Monstroid Brainstormin


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More thunks on the bestiary of my probably-never-going-to-exist big gay rpg.  This is mostly random free-form stuff, but I’ll lead off answering the question I asked at the end of the last post on the topic:  what animals do I want to see here?  Like what mundane animals live there, and how do they interact with magical monsters and people?  Easy to imagine unicorns and griffins and cockatrices ruling all lesser beasts with their unnatural ways.

Maybe not tho.  Maybe those beasties just exist in balance with everything else in the ecosystem, doing their own distinct niches.  It’s easier to come up with the magickal monsters when the baseline fauna is decided on.  Wouldn’t have half eagle half lions in a world with no lions, right?  To that end, creatures I’d like to see:  The standard Eurasian fare, since this is another RPG inspired by the world of knights in shining armor.  They need horses to ride.  They could have similar distributions, but maybe more lions and tigers in the europey West than there were by medieval times in our world.  But besides that, it would be nice to have some more cool animals.

How can you have an Africa-inspired south without Afrotherian animals like elephants?  Maybe the seaside could have dugongs and manatees, southern rocks could be crawlin’ with hyraxes.  Or would those be outcompeted by marmots?  Other cool African animals that have a bit of representation elsewhere include mongooses and hyenas and crocodiles, cobras, leopards… I should have regional variations on these.  Like maybe male lions in the west have manes that look like mohawks, or leopards in the north have no spots, just… whatever.  If loxodonta could roll up on the Europe-like area without needing a Hannibal to drive them, they surely would.  How weird could that be?  Should I make up my own oddball members for this clade, with funkier tusks?  How about rhinos?  Europe used to have rhinos too.

No Americas means no sloths or New World monkeys or armadillos, no capybaras or guinea pigs, no cougars or jaguarundis or ocelots, no coyotes or raccoons or opossums or toucans or condors… Who would I miss the most?  Who would I want to steal?  Jaguars could just be stocky semi-aquatic leopard species, and I could use other cheats to get similar weirdos in.  Coyotes and golden jackals are very similar.  I guess in lieu of armadillos we could have more varied pangolin species.  That’d be cool.  Condors are pretty neat but mostly I prefer Old World vultures.  Maybe capybaras could get replaced with micro hippopotami or semi-aquatic hyraxes – some holdover intermediate form on the grade to sirenians.

I do love Australian and New Zealand animals but for this I can lose ’em.  Did we lose any animals in the Pleistocene that would be cool to snatch back for this..?  I don’t feel the need.  Stick some wool on the iciest boys.  Going further prehistoric, I do think non-avian dinosaurs are fun to combine with high fantasy, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll lose them here.  Ooh lemurs and fossas…  No Madagascar…  Yeah, sorry lemurs.  You can get your revenge in Gun Lemurs.

I like the idea of making large animal fauna very different from inner sea to outer ocean.  Fish could be sorta samey by evolving before the sea was enclosed, but all the large mammals emerged after that.  Maybe the inner sea could have abundant nautiloids because all the pinnipeds are on the ocean side, maybe it could have a whole separate radiation of whales that split from the ocean whales when the last common ancestor still had hooves.  Or they got outcompeted by giant crocodiles or sharks or sea cows.  Maybe hoofed whales could still exist, or other protowhale variants, niches something like a cross between a peccary and a capybara on crack.

Whence magical beasties, like unicorns and such?  They’d be created by gods or wizards or the magic of the Outer Wild, but establish breeding populations on Gaya.  I might crib some ideas from Pliny, but it would be cool to just make up my own that match the vibe.  Was just randomly reminded of the “leontophone” recently, sounds fun.  I think griffins would be specialized predators of pegasi.  Take that, u majestic creatures.  I was calling the RPG The Cockatrice because dicks but the poison roosters should be here too…  No special thoughts on these for the moment.

