The Essential Yuan-Ti Reader

As subterranean creatures with access to powerful magic and poison, drow make excellent behind-the-scenes schemers and manipulators. As combatants, drow are easy for you to scale to match PCs’ abilities—just add class levels. Their hidden cities make for exotic destinations, and their worship of the loathsome Spider Queen encourages heroic intervention by adventurers.

If you’re looking to move on beyond drow (and hopefully you are—it is the title of the blog, after all), the campaign villain you choose should ideally reach the high bar already set by the drow. Flipping through the Monster Manual, one race immediately leaps out: the yuan-ti.

Simple to level, consisting of several subspecies, and coldly reptilian in nature, yuan-ti are easily a match for drow in both ability and sheer malice. Their affinity for poisons, disguises, and enchantments make them hard to pin down, and their ability to recruit and even transform humanity to their cause makes them truly despicable and insidious. The drow will enslave and murder you. But you’ll serve the yuan-ti without even realizing you’re doing so…until the day they enslave and murder you. You might even wind up as one of them. Or you might wind up as lunch.

It’s no accident that two of the best (or at least most readable and thought-provoking) supplements for 3rd Edition put yuan-ti front and center. In Ghostwalk, yuan-ti are heartless, otherworldly monsters, spilling forth from the Demiplane of Coil to assault the City of the Dead (and nearly driving that setting’s elves to extinction for good measure). In Serpent Kingdoms, yuan-ti are the ultimate plotters, secret agents, and saboteurs, bringing down or subverting human civilization from the inside. Both of these books—along with an article about yuan-ti sociology, “Venom and Coil” by Robin Laws, in Dragon #305—are required reading for DMs wanting to run yuan-ti in any D&D edition. (Races of Faerûn also gets a nod for pureblood and tainted one stats, but Serpent Kingdoms is the vastly more essential work.)

DMs wanting to dig deeper should check out the Settites from Vampire: The Masquerade. These vampiric and herpetological troublemakers are great analogs for the yuan-ti, and the various supplements describe any number of inspiring ways that snake cultists and snake monsters could embed themselves in a city, enmesh themselves in its politics, tempt, seduce, and intoxicate its citizens, and help bring it to ruin (or make it flourish) as fits their nefarious ends.

The yuan-ti also give DMs a reason to explore outside D&D’s traditional European backdrop. If characters take the battle to the yuan-ti, they can easily find themselves in locales more reminiscent of the Mediterranean, North Africa, India, or Brazil. Inspiration might come from 2nd Edition AD&D’s Al-Qadim campaign setting, Will Eisner’s The Spirit comics, or One Thousand and One Nights (often known as The Arabian Nights).

For a truly trippy backdrop to a yuan-ti campaign, rent David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Forget about its tenuous connection to Williams Burroughs’s novel—or plot entirely—and just let the sense of it (and the truly creepy creatures) inspire you…