Editing Kuo-toa (section)

==Their Niche==
Gary Gygax for his ongoing Depths series needed some sort of exotic [[morlock]] as might be found this far down. The lore was already groaning under Too Many Humanoids even by the late 1970s. The lore further had [[sahuagin]], to knock off Lovecraft's [[Deep Ones]]; here, the narrative needed something clearly weaker than [[drow]]. He'd already whiffed on his first idea, to bring [[illithid]]s into D1's narrative - he wasn't going to risk ''that'' again. So for D2 he pulled a second Lovecraftian trope, that of madness.

This constrained the kuo-toa nature at their very genesis - here are those fishmen as cannot compete with the others, so they hide in caves from the bigger, nastier fishmen (or squidmen, or other tentacley... things). The kuo-toa, thereafter, end up pathetic and even slightly ridiculous. Their role as an Underdark race has been as serfs or patsies for the real enemy. They're not even as scary as the [[kopru]] in ''[[Isle of Dread]]''. (Later, the second [[Monster Manual]] will serve up the [[aboleth]]; later still, the Deep One niche will be more-or-less effectively met by the [[skum]].)

As Deep-One ''failures'' the kuo-toa work well. They are alien, intermittently hostile, and unpredictable. But if PCs can swallow their disgust and distrust, they can find allies here.