Niche Request: Gnoll Ancestry

[Wonky Chewbacca]

James Jacobs wrote:

Midnightoker wrote:

Fetchlings pretty please! Gnoll is a huge favorite since I have an old Gnoll character.

An aberrative touched Ancestry for those that want to be more tethered to the occult essences.

Aberrations are tricky things to pull off as PC races, or as non-evil for that matter. One of the toughest challenges I had back in Lords of Madness for D&D was to come up with a non-evil aberration race. There's nothing in the creature type that says "MUST BE EVIL" but the fact that they're supposed to be, well, aberrant, means that they can't fit into normal society or life in some way. Which makes them tough calls for things that should be able to fit in to a society, which is what has to be an underlying assumption for a player ancestry since the game's about characters working together in a society in most cases.

It's further a challenge in that the further we get away from the expectation of human sized and human shaped, things we take for granted in world design and adventure design start falling apart. If we make nagas a PC option, what sort of wearable magic items can they wear? How do they handle things like doorknobs? What if the adventure expects every player to have feet for some reason?

Starfinder's probably a better game to look to if you want to play truly unusually shaped characters... but even then it gets tricky and potentially has unintentionally comical or unbelievable situations showing up that can break a table's verisimilitude.

You made the silthilar (those were then aberration searms, yes? Been too long simce I cracked open my LoM.)? I loved those guys and their grafts!

[Val'bryn2]

I would like to suggest something for the writing going forward, when you're writing about specific groups of a race, for example the Gnolls from Legacy of Fire, specify it with language like "these gnolls". We had issues higher up with the discussion between the apparently misogynistic early Gnolls and the Gnolls from the Monster Codex being matriarchal. It creates confusion when the lore being contradictory.

[Winkie_Phace]

I'd love to see a Gnoll ancestry. Hyenas are so unique that they seem like they'd be pretty fertile ground for creativity as far as ancestry feats go. A Gnoll Witch just sounds like too much fun.

[Vic Wertz]

Locking this thread until we can get moderator cleanup.

[Diego Valdez]

I have removed a whole lot of posts and replies to them. This thread went tremendously off topic and not in a good way. Please flag and move on instead of engaging. I will not be re opening this thread as the OP's question has been answered and it is clear the discussion isn't going to go anywhere good.