D&D (2024) Monster manual Fey video up

Paul Farquhar said:

This isn't really one single aesthetic. It ranges from the saccharine to the grimdark.

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For sure, there’s been darker portrayals of Fey: Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend, for example.

Also Suldrun’s Garden by Jack Vance. We get in hard rated R content in there.

Even certain books by Neil Gaiman (yeah I know, but this isn’t a promotion) contained examples of darker Fey-adjacent themes.

Making Goblins into Unseelie Fey makes them darker to me overall, based on the fiction and folklore I’ve experienced in the past.

My impression from the reallife goblin lore that I have come across.

They are frighteningly powerful, yet somehow inept and comical. The dissonance between actually dangerous but no one takes them seriously, I ascribe to a low Charisma − at least for the individual goblins in these particular stories. They are obsessively malicious, intending to do harm often with some kind of "master plan" that never pans out, because of ordinary everyhuman heroes managing to thwart their plans.

Also, they are magically power, such as making potions, casting invisibility spells, and so on. More clearly fey and from the land of the faerie.

@Sacrosanct

Regarding the Underworld.

In Finnish folkbelief there is a concept that the realm of ancestors and the realm of magical creatures are the same place. For example, there is the trope of "a lake with two bottoms". One can dive down into the bottom of the lake to find an underwater cave, swim thru the cave, and come out the other side into an upside down lake of an upside down world, that mirrors the ordinary world. This mirror world is a realm of abundance and happiness, where the ancestors who are buried underground live out their normal but blissful lives. The otherworld also has various the magical creatures from folkbeliefs populating it. The Finnish lore also has the magical nature beings populating the ordinary world (often invisibly incorporeally like they do in Norse lore) but additionally in the context of the sacred ancestors, there is a sense of an otherworld as well. An underworld.

In this case, I would translate the Finnish otherworld into D&D as the typical Feywild that echos the Material plane but more vividly. Notably, in this Finnesque magical culture, in this part of the Material world, the souls of the dead become the Fey type instead of the Undead type.

I have to see how reallife Finnish players feel about this interpretation (@Crimson Longinus), but Fey is how I might go about it at the moment.

Weiley31 said:

Kobold Press has TONS of Fey Lords/Ladies and Baba Yaga herself in their Tome of Beasts books.

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Sure! I don't claim to be the only one who did it!


* although, my focus was on historical folklore and mythology representation, not the representation that D&D has had over the years. It's why kobolds look like this:



And bugbears look like this:

Sacrosanct said:

Sure! I don't claim to be the only one who did it!


* although, my focus was on historical folklore and mythology representation, not the representation that D&D has had over the years. It's why kobolds look like this:

View attachment 394337

And bugbears look like this:
View attachment 394338

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I keep on forgetting you did the Twilight Fables book. I keep reminding myself to get a copy one of these days.

Especially for the War Corgis.

Chaltab said:

Combined with the changes to humanoids using generic stat blocks modified by race, it seems pretty clear that this is in part a way to avoid the baggage of having humanoids innately tied to an alignment. Githyanki can be typically lawful evil if they're aberrations. Githzerai can be typically chaotic neutral if they're aberrations. Gnolls can be typically chaotic evil if they're fiends. Goblinoids as fey can be tied to an alignment in a way that feels iffy for goblinoids that are just folk.

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How does that track with Worgs becoming fey instead of Monstrosities? I think they also suggested Displacer Beasts changed to Fey instead of Monstrosities. Or the Grimlock becoming an Aberration.

While the discourse has been drilled into the ground and buried on "humanoid becomes something else" that isn't the entirety of what they did. And if it was solely about humanoid alignments and not the story beats they keep telling us it was about... then why change the other monsters? If I see they switched Trolls from Giant to Fey, how is that supposed to tell me that it was motivated by being allowed to make them evil, instead of being motivated by many troll stories and myths coming from Faerie Tales and the Troll making more sense as a Fey creature?

