"Night falls at last on the grasslands, and you sit beside the fire with your allies, a meal heavy in your belly. The bard strums a small tune, while the artificer continues work on their pet project. Technically on guard duty, you are content to merely sit and listen to the sounds of the savannah. And then, from the distance, you hear a distinctive laughter, like the barking of dogs..."
An early gnoll
Gnolls have been present in the game of Dungeons & Dragons since the very first edition of the game, though there isn't much to speak of on that incarnation. However, their history technically stretches back even further than that, to the gnoles of Lord Dunsany. One of the major influences on modern fantasy literature, Dunsany was a great inspiration to many authors, including H.P. Lovecraft and even J.R.R. Tolkien himself. His gnoles, however, had very little in common with the gnolls of D&D.
As D&D continued to evolve and grow, many of the original monsters designed for the first edition did too (although some have been, thankfully, left behind). The modern gnoll is a distinct, hyena-like species of humanoids with a variety of traits– few of which speak to their credit. Described in earlier products as savage, war-like, and even potentially related to demons, gnolls haven't yet been touched by Wizards of the Coast's recent attempts to rectify the issues with having an inherently "evil" species of humanoid in its game. Personally, I think having any species within your imaginary world inherently linked to a moral alignment is needlessly limiting. None of us think relegating angels to strict bastions of purity is good worldbuilding; why is forcing gnolls to be evil any less restrictive?
Even in their most recent 5th Edition incarnation in Mordenkainen Presents, gnolls get nothing more to their credit than a throw-away line about how they might not be all bad, just "dedicated to the survival of their kin"... Followed by statistics for a special type of gnoll that reanimates from the dead after suffering the crime of cannibalism.
The gnoll's issues can probably be chalked up to the image problems of its inspiration, the hyena. Even though hyenas play an incredibly important role in a number of ecosystems, their reputation as scavengers and negative role in many mythologies has left them with the short end of the stick compared to other feliforms. While that seems to slowly be changing, as more people realize there isn't such a thing as a "bad animal", gnolls are probably going to take a little bit longer to shed their reputation as murderous villains.
How could you not love a face like that?
Of course, being known as a villain isn't all bad. Some people like villains! And at it's heart, D&D is a game about combat, meaning that someone needs to do the attacking. And while I don't have time to get into any of the complicated moral underpinnings of D&D's expected "fight first, talk later" vision of heroes, suffice it to say that gnolls do still fill an important niche as low-CR mob enemy of choice in more arid adventure locales. But even if they remain ruthless, bloodthirsty raiders, gnolls do still deserve an opportunity to maraud beyond their typical horizons, so here's 8 fun and fresh ideas for gnoll encounters in your game:
- With their ship listing badly after a storm, the party wants nothing more than to reach a friendly port where they can turn in and make the necessary repairs to get back on the seas. But the only port within a day's sailing is Dunsany Bay, a fertile crescent of land along the coast of an otherwise dry and barren land. Dunsany Bay is run by a group of gnoll privateers, who ruthlessly uphold the bay's only law, "Might Makes Right."
- Somewhere deep within the Underdark, blades flash, glittering in the dim
light of glowing mushrooms, and Yeenoghu, Demon Prince of Gnolls, howls
his last. Across the Forgotten Realms, eyes dimmed by bloodlust turn
bright, and a thousands spears are lowered. With Yeenoghu's death, the
demon's violent grip on the minds of gnolls is broken. Their kind, once
driven by unquenchable hunger, are given a freedom they have not known
in millennia. Unfortunately, old grievances are not so quickly
forgotten. While gnolls try to grow into a world where they are free
once more to choose their own path, many of Toril's other residents are
struggling to see beyond the reputation given to gnolls by centuries of
fireside horror stories, and tensions always seem ready to bubble over
at any moment.
- After an exhausting day combing through the sands of the Anauroch desert, an ambush in the middle of the night spells defeat for the tired adventurers. But the party are surprised when they awake, still alive, but as captives in a vast arena hidden in a cavern beneath the desert sands. Ruled by a gnoll nearly twice the size of the others, who styles herself "Ruler of the Wastes", the PCs are promised their freedom if they can survive a brutal, non-stop series of challenges. Unfortunately, the final fight is a one-on-one combat with the Ruler of the Wastes herself, wielding a pair of lances as if they were little more than spears.
- When a protoype spelljammer crashed just outside a village of gnolls somewhere in the Forgotten Realms, bureaucratic issues delayed the ship's retrieval. When a company finally arrived to salvage the helm, they found the entire ship missing, along with the abandoned remains of the village. How the gnolls repaired the ship remains unclear, but they've turned their lucky find into a certified meal-ticket, which has slowed spelljammer trade within the sphere to a crawl. Between raids, the gnolls hide somewhere in the shattered remains of Toril's moons, their prototype helm giving them the maneuverability necessary to dodge the dangerous debris.
- In the middle of their travels, the party stumbles upon two groups of gnolls locked in vicious combat, which isn't entirely unusual in places where the territory of two clans overlaps. Upon a closer look however, it becomes clear that one side is entirely living gnolls, while the other is nothing but reanimated gnoll witherlings. When the undead successfully rout their living brethren, the pack retreats directly towards the party. If they are discovered, the gnolls recognize the party's strength, and are too exhausted to fight. Instead, they reluctantly ask for aid in defeating the necromancer who raided the clan's burial yard, turning the bones of the gnolls ancestors against them.
- On the world of Theros, leonin and humans have been at each other's throats for centuries, but their violence has never quite spilled over into all-out war. But in recent weeks, the leonin have surged further than ever into the lands controlled by the city of Akros, and each encounter brings the death of more soldiers. Finally, a captured leonin prisoner brings surprising news of a new threat from beyond the grassy fields of Oreskos– strange, hyena-like creatures who are pushing the leonin from the homeland and into the realm of humans. Now the decision must be made on whether to continue the fight with the leonin and risk the eventual arrival of these new foes, or ally with ancient enemies against a dangerous and unknown threat.
- Gnolls are nothing if not versatile, and can be found in just about any environment, including fetid swamps and the furthest arctic reaches. But when dwarven miners from the great city of Bumthiad breach a tunnel into an underground lake of acidic water, the last thing they expected to find were half-blind gnolls, adapted to life underground on a diet of caustic bugs. The gnolls, for their part, were only too eager to push their way into the mining tunnels. While the tunnels were barely sealed in time, large amounts of mining equipment were left behind, including powerful explosives, and the city's leaders worry that they have only temporarily stopped the problem.
- Many years ago, Colonel Leopold Boone earned a reputation as a ruthless hunter, a brutish man with a mean-streak a mile wide, and a particular bone to pick with gnolls. The colonel's dark deeds earned him a one-way ticket just before his death through the Mists of Ravenloft, where he was deposited into a simulacrum of his home plains. Here he has taken to a monthly hunt of the innocent residents of his Domain, chosen by some inscrutable process of his own mind. But each time he sets foot on the fields, a wild hunting party made from the undead spirits of gnolls killed by Boone in life appears elsewhere, and ravages its way across the land. And each time, just before the colonel can claim his kill, this phantasmal hunting party finds him, and he is forced to flee.
No comments:
Post a Comment