Design Notes: Serpent's Children (Patreon)

Surprise! Another design notes entry for June. When it was suggested I do a design-notes entry on a species, it specifically was for one with "a lot more moving parts than most traditional races" — and then I proceeded to talk about Awakened Trees, one of the more basic species I've written in awhile. So let's zip the other way, and talk about one of the most complicated species I've written!

Serpent's Children began life as Yuan-Ti (Revised), which will surprise absolutely nobody. I've always thought snake-people are cool as hell, but WotC really dropped the ball on theirs. Volo's Guide had the first iteration of the Yuan-Ti Pureblood, and gave them both magic resistance and poison immunity, blowing their power budget to smithereens. Then when WotC revisited them for Monsters of the Multiverse, they made the baffling decision to keep the magic resistance and ditch the poison immunity — keep the feature that's less flavorful and more impactful, and lose the one that's interesting.

So D&D needed a good snake-person. I pretty quickly settled on two mechanical hooks to prioritize:

Being a friggin' snake. The fact that WotC only ever implemented Purebloods, i.e. the yuan-ti that can pass for human and aren't very snakey, is a crime.

Being a weird mutant. Yuan-ti Malisons have one of the most interesting (albeit kinda failed) statblock experiments in the game, with multiple subtypes contained in the same statblock. One type are humans with snake heads, one have snake torsos, one just have giant snakes for arms.

The Basics

Type: Monstrosity! Immunity to Hold Person and Charm Person is a nice situational benefit.

Size & Speed: Medium and 30 feet, nothing to see here.

Poison Resistance: Feels pretty quintessentially snake-person to me.

ASI's: Two points of your ASIs come in at the species level.

Serpent's Form

The Serpent's Children get two interesting headline features, both in the form of a choice menu. By mixing and matching, you can build your own unique mutant snake-person.

Serpent's Form is the "major" feature, and lets you choose between a snake tail, a snake head, and passing-for-human. Your choice determines your 3rd ASI point. Broadly, the snake tail boosts speed and grappling; the snake head gives you a bite attack; and passing-for-human gives you Deception and disguise kits.

Serpent's Heritage

Serpent's Heritage is the "minor" feature, allowing a PC to make two selections. There are nine options overall, ranging from poison immunity to 5' blindsight to shedding your skin at will.

How the Design Works

Serpent's Children may read fairly complicated as species go, but the design's honestly pretty straightforward: it's just two choice menus. There's a little interaction between the two (you need fangs to get a poison attack), but they're mostly independent. The only real trick to it is to walk through enough of the combinations that you eliminate any overpowered combos. You can also sort of think of the modular design here as being a build-your-own-subspecies design (and the power budget's pretty similar, actually).

That's really all there is to go into! I don't think every species needs a choice menu, let alone two big ones. But it's a great way to try and model a really diverse type of species, where there's a ton of room for individuals to be mechanically distinct.