Gray Dwarves (Duergar)

Like the drow, the duergar are a cold-hearted subterranean race of dark-skinned humanoids. Unlike the drow, they put on no airs of aristocratic refinement, despite thinking they're better than anybody else.

Duergar are deep believers that life is nothing but thankless, painful work, as the doctrines Laduguer state. The priests of their religion go through agonizing torture in order to prove themselves worthy. The rest of them are all craftsmen, creating beautiful treasure after treasure. However, they don't seem to indulge very much in them. The dress of the duergar is drab, without embellishment, while their works are locked away in deep trap-filled vaults. Life is work, not pleasure, even if it's the pleasure of artistic accomplishment.

Duergar also have a fascinating origin myth. Laduguer created the grey dwarves and taught them to work. And they did. But there was one dwarf, the Lone Craftsman, who would hide away from deific eyes and commit blasphemies: he created life. The Lone Craftsman made all the other races of the world and when Laduguer found out, he cursed him, transforming him into the first derro, another subterranan race made up of psychotic small man incapable of creation due to their small attention spans. So the Duergar see all other races as abominations and insults against their god. They especially hate other dwarves, seeing them as the Lone Craftsman's ultimate heresy. The only race they almost respect are gnomes, since they're almost as single-minded in their craftsmanship as the duergar.

They're tough to fight as well, with innate size-changing and invisibility abilities. I bet a good many adventurer has been smashed by an underground giant not realizing that they were fighting a dwarf.

There need to be more lady dwarves. Also, the lady dwarves need to be as hirsute as their male counterparts.

Brain Mole

Amazingly psychic moles aren't another entry in the silly things wizards make tag (not to my knowledge, at least), but it's darn close. These little fellas must be quite annoying for early-level psionic adventurers, draining your precious power points and giving you psychic-only diseases.

Psionics (psychic magic) is one of those sets of rules I never bothered learning with D&D. The game is already complicated and varied enough as it is without throwing another form of casting in the game. All I really know about it is what I read about in this monster's entry, and the various complaints of loud people in forums claiming that they're broken.

Any psionic stories from you guys?

Githyanki

Githyanki are vicious, gaunt humanoids who live in societies strewn across the Astral Plane, the vast, timeless space between dimensions. Long ago bred as slaves to the ancient Illithid empire, the Githyanki were led from captivity by their ancestral leader Gith, in a great war which nearly wiped out the Illithids altogether. Now, wracked by internal conflict, the Githyanki are little more than a race of pirates, adding to the dangers of astral travel. They build their fortresses on the petrified bodies of dead gods adrift in the void.

The Githyanki are a weird sort of race in D&D, looking a little like a cross between orcs and elves (if such a thing is concievable). Not only are they essentially pirates, they are space pirates, which is pretty cool in my book. I inked this one by hand in Photoshop after making some custom brushes, and I'm pleased with the result. I tried to make up for the fact that they're usually depicted as barely clothed humanoids by doing a ridiculous upside-down foreshortening thing, but I think it gets the zero-gravity feel of the Astral Plane across fairly well. Oh, and they use these cool mercurial swords.