Always seems like a good plan to me
Alright, let me see... trying to do this from a cold start, so things might get a little incoherent...
Matriarchal: Everyone who thinks of hyenas thinks of the spotted breed, where females rule the roost. Even if striped hyenas and aardwolves are actually egalitarian, it's a rare social dynamic for mammals. Add in that no edition of D&D has ever actually run with this - even in Pathfinder, where they worship Lamashtu, they're still dominated by male chieftains, even if the female priestesses are given roughly equal respect. I don't want this to devolve into paradoiac levels like D&D's infamous Drow, but females as the bigger, stronger, sex and their culture reflecting this is something I'd like to pursue - the magocratic aranea aren't right for it, due to, y'know, valuing magic over physical force.
Dark, Not Evil: As I said before, I really liked the 4e fluff about gnolls being torn between the Beast and the Demon; I don't want them to be Always Chaotic Evil, but I'd like to preserve that struggle if I can, or at least make them a little scary and not conventionally nice. I envision gnolls as accepting necromancy in a way that other races, at least in other settings, would traditionally balk at. They consider it an honor to be brought back as a Witherling to help defend the pack, and see it as natural to use skeleton and bone golem-based slave labor to do the manual labor. Eating the flesh of your enemies is practical, not out of savagery, and they're still animal enough that they prefer to hunt and live by night and sleep during the heat of the day - which, let's face it, in the Bitterflats is actually a rather sensible way to live if you can see in the dark.
Pack-Structured: The foundation of spotted hyena culture is the pack. It's competitive and it struggles for hierarchy, but it's still loyal to its members and stands firm against aggressors. It shouldn't be the sole "redeeming" aspect of gnoll culture, but the positives and negatives of pack as a cultural base are something I want to explore with them.
Feral, Not Stupid: Gnolls may have a stronger set of instincts and a culture based more on their bestial origins than some races, but that doesn't make them idiotic any more than it makes them evil. Just because gnolls can appreciate the fun to be had in a good mud wallow or enjoy hunting for the thrill of it doesn't mean they can't make art and music and otherwise be civilized, in their way.
Excorcising implies you want to get rid of it, and in that case just get rid of it.
It is a vaguely interesting concept, but you have enough sexual oddities on Malebolge, using the Gnolls as a foil for philosophy and culture may be more interesting and then just pick one of the gender hierarchies to make it work.
The reason I ask for help exorcising it is because I honestly can't make my mind up for it. As I stated when I proposed the theory, there's a lot of reasons why "the three subraces as three distinct genders" makes sense, between the matriarchal society of real-life spotted hyenas, the distinctively unusual anatomy of female spotted hyenas, the mythological association of spotted hyenas with hermaphroditism/genderbending due to that anatomy, the striped hyena's place in still-surviving folklore and traditional magic/medicine as a talisman for sexual and romantic purposes, and even the common percepion in many ancient cultures of the genderfluid/intersexed/transsexual as inherently divine or mystical (cf: Ishtar's transsexual sacred prostitutes, the Greek god Hermaphroditus, etc).
The only reason I'm hesitating is that we already have kobolds and their offshoots as hermaphroditic or otherwise genderfluid. But, then again, this is a world where one of the dominant races can randomly have tentacles, misplaced facial features, hunchbacks, be covered in whispering mouths that drool black gunk, have prehensile hair, physiques like a Tyrant out of Resident Evil, or otherwise be hideously mutated, so... I don't know if it's really that big a deal that one race has a "third gender" which is metaphysically different to the males & females, especially if it's a minority.
...I was talking about the Calibans, before anyone asks who the aforementioned super-freaky race is.
Not sure what you mean, but I am vaguely curious as to the normal folk of Malebolge. What are the humans up to? The Dwarves and Elves are pretty much dead, but humans are still up and kicking it sounds like.... which... would that make them technically the winners of the war? They are the last people standing in a lot of ways.
Well, the problem I have with talking about humans is that I'm not exactly 100% set on what they've got going on. Like in "traditional" DND, Malebolge humans are the "adaptable" race; they weathered the apocalypse and survived, but their culture fragmented. They come in all shapes and sizes, from pseudo-primitives who're devolving into calibans to hardy frontier types working to rebuild society to even surviving fragments of the old world desperately clinging to what they have - Fallout is a big influence on my vision of humanity in this setting.
