I have wanted to write something in the Worldbuilding community for a while... so here goes.
A very recent drawing of a Gnoll. I made it for a boardgame project, but that has since moved in another direction, so I thought I'd better use it here.
Many years ago my brother, my two cousins and I was introduced to the Dungeons and Dungeons roleplaying game. We were 12-15 years old, had been playing games for many years, but our uncle who always gave us the newest in boardgames had informed our cousins (when he gave them the game for Christmas) that this should be something very different from a normal board game. It did say so itself on the cover of the rules: This game requires no game Board because the action takes place in the player's imagination.
We sat down to read the rules (a bit of a feat as they were in English) and began realising that it really was different. The process of creating a complex playing character was fascinating, but the oldest of my cousins, a person who plays an important role in this little story, was a bit disappointed when he realised that he could not make an orc wizard. The rigid classes and the idea that you should choose alignment (evil, good or neutral) obviously rubbed us all the wrong way.
So we began playing the game on a week long holiday and had great fun. Dungeons were drawn and games were constructed and played and it was in this early stage that the cousin I mentioned earlier found the gnoll in the DnD rulebooks.
In the rules they are described like this:
Gnolls are beings of low intelligence that
appear to be human-like hyenas. They may
use all weapons. They are strong, but dislike
work and prefer to bully and steal. For
every 20 gnolls encountered, one will be a
leader with 16 hit points who attacks as a 3
hit dice monster. Gnolls are rumored to be
the result of a magical combination of a
gnome and a troll by an evil magic-user.
A drawing of two Dungeons and Dragons gnolls, found on this page.
But in Danish ears (and maybe also to other people) it is a pretty funny name. So my cousin immediately populated his and my games with gnolls... not the hyaena faced kind mentioned in the DnD rules, but crazy, erratic, manic little creatures that only seldom retorted to violence. When they did they were, due to the DnD rules pretty good in battle, but that didn't change anything, and none of us envisioned them like they were portrayed in the rules. We are all reasonably good at drawing in the family and the physiology of the gnolls, already at this early stage, was going in a very different direction than the one portrayed in the DnD rules.
a big hanging nose, big eyes and ears and normally bald. This one seems to have hair (maybe a wig). An old drawing made by my cousin.
When my brother and I came home from the vacation, my brother immediately began drafting a new game. It was obvious that we could improve on Dungeons and Dragons and for example make it possible to have orc wizard characters. When we had finished the first version of the rules you could choose your character from any race you liked. The game, that from then on replaced Dungens and Dragons (which we never played again), had the usual fantasy races: man, orc, dwarf, elf and troll that was pretty much the same as every other fantasy film, book or roleplaying game, but many of the races were different even though they had commonplace fantasy names: gnomes, kobolt, hunchback and gnoll.
Because of my cousin's gnoll visions, this race developed in a very special direction. The gnolls were strange creatures - When encountered alone they were intelligent, often very intelligent, but with a tendency towards all kinds of idiosyncratic mannerisms often mimicking humans in strange ways. I think that the one depicted above for example is possessed with the idea that he is a bard and therefore wears a wig like his human idols.
When encountered in groups the gnolls had often been gripped by sudden migration, religious awakening, strange collective hobbies, sex orgies, or mass hysteria.
A drawing made by my brother, of a band of gnolls obsessed with war.
The gnolls seldom had much cloth, that was one of the typical traits of them, but when imitating humans they could be richly dressed.
The gnolls had reached a new form and they stabilised in our collective mind as these intelligent, but half mad creatures without impulse control.
As we had left Dungeons and Dragons behind all that remained of the original gnoll was the name.
A gnoll used for finding truffles
