An adventurer’s desire to explore isn’t the sole province of those born to the land, as the seas contain just as many if not more secrets waiting to be explored.
A naturally curious creature, Dru’ugo has always been fascinated with artifacts left behind by ‘bovers, those mysterious folk who live beyond the scintillating surface of his watery world, and has spent his youthful decades exploring wrecks, salvaging from ruins, and collecting whatever ( often erroneous) gossip the merfolk see fit to trade him. Fittingly, this makes him one of the best contacts the party can ally with when trying to explore the sea, as the shoalworm is happy to share his findings and provide water-taxi services if the party will explain to him things like agriculture or share the stories of the places they explore together.
Adventure Hooks:
A sea beast has been menacing ships throughout a high-trafic trade channel, forcing them to veer widely off course in order to avoid a confrontation. Tired of profits lost after shipments are delayed by days, the local commerce commission offers an open bounty on the beast’s head after a reputable crew of leviathan hunters very publicly turned the job down. As it turns out this “beast” is just Dru’ugo, excited at having found a reliable place to try and make contact with ‘bovers and ask them questions, rearing up before their ship and trying to mime out what he needs with fins and tail.
Due to a tragedy of anatomy and never having attended a non-fish based school, Dru’ugo is incapable of speaking the common tongue, and his chances to learn to understand it are sparse. This has forced him to be reliant on a friendly mermaid by the name of “Opportunity-bubbles-up-from-below” ( or Ublup for short) to serve has his translator. For her part, Ublup gets figity when her friend makes her play mouthpiece for too long, as she’d much rather be out manta racing with the other deepsea layabouts. If the party could somehow find some means of breaching the language barrier, whether by using telepathy or devising some enchantment, they’ll earn themselves a friend for all time, provided they can handle the ensuing barrage of the shoalworm’s questions.
Some time after their first excursion with the shoalworm, Dru’ugo gets word to the party that he’s found another ruin, and would love to explore it together in order to hang out with them once again. Drawn in by the prospect of looting a sunken city in good company, the group and their sea-noodle ally don’t notice that the place they’ve exploring are occupied by a cult of marrow dedicated to a terrible goddess of the deep ocean. Angered above all at Dru’ugo for helping these land-dwellers to trespass into the goddess’s domain, the high priest of this cult calls down a curse that transforms the mostly harmless shoalworm into a rampaging leviathan. While Dru’ugo struggles in vain against the curse in order to give them time to escape, the party must break for land and devise some means of subverting the goddess’s wrath, before they’re forced to slay their transmogrified buddy as he mindlessly rampages along the coast.
Doesnt the Skyscour Clan feel like the sort to follow the Revolation Tyrant Mnyull? Or, rather, ride at his front...
Imagine the days leading up to impact, portals tearing onto unsuspecting planets, ships descending from the silver void, legions of untold number raiding whole wildspaces.
Then they suddenly scatter, with or without their prize, the star vikings and astral war boys clear out as if smoked like bees.
Only days, if even that, are given to the raided few before a cosmic armageddon makes impact.
Campaign: Shore of the Silver Sea
As this eagle eyed reader mentioned, there’s been a trend in my writing over the past few months, seemingly unconnected occurrences that herald something great and cosmic, the emergence of a new campaign to launch your parties from the beach of the mundane into the vast and wondrous depths of the astral sea.
Our Story begins as many do, in the aftermath of a great storm: With the party having only a few nights past taken shelter in a portside tavern known as the Long Walk, waiting out the rain and the wind in the traditional manner: sitting by the hearth with the other patrons as they listen to the old salts spin yarns. One of those patrons was fellow of the royal botany society, who was more than happy to hire the party on as guides and escorts as he explores and documents the flora of the coast. This intrepid ( if a bit tepid) expedition rapidly heats up as the party stumble across a hidden cove and the fresh wrecks of two ships, one civilian, one royal navy, cast far from the sea and left without survivors.
This discovery leads the party to getting caught up in a silent tug-of-war between the navy and a secretive faction of smugglers, with one wrong decision ( likely them filling their packs with plundered goods) ending the party up on the wrong side of the law. On their way back to town however, the party watch as a light falls from the sky over the barony, forever changing their fates as they return to a realm that’s been touched by the stars.
Early Game
One of the tall tales told by the sailors at the Long Walk was of a marauding reaver king who invoked the ire of the sea god, who in turn brought down a wave so mighty that it smashed the reaver’s fleet to splinters and buried him in the rubble of his own castle. Buried so they say.. along with all the treasure he had taken from raiding richer ports... and while the story is likely exaggerated... it wouldn’t hurt to go take a look, would it?
Strange rumours trickle in from the hinterlands, odd folk on the roads, sightings of unnatural animals, talk of a cave where whispers of the past and imagined tomorrows dance. All of these threads will lead the party to a meeting with a potential mentor, an old lighthouse keeper who holds the mystery of the stars and stands against the cold cruelty of the void. Perhaps he can shed some illumination on the party’s current struggles
The star’s falling has caused chaos in the region’s capital: an arson spree, the baroness forcefully conscripting oracles, sightings of a dragon out in the wilderness. Trekking along with a professional hunter, the party discover that they are not on the tale of some feral drake looking to move into new territory, but a full dragon who seems to be purposefully searching the region with the help of a masked rider.
