Dungeons & Dragons might be a pen and paper RPG, but given the whole dungeon-crawling aspect, it’s also a game about monsters (this is clearly an unbiased statement). There are tons of creatures for your Game Master to pit you against in the game, and a huge amount of artwork depicting them. I’d like to bring up one of my favorites: the Doppelganger.

Actually, you can also play as a doppelganger character in the game, but at least according to the rules I was playing by, it wasn’t permitted unless the character received huge penalties. I’m still very sore about this, even though I haven’t played in a while. I have no idea if that’s true of all other rulesets or not, because quite frankly I’m the guy in the campaign who’s always asking “…how do I do that?”, so if any of you out there are experienced with pen and paper RPGs, please tell me if there’s a reasonable way for me to play as a doppelganger in like… any of them. I have a burning need to be able to play as this. Anyway. Back to the doppelganger itself.

One of the big parts of my affinity for the doppelgangers in Dungeons & Dragons is simply how they look. Anthropomorphic traits have always been one of my favorite things to see in a monster; I’ve always favored things that are clearly not human but still possess some traits of one. And as you can clearly see, D&D’s doppelgangers are definitely humanoid but not human at all, and even the creators knew this, classifying them as “monstrous humanoids”. They also remind me of the Regenerador from Resident Evil, which I wrote about before. I know D&D is a game about imagination, but the text description is pretty close to this, and seeing the pictures themselves really help to give me a mental image of what my monster is going to look like. And call me shallow, but cool monsters are one part appearance. (Props to Wizards of the Coast for having so much cool art of them. I know they’re the guys who make the game, but still, not everyone illustrates their works comprehensively like this. It’s awesome!)

It looks like an alien… but without making you scream “oh it’s just a stupid alien”; that is to say, it balances fantasy design sensibilities with the stereotypical image of an extra-terrestrial and creates a nice balance. It looks otherworldly and weird, but it also looks both dangerous and yet not particularly malevolent. The distinct lack of malevolence is important, in my opinion, because doppelgangers are all about deception.

Finally, there’s its powers. Mythological doppelgangers are generally some kind of spirit or double of a specific person, and not a predatory shapeshifter… but I think we can all agree that putting “predatory” or “shapeshifter” before or after another word makes it cooler. The D&D doppelgangers are physically powerful; their gangly, frail appearance is misleading. They have powerful shapeshifting abilities and, unlike changelings, seem to be able to actually change their physical form instead of just creating illusions. They can also see in the dark and read minds.

Can you not see why I would want to play as one of these things as well as why they’re so nerfed???

Come on, tell me you think this is cool. I mean… it is cool right? You’d want to play as one of these? Hell, you’d probably want to be one if they were real? Right? Right?

They also come in sexy female form:



SERIOUSLY IF YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE THE RULES LET ME GET IN ON THIS LET ME KNOW ASAP