#grimlocks

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hi! I really like your other takes on Underdark races, and wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on improving grimlocks? Beyond the permanent blindness they have and the whole being humans who adapted to the underdark, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else done with them.

Monsters Reimagined: Grimlocks

Would it surprise anyone to learn that a d-list d&d monster has It's roots in 1800s ideas about eugenics and bad adaptations of genre fiction? No? Then you've been paying attention, top marks.

Asker is absolutely right in their assessment that there's not really much to grimlocks. They're one of many "hostile tribal primitives" that have filled out the monster roster ever since the original developers lifted them en mass from the pulp adventure stories they grew up reading.

A common theme among these pulp works and the early scifi that inspired it was devolution, the idea that a people could degrade from greatness back into an animistic nature. The most well known pop culture example would be HP lovecraft's deep ones, where the author's fears of race mixing manifest as monsters that literally push humanity back down the evolutionary ladder to the stage of fish.

There's plenty of different ways to explain the origin of this writing trend, but I like to chalk it up to an anxiety resulting from the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by a society that believed wholeheartedly in scientific racism. If intelligence (read: whiteness) wasn't just a god given right but was infact inheritable, then it could also be disinherited, bred out of a population whether by on purpose or by accident. This made it so important to practice good breeding (read: eugenics), to preserve the pure stock from falling to degeneracy (read: miscegenation) and introducing undesirable traits into the genepool.

We can see fear this with grimlocks, humanoids who were inherently lessened by their "adaptation" to life underground, losing their intelligence and eyesight and descending into a state of barbarism. Given that this is one of the few d&d monsters that mention evolution at all, we can trace this feature to their likely inspiration: The morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time machine, published a scant 36 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

I'm not well read enough to know whether Wells pioneered the idea of subhuman descendants, but I can say that most of his imitators missed the point of his writing: Wells saw in his day an increasingly indolent upper class inflicting brutal and dehumanizing labour conditions on the poor to support their own carefree lifestyle. He satirized this in his book by showing that while the descendants of the rich had devolved into beautiful, useless, idiots, the descendants of the workers devolved into subterranean ape-things who maintained the machinery that allowed the eden like existence of the rich while farming them for meat. Say what you will about Wells' race politics (Neither degenerate fop or inbred ape can withstand the smarts and strength of the enlightened colonial Englishman) but his writing was specifically class continuous, and the brutality of the morlocks was a direct result of the exploitation of working people in his own day and age.

When the morlocks were adapted into the grimlocks , the d&d writers kept their canibalistic streak but specifically removed their class based origins as well as their mechanical knowhow. This is a near identical process to what happened with a creature the worlocks helped inspire: Tolkien's orcs, which were likewise turned from a commentary on the brutality of the industrial age into warlike primitives. It's a bit of a trend.

If you wanted to "fix" the grimlocks I'd go one of two ways:

If you want to engage with themes of primality, make them legit underdark dwelling primates/australopithecus type of creatures, just figuring out tool use and language. Make the rumours of them being descended from cave-exploring humanoids a common myth made up by surface dwellers.

If you want to get spicy about it though, give them back their mechanical aptitude and maybe mix in a few more dashes of pulp "lost civilization" ancient aliens nonsense. Have them dwell in great mechanical complexes beneath the earth, worker drones who've long outlived the creatures that enslaved them and scribed mechanical knowledge into their very being. Originally denied understanding of the machines they toiled to build, work, and maintain, the grimlocks jealously guard the science they've spent generations reverse engineering, giving them the reputation of being violently territorial for those underdark travelers who venture too close to the megastructures they inhabit.

Artsource

[celnpudding]

me grimlock professional artist

[zeropro]

Remember back when Swoop was the only aerial offense the Autobots had?

Wonder how StarScream felt about the curious dino.

[kaiselline]

Sketches for an idea i had about the autobots liking the trailer and just passing time there. Optimus just lets it happen, bc why not

Anyway, i let him be happy for far too long already

The thought of optimus having to carry the literal dead weight of his friends is what actually made me want to do this, i might make this a full piece one day, who knows

[bebebeep0v0]

😆

[maukiki1]

Go random bullshit go

Jumpscare warning

[classjezter]

For you idea that wheeljack finds the Dinobots as sparkling I imagine that since Grimlock is the oldest he would be standing in front of his siblings protectively ready to fight wheeljack when he finds them. Despite Grimlock effort he is just like a kitten hissing he thinks he is beind intimidating but he is just being adorable

He was small and cold and scared, but there were smaller ones that were colder and more scared

From this

[catpeap]

[yellowpiez]

Drawing transformers as stupid babies collection

[jebbliink]

Gee Grimlock, how come they let you have two dads?

[startheskelaton]

Updates:

The rabbits fucked…. Ouughhhhhhhh

My brother got some friends of his own, good for him!

The gay birds have welcomed their ugly ass chicks into the world 💛

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[dailyadventureprompts]

i think you had a good analysis on the grimlocks & how to fix them overall, but i disagree that taking an "ancient aliens" route is a good way to fix them. i know it likely wasnt your intent, but all the ancient aliens stuff is also based in racist ideals of which societies were "advanced" enough to make certain things, and are also often quite antisemitic. sprinkling some stuff from that into the grimlocks gives it a good chance of just becoming racist in a different way

Friend I am all too familiar with the conspiracy theory/quack archaeology headspace so when I touch on that iconography I do so with deliberate intent.

The fundamental context of the ancient alien theory is "These buildings are too impressive for nonwhite savage people to build, they must've been constructed through advanced technology handed down by a white atlantian/interdimensional/alien civilization from whom the white explorer claims decent."

I'm a big fan of playing with problematic fiction tropes (especially in the pulp genre) by swapping perspectives around to the people the author doesn't expect you to sympathize with, and in the case of the ancient aliens setup it's something along the lines of "Man it sucks that this asshole with lazerbeams showed up, enslaved us, fundamentally altered what we were and forced generations of our people to labour to death building him a palace. We should unionize and kill that guy"

I was specifically inspired by the brilliant Innsmouth Legacy novel series which reinterprets Lovecraft from the perspective of the people his fiction acted as a veil for his (and the entire pulp genre he was a pillar of) prejudice.

[lecanel]

I want to rewrite the entire plot of the 2nd season of Earthspark:

1)Instead of Starscream, the main villain is Quintesson. (The whole season). That is, the Quintessons want to collect Emberstone, gain the power of Quintus Prime and destroy another world

2) Due to the fact that the Decepticons are not villains, we will have even more of their disclosures on the good side

3) And in the end, all together: Autobots, Malto, Decepticons will defeat the Quintessons

The Good ending. Peace, friendship, love 😘

[zeropro]

It's kinda sad that starscream is having a better time with the autobots- the enemy he's supposed to be fighting against, than he ever did with the decepticons

Well, I wouldn’t say his time with the Decepticons was ALL bad. In fact, while staying with the Autobots, some familiar faces may turn up at the Autobot base now that Starscream is hanging out there!

For a lot of people, the war has essentially been over for nearly three years (due to both Optimus and Megatron being out of the picture). Now that Megatron is back, not everyone wants to go back to war, and some of the Decepticons that had been hiding out on Earth are starting to reach out for help. I think with Starscream staying with the Autobots, he'd become a sort of liaison between ex-Decepticons and Autobots. This isnt to say they're all living at Autobot base now, some of them might, while others like Swindle are out doing their own thing and only showing up to trade or whatever else.

A bit annoying to Starscream considering they wouldnt follow him when he was technically leader of the Decepticons, but we take what we can get.

[knnw-a]

[czcreation]

Dummy idiot dumbass trio