The Alphabetical Monster Thing Available As A .pdf...

...you must be shitting me. No fucking way.

The whole thing is available right here in friendly HTML, with no download bullshit, no file-size issues, no compatibility issues, no waiting around to flip to the next page. Seriously, you want a pdf? When you hear music you like do you go "That was awesome, but can I get it on wax cylinder?" Plus the originals have all the peoples' comments with their ideas about monsters, many of which were brilliant even if I never did get around to saying it.

My Relationship With The Z Monster Is Complex

All the monsters-Z.

If your name starts with "Z", you quickly learn in school what an unlikely and unpopular letter it is. Do all children identify with the first letter of their first names? Do Davids feel for "D"s and Steves feel for "S"s? It was obscurely depressing to learn, when I was 8 or whatever, in The Phantom Tollbooth, that the reason nobody used "Z" was it didn't taste very good.

Anyway...

Zombie

There's only one "Z" monster--and, like the name "Zak", zombies became popular in the last decade. They are, in many ways, a symbol of that decade, and, like all popular monsters, a symbol of what people at that time feared in other people. So I wrote about them when discussing the Zeroes in my last book:

In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.

Night of the Living Dead is a really good movie, so is that one where they're in a shopping mall but man oh man am I sick of zombies. I think I'll be ready to hear about them sometime around 2020.
_____

In hopefully unrelated news, Frank Frazetta died today. Considering the recent weirdness with his family and his illness and his possibly going and fucking up his old paintings, this may not be the worst news (he hasn't been all there, apparently, for years) but it is a good time to remember that he was very very good, and did things with lush color and movement that no other artist ever had before, in any genre or at any time, and that it was worth having all those dead-eyed, sallow skinned, constipated, overrated Italian Renaissance painters and fiddly, brown-obsessed 19th century Orientalists if it meant that one day the bloodline would result in Frazetta. He was the Muad'Dib of the main Western line of painting and, along with Vermeer and Velasquez, is one of the few things that justifies its existence.

Y Monsters? Why not?

All the monsters--Y.

Like "x", "y" is a lonely letter, with only 2 monsters. Soon I'll have to actually think before writing blog entries again.

On the other hand, all Y monsters are all good. Not even "D" can say that.

Yeti

The proper image, if you can find a way to evoke it in the players, is the wampa--not the toy with the hugging arms but the way it looked and seemed on the screen when you were a kid--when Luke first wakes up--long-haired like an Afghan hound, bent over, devil-horned, but human enough that the word "cannibalistic" still seems to apply. Until he Forced that lightsaber into his hand, that was a horror movie--maybe the first one most of us ever saw.

Like a mummy, the monster has to be detached from it's cartoony associations (and various cartoony names) in order to imagine how frightening and believable a goatmanbeardevil hidden in an ice cave really is if you're trapped alone in a landmarkless wilderness.

Yuan-ti

These snake men work, how could they not? Snake-anythings work.

I don't like the South American/South East Asian associations of the name, as it suggests--in a D&D context--that they come from far away. I prefer the idea--like in Conan--that they come from the same place, but an earlier time. In my campaign, they're called Librarians--for reasons I'll explain in some post in the future.

The X Monsters

All the monsters--X.

It doesn't make sense that a word would start with "X"--so, by extension, the "x" monsters are artificial, alien things that make no sense.

Xag-Ya & Xeg-Yi

These Monster Manual 2 beasts are magic living matter/anti-matter balls with tentacles. Not as stupid as they could be, not as full-on freakish as the Xorn.

They're a little abstract for my taste, though the comments for these posts have included so many good monster ideas that I bet one of you out there has thought of a nice spin on the Gygax-anagram monsters so I'm gonna sit back and see what y'all have to say in this case.

Xorn

The Xorn is so weird and makes so little sense that you have to give it props just for that-- it comes from the elemental plane of earth to here to mug people for their precious minerals. Implying:

A) Things like gold and rubies are hard to find on the Elemental Plane of Earth, and

B) It can't just use its move-through-stone power to collect them itself.

