2025 Monster Manual to Introduce Male Versions of Hags, Medusas, and Dryads

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The upcoming Monster Manual will feature artwork depicting some creatures like hags and medusas in both genders, a first for Dungeons & Dragons. In the "Everything You Need to Know" video for the upcoming Monster Manual, designers Jeremy Crawford and Wesley Schneider revealed that the new book would feature artwork portraying both male and female versions of creatures like hags, dryads, satyrs, and medusas. While there was a male medusa named Marlos Urnrayle in Princes of the Apocalypse (who had a portrait in the book) and players could make satyr PCs of either gender, this marks the first time that D&D has explicitly shown off several of these creatures as being of both male and female within a rulebook. There is no mechanical difference between male creatures and female creatures, so this is solely a change in how some monsters are presented.

In other news that actually does impact D&D mechanics, goblins are now classified as fey creatures (similar to how hobgoblins were portrayed as fey creatures in Monsters of the Multiverse) and gnolls are now classified as fiends.

Additionally, monster statblocks include potential treasure and gear options, so that DMs can reward loot when a player character inevitably searches the dead body of a creature.

The new Monster Manual will be released on February 18th, 2025.

 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

I'll admit we were aware of the book, but, never saw it in use in 2e. That was a major change in 3e, where virtually everything was playable right out of the gate with things like Level Adjustments and whatnot. Or was that 3.5 that added that? I do vaguely recall a Complete Humanoids book for 3e, or is that just fuzzy memories.

In any case, gnolls were not a particularly popularly played race, I don't think. I'm sure some people played them. Not denying that at all. But, not very commonly IME.
Somewhere before the Humanoids book there was a surprisingly long Dragon magazine where you could play monststrous humanoids too. We used those rules first before the Humanoids book came out, if I recall correctly.
 

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I think we Enworlders sometimes need to be reminded our experience and opinions on D&D tend to be fairly niche compared to the greater sea of D&D players past and present.

I also don't that it being obscure as a pejorative, it is just a fact.
I think when you are comparing a book from 30 years ago to today, claiming obscurity because people today don’t know about it is moving the goalposts a bit. Yes, 5e is much more popular than 2e ever was. Maybe the Complete Book of Humanoids sold poorly at the time. Obscurity does not directly correlate to sales. That does not make it an obscure book for its time, nor does it make it non-core unless one is defining that as any book outside the main three books (PHB, DMG, MM).
 

I suspect you already know the answer.

On the other hand there's no consistency with this, and I was reliably informed that changing hobgoblin to "fey" is better because it's "more in keeping with their mythological origins", despite being disconnected to their history and use in D&D. People are free to question whatever lore change WoTC offers up, I think, and there's no need to just go like this:

I Love It GIF
.... uncritically.
As I said earlier, maybe you like to read it before posing dumb images, I am not against critics. I said it is ranting how inclusivity or changing some lore destroys D&D forever because reasons.

So feel free to question, feel free to dislike, but people just hating everything because they hate people that don't fit into their narrow world view are not worth listening to (as one WotC author correctly stated...).

This is what I found on youtube. People who want to tell others how to live and ranting about everything WotC does to make the game more welcoming.

If you don't like it, don't use it.
 
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This thread is super long, so hopefully this has already been added:
  • Satyress: Satyress - Wikipedia
  • The male equivalent of a hag in Celtic folklore was the bodach: Bodach - Wikipedia
  • Many of the "hag partners" were for some reason characterized separately a giants in D&D (for a long time, hags mingled with giants in AD&D folklore if I remember correctly), which is an odd choice, since it's pretty clear in folklore they were considered the same thing, so to speak. But many of the legendary hag-type monsters had monstrous husbands that could easily be male versions: Befana has befano, Grila has Leppalúði, etc.
If you dig enough, there are "pretty close" alternates of just about every gendered monster. D&D made some choices early in the game about monster classifications (like the curious gorgon/medusa split that most folklore doesn't accommodate) that have now influenced fantasy representation (if you search for "male medusa" maedar comes up like it's part of folklore, which it isn't).
 

I wasn't aware of multiple cerberus in D&D, but the Golem, despite being a single achievement, could be made using a ritual, so it's not out of lore that one could create several of them.
There was one Golem created in Prague.
There was one Medusa in greek myth.