As it turns out, the dragon and rider are travellers from the astral sea, pilgrims following an omen from the goddess of guidance and starlight. They followed the star across worlds until it landed in the barony, and was eventually misplaced by a hapless young man rounded up by the baroness’s agents shortly after becoming an accidental oracle and asking the party for help earlier on their travels. Reuniting the star with its chosen seekers grants the party a vision of the future, of an attack they will not have time to avert.
Mid Game
Hollowed out by eons of immortality and war, a clan of astral elves has ripped open a portal and begun raiding the original port city the party started their adventure in, snapping up goods and taking hostages. Here is a decision point: should the party rush to save the innocents before help can be raised, they will be overwhelmed, taken captive and hauled away to the raider’s stronghold. Should they rally their new allies and arrive in force, they will be too late, and will have to seek out another means of travelling beyond the reaches of the waking world.
In the latter option, the party will find themselves portalling to Lydestrum, a city of glass floating in an eternal gyre of mist and wind, and the hub of their outerworld adventures. Here they might begin their search for the pirates by seeking rumors at the alien filled docks, make an alliance with local powers by helping to wrangle some storm-tossed architecutre, or simply sign on to a spelljammer ship and begin to learn their space-legs.
The bright maiden Urania is not the only goddess at work among the stars, for as the party explore the city they hear the name and see the handiwork of Nyx, Mother of Primordial Darkness. Catching a night blessed thief is enough to earn the party Nyx’s attention, who decides to rope the party into a little wager involving her astronomic counterpart and the disaperance of a sacred lantern before an imporatant voyage.
After meeting an artisan who can make marvelous weapons out of light, the party end up getting snared in local politics after this new friend is kidnapped from their shop. The trail leads them into conflict with blackmarket dealers from the plane of exiles and getting mixed up with the glass city’s political powers.
Tangling with the astral sea’s criminal element may have just paid off, as the party have managed to snag themsleves a star-chart pointing to what just might be the haul of a lifetime: The long abandoned manor of an archmage hidden in the vastness of the silver sea. What they find instead is a labyrinth of nightmare and splendour and fungus, which just might hold power and secrets that will aid them as the campaign closes.
One of the expeditions sailing out of the star port has its aim on discovering the much speculated origin of an eerie signal coming from a haunted nebula. As luck would have it, this happens to be a regional base of the elven pirates who attacked the party’s homeworld, who destroy the ship they’re travelling on, capture their companions, and leave the party stranded in the frigid barrens of a meteor field. Searching for shelter, they find the origin of the signal: the partial wreck of a long abandoned jammership still attempting to deliver its message. With a little elbow grease and some ghostly aid, the party can take this ship as their own, bring vengeance against he pirates, and begin hunting for the villains who set this all in motion.
Late Game
The party’s enemies are not simply slavers and pirates, they are recent converts to the following of Mnyull the revelation tyrant, a god of interplanetary conquest. He has tasked the rabid immortals with the reunification of their long scattered army, and the reactivation of the ancient weapon they were once tasked with guarding, a labour to which many including the party’s old friends have been put to work. If Mynull’s plan comes to completion, whole systems will be forced to submit, and if the party can bring evidence of this to their allies in Lydestrum, they may just have a chance to fight the pirate fleet on equal terms.
Fighting an army is one thing, defeating a god is another, and so the party are counselled to seek out the great celestial sage who makes weapons at the star-goddess’s behest. Therein the party must undertake a sea-spanning quest to gather the materials necessary to withstand their struggle: Venturing into shadowed vaults within the core of a moon-sized forge, seeking out the most dangerous and beautiful of lights at the edge of known space.
The Revelation Tyrant cares nothing for the fate of his pawns, merely that victory is achieved in his name, and so has planted the same vision of supremacy into the Skyscour elves as he did the leaders of Lydestrum. The idea of a weapon that could strike far away worlds, tribute and glory delivered by subjugated neighbours, a threat to that glory by a challenger from afar and the need to strike before that challenge is made. No matter who wins the battle, Mnyull benefits from the outcome, as the leader of the victorious force will be struck by further visions and ascend as the Tyrant’s physical avatar.
The Party will be hunted, possibly by former allies, into the depths of wildspace, unable to return home lest they single out their humble world as a target for the weapon. In that lonely and desperate moment the goddess will appear to them: Nyx, merciful but resigned will offer them a shroud, a means of hiding their world from Mnyull’s sight and sparing themselves the conquest others will doubtlessly suffer provided they give up sailing the astral sea forever. Bright Urania offers them a chance, a divinely ordained heading to slip back around their pursuers, back past the fleet they helped to provision and the weapon they ensured would be completed, and right to the foot of the tyrant’s throne. It is only a chance though, no guarantee they can pull it off without loss and sacrifice, no guarantee that they will win in the end.
We all know what the party will choose, Nyx does too, and when the heroes jet off to go on their suicide mission they’ll do so with the ancient goddess working from the shadows to turn aside the eyes of wary sentries. She’s had a cold, dark vault beyond the boundaries of reality picked out for Mnyull for quite some time. She just needed him to make the mistake of incarnating himself in one place so she could stick him in there all at once.
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
I just read your Orcs reimagined and I loved it. An origin that I’ve been tossing around for Orcs in my own worlds is kind of stealing the mythological origin of the Klingons from Star Trek - they were created by gods a long time ago, but eventually they realized the gods were more trouble than they were worth and killed them.
