(3.5e) Sahuagins!

[shimmercat]

Maybe it's because aquatic games aren't that common, but it's super hard to find good info about Sahuagins! (At least anything more in-depth than what the MM and Stormwrack hold.) Sahuagins are one of the major villains in the game I currently play in, and the DM let slip that a major Sahuagin baddie (a high-level, super LE illusionist who had infiltrated a wizard university and was going to assassinate the Dean -- which our characters valiantly PREVENTED! *goodheropose* ) is going to be our End Boss (unless the game goes some other direction completely XD).

But we need ideas for Sahuagin names. And ideas for other things that could make the Sahuagins more special and cool. But especially names.

Anyone got any ideas?

[Grail]

See if you can get your hands on the 2e Monstrous Arcana book, The Sea Devils, I've got it somewhere, and it's not too bad. I used it to run a game way back when, using them as the main villain race.

[Thane of Fife]

You could try reading The Threat from the Sea trilogy. It's all about the world beneath the oceans and seas of Faerun.

[Athaniar]

Sahuagin? I suggest you read a cheerful little tale called The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

And Malenti are weird. They look like aquatic elves, but are still sahuagin? How does that work?

[Dyllan]

If you do want to get The Sea Devils, it's $5 on Paizo - http://paizo.com/store/games/rolepla.../v5748btpy7mr4

Alternatively, the Sahuagin are supposed to be based (at least in part) on the Aztecs. A Google search of "Aztec Names" turns up a surprisingly large number of results, so you could use that.

Also, I found a couple old 1st edition modules that feature Sahuagin fairly prominently - you might be able to pull some good information from there.

http://www.ob1knorrb.com/Saltmarsh/saltmarsh.pdf

http://www.kestrelarts.com/text/Dunwater.pdf

Hope that helps.

[Inyssius Tor]

From the Frank & K "Tome" series, sadly and abruptly discontinued:

Borderlands of the Sahuagin: Sore Winners

The first thing to understand about the Sahuagin is that they have already won. Completely. The surface of the world is about ¾ ocean and they own almost all of it. From the standpoint of the Sahuagin, the only places on the planet that have non-Sahuagin races in them are the stale crusts that they already had the presence of mind to cut off their sandwich. All of the non-Sahuagin races are all ghettoized. Even the other aquatic races have been marginalized to the point where they only get the brackish water (Locathah), the rocky shallows (merfolk), the underground darks (Kuo-Toans), or the muddy salt marshes (Lizardfolk). The real real estate – the ocean and coastline – are pretty much the private playground of the Sahuagin.

Individually, Sahuagin will kick your ass, and collectively they will kick the ass of any nation you happen to support. The combined populations of all other sapient races on any planet are less than the population of Sahuagin on that planet. The Sahuagin are also much smarter and better organized than you are so their cities are actually more productive than yours per person in addition to the fact that they have more cities than all the other races and their cities are more populous.

The Sahuagin mutate constantly, but are not inclined to Chaos. They just all have different appearances and capabilities. But every one of them is gifted with super intelligence and thick natural armor. The Sahuagin deep seers are some of the most gifted wizards on the planet and honestly have nothing better to do than just scry on crap and tell the armies where there's some cool stuff to go loot. From time to time the Sahuagin will come onto land to beat the living crap out of people and take control of important or valuable items. Then they take the spoils of war and drag it back under water, laughing the whole time.

Against this backdrop of crushing inferiority, how do the other races maintain? Most of them are fighting for stakes so small that they haven't even noticed that the vast majority of the planet is owned and operated by brutally efficient fish men. But one race that certainly has noticed the power discrepancy is the race of elves most likely to be forgotten: the Sea Elves. They actually live in many of the same areas and have a war going with them.

Life is hard for a Sea Elf, because every one of them is born into a post-apocalyptic world where mutants run amok and hunt them for sport. But it's actually even worse than that because in addition to simply being physically and intellectually inferior to the Sahuagin like everyone else is – they are actually stupid and useless even contrasted with the surface races. An average Sea Elf is as much the intellectual inferior to a Sahuagin as a Griffin is to a normal human. The Sahuagin consider the Sea Elves to be little more than animals, and they aren't wrong.

The Sea Elves keep surviving at all because they see farther than Sahuagin in low-light conditions (and are thus often able to swim away from potential encounters with Sahuagin during the morning and twilight hours that Sea Elves leave their hidden nests), and also because every so often a Sahuagin gets born who looks exactly like a Sea Elf. These Sahuagin mutants, called Malenti, are a little bit worse than a normal Sahuagin in that they lack the rending claws. But they're still stronger and smarter than any Sea Elf that ever swam the 7 seas. So when these Malenti realize that they get a crap deal from Sahuagin society, they often as not run off to join the Sea Elves, where they almost immediately rise to positions of leadership. They also gain crap loads of experience very quickly because the odds are so stacked against them. In short, the reason that the Sea Elves still exist is that they actually are a splinter faction of Sahuagin that uses real sea elves as beasts of burden instead of simply hunting them like the more normal Sahuagin groups do.