In looking at the story Puss in Boots (before the most recent time I was messing with it), I was struck by the absurdity of these helpful animals in fairy tales, and wanted to include something like that in my RPG.  I wrote a first draft novel once in this world, called The Death Knight.  It can’t be published anytime soon, but it’s a hoot.  I made a Puss-type character for it, which was real fun to write.  Just a cat that likes you for cat reasons, but is also magical and talking.  Teddy bear picnic havers.

So magic animals are cat-sized, whether they’re a bullfrog or a raven or a snake, and they talk, and they can do some random impossible thing as part of their gimmick. Sub-type “Divinity.”  My husband was saying he thought the game should have Watership Down type characters, like a goose in a bonnet, that live in treehouse villages.  That would be a different, less magical category.  Call them talking animals?  Probably the ones to hang out with faeries.

I should probably ask a furry how they’d prefer to see a game handle humanoid animal people.  I had a few thoughts on that.  One, just more hate for the splatbook tendency of D&D to produce redundant concepts.  There were like a dozen plus lizard races in those books!  I don’t wanna do like that.  My initial idea for an animal-themed character race was animal-headed people, like the minotaur, like characters from Bojack Horseman, as a singular race that had random animal heads that said something about their personalities.  Like a beaver-headed dude and a crow-headed woman could give birth to twin babies where one had a chicken head and one had an alligator head.  But furries always want their fursonae to have more animalistic features to the body as well, to have tails and paws and shit.  Merely having an animal head will not satisfy them.

So animal races that are more like, furry bod.  Like wolfen from Palladium’s fantasy RPG, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or those ducks from Runequest.  But do I have it be one race that can have any kinda animal type, like the animal-head thing I originally conceived, or just animal races that are all that animal type, like the aforementioned examples?  If I start making races based on animals, where do I draw the line?  Which ones do I include?

More importantly, if I make content with a nod toward trans girls someday, shouldn’t I include anime catgirls?  How cat should they be?  How about puppygirls?  Where does pony play fit into all this?  The head spins.  I’m not trying to make the furriest RPG.  That’s somebody else’s job.  Incidentally, if you know of furry RPGs you wanna recommend in the comments, I’d like to hear about ’em.

Moving on, other things I’ve thought about.  Greek mythology, like, the freaks at the bacchanal.  Satyrs, maenads, sileni.  I never knew about sileni until I saw the movie Šileni by Jan Švankmajer.  It didn’t have anything to do with them, just that the mythological creatures symbolize madness and that movie was about insanity, in its own theatrical (stock ableist) way.  I enjoyed that film a lot.  But what are sileni?  Some sources have them as an old man or satyr on a donkey, some don’t distinguish between them and satyrs, etc.  It varies.  Point is, they’re in the retinue of Dionysus partying with deadly abandon, along with maenads and satyrs and centaurs.  I liked the donkey connection and made them into donkey people, similar mix of animal and human features to that of satyrs.

Maenads brings me back to nymphs.  For some reason, most of the interesting ideas I’ve come up with for player races are centered on nymphs.  There were a lot of nymphs in mythology by a lot of names, and no real official canon to it all.  They were always pretty ladies with some kind of supernatural origin or power (in this maenads may have been outliers), but I’m like, no way.  They can have whatever gender, in my book.  So what will they be?

Immortal pretty people that form out of nature by spontaneous generation, but rarely.  That got me thinking about immortality.  In RPGs you always level up the longer your alive, which produces the unrealistic phenomenon of old people being the most powerful.  Granny has a hundred hit points.  Watch out.  What about immortals tho?  How can you play a character like that, who might have a billion zillion experience points?  My solution was that they lose their skills and memories if they don’t practice them, and they sometimes go dormant for long periods of time.  This came to me as a mental image of people in the foam of a wave, of in the rocks of a mountain, or floating in clouds, or tangled in tree branches.  What if you found a guy in the woods who went to sleep four-hundred years ago, and was half-buried in soil and roots?  Kinda cool.  This could allow people to play an old character as a 1st level guy who has to work his way back to the skills he once had, who has memories of bygone lives that could have been glorious or mundane.

