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Thursday, March 21, 2019

Nagas and water weirds

An interesting coincidence I noticed were some similarities between the d20 monsters nagas and weirds.

The d20 naga are magical human-headed serpentine immortals loosely based on the naga in Vedic myth. They have a number of different variants in different d20 books, including 3pp like Creature Collection, Rokugan, and Monsters of the Mind. I have no idea what their fluff is, but apparently they associate with astrology.

The weirds are a family of generally serpentine elementals whose capabilities have varied widely across the d20 editions. Originally introduced in pre-d20 as the water weird, they were expanded under the d20 era through Monster Manual II, Dragon magazine and Tome of Horrors. The expansions included additional elemental variants and semi-humanoid oracles (playing off the etymology of weird).

Is there a connection between the naga’s astrology and the weird’s weirdness? I think a lot of d20 have a general problem with blandness, so condensing monster families to make a more interesting result always strikes me as a good thing.

I’ll probably post a more detailed ecology in the future.

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