Thursday, July 11, 2019

Demon brood idea: manalishi

As suggested by Mongoose Publishing's The Slayer's Guide to Demons and Encyclopaedia Arcane: Demonology, demons or fiends are divided into a number of broods (tags in D&D 5e rules). Each brood descends from a member of demonic royalty, and are named for their founder plus the suffix of -ka meaning "brood of." For example, the tanar'ka and are the brood of Tanar, the baate'ka are the brood of Baate, the yugo'ka are the brood of Yugo, and the tzaretch'ka are the brood of Tzaretch. Other broods named in the literature include the vang'ka (insectoid demons), jartas'ka (shadow demons), and nuyul'ka (mind worms).

I present another brood: manalishi'ka. The manalishi, or "scaly devils", are fiends with distinct reptilian features. They were originally introduced in OSRIC as an OGL substitute for the closed content abishai devils, although they were renamed to scaly devils in later reprintings. The name originates from the title of a song by Peter Green.

Garnfellow proposes that manalishi are dragon eggs transmuted into devils. I would go a step further and propose that the manalishi include a variety of other scaly fiends, like dorvae and lernaeati*. I've got tons of ideas for a draconic family tree but that's for another time.

*From Monsters of Porphyra. Called "savant hydras" in Creature Collection and "hydranoids" in Monster Geographica.

ADDENDUM 11/22/2019: In the Scarred Lands' Creature Collection series, reptilian devils like the savant hydra and heartclutch are the servants of the LE god Chardun created in mockery of his reptilian mother the titaness Mormo. I think I could take inspiration from them too.

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