Why are some elementals immune to poison? Who cares!

A strange thing I noticed while browsing the MM is that some elementals are immune to poison but not others. For example, azer, gargoyles and generic elementals are immune to poison, but magmin, xorn and genies are not. This may be a legacy from 3e, as in that edition elementals were automatically immune to poison, but this doesn't explain every example.

There isn't any explanation given for this, so I will just take it as a given. Not everything about a monster needs some kind of elaborate explanation. The poison in the game rules operates nothing like poison in real life, so it's acceptable that some monsters are immune without explanation. In real life, everything is a poison at certain doses, and different animals have different tolerances.

It's probably best to treat "poison" as an esoteric element, since that would explain its universal effects in the game world.

Subverting the green-skinned space babe trope

Those of you who frequent TVTropes may be aware of the "green-skinned space babe" trope, popularized by Star Trek's Orion, Star Wars' Twi'lek and more recently Mass Effect's Asari. I find this trope to be fundamentally sexist, since it objectifies women and values impossible beauty standards. So are its typical variations. Reversing it and portraying the aliens as sexy dudes still values impossible beauty standards. Revealing that the sexy babes are actually the males of their species, which is distressingly common as a joke, is transphobic.

I stumbled upon an unorthodox solution in the fanfiction The Enemy of My Enemy. In that story we are introduced to the Galra Empire, a vast stellar empire of purple cat people. These Galra are divided into six "genders" of qylar, gol, gal, qvir, raego, and ruj, all of which appear from a human perspective to be male. These genders are more like castes and are used to determine an individual's role in Galra society. They look noticeably different: some look like the thundercats, others like elves, and one gender has reptilian scales. The gal, qvir, raego and ruj are biologically male: they have a penis and testicles. The qylar, distinguished by possessing tails but otherwise resembling the qvir, is biologically female: they have a uterus and ovaries. The gol are sterile and possibly sexless. As I mentioned before, a human being would mistake them all as male because they lack human-like sexual dimorphism. Galra always use male pronouns regardless of their gender, further maintaining this illusion.

Orc lives matter (too!)

Psyche! I could go on a rant about how the portrayal of orcs in fantasy role playing is politically incorrect, but I decided to sidestep that debate entirely. This is fantasy escapism, not politics!

Do you want to add more depth to orc culture but still keep the stereotypical violent savages? Then justify their behavior by giving them a religion that literally claims god hate orcs!

Do you want to introduce a culture of good orcs alongside the stereotypical evil orcs? Then drop in the leonorks from Children of the Planes by Tangent Games, an entire race of goodly orc paladins right out of the mirror universe!

Giving depth to orcs:

• Orcs as corrupted elves. (Lord of the Rings, Elder Scrolls)
• Orcs as fantasy indigenous peoples displaced by human colonialism.
• Orcs as distant relatives of humans who lack self-awareness but excel at learning. (Ravenflight)
• Orcs as fantasy Mesoamericans who sacrifice people to keep the sun burning. (God hates orcs)
• Orcs as an entire culture of fantasy Christian crusaders. (Ravenflight)
• Orcs as a fallen people enslaved by conniving demons. (Warcraft)
• Orcs as the mellow descendants of a collapsed expansionist empire. (World of Aruneus)
• Orcs as cute monster girl amazons. 
• Orcs as pig men. (Animal Races: Clan of the Pig)
• Orcs as Gaia's vengeance (13th Age).

Other ideas:

• Pig-faced orcish Clans: Boar, Hippo, Orca, Pig, Warthog, 
• The Orcish Empire was a Mordor-like expansionist empire that ruled and conquered vast tracks of land in ancient times. After reaching its peak the empire collapsed and its citizens were left to fend for themselves.
• Amazonian Orcs: The Amazons are an orc ethnicity characterized by several distinct biological and cultural traits. They are all-female and cannot carry sons to term. They are dismissive of orc males and view human males as optimal mates. They specialize almost exclusively in violent pursuits such as hunting and warfare. They raid human villages to acquire slaves to perform other roles required to sustain their tribe.

Orc Ethnicities, see Tome of Horrors series

• Orc, Black... death worshiping orcs
• Orc, Blood ... even more violent orcs
• Orc, Common
• Orc, Ghost-Faced ... shadow orcs
• Orc, Greenskin ... forest orcs
• Orog (Greater Orc)
• Leonorks ... aasimar orcs 

Even more ideas:

• While I have nothing against people who prefer the traditional portrayal of orcs, if you want something new or fresh then I will provide. My cosmology uses a mix of Stormbringer and Manicheanism that divides the universal factions into Cosmos, Order, Discord and Chaos. All of them except for Cosmos are objectively evil, but all four sides consider themselves morally right.
• Orcs serve the forces of Chaos. Like most humanoids, their belief system is a strange mix of Aztec and Gnostic. They openly worship the evil archdemons and believe that the gods of demikind are evil too (why else would they prohibit drinking, prostitution, gay marriage, etc?). If the archdemons and gods are not entertained, then they will kill everyone or worse. So the orcs engage in raiding and other activities that cause suffering, but themselves are fully capable of altruism. They might adopt human orphans and raise them in the orcish faith.
• Orcs have multiple ethnic groups, like black, blood, greenskin, ghost-faced, etc. One incongruous ethnic group in particular is the leonorks, who are characterized by their allegiance to Cosmos and proclivity for the paladin profession.
• Options: The problem with treating orcs as people is that fiction typically uses this as an excuse to turn them into caricatures of Africans and Native Americans. Indeed, most of the time these stories don't have people of color at all. The WarCraft movie is a particularly racist example: all the orcs are played by black actors and all the humans, dwarves and elves are played by white actors.

Links: 

• http://incrediblevehicle.com/2014/09/24/evil-races-in-dd/
• https://cartographyofdreams.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/orcs-the-irredeemable-race/
• http://www.haresrocklots.com/words/essays/yrch/
• http://keepontheheathlands.com/2017/07/06/presentation-tropes-monster-races-fantasy-games/

Racial hierarchies

Fantasy gaming has a fairly detailed racial hierarchy, but for this post I will break it down into its most simple. Humanoid races may be grouped by varying criteria, usually by how human-like or pretty they are.

Resolving the paradoxes afflicting elementals

The MM entry on "elementals" is riddled with contradictions and plot hooks that go nowhere. In this post, I will examine those mistakes and provide solutions.

Monster intelligence, part 1: beasts

As an exercise, I decided to look up and compare the intelligence scores of the monsters in the MM. I was aided in this by a brief analysis of what intelligence scores supposedly measure and a spreadsheet listing the ability scores of all the monsters in the MM (see the links below). Thus, I decided to make a series outlining my findings. For my first post, I decided to look at beasts.

Undead hunger

5e does not have any rules for undead hunger, but it is a neat concept. I decided to use a twist on the idea: All undead are subject to physical deterioration without a steady stream of animating power.