Breaking News: Kuo-Toa Not Froggy Anymore

[fnwc]

Every oddball race sounds better with "born".

Björnborn?

 

[frankthedm]

Thumbs up from a Lovecraft fan.

True. Especially since the narrowing of the skull is something that escapes a LOT of depictions of deep ones/Hybrids*. ButTBW, HPL's deep one did have some frog to them as well, though that might have beed more from the trasistion from man to fish.

*Notably Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth made their facial features seem to get wider as the taint progressed. Full Deep ones in that game were also 'quite' muscled so the look worked well enough in-game.

 

[Keenath]

Whoah!

Awesome.... I never liked Kuo-toa because they looked too comical and cartoony in the 3.x monster manual.

This guy... yikes. Yes.

 

[I'm A Banana]

People are thinking way too narrowly if they think the game only has room for one fish-person race.

Kuo-toa are the hideous dwellers in the dark deapths, creatures of madness who shun the light and revile suface-dwellers. They're clerics and psionicists and wizards and sorcers, spellcasting creatures of alien knowledge. They are deep-sea fanglyfish Lovecraftian horrors.

Shahagin are the predators in the shoals, murderers who delight in blood and get driven into a frenzy at the promise of prey. They're rangers and fighters and barbarians, warriors of tooth and fin. They are shark-people, barracuda-people, piranha-people.

Locathah are the foreigners, the "people of the sea," locals who don't trust the PC's, but who trust the sea devils even less. They just want to be left alone to be fishy in peace. They're not really combatative classes, and when they are, they're more like rangers and druids -- hunters and gatherers, not warriors and madmen.

Merfolk are the intermediaries, the "betwixt two worlds" people, who have an affection and kinship with the landbound races, but who delight in their oceanic existence all the more. They are the artisans and the muses, the romance of the sea. They're the bards and the artists, masters of pearl and waterfall and grotto.

Nereids are the aquatic fey, inscrutable creatures who represent the mystery of the world beneath the waves. They represent the water itself, they are the spirits of lakes and rivers, creatures who will destroy you if you taint them, creatures who will amuse themselves by drowning you, creatures who want to flood the world, if they can. They're faerie spellcasters, full of elemental wrath.

Ixixachitl are the demonic bottom-dwellers, the "devil rays" who exist entirely independant of the land-dwellers, who don't care about what goes on beyond the waves of their ocean, and who demand absolute loyalty and affection inside of it. They represent the vast evil beyond the PC's grasp, an evil that doesn't even concern itself with land-bound activities except as incidentals, an evil whose goals are not going opposed by the PC's because it is unknown. They are secret and dangerous, undead, demonic, fiend-worshipping masters of dark magic.

There's plenty of room to make these guys distinct in all three major ways.

Of course, I wouldn't expect the MM1 to focus on 'em. Aquatic campaigns aren't common enough to get instant core support, I'd think. Kuo-toa are good fishy enemies, and I'd hope to see Merfolk for the mythological value, but beyond that, they can probably wait for future MMs.

 

[Aeolius]

This guy... yikes. Yes.

I hope the locathah get redesigned, then, instead of excluded. There may be a bit of a crossover:

Granted, in my games the locathahs' coloration tends to emulate that of angelfish; especially the queen, emperator, regal, and majestic.

 

[HeinorNY]

Kuo Toa could kill the locathah and sahuagin and take their stuff.

 

[frankthedm]

No, frogginess lands squarely in the source material on which the kuo-toa were based. Lovecraft's Deep Ones were often as often described as "bactrian" and froglike as they were "ichtheous" and fishlike in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Of course, I'm making up those adjectives... I can't remember what words he literally used. Probably a lot of eldritch and squamous in there too.

Neither "eldritch" nor "squamous" show up once in Shadow over Innsmouth. "Eldritch", is a word that does apply to a lot of his work, though HPL rarely used the word "Squamous". He did one time, in its proper usage to describe a scaly snakelike protrusion on something. The d20 Call of cthulhu book seems to have triggered an overuse of the word. Seriously, how is an energy blast "scaly"?

Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion - which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly wed tar articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

 

[fnwc]

No, frogginess lands squarely in the source material on which the kuo-toa were based.

True, but in D&D, the frog-like humanoid crown has to go to bullywugs. From the Wikipedia entry:

"In the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, bullywugs are a violent race of frog-like humanoids."

Looks like a frog on steroids, but a frog nonetheless.

 

[hong]

Hm, I wonder if Deep Ones play D&D....

 

[mmadsen]

No, frogginess lands squarely in the source material on which the kuo-toa were based. Lovecraft's Deep Ones were often as often described as "bactrian"...

So the bactrian Deep Ones have two humps, right?