Gnolls, gnolls, glorious gnolls

[roguerouge]

Well, if you use the hyena's anatomy as a base, it'll be essentially impossible to tell the difference between male and female gnolls, according to the biology and culture sections on hyenas on wikipedia.

And, for a while, weren't hyenas one of the few animals with CE as their alignment?

 

[Kesh]

I'm sure I'm a little biased, but…

I've loved gnolls since I first picked up the game, but I've never used them as written — I got as far as the "hyena-people who treat their females as chattel" and suffered a fatal disconnect. So instead they became a faintly savage, matriarchal group of clans, the brutal pragmatists without actually being full-bore evil.

Among the tricks I've used:

- Strong ties to natural magic. Gnolls might not have much by way of wizards, but they have some very dangerous druids. Shifting, calling down natural cataclysms, the whole nine yards.

- Assuming a hyena-ish anatomy with a long torso and long arms (and high Strength), they would probably favor weapons that take advantage of that leverage: axes, hammers and flails. Gnollish longbows are built for a powerful, seven-foot archer with disproportionate arms, and would be hard for a human to use; they have a base damage of 1d10.

- Man-eaters. Gnolls will eat any humanoid they catch and kill, as well as other animals. Some clans hunt ogres as if they were hunting large, dangerous prey like Cape buffalo. It's always fun to have players find gnoll-made trade goods like minotaur-horn vessels, trollbone chariots or ogre-skin leather.

- Cunning. I once stymied my players by having some gnolls just hang up a sheet across a defensible entry into a ruined city wall. The players wound up going the long way around, reasoning that the gnolls were probably up to something they didn't feel like dealing with.

- Hyena motifs. Here I pulled out the strong matriarchal influence, but also little touches like them being effective and brutal killers as well as scavengers; not the biggest beastie on the block, but among the most dangerous. They'll pack up and move rather than get into a fight that might exterminate the whole clan, but if they need to fight, it's no-holds-barred.

Well, if you use the hyena's anatomy as a base, it'll be essentially impossible to tell the difference between male and female gnolls, according to the biology and culture sections on hyenas on wikipedia.

And, for a while, weren't hyenas one of the few animals with CE as their alignment?

These are basically where I've gone with it. Heavily into demonic magic and (abuse of) nature magic, expert ambush-hunters, slavers and cannibals, matriarchial with a system of dominance based on combat and number of slaves owned, and the difficulty of other races to distinguish between the genders.

 

[Barastrondo]

Well, if you use the hyena's anatomy as a base, it'll be essentially impossible to tell the difference between male and female gnolls, according to the biology and culture sections on hyenas on wikipedia.

Not a point I was looking to prove; anyway, they allegedly have to nurse their young, and given a humanoid body structure, you're probably going to be able to tell a female gnoll apart at least some of the time. Particularly if they only give birth to one or two young like us humans; then they only need a pair of breasts, and you're looking at something more humanlike in anatomy.

(I am lightly embarrassed about how often I've had to cite the correlation between the number of mammaries and the number of young born in the course of my day job.)

And, for a while, weren't hyenas one of the few animals with CE as their alignment?

That would make me wonder just what someone was smoking. What, were lions lawful evil, too? The hyena/lion conflict a spillover from the Blood War?

I never messed around with gnoll demonology; I liked them as general-purpose animists, a role that most other humanoid races weren't filling with their organized gods and pantheons and such. Actually, that's not true — I did retool Yeenoghu into a feared demon of starvation, hunger and general ghoulishness, the kind of Adversary you might expect from a culture that would worry about poor hunting. Gnolls had the same perception of him and his followers that superstitious humans had of those grave-robbing, weirdo hyena animals. I was fond of the irony.

 

[roguerouge]

anyway, they allegedly have to nurse their young, and given a humanoid body structure, you're probably going to be able to tell a female gnoll apart at least some of the time.

Hey, don't look at me, man. Wikipedia: "Early naturalists thought hyenas were hermaphrodites or commonly practiced homosexuality, largely due to the female spotted hyena's unique urogenital system. According to early writings such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Physiologus, the hyena continually changed its sex and nature from male to female and back again."

And: "The majority of hyena species show little sexual dimorphism, usually with males being only slightly larger than the females. The spotted hyena is an exception to this as females are larger than the males. One unusual feature of the spotted hyena is that females have an enlarged ..." And I'm going to stop there due to the grandma rule. You can finish the sentence yourself at wikipedia's entry on the gals.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I'm loving the Ancient Egyptian themed Gnolls.
That is so very cool I might have to yoink it for some future play.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Gnolls also make good bases for:

1) FRPG versions of The Predator

2) A race of prey specially bred by some more powerful race for exhilerating hunts. That master race has either died out or were overthrown by or have forgotten the Gnolls. Now, left to their own devices, they've become the scourge of the world.

3) The last members of an ancient, fallen empire whose very existence is lost to time- even to the Gnolls themselves. Perhaps they are your campaign's version of Atlanteans...

4) Quasi- African/Meso-American civilizations that practice ritualized cannibalism- think Eaters of the Dead who have been given a sacred calling by Death himself- repulsive to other sentient races, but secretly quite civilized.