Plus it "moves its molecules" around plus it's called a "xorn" plus it looks like a stone Humpty Dumpty with a nose-arm and a mouth on the top of it's head. Seriously, someone was like "Hey, there's a monster in the Manual for every letter but X--let's take drugs until we think of something!"

W Monsters

All the monsters--W. W monsters are all trying to be badass. Some succeed.


Wasp, giant

I have the same problem with the giant wasp as I do with the giant owl,--making it bigger doesn't exaggerate what's scary about it--a giant fly is grosser when it's big, a giant spider can catch you in its web or its jaws when it's big, a giant mantis can decapitate you if its big.

A wasp? You're afraid that a wasp will sting you. Making it big doesn't automatically make it more poisonous.

Water Weird

A water weird is obviously way better than a water elemental--but why? Well there's the name for one, there's the picture for two--the idea of the weird simply being an existing body of water like in a well or a pool that starts taking a shape is way spookier than a big wave with eyes.

Is there anything else to it? The water weird seems to be a bit more about trickery or deception whereas the water elemental seems to be just about brute force. We already knew that waves were out to get us.

Weasel, giant

The thing that puts a giant weasel head and shoulders above all other stupid monsters (including the giant beaver) is that there is no word in the English language that's funnier.

Nothing is funnier than a weasel. As I think Dave Barry pointed out you can replace any word in any weasel with the word weasel and it's instantly funny. Watch: I'm sorry but your one eyed daughter with down syndrome has cancer of the giant weasel. If you're going to be stupid go full on. "They will attack until destroyed."

We filmed an episode of "Axe" today. We had our first on-air fatality. (Guess who! Find out in a month and a half.) To my intense pleasure, she immediately rolled up a new character with a pet weasel.

Whale

"The latter will occasionally attack humans (killer whales will always do so), and all forms of whales are very dangerous if molested."

Molested?

The best thing ever said about whales outside Moby Dick was "We took swords with us, swimming one handed, to fight off whales."--from Grendel by John Gardner--which is a really great book and anyone who's into D&D, existentialism and modernist literature should read it. So I guess I'm saying me and Mandy should read it and maybe nobody else.

Wight

Another one of these: if you're a veteran player it means "level drain" if you're not it means a colour spelled wrong.

If we're constructing a game from the ground-up would there be a point to the wight? I think the niche untaken would be as a kind of "civilized" undead that has a little bit more of the common addict about it than the vampire. The vampire's connotations of blasphemousness and aristocracy preclude it seeming like a total junkie in a medieval context and the zombie's mindlessness makes it lack the pathos of a living thing reduced to something less than it was. That is, the wight appears in cities like an ordinary homeless person only slightly pale--then it grabs you and kisses you and you get dumber.

Will -O-(The) Wisp

This monster (monster doesn't seem exactly the right word) derives from a spontaneous light phenomenon noticed in swamps worldwide that science is as-yet still unable to explain.

One Irish theory holds that someone named Jack made a deal with the devil to pay his bar tab, then tricked Satan into climbing a tree, then carved a cross into the tree so Satan couldn't get down. This upset Satan so he cursed Jack to wander the earth with only one light to guide him which Jack then stuck into a gourd. While I have never used a Will-O -isp in a game I will say that Jack sounds like a seriously awesome PC. Any god that wouldn't let him into heaven probably isn't worth worshipping. There's probably a Pogues song about him.

Wind Walker

More invisible creatures from the elemental plane of boring.

This is the name they give the invisible stalker at the New Age get-in-touch-with-your-inner-fuck-camping-retreat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYhe612xdQ0


Wolf

Wolves? Definitely.

So then: Regular Wolves? Dire wolves? Worgs? Winter Wolves? Or all four? Seeing as how my whole campaign is in and endless winter we'll need wolves. I feel like I really only wanna use one. Regular wolves are a necessity, I suppose, since every fifth npc has the word "wulf" in their last name somewhere. Plus there's already werewolves--I'm gonna resist the marvel comics-esque urge to create endless variations on something just because it's cool.

