d6 | Flaws |
1 | Do not prevent me from eating at least a piece of any edible creature I kill. You will regret it. |
2 | Concepts like the difference between "always" and "sometimes" baffle me. Other races are so inconsistent! |
3 | I cheat in any kind of contest, as I always put both strength and mental prowess to their fullest use. |
4 | I am uncomfortable staying in the same permanent shelter for more than a week. Thri-kreen are meant to wander. |
5 | Clutch-memory haunts me with the ghosts of my forebears and all that they suffered. |
6 | I treat one common race as if they are not sentients, based on one unfortunate encounter. |
Design Notes
The thri-kreen clutch memory became one of my favorite parts of the writeup in short order. I've always found unexplained, intrusive, or borrowed memories interesting as a source of stories and mystery, as the PCs in most of my games will tell you.
I considered trying to go more outright alien in the grammatical structure of the features, or even scrapping the whole concept of traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws and going for something stranger. I still feel that that approach would be worth exploring, but for this post I've settled for something approachable and readily usable for players and DMs.
I think my central piece of advice for playing a thri-kreen is to go for weird word choice in dialogue. Think about how the thri-kreen distinguish things - for example, I've gone with "sentients" rather than "people" to suggest that idea.
More so than other races in this series, make sure you read a thri-kreen writeup such as the one in the 2e or 4e Dark Sun sources. It has a lot of key specific details that explain what goes on here. The general geek consciousness has a pretty good idea of what goes on with elves, dwarves, and so on - we're still not even one standard deviation from Tolkien's elf culture packet, which his son Christopher published under the title The Silmarillion. Even much less common protagonist races like homunculi have Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to draw on, and a hundred or so iterations on her work. Not so for the thri-kreen, I suspect. They've been in D&D since 1982, but I question how much penetration into our imaginations they've gained.
Finally - this list isn't custom-fitted to Athas. The only one that really doesn't work well for Athas is Bond 3, but if you're playing in a 5e Athas, make sure your choices reflect that setting in full.