding, and is certainly something that fits into a fantasy bronze age. The problem occurs that despite thousands of years passing canonically since the rise and fall of the serpent empire, the Yuan-ti are STILL AT IT, huddling in their decrepit temples and having made 0 social or technological process. Despite their updated lore, they still only exist to bushwack heroes traveling through equatorial wilderness and provide minions for greater campaigns.
it’s also weird to me that the Yuan-ti are singled out as if they were a particularly wicked force in history as nothing about the ancient yuan-ti empire was particularly more brutal than any IRL culture of a comparative era. Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and enslavement is what empires DO, regardless of whether their priesthood happens to be cold-blooded or not. The fact that the rich and powerful of that era would sacrifice others for their own benefit is just a given, and the fact came along with a scaled transformation and “physical perfection” is no different than a feudal lord going to war for plunder, or a modern tycoon overworking his employees to afford a new yacht.
As D&D baddies go, Yuan-Ti are odd in that they somewhat subvert the the “always chaotic evil” trope by not being spiritually compelled to do evil the way orcs or gnolls are. Instead, they’re universal sociopaths and their culture is just laser focused on the “Other people aren't actually people” angle. Nevermind that a culture like this couldn’t actually sustain itself, as civilization is only sustained by people working together, compromising, and caring about one another.
How do we Fix this: I think a lot of yuan-ti lore can be salvaged by thinking of them less as a “race” and more as the biproduct of a particular magical tradition that leaves a mark on practitioners and their descendants. Likewise, I think we can say that the “ emotionless cruelty” is more a styereotype about the serpentfolk given the callousness of their progenitors: the original Yuan-ti were sociopaths because sociopaths seek powerful positions, and people in powerful positions would have the resources required to perform the transformation into yuan-ti.
We also should change how the transformation works: the basic level of yuan-ti ( the pureblood) are the “intended” results of the transformation ritual, as this ritual requires no human sacrifice. All the other forms known are biproducts of a perversion of the ritual by using more life energy, which explains why the end results are so varied, and why they carry names like “ Abomination” and “ Anathama”. Those who are born purebloods/willingly transform into them carry this bloody legacy however, and the suspicion of those who remember the legends of the original Yuan-ti’s cruelty.
There’s also a lot of fun things that can be done with the legacy of the serpent empire itself, and I encourage you to mix/match any of these options as they provide adventure hooks/lore for your own setting.
The yuan-ti priesthood were smart, and when their empire crumbled ( as all empires do), those that survived the retribution of the peoples they had oppressed offered their services to the kingdoms and warlords that arose to fill the power vacuum. Respected due to their intellect and powers, but distrusted due to their previous crimes, the serpentfolk settled into the positions of sages, courtiers, and royal mages, jealously guarding the secrets of their transformation as would any mystic sect. In this way they have endured the turning of ages, at once separate from the people of their former empire, and subtly interwoven with them.
Every so often, someone discovers the lost lore of the serpent lords and attempts to claim a little of their power for themselves. Perhaps it is a pureblood descendant looking to reclaim their “birthright”, perhaps it is a sage reading ancient tomes hungry for the revelations of metamorphosis. Either way, this allows for Yuan-ti to pop up without warning, and can be used in a thematically similar way to someone trying for lichdom.
Seeing the fall of their domain, some serpentlords fled into the far wilderness, in order to create isolationist enclaves and maintain their power. THESE are where you get the hypertradionalist “ snake supremacy” sort of people, but they should be treated exactly like you would cult enclaves in our own world. Interestingly enough this gives yuan-ti players a chance to indulge in religious trauma narratives, except with snake-gods swapped in for offbrand Christianity.
There’s nothing the rich and powerful want more than being immortal, so lets say that some of the Yuan-ti elders figured out a way to do that ( possibly by reaching Anathema status). These elders would continue to exert cultural influence ( with the case of the court mages or enclaves options) or might have sealed themselves away in tomb-like strongholds for generations long hibernation. Awakening to find they’re no longer the dominant force in the world might not be a reality these regal reptiles could comprehend, so expect them to lash out at presentday authorities or try to reassert their positions from within.
On Deities: While I’ve got more than a few problems with how d&d does its gods, I think they’re all present in how yuan-ti religion is handled. Namely, the serpentfolk religion is less an ethical philosophy or belief system, and more a transactional pact between the sacrifice providing cultists and an ever hungry cosmic being that grants them powers in return. Volo’s guide points to this being a byproduct of their ego and inability to feel emotions like devotion or reverence, but mechanically it’s almost identical to how every other religion in the default setting works.
With Yuan-ti being so tied up with their religion, I figure it’s a good idea to give their gods a refurbishing like I did to Orcus, turning them from placeholders into real ideologies that people would actually want to worship, even if they were evil:
Merrshaulk: The default god for temple lurking Yuan-ti, the origin of all the sacrificial snake transformation rituals, currently in a millennia long hibernation where as his followers want to wake him and reassert their power over their empire. I’d go one step further and say that this was the patron god of the bronze age city-state that the Yuan-ti originated in, who was in-turn served by the priesthood who popularized the metamorphosis. Just like his followers, Merrshaulk began as a very basic humanoid god, and came to resemble a great snake more and more as the culture that supported him was transformed. This transformation from harvest deity to a man-eating god of imperium to all-devouring serpent in response to his follower’s desires makes for a great addition to any mythology, and provides a lot of texture to a setting where the serpentfolk feature.
Dendar: The “Night serpent” is one of the most amazing parts of default d&d lore that no one ever told me about; a titanic snake that arose from the first mortal dreams and has been devouring the multiverse’s collective nightmares ever since? METAL AS FUCK. For some reason ( likely because the authors were trying to create yet another all consuming big bad,) Dendar’s goal is to eat enough nightmares to one day manifest and devour the world. Eh... pretty cliché if you ask me. Why not lean into the ragnarok influence and say that Dendar will emerge to eat the world when there isn’t enough nightmares for her to eat, leading some of her most zealous followers to create nightmares in the hopes of sating their world devouring patron. Whether these fear-bringers are justified or totally misguided, it makes for a waaaay more interesting story.
Pharika: You couldn’t ask for a more serendipitous coincidence than for a whole other game to develop a snake based god of healing, transformation, and affliction, then for that game to lend it’s setting to d&d. Pharika SHOULD be the patron goddess of the Yuan-ti, as her mythology already has her filling the world with secret knowledge that her followers must learn to understand. Whether through the process of alchemy, medical service, or experementing on the bodies of other creatures, having Pharika as a patron gives the serpentfolk an amazing, thematically rich patron the way that dwarves have the Allhammer, or elves have the Archheart
