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View Full Version : Roleplaying Aasimars/Tieflings with animal or eldritch features, do you dig it?



Spore
2018-05-28, 09:00 AM
People complain when elves are just humans with pointy ears.
People complain when tieflings are retconned as horned demonic things with tails because they would be killed or exiled as infants. this thread primarily focusses on planar/outsider races though things like genasi or fey are certainly also welcome.

What amount of "freakish" features is your 'sweet spot'? What characters with odd body parts do you play?

Do you allow special appearances as long as they are not to be reflected within changing racial rules? How would you let your general populace react to such abnormal appearances? Overreact with stakes, torches and pitchforks? React with a distrustful glare? Shrug it off?

Pelle
2018-05-28, 10:52 AM
In my setting, demons have anthropomorphic appearance. Thus, tieflings look like humans, but have some animal feature that reveals their heritage, like horns, tail, sharp teeth, scales, or a beak etc...

Kaptin Keen
2018-05-28, 11:47 AM
My tiefling bard has slightly luminescent red eyes, horns, tail, and skin blacker than night. This I'm fine with. A tentacled abomination of the Great Old Ones I wouldn't play.

Dalinale
2018-05-28, 11:38 PM
Aasimars and tieflings are treated more like the elven races than anything else; the sort of events that could produce a good amount of either are far flung and rare throughout history, and individual populations, whiles scarce, tend towards similar features and are generally identifiable by the use of appropriate checks. Aasimar specifically can get hit with the weird stick as much as tieflings do; bright unnaturally colored skin (bright pink, pale blue), strange mono-colored eyes, and the occasional halo are just the start; there's nothing particularly celestial about mammals and scales and even light feathers are not out of the question, with the most extreme features being a beak or blank or obscure facial features, the head appearing to just be a smooth ball that gives off a soft light. The end result can often look like something that could feasibly appear in a gay pride parade. Basically, Aasimar can be gaudy as all hell, even the evil ones. Especially the evil ones.

Tieflings are close to that; most individuals tend to have at least one set of limbs switched out with an animal equivalent, goat legs being commonplace. These are beings that could claim decent from most variety of fiends; they are a broad category and what might be true for devilspawn might not be the case for demonspawn. The most extreme might have a few blind eyes scattered over their torso and the least apparent might be able to pass as a oddly colored half-orc.

Seto
2018-05-29, 04:38 AM
I'm currently playing a Tiefling, clearly identifyable as such. Slightly pointier teeth than normal, yellow iris in his eyes, faint smell of sulfur, red crackled skin, and when wounded, thick darkish blood. No horns or tail, though. NPCs are generally distrustful of me, but after some convincing they're willing to do business with me. "If I played it realistically, people would throw stones at you circus freaks, but we have to keep the adventure going", dixit my GM (our group is me, a mute Suli who communicates by whistling, a Fetchling Summoner inside her six-armed Eidolon, and one human Ranger with a giant scorpion companion).

In a campaign I'm about to start GMing, one of my players has announced his intention to play an Aasimar. I'm curious to see what kind of physical description he comes up with.

LibraryOgre
2018-05-29, 11:48 AM
Something I miss from earlier editions is variable abilities for Tieflings and Aasimar, depending on their descent. 3e did this, to an extent, with racial feats, but even some simple variation would be nice.

hamishspence
2018-05-29, 12:39 PM
in 5e, Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, allow you to play tieflings with slightly different abilities from "regular tieflings".

Hunter Noventa
2018-05-29, 01:10 PM
Something I miss from earlier editions is variable abilities for Tieflings and Aasimar, depending on their descent. 3e did this, to an extent, with racial feats, but even some simple variation would be nice.

Pathfinder put out whole books for them with a slew of alternate minor abilities and a large selection of cosmetic differences.

I played a Tiefling Magus with hooved feet, curling ram horns, a prehensile tail and eyes that glowed with violet light that let her see ethereal creatures. The latter never came up, but it was still a fun character to play.

Spore
2018-05-29, 09:39 PM
Something I miss from earlier editions is variable abilities for Tieflings and Aasimar, depending on their descent. 3e did this, to an extent, with racial feats, but even some simple variation would be nice.

A problem then arises that optimizers tend to create stuff like Oni Tieflings with wings and prehensile tails. Ya know, stuff that rubs me the wrong way. Oni are supposed to be incredibly powerful but brutish enemies. The elegance of flight, the dexterous nature of picking stuff up with a tail simply doesn't fit. Yes, this is D&D where you can have a Int 22 Ogre Magus, yes it is derivative and thus isn't forced to be identical to its source material, but still. And with Pathfinder's tendency to force fluff through crunch, you almost have to take the Scion of Humanity trait to appear somewhat human.

But honestly what ticks me off more is the stereotypical backstory of these races. Aasimars are almost revered most of the times (imagine someone with a halo over his head, claiming his great-grandfather was an angel, he'd STILL be a freak). And in the same settings where half-werewolves run around, players often decide their goat horned tieflings are extremely oppressed when in reality the average commoner can't even distinguish between a shifter and a tiefling. And yes, in some cults, a tiefling can be revered as a (dark) god's gift, especially when you're the kid or adoptive kid of the leader of the cult/church.

This makes me want to roll a tiefling "paladin" with a warped body like cracked skin looking like a stream of lava, big horns and a general malicious aura around him, dipping or entirely taking Warlock, from the Charlatan or Acolyte background, claiming he is a chosen one of (insert good god), with a sense of entitlement that borders on self-illusion. Just to abuse this trope.