Thri-kreen

The thri-kreen are a race of sentient, mostly-humanoid mantis-people, originally from the Dark Sun campaign setting. They later proved popular enough to port over to other places. Scary, but in an alien way rather than an evil way.

They have poisonous bites, psionics, and they can jump like grasshoppers. They don't sleep, but their lifespan is only 30 years. They don't have cultural taboos against cannibalism, and love the taste of raw elf, though they aren't the crazed murder-munchers the Dark Sun halflings are. They prefer double-bladed lightsabers polearms, and make three-sided Xena-style boomerang throwy-things by mixing their venom with plant sap until it hardens. They've also gone through a few different body configurations over the years, starting out as basically praying mantises with hands and moving towards a notably more humanoid bent in recent editions.

First showed up in AD&D in Monstrous Manual, and became a playable character race in the Dark Sun Revised edition. The MM specifically stats the basic thri-kreen, and mentions the existence of two cousin species; the more powerful and intelligent Tohr-kreen ("mantis nobles") and the spacefaring surgeons & bio-artificers called Xixchil. There would eventually be a Dark Sun splat detailing all of the varieties of thri-kreen and tohr-kreen (basic tohr-kreen, j'ez, j'ohl, giant zik-trin'ak, primitive trin, laborer t'keech, female druid tondi), whilst the xixchil would get attention paid to them in Spelljammer.

Thri-kreen are the darlings of powergamers everywhere, as four arms means four weapons means all sorts of crazy builds focused on massive, nigh-unusable numbers of attacks each turn. It turns out four arms doesn't help with spellcasting at all, so they're actually not such a huge deal.

They were recently voted one of the three most-popular races to be added to 5e, perhaps because they're the hardest "core" Dark Sun race to just glue another's template over and call it a day. The designer admitted that doing so would be pretty tough, but that it had to happen eventually.

They're a favourite when some drawfag offers to sketch some erotica for /tg/, and wants to squick us out instead. Well, except for those corrupted by Slaanesh.

Gallery

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  L'original.
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  CHATCHKAS AND SPEARS
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  Long pointy sticks and three-pronged throwing stars.
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  No magic, psionics only, final destination.
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  Knifin' around
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