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Here are some suggestions, taken from the Imaginary Bestiary Vol I-III: Ape, Laser Archaeopteryx, Acidic Baboon, Phantom Barracuda, Land Bat, Orc Beetle, Alchemical Beetle, Mesmeric Caterpillar, Famine Centipede, Dreadful Cetacean Telepath Crocodile, Blade Crow, Murderous Cuckoo, Cloud Doom...

Well, I could be wrong! I didn't know I was going to come to that conclusion when I started writing -- I just looked back over my list of features and thought, "Hmm, good and evil are totally irrelevant here." As @pemerton has pointed out, OD&D and AD&D 1e have several features that are at odds...

What are the load-bearing tropes for Gygaxian D&D? The adventuring environment – dungeon, wilderness – must be unknown. The PCs should therefore come from somewhere else. The adventuring environment must contain things the players want – treasure, magic items. The adventuring environment must...

That's true, but I think the main text of the article does what it says on the tin.

Don't blame @Malmuria! The article posted starts off by saying: NOTE: THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT THE USE OF HUMANOIDS OR THE RACIALIZED OTHER IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS... THIS POST IS ABOUT HOW AESTHETIC (SETTING, PLAYER EXPECTATIONS, THEMES AND IMAGERY) INTERACT WITH MECHANICS AND DESIGN PRINCIPLES.

I haven't seen that thread. My view is that there are two reasonable ways to go in order to improve very human-like evil monsters such as orcs: 1) Keep their human traits (society, language, culture, religion, tool-use, biological needs, bear young, etc) and make their morality human too. 2)...

I think we can see changing attitudes to sexual morality in D&D's descriptions of unicorn riders. Those changes are, in my view, a good thing. 1974 OD&D is explicit about virginity being a requirement: "Only a maiden (in the strictest sense of the term) of pure and noble heart may approach the...

This post is a summary, with links to lots of other posts providing supporting evidence and argument. Identical language – "mongrels" in AD&D 1e and AD&D 2e used to refer to half-orcs, "civilized and savage" "races" in D&D 5e. This post is about the word "mongrel." This post covers "civilized...

Apart from their ability to produce offspring together such as half-elves and half-orcs. My understanding is that, as modern biology uses the term, this would make them all one species. Tolkien makes a similar point about his elves in Letter #153 (1954): "Elves and Men are evidently in...

"Genetics" is probably an inappropriate word to use as it's too modern and scientific. But "genetics" is usually understood to refer to traits that are "natural" (1e), "innate", "inborn", or "instinctive" (5e).

D&D 5e is unusual in making humanoid evil innate and unchangeable. The only other edition that does so is AD&D 1e, though it's less explicit. In OD&D (1974) orcs can be Neutral or Chaotic (synonymous with evil in OD&D). In the AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), orcish evil is one of their...

Excerpt from Folk-Lore Society, The Denham Tracts (1895), quoted in Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976): Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits; which is another incontrovertible fact. What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years...

I've heard of similar interpretations of The Walking Dead -- it's claimed a section of its fanbase interprets it in roughly this way -- but I've never seen the show so I have no opinion about whether it's a misinterpretation or not.

Gary Gygax described the armour as "samurai-like". Source

Is it appropriate to compare D&D with genocidal racism? Gary Gygax did so in 2005 when he justified the killing of evil humanoid children and other non-combatants with the phrase "nits make lice". As Gygax says, this phrase was reportedly used by the 19th century genocidaire, Colonel...

I don't think I'm upset! I explain my use of such imagery a few posts upthread.

I think there's a strong correspondence between the Tokio Kid and the artwork for the goblin in the 5e Monster Manual: The creators of 5e were, ofc, well aware of the 1e hobgoblin art's resemblance to a Japanese samurai and seem to have played that up in the 5e goblin and hobgoblin art. That...