Flying space gnolls!

One of the unit types in Grimdark Future's "jackals" army list is vultures - canine beastmen equipped with jump packs. Gnolls, of course, are feliform rather than canine, but they have impeccable scavenger credentials. 

 I used space-marine backpacks with space-marine shoulder pads over the exhausts to create the appearance of mobile-jointed jets. The weapon arms come from all over the place.

Space gnolls!

 Kitbashing Frostgrave gnolls into sci-fi versions is something I've been doing since the kit came out. These guys are the picking up of a project I was working on about a year ago. Happily, the kitbashes I made then work as a unit of "jackal" trackers for Grimdark Future plus a couple of heroes (one very big - a converted Wizkids gnoll).

I painted these figures very quickly, chiefly through drybrushing, with a few select layering-and-highlights areas (the black hyena-like features and the red weapons and armour). Drybrushing can look quite rough, but I reckon it's appropriate for dusty scavengers on some desert planet.

Some Ral Partha and Citadel gnolls

Gnolls are always handy monsters to have around - whether as generic beastmen or to fulfil specific roles in games such as D&D, Frostgrave and Elf, Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde. 

They are ultimately derived from Lord Dunsany's story How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles. The first edition of D&D makes this plain, along with the suggestion that the creatures were part gnomes and part troll - surely the inspiration for the original Citadel gnolls, which were eventually renamed "great goblins".

So why did they become hyena-men in later editions of D&D? I think it's just part of a general trend by which the "giant class" creatures - essentially a hierarchy of ever-more dangerous goblins - started to be differentiated through animal attributes. So kobolds became dog-men, goblins preserved the archetype of the Tolkien orc, orcs became pig-men, hobgoblins monkey-men or ape-men, gnolls hyena-men and bugbears bear-men. 

Interestingly, gnolls have preserved their animal identity through the various iterations of basic and advanced D&D as most of the others have not. Perhaps that's because hyena-men are just a more evocative concept - conjuring the ghouls of Arabic folklore as well a whole range of unsavoury habits. Hemingway summarises these nicely (if a little unfairly); his description is a great starting point for GMing gnolls:

"The hyena, hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain."

Gnolls!

 Here are a couple of gnolls: one originally by Rieder Design and now sold by Alternative Armies (as a "dog man") and the other by Essex. The latter (with the sword) may have a certain iconic status to readers of a certain age, as he was a regular feature of adverts in White Dwarf. 

More Minfigs gnolls

 Here are a couple more Minifigs gnolls to go with the one I painted up last week. The new ones are from the 80s (?) Greyhawk range rather than the 70s D&D range and are somewhat more hyena-like. But I like the look of both types together - some more manlike, others bearing more heavily the Mark of the Beast.

A Minifigs gnoll

 

Here's an old Minifigs gnoll. This range is clearly based on the Tom Wham illustration from the Basic D&D set:

And the Wham drawing is based on Dave Sutherland's illustration in the Monster Manual, though the former seems to have lost some of the more hyena-ish elements along the way:

A later range of Minfigs gnolls (World of Greyhawk, below) make the creatures more hyena-like, but they still retain some similarities to the original range - especially in stature. 

I'll be fielding the two types together in games: it would be odd to expect creatures of chaos (which is what gnolls are in early D&D) to lack variety!

Practising my art upon the gnolls ...

Here are a few quick gnolls - demonstrating none of the artistry of Mr Nuth, but some quick 'n' dirty speed painting instead. using the same basecoat/drybrush/wash method of the last batch I did.

These work out as four shooter elements and a brute for MicroHotT or four gnoll longbowmen and a chief for Book of War.

Gnolls!

I assembled my last remaining Frostgrave gnolls last night and gave them a very quick bash with the brushes, along with a big Reaper gnoll to act as a matriarch.

I've tried various hyena-like schemes on gnolls before, but here I went with the Monster Manual's prescription:

Gnolls have greenish gray skins, darker near the muzzle, with reddish gray to dull yellow mane. 

 That's probably just a Gygaxian attempt to describe hyena colouring, but it gives a distinctive template for underworld monsters, so I went with it.

I painted these fellows very quickly, though I used a three-stage process on the armour and weapons to get them good and rusty. Everything else was just blocked in, drybrushed with silver-grey and then washed with an appropriate colour. Then I used some silver-grey to highlight the odd edge or spot here and there.

The Reaper gnoll is much, much bigger, but makes a suitably sizeable matriarch; I like to assume that gnolls have the same sort of sexual dimorphism as hyenas.

Gnolls again

In my last post on gnolls, I was preparing to ditch them from my imminent campaign in favour of hyena-like ghouls. All well and good - but then I chanced upon some of the old Citadel AD&D gnolls in the leadpile. These aren't ghoul-like at all - they're big and burly rather than lithe and loathsome.

