I was spending some time with demonology a few years ago, motivated by the observation that grimoires listing demons had enough in common that they presumably derived from an original source – that you could find that source, and get the “real” details on demonic characters like Belial, Samigin, Asmodeus, and Glasya-labolas.  I even found the name of this source: The Book of the Offices of Spirits.  The Lesser Key of Solomon and other texts purport to be transcriptions from that source, and yet, there are no extant copies that could be regarded as having high fidelity to the original – assuming it ever existed.  The copies of copies of copies change things up, so much so that the oldest version I could find, in the Fasciculus Rerum Geomanticarum, had a very different list and information from the later books.

And it was all hooey anyway.  If I could find the original Liber Officiorum Spirituum, I’d just be finding older hooey.  The trappings of systematic and encyclopedic information in the copies are enticing to that pokedex mentality.  I wanted to catch them all.  Once again, I find myself tempted to a similar end.  I’ve been trying to come up with the list of monsters for my big gay rpg, and the lure of finding the “authentic” or “original” monsters of fairy tales and mythology and legends is there.  But it’s all hooey.  Why do enough research to write a new entrant to the libraries of compilations that already exist?  Why not just make up my own hooey?

So I probably will.  But I’d still like to include the big iconic monsters of fantasy and folklore.  Pinning down at least that much, a useful thing to do.  Some campaign settings from 20th century RPGs went for the classic D&D list of playable races, plus or minus, and then tried to include some iconic new weirdos for flavor.  Others tried to reinvent the wheel with an all new list, or went for a more low-magic concept where all the players are human.  I’m pretty well decided on the first option.  As much as this is a TTRPG, I’m also inspired by video game RPGs, like the older Final Fantasy games.

Backing this idea up a bit, an anecdote that may inform my motivation.  In the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition dayz, when Monstrous Compendium pages were hole-punched so you could put them in your own three-ring binders, my Tech Support Guy had a good solid binder going.  I’d look at the intelligent species in it and think, that’s a character.  Why couldn’t it be a playable character?  So I used the monster stats to reverse engineer playable stats for a bunch of them – particularly satyrs, nymphs, and fairy folk.  Were they balanced?  No, but they were accurate to where a player version would be functionally the same in combat as a “monster” version, until they started gaining levels.  I might have even spaced out supernatural abilities by level, like they did for some creatures in 3rd Edition’s Savage Species, don’t remember.

What this illustrates is my annoyance with systems not being fully thought out from go, being constructed piecemeal.  If I ever get this thing going, I will try to get it as close to perfect as possible first time, so I don’t have to fuck around with revisions.  Part of that is the monster and class lists themselves.  I don’t want to make people buy a zillion “splatbooks” to get the full package.  Those kind of products weaken the original game as an artistic expression, because they result in numerous duplicated concepts.

Like there will be several character classes that are functionally identical to paladins, or separate stats for a creature from folklore by several different names, which were always meant to be synonymous.  Or so many “subspecies” of elf you wonder how one world could sustain all of those isolated populations, like why they wouldn’t grade into each other more like humans do.  It all just feels poorly conceived, which is what you don’t want art to be.  I know, they didn’t want to be artists, but I can’t help but be an artist, so this is my thinking.

And being this goofy combination of analytical and fussy, broad and abstract, I find myself torn between building a pokedex out of every source of monsters fairies etc that I can dig up from everywhere forever, and trying to get away from that altogether, because a half-measure would not be satisfying.  As I have rolled through all these kinds of thoughts, while wiki-surfing mythological beings, I’ve come to a perhaps tenuous conclusion that I want to make up my own guys, that can be representative of various guys from IRL mythology and folklore.  That is, I want to make up my own fairy that could be a stand-in for multiple types, like clurichauns and leprechauns and kobolds and duendes and gnomes could all possibly be the same species by different names.  Make sense?  But at the same time, not be so broad that my monsters can just be anything wilson-nilson – so variable that the core idea is lost and they become a conceptual mush.

I’m a victim of the same mentality as all those old school TTRPG makers, thinking I’m going to do it right, where all who have gone before were inferior minds.  I’ll make the one game to find them and in the darkness bind them, muhahaha.  But like many with these tendencies, I’m OK with never really getting recognized for that magnum opus.  It can remain the humble home brew.  I’m doing it for myself.  I will share it if it ever gets to a publishable state, but that’s not the aim.  The aim is to make something that works for me in all my particulars.

(I’ve been told having one’s work stolen by AI is the worst.  Publishing anything at all, well, it definitely makes that possible.  All my bloggy thunks will one day be grist for the Bébésque Machinélange, likewise my “magic system.”  There is nothing truly original here.  Steal it, somehow magically convert it into money, then come back and laugh at my foolishness.  I’d like to see it.)

So playable species should look like a natural part of the world they live in, should be conceived at the same time as the monsters.  It shouldn’t just be ooh, thought of a random cool thing, I’ll ram it in there.  Make the tree of life, fill it out, and then go into the individual branch ends and do all the random cool thingening there.  I’m jacking for beats.  D&D 3e had monster types, which was useful for game effects – a sword +2 against dragons affects all creatures with the dragon type – but also appeal to my interest in taxonomy.  There was another way of classifying creatures they didn’t get into much, an idea I gathered from their Planescape Monstrous Compendiums: by social structure.  In Planescape there are groups of creatures from the Outer Planes of the D&D cosmology that group naturally, like demons & devils (tanar’ri & baatezu lol), angels (devas), modrons, yugoloths, slaad, etc.  That was another layer of flavor I found interesting.

I’ve already come up with a lot of the basic material I’m about to explain here, but it was before I settled on my guiding principles elucidated above – don’t try to make stats for rusalkas and zmeys and banshees, make something that could be any similar creature by a different name.  Like, I don’t need five hundred slightly different spooky horses that will drown you, even if Europe did feel the need for that.  Resist completionism.  Proceeding with all that shit in mind…

is enough material for another post.  I break this up.

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