Wolverine

Speaking of which...

The wolverine as listed actually has more hit dice than a wolf. Anyway the wolverine seems like a good utility monster if, say, the PCs are asleep in the middle of the wilderness and you need something to sneak up and eat all of their food. Any similarity between what I just typed and the situation prevailing circa episode 14 of I Hit It With My Axe is strictly coincidental.

Wraith

Wraith is a much better word than "wight" and aside from that it's much more of an immaterial undead like a ghost.

I already talked about how "spectre" was way creepier than "ghost", more disturbing and subtle. Wraith, I think, is likewise better and--luckily for the wraith--for a slightly different reason.

A wraith sounds definitely evil while spectre just seems terrifying and unnatural. Anything called a "wraith" is definitely out to get you. Also, while "specter" summons a psychological horror a "wraith" is something with a spooky cloak. This is important because it would be beneath a spectre's dignity to go galavanting around slumming with skeletons and death knights and other corporeals in an undead army, whereas the wraith fits right in.


Wyvern

See Dragon

No Wonder Vampires Are So Lonely

...reviewing all the monsters, you'll notice there's only one decent monster that starts with V. Unless you count the Vargouille, which is a type of vampire.

Vampire

The usual problem with vampires in D&D is squaring the typical (and very interesting) conception of a vampire as a spooky Machiavellian subtle horror movie monster with the fact that the easiest thing for a vampire to be in D&D is a guy just like you who hits you with things and can turn into a wolf or a bat and is really hard to kill. Basically a sort shape changing Goth-themed super villain

I'll just record a few rules you might be able to use to make a spookier vampire:

A vampire can never (and knows it can never) touch the same victim twice--so if it goes after you, it's going all the way.

A vampire can never appear to the same person in the same form twice--so you never know if you're fighting the vampire or just one of its minions.

A vampire can never change shape in front of anyone else and if reduced to 0 hp it will have to be rescued.

Vargouille

My best shot at the vargouille was this.

The Two Monsters That Begin With U Have Nothing In Common

All the monsters...U time.

Like its good friend Q, U has but two monsters:

Umber Hulk

In the comics, the Hulk got his name 'cause he was marauding around and some soldier said (approximately) "It's some kind of....hulk!" Do you imagine this thing got its name because it waddled out of the shadows and some terrified henchman went "oh no, it's some kind of...hulk! A-and it's umber!"

In recent years, illustrations of the umber hulk have turned it from its original Kirby-esque form into a sort of bipedal giant flea. The original at least has wackiness on it's side, the new one is the kind of thing that'd look really great in the 3d animated giant bug movie but has very little cache in the imagination. The original umber hulk--if we ignore the comic bookiness of the picture-is really not too far from a Bosch demon: it looks at you and you are confused and then it bites you with mandibles. I think my real issue with the hulk as originally presented is that it's treated like an ordinary species rather than some abyssal abomination.

Unicorn

We are all the way down to u, very near the end, so you probably already know--if you've been reading these since the beginning--two things I'll say up front:

-the unicorns I'll use will be nasty or gruesome or gritty or appalling victimized and,

-the girls would desperately like to get their hands on one.

But what else? Long before Christians or even Europeans got ahold of unicorns, their defining feature was untamability--it signified this to every culture that ever dreamed of a horse with a horn. Why?

Well, what's a horse? To the kinds of people who sit around thinking up things to engrave and to symbolize, a horse is an aid to war. You ride on it so you can fight people and the horn is a weapon. In other words, in a unicorn you've got the horse and you've got the sword, so who really needs a guy since all they really do is sit on the horse and hold the sword? It's the premodern equivalent of a tank. So a unicorn very neatly symbolizes self sufficency--it is, if nothing else, independent.

