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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8023497" data-attributes="member: 6801228">First of all, I have no idea why you feel the need to mention them eating their young. Secondly, why ask me what the difference between them and the other evil races is if you are just going to dismiss it?I don't know when that lore started, but I do know it existed in prior editions and is in the current Volo's guide and probably even the Monster Manual. Been the lore for gnolls this entire edition. See, I don't think you should have Half-Orcs in settings where orcs are born evil. Because that is problematic. I also, don't really like half-orcs and half-elves as storytelling concepts. I always have to mess with them, because the idea of "born of two worlds and not accepted by either", while something a lot of people struggle with, always felt... I don't know. I want the world to be better than that. Sure, I want evil and grit and darkness in the world. I want horror and dark forces. I don't want women degraded, or people judged for their race. That isn't the type of evil I am interested in in my world.Ah, I see what you are trying to do. Aboleths aren't people because they have a hive-personality. There is no individuality amongst them. An Aboleth is reborn into the world, and they are the same as every other Aboleth. That is what pulls them out of personhood, but that is not how I define personhood. To be a person you need a few things. Free-Will to make choices. A range of emotions (if you are 100% rage and ahte all the time, you are not a person), Intelligence enough for language and understanding concepts. Demons meet a weird place. They are likely people, but they are also destruction personified. They are anthropomorphized in a physical sense. I'd say they hit well on the line.You are missing the the scale with this. Everything is ctrl+v from one Aboleth to the next, except the experiences of that body, which are then spread to every Aboleth created after. This isn't "I am a new mind and I have access to all these memories" this is like waking up in a new body, for every single Aboleth. They are less a species and more a series of clones.Edit: The more I think about it, I guess Aboleths are a person. A singular person, because they are all copies of that original mind. Mindflayers would still not be, because they lack free-will. I'd say Elder Brains might be, but I also remember hearing that Elder Brains are just nodes in a larger network, so I'm not sure at what scale we reach an entity with free-will to act.So only Humans are people. Is that your answer?Edit: As you continued it seemed you expanded to anything Intelligent, which includes everything of import.I disagree with you here. Insanity and murderer do not make you not a person. They make you an insane person or a bad person, but you are still a person. Being a member of society isn't neccesary for personhood either.I can see an argument for serial killers being so warped that it is easier to consider them not being people. But I don't think that is a necessary step to take. I think showing remorse and regret at the horrors that had to go wrong to create such a person is appropriate, and at a certain point of depravity, death is a solution that must be considered, but if we remove personhood from them, I think it becomes less of a tragedy, and I'd rather it stay a tragedy that they were so far gone, rather than the other way. I have not done explicit research into them, but I have seen plenty to understand that that hole is a dark and deep one that I do not wish to tread.</blockquote>

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