I would love to see more Monsters Reimagined style pieces for Gnolls and Goblins and Drow and the ‘monstrous’ player races that are rooted in racism and colonialism
Monsters Reimagined: Gnolls
I wanted to follow up with gnolls specifically because they’re a case study in how d&d has tried to “fix” the issue of “monstrous humanoids” and the ethical concerns of “always chaotic evil” and ended up going the exact opposite direction of what they should have done, doubling down on the justifications for why they’re bad and why it’s alright to kill them rather than addressing
TLDR: Rather than the psychoic killing machines they’re presented as currently, Gnolls should be the game’s consummate survivalists. Better equipped to live a more naturalistic lifestyle thanks to their numerous animalistic traits, they thrive in the outlands and harsh wilderness. Because living as hunter/scavenger/gatherers has worked out for them so well, Gnolls never really integrated in with the other agrarian-focused cultures, preferring to keep to the safety of the wilds rather than the frequently contested farmlands, leading to a mutual unease and cultural barrier that both groups have to work to overcome. Gnolls have very few taboos about what is and is not “useful” and have been known to eat the bodies of fallen travelers when food is scarce, or dig up graves for the valuables stored inside. This has given Gnolls the reputation as cannibals and blasphemers, when really it’s only the hyenakin being practical.
What’s Wrong: As of 2nd edition, Gnolls were like just about any other monstrous humanoid dnd species, savage primitives who worshiped evil gods and participated in various acts of barbarism. Slavery and cannibalism were the things that typified the gnolls ( not that other monsters weren’t willing to engage in slavery and/or cannibalism) and they were decidedly cruel and lazy, capturing others because they thought work was demeaning ( which is a whole... crockpot of weird stereotypes that I’m not going to get into at the moment). This characterization continued up through 3rd edition and pathfinder, the latter of which substituted the gnoll’s cannibalism god for Lamashtu, “the mother of monsters”, who is said to have birthed most “savage humanoids” in her wretched womb ( again, don’t have time to get into that but YIKES).
Then 5th edition crept around, and the gnolls took on a new flavor. They were decidedly MORE evil, MORE savage, LESS sapient, than previous versions, driven to endless slaughter by the voice of their demon-god Yeenoghu, practically demons in flesh themselves. They were remorseless killing machines who desired only chaos, to the point where I often saw them referred to as “Jokerlike” by gamer-bros who lacked the media comprehension required to relate them to any greater motivation.
To explain why they went through this metamorphosis, I’m going to have to explain a little bit of gaming history, as well as d&d’s version of the trolley problem. Buckle in, this is going to get Pedantic...
First The history lesson: Because d&d had its roots in wargaming, enemy creatures in the monster manual were presented with a category called “Organization”, which told you how large the squad sizes of these creatures could/should be. Often these came with the chance to roll for additional troops, or have a leader who had advanced levels and special abilities. Problem was, for savage humanoids, these organization charts almost always included information about the demographics of a “monster” village, including how many non combatants and children there were in relation to how many fighters they had ( anywhere from 5-50%)
Here’s an excerpt from the 2e monster manual:
Habitat/Society: Gnolls are most often encountered underground or inside abandoned ruins. When above ground they operate primarily at night. Gnoll society is ruled by the strongest, using fear and intimidation. When found underground, they will have (30% chance) 1-3 trolls as guards and servants. Above ground they keep pets (65% of the time) such as 4-16 hyenas (80%) or 2-12 hyaenodons (20%) which can act as guards.
A gnoll lair will contain between 20 and 200 adult males. For every 20 gnolls, there will be a 3 Hit Die leader. If 100 or more are encountered there will also be a chieftain who has 4 Hit Dice, an Armor Class of 3, and who receives a +3 on his damage rolls due to his great strength. Further, each chieftain will be protected by 2-12 (2d6) elite warrior guards of 3 Hit Dice (AC 4, +2 damage).
In a lair, there will be females equal to half the number of males. Females are equal to males in combat, though not usually as well armed or armored. There will also be twice as many young as there are adults in the lair, but they do not fight. Gnolls always have at least 1 slave for every 10 adults in the lair, and may have many more.
Gnolls will work together with orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, and trolls. If encountered as a group, there must be a relative equality of strength. Otherwise the gnolls will kill and eat their partners (hunger comes before friendship or fear) or be killed and eaten by them. They dislike goblins, kobolds, giants, humans, demi-humans and any type of manual labor.
Remember, these are specifically the stats for a gnoll LAIR not a village. People build villages, Gnolls ( being not people by default) cram their living space into the dungeon the party is delving, or the living space is itself a target for extermination in order to save the land from the blight of gnollish exitance.
Skipping right over how the demographics don’t bear any resemblance to an actual hyena pack, lets look at the fact that there are TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN AS THERE ARE ADULTS, meaning that there are fuzzy families standing in the way between the murder-hobos and their treasure, and with each defender cut down, the party is creating scores of orphans. The book can cram in as many excuses as it wants about how these creatures are sadistic and terrible and bad for the environment, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re people, who according to the rules and greater lore of the game a) are capable of feeling pain and fear b) have souls, making them fully willed individuals and not simply animals . How then can their outright slaughter be a good thing?
Well... lets look at some of d&d’s inbuilt genocide apologia, and a classic session killing scenario that’s come to be known as the “baby monster dilemma”.
