Gloombunny said:
What's with the pointy ears on all those old-school-tiefling pictures? I thought they were demon-human hybrids, not demon-elf.
Why do you think that only elves get pointy ears?
In part, it's a DiTerlizzi thing: his fondness for fairy-tale leaked through, though not all of his tieflings have pointy ears. Anyone using his stuff as a reference is likely to have pointy ears, too.
In part, it's a change in what the teifling has been. It was originally "a human plus
something else", which meant that they were basically a catch-all category for planetouched -- good, evil, fey, chaos, law, spirit-world, ethereal, ninja, whatever. They rapidly became more fiendish than anything else, but the idea always was that they were of mixed blood of various types, they didn't have the strong lineage of descent that an alu-fiend or somthing did. So when the original artwork was called for, DiTerlizzi let the "faery foundling" angle take over his art. IMO, that's something cool, the blurring of the lines between "fey" and "demon" is awesome in my mind, though 4e definately goes with the flow and makes them strongly associated with a particular brand of outsiders.