When draconic blood flows through the veins of a non-dragon, that creature comes to exhibit dragonlike characteristics. A half-dragon has a dragon’s snout, fangs, and scaly hide, and possesses a breath weapon as devastating as that of a true dragon. Some half-dragons even grow wings. The lifespan of a half-dragon is far longer than that of most humanoids, with some half-dragons living 300 or 400 years.

Burning Blood. Mad wizards—or anyone in need of powerful minions—can infuse a creature with dragon blood. This painful process burns away much of a creature’s former nature, producing a servant loyal to its creator but perpetually tortured by the blood burning in its veins. Chromatic and gem dragons frequently employ this technique to create dependable servants.

Shape Changers. Metallic dragons that take humanoid form sometimes fall in love, mate, and even marry in that form. The product of such unions is a half-dragon. A metallic half-dragon is often nurtured by both its parents, though a humanoid parent may die of old age long before their half-dragon child is fully grown.

Dragonborn Champions. A child of dragonborn parents sometimes exhibits half-dragon characteristics. Often, a half-dragon dragonborn is expected to take on the role of chieftain or champion. Those halfdragons unwilling to take on the mantle of leadership often leave dragonborn society altogether.

Dragonborn champions are particularly common among dragonborn tribes that serve essence dragons.

Three old crones cackle over a bubbling cauldron on a secluded isle. Inside their pot are the bones of misbehaving children. These fey creatures are called hags.

Wicked Witches. Although hags appear humanoid, they are in fact fey creatures that prey upon humanoid and faerie folk alike. Hags pay fealty to the archfey Baba Yaga. To better emulate their terrifying mistress, hags often take the form of withered women with exaggerated features, such as extremely long noses, stringy gray hair, and loose skin draped over skeletal frames, although they sometimes appear as decrepit old men.

Boons and Bargains. Like all fey creatures, hags follow strict rules. They never prey on a victim without gaining some form of power over it first. Being impolite to a hag incurs a minor obligation, while stealing from a hag or trespassing in its home may put a mortal entirely at the hag’s mercy.

A hag’s favorite form of power, however, is the bargain. Hags have many gifts to offer—writs of safe passage, healing balms and love potions, or curses placed on one’s enemies—and desperate people sometimes pay terrible prices in exchange for such help. A hag always makes good on a bargain but often twists the petitioner’s true desires. A mortal may become rich at the expense of a loved one, marry their beloved only to find the union plagued with conflict, or give birth to a longed-for child that turns out to be a mischievous hedgehog. In any case, once a bargain is sealed, the bargainer is in the hag’s power.

Maternal Monsters. Many hags are driven by a perverse instinct to adopt mortal children. They develop over-protective, yet loving, relationships with their children, and sometimes even pass on their powers to their wards. As fey creatures, however, hags enforce rigid, arbitrary rules, and have been known to kill and eat poorly behaved children. For this reason, mortal mothers sometimes use the threat of a hag’s visit to frighten their children into obedience.

Cruel Covens. Hags that practice together are called covens, and usually consist of three hags that are closely related. Though hags in the same coven are fiercely loyal to each other, feuds between covens are common. Covens may compete over the number and cruelty of their bargains, the comfort of their lairs, or who makes the better human pancreas stew.

A hag in a coven is more powerful than one alone. It gains new abilities that persist even if the others in its coven are killed. Only banishment from a coven can rob a hag of its enhanced might.

Guardians, sometimes called golems, are animated constructs made from various materials: moldable clay, rigid stone, mighty iron, and even stitched flesh. They are singular in purpose, carrying out their creator’s commands with the commitment of a force of nature.

Constructed Form. Crafting a guardian’s body requires the skill of an expert sculptor—or surgeon, in the case of flesh guardians. Once the guardian’s body has been constructed, a spellcaster must use secret formulae to breathe life into the creature. A guardian never ages and can endure centuries after its creator’s death.

Command Dependence. A guardian can’t think for itself and acts only on commands from its creator. When its creator is present to oversee it, a guardian will perform its tasks very well. If its creator is absent, a guardian will carry out its orders to the best of its ability but can’t make corrections using its own reasoning. A guardian that is prevented from fulfilling its purpose, or one that is severely damaged, is unpredictable. It could simply become inert, or it may fly into a violent frenzy. Given these limitations, a guardian is suitable for only simple tasks, such as guarding a specific location or acting as its creator’s bodyguard.