Chaosmancer said:

How does that track with Worgs becoming fey instead of Monstrosities? I think they also suggested Displacer Beasts changed to Fey instead of Monstrosities. Or the Grimlock becoming an Aberration.

While the discourse has been drilled into the ground and buried on "humanoid becomes something else" that isn't the entirety of what they did. And if it was solely about humanoid alignments and not the story beats they keep telling us it was about... then why change the other monsters? If I see they switched Trolls from Giant to Fey, how is that supposed to tell me that it was motivated by being allowed to make them evil, instead of being motivated by many troll stories and myths coming from Faerie Tales and the Troll making more sense as a Fey creature?

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I'm not saying that some of the changes aren't also motivated by story reasons. But none of these things are happening in a vacuum.

It's not like this sort of thing is even unique to 5.24. A5E already just made most creatures not have an alignment trait, so that it only applies to certain extraplanars and high level clerics. And Tales of the Valiant doesn't have alignment. It's just different ways of heading off the biological morality issue that has always been kind of an uncomfortable background detail of the game for years.

Chaltab said:

I'm not saying that some of the changes aren't also motivated by story reasons. But none of these things are happening in a vacuum.

It's not like this sort of thing is even unique to 5.24. A5E already just made most creatures not have an alignment trait, so that it only applies to certain extraplanars and high level clerics. And Tales of the Valiant doesn't have alignment. It's just different ways of heading off the biological morality issue that has always been kind of an uncomfortable background detail of the game for years.

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Sure, there can be mutliple factors. I guess my issue is that people keep presenting it as the ONLY and OBVIOUS factor, when... I don't think the designers have ever once stated that was the case? They have never said that they changed a type to make it okay to kill the enemies by making them not humanoid. And so it feels really bizarre to me to keep insisting that that was their primary or even a big motivation.

Especially when, taking a step further... they have plenty of evil humanoid NPCs in the game. A ton of them. Many of the bad guys and villains they have people fight were humanoid. So why insist what might have been a minor consideration for a few changes at best to be the main consideration for all the changes?

Chaosmancer said:

Sure, there can be mutliple factors. I guess my issue is that people keep presenting it as the ONLY and OBVIOUS factor, when... I don't think the designers have ever once stated that was the case? They have never said that they changed a type to make it okay to kill the enemies by making them not humanoid. And so it feels really bizarre to me to keep insisting that that was their primary or even a big motivation.

Especially when, taking a step further... they have plenty of evil humanoid NPCs in the game. A ton of them. Many of the bad guys and villains they have people fight were humanoid. So why insist what might have been a minor consideration for a few changes at best to be the main consideration for all the changes?

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Humanoids can be evil individually or through association with a group like a political organizaiton or cult, but they seem to be avoiding making any humanoid evil as a matter of species identity. It's not that humanoids can't be evil, it's that humanoid races shouldn't be evil because the idea of an 'evil humanoid race' is icky.

Does it really help to change formerly humanoid races to other creature types so they can stay evil like goblinoids and githyanki? I dunno, maybe. Whatever the case it just doesn't bother me like it does Michah Sweet. I was just trying to explain what (I think) he meant; I agree that it's happening, but honestly I don't care if WOTC wants to gloss over that part of the reasoning because they get enough guff from the 'anti-woke' losers as it is.

Chaosmancer said:

How does that track with Worgs becoming fey instead of Monstrosities? I think they also suggested Displacer Beasts changed to Fey instead of Monstrosities. Or the Grimlock becoming an Aberration.

While the discourse has been drilled into the ground and buried on "humanoid becomes something else" that isn't the entirety of what they did. And if it was solely about humanoid alignments and not the story beats they keep telling us it was about... then why change the other monsters? If I see they switched Trolls from Giant to Fey, how is that supposed to tell me that it was motivated by being allowed to make them evil, instead of being motivated by many troll stories and myths coming from Faerie Tales and the Troll making more sense as a Fey creature?

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One could argue that feeling you to have to make some changes already gives an opportunity to make other changes you might otherwise not have bothered with by themselves.

Just speculation of course, but I feel your post was looking for such.