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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Timespike" data-source="post: 8340339" data-attributes="member: 29665">I'll give you another fun example since Morrus has kindly released us from our NDAs.One of the most impactful changes to Level Up on a lore level has been the rethinking of what role alignment plays. Most things don't have them any more, which means that a lot of monsters had to be re-thought. A lot of designers picked various monsters to do new lore for (I'm interested to see what the others did!) fairly early on, but I came in late and picked up the "leftovers." One of those was grimlocks, a monster I have never actually used as a GM.In O5e, grimlocks are basically CHUDS; they're stupid, vicious, cannibalistic, and sycophantic toward mind flayers. That meant that several things had to go. First, obviously, we couldn't use mind flayers or connect anything to them because of intellectual property restrictions with the OGL. We also have been trying to get away from portraying humanoids as stupid and evil from birth both for sensitivity reasons and, frankly, for utilitarian ones. If the vast majority of the entities in your monster books can be allies or enemies, it gives GMs more flexibility in storytelling, and to paraphrase Paul, the lead guy on the monster book, it effectively increases the size of the book because of that versatility. Almost anything can be friend or foe, regardless of the party's moral or ethical leanings. To use one quick example: it allows for things like bridge trolls. O5e trolls are CE balls of hungry murder. They're not going to maintain a bridge and collect tolls, they're just going to rip you to shreds and eat you.So with those considerations in mind, we redesigned the grimlocks. We took a page from the morlocks of H.G. Welles's The Time Machine and gave them a bunch of underground machinery to tend to, but the morlocks have their own baggage, so that's about as much as we took. What we wound up with was a society descended from a  group of human engineers trapped by a mining accident who managed to survive and ultimately thrive underground. Their machinery can stabilize the geology of entire regions, effectively "shutting off" volcanoes and earthquakes, preventing the ocean from flooding the underlands, etc. But as you'd expect, they're pretty protective of that machinery. So it's still dangerous to wander into grimlock territory unannounced, because you're very likely to provoke a violent security response.At the same time, if you make contact with them on their terms, they're not unreasonable, they have a vast underground society, and they're technologically-advanced. So they could be a critical ally against some large-scale threat, and it would make sense for them to be. I'm actually pondering writing a supplement for Level Up where they're another playable option. Much like the redesigned orcs that you may have seen in the Origins playtest document, they're now much more than a monster.</blockquote>

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