Yeah, that's kind of their niche. They are scholars, magi, and faustian-deal-offerers among the daemons.

Some of them, sure. Evil scholars, too!

Pince-nez: an essential part of the arcanoloth look!

Very interesting design.

Sexy boy scribes are all the rage

cool art work ! =3

What are Arcanaloths? Aside from looking like cool foxy scribes. o.o

Short story; a jackal or dog demon from the old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game.

Long story; old style D&D cosmology had this distinction between Neutral Evil, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil, where the servants of Lawful Evil were devils, and the servants of Chaotic Evil were demons, and eventually TSR's game designers decided the servants of Neutral Evil were daemons.

When second edition rolled around, the "fluff" behind the game had a big extraplanar war between Lawful and Chaotic Evil factions (they still hated the Good factions, though!), and a lot of other really neat story details! Because of some public worry about satanism in the 1980s, TSR renamed all of them. "Demons" became "Tanari," "devils" became "Baatezu," and "daemons" became "yugoloths."

The same way there were a whole batch of weird, cool Chaotic and Lawful Evil critters, Neutral Evil had a wide array of yugoloths. For instance, "mezzoloths" (big armored insectile demon things), "ultraloths" (creepy aquatic smooth skinned demon things) and "arcanaloths" (jackal/dog/whatever dudes).

This basically stuck around in third edition after WotC took over Dungeons and Dragons. Fourth edition revamped all of the story background, though, so there's no such thing as "neutral evil," "yugoloths," or "daemons" in fourth edition.

4th ed trashed almost 30 years of developed, shared background for D&D, and replaced it with something distinctly less imaginative and certainly less detailed. Which is why it hasn't exactly gone over with flying colors. WotC has managed to fracture their player base pretty substantially.

I like 4e on a crunch level. It does fast-paced, tactical, ultra-cool action very well and it's basically the best edition ever as far as giving the DM tools to come up with interesting and balanced combat encounters, then deal with the experience distribution afterwards. There are things I don't like about it as a genre thing (don't like the genre, play with another) but the game itself is pretty nice.

But the fluff just doesn't do it for me. Feywild? Elemental Chaos? Mmm, ehh, I liked the Great Wheel. And even though yeah, I guess 4e fluff makes some of the background consistent and coherent, I liked D&D being more free-form as far as fluff went. 3e, with its very official Greyhawk background, still felt less like the cultures and deities of the setting were being mandated. And most 4e art just totally leaves me cold.