 Howdy, how's it going? My name is Davy Chappy, and we'll be talking about Kenku. That's right, I'm doing an entire video dedicated to a race of birds that mimic other people's voices and can't fly, but really want to. You would think that that's enough lore to get you through the cold winter nights, right? That's what I thought when I covered them in my guide to Volo's Guide to Monsters, but popular demand says that I need to stretch this out into an entire full-length video, despite the lore on them being so small that it can fit into a Dixie Cup, so let's see how much filibustering I can do between Volo's Guide, the Monster Manual, and the Forgotten Roams Wikia page to fulfill your binge-watching needs. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like constantly repeating what other people say, may inevitably get really, really irritating, feel free to play your Kenku however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, Kenku are what happens when you take a Simon Says and give it boobies, hand it a knife, and watch as it terrorizes the neighborhood grainery. Often found hanging out in shady city streets, Kenku appear to be giant bipedal crows, except with their bird wings having been replaced with disgusting bird arms. Your average Kenku is physically frail due to being a bird, but unlike other birds, it cannot fly due to the aforementioned disgusting bird arms. A fact which heavily depresses the Kenku as they look off into the sky and wonder why bird god hates them, and there actually is a reason for that, but we'll get into it in a minute. Starting at the beginning, when a Kenku is hatched, it spends a short amount of time hanging with its bird mom before it gets old and decides to fly the coop. But life for a big city bird isn't easy, and its follow-the-leader-like nature tends to lead it into falling in with a murder of other crowfolk, which in turn have usually fallen in with a murder of non-crowfolk hooligans who have themselves fallen in with a murder of people who have recently had their valuables stolen on account of being murdered. It is the inenviable nature of the Kenku to act as enlisted grunge soldiers for nefarious guys of bigger, badder, and eviler fame. Filling much the same role as goblins and kobolds, but where goblins are sneaky and squirrely and kobolds have their inventiveness, Kenku have an act for getting around the big city, and when they need to lure somebody into a trap, they have the most polarizing thing ever written about a playable race. They have the ability to mimic voices they've heard. Now let's be honest, you knew that. You knew that when you clicked on the video, although I guess it would be more correct to say that they don't just have the ability to mimic noises, they have to mimic noises. That is their only mode of speech after their bird jesus got mad at them for being thieves and subsequently stole both their ability to fly and their ability to talk. One would think that having disgusting bird arms instead of feathers would actually make it easier to steal things, but what do I know? I'm not bird jesus. It's for this reason that not only do Kenku have an extreme longing to fly up into the air and straight out of this bullshit, but also whenever they want to talk, they sound like bumblebee from those great Transformers movies. See, the ramifications of this curse are that Kenku are literally incapable of making any sort of noise other than a recreation of what they've already heard from somebody else. Little is known about how this is actually meant to work, as Volo's guide only says, and I quote, although unable to speak in their own voices, Kenku can perfectly mimic any sound they hear. Kenku cannot create new sounds and can communicate only by using sounds they have heard. As a DM, that still leaves some awkward questions for me to answer on my own, such as do Kenku have to recite words perfectly or can there be some sort of inflection? Does the Kenku sound like an actual person or do they sound like a bird doing some crazy bird talk? Do they have to recite it in the volume of the person that they heard even if because of the Doppler effect it doesn't sound correct? Does the echo get repeated? If a Kenku says something and another Kenku hears it, can that Kenku then recite it even though it came from another Kenku and that seems like cheating a curse? If a Kenku falls down in a forest and there's nobody around to hear it, does it still make a sound? How long can a Kenku hold onto a phrase before they can't recite it anymore? If it's a short time, when is the cutoff and what if the Kenku keeps using it? If there isn't a cutoff time, doesn't that mean that the problem of Kenku speaking shouldn't be a problem because the mass accumulation of a flock of Kenku learning words should give them enough ground work to pretty much say whatever they want? If a Kenku is raised in a human village and learns common by listening to its adoptive mother and father talk, is that not how just normal people learn to speak? What about instruments? Do they open their mouth like in Lilo and Stitch? In any case, there are questions that are likely to come up if you give any amount of thought to the Kenku and their weird curse, so most DMs just treat them like parrots and go on their way. And this is fine, I played a Kenku that was a drug addict and was subsequently named... and he pretty much only communicated in calls and bird noises because trying to play a game of charades every sentence is annoying and just saying I make a noise that indicates I want you to follow me is a bit of an immersion breaker, at least for me. Now I actually do implore you to use the I say this by using these noises routine if you want to communicate with your party because I promise you that unless your name is a Matt Mercer and your Kenku's name is Kitty, you will try to do the mimicry thing that the Kenku is known for, realize that your party is quickly growing to hate you every time you open your stupid bird mouth because the noise is coming out are either annoying on their own or the act of piecing together the labyrinthine thoughts that are your sounds is just too much for them, and then you will stop, get sad, and see if your DM will let you play an Erakakra. Other things that are canon to the Kenku but nobody talks about because why would you restrict an entire playable race like this is the fact that in the same way that Kenku are incapable of making noises for themselves, their curse actually goes deeper than that by preventing the Kenku from just straight up having an independent thought, possibly as a way of justifying their undying servitude to whomever has enough birdseed. Kenku literally cannot create new ideas in their heads, forcing them to resort to stealing everything and anything they can, up to and including your intellectual property. Now I don't usually advocate for this but I think that this may be the one and only time where you're justified in just not informing your DM about the lore of your race because what even is this lore? It's needlessly restrictive and dumb. Of course it does mean that the Kenku are more likely to imprint upon adventuring parties, what with their crazy flashy shiny things, and if you want to play a Kenku on your own you are going to need stats. Now as a Kenku you will be more dexterous and wise because the first thing that comes to mind about Kenku is their wisdom, you are an expert forger gaining advantage on forgery related tasks, you get proficiency in two of either acrobatic's deception's stealth and sleight of hand, and you get mechanics for that mimicry trait so that if your deception is high enough you can trick somebody into thinking that you are in fact not a bird but a lusty argonian maid. So all in all if you want to play an adventurer that is breaking out of its subservient stereotype while also having a lot of lore that you will mostly avoid because it's dumb, play Kenku. And if your dungeon master ever asks what the Kenku are about just hide your book, look them straight in the eye and say anything you can do I can do feather. But that'll about do it I hope you enjoyed this video be sure to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below and squawks support me on patreon but yeah devy out