This is perhaps why riding a pegasus into battle seems a little bit less overkill than riding a unicorn. It's actually a kind of interesting paradox: no matter how it's set up, the point of the unicorn is generally going to be that the PCs want the unicorn--but the other point of the unicorn is that the unicorn makes the most sense when it's independent. Doing pretty much the only thing a PC could do with it takes away the very thing that makes it itself.

Most monsters you can only kill their bodies, but a clever enough PC can actually do worse to the unicorn: it can rob it of meaning.

T Monsters Are Funny

All the monsters--T.

The monsters that begin with T are a little funny. Some are downright silly.

Thought Eater

Mandy: This is just Psyduck from Pokemon except before Pokemon. The joke about psyduck was that he was stupid and bumbling.
Zak: But aren't psychic monsters always smart?
Mandy: Let's look up psyduck in the Wikipedia.
Zak: No! I don't wanna look up Psyduck in the Wikipedia.
(Mandy looks up Psyduck in wikipedia.)
Zak: Do you think that the Psyduck was based on the Thought Eater?
Mandy: I think the Psyduck is better than the Thought Eater, but yeah, based on it.
Zak: Why?
Mandy: It has a whole back story like the Psyduck has a headache and it pretends to be stupid in order to lure people into a false sense of security--it has more character. This thing is just a dumb predator that's like (duck voice) I'm gonna eat your brains!
Zak: So if you were running a game would you include a Thought Eater and just give it Psyduck's back story?
Mandy: Maybe, I'd probably do some other adjustments.
Zak: Like what?
Mandy: I'm not gonna tell you 'cause then you'll do it like when I mentioned the Shrieker as a kind of spell and you were all like 'oh now that I think of it there's all kinds of ways to use Shriekers as spells.'
Zak: No, sugar, I'm gonna leave that one for you to do.
Mandy: What the Shrieker as spell or the Psyduck?
Zak: The Psyduck.
Mandy: I'd rather have the Shrieker spells.
Zak: You wanna run the game on Friday?
Mandy: Sigh.

Tick, giant

Of course, what I want to say--what anyone would want to say--is that giant ticks suck but over the course of this alphabetical exploration I started to wonder if maybe my attitude toward stupid monsters is a little too harsh. All I know is that if I ever do use a giant tick I am going to hear Kimberly Kane say "This thing fucking sucks!"

Tiger

Mandy would like me to note for the record that the smilodon is the only big cat that gets a bite attack.

I would like to note that I think white tigers are a perfectly acceptable addition to a vikingy landscape via Siberian tigers and Micheal Moorecock's Tigers of Pan Tang. I'd have it as a sort of exotic import that somehow managed to thrive.

Actually, starting this alphabetical monster run down has made the wastes between Vornhiem and Nornrik a considerably more interesting place. In addition to white tigers it has snow leopards and maybe even the occasional giant lynx--it used to just be all wolves. I think it's still mostly wolves though.

Titan

The titans in the manual are kind of meh. If I was gonna have a Titan I'd want it to be something really different from a giant--I'd want them to be like the titans in Greek myths or at least the crazier ones, very distinctive--one with like 900 eyebrows and bees for arms and each one different from each other one and like everybody knows that there are these titans around and they're all different just like everybody knows there are a certain number of them, like hockey teams.

Titanothere

Titanotheres, though more closely related to horses than rhinos, represent a rare example of a prehistoric animal being less cool than the modern one. While rhinos get horns, all the titanothere gets is shoehorns which is especially weird since shoes hadn't been invented yet.

Toad, giant

"The ice toads have their own weird language." I said most of what I have to say here under Frog but I just want to note ice toads are as smart as people.

I like to imagine a whole ice city built by ice toads with everything designed for those who hop and have no hands and it's full of devices that can be operated only by the proper use of webbed feet and sticky tongues.

Trapper

Trapper--frequently called the Lurker Below--is, like the Lurker Above, really dumb. The question then becomes is there a way that they might be stupid in the sense of stupid awesome rather than just garden variety stupid?