First lets acknowledge that d&d is fictional, existing separate to but directly inspired by our reality. Lets also acknowledge that fictional events do not hold the same moral weight as events in our world, and that an author writing about a murder does not in any way share the guilt of say... a hitman.
That said, a fictional work can still be said to express harmful ideas, even if the ideas only exist on a page. A movie is not racist because it has racism in it, it is racist because it reinforces the structures of racism, justifying the bigoted actions of others by helping to reinforce a worldview that directly harms others.
For most of its history, d&d has said that racism is GOOD, by creating an innumerable number of monstrous “others” to serve as opposition to the heroes, and justifying that opposition both by the moral framework of its universe and by the inherent foulness of those foes. In the same entry, Gnolls are described as “Evil”, “Preferring to eat sentient humanoids because they scream the most” and “ Hunting exhaustively to the point where the wilderness will take years to recover before they move on.”
If gnolls are inherently evil and sadistic, the only dead gnoll is a good gnoll, and adventurers (goodguys by default) should not suffer one to live.
This is how you end up in wild situations like the Baby Monster Dilemma, where characters like the paladin, who are compelled to do good and never allow an evil act ( in the earlier editions atleast) are forced to wrestle with the moral conundrum of what to do with all of those gnoll children they just orphaned.
Leaving the Gnoll pups alone means that they will either starve to death, or grow up to do more evil in the future,
Because like most monstrous humanoids, gnolls have inherently evil souls, and so adopting them and nurturing them to be good is doomed invariably to fail ( there are plenty of examples of this “call to evil” throughout d&d lore)
Therefore the best answer is to slaughter them all on the spot, which lays somewhere between an act of genocide and Cruella D’Ville level of puppy murder, depending on your conception of gnoll sapience.
This is why I say that d&d has genocide apologia baked into it. In the case of fighting a very common enemy the way the game wanted you to fight them, the mass murder of children is a morally sound decision that leaves the world a better place. The game creates a scenario where enacting genocide is good and makes “Kill the monsters, take their stuff” a primary progression mechanic.
I don’t want to play a game that constructs elaborate setups to justify why it thinks genocide is ok, much less one that uses the same arguments that were used to justify IRL genocides within the past century. Because D&D happens to be the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and because I like the underlying mechanics so much, the lore is going to have to change quite a lot before I’m comfortable using it, and by the way things look ... it seems like a lot of other people are in the same position.
Now with that in mind, lets look at how WOTC tried to fix this and where they went wrong:
In order to make purging gnolls from the world justified, the writers of 4th and 5th edition tried to double down on gnoll’s evil traits, saying that they don’t have emotions, and even making them constantly demon possessed, under a species wide curse that compels them to ruin and rend and destroy with no thought for others. By turning that monstrosity dial up all the way to 11 ( They’re so evil that not actively hunting them to extinction is a moral failing) the writers are trying to bulldoze past the baby monster conundrum by giving an objective answer, Problem is, the gnolls are still, technically, people, in possession of souls, families, and the ability to think and reason... the writers have just gone out of their way to create them in such a way that their evil invalidates all of that.
I wouldn’t have a problem with it if gnolls were literally beasts, or monsters spat out of the pits of hell, or manifesting spontaneously from nature, but the problem is that they REMAIN intelligent humanoids. The current Monster manual describes them as a plague that descend without warning on civilized lands to slaughter and pillage and wander elsewhere looking for new places to raise, making nothing of lasting value and instead taking whatever they might need from the corpses of their victims. I can’t help but compare that to villainized depictions of displaced communities or nomadic peoples, scorned by those of more settled societies that may or may not be expanding out into the nomad’s territory.
How we can make this better: Stripping the Gnolls down to their base concept as “ Hyena people” gives us quite a lot to work with while reimagining them. Hyenas are adaptable social creatures with a unique sexual hierarchy that you can spin out into a lot of interesting cultural dynamics out of ( go look up some hyena biology facts and tell me that’s not a goldmine for coming up with unique social patterns). Being strict carnivores means they miss out on the development that agriculture brings, but their wider palate when it comes to what’s acceptable as meat ( scavenged carrion, insects) allows them to survive in much harsher climates, though likely with smaller numbers. Groups would be transitory, following the migration routes of the animals that they hunted, splitting up and gathering together based on the availability of the food supply.
Though migratory, gnolls would likely be highly protective of these lands, as sustainable access to a highly limited foodsource would mean the difference between being able to stay with the route or being force to travel to unknown lands scavenging. Gnoll territory would likely clash with wolves, lions, and other large predators
Gnolls could also perform a unique form of insect-agriculture, cultivating colonies of termites, crickets, and leaf-cutter ants throughout their territory to act as backup food storage.
( Also this whole thing about gnolls keeping Hyenas as pets always bugged me. You don’t want pets that eat the same thing as you, gnolls would keep easily )
Gnoll culture would likely be eminently practical, with everyone expected to be able to cultivate different skills depending on the seasonal availability of food. This would lead to less specialization and stratification among the pack-members, as well as a network of mentor-apprentice relationships that would likely transcend individual packs. The best leatherworker would train leatherworkers from all allied packs, and this would foster a spirit of dependence and unity despite territorial separation. Gods of the hunt and weather would likely feature prominently, as well as dualistic gods of life and death, who the gnolls would thank for their random gifts of carrion.
