Crows, James Introcasos MCDM Dungeon Crawler RPG

[Staffan]

I think this assertion that it's all "on the periphery" when we're talking about default playable races and backgrounds and so on is a bit well, completely factually wrong lol. Not much nuance there. It's obviously not just "on the periphery".

Plus, like 50% of the monster book is weird-as-hell stuff. Cool as hell? Yes. But both very weird and very specific. And this is a tactical RPG, so you need really well-built-out monsters.

50%? The only ones I'd count as somewhat weird are: Bredbeddle, Olothec, Time raider, Valok, Voiceless talker, Wardogs, and Xorannox the Tyract. And many of those have direct counterparts in D&D: olothec are aboleths, voiceless talkers are mind flayers, and Xorannox is a named overmind which is basically a beholder. And if you squint, time raiders are basically gith – they even have the same background of being enslaved by mind flayersvoiceless talkers.

Then you have some that have a bit of an alternate take on the topic. Dwarves as magitech users and with psionics is a bit out of the ordinary, and hobgoblins having infernal heritage is an interesting twist.

And both time raiders and memoneks are called out as not being native to Orden and thus very rare. They're offered as PC options because they're rad-as-hell, and because it can be real fun playing a fish out of water (if you haven't, check out Djordi's portrayal of Uv'vek the time raider null in MCDM's playthrough of the Delian Tomb, he's a delight).