There is a certain pleasing elegance in the idea of defeating a lurker above by rolling a lurker below out underneath it and letting them fight it out. I also find myself wondering why later editions--generally so fond of variant monsters--never produced a lurker sideways?

Treant

I cannot abide friendly treants. The idea of the woods as a helpful and smiling and comforting thing is as anathema to me as having one of the stones in the wall of a dungeon decide it wants to take care of the players.

The environment is hostile--why else would you be in it? There might be sprites or fairies or even goblins that are friendly but it should be obvious at all events that the natural world itself--and any emanations of it--are absolutely opposed to the PCs and that their movement across it is therefore always a movement behind enemy lines. A friendly tree or friendly bush or a friendly blade of grass or a friendly example of anything that defines the landscape and is everywhere in it suggests that part of nature might want the PCs around. In unique cases maybe but as a philosophical principal, never. A friendly tree implies that at least one of the trees in the landscape isn't a spooky twisty doomforest tree and that is entirely unacceptable.

Triton

Like mermen only allegedly tough. I'm not buying it.

Troglodyte

Troglodytes are a cross between lizard men and cave men and so are like the thing about lizard men I like least. They do have interesting gimmicks though: they have chameleonlike skin and, when angry, they emit a secretion which weakens humanoids. I think the idea of distinct races of lizard men each of whom emit some distinctive sort of slime, though I see no reason why they can't just live in lizard houses rather than caves.

Troll

Giants have to be big, ogres have to be brutal and trolls have to be ugly. The troll doll is no exception. The Skáldskaparmál says:

They call me Troll;
Gnawer of the Moon,
Giant of the Gale-blasts,
Curse of the rain-hall,
Companion of the Sibyl,
Nightroaming hag,
Swallower of the loaf of heaven.
What is a Troll but that?

Wikipedia also says:
"A fairly frequent notion is that the trolls liked to appear as rolling balls of yarn."

Notions about what exactly a troll is vary wildly but to modern ears I'd say the outstanding connotation is ugliness or at least distorted features. I imagine the billy goats' troll as a green thing with a very big head and a very big bump on it's very big nose and a black hat.

Another thing about trolls is that, unlike giants, the connotation is almost always undesirable and, unlike ogres, it's not necessarily clear why. The word "troll"--though unspecific--is always insulting. You wouldn't call someone you didn't like a goblin or demon or ogre--that'd suggest they were too tough, or they were genuinely getting to you--but "troll" is just about right.

A troll is a supernatural equivalent (to modern ears) of a maggot or a slug--something undesirable but that reaps no power of intimidation or badassness from it's undesirability. The trolls in D&D regenerate, but even this power is given overtones of grotesquerie in the manual "the loathsome members of a troll have the ability to fight on even if severed from the body; a hand can claw or strangle, the head bite, etc."

Turtle, Sea, Giant and Turtle, Snapping, Giant

Certain turtles live a very long time, but all turtles--because of their slowness and wrinkles--seem old (with the possible exception of the odd cartoon turtle or baby red eared slider). This gives them unusual pathos for reptiles: you can feel bad for a turtle, and if you watch them you frequently do.

The other thing about turtles is that they have this piece of architecture on their back--so symmetrical and structural (and attached more incongruously than a crab shell to a crab). These two characteristics combine to suggest the common idea that the turtle is part of the earth or connected to it.

These to me are the really interesting giant turtles, the turtle that has the whole world on its back, or the turtle that has an inhabited island on its back or the turtle who's head and limbs stick out from some fantastic gem.

Tarrasque

The tarrasque never seemed weird enough to me. It's supposed to be the most terrifying and earth-shattering monster, but it's presented as just a stack of (very high) stats. If there really was a tarrasque I would want it to be storied and tabooed and steeped in philosophical mystery, I would want it to have obscure effects on the colour of goat's horns and fishwive's dreams. Anything that wants to be taken seriously as a god or a demon has to be thought about as often and as seriously as a god or a demon.

