#setting design.

History: Trains emerged as an evolution of cart technology, as in the desire to move goods and materials from one place to another, we as humans realized that regular old wheels tended to make roads and other paths into pitted slogs by repeated use, and we invented carts that moved on rails instead. Eventually when engines got small and efficient enough to start doing the job of everyday people, we figured out a cart that could move itself with a little oversight, and the train picked up steam from there.

What began then was a patchwork of individual businesses building railways to improve their efficiency, leading to the development of railway companies specialized in installing these sorts of transit mechanisms at their client's expense. Eventually these companies started to pitch themselves to governments (who themselves were made up of business owners) and there was a sudden explosion of rail across the industrialized and colonized portion of the globe.

In order for you to have rail travel in your games ( even if you don't end up using steam engines), you're going to need powerful, centralized governments to make it all work, as individual nobles and landholders will likely be too squabbling to organize such a project, muchless have the funds. Any kingdom/empire/state with an interest in moving goods quickly from one location to another can build rail lines, with the added benefit of being able to project power across vast reaches of territory by way of deploying troops along the rails.

Rail travel makes cities and their surrounding settlements explode in size, expediting the flow of goods and supercharging the economic engines that communities already relied on. This allows for industry to be centralized specialized, and their products to be widely distributed, raising the general standard of living by allowing people in far off corners of the territory to have access to the same goods/tools/medicines as those living in the nation’s capital. 

Gampeplay:  Much like airships, railways change the way that campaigns have to be run, though rail travel tends to be available to the party much earlier in their adventures. 

Travel between major settlements becomes near instantaneous, cutting down on the random encounters that might fill out an early game party’s XP . Compensate for this by having social encounters that occur on/waiting for the train, allowing the party to make contacts that they’ll be able to follow up on later in the game. 

Alternatively, if you’re running an open world/travel based game, consider having the first few adventures occur in a region not yet connected to the rail network, to give them a bitesized taste of freedom before graduating to the larger map. This could be by traveling overland to a larger town, or by completing some quest that allows the railroad to finally be extended to their starting town. 

Train companies become powerful movers and shakers on the political chessboard, rivaling merchants and powerful nobles as they act as both villains and potential patrons for players. In your classic d&d world, these companies are likely to be a constant source of monster contracts wanting to keep their most profitable lines clear of interruption or attack. 

Everything is closer together now that the rails connect everything, meaning that if you want your party to venture out into the wilderness, you’ll likely have to put your hidden vaults full of mcguffins further out past whatever frontier town is the end of the line. Concurrently, Villains can now execute plans across a far larger territory with much fewer minions, which means multiple antagonistic groups might be playing around in a single settlement without the players even realizing it. 

Paradoxically, those areas that the railway allows most people to skip past may become increasingly adventure-prone, as wilderness without adventurers to brave it will become increasingly wild, and settlements excluded from the railroad’s prosperity may become a haven for those wishing to avoid the scrutiny of the masses. 

I hope that helps anyone thinking of including trains into their campaign, but I might do a follow up to this after doing a little more thinking on the subject. 

Habitat/Society: Gnolls are most often encountered underground or inside abandoned ruins. When above ground they operate primarily at night. Gnoll society is ruled by the strongest, using fear and intimidation. When found underground, they will have (30% chance) 1-3 trolls as guards and servants. Above ground they keep pets (65% of the time) such as 4-16 hyenas (80%) or 2-12 hyaenodons (20%) which can act as guards.

A gnoll lair will contain between 20 and 200 adult males. For every 20 gnolls, there will be a 3 Hit Die leader. If 100 or more are encountered there will also be a chieftain who has 4 Hit Dice, an Armor Class of 3, and who receives a +3 on his damage rolls due to his great strength. Further, each chieftain will be protected by 2-12 (2d6) elite warrior guards of 3 Hit Dice (AC 4, +2 damage).