And yet, despite the fact that the Sahuagin have won at everything, they still continue to fight the other races and take their children and stuff. Partly this is to feed the insatiable demands of their Baatezu masters, and partly this is because on some deep level the Sahuagin are convinced that it actually couldn't possibly be that easy. In addition to looking for bling and candy to take from the weaker races, the Deep Seers are also combing the world for the one thing that the Great Mothers are pretty sure exists somewhere: the hidden army that the other races are putting together to take the world back from the clutches of the Sahuagin Empire. As far as anyone knows, it doesn't exist, but for some reason the Great Mothers keep insisting that the searching continue. Maybe they know something we don't?

...anyway, there's more on the topic here. Use the search function!

[shimmercat]

I did try a search, but I've learned that if I can't find it in a search in 3 minutes, then I should post in a forum. Why? Because I would NEVER find nearly as much great info as people can post in 20 minutes on a forum.

There is some great info here. Thank you so much!

[Starbuck_II]

Buldar's Gate 2: Shadows of Aym on PC taught me that Sanguin are insane or at least the ones you meet are.

Granted, the rebel Prince did seem more sane than the King (due to inbreeding).

[Ascension]

Granted, the rebel Prince did seem more sane than the King (due to inbreeding).

But wouldn't the prince be even further inbred than the king?

[Recaiden]

I don't think he was the kings son. He was some other prince. I think he may have just been an average guy who declared himself Prince and went to kill the king. BG2 did have a section where you could go to the Sahuagin city, and quite a few had names. You also got some great items there.
I also remember that when the Sahuagin attacked your ship, you were doomed, except that you were a prophesied savior of this city. The only reason the Sahuagin didn't kill everyone else is that the Githyanki showed up and killed the sailors first. They're smart and dangerous things.

[Prometheus]

Sahuagins? They're just evil Locathahs, nothing to worry abou-
*is stabbed through the throat with a trident for blasphemy against the great people of Sekolah*

EDIT: Apparently A.B.O. is a curse-word. Who knew? (I feel that it is appropriate to bypass the filter because it is referring to the word rather than the meaning).

[Inyssius Tor]

I did try a search, but I've learned that if I can't find it in a search in 3 minutes, then I should post in a forum. Why? Because I would NEVER find nearly as much great info as people can post in 20 minutes on a forum.

There is some great info here. Thank you so much!

Oh yeah--I mean, like, use the search function on the page I linked to. 'Cause there's even more stuff there.

[bosssmiley]

Inyssius Tor beat me to the Dungeonomicon recommendation, so I'll just add this: the Grindylow in China Mieville's "The Scar" are the Sahuagin under another name. Fear them.
...
No, more than that. Much more..

[Kaiyanwang]

Suggestion above (BTW, a cookie for Innsmouth) are very good. Two things come in my mind.

- You could even steal something from World of warcraft Nagas. They are similar in a lot of things more to Sahuagin than to D&D Nagas

They were Night Elves once, so you could explain Malenti very well, with similar refluffing.

Queen Azshara story is awesome, too... you could link the Well to some Node Spellcasting concept... anyway, take a look.

-Links with Nine Hells of Baator Devils. Maybe, they summon devils from the seas of Nine Hells, so you could apply some template to devils and bring powerful allies to Sahuagin.

[Tyrmatt]

Buldar's Gate 2: Shadows of Aym on PC taught me that Sanguin are insane or at least the ones you meet are.

Granted, the rebel Prince did seem more sane than the King (due to inbreeding).

I do agree, the bizarre civil war they have going down there is just nuts. I think I just murderised them all, looted their bodies for the magic rope and headed on to the Underdark.

[shimmercat]

Inssysius: Oh, I misunderstood you. I think I was expecting to get yelled at for not trying google search first. Which I DID... just not very hard.

From this thread, I'm learning that Sahuagin are much smarter and much more evil that I previous believed. (As I am not the DM... I'm pretty sure that HE knew they were very smart and very evil!) I'm not sure sea elves (and therefore Malenti) exist in our world, as we as a group tend to hate on the elves, but the "Borderlands of the Sahuagin" thing may make us change our minds and put them in their for pure spite.

The characters at one point suggested taking the fight to the Sahuagin and making it an underwater campaign for a bit, but I think that it would be asking for a TPK. I don't think that 5 lvl 10 human PCs (and more RP based than optimized) could stand a chance against what we would find down there.

[Djibriel]

Eberron has great Sahuagin flavor; Shargon/The Devourer as their major deity and a custom of eating their enemies, producing mutant offspring as a result. 4-armed Sahuagin and Malenti are the result, but the freakier the meal the freakier the kidz (implied).

Sahuagin are pretty great as a race, I think, but I'm not sure more info on Sahuagin is going to prove that useful in your campaign. A high-level, super LE illusionist prancing about in towers doesn't sound like a Sahuagin at all; they're more likely to advance as Rangers or somesuch, so 'typical' Sahuagin behavior or whatever probably won't appear that much.

[shimmercat]

Did I mention that the illusionist has 4 arms?

Nah, there's a lot more going on with the sahuagin race than that; the illusionist is just the sahuagin the PCs have the strongest relationship with. His motives and plans were very sahuagin-esque, especially after reading some of the material posted here. We're looking at an all-out war between the sahuagin and one of the human nations, and the illusionist was on a long-term infiltration mission which would have ended in him assassinating a head of state and replacing him. ...It makes more sense in context, trust me. *is bad at explaining things*