Mysterious Origins. Some scholars believe that a guardian is an animate, but lifeless, being. Others claim that a guardian’s creator imbues it with an elemental spirit—or a bit of the creator’s spirit—during the guardian’s creation. Whatever the truth, constructing a guardian requires instructions found in a rare magical tome called a manual of guardians .

Constructed Nature. Guardians don’t require air, sustenance, or sleep.

From the wildest forests to the most sprawling metropolises, there’s no place in the world you won’t find goblins. For these small, individually weak creatures, survival is the greatest virtue.

It’s A Living. Life is unfair to goblins. It’s the one thing they can count on. Goblins are rarely granted mercy or kindness by larger folk, and in return they rarely extend it to others.

Goblins are often found in the service of more powerful creatures, particularly larger goblinoids such as hobgoblins. When faced with impossible tasks or unfair expectations, goblins grumble and complain, plot petty revenge, then roll up their sleeves and get to work. Where other creatures might turn up their noses at disgusting, cramped environments, goblins see opportunity. They will carve out space where none exists, flourishing in the cracks of civilization or in the unforgiving wilderness.

Expert Opportunists. Goblins often lurk in civilization’s liminal spaces: in abandoned mines within raiding distance of a village, or in a sprawling sewer beneath a city. Goblins can find a use for almost anything, from broken or discarded gear to abandoned tunnels to the rotting husks of long-dead trees. Goblin equipment is frequently scavenged or crafted out of unlikely materials. Goblins rarely risk combat, except when they are certain they have the upper hand. They will gladly take your discarded food, however—and, if you’re not careful, whatever else is on your table and in the bag you left unattended, as well.

Feral Glee. Goblins take their joy wherever they can find it. An unsupervised moment to play is a prize they cherish more than food or treasure. It may not last long, but goblins can make a game out of anything, and they respond well to anyone who plays along.

Giants tower over other mortals, standing between 15 and 30 feet tall. While they may look like large humanoids, they are in actuality beings with close ties to other planes.

Elemental Power. Giants left their mark on the world long before the rise of the empires of humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs. Some say giants are the descendants of elemental gods, and thus are the inheritors of divine power. Others believe giants were created at the dawn of the world, hewn from the same primal elemental matter that gave birth to the Material Plane. Whatever their origin, giants are powerful forces of nature.

Ancestral Homes. Giants claim their empires once spanned the world. Indeed, many giant clans still habit ancient palaces of imperial grandeur. These palaces invariably have close ties to elemental and other planes and contain ancient treasures that can draw the attention of adventurer and dragon alike.

Towering Achievements. Giantkind has produced some of the world’s greatest warriors, finest craftspeople, and most powerful spellcasters. Giants value competition, from the frost giants’ contests of strength to the hill giants’ eating contests. Most giants do not concern themselves with the affairs of humanoids, while the worst among them exploit small folk for their own ends. History is filled with stories of giants raiding farms or kidnapping people, but also of wise giants passing knowledge down to the small folk or giant heroes slaying rampaging beasts.

Undead cursed with an eternal hunger for humanoid flesh, ghouls prowl graveyards and the ruins of dead cities. Though content to feed on corpses, ghouls prefer fresh meat. The unfortunate victim of a ghoul’s paralytic touch can’t struggle—or even scream—as the ghoul devours them alive.

Dark Blessing. Legends say the first ghoul was an elf who practiced depraved, cannibalistic rituals to curry favor with the demon lord of undeath. When this elf repented, the gods decreed that he and his kind would be forever immune to the ghouls’ paralytic touch. Still, the demon lord continues to reward feasters of flesh by transforming them into ghouls. Even those who turn to cannibalism out of desperation might unwillingly receive the lord’s dark blessing. Aboleths , hags, and necromancers know rites to create ghouls, as well.