In a lair, there will be females equal to half the number of males. Females are equal to males in combat, though not usually as well armed or armored. There will also be twice as many young as there are adults in the lair, but they do not fight. Gnolls always have at least 1 slave for every 10 adults in the lair, and may have many more.

Gnolls will work together with orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, and trolls. If encountered as a group, there must be a relative equality of strength. Otherwise the gnolls will kill and eat their partners (hunger comes before friendship or fear) or be killed and eaten by them. They dislike goblins, kobolds, giants, humans, demi-humans and any type of manual labor.

Remember, these are specifically the stats for a gnoll LAIR not a village. People build villages, Gnolls ( being not people by default) cram their living space into the dungeon the party is delving, or the living space is itself a target for extermination in order to save the land from the blight of gnollish exitance. 

Skipping right over how the demographics don’t bear any resemblance to an actual hyena pack, lets look at the fact that there are TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN AS THERE ARE ADULTS, meaning that there are fuzzy families standing in the way between the murder-hobos and their treasure, and with each defender cut down, the party is creating scores of orphans. The book can cram in as many excuses as it wants about how these creatures are sadistic and terrible and bad for the environment, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re people, who according to the rules and greater lore of the game a) are capable of feeling pain and fear b) have souls, making them fully willed individuals and not simply animals . How then can their outright slaughter be a good thing? 

Well... lets look at some of d&d’s  inbuilt genocide apologia, and a classic session killing scenario that’s come to be known as the “baby monster dilemma”. 

First lets acknowledge that d&d is fictional, existing separate to but directly inspired by our reality. Lets also acknowledge that fictional events do not hold the same moral weight as events in our world, and that an author writing about a murder does not in any way share the guilt of say... a hitman.  

That said, a fictional work can still be said to express harmful ideas, even if the ideas only exist on a page. A movie is not racist because it has racism in it, it is racist because it reinforces the structures of racism, justifying the bigoted actions of others by helping to reinforce a worldview that directly harms others. 

For most of its history, d&d has said that racism is GOOD, by creating an innumerable number of monstrous “others” to serve as opposition to the heroes, and justifying that opposition both by the moral framework of its universe and by the inherent foulness of those foes.  In the same entry, Gnolls are described as “Evil”, “Preferring to eat sentient humanoids because they scream the most” and “ Hunting exhaustively to the point where the wilderness will take years to recover before they move on.” 

If gnolls are inherently evil and sadistic, the only dead gnoll is a good gnoll, and adventurers (goodguys by default) should not suffer one to live. 

This is how you end up in wild situations like the Baby Monster Dilemma, where characters like the paladin, who are compelled to do good and never allow an evil act ( in the earlier editions atleast) are forced to wrestle with the moral conundrum of what to do with all of those gnoll children they just orphaned. 

Leaving the Gnoll pups alone means that they will either starve to death, or grow up to do more evil in the future, 

Because like most monstrous humanoids, gnolls have inherently evil souls, and so adopting them and nurturing them to be good is doomed invariably to fail ( there are plenty of examples of this “call to evil” throughout d&d lore) 

Therefore the best answer is to slaughter them all on the spot, which lays somewhere between an act of genocide and Cruella D’Ville level of puppy murder, depending on your conception of gnoll sapience. 

This is why I say that d&d has genocide apologia baked into it. In the case of fighting a very common enemy the way the game wanted you to fight them, the mass murder of children is a morally sound decision that leaves the world a better place. The game creates a scenario where enacting genocide is good and makes “Kill the monsters, take their stuff” a primary progression mechanic. 

I don’t want to play a game that constructs elaborate setups to justify why it thinks genocide is ok, much less one that uses the same arguments that were used to justify IRL genocides within the past century. Because D&D happens to be the world’s most popular roleplaying game, and because I like the underlying mechanics so much, the lore is going to have to change quite a lot before I’m comfortable using it, and by the way things look ... it seems like a lot of other people are in the same position. 

