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Message: <blockquote data-quote="QuietBrowser" data-source="post: 7114674" data-attributes="member: 6855057">We all know the tieflings, and we all know that back in 2nd edition, they were essentially the mutts of the Lower Planes; tainted by the infernal, but with no particular clarity as to which of the many, many different fiendish species was their actual progenitor.And yet... this wasn't quite enough. We all know that the half-orc basically evolved out of the attempt to balance gameplay with players' interest in playing an actual orc, and a similar sentiment has long gripped the tiefling: we can't play a full-fledged fiend, but, we could use the tiefling to emulate that without breaking the game over our knees. And so, there's long been some attempts at doing more "pureblooded" tieflings.2nd edition had the tiefling traits table; whilst ostensibly used to generate random appearances, everyone knew that if the DM permitted, you could pick the right traits to go with a specific backstory.3rd edition ignored this idea, unless one counts the existence of the fey'ri (elven tieflings) and tanarukk (orcish tieflings), but Pathfinder has full-fledged "tiefling subspecies" to represent each of its various fiendish races, from demons, devils and daemons to more unique critters like divs (malevolent genies), asuras (godly mistakes that hate their creators), kytons (OGL cenobites), and oni.4th edition even touched upon the idea; Dragon Magazine had "lineages" for tieflings, like the Blightseers (tied to Baalzebuul, who had an entropic gaze), Broken Mirrors (tied to Levistus, who brought bad luck) and the Blood-Crowned Courtiers (directly devil-blooded tieflings, who basically had the power to hulk out).5th edition? Well, beyond the variant racial traits in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, we've seen an attempt to make tieflings into a proper subrace-based racial collective in Unearthed Arcana: That Old Black Magic, with the Diabolic (corebook) and Abyssal Tieflings.But, what I'm curious about is this: do folks think the subrace approach for tieflings could be expanded upon? Could we make more varieties of tiefling via the subrace mechanic?If people think the answer to the above is "yes", then what would those subraces actually be? I have a few ideas myself, mostly amounting to Night Hag, Ravaasta, and Demon Prince Lineages, and I'll share my reasoning and even some draft crunch for them if folks are interested, but I want to hear how people think we could flesh out the tiefling's racial options more.</blockquote>

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