 

[theskyfullofdust]

Well, this is all very good. Plenty of ideas here. Thanks guys and gals.

 

[Set]

I've loved gnolls since I first picked up the game, but I've never used them as written — I got as far as the "hyena-people who treat their females as chattel" and suffered a fatal disconnect.

Heh. Gnoll women were oppressing their menfolk long before those Drow copycats got into the act!

- Strong ties to natural magic. Gnolls might not have much by way of wizards, but they have some very dangerous druids. Shifting, calling down natural cataclysms, the whole nine yards.

Love the idea of Gnoll Druids with Hyena companions (or 'Dire' Hyena mounts).

- Man-eaters. Gnolls will eat any humanoid they catch and kill, as well as other animals. Some clans hunt ogres as if they were hunting large, dangerous prey like Cape buffalo. It's always fun to have players find gnoll-made trade goods like minotaur-horn vessels, trollbone chariots or ogre-skin leather.

I'm fond of the idea mentioned downthread of having Gnolls run along a spectrum. Some consider other humanoids 'the most dangerous game' and others stick to ritual cannibalism / sentiapophagy, as a way to 'absorb the traits of' or 'honor and remember' a particular individual.

- Hyena motifs. Here I pulled out the strong matriarchal influence, but also little touches like them being effective and brutal killers as well as scavengers; not the biggest beastie on the block, but among the most dangerous. They'll pack up and move rather than get into a fight that might exterminate the whole clan, but if they need to fight, it's no-holds-barred.

One difficulty with the whole fluff vs. text thing is that a lot of races are described as behaving in *extremely* lawful ways (Gnolls oppressing another gender and keeping slaves? Dark elves, in just about every post-Gygax incarnation?), and then labeled as 'chaotic' when they aren't in any way 'chaotic,' they're just *not very nice.*

Pick some race that can't function in packs, and that can be chaotic, but races that work together and have rigid heirarchies, friggin' caste systems and status ranks and all that crap, and it's not 'chaotic.' It's very much lawful. Same with Barbarians in 3.X. Nomadic and tribal cultures had very strict rules of conduct and what was acceptable, and breaking those taboos could get you exiled, or even killed.

 

[Barastrondo]

Heh. Gnoll women were oppressing their menfolk long before those Drow copycats got into the act!

It's a rough world out there. Send the males to hunt the most dangerous things, since they're rather more replaceable. The ones who survive the longest and get strongest make great mates.

Love the idea of Gnoll Druids with Hyena companions (or 'Dire' Hyena mounts).

It's also an excuse to stockpile hyena miniatures. Heh.

I'm fond of the idea mentioned downthread of having Gnolls run along a spectrum. Some consider other humanoids 'the most dangerous game' and others stick to ritual cannibalism / sentiapophagy, as a way to 'absorb the traits of' or 'honor and remember' a particular individual.

That's probably how I'd do it overall. It hasn't come up too often, though there was a session in which the PCs went after a band of ogres that had claimed a certain section of the ruined city everyone was squatting in, and the gnolls they'd negotiated a truce with wound up scavenging the battlefield after the PCs were done with their looting.

When the PCs next visited the gnoll camp and saw gnolls chopping up ogres, making sausages from the guts, throwing bits to their pet hyenas, hanging strips of ogre out to dry, and little gnoll-cubs running around with red-smeared muzzles... well, sometimes it's fun to play with the idea of what another fantasy race considers a "domestic scene."

One difficulty with the whole fluff vs. text thing is that a lot of races are described as behaving in *extremely* lawful ways (Gnolls oppressing another gender and keeping slaves? Dark elves, in just about every post-Gygax incarnation?), and then labeled as 'chaotic' when they aren't in any way 'chaotic,' they're just *not very nice.*

Pick some race that can't function in packs, and that can be chaotic, but races that work together and have rigid heirarchies, friggin' caste systems and status ranks and all that crap, and it's not 'chaotic.' It's very much lawful. Same with Barbarians in 3.X. Nomadic and tribal cultures had very strict rules of conduct and what was acceptable, and breaking those taboos could get you exiled, or even killed.

Yeah, I usually ignored the "alignment" section of a monster and drew inspiration from the notes on their culture instead. I was a serious sucker for "Ecology of" articles back during the Roger Moore years of Dragon, and the 2e monster presentation put a lot of space into the kind of detail I liked. Orcs are LE? Okay, whatever. Orcs focus on war as the means to harness their more bestial instincts of violence, and acknowledge a pantheon of brutish gods who stress strength above all? Hey, now we're in business!

 

[MonkeyDragon]

There is a free pdf module on rpgnow by Creative Mountain Games, one of the cooperative dungeons, that features gnolls. I forget the name but one of the late ones I think.

That would be Cooperative Dungeon Four, the Tomb of Chaos. I was an editor on that one, and wrote some of the adventure hooks. Sigh. Good times. It's a pretty good dungeon, though kind of insular. I don't know that I'd write a whole campaign around it.

I like gnolls because there are so many different kinds and challenge ratings of them in the various monster manuals, and because they're low level enough to turn them into whatever class you want, and yet burlier than goblins or orcs, so there's less work to do. I'd say great for a lowish to mid level game.