Didja know the Cyclops wasn’t the only giant Ulysses met on his journey?  On one island his crew met a city of giant people who just started gobbling them up like chicken wings.  It was a horrifically evocative idea, actually, if you get a mental picture of it.  The Laestrygonians.  The times I’d seen reference to them in the past weren’t quite the same as what I’ve turned up more recently, and I have been cobbling together a race of giants pretty different from the original notion.  Still, gotta have big chompers.

That puts me in mind of ogres.  From Europe to Japan there is a concept of an ogre, with a lot of variety over that range.  Generally it’s a wild man, giant and club-wielding, an eater of men.  There’s blurred boundaries with the idea of the Green Man, but I feel like ogres are more universally large and bullying.  This puts me in mind of child abuse, and they aren’t the only monster that do so.  Lamias are famous for eating children.  With these two archetypes in mind, I once had an idea for an RPG where the characters are all children of lamias and ogres, in high school, some question of whether it’s a metaphor or a dream or reality within the setting, blah blah blah.  The point tho.  Big scary monsters can be scary &/or psychologically interesting.

When I was thinking on playable races I had an idea that could be reserved for high-power adventures where the characters could be demigods.  They’d have similar stats to regular characters, but have some limited ways they could break the rules.  Like in Jason and the Argonauts when Hercules chucks a rock out to a distant island and another guy who is not as strong sez “I can do that,” and achieves it by skipping the stone.  Home boy, that is not possible.  But as much of a headache as that could be to adjudicate in game terms, the flava would be sweet.  I’d like to see if I could make it work.

I mention this in an article about monster ideas because I realized I’d already embraced a similar idea for magical animals, and that implies they are a kind of divinity, doesn’t it?  So in this conception, they’re like nymphs, naturally emerging from nature, possibly on a path to becoming gods themselves, or just fucking around and living as an interesting little part of the world, until their time is over.  Angels and devils should likewise have some kind of powers not available to anybody in the material world unless they somehow also are born with or achieve divinity, on a spectrum leading up to gods of heaven and hell.  Less interesting to me, but a natural extension of that line of thought.

Elfs.  I don’t know why elves gotta have multiple types, some kinda Tolkien damage, but I couldn’t shake it off.  My husband thinks elves should be short but other partisans are sayin’ they should be tall.  Some should be lofty and live in silver light, some should be wild boyz.  The idea of duality in dökkálfar and ljósálfar call out to my ass as well, and we’ve had a few others I wanted to squeak in.  The list is currently at high elves, light elves, dark elves, garbage elves, glamer elves, and murder elves.  Garbage elves are downtrodden of urban realms, glamer elves have extra magickalism, murder elves have affinity for other murder faeries like kelpies and rusalka, and the other are the usual shmusual.  My idea on dark elves is that they can have unnatural skin tones which may or may not be dark, and they have a more lively / informal / chaotic culture.  Light elves more ordered and prim with human-like skin tones that can also be very dark depending on where in the world they come from.  Gettin away from evil / good as well as light / dark skin tones as having implications, I hope.

I hinted at some of my other thoughts in the last post on this topic without getting into them properly, and running out of time on this post, so I’ll let it stand at this.

I really let my queue get dry.  I have an idea for a post and I queue it before it’s actually done, and as I rush this out eight hours before I’m required to wake up for work tomorrow, I marvel at how it came to this.  I guess I had a little glut of high-effort posts all come due around the same time.  Whatever.  Check out more excessive word count tomorrow, with Dead Milkmen Part II.

Comments

  1. flex says

    About elves….

    In pre-Tolkien fantasy and folk tales you often find that elves, dwarfs, fairies, and brownies are the same creatures. Shorter than humans, usually helpful to humans when treated kindly, but also mischievous. A lot of the Brother’s Grimm tales use the terms interchangeably. I’ve read Rumpelstiltskin as both an elf and a dwarf (but never a fairy).

    There are, of course, exceptions. The legend of Thomas the Rhymer refers to the Fairy Queen of Elfland (or Elphame, or Elphen, or Australia), and Thomas initially mistakes her (the elf, or maybe fairy) for the Virgin Mary. Who might have been short, but probably didn’t have pointed ears (or wings). Another old ballad, Tam Lin, also references the Queen of Elfland, but doesn’t describe her. The Gaelic elves, which influenced William Morris, and also Tolkien, appear to be closer to human-form than elves from other European nations.

