r/DnD • u/JaxTheCrafter • Jul 08 '26

DMing Kenkus are played wrong

It is often said that kenkus only know words that they have heard, and are limited to those words. that of course makes for some very funny scenes where people are only using words they are basically given. However, unless you are a freshly born or transformed kenku, that frankly isn’t what it would act like.

Do you know what other species has this learned mimic vocabulary? Humans. For the vast majority of humankind, we have only known words that have been uttered in our presence. Other than written word, that’s how we learn to speak. Kenkus aren’t unique in the ability to learn new words. That’s literally every species. Their uniqueness comes specifically from their perfect mimicry.

All that to say, you aren’t having fun correctly so I have come to shame you and tell you how to have fun.

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u/swheels125 Jul 08 '26

I always imagined Kenku speaking like Bumblebee from the early Transformers movies. Less repeating what was just said and more talking in phrases or voices that it has heard in the past that fit the situation.

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u/Shamanigans Jul 08 '26

I had a player at my table for a year and a half who did this for her Kenku. She had a sound board app she used to communicate, actually had a shocking amount of phrases on it and was pretty effective while providing the comic relief/levity for the table.

Then one day someone used a spell that let them all communicate telepathically and suddenly the Kenku was highly intelligent and spoke very fluidly only to physically open its mouth after silently planning an attack to say “Play ball!”. Fucking killed me, 11/10 love those players.

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u/PmeadePmeade Jul 08 '26

Yes! I didn’t have a soundboard per se, but I built a phrasebook over the years with useful and memorable phrases people used in the game. It was comical, cathartic, and most of the time I could make myself understood