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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9872190" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Oh! Ok, that makes sense. I’m far from an expert on monster design, but generally speaking, if you want to communicate that a monster is female, using softer, rounder, more aquiline shape language can help with that, especially if contrasted with harder, sharper, more angular male counterparts. The Turians from the Mass Effect games are a great example of monster (well, alien in this case) designs that communicate sexual dimorphism without leaning on anthropocentric gender signifiers.Well, yeah, in real life, a lot of the traits we tend to associate with maleness vs. femaleness are particular to mammals, and not even all mammals. If you want highly naturalistic designs, you don’t even necessarily need there to be visible sexual dimorphism within a species, and if you want there to be, you can make it pretty much anything you want. If you’re familiar with the YouTube series Helluva Boss, the imps have a neat example of sexual dimorphism where the males have white hair and horns with very wide stripes alternating between black and white while the females have black hair and mostly black horns with thin white stripes, which is neat because they have occasional background characters with hair that seems to be dyed and growing in the other color at the roots and horn patterns that don’t match what you would expect based on their gender presentation. Neat trick for communicating transness in a non-human sapient species!All that being said, it’s also important to consider your audience and their expectations. If you’re designing a fantastical species you want to be appreciated by animal nerds and/or queer folks, yeah, using traits that communicate sexual dimorphism in a way that is totally different than the kind found in humans is a great way to go about it. If you’re designing an individual monster or demon character that you want a general audience to be able to immediately recognize as female, you probably aren’t going to achieve that goal without leaning into modern gender stereotypes. You probably don’t need to beat them over the head with it, but you should probably still lean into the shape language the average straight cis dude is going to expect from a female character, which means at minimum soft, curving lines, and if they have remotely anthropomorphic body shapes, narrow shoulders and wide hips.</blockquote>

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