Now with that in mind, lets look at how  WOTC tried to fix this and where they went wrong:

In order to make purging gnolls from the world justified, the writers of 4th and 5th edition tried to double down on gnoll’s evil traits, saying that they don’t have emotions, and even making them constantly demon possessed, under a species wide curse that compels them to ruin and rend and destroy with no thought for others.  By turning that monstrosity dial up all the way to 11 ( They’re so evil that not actively hunting them to extinction is a moral failing) the writers are trying to bulldoze past the baby monster conundrum by giving an objective answer,  Problem is, the gnolls are still, technically, people,  in possession of souls, families, and the ability to think and reason... the writers have just gone out of their way to create them in such a way that their evil invalidates all of that. 

I wouldn’t have a problem with it if gnolls were literally beasts, or monsters spat out of the pits of hell, or manifesting spontaneously from nature, but the problem is that they REMAIN intelligent humanoids. The current Monster manual describes them as a plague that descend without warning on civilized lands to slaughter and pillage and wander elsewhere looking for new places to raise, making nothing of lasting value and instead taking whatever they might need from the corpses of their victims. I can’t help but compare that to villainized depictions of displaced communities or nomadic peoples, scorned by those of more settled societies that may or may not be expanding out into the nomad’s territory. 

How we can make this better: Stripping the Gnolls down to their base concept as “ Hyena people” gives us quite a lot to work with while reimagining them. Hyenas are adaptable social creatures with a unique sexual hierarchy that you can spin out into a lot of interesting cultural dynamics out of ( go look up some hyena biology facts and tell me that’s not a goldmine for coming up with unique social patterns). Being strict carnivores means they miss out on the development that agriculture brings,   but their wider palate when it comes to what’s acceptable as meat ( scavenged carrion, insects) allows them to survive in much harsher climates, though likely with smaller numbers. Groups would be transitory, following the migration routes of the animals that they hunted, splitting up and gathering together based on the availability of the food supply. 

Though migratory, gnolls would likely be highly protective of these lands, as sustainable access to a highly limited foodsource would mean the difference between being able to stay with the route or being force to travel to unknown lands scavenging. Gnoll territory would likely clash with wolves, lions, and other large predators 

Gnolls could also perform a unique form of insect-agriculture, cultivating colonies of termites, crickets, and leaf-cutter ants throughout their territory to act as backup food storage. 

( Also this whole thing about gnolls keeping Hyenas as pets always bugged me. You don’t want pets that eat the same thing as you, gnolls would keep easily ) 

Gnoll culture would likely be eminently practical, with everyone expected to be able to cultivate different skills depending on the seasonal availability of food. This would lead to less specialization and stratification among the pack-members, as well as a network of mentor-apprentice relationships that would likely transcend individual packs. The best leatherworker would train leatherworkers from all allied packs, and this would foster a spirit of dependence and unity despite territorial separation. Gods of the hunt and weather would likely feature prominently, as well as dualistic gods of life and death, who the gnolls would thank for their random gifts of carrion. 

Like most of the “always chaotic evil” ancestries, I don’t mind keeping the monstrous aspects of the gnolls somewhere in the toolbox, and the idea of the “always hungry, always bloodthirsty” raiders that not even other evils will align with is an interesting menace to face. In the default Gnoll lore, the gnolls were created from hyenas who fed upon the carrion left behind by the rampaging demon-prince Yeeenoghu. With a simple twist, we instead have “The hungry ones” a cult or demonically influenced faction of gnolls who are a dark perversion of gnollish nature much in the same way that vampires are a dark reflection of humanity. Made up of outcasts from stable gnollish society, these wretches revere a carrion demon as none of their people’s other spirits will watch over them, and aim o fill their bellies as many times as possible before the wilds finally claim them ( think Mad-Max warboys) 

If you wanted to put a twist on it, have these hungry ones be the “first contact” point between your traditional fantasy cultures and the gnolls of the badlands, souring relations between both groups and feeding off the inevitable clash.