History of Gnolls Adventure

[fissionessence]

So in my campaign each character came from a different plane of the multiverse, and they are traveling through planes by some means they don't understand. So far they've encountered a mysterious red orb in front of a portal to a demonic realm, and they're looking for a second big red orb now on a different plane (which is also in front of a big demon gate, but they don't know that).

After their current adventure, I'm tentatively planning to the home plane of the gnoll character. On that plane, gnolls run wild across a continent. Now, taken from the Return to Northmoor podcast adventure, I got the idea of a temple or building that's 'sealed in time'. That is, through some failsafe magical devise, the temple was sealed so that everything within is frozen in time so that either it could be reactivated once stuff outside becomes safe again, or so that stuff inside can't get out.

I'm imagining an ancient civilization who had at least one such building. Inside is where the demon portal opened, and some demons got through, but one guy in the temple managed to seal it to prevent some bigger ones or something. Somehow the players unseal the temple (most likely accidentally) and the first thing they hear is "It didn't work!" or something of the like. The guy who hit the switch thinks the timeseal didn't work because he can 'still' move, but what happened is that it did work and they were sealed for thousands of years, but now it's unsealed so it feels to him like no time has passed.

So within this temple is a snapshot of the chaos that was unleashed on the continent a thousand years ago, and the players will have to deal with it and find their red orb and learn more about the demons.

What happened is that some of the demons (who weren't sealed in time) corrupted the advanced race and turned them into gnolls, which is why that's what lives on this continent now.

So my question is . . . what race should this ancient advanced people be? Human seems obvious but boring, and I'm willing to make up a new race to make it feel cool. The gnoll aspect could be from the demons mostly, or the original race could have had a slight hyenaish feel.

Other insights or suggestions on the rest of the story are welcome as well

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[conanb]

I would invent a race to do this. Perhaps they were more dog like, human like with Dog heads. Something in mind with the egyptian gods. Before they became gnolls they could have been the race that built the temple. Throw a few survivors in on the continent holding out against the gnolls. I would also maybe make the gnoll blood like vampirism among them. That is if one of the dog people gets bit by a gnoll, it's only a matter of time before the demon blood takes over. So the dog people feel like they're living in a zombie universe. The gnolls here should be crazy feral to give a big difference with the gnoll in the group. Then the player would have more in common with the Dog people. He would be like Blade, a vampire that can live among the regular people without threatening them.

Just some suggestions.

 

[fissionessence]

Well this plane is where the PC gnoll is from, so though these gnolls are different in demeanor from her, they shouldn't be biologically different; she was born one of them.

One of the things she initially mentioned for her home plane was that the gnolls had other races as slaves, but she really isn't the type of player to delve to deeply into the backstory, so the rest is up to me.

When you said dog headed people, I thought what if the dogs were 'loyal' to another race who were the smart ones and mostly in charge. When the dog headed people turned into gnolls from the demons, the tides turned and the slaves that the player mentioned are the race to which the dog headed people used to be loyal.

I've actually already had too many animal-headed people in the campaign, though, so unless I wanted to make a theme of it and come up with a story explanation as to why that style is so prevalent in the multiverse, they probably shouldn't just be 'dog headed people'.

Thanks for the suggestions and for helping me think through it!

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