I love goblins and lizardmen. Goblins because deranged little dudes running around is always a blast. Lizardmen because alligator people with melee weapons are the way I wish dinosaurs evolved instead of being birds.
Dragons, dragonborns (though half-dragons are original and better than dragonborn but more poweful so they wasn’t balanced as player race) and kobolds.
Khajiit and all other cat-people and cat-monsters everywhere (maybe except Kzinti)
Owlbears are great too.
Trolls come in dizzying array of variants (my favourite are the troll gods from Edding’s books).
Tengu, especially the crow-tenguI just have a soft spot for Warcraft-style orcs. Something about their seemingly brutish nature and deep sense of honor. I also just like their visual style, be it the race, their fashion or architecture.
K’chain Che’malle. Fricken’ dinosaurs with fricken’ sword arms.
Fricken’ dinosaurs with fricken’ sword arms.
The undersells them by a lot! That makes them sound comparable to Deathclaws in Fallout, but K’chain Che’malle scared gods!
Yes. This pleases me.
I love goblins and lizardmen
Fine 😔
Hobgoblin is a subspecies of goblin thus I would include them in my statement of fondness. Gotta have someone ordering the goblin rabble around and nothing beats a hobgoblin at that.
What’s the deal with hobgoblins, though? What is their relationship to cooking equipment?
Tieflings. The “alignment” section of the 5e PHB (before they decided describing alignments was racist and removed it) read:
Tieflings might not have an innate tendency toward evil, but many of them end up there.
Which is such a powerful storytelling device. It does what sci-fi and fantasy are so often great at: comment on real-world social issues with a step of indirection that makes the story feel less on the nose. Their internal innate selves are indistinguishable from humans, but because they have horns, a devil’s tail, and often reddish skin, people assume they’re evil and treat them accordingly.
It’s an element that is handled so excellently by Erin M. Evans in her Brimstone Angels series:
A woman stood in the doorway opposite the bench, watching Farideh with a wary eye, no subtlety in her distaste. Farideh shifted uncomfortably.
“You waiting for someone?” the woman said after an interminable time.
“My friend,” Farideh said. “He won’t be long.”
“Buying spices from another devilborn.” She sniffed. “Your kind do like to stick together.”
Farideh’s tail flicked nervously. She pulled it closer to lie along her thigh. “My friend’s human, many thanks.”
“Is he now?” Farideh met the woman’s skeptical gaze. Without the ring of white humans were used to, Farideh’s eyes were unreadable. Emotionless. Inhuman. The shopkeeper could stare as long as she liked and Farideh knew she wouldn’t see anything there, not without practice.
“Do you want me to have him show you?” Farideh said. “Or do you want to say what it is you’re getting at?”
Farideh knew perfectly well what the shopkeeper was getting at: she didn’t belong here. Whatever clientele the shopkeeper was used to dealing with, a seventeen-year-old tiefling trying to rein in the tendrils of shadow that curled and coiled around the edges of her frame was not a part of it
Longer excerpt available on author’s blog. (It’s book 3 of the series, but no significant spoilers here.)
Of course that’s only one small part of the characters, but it’s done so well. They’re well-rounded full people who, like any real human, have to deal with getting through life (in their case, fantasy action adventures) while other people react to them.
I believe getting rid of innate alignments was the right choice. The racism might have been why, but the issue I always took with it was the alignments being too broad and ill-defined.
In general I don’t mind getting rid of alignment. I just think that D&D did a really clumsy job of it. Look at the Pathfinder 2e remaster for a much better way to go about it. Paizo removed alignment in a way that actually improved the flavour and variety of the game.
But with the 5e tieflings in particular, removing that one paragraph from their statblock completely takes out a lot of really evocative ideas. It was also accompanied by the removal of most of the sidebar flavour text for tieflings, which previously read:
Mutual Mistrust
People tend to be suspicious of tieflings, assuming that their infernal heritage has left its mark on their personality and morality, not just their appearance. Shopkeepers keep a close eye on their goods when tieflings enter their stores, the town watch might follow a tiefling around for a while, and demagogues blame tieflings for strange happenings. The reality, though, is that a tiefling’s bloodline doesn’t affect his or her personality to any great degree. Years of dealing with mistrust does leave its mark on most tieflings, and they respond to it in different ways. Some choose to live up to the wicked stereotype, but others are virtuous. Most are simply very aware of how people respond to them. After dealing with this mistrust throughout youth, a tiefling often develops the ability to overcome prejudice through charm or intimidation.
That got cut down to the far more brand-safe but dead boring:
Met With Mistrust
Ignorant people tend to be suspicious of tieflings, assuming that their infernal heritage has left its mark on their personality and morality, not just their appearance. The reality is that a tiefling’s bloodline doesn’t affect their personality. They are gifted with magic from the infernal realms but chart their own course in life.