They also have plantigrade legs, like humans. The Frostgrave gnolls are digitigrade, so the two lots don't mix. Then I found some Alternative Armies "dogmen" that I had bought ages ago precisely because they fitted in well with the Citadel gnolls. And then, I got these old Grenadier gnolls very cheaply on eBay. They're not an exact fit with the Citadel and AA ones, but they'll mix in well enough. They're the first finished.

I've always found Grenadier Miniature a bit tricky to paint. They're nicely modelled, but they tend to have very shallow detail - and lots of it - without the exaggerations that make Citadel stuff sympathetic to paint. That defeats my usual stratagem of drybrushing. So for this pair, I just went for speed and "impressionistic" highlights on the fur (greenish-grey, as per the Monster Manual).

Gnolls and ghouls

I love Lord Dunsany's fantasy stories - not least because some of them make excellent bedtime stories for children. I've read mine The Hoard of the Gibbelins, How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles and The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller, and of the Doom that Befell Him several times. They love them (all three are essentially the same story), and they reckon The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth is "epic" too (it is!). A year ago, in Florence, I managed to send them to sleep after an ice-cream-fuelled day by means of a soporific reading of Idle Days of the Yann  - one of the best of Dunsany's tales, but not so appealing to the young imagination, I fear.

I'm fairly confident that How Nuth ... played a significant part in the establishment of D&D's thief class, presenting as it does the burglar as respectable professional. It probably influenced The Hobbit too, for the same reason; Tolkien knew and liked Dunsany's work. 

But the most direct contribution Dunsany made to D&D was the gnoll. Gygax denied the influence later, but it's plain as can be, barring a typo, in the original brown books:

GNOLLS: A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale. Otherwise they are similar to Hobgoblins, although the Gnoll king and his bodyguard of from 1–4 will fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power.

The hyena-like form that appeared later owed nothing to Dunsany, of course. But when Gygax and Arneson were stocking their first bestiary with a range of synonyms for goblin, to which they ascribed escalating power,  they turned to the gnole/gnoll as one of the more powerful. So, in OD&D, we have kobolds, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and gnolls - none of which are described in much detail, and all of which, barring gnoll, essentially mean 'goblin'.

Dunsany's gnoles were certainly dangerous - formidable, even. And the Sydney Sime illustration that accompanied the publication of the story - and inspired it too, for the illustrations of The Book of Wonder came first - shows the gnoles as shadowy, goblin-like creatures:

(You can see more of Sime's stuff here.)

It's easy to see how these hunched and powerful-looking monsters fit into the taxonomy of ever-more formidable goblins, creatures that were eventually distinguished by giving them animal-like characteristics (dogs for kobolds, pigs for orcs, apes or mandrills for hobgoblins, hyenas for gnolls).

Since the Monster Manual, D&D gnolls no longer appear as part of a goblin hierarchy. To me, they intrude rather into the territory of the ghoul. Lovecraft's ghouls have dog-like snouts (hyenas are more closely related to cats than dogs, but they look more like dogs):

"But damn it all, it wasn’t even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all panic—not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn’t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet—none of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness."

And of course, in the popular imagination, ghouls and hyenas are both, above all, eaters of the dead.

In Arabic folklore - at least as it has filtered through to the West - ghouls are demons that haunt cemeteries and eat corpses:

"There I hid myself under the shadow of the wall, and crouched down cautiously; and hardly was I concealed, when I saw my wife approaching in company with a ghoul--one of those demons which, as your Highness is aware, wander about the country making their lairs in deserted buildings and springing out upon unwary travellers whose flesh they eat. If no live being goes their way, they then betake themselves to the cemeteries, and feed upon the dead bodies."
(The Story of Sidi-Noumain, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, ed. Andrew Lang)

 Sometimes, they assume the shape of a hyena. And in any case, they're bestial and monstrous in appearance.

In running D&D, I like to prune and rationalise the monster list somewhat. Most GMs do, I suspect.I used gnolls in a recent Dungeon World scenario that I ran for both my kids and a visiting relative and for a group of old friends. In both games, the gnolls manifested as nocturnal haunters of ruins and tombs - all high-pitched snickering, bone-gnawing and glowing eyes in the darkness. Those are exactly the characteristics I'd want from ghouls. And I think the hyena-like heads help to differentiate ghouls from walking corpses of various sorts, making them stranger, eerier yet more resonant. Oddly enough, the Monster Manual connects gnolls and ghouls through Yeenoghu, the Demon Lord of Gnolls, who "also receives homage from the King of Ghouls".

 So, in the megadungeon I'm currently planning as a setting for both skirmish wargames and RPGs, gnolls will simply  be ghouls.