The tarrasque of Christian legend is one of those mix-and-match medieval terrors (turtle shell, lion head, etc) native to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. St. Martha used her feminine wiles to tame it. This is all fine and good, but a great deal has been not so much lost as re-scripted in the translation--the tarrasque-as-medieval-Godzilla and the tarrasque-as-fable-fuel will take some work to hybridize or reconcile, but it might be worth it.

The thing about D&D is the obvious lateral thinking solutions (showing the medusa a mirror for example) are part of the monster description to begin with. To redesign the tarrasque as a puzzle monster would take considerable cleverness on the DMs part, the solution to the tarrasque would have to be unexpected yet at the same time couldn't just be some random obscure thing (say, if a bluebird kisses it on the cheek it dies). Of course, the tarrasque is somewhat of a puzzle monster already--common solutions include wishing it into the center of the sun or building walls of force around it and then filling it with water, but both those include a considerable quantity of brute force in addition to brains.

A good puzzle-tarrasque would, I'm thinking, be something along the lines of the tarrasque cannot be killed by anything that moves or anything that has seen the moon or something like that.

Thri-kreen

Why have a tri-kreen when you could just have a giant praying mantis? Because thri-kreen have hands and also because they have those cool three-bladed weapons that they throw. I never liked the S&M-gladiator look that they had in some pictures, but mantis men seem like a fine idea and mantis women absolutely nightmarish.

Troll, marine (scrag)

See this.

"S" Is Where The True Classic Monsters Hide

Perusing all the monsters alphabetically, "S" is clearly the mother lode. "D" has demons, devils, and dragons, but for real-life terrors--sharks, snakes, skulls, scorpions, slugs--you can't beat "S". Things that start with "S" have been frightening people since before the letter was invented.

Sahuagin

Along with the ixitxachitl, the morkoth, the masher, and several other pointless underwater monsters were apparently created by Steve Marsh for the Blackmoor supplement in 1975 (if you spend more time researching than I want to then I'm sure you can figure out what's Marsh and what's Arneson and what's Gygax here, ANYWAY...).

The sahuagin entry is one of the longest in the book and details sahuagin society extensively though god know's why. I think Marsh was working in the wrong medium: his manta ray philosophers and brutal shark men and crazy fish might have been great in a pulp novel or in a Jae Lee-illustrated run on Sub-Mariner but, as gaming material, all these interlocking, backstoried monsters boil down to is a set of stats and a small crappy black and white illustration (or, in later editions a cartoony, superdeformed color illustration). And in that medium, they do not come particularly alive.

There are lots of details about the organization of sahuagin society with weapon lists and percentile charts, but no details on, say, what makes them any different from underwater hobgoblins or what weird beliefs they might have or the peculiarities of their architecture or beast-of-burden breeding practices. Telling me the percentage armed with a trident vs. the percentage armed with a net might--theoretically--be useful, but not as useful as giving me details that make me care whether one has a trident or a net.

The sahuagin looks like a dumb ape with fins and nothing written in the entry overcomes that. If I mentally change their name to "sea devils" rather than their egregiously pseudo-exotic original name and transpose the finned ape picture with the awesome Trampier salamander on the next page I suddenly feel like a race of cruel sea slavers might might might be worth all the effort and non-dungeoneering it would take to get my players to care about things happening dozens of miles underwater to yet another race of ill-tempered humanoids.

Salamander

Actual salamanders sleep inside logs, so sometimes when you build a fire you suddenly see salamanders crawling out of it. This gave rise to the idea that they had an affinity for fire. I like salamanders a lot (it's probably all down to Trampier).

I like that they come to the material plane for "purposes known only to them". I imagine them surrounding people and hissing and poking them with their strange spears bathed in a wrong glow.

I also like the idea of frost salamanders. Lizards and amphibians usually hate the cold, but in our minds they are cold so somehow it all works out.

Satyr

The modern conception of Satan is a streamlining of the satyr or, more specifically, of the satyr and the satyr-gods Bacchus and Pan. Through an injection of serpent blood--or perhaps simply because of the difficulty of carving curls into stone--the image of Satan often lacks the goat hair on his goat legs. It's an improvement.