Like most of the “always chaotic evil” ancestries, I don’t mind keeping the monstrous aspects of the gnolls somewhere in the toolbox, and the idea of the “always hungry, always bloodthirsty” raiders that not even other evils will align with is an interesting menace to face. In the default Gnoll lore, the gnolls were created from hyenas who fed upon the carrion left behind by the rampaging demon-prince Yeeenoghu. With a simple twist, we instead have “The hungry ones” a cult or demonically influenced faction of gnolls who are a dark perversion of gnollish nature much in the same way that vampires are a dark reflection of humanity. Made up of outcasts from stable gnollish society, these wretches revere a carrion demon as none of their people’s other spirits will watch over them, and aim o fill their bellies as many times as possible before the wilds finally claim them ( think Mad-Max warboys)
If you wanted to put a twist on it, have these hungry ones be the “first contact” point between your traditional fantasy cultures and the gnolls of the badlands, souring relations between both groups and feeding off the inevitable clash.
I’ve been sitting on the idea of a campaign set in a vast desert, specially focused a city of vice and crime built on a massive oasis in the middle of the sands.
Beyond that… I’m all out of ideas. Any thoughts to help flesh out this unnamed city/what my party could do or encounter here!
Thank you! Love all of your adventure prompts, by the way!~
Adventure Compendium: Pockets full of Sand
Alright friend, this is going to be rapid fire, including a bunch of different adventure prompts that might not quite fit together so that you can start gathering up the raw material for a full campaign.
First off, the campaign is set in Idisimar: City of Deep Wells, a prosperous trade port that in the past 15 years or so has been taken over by a pair of bandit lovers and their supposedly "reformed" army of cutthroats. Not at all obsessed with the same sort of propriety and reserve that typified the dynasty they outsted, the lovers have opened the markets to all and encouraged trade, vice, and graft, all because it'll fill their pockets faster.
Our party starts at the bottom of the social ladder, lowlives, drifters, or people who've been cheated out of an honest living. Tell the players upfront that this campaign is going to focus on two things: heading out into the far wilderness to explore ruins and tombs, and heists, so encourage them during character creation to think of both their jobs on a criminal crew AND how they'd aid in exploration.
The first adventure starts with the party's formation: A dealer in relics has need of a group of (semi disposable) outriders to scout out a ruin he's become newly aware of. He's even willing to help outfit them for the journey, should they sign an agreement: They can keep any coin they find, provided he gets the cultural artifacts to sell onto his high-paying clientelle This forms the backbone of a working relationship the party will use for the rest of the game.
Along their journeys out into the wastes, the party will be harassed by a gang of slavers working for an increasingly mad bandit queen operating out of a former pilgrimage site. This turns out to be the party's first heist target, though they may have to disguise themselves as outlaws/throw themselves to the lions (literally) to get in.
Its a little while after this that a nervous individual approaches the party, claiming to have work from an unseen benefactor: as it turns out, the benefactor is a dragon, and the work is breaking into the tombs beneath the necropolis she's currently lairing in. Their relationship with the dragon gives them access to the campaign's megadungeon... but the dragon itself escaped from the menagerie of Idisimar's former ruling dynasty, and the bandit-lovers now sitting on the throne want it back as a show of legitimacy.
After clashing with a gang of hostile-zealots looting through the same ruins they were interested in, the party learns about a new heisting target: the vaults of a disreputable crusader order located within the city which hold innumerable relics and other treasures looted from their long and bloody "pilgrimages". Just don't mind the fanatics guarding the gates, or the thief hating angel that patrols the halls.
About this time, some of the party's criminal contacts start disappearing, victims of a serial killer looking to purge the city's underworld. on a long overdue vengeance quest. Be sure to really endear the party to the local scoundrels a few sessions before you start picking em off.
Slowly crank up tension within the city over time by introducing strange new anti-clerical laws and a corresponding tide of fervor, all spurred on by unseen manipulators. The party's final enemy is a group called the Cult of the Hidden Sun, a mystery sect that wants the city to fall into civil war so that they can establish a religious hegemony afterwards. In one last heist, the party must infiltrate the secret lair of the cult's hidden, aberrant master, and steal proof of the cult's malfeasance once and for all.
Heya! Running a campaign for my players that's loosely based on The Witcher. Amy chance you can cook up a Witcher-esque ranger/artificer (alchemist) faction for me?
Faction: Knights of the Ratcatcher King
It’s dirty work, but someone’s got to do it
Adventure Hooks:
The party accept a bounty from a noble interested in ousting a nest of monsters from a long abandoned village and resettling the surrounding lands. However, after the party ventures out to the derelict settlement they discover a) A detachment of highly organized monster hunters has already disposed of the beasts with ruthless efficiency b) they were just the latest adventuring party the noble had sent, the rest having died and been devoured by their supposed quarry. While most of these well equipped hunters brushes the party off as “Freelancers” one heavily scarred but social member of their company offers the party a few tips on accepting the wrong sort of jobs, going so far as suggest they seek out their group again if they want to “get serious”.
In the depths of some dismal dungeon the party finds a chamber rank with the smell of rot, long dead monster corpses surrounding a single figure with their back to the wall and a gun still clutched in their hand. Despite the numerous deadly wounds this stranger suffered their gear is of a much higher quality of the party’s own, should they be able to find someone to mend it of claw slashes and acid stains.
