Monsters Reimagined: Thri-Kreen
D&D lore has never been kind to human/animal hybrid characters, especially to those who resemble animals stereotyped as being “evil”, such as gnolls or lizardfolk. This goes double for Thri-kreen the game’s default bugpeople, who etither get no lore at all, or get a few paragraphs describing how they don’t have emotions or personalities and see most other humanoids merely as food.
That’s the personality of a monster species, not a player option, and that general flatness of concept is expressed by almost every piece of thri-kreen art: depicting them mostly naked in a barren landscape brandishing a weapon at something.
While there’s a few seeds of interesting worldbuilding in the different versions of the Thri-Kreen , I’ve found the best way to make them conceptually rich is to continue my trend of combining two lackluster bits of canon into something distinctive, in this case, the mostly forgotten race of creatures known as dromites, who share the Thri-Kreen’s traits of being insectoid and psionic, but have a lot more interesting notes about their culture, Here’s What I’ve come up with:
The “Kreen” evolved on a distant world as a singular psionic hivemind, functioning much in the way you’d expect any colony of insects might save their ability to learn and retain information was far greater than that of any simple arthropod. Developing knowledge of engineering and magic that let them spread across the planes, they eventually suffered some kind of disaster that caused their hivemind to dissolve, leaving the “Thri-Kreen” as free willed individuals for the first time, where as before they were merely fragments of a consciousness that spanned planets. The chaos was immediate, as if each organ and cell of a single body suddenly gained awareness, forcing the fragments of what was arguably a single world spanning organism to begin constructing cultures and civilizations from scratch.
While in the many millennia since the end of their hivemind have seen the Mantises take numerous different paths, the concept of “wholeness” is a reoccurring theme. The name “Thri-Kreen” literally means “un-whole”, referencing their psionic bond with one another, and hearkening back to their undiminished “Kreen” or “whole” state of the distant past. This search for wholeness leads the Thri-Kreen to live in small, closely bonded groups where each individual may be in contact with every other individual, much in the same way that creatures in cold climates will stick together to share bodyheat. While it’s not unsusual for smaller groups to break off from a larger one, absolute isolation is considered to be a terrible state for a Thri-Kreen.
Outsiders who come into contract with the Mantisfolk would describe them as a strange mix of dependant and standoffish: offering help without ever being asked but challenging every opinion ever voiced. This is because unlike most mortals, who tend to become resistant when their opinions are challenged, Thri-Kreen seek group consensus above all and when faced with a crisis will begin checking their ideas against others to throw their weight behind the best option possible. This leads to Thri-Kreen settlements being largely non-hierarchical, through prone to sudden political swings.
Thri-Kreen are mostly genderless, through groups looking to expand ( or larger enclaves looking to maintain their population) will yearly elect “queens” and “consorts” for the reponsibility of producing young. Most other species mistake these individuals as leaders of the Thri-Kreen, when really their job is to fuck for days to months at a time. Smaller, nomadic groups of Mantisfolk gather together to have these sorts of elections, and the young are divided equally to be raised by the different packmembers as they enter their pupation stage.
The umberhulks that populate the underdark and slave pens of the cruel neogi bear an uncomfortable resemblance to present day Thri-Kreen, hearkening to the fact that while many of their kind found new beginnings across the astral sea after the dissolution of their singularity, many others found terrible ends. Likewise, the clockwork horrors that swarm across spelljammer ships and junkworlds communicate in a codified form of the Thri-Keen language, hinting at the existence of what might be an extinct conclave of mantisfolk engineers, or a hidden coterie of insectoid artificers intent on recreating their kind’s previous numbers in metal.