Scorpion, Giant

It's hard not to like scorpions, but my heart belongs to the man-scorpion. It's one of the very first monsters in history--Gilgamesh meets them when they're working as underworld bouncers (one of the only jobs available to monsters in those less enlightened times).

"...their glory is terrifying, their stare strikes death into men, their
shimmering halo sweeps the mountains that guard the rising sun."

It's interesting how no matter how much we think we know about the world, the scorpion's sting still strikes us as fundamentally dishonest just because it's on its tail. The scorpion always has to play the bad guy.

Sea Hag

I did not realize until looking at this entry just now that the canonical sea hag had a three times daily death gaze. Anyway...

For me there are two kinds of sea hag, the one with a sense of humor and the one without.

The sea hag with a sense of humor is the one you might find at the head of a lusty pirate crew and the one that turns you into a frog just for fun. The sea hag is mad and reckless and will pretty much do whatever.

The sea hag without a sense of humor is the hag who bemoans her lost youth (what are hags when they are young? Maybe dryads, maybe nymphs?) This sea hag has straight gray hair and turns you into a toad specifically so that you will be as miserable as her. She generally occupies a lonely sea tower and is anti-social.

When there are three sea hags they must all be of the same sort, otherwise the PCs may be able to exploit their differences in disposition. Plus then what's the third one?

Sea Horse, Giant

If you ever go to an aquarium and look at seahorses they're almost unbelievable. Like you look and go "I do not believe that I am seeing an animal that;s real". Not just their shape, which is--granted--very weird, but the fact that they manage to stay upright bobbing like fishermen's hooks no matter what. They look more like they were designed by some rococo theatre-background painter than by natural selection. I find the idea of anything really violent managing to get around to its tactical satisfaction while mounted on a seahorse pretty implausible.

I think the giant seahorse is more made for your underwater annoying magic weirdo types like water sprites or sea goblins. (Mandy opines that sea goblins would ride on these.)

Sea Lion

The sea lion is ok in a kind of public-swimming-pool-Neptune-mural-gone-wrong-aquatic-Lewis Carrol kind of way. I've got nothing against it as long as it doesn't ask to be taken too seriously.

Shadow

I like to treat shadows like shadows: I like them to be related to some indentifible source (as in the shadow of some object or monster) and I like them to depend on where the light is coming from. I also really like that part of Peter Pan (the only part of Peter Pan I can remember) where he gets detached from his shadow and has to sew it back on anyway, point is the possibilities are endless.

Shambling Mound

The shambling mound is the DnD version of the Man-Thing. The carrot/tuber nose is the giveaway and makes it more like the Man-Thing than the Swamp Thing--who was invented a year later by the roommate of one of the guys who invented the Man-Thing. Both of these, in turn, derive from an older character known as The Heap and The Heap no doubt derives from an even earlier monster which I have no idea what it is but I'm a hundred percent certain that someone in the comments will let me know all about it as soon as I post this entry.

Anyway the point is--in the seventies a lot of people thought that fighting things that were sort of dull green and slow moving and shaggy was a good idea. Was it because they were hippies or because they liked the idea of fighting hippies? Who can say?

Shark

What you'll notice about the Monster Manual shark entry is that it's completely wrong in every way down to the fact that most sharks do NOT have to keep moving in order to survive. The manual also leaves out the coolest fact about sharks which is that they're immune to bombs. According to Wikipedia "In 1957, after a series of shark attacks, the South African government ordered a warship to drop underwater bombs on the sharks, but it failed and the attacks continued."

Although they are fairly predictable as a monster as you'll find at sea (the Rat, Giant, (Sumatran) of marine encounters), I'm not going to be such a stick in the mud as to say sharks are boring. Really, as Steven Spielberg knew, it's the threat of sharks that's great: "Oh look you're in the water, oh look you're bleeding, what will you do now?"

