I once read wonderful blog post which imagines an alternate universe where instead of D&D, Gygax and Arneson made a game about people's feelings. Feelings, it said, are easy, just some variables describing emotional states. Combat is hard: all that detail, all that complexity. No one does games about combat in this alternate universe.
But let's look at D&D, and especially the dungeon-crawl computer games that evolved from it. It's fashionable within neo-old-school circles to take old RPG rules and read and interpret them almost like religious texts, attempting to recapture lost subtleties.
The inhabitants of remote coastal regions and river deltas, Dolphin Men are feared as sadistic raiders. Occasionally, one of the brighter ones will go adventuring.
Following a discussion playing Labyrinth Lord a while ago, here's a quick proposed "Axolotl man" class:
This is another installment of "how I would do fantasy creature X". This time: dragons.
Labyrinth Lord is a pen & paper RPG system that's roughly the same as the original Dungeons and Dragons. As such, its main draw is that it's a simple system, with flavorful rules. It is however not very balanced. In practice, pretty much everyone plays LL with some set of house rules.