Plague or disaster strikes the settlement, and as the people panic and the powers that be squabble or prepare to make a hasty exit, the party is approached by a dour woman with a veteran’s bearing and surgeon’s dispassionate reason. There will be hard times ahead, harder if the party does not act quickly. Will they have the stomach necessary to do what needs to be done and save their home?
Setup: The name “Ratcatcher king” started as a jest, for after flood struck the city and plague swept through the streets, the landed nobility joked among themselves about the hubris of the commoner who wrote to them demanding aid for a city drowning in its own dead. They might not have listened but the people did, understanding that their home didn’t just need saving, it needed triage, sudden decisive action on a multitude of fronts that required not only brutal practicality but also the efficiency of people who knew what the fuck they were doing.
Quarantines went into place, military planning given not only to the disaster relief efforts but to soup kitchens and field hospitals, the elimination of plague vectors and the defense against monstrous scavengers that always sweep in during such times of crisis. When the letters went out again, they bore the sigil of the rat, cage, and crown, and carried with them the threat of reprisal should aid not come swiftly.
That was how it started, and in the century since their founding the Knights of the Ratcatcher King have turned from a band of volunteers to outlaws to a chartered martial order with branches in every kingdom with the sense enough to have them. They care little for politics of peace or war, choosing to instead focus on existential challenges such as plague, calamity, or monstrous infestation, treating these threats with a workmanlike efficiency and the grim practicality of folk doing a public service.
Notes on the benefits of Joining the Ratcatchers and future adventures below the cut:
Faction Perks:
There’s always work ploughing shit: The world is never free of Crisis, and the knights divert their resources where they can. Should the party sign up, they can be expected to move from assignment to assignment much in the way of a member of a mercenary company out on contract for a fixed length of time. They will be paid extraordinarily well during this period, with their housing, food, and medical needs cared for by the Knight’s support staff. High ranking members of the order are likely to be given more freedom as they are expected to carry out more nuanced and far ranging missions, but can still expect the same hospitality.
Suit up: The violent utilitarianism of the Knights’ mission means that no resources can be spent on graft or pointless loss of life, and so they equip even their rank and file with access to high-grade gear suited for a life of battling monsters, plague, and the forces of nature. Early adopters of technological innovation, the party an expect access to gasmasks, advanced prosthetics, and even gunpowder should the setting allow it.
Under a rat-strewn banner: Opinion is divided on the Knights, on one hand they’ll swoop in to save you from the brain-moles or werewolves infesting your village, on the other they tend to be heavy handed once they’ve decided that a particular settlement is theirs for the saving. The appearance of the Knights en mass is seen as an omen of doom, so the party can expect to be given a wide birth while at the same time respected during crisis situations.
By Cage and Crown: As both hunters and healers, the chapterhouses of the Order are some of the greatest repositories of monstrous lore and medical knowledge in the realm, containing many treaties others might consider profane or heretical. Researching the bane of monsters or the cure for obscure ailments might just be worth the rigorous life of a ratcatcher for those in need of such knowledge.
Welcome to a collection of hideouts and forts for various monsters, inspired by the upcoming Monster Manual! This map pack includes hideouts for 4 classic fantasy monsters: the bandit, pirate, demon, and drow.
Some hideouts feature walls protecting the living quarters, while others rely on natural rock formations for defense. The hideout can be accessed through multiple entries, giving your players flexibility with how they want to approach.
Each hideout map comes with a night variant (or a lightless variant for the underdark and hell maps). Foundry VTT modules with pre-built walls and lighting are also available to Patrons.
Places you should add to your little town/city in your fantasy world!!
Post offices. Wild, I know. But give me the unhinged kind. Pingeons and little postal dragons all over the place. You enter. The most disgusting smell fucking assaults your nostrils. You know what it is. Letter in hand, you go up to the counter. The postal worker is just a slightly bigger pigeon. You shed a tear.
PLAYGROUNDS!! Create the most dangerous kinds of playgrounds, the ones suburban moms would TRIP if they ever saw one. Monkey bars that are way too tall, swings that go full circle... The metal slide stays the same, it's already painful enough.
PARKS!! MAKE IT ALIVE!! Show people going on walks, reading beneath trees. C'mon most of them are already hundred years old (And are going to die after that CR 15 creature wrecks the town) anyways!! Show couples and picnics, show a family enjoying the sunday, give me someone picking flowers for their loved ones.
A bakery! Do you know how much these places are underrated? And do you know how much plot potential they have? Every good story starts with food poisoning or granny's recipe! Give me a place your players/readers are going to treat like home and, for once, it's not a tavern or a guild.
Government buildings! Give me a town hall that has a kilometric line in front of it. Give me a registry that is as old as this town. Give me police stations! Give me courtrooms! Make one of your players get arrested and now all of the party has to go through burocracy like a bunch of normal people!
(Who am I kidding? You don't need to make them get arrested. They are going to do that for you.)
Touristic attractions! Give me a full-on statue of the country's leader! Give me museums! Give me streets, ruins and whatnot that attract thousands of tourists everyday! Give me an annoying city guide that tries to get the party's attention everytime!
Magazine stands! Magazines don't exist? Newspaper stands! From the Queen's Journal to the most questionable new piece of Fox's Tailtracker, you have it all! Make your players doubt what's actually happening, sprinkle a little fake news... Or is it fake at all?