More than Monsters. Unlike mindless undead such as skeletons or zombies, ghouls are intelligent, though constant hunger turns most into ravening monsters. A ghoul whose appetites are routinely satisfied, however, might recover some of its faculties. Much like vampires, many “noble” ghouls conceal their nature from the settlements they feed upon, so as to keep a steady supply of food at hand. Others journey far beneath the earth to seek out the ghoulish empire said to exist in those dark, forbidding caverns.

Undead Nature. Ghouls and ghasts don’t require air, sustenance, or sleep.

Powerful spirits who command the elements as easily as a general might command a legion of soldiers, genies rule the Elemental Planes. Beings of air, earth, fire, and water, genies are as diverse in form and temperament as the elements they command. Their cities are bastions of relative safety amid the roiling torrents of the elements. On occasion, genies visit the Material Plane to explore or to meet with a powerful spellcaster.

Splendor of the Planes. There are four types of genies, each embodying one of the four basic elements. Their unique nature gives them mastery over elemental magic: a genie can create all manner of magical wonders out of the raw stuff of the Elemental Planes. Genies gather in places where currents of elemental energies come together. There, they build cities of unimaginable splendor, where creatures of all sorts can live together. Art, music, and magic flourish within their walls.

Noble Genies. The most powerful genies— sometimes called nobles by envious mortals—are the undisputed masters of the elements. Lesser genies are drawn to them, and some genie nobles also create elementals, imbuing them with a portion of their own essence and personality. The most powerful nobles can grant wishes to mortals who earn their favor.

Mortal Fascination. Sometimes genies will explore the Material Plane, living among mortals in secret or offering their services in exchange for treasure. Why they do so is a mystery, even to genies. Perhaps they feel an attraction to the ever-changing inhabitants of an otherwise stable plane; perhaps they are simply amused by the everyday struggles of people who invest so much into what seems (to a genie) like such a short life.

Elemental Demise. When a genie dies, its body becomes a mote of elemental energy. This mote might take the form of a glowing chunk of earth, a shardof crystallized air, or an ever-burning ember.

Divi || Divi Noble || Djinni || Djinni Noble || Efreeti || Efreeti Noble || Marid || Marid Noble
 

In lightless caverns and fey forests, fungi appear in every color and shape. Some grow to prodigious size, choking pathways or forming looming fungal forests.

Self-Propagators. Fungi do not need sunlight to flourish. They grow in any available organic matter, including bodily waste and corpses. Fungi provide many necessities to underground dwellers: food, fuel, alcohol, and even phosphorescent lighting. Common fungi reproduce by ejecting spores, which are carried on breezes or cling to the bodies of passing creatures. Monstrous fungi treat other life forms as food and hosts for expansion: they have a remarkable variety of ways to infest, infect, and devour more mobile creatures.

Faeries are luminous, elfin creatures with delicate wings resembling those of butterflies or dragonflies. Though they can appear deceptively non-threatening, faeries wield great power on their home plane, variously called the Dreaming, the Feywild, or Fairyland. Many people assume all faeries are the size of the tiny pixies often seen on the Material Plane. In the Dreaming, where time and space are mutable, powerful faeries change sizes as they do clothes, appearing as pixie-sized beings one day and towering
giants the next.

Faerie Courts. Faeries are loosely organized into feudal courts, with each faerie subject to the rule of a powerful archfey . Within their own realms, archfey have nearly godlike power over the land and are able to raise forests, fell mountains, and even change seasons at will. Most archfey align themselves with one of two rival factions: the seelie and unseelie courts. While all fairies are prone to mischief, the seelie courts often spare creatures who meet their arbitrary standards of beauty and worthiness. The unseelie courts, on the other hand, revel in the grotesque and are prone to unprovoked malice. Neither faction can be said to be “good” or “evil”: concepts of morality are foreign to faeries.

Rules and Favors. Mysterious laws bind faeries to one another in complex webs of obligation. A creature that performs a seemingly innocuous act, such as speaking the faerie’s name or giving it a certain food, may earn the right to claim a favor from a faerie. The nature and timing of the favor is up to the faerie: it might take the form of advice, service, aid in battle, safe passage—or something seemingly useless or inconvenient, such as a magic bean or glowing hair. Refusing to accept a faerie’s favor is considered a grave insult.