I think part of the problem is that D&D minotaurs have always been a little schizophrenic.
On the one hand, their origin is CLEARLY the Greek myth. It's one of those monsters that even people outside of D&D have a pretty clear view of. It's iconic of D&D's ability to take mythical creatures you've read about since you were eight and let you interact with them yourself, and make your own stories about them.
On the other hand, D&D minotaurs were also multitudinous. There wasn't just ONE minotaur, there were several. Families of the things.
On the third hand, Dragonlance. Pirate noble warrior race folks. Okay, they have the form of bovid-humanoids, but really, they're more Kothian than Minotaur.
On the fourth hand (because I'm a thri-kreen), for some reason they recently decided that all cow-people should be Minotaurs and all Minotaurs should embrace all cow-people.
Of these four approaches, they need to choose ONE to be the D&D Minotaur in the Monster Manual.
I'm an advocate for
#1 or
#2 . Recognize that not all cow-people need to be minotaurs, promote the use of other names (Kothian, Yikaira), and plop down either the mythological one or the classic D&D one in the MM. Either way, we don't need the "random cultist turns into a monster for no friggin' reason" background. We could use the "this is a
punishment" backstory, since that resonates with the original myth better, and we can work Baphomet in that way (he's the god who grants the ritual that creates minotaurs!), but we don't need yet another demon cultist who randomly turns into a monster.
I see it like this:
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The Borus family keeps a monster in their basement.
The children in the town of Viblarc know all about it. That old manor on the hill, the people who live there, the ones who own the big herds of cattle and who make a lot of money from the meat, they have a monster in their basement. They say the monster was once a man, but he broke the law, and was punished. Now, the Borus family pays the Black Masks to scour the city, picking naughty kids off the street after curfew, and feeding them to the monster in the basement. They say on quiet nights, you can hear it roaring, crying, raging in its cage, at the people who imprisoned it, hungry for more tender human flesh.
Travelers in Viblarc largely disregard this story as the story of a bogeyman, a variation of the monster in the closet or under the bed, used by parents in Viblarc to get their children to obey.
And yet...
People go missing in Viblarc with surprising regularity. Every few days, a drunk, or a woman of the night, or a poor orphan, or a vagrant, simply disappears. Not that the people of Viblarc mind. How these unsavory types are kept off the street is irrelevant to them, and to most other people in the region. Nobody misses the abusive husband, or the babbling madman. They never had many friends to begin with.
And there is a story...
A story about how, five generations ago, when the town was wealthier and the Borus family was admired, before they became secretive and quiet, how that all changed, when one daughter of the proud Borus family committed some sin with some commoner, and how she was locked in a nunnery, and how he was never seen again. Such is the fate of forbidden love one may say, but in late, drunken moments at the tavern, when the eerie wind blows strange sounds through the streets, some old men will speak of something more at work. They will speak of the patriarch of the Borus family in that time, Cambrid, and his temper, and his rage, and his implacable fury, and they will speak, if you let them run their tongues long enough, of his dabbling in darker arts, with priests said to be able to control our animal impulses. Priests who promised to reign in the daughter. To change her forever. About how that "nunnery" is actually a pit beneath the manor, where his daughter still lives, transformed into a hungry monster who ate her former lover, and who continues to hunger for the tender flesh of mortals, who must be appeased. About how those priests still exert their stranglehold on the family, aware of this dark secret, and how they help, in their black bull's masks, to grab folks off the street to feed the Daughter of Borus.
[/sblock]
...for me, a core part of it is that
intentionality. The core minotaur, whether multiple or singular, should not be an accident, a random happenstance. They should be deliberately created, and they should be reminders of shame and decadence, symptoms of the illness of the hubris of the powerful and wealthy.
Baphomet, of course, probably has a hand in their creation.