...Toy stores. OK HEAR ME OUT. Make magic toys; miniature skyships that actually fly, metal toy dragons that expel fire, little wands that make little light spells, wooden creatures that can move and make noises... Make children happy! And your players too because they will waste their money on these stuff.
Instrument store!! Make your bards happy with special instruments or just weird ones! Give me a battle in one of those that is just filled with funny noises and the worst battle soundtrack ever!!
Not exactly a place but... Cleaning carts!!! Show me people cleaning the streets, picking up the trash, cutting trees!! Make the town look clean!! Give me an old man that is really proud of his work!!!
(or ways to make your players feel even worse when the villain destroys the town later on :) )
Yeah, a lot of what bothers me about fantasy settings (especially D&D) is that people try to run wizards like they're academics, but their only exposure to academics is authoritative professors telling them The Truth, so they don't realize that all academics are always 5 seconds away from trying to strangle each other over questions like 'does time really pass or does it just seem to pass'
What makes it even funnier is that we're dealing with people who's area of expertise is finding ways to break reality, meaning that the more entrenched you are in your wizarding studies the more likely it is that you'll find a way to make reality confirm to your inherent bias.
This leads to your tenured litches/elven archmage professors LITERALLY unable to share rooms with eachother not only because of academic rivalry but because they have conflicting (and centuries outdated) theories of how physics should work and having them get into an augment would likely rip a hole into the astral sea.
hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him
yeah umm actually everyone kinda lives, inside.. the walls yeah. no yeah theres not any surrounding farming communities or villages to levy taxes from so we're pretty much just in a stone pit all together. Theres a massive stone castle tho! where did the infrastructure for the stone quarring come from? I dont know... Evil wizard maybe?
If you actually want to know how medieval (and overall pre-industrial) cities interacted with its rural enviroment, check out these articles:
This week and next, we’re going to look at an issue not of battles, but of settings: pre-modern cities – particularly the trope of the city,
Last week, we looked at a model for what the countryside around an ‘ideal city’ might look like. Today we’re going to introduce some complic
Long story short, cities weren't islands in the middle of nowhere. If you're a generic fantasy character approaching a city, you wouldn't find a lonely Shining City Upon A Hill (hmm, interesting imagery there, wonder what it means...), but actually a highly populated area of farms, orchards and all that feeds and maintains a city.
Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.
Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.
Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.
Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.
Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.
Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.
Group Stealth in D&D 5e is kinda funny, and I'm not sure what the intent and actual method for applying all these rules in concert is.
Okay, so let's start with Group Checks: Group Checks: in some circumstances where a whole group is working together to do a thing, the GM may allow a group check. It means that everyone in the group makes an ability check, and if at least half of the group members gain success it means the group as a whole succeeds. The rules for Group Checks don't explicitly mention using Stealth with Group Checks, but a lot of people have extrapolated that from the rules, and it seems to be a commonly used method for handling Stealth.
There is a rationale for using Group Stealth, including that sneakier characters can help more clumsy characters stay silent, and there are also gameplay rationales for it (it speeds up play significantly when the group can move as a group without worrying about the dwarf in plate mail alerting every enemy).
But it might not actually make a lot of sense because, first of all, group checks mathematically incentivise having an even number of party members making the check (with two characters making a check, just one needs to succeed to meet the "at least half" quota, while with three characters two would need to succeed. I know D&D 5e likes rounding numbers down, but there is no reality in which 1 is more than half of three, sorry.) but the logic used when handling group checks might actually run counter to other, more specific rules.
Like, what is Stealth used for usually? Not being seen. In the context of these dungeon games it's often for the sake of gaining surprise. Now, the way a lot of people handle surprise is simple: take the highest passive perception among the group being surprised and make a group Stealth check, right?
That approach might not actually be supported by the rules. Here's what the rules on Surprise say:
The DM determines who might be surprised. If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other. Otherwise, the DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side. Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.
The wording here suggests a different approach: if a character or monster doesn't notice a threat, explicit call for individual Stealth checks. Remember, specific beats general in D&D 5e: the general rules for Group checks say that group check work like this. The specific rules for surprise on the other hand suggest a reading where it's every check being compared against the enemy group's.
What this means is: instead of Dongle (+5 Stealth) and Dongle (-1 to Stealth) making a single group Stealth check against the target group's highest Passive Perception (which would lead into an all or nothing situation where either everyone in the opposing group is surprised or no one is) the intent, as far as I can gather may be more like this:
Bongle and Dongle are sneaking up on a group of bandits (passive perception 10) lead by a veteran (passive perception 12). Bongle rolls an 8 but his +5 brings it to a total of 13, exceeding all enemies passive perceptions. Dongle rolls a 12, which brings it to an 11 after his -1, meaning he would only surprise the bandits. Because surprise is contingent on a character being unaware of any enemies, this means that the Veteran (who noticed Dongle) is not surprised, while the bandits (who noticed neither of them) are surprised!
Anyway, I'm not sure if Group Stealth was ever an intended interaction of the rules, but it's become a very commonplace practice. I do understand why it's used, but I also feel the way a lot of people run it may make surprise a bit too easy for characters to get.
My breakdown is whether or not they'te going into an encounter:
The party trying to move through a city without people noticing they've arrived in town: group stealth check
The party trying to sneak past the guards who are specifically checking credentials and motives of those moving into the walled noble district: individual rolls
The party trying not to raise the alarm as they move from dungeon encounter to the next: group stealth check.