    However….

    A couple years ago I was contemplating this separation of Elves from the historical conjoinment of them with fairies and dwarves, and realized that I may be mistaking the forest for the trees. For those works which I’ve read which uses the terms elf, dwarf, or fairy interchangeably are either from translations or more modern (later than 1850). So, it is possible that the original mythologies did make distinction between mythical races (like the Germans did between dwarves and kobolds), but the translators didn’t. Now I don’t know what to think.

  2. says

    Very much so, on all counts! I remember palladium books strange relationship with fantasy monsters. Back in the 1e days of their FRPG, the main writer / artist dude did a bunch of redraws of content from the Dictionnaire Infernal, which could look pretty creative if you didn’t know the source, which I didn’t. Sources got sources got sources, and the Dictionnaire Infernal itself was just a collection of older things run thru a late victorian brain. Later on, in Rifts: South America, the same dork decided jungle elves should be called duendes de junglas or somesuch, like, google image search mighta told you this word doesn’t have the association you are seeking. I fucken love that the actual word of choice shoulda been elfo. Hehehehhe.

    But there it is, the idea we get that there is a right use of any given use of language. Maybe sometimes sorta but it’s all highly subject to local circumstances and history. Haitian Creole spells cheese fwomaj which is a lot more accurate to how French speakers say that shit in 2025 than the spelling they decided was canon in 1325, or whenever that happened. Maybe you say duende in one country and they think of Legolas, when duende in most other countries is a gobliny-gnomey fucko – and the exact opposite coulda been true less than a century before that.

  3. flex says

    I’d think it would be interesting to go one step further. As it stands now there is an underlying assumption that all these various races of elves are distinct races, i.e. they may share a common ancestor but are now incapable of interbreeding.

    Now if that is true, then while the humans may call the entire sub-group as elves, the elves themselves may have unique names they give to each race, and think of each race as completely separate. To illustrate, we call horses and zebras both equines. But if you asked a horse if they thought that a zebra was an equine, they might say it wasn’t. Further, horses and zebras can mate and produce off-spring, but those offspring are sterile.

    In the case of elves there are three obvious options.

    First, they could be completely distinct races, and cannot interbreed. I.e. they cannot generate any offspring even if the physical act of sex is possible.

    Second, they could be within a claudistic group called elven, and be able to interbreed, but their offspring is sterile. Thus a high elf could rape a garbage elf and the resulting high-garbage elf would have characteristics of both races, but not fit in to either. I suppose it could be an act of love too, but there is something about the hoity-toity, holier-than-thou high elves which makes me think they do unsavory things when no one if looking. (FWIW, this also suggests that all human-elf offspring are sterile.)

    Third, they could really be all one race, but culturally separated. So if a wood elf and a high elf fall in love they may be ostracized by both of their communities and any offspring may struggle to adapt to one of their parents communities. Apparent racial differences are really only differences in appearance caused by generations occupying different environments/cultures, but not enough generations to form separate and distinct races. Lot’s of opportunity for role-playing in a world where elves are comfortable mingling with humans but dislike other elven cultures.

    Of course, in most fantasy worlds, there is a fourth option. [jazz-hands] Maaagic. Any world where a lion and eagle can mate to produce a griffon, and then a griffon can mate with a horse to create a hippogriff, doesn’t really have races as we know them. Which means things can really get fucked up.

  4. says

    palladium went with “elves are different species, no halfsies.” i favor these races as having more than just cultural differences but being fully able to interbreed because magic etc. this is a world that allows half-elves, so an elf-elf should be good to go. d&d’s dragonlance made a big deal of different elf types but idk if they said anything about them interbreeding.

  5. flex says

    Bi’god I’m old.

