Mysteries of D&D: Rakshasa Hands
Chapter: Season Six
This comic is a little old school but it makes me laugh. I genuinely have always wondered about this and I scoured the depths of the internet to find the answer but as with many old school D&D things, the answer seems to come down to “Gary wanted to do it”. On the gameplay side of things, Rakshasa are NO JOKE. They will wreck a party in the right (wrong) circumstances.
HOVER-TEXT: Never question The Gygax
Rakshasa: The fursona of evil Batman.
Okay, does this mean hands actually reversed, so if you held your arms straight out with your hands vertical, you’d have a left hand on your right arm palm out, or reversed in such a way so that basically your hands held out the same way would just have thumbs coming out the bottom? This is critically important to know.
Yes.
it just means the thumb is on the other side since thye only have 3 fingers
http://www.dandwiki.com/w/images/thumb/c/ce/Rakshasa_Noble.png/360px-Rakshasa_Noble.png
Palms on the outside
he’s not wrong…Backwards hands are indeed spooky.
I was under the impression that the original Indian lore had them with backwards facing hands
Looks like this question has come up before… 🙂
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/24615/what-inspired-the-dd-version-of-the-rakshasa
Rakshaminster Aumarsa?
Hmmm… I’m making preparations to run a city based criminal campaign and I hadn’t thought to use one or two of these for rival organisations, they would however be a perfect fit, thanks for the idea.
Hee Hee… I actually met Gygax at a party once at GenCon… swapped war stories and such. I never asked about the hands thing, but a couple others (like the rust monster propeller-tail) were pretty much yeah, he wanted it to look that way.
The origin of the Rakshasa backwards hands is actually from Arabic mythology. Did we all forgot somewhere along the line stat all the original D&D monsters came from pre-existing mythologies?
No they didn’t. A lot, sure, but not all. For one, I’m pretty sure the bunny-on-a-stump wasn’t…
Yeah… 1: Rakshasa are from Indian myth, not Arabic. 2: Half the original D&D monsters came from getting high and playing with dime store rubber dinosaur toys. Or would you like to share with the class what mythology beholders, owlbears, and bulettes are from?
Here’s a fun story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulette#Creation
LOL nice! It often makes me wonder where some of this strange quirky stuff comes from. I tend to think it may be similar to my late night, too much to drink, gaming sessions.
I’m going to guess that it ties to legends about Asian weretigers and how many legends had a “they get this one part of human anatomy wrong” tells. You see similar stuff in some of the weird old European tales, like “it’s smile is upside down” or the like.
Well, according to the not-RPG book “dizionario illustrato dei mostri” (monsters visual dictionary), Massimo Izzi 1989, a huge compendium of nearly every mythological monsters of the world ( http://www.anobii.com/books/Il_dizionario_illustrato_dei_mostri/9788876054495/01f11aaf465a39db75 ) Rakshasa are evil Indian spirits who HAVE backward hands (well, fingers, at least). They are no tigers, though, but they are “yellowish, with fice feet, vith blue neks and covered with chimes” and so forth ^_^’
That is a fun comic! And old school is awesome. 🙂
I am currently working on a screenplay that uses the Rakshasah as the evil monster. Based on the original mythologies…but I can’t help but see the D&D “tiger” version in my mind’s eye!
I think the first guy to draw them just made the hands backwards & no one noticed until the module was on store shelves.
So the question is not about the mystical tiger people (who are dumb enough to smoke), but that their dew-claw/thumbs are on the outside not the inside of their monkey grippers.
I am going to say this entire thing baffles me why people think they are backwards. The hands as drawn in 1E Monster Manual are not backwards. The pipe is held in a slightly awkward fashion but hey who are we to judge how tiger headed people should smoke 🙂
Actually, the rakshasa of Indian lore are not really tiger-faced, but the word translates more as goblin, or evil spirit. Saw a vid on Youtube on it.
It’s in some of the Rakashasta myths. They are shapechangers, and I believe they either get the hands wrong, of they just like to bend them backwards.
In a Marvel Game I ran online for awhile I applied some creativeness and brought in a Rakashasa as an on going baddie. Back in the day it was part of Marvel’s continuity that the Hyperborian world of Conan, Kull, ect was part of the Pre-History of the Marvel Earth (which built a great X-Men story with Manhattan turned into a Hyperborian city). Knowing that the Conan stuff is as much a part of D&D’s DNA as Tolkien I found a home brew conversion guide for 3rd Edition to MSHAG SAGA and decided this Rakashasa had been confined in an artifiact that was recovered by archeologist, and he was freed at ESU (my players were all playing ESU students with powers). The game broke down before I could ever reveal him, but the first session he summoned a band of Drow who had served him in the distant past through time to test the modern world while he remained in shadows. His ultimate goal was going to be a summoning of the Old Gods (Marvel actually has a fairly impressive history of Mythos-lite stuff running in the back ground).