Gnolls

Beyond the edge of their enemies' torchlight, the gnolls' tittering growls and snickering vocalizations disrupt the stillness. Occasionally, the light of reflective eyes dances in the darkness, but it is never enough to give a clear idea of the gnolls' number or plan of attack.

Like the hyenas that hunt with them, these pack humanoids use misdirection, fear, and coordinated attacks to wear down their prey. With a cackling and irksome confidence, they murder at a leisurely pace, one spear strike at a time, ripping flesh and drawing blood until their enemy is too weak to resist their final onslaught.

Creatures primarily of the burning desert and arid plain, gnolls know that survival relies on the pack. The matriarch of the pack enforces simple rules of gnoll cohesion. The struggle is not from within the pack, but outside of it. That which is weaker than the gnoll is food. Rest ensures sufficient strength for the hunt. Bite off only what you can chew, saving the rest for the survival of the pack—but always claim your share. Raise whelps to be strong, and discard the weak.

Any creature that is not part of the pack is nothing more than moving meat. Even when a gnoll pack serves a powerful master from outside the pack, it does so with only its own survival in mind, and it quickly abandons that master if continued service would be suicidal. Other races might look down on the gnolls as selfish, lazy, and ultimately destructive, but gnolls merely cackle at such judgments. For gnolls, survival is the only morality, and eating one's enemies is the ultimate display of power.

It was once believed that gnolls were a scourge of savannas and deserts alone, but while most gnolls prefer the regions favored by hyenas, they live and hunt in nearly every climate. Because gnolls' survival and pack cohesion rely on the hunt, if a pack becomes too large, it splinters. The weaker group is pushed beyond the borders of its former pack's hunting territory, often into regions with different ecologies and prey. While gnolls are numerous in arid climates, smaller and more desperate packs roam highlands, lowlands, forests, taigas, and even the Darklands.

Gnolls are strictly carnivorous, even to the point of resorting to cannibalism in times of great need, during religious rituals, or to show their dominance after defeating a rival. The majority of their meat, however, comes from the hunt. Nearly any kind of meat can provide sustenance, but they have a strong preference for the flesh of sentient creatures. This preference is both practical (as sentient creatures are a great threat to the pack's stability and survival) and bound up with the common gnoll superstition that consuming a creature allows one to absorb its power. That said, there is a prevalent taboo among most gnolls against eating the flesh of the pugwampi (Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 2 144). Their disdain for these fawning fey is so great that most gnolls believe that eating pugwampi flesh weakens gnolls and can even curse the entire pack. It is better to kill them, weave their flesh into pugwampi braids —which at least have some use—and leave their meat to rot.

Gnoll packs are matriarchal because female gnolls tend to be larger, more aggressive, and more cunning than males. Size aside, there are few physical differences in the appearances of female and male gnolls. On the average, a gnoll male is around 6 feet in height while the average gnoll female is closer to 6-1/2 feet, though gnolls of both genders appear shorter due to their stooping posture.

The gnoll pack is a multilayered structure based on competing for dominance, with one alpha—typically the largest and most powerful female gnoll—at its apex. Rarely, a group of packs can mesh in an even more complex and ever shifting hierarchy in order to create a tribe or horde. This happens only when they're led by an extremely powerful leader, be it an alpha gnoll or a bullying outsider who can understand and manipulate the ever-shifting sands of gnoll dominance.

Gnolls respect power and the ruthlessness to wield it successfully more than they do birth or station. A gnoll holds power over a pack because he or she is feared and revered, and only as long as he or she remains so. Because of this, when a pack leader dies, becomes infirm, or loses face, authority changes hands after a brief and bloody scramble for power between any gnolls with a thirst for power and the ability to assert dominance. Such scrambles for ascension often splinter a pack, as failed would-be alphas and their supporters are chased from the pack. This can create powerful rivalries between splintered packs, but often the ejected gnolls leave their pasts behind and pursue the hunt in new lands, attempting to build a new power base through increased breeding and rampaging hunts for new prey.

Like hyenas, gnolls are nocturnal. During the day a gnoll encampment would seem slothful to outside observers, especially if they saw gnolls only during daylight hours. Such sightings, along with the fact that gnolls see little use in building permanent structures, have given gnolls the reputation for being lazy brutes. At night, though, the pack becomes a frenzy of murderous activity. Gnolls divide themselves into raiding parties, each of which scouts prey in the nighttime hours. When particularly powerful prey is located, the scouts vocalize to the pack in order to regroup and attack the prey in a swarming group. While the gnoll pack is usually interested only in the kill, some packs will take slaves for a time, using them as manual labor, and as a stock of food when prey is scarce. More often than not, such gnoll packs keep slaves while whelps are young, and when the captives have been sufficiently weakened from abuse, they're released as quarry so the whelps can engage in their first hunt with prey that have lost the ability to fight.

## Introduction

Apparently, the Gnolls of Carthage has had a smear campaign put upon them by the Empire officials. The smear campaign paints gnolls as savages. This is not the truth. The gnolls, although Hyaenids (humanoid hyenas) basically, are not a bunch of murderous savages. They have culture at Carthage. Although the Carthaginian gnolls and the Empire fought on numerous occasions, the gnolls were never conquered.

They, the gnolls, have been living in peace. Scared that the empire will eventually conquer them. Gnolls are peaceful creatures, and some of them do get adventurous from time to time. Some of them do find adventure in the Empire.

## Statistics

### Pathfinder Statistics

Type Humanoid (Hyaenid)

Size Medium

Base Speed 30 ft.

Ability Score Modifiers Flexible (+2 Str, +2 Con)

Languages Xenophobic

Racial Traits

Natural armor

Darkvision 60 ft.