The Blood War: Part of Mordenkainen's Contents Page

Very interesting! Although I would rather have seen some of the table of contents concerning the Bestiary, this is quite intriguing as well!

 

[gyor]

Arthas cannibal halflings are pretty dark.

True, but they are dark fir good reasons, they're dark, but not evil.

 

[Parmandur]

The truth is they wanted to cover all the PHB races except humans and dragonborn (likely saving Dragonborn for a Dramonicon style book and half orcs (half orcs benifit from VGTM instead).

I would surmise that they noticed after Volo's that there was suddenly more fluff support for Yuan-Ti and Kobolds than for Elves and Dwarves. Mix that with the popularity of race splat (both 2E "Complete *" and the 3E "Races of *" series combined Halflings and Gnomes in one volume, I believe), and a book of PHB race info seems a good idea, and since it worked to mix fluff with monsters previously, bring in the Gith and the Devil's & Demons with the Tieflings and the Bestiary. Less bloaty than the 2E highly focused splat approach, but covers a lot of bases lightly.

 

[Parmandur]

Don't expect too much in quantitative terms, or you'll be underwhelmed. I think people made that mistake when estimating the amount of monsters in Volo's. WotC is rather fond of cutting stuff that doesn't convince them qualitatively. And then we should probably count 20 pages of the book reserved for tables with random planar location names in multiple languages.

Most of the stuff seen in a bunch of UA articles will be there, but not all. I think somewhere they already said which elven subraces, and they don't include wild elves and winged elves.

They do have a number of random tables, which are always fun. They haven't commented on the Elves beyond Shadar-Kai and Eladrin, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them in as just the UA stats with a touch of fluff.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Did Spriggans count as "Dark Gnomes"? Because Svirfneblin certainly don't. Though I guess the standard Gnomes in Eberron are sort of the scheming types who might be evil in many cases.

 

[Melanthios]

TIEFLING SUBRACES TIEFLING SUBRACES TIEFLING SUBRACES

...but also, i'm SUPER interested in the new info on the lords of the nine and the cambions and CUSTOMISATION TABLES AHHHHHHHHHHHHH this is very exciting and definitely is going to be my birthday present to myself.

 

[Parmandur]

TIEFLING SUBRACES TIEFLING SUBRACES TIEFLING SUBRACES

...but also, i'm SUPER interested in the new info on the lords of the nine and the cambions and CUSTOMISATION TABLES AHHHHHHHHHHHHH this is very exciting and definitely is going to be my birthday present to myself.

We did get those subraces previewed in the UA article last year, if you haven't seen them.

 

[CapnZapp]

Did Spriggans count as "Dark Gnomes"? Because Svirfneblin certainly don't.

Svirfneblin are "Dull Gnomes".

 

[Herosmith14]

Svirfneblin are "Dull Gnomes".

I actually kind of like Svirfneblin. Belware Dissengulp was a fun character.

 

[gyor]

Svirfneblin are "Dull Gnomes".

Underdark Gnomes.

 

[Irennan]

The Tieflings options in UA are about two pages, and the Eladrin plus Elf subraces are ~5 pages, which doesn't account for art assets. Don't expect we will see too much about Elf deities, past Corellion.

Crawford said that the book will go in "a lot of depth about the drow pantheon". He confirmed that Eilistraee, Ghaunadaur and Vulkoor will all get sections dedicated to them in the book when asked. That leads me to think that most of the drow and elven gods will receive a writeup like the ones that the FR human deities received in the SCAG (that certainly isn't "a lot of depth", if we compare it to the 2e and 3e treatments, but it certainly seems to be by 5e standards).