Of course you can create more Golems in D&D. Why shouldn't you create more Medusas, male or female, in D&D?
Isn't that a false dichotomy? The better is "a wide variety of original monsters, that don't bear a name that cause confusion/eyerolling".
Just because you roll eyes at male medusas and don't notice every other incorrectness does not make one worse than the other.
If you create a cool vampire with its own lore, call it Strahd, not Dracula, not Adolf. One can, of course, but I think it does'nt add anything.
I really always thought about medusa in D&D lore as categories like Vampires.
And I bet, all Vampires in folklore are male... As far as I remember noone ever raised an eyebrow when suddenly there were female Vampires. But now for medusas you do? Maybe because female Vampires are sexy, male Medusas are not?*

I think that sounds like having double standards, doesn't it?

*I think I have noticed a pattern there. But I won't dive deeper into it here...
 

Having wildly different origin stories hasn't stopped Wizards of the Coast from gracelessly mushing together the "multiversal origins" of a whole bunch of other creatures from elves to goblinoids so I don't know why you'd expect them to exercise any restraint with gnolls.
It just makes more work for the DMs that want their settings to be unique
 

Remember when Monster Manuals were interesting to read and full of ideas.
Like male Medusas and fey Goblins and dragon Kobolds?

So now it is easy to explain the difference between those creatures because they are distinctive.

Like having adventure ideas and pictures that have monsters in action in their habitat?

Like green dragons that resemble snakes.
Like dragons actually having different body types instead of just one more horn here and there and actually having different abilities instead of just a different elemental breath weapon?

Yeah... I remember that...
 

DM: You meet a wolly elephant, ready to charge, as you wander through the terrible blizzard of the Icewind Dale....
Players: WAIT, is it a she-elephant or a he-elephant?
DM: What? It's about to charge
Players: That's important. Can we roll Perception? Or is it Animal Handling?
DM: It runs toward you...
Players: "I cast Unresistible Guts Explosion on him." rolls 18 Now that he's dead, let's examine it more thoroughly. Was it a he or a she elephant?
DM: and you really have no clue on why it's difficult to find DMs these days?
Yes. Male elephants have really big teeth and are quite agressive in their must. While females are agressive if you threaten their youngs.

Or was your example a silly rant?
But TBH, it actually mattered a few times.

1. I had an alien race (it was in the long-forgotten days of 2023, we had races back then) whose elite where sexless cloned in vats, while the mindless slaves reproduced sexually. When interacting with them, asking if they were man or woman resulted in a fun roleplay with the alien being insulted. And the players understanding why later.

2. In a murder mystery I had, I made a prop with a letter from the mastermind who sent an assassin, and it revealed the culprit's sex thanks to grammar (does not work in English as well as it is either too obvious (her majesty/his majesty) or doesn't appear at all). I had carefully written the text so it was long enough to not make it obvious and carefully wrote to avoid situations where the grammatical gender of the writer would be revealed except once.

But those are odd cases.
Why do you make this example then...
 

yawn

Did this with medusa decades ago.

Medusas in the Hodgepocalypse are nerdy types that encompass gender options and come in full-color patterns of snakes.

One of my reoccurring villains is "The Copperhead Kid," an old west gunslinger Medusa (with an obvious Copperhead snake pattern), that Jesse James and John Wesley Hardin inspired, and he has become a favorite villain the pcs love to hate. :D
 

There was one Golem created in Prague.
There was one Medusa in greek myth.

Of course you can create more Golems in D&D. Why shouldn't you create more Medusas, male or female, in D&D?

Just because you roll eyes at male medusas and don't notice every other incorrectness does not make one worse than the other.

I really always thought about medusa in D&D lore as categories like Vampires.
And I bet, all Vampires in folklore are male... As far as I remember noone ever raised an eyebrow when suddenly there were female Vampires. But now for medusas you do? Maybe because female Vampires are sexy, male Medusas are not?*

I think that sounds like having double standards, doesn't it?

*I think I have noticed a pattern there. But I won't dive deeper into it here...
Bad bet on the vampires: both fictional and supposed vampires in real life were female. Camilla, Elizabeth Barthory and Mercy Brown (the latter a woman in 19th century Rhode Island) were all though you be vampires, in either the original corpse style or the sexy aristocratic style.

Interestingly, werewolves would have been a safer bet. Most werewolves were male in both history and folklore, sometimes considered the male equivalent to witches. Skinwalkers too, though much of the "folklore" surrounding them is bunk due to the fact that Navajo don't share info with outsiders and the internet has been ripe to make up its own lore to fill the gap.

And while the Golem was a singular creature (equivalent to the D&S clay golem) it's double ironic that another classic golem, the flesh golem, is also inspired by a single entity: Frankenstein's monster. One thinks if he has a snazzy name, that would be his creature type in D&D as well...
 

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