Because tieflings were my absolute favourite race in D&D (thanks in no small part to Ms Evans’ excellent writing), I was really, really disappointed by the changes. Those changes, as well as all the others that came out around the same time (removing whole pages of content that had already been purchased without any recourse), played no small part in my decision to switch over to Pathfinder
Kenku! Little crow folk who can only speak in mimicry. I made it all the way through the D&D 5E adventure Wilds Beyond the Witchlight as a kenku bard, taking enormous amounts of notes of the things I heard so I could go back to find things to imitate.
I mean at the core of it I actually just love crows, but kenku are a realy fun challenge to RP and their current abilities in 5E are very conducive to creative usage
Awesome, I love the idea of building a working library of dialogue to make use of. Technically mimicry would mean having no actual understanding of the phrases actual meaning so it would have to be coincidental to say something useful in context… but it would be such a fun mechanic I would find some way to hand-wave it into making sense.
Might also be fun to extend the mimicry to physical mimicry too. Maybe picking up something that you have seen X number of times. Though that would add even more data tracking, hehe.
Ehhh it’s literally a magic curse, I’m okay with ignoring the details of how real life mimicry works. Going by old lore they also couldn’t come up with any new ideas of their own either, but this makes them kind of impossible to actually use as characters, so I’m content to ignore that as newer stuff seems to
Ah ok, they already have a built-in hand-wavey mechanic to explain it. That’s handy. Extrapolation from their inability to think creatively and only mimic, it seems like that would indeed set up for physical mimicry too. But that would probably get old fast, since it would have to be at the expense of gaining stuff naturally with levels. You’d either have to be trained everything you want to know, or have the DM set up encouters that makes sense for picking it up eventually. Maybe fun for the first couple levels, but just unnecessary tedium as it goes on.
Certainly makes more sense fun-wise to retcon the scope of the curse to a more limited handicap. Something that fits the scope of a single hardship slot.
I know it makes me super basic but… dragons. I know, it’s not inspiring. But I must add a caveat. I prefer that they are intelligent, on par with or surpassing humans in intelligence and willing (if reluctantly) to interact with them. Game of Thrones dragons are cool and all but they don’t really do it for me in the same way as, say, the dragon from Dragonheart.
If a dragon is looking down on us magic less short lived specifies as trash what is the point? I want my dragons innately magical in strange ways, clever and older. I enjoy a rampaging dragon but even better if they are doing it on purpose
Basic is good. In fact I asked this question because I wanted to get a “vibe check” on what people thought was iconic.
I love Goblins as well so I always make mine Pathfinder inspired so they will be green with a big head who love fire and general chaos instead of orange like dnd goblins. They are always fun since they like to straddle the lines between disgusting, cute, destructive and helpless. I know my players always will befriend them so I like to put a lot of them in there.
I also like to treat them like cockroaches or fruit flies who breed very fast and can adopt to any conditions. So there will be strange variations based on where they live. Mud goblins, fire goblins, moss goblins who just have small physical adaptations to better fit their habitat.
Changelings (d&d style), Doppelgangers, Werewolves, really any kind of shapeshifter, the more shapes/types they can take on the better.
I don’t know if you would call
HobbitsHalflings monster races but they are my favorite. I love the way Eberron did them with their mark of hospitability so they have special magic to make everywhere more comfortable and good things just happen to them. I love how they just took the fearlessness and everything good from Kinder and just wrapped it into regularhobbitshalfings.Weeping Angels
Parshendi, if they can be called a monster race.
Having completely different forms they take for specialization depending on task is fascinating. And I love the way rhythm is baked into their being so innately, how every Parshendi can hear the same rhythms and attune them to express or mask emotion.
Elves. They’re basically a cross between the 1% and the most insufferable celebritity influencers imaginable. Having a murder-hobo license to burn down their superiority complex is the best solution imaginable.
Are you a Pratchett fan? I think you’d like his take on elves, I think the first Discworld they’re in is Lords and Ladies.
Do biblically accurate angels count?
Sure.
I’ve always loved dragons in fantasy genres, specially intelligent talking ones that are on the mcs side.
Also like slimes and love when fantasy worlds play around with different types of them
I am very grateful to my DM for allowing me to play as a gelatinous cube that had absorbed a headband of intellect. Such a fun character to play!
I have a tiny little idea bumping around my head for a setting where dragons are not only intelligent but are the apex species. I think it’d be cool to base them off solitary predators like bears, jaguars, etc, as it means they would hate cooperating but would grudgingly do so if necesaary.