The party is trying to get into position for an ambush against a group of enemies they've spotted: individual checks
Baldur's gate 3 style stealth (where you declare you're being stealthy and only roll when you risk discovery) also makes this WAY easier because it cuts down on the extraneous rolls that slow things down and let the tension bleed out.
Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.
Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness
Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.
As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.
We can do better
TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.
While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:
It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.
Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.
Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.
Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.
Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.
The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.
There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.
Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.
Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.
THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".
What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now
Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time
THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.
Adventure Hooks:
The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)
Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.
The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.
Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.
Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.
Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.
Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.
The amount of religiosity in a given campaign varies from table to table based on the DM's ability to flesh out the world, the players' desires, and the understanding both have about the expectations a given setting has re: religious practice. If you think religion isn't featuring strongly enough in your game, talk to your group.
Read material that isn't 5e. There are heaps and heaps of articles and sourcebooks on the religions of Oerth, Krynn, and Faerûn, plus a few on Eberron. Like, 3rd edition had at least three sourcebooks on the subject specifically (Deities & Demigods, Faiths and Pantheons [Realms], and Faiths of Eberron; there was probably one for Krynn, too) detailing clergy, holy days, and such, and Dragon ran numerous articles on the various faiths (especially towards the end of its print run). Pathfinder (3.P) continued that trend. 2nd ed. AD&D had quite a few books on the subject, as well, often with even more detail than the more detailed 3e sources.
At minimum, main books for campaign settings should speak to the place of religion on a day-to-day, lay basis. I know it did in 3.x and I thought I saw at least some of that in 5e books.
D&D religion is weird because D&D gods aren't written as the products of actual faith. They're objectively real, have stats, and are active participants in the meta politics of whatever campaign they're written into..... which is a really dumb idea if you ask me.
Treating the gods as these ultra-powerful NPCs forces the DM to do a load of extra work explaining WHY every campaign isn't over before it begins by way of divine intervention, to say nothing of adhering to a singular cosmology which simultaneously has to allow for all gods while narrowing what a god can even BE.
It completely negates the narrative themes of spirituality, which are what give you those delicious setting details OP was talking about.
VALDA'S SPIRE OF SECRETS PHYSICAL BOOK FINALLY ARRIVED
Since funding in 2021 and the digital release in Feb 2022, I have adored this book and all the new material inside it. There is not a single D&D game I have played in the last 23 months where there hasn't been a race, class, subclass, feat or spell from this book making an appearance.
It's said they found the god in the old tombs, in that forgotten quiet where long eras had worn away all the epitaphs. They drew in a breath of the still air and on their exhalation the god took flight into the world on vulture's wings.
-The Silent Testimonies, book 1
A god not of death, but of the dead, Nerull presides those aspects of the mortal coil that lay beyond the Raven Queen's domain of mourning and memory. Someone must keep vigil for the departed long after their names have passed from the memories of the living, and so that duty falls to Nerull, who's chosen people are the spirits that have lingered in the world far longer than they were ever alive.
Beyond the dead, the vulture’s faithful are an eclectic lot. Itinerant gravetenders, scholars of forgotten tongues, Bonesetters who's experience with embalming helps them minister to the living. To Serve Nerull you must first die, though this is often symbolic.
Unlike his fellow carrion-bird death god, Nerull's following does not frown on the use of necromancy, or the existance of undead. Ghost stories, whether vengeful or sorrowful are considered holy for the way their memory transcends time. The exception to this reverence of course are those trapped in suffering, and the "hungry" dead who feed on the living. Pain and want are after all the purview of life, and Nerull dispatches hunters and psychopomps to ease such spirits along their way.
Adventure Hooks:
While out on their travels the party encounters a procession of grey pilgrims, masked and shrouded, all silent save for the leader of their procession who carries a staff jingling with bells and welcomes the party to sit by his fire. He tells tale of conflicts across the realm, new and old, shared with her by her flock, and invites the party to walk along with them the next day if they wish to see something splendid. Should the party agree to such unsettling company they will walk until sunset when they come to a hillside dotted with loose stones, where one by one the pigrims will walk out and begin constructing their own cairns. The procession leader will thank them for their observance, not many are so kind to the unnamed dead, and will reward them with answers to five questions before departing on pallid wings.
After inexplicably befriending one of Nerull's agents (and possibly his daughter?) during one of their adventures, the party are liable to be put out when they don't see their favourite psychopomp for a while. Queue sightings of a foreboding spectre that's knocking one by one on the doors of the city at night, sending people into a panic. Imagine their surprise when it turns out this wraith has a message for them... their favourite omen of doom has been kidnapped by a necromancer and her boss (dad?) wants them to get her back.
The Vulture's work is never done, and this time he's decided to enlist the heroes for aid. Perhaps there's an undead spirit that needs to be quieted, perhaps there's something sinister at work in a ruin once consecrated in his name, perhaps it's just making sure they clean up after themselves after their latest stint of tombrobbing. Regardless, Nerull can offer the heroes something far beyond coin... closure with the dead, ensuring visitation with a loved one for some much needed closure.
Titles: The Vulture, The Bonesorter, Dead Ned, the weary reaper, the vagabond end.
Signs: Plants too dry to rot, the voices of the departed carried on the wind, skeletons rearranged into trees or gardens.
Symbols: A scythe or sickle entwined with flowers.
