Yora
Legend
This thread had me thinking that for my world, gnolls probably should be natural hunters and scavengers.
Unless it's made specific that creatures are magical creations, I feel they should be able to exist in a paleolithic environment with very few people around and no technologies and institutions of civilization to sustain them. (I already did some rewrites for doppelgangers on that basis some years ago.)
Gnolls can exist deep in the wilderness and have society and culture of their own even when nobody else is around to rob. Unlike early humans, they are almost entirely carnivorous and always relied on hunting for food, but being social pack hunters and much smarter than animals, they were doing very well with stealing prey that other predators had killed by chasing them away. And their digestion is also fine with meat that's several days old.
The great majority of gnolls still lives that way deep in the wilderness, now that they have spears, bows, leather, and rope and strings. But those that live on the edges of civilizations very easily take on the habit of not just chasing other predators away from meat, but also chase other humanoids away from any stuff that they want to have. Gnoll banditry and raiding is really no different from human banditry, but overall gnolls are much quicker to take up that habit as it's much less a violation of their social norms. But of course humans also do it all the time anyway.
Among the humanoids, gnolls are the most inhuman. Which greatly limits the other potential interactions that the wild hunter bands could have with settled peoples. Nonviolent interactions are possible, but there rarely is enough comfort on either side to establish much in the way of cooperation and trade. Very remote borderland villages might know about gnoll bands hunting in the woods on the other side of a river or some hills that respect that informal border, but will only very see them in the distance. But this might change very quickly if something forces the gnolls to shift their hunting grounds and the villages look like the best alternative food source.
Where gnolls get a particularly nasty reputation is their habit to eat people they killed in a raid. Humans are almost always too high risk for hunting when other prey is around. But if they do a raid and people get killed, it's free meat just lying around!
Unless it's made specific that creatures are magical creations, I feel they should be able to exist in a paleolithic environment with very few people around and no technologies and institutions of civilization to sustain them. (I already did some rewrites for doppelgangers on that basis some years ago.)
Gnolls can exist deep in the wilderness and have society and culture of their own even when nobody else is around to rob. Unlike early humans, they are almost entirely carnivorous and always relied on hunting for food, but being social pack hunters and much smarter than animals, they were doing very well with stealing prey that other predators had killed by chasing them away. And their digestion is also fine with meat that's several days old.
The great majority of gnolls still lives that way deep in the wilderness, now that they have spears, bows, leather, and rope and strings. But those that live on the edges of civilizations very easily take on the habit of not just chasing other predators away from meat, but also chase other humanoids away from any stuff that they want to have. Gnoll banditry and raiding is really no different from human banditry, but overall gnolls are much quicker to take up that habit as it's much less a violation of their social norms. But of course humans also do it all the time anyway.
Among the humanoids, gnolls are the most inhuman. Which greatly limits the other potential interactions that the wild hunter bands could have with settled peoples. Nonviolent interactions are possible, but there rarely is enough comfort on either side to establish much in the way of cooperation and trade. Very remote borderland villages might know about gnoll bands hunting in the woods on the other side of a river or some hills that respect that informal border, but will only very see them in the distance. But this might change very quickly if something forces the gnolls to shift their hunting grounds and the villages look like the best alternative food source.
Where gnolls get a particularly nasty reputation is their habit to eat people they killed in a raid. Humans are almost always too high risk for hunting when other prey is around. But if they do a raid and people get killed, it's free meat just lying around!