Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 9549661" data-attributes="member: 6796661">I still like that succubi were the female sexual-sin demons and incubi were the male counterparts, as they are in medieval folklore. The new 2024 MM take may grow on me. I like the concept, just can't get over the names being the same. This old grognard is going to have trouble not confusing things. As for gorgons, I was peer editing a law review article in law school and changed "medusas" to Gorgons and had that edit rejected by a professor. Using "medusa" as a common (instead of proper) noun, has been the norm in (at least American) English for some time. Outside of certain fields of study, I don't think anyone would refer to a group of gorgons as gorgons, they would say medusas (or maybe "medusi" or "medusae" if the writer wanted to sound fancy).  Also, reading up on this a bit and I find that using medusa as a category has been common since the 1700s.  So, might as well use gorgon for something else. The 1E Sphinx certainly knew how to distract many of those attempting to solve her riddles. I've always thought of Sphinxes as female, as that is how they were typically depicted in Greek mythology. See, for example, Oedipus Rex. [ATTACH=full]391613[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]391614[/ATTACH]The Metropolitan Museum of Art did a reconstruction of what this would have originally looked like when it still had paint, and the result makes the new MM art seem like a nod to history in terms of coloration:[ATTACH=full]391615[/ATTACH][URL unfurl="true"]https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/archaic-greek-sphinx[/URL]While Egyptian sphinxes were dominated by male imagery (even those for Egyptian queens, like the Sphinx of Hatshepsut, while showing a feminine face were still given a ceremonial beard, as another poster mentioned above), there are some example of sphinxes with a clearly female head, such as this one, which was originally attached to sphinx's reclining body, displayed at the Brooklyn Museum: [ATTACH=full]391616[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification