Plus, frankly it is nice to have a stock enemy you don't have to feel bad about slaughtering wholesale. Orcs? Okay, maybe our cultures misunderstand one another. Demon worshipping cannibalistic hyena men? Let me get my axe.
D&D 5E WotC to increase releases per year?
Bravesteel25
Baronet of Gaming
While I would love to see Greyhawk published along with some regional Realms books, I'd like to see some more focused books like someone said upthread. Sandstorm, and the like from 3E were great books and could still fill the Player & DM content requirement. I'm really tired of having little tiny nuggets of rules tucked away into the adventure releases that I couldn't care less about most of the time.
Ath-kethin
Elder Thing
I don't have a problem with demon-worshipping gnolls. What I don't like is the creation of gnolls by a demon being presented as fact rather than faith.
A bunch of gnolls who believe they were created by a demon lord and seek to emulate that demon lord is cool. Saying it's true just seems really lazy. I have just as big an objection to the relationship between elves and Corellon whatsisname, orcs and Gruumsh, and similar cases.
It makes sense that elves are commonly taught a given creation myth, and orcsn and gnolls as well. But I really don't like making those myths literal historical events.
5e is trying hard to appease people who don't like D&D alignment, but at the same time baking alignment-based concepts onto various creatures and setups. It's an unfortunate mix.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Yeah I think that for specific settings, it's totally valid to have it as a historical event, rather than a myth, but the generic versions of races, the MM versions, should probably be, well, generic versions, and in that case it needs to be myth.
I think literal truth being available to folks in a D&D setting is interesting. We already know what it looks like when people don't know but believe they have some magical origin -- that's the real world. But how actual knowledge of who created your people and why, and what that means for both your individual life and your society, is definitely going to something worth exploring.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
In a specific setting.
Not as the generic design of the races. Loads of settings, maybe even the majority, are incompatible with making that sort of thing "factually the case". The issue is people wanting it to be true in the MM, not in a specific setting.
Faolyn
(she/her)
It's a weird situation. In D&D, the gods, by default, literally exist and can even be met in person via planer travel. So the myths, or at least many of them, about them should be at least partially true. But, as you say, there are other problems with that: if you have a world where you can't meet the gods, if you don't want certain gods to exist, if you don't want the gods to have active influence in the world, or even if you don't want humanoids to ever be even "Usually Evil." So yeah, it's an unfortunate mix.
Oofta
Legend
I always assumed that Volo's was FR specific and therefore gnolls as described (literally created by a demon) is just one possibility and only matters to FR. I like the concept, and even though Yeenoghu doesn't exist in my campaign world, I used roughly the same concept.
Then again, I take all the entries from the MM as just the default starting point, any entry in the book should be modified for a specific campaign world if you want.
Then again, I take all the entries from the MM as just the default starting point, any entry in the book should be modified for a specific campaign world if you want.
Dire Bare
Legend
It's not a lazy story, it's just not a story to your liking. Which is fine, it's certainly a change to the "gnoll story" from earlier editions, even though the demon-worshipping part was added in 3E.
One of the reasons (IMO) they did this was that . . . we have plenty of evil humanoids in the game (orcs, goblins, etc) and gnolls were under-utilized. So, they got an upgrade in 3E starting with the Chainmail miniatures game, and that story became popular enough it "took over" gnolls. 5E certainly takes it even further than 3E did.
One of the things WotC, and the gaming community, is wrestling with is presenting classic "bad guy" races without the baggage of racist thinking/language. If gnolls are "people", sentient, capable of free-will . . . and they are all crazed demon-worshippers . . . that's a problem. But if gnolls are demonic creations of Yeenoghu incarnated on the mortal plain, they aren't "people" but "monsters/spirits". Is that better than the old story? YMMV.
One of the more interesting takes on gnolls is from the BECMI D&D era, and the Mystara campaign. These gnolls were related to other dog-headed humanoids like lupin and hutaaka (yes, hyenas aren't dogs), but were as savage as the typical depictions of orcs and goblins . . . . for the most part. There was a tribe of gnolls forced into caverns under the Sind Desert due to an environmental catastrophe, where they met a tribe of elves there for the same reason. The two cultures started cooperating, and eventually formed a shared, dual-culture, Graakhalia. It was pretty neat.
Well, I wasn't responding to the generic versus specific setting argument, just the statement that certainty was bad.
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