Foes of the Tower Lands: Curseborn

There are as many curseborn as there are curses.

It's impossible to describe them all. Victims of blights that corrupt the flesh. Fools who trod forbidden ground and invoked the gods' wrath. Things with the shapes of humans and raun, conjured or spawned by forgotten powers to walk a land no longer their own.

Those whose flesh is touched by curse are shunned, hunted. In far corners, they seek refuge. Some are little different than beasts, all reason lost. Some turn against the world in anger. Some wish only to be left to their pain.

Perhaps there are even friends to be found among them. For it is whispered by some, even a curse may carry a seed of blessing....

Goblins

Strength d4 [HD 1-1], speed 30', AC 0 [unarmored], small claw or small bite [as dagger], morale 5.

Ghuls

Strength d8 [HD 2], speed 40', AC 0 [unarmored], claw or bite [as sword], morale 7.

Ogres

Strength d10 [HD 4], speed 30', AC 1 [as leather], large fist [as maul], morale 9.

To one of these basic forms, or another of your choosing, add any number of curse-marks (1d6+1 if you want a guideline).

Determine intelligence (choose or 1d3):

1. Feral. As animals.
2. Limited. Use simple tools and tactics, may be capable of some speech.
3. Humanlike. Speak, can wear armor (if it fits) and use tools freely.

Fungus Goblins of the Silver Chamber: Fungal physiology, keen smell and hearing, reconstitute from Mother Fungus on death over 1d6 days. Limited intelligence, speak limited Halish.

Pale Ghuls of the Saltway Cave: Near-blindness, keen smell and hearing, pyrophobia, photophobia. Mostly feral, occasionally humanlike (though still cannibalistic).

Notes

I think monstrous humanoids are useful in D&D. They provide interesting tactical and often social challenges you don't get with other kinds of enemies. Powerful, solitary monsters don't allow for group engagements. Undead and similar creatures can, but they tend to be distinctly inhuman in how they fight and behave, in ways that have serious gameplay implications, like being mindlessly hostile, fearless, and immune to pain. And with regular humans, you lose out on some of the wondrous and fantastical.

However, a lot of presentations of monstrous humanoids are really fucking racist. It may well be that it's impossible to have them without being at least a little racist. I'd like to believe that's not true. The curseborn are my attempt at avoiding the worst of it.

The common appeal of monstrous humanoids is that they're evil, but still people. They act like people, they have communities and relationships and lead complete lives with all the behaviors we're familiar with, but they do it all in an evil way that makes them okay to murder without hesitation. I think the big problem comes with trying to keep these two conceits tied together, whether explicitly or covertly. You can't depict people as being inherently evil and universally valid targets for violence without getting racist.

Some treatments take the approach of making them not really people. See orcs as cauldronborn bio-weapons without individual lives. That can be cool, but functionally, at that point, you might as well just use undead. My preference here is to keep monstrous humanoids as people, but not inherently evil. PCs killing enemies that aren't objectively evil doesn't bother me in a game, so this approach lets me keep the benefits of monstrous humanoids--relatable needs and behaviors, consciousness, social relationships--without sacrificing anything I care about.

Like I said, I could just use humans, but I like the fantastical feel of PCs meeting people who are visibly weird and alien compared to them. (The raun are separate thing, I'll get into them in another post.) Monstrous humanoids can have features and behaviors that make them socially and tactically interesting without being evil. At the same time, I don't want to put a bunch of fully developed large-scale societies of non-human sapients in my setting, because the Tower Lands overall are meant to be very human-focused and specifically focused on the Halish people.

The curseborn are my solution. They're meant to be included in adventures as groups, but those groups are singular, local phenomena. The pale ghuls of the Saltway Cave were created by something that exists within that dungeon; they exist there and nowhere else. This is how the curseborn allow me to get the benefits of monstrous humanoids without any of the stuff I want to avoid.

• They're people, or potentially more like animals, but not undead or automatons. They're alive, they're biological, they eat and feel pain and fear (unless they don't for some reason!), but they can potentially talk and have relationships and use tools and engage with the PCs socially and tactically.
• They're weird and alien, but because they're all the product of specific local events, they all have a concrete reason why they're like that, not just committing the crime of being born the wrong race. The events that created them will inform their behavior and motivations and present problems for the PCs.
• They're few in number and local in influence, so I don't have to develop large-scale cultures or societies for them and can keep the overall setting human-focused.

If you're gonna use curseborn, I highly recommend doing them this way. The templates here are baselines, but go beyond those--give them unique features to make them interesting, and think about where they came from. Otherwise, I think you'll be really bored.