Over on rpg.net, forum member Felix has been conducting a read-through of the AD&D Monster Manual II. One of the entries is the Grim, a shapeshifting black dog in the finest tradition of the many "Black Dogs" appearing in British fairy folklore.

Unlike most Black Dogs, which are generally fairy creatures, the Church Grim is a spirit that protects churchyards from grave robbers and other criminals.

The tradition (which appears both in England and Scandinavia) has the Church Grim as a person, the first to be buried in a new churchyard, whose soul has to watch over it. To spare a human soul this duty an animal might be buried first. In England this seems to always be a dog, but in Scandinavian tradition the Kirkegrim might be a bear, pig, or horse as well.

One of the biggest influences on my childhood imagination was Katherine Brigg's 1976 Dictionary of Fairies, a book that was battered and dog-eared when I got my copy, and which is even moreso now, many years later. In the dictionary, Briggs describes hundres of fairy entities and tropes, indexing them all with a list of descriptive themes and motifs (which you can look up at the back of the book). As soon as I saw the RPGnet post about the Grim I was sure that it was included in the Dictionary, and indeed it was.

[...] when a new churchyard was opened it was believed that the first man buried there had to guard it against the Devil. To save a human soul from such a duty a pure black dog was buried in the north part of the churchyard as a substitute. Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies

Eden Phillpotts (a very prolific author of the early to mid 20th Century) wrote a story called "The Church Grim" in 1914, revolving around the mystery discovery ...

The 5th Edition of D&D defines six levels of living conditions, from Wretched up to Aristocratic with different costs associated. However, apart from hob-nobbing with the rich (or the poor) there are no real mechanical benefits to each standard of living. This leads many players to ask: "Why pay 25gp a night to live at a Wealthy Standard, when I could sleep in a ditch for free?"

The most obvious answer is: "Because you won't have to sleep in a ditch!" but roleplaying benefits are not mechanical rewards, and some people are more focussed on the later than the former, which is a perfectly fine way to play. If you need your gold to buy diamonds for ressurection, you won't want to waste it on expensive inns.

I've been running a campaign of 5th Edition D&D since the day it reared its head in the form of the Lost Mines of Phandelver boxed set. Over the years we've had a number of deaths, and a few cases of ressurection via Raise Dead, but recently one of the founding characters, Kerri, died in a way that Raise Dead couldn't fix (spontaneously dissected by the Headmaster of the Nothic College.

Enter the party Druid, Arra, and Reincarnate, which sent me off to think about how I wanted Reincarnate to work in my campaign.

The Original D&D reincarante could bring you back as a variety of monsterous and animal forms, with plausible Player Character races being very much in the minority. Delta's Spells Through the Ages has a great run down of what reincarnate (in both Wizard and Druid forms) used to do. The 5E version, on the other hand, brings you back as a boring adult member of one of the standard player character races.

Boring! I thought.

My own take was that, as a Druid spell, Reincarnate should create fey things, natural things — sprigans and boggans and banshees, oh my! (Not any of those actual things, as it turned out, but natural things nevertheless). More than influenced, I admit, by Ortwine's reincarnation in the fantastic Tales of Wyre. So I set out to comb through the official and fan fey races and compile a list I was more comfortable with, and this is the result.