MONGRELFOLK

MONGRELFOLK

"They are a mixture of many different creatures, each mongrelman having possibly the blood of humans, orcs, gnolls, ogres, dwarves, hobgoblins, bugbears, elves, bullywugs and others flowing through his or her veins."

Gary Gygax, Monster Manual II
These guys first appeared in the supplement Dwellers of the Forbidden City. 
Later they showed up in Monster Manual II with an illustration by Jim Holloway.

The mongrelfolk (formerly mongrelmen) definitely give me mixed feelings. I love the idea of a magical Frankenstein's monster. It's a great excuse to make a wild humanoid chimera.



But much like Frankenstein's monster, the creatures themselves seem more pitiful and sorrowful than they appear at first glance. There's also an element of fear of miscegenation in the entry as documented on this great blog Your Dungeon Is Problematic. 

"So the concept for this race is literally based on fears of miscegenation, as if they took inspiration from tracts against 'race-mixers' from NINETEEN-FUCKING-TWENTY."

While I don't 100% agree with the above post, I think it's worth keeping in the back of your head when we talk about these guys. I don't think the intent was to evoke fears of miscegenation but the talk of mixed "blood running through their veins" doesn't help. 

I personally like to view them like the creature in Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein In Baghdad. An amalgam of disparate parts held together by magic to create a tragic weirdo.

"In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a junk-dealer named Hadi al-Attag collects the scattered body parts of bomb victims with the intention of giving them a proper burial. Al-Attag first stitches the body parts together to create a single body, calling it "Whatsitsname", but when he leaves the body alone, the spirit of another bomb victim enters the corpse and brings it to life. Whatsitsname starts out on a mission of vengeance, killing those he considers responsible for the deaths of the bomb victims, but his actions spin out of control when he begins justifying the murder of other people for valuable body parts, raising questions around guilt, innocence and justice."

There's a bit of Herbert West: ReAnimator in there too. Mostly the Brian Yuzna sequels when body parts start getting grafted willy nilly!



I guess they're most closely akin the the mutants in Futurama. Random body parts in strange places, different skin textures (fur, scales, flesh), wild configurations of eyes...but here, instead of being created by a mad wizard, they're created by toxic waste. 

 I'm also reminded of my favorite Futurama Scary Door spoof where they put all the evil parts of all the evil creatures in a blender and "turns out it's man". 

Basically I just love an excuse to draw a bunch of mutated parts together in a wild arrangement! I had a lot of fun drawing this guy!