Lair Larrikin
Posts: 21
Joined: Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 00:01
Why rename Kenku to Tengu?
As anyone who knows D&D Kenkus and reads the Wiki article on Tengus (antropomorphic bird spirits from Japan) can see, the former was probably derived from the latter! Granted, kenkus in D&D do not have much of flavour, but what is there is obviously at the core of the Tengu mythology: Violent birds with human traits. Heck, even the name is only a slight variation of the source. In Crawl, the only big change that has been made to Tengus is that they do not have wings anymore (which is good, since this always interfered with the armour wearing capability of Kenkus). However, the evolution of Tengu in the original mythology suggests they are actually more human now than bird - they don't even have beaks normally; also they are not violent.
This brings me to the main point about this change: It could have been done without changing the name. The devs could have done anything with Kenkus in Crawl - the fact that they were originally from D&D is totally irrelevant, especially today, where probably a lot of Crawl players never played D&D or simply do not give a crap about what it was in D&D. I love how it is often stressed that Crawl wants to get rid of fantasy cliche, especially flavour-wise, but the changes that are made to that are almost always based on something that already exists anyway. True creativity is something different. And I can't see how changing Kenku to Tengu magically gives the species and the game more flavour, as if a japanese flavoured species was a prerequisite to including asian mythology. Let me repeat, you can change that stuff without changing names. And yes, I am mad because you changed a name. Even though it is arbitrary, I grew quite fond of "Kenku". Also, I saw that there are new leaderboards for Tengus even though they are the exact same species. Which is depressing, since I 15 runed 3 Kenkus Combos previously un 15-runed, and I planned to do more. So I can play 0.9 now as long as it is available, or switch to Tengu. Fucking Tengu.
/rant