Editing Manscorpion (section)

==Forgotten Realms==
[[File:manscorpion 5e.jpg|thumb]]
In the [[Forgotten Realms]], manscorpions have gone by many names. Their official name is the '''tlincalli''', as this is the name they were introduced by in the Monstrous Compendium Forgotten Realms Appendix II (MC11). In the article "The Known World: Fantastic Heraldry" in [[Dragon Magazine]] #199, they are called "Scorpionmen", whilst in the Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerun for 3rd edition, they are called "Stingers". Finally, in Volo's Guide to Monsters for 5th edition, they were given the name "Scorpion Folk". In fact, the Monstrous Manual's "Manscorpions" are, based on their artwork, clearly a copy of MC11's Tlincalli entry, only cutting out the few titbits of Realms-specific lore.

The MC11 depiction of the Tlincalli is fairly sparse on lore; they're one of the countless one-page monsters whose entries are largely dominated by their combat stuff. Tlincalli are native to the [[Maztica]] region, where they inhabit the [[Underdark]] that lies below the northern deserts and enslave [[human]]s and desert [[dwarf|dwarves]] to serve them. They resemble [[centaur]]-style hybrids of a dark-skinned human and a six-legged scorpion, with bony plates covering their chest and stomach, protruding ribs & backbones, and red, glowing, pupilless eyes adding to the inhumanity of their appearance, for all that their features are quite handsome. Unlike most scorpionfolk, tlincalli lack the scorpion's claws at their waist; instead, their humanoid hands are tri-digited affairs with two thick, taloned fingers and a long, claw-tipped thumb - these clumsy appendages bear a pronounced resemblance to the classic scorpion pincers.

Their culture features both warriors and spellcasters, which are a mixture of [[hishna]]shapers (the crappy [[evoker]]-equivalentof [[Maztica]]) and [[cleric]]s of [[Zaltec]], [[Plutoq]] and [[Nula]]. They inhabit underground cities that are built in a weird mirror-image of Maztican cities; they dig downward-plunging pits instead of erecting buildings, and their "pyramids" are inverted into great step-sided hollows. Whilst not very dexterous, they are fine sculptors, although they rely on their slaves for mining and any crafts that require fine manual dexterity, such as forging. They are implied to be quite militaristic, as the most common tlincalli encounter is with a patroling squad of soldiers, known as a "swarm".

In the [[Al-Qadim]] [[splatbook]] "Secrets of the Lamp", it is mentioned that the [[City of Brass]] is home to a legion of 2,000 tlincalli slave-warriors known as the Black Darts.

In [[Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition]], their lore is much larger, and now they take up over a page of [[Monsters of Faerun]] to cover. Described as mixing "esoteric religious mysticism with murderous tendencies and the stinger of a giant scorpion", they are now crimson-skinned rather than black-skinned, and seem to have both lost the claw-like hands and gained a fourth pair of scorpion-like legs, without gaining the scorpion pincers, at least if you judge by the artwork. They are said to possess "an extremely sophisticated culture, full of strange philosophies that filter deviant human notions through multifaceted insect eyes", but what that actually ''means'', we're not told. There is no mentioned of the inverted pyramids and towers in their hive-cities, but we do gain two new cultural quirks.

The first is "stinger racing": on random occasions, groups of 2d10 stingers (each individual stinger is 90% likely to be a male) will sometimes come charging out of their hive-cities and race on and on, refusing to stop until they die of exhaustion. Nobody knows ''why'' they do this, they just ''do it''.

The second is that tlincalli practice a strange ritual of divination, which involves burying themselves just below the surface and waiting to feel creatures moving above through their tremorsense ability. As part of this process, they create a "mystical grid" of their territory within the range of their senses, and the movements of creatures through this grid serve as the basis of their divination results. Once again, we're told nobody knows the actual details of how this works or even what the tlincalli seem to use it for.

Other tweaks of note are that tlincalli now have a racial trait called "bolthole magic" that lets them teleport 20 feet straight up or down through solid earth, that tlincalli hunting parties are usually composed of equal numbers of males and females, and that a tlincalli hive-city used a massive ritual spell that took three years to cast to teleport themselves into the [[Underdark]] beneath Amn, where they have colonized the ruins of the [[dwarf]] kingdom of Xothaerin and are now looking to expand.

The tlincalli most recently appeared in Volo's Guide to Monsters for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Now much more inhuman looking, and with their eight-limbed scorpion body using six legs and a pair of pincers, their lore has changed drastically once again. Now the tlincalli are described as a proud race of nomadic tribal hunters who explicitly don't build cities or any goods other than crudely reforging scavenged metal weaponry. A very far departure from the highly civilized tlincalli of 2nd and 3rd edition! They've lost their bolthole magic power, and their tremorsense, and just basic bruisers. Oh, and they no longer practice slavery... they just capture fallen foes to feed them to their voraciously predatory newly-hatched offspring.