ORCSES!

Wait, why is that rather disheveled woman holding my severed head? Is there a Sleepy Hollow -themed paragon path I don't know about? Oh, I see. (This picture also created something called "Barbarian Basketball" among my crew, but the less said about that the better.) While I do poke fun at the sheer number of horrible deaths illustrated of a player character race, just being a member of that race isn't enough for it to be "good." That's why I proposed the Monster Manual item. Minotaurs are totally kosher if you take in their new fluff, while gnolls…well, even the article that debuted them as a PC race included feats so that you can eat corpses and included a terrible story about killing people by pretending to be their dead loved one. The point is, I think Wizards went the right way with this; just because a race is a player character option doesn't mean that it stops being a monster. That doesn't make my character any less sad w...

D&D Outsider Jared von Hindman With monsters in the air (and the release of the Monster Manual 3 on the shelves), we take a look at playing monstrous races… Spoiler Alert: It's hard to talk about evil or monstrous races without some reference to Salvatore (the Elder). As such, I might spoiling a subplot in one of the more recent books since it's just too apt to pass by. You were warned, Drizzt fan! Let's get something straight: Evil is cool. The bad guys, with the exception of maybe James Bond villains, usually have better outfits, cooler abilities, and even lairs. Just looking at what's available to a player these days, we have zombies (revenants), werewolves (shifters), minotaurs, vampires (the Vampiric Heritage feat that lets you play a “daywalker” vampire who does indeed suck blood), demons (tieflings), beastmen (gnolls) and golems (warforged) all readily available to the standard D&D player without any r...