    I think I ran into Kevin Siembieda a couple times in the 1980s when I was going to cons and more involved in RPGs. Kevin was local to me, but never a friend. I was a friend of Richard Tucholka, of Tri Tac Systems. Tri Tac never made it as big as Palladium, but they had some really good RPGs. I cannot claim to be a close friend of Richard, but he enjoyed a couple of the LARPs I ran. We ran a LARP set on a generation starship and Richard volunteered to make all the security badges for us, for free. As a thank you we gave him a Bosch jigsaw. Richard then used the jigsaw to build a secret room in his basement, with a concealed door. Later on, when Richard was being questioned by the FBI over one of his games, he showed them the secret room and they were appreciative of it. Regrettably, Richard has moved on to the back room of the great hobby shop in the sky, probably running sessions of Stalking the Night Fantastic to an appreciative player group. I first met Richard at a Confusion (a Michigan SF con), because I was wearing as a costume my grandfather’s zoot suit with a snap-brim fedora. Richard insisted I join his player group for a session.

    In those pre-internet days, when I collecting my shelf of Grimoires and Goetia, I never encountered de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. I had gone as far back as MacGregor Mathers’ works, and I see now that Mathers cribbed a lot from de Plancy for his The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. As you say, it goes way back. Of all the books I found, I felt that Arthur Waite’s books were the best, as it was pretty clear he didn’t believe in any of it, and was just compiling information from the medieval grimoires.

    Now I want to find a copy of the 1863 edition of de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. There doesn’t appear to be any for sale at a reasonable price on Abebooks. So I guess I’ll have to wait until one shows up.

    I will call you out, politely and without malice, on Palladium’s stealing of all their creatures from de Plancy. I just glanced through my copy of Monsters and Animals (1985) by Kevin Siembieda, and I really only see one obvious steal from de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, that’s the Adram, which is the Adramelech in de Plancy. There may be a couple of others, but they are not as obvious. We never played Palladium, but I purchased the game and a number of the books. Siembieda clearly spent a tremendous amount of time creating a world, and I certain his RPG group appreciated the detail he put into it. It was always a pleasure to read what he published even if he never reached the popularity of AD&D. The group I played with started with the Blue-Box D&D but AD&D came out shortly after we started role-playing, so we stuck with that for many years. Before 2nd edition AD&D came out we had switched to GURPS, aside from one group I was in which played a home-grown game called GateCrasher. Mike Lucas, the creator of GateCrasher and a good friend, has moved on to a full-time writing career and none of the rest of us have the time to write scenarios for games. Maybe when we all retire, if we ever can, we might start again. But it would probably be a very different type of role-playing; we are not as innocent as we were thirty years ago.

    Sorry for the long comment, you touched a memory.

  6. says

    love a long comment when relevant to what i’ve written about, and this be. btw, i located a copy of the dictionnaire infernal and paged about halfway thru, coming up with the following, a few of which were ambiguous but more of which were obvious: eyekiller=amon, waternix=glasya-labolas, tezcat=kali, kinnie-ger=flauros, peryton=furfur, rahu-men=ganga-gramma …

    looked up tri tac and they actually got raided by g men, just like steve jackson games? that’s hilarious. and shitty. i had no idea they did that to more than one game company. EDIT – i was responding to things sentence by sentence and hadn’t noticed you already mentioning that, heh.

    respect to palladium games, which had numerous faults, but i invested years of effort in playing with them, and don’t regret it too much, heh. the fact old kevin’s fantasy setting was less splatty than D&D and was mostly illustrated by the boss lent it an artistic unity less common in D&D writ broadly. (some specific D&D products like the planescape boxed set kick its ass tho.) but i did like it a lot, especially the larry macdougall art in the northern wilderness books. and mashing up the extended universe was fun, tmnt flying robotech mecha, and all that.

    man, i’m tired as hell but i signed myself up for some big-ass posts and gotta get back to the mines now…

  7. flex says

    My Word!

    I didn’t know Mel was still promoting Tri Tac games. It’s probably been 15 years since I looked at anything related to Tri Tac. I hardly met Mel, but maybe I should reach out to her through mutual friends and try to create a connection.

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