And the megalodon? I don't know how big a megalodon is really supposed to be and I don't feel like looking it up but I imagine it's about big enough to eat a sailing ship or to take a decent sized bit anyway and I imagine it likes to eat wood as much as flesh. Or at least I imagine that's what the PCs have heard.

Shedu

The most interesting thing about the shedu is if you drive to Anahiem from Los Angeles there's a whole bunch of them carved into the shopping mall you can see from the freeway. It's like they were thinking "Wal Mart is stupid, Shedus are stupid, let's just put everything stupid in one place."

Shrieker

I like shriekers. It's odd because I hate car alarms. I wonder if intelligent monsters who live in dungeons get pissed off about shriekers the way the rest of us do about car alarms.

What I don't like is the idea people purposefully cultivating shriekers as guards--or at least I'm afraid of overdoing it. After you do it once or twice, they become less weird and mysterious and they feel like just a piece of technology.

I think the concept of the shrieker could be extended to a great many different creatures: something basically immobile and dumb that explodes in howls whenever anyone comes near. That's what I was thinking when I had that woman filled with spiders that showed up in the third episode of I Hit It With My Axe. Mandy just had an idea--a spell you cast on someone, a curse that makes them like a terrible infant: you shriek uncontrollably whenever anyone (except perhaps some single specific creature) comes near you.

Now that I think of it, there's really all kinds of shrieker spells you could do, turning someone unwillingly into an alarm system or maybe you could just put shriekers in their food. Alright I'm gonna keep quiet now so as not to give anything away to my players.

Skeleton

Why do the dead hate us? Well like they say in Full Metal Jacket "the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive" but also, they seem to hate us because they smile. That's really hard to take, I think.

Why are they smiling? Since the idea that they're smiling because they're dead seems to be anathema, we assume it must be some sort of evil glee like they're laughing at us. It's pretty self- absorbed, maybe they really do just like it better that way.

There's also monster skeletons--which are nice because, often, they look like whole new creatures under the skin. An ironic law is in effect here: the kindest animals change their aspect most radically. A snake skeleton has roughly the same aura as a snake--but a cow or a horse turns completely fiendish, and few things look as positively diabolical as an elephant skull.

Once in a while I'll come across a monster in the course of these entries and ask if anybody reading has ever used it. With skeletons I have to ask whether anyone reading hasn't?

Skunk, Giant

I will simply say that the skunk backs up my S monster thesis. People are afraid of skunks. In real life, anyway.

Slithering Tracker

I don't think the slithering tracker has to be boring. It could be a sort of three foot long centipede sort of thing with a gelatinous body like a jelly fish and when it drinks your blood you can actually watch it fill with red before slithering back to it's master.

Slug, Giant

Anything a giant slug can do a flail snail can do better.

Snake, Giant

Like skeletons, snakes are almost too good. Plus there are all these snake monsters with snake parts.

In order to avoid feeling like you're just repeating the same thing over and over, I like the idea of organizing snake monsters into a snakey hierarchy. The Greeks did it: they assumed that most snake monsters were related--as in "had the same parents". My ideas about relationships between snakes and snake monsters are pretty involved and I'm going to keep it a secret for now.

Spectre

Although it's a synonym for ghost, "spectre" is a more ominous word. A spectre is (etymologically) something you see but don't fully understand. Ghost is a kind of harmless-sounding word--it still has something of a person about it (maybe just because of Casper), "spectre" though is definitely bad.

A spectre is not something that you can just ignore, a spectre is a serious problem. There are alternate kinds of ghosts: spooks can be things other than what we think of as ghosts--spirits of single dead individuals. The "egregore" or at least one version of it, is a collective spirit created by a shared emotion--a spectre could be an egregore formed from feelings originating with a massacre or other horrific event something much more complicated and subtle than one dead see-through person. I think a spectre should be a master villain.

Sphinx

The only sphinx that interests me is the gynosphinx (though I will say that the hieracosphinx seems pointlessly close to a gryphon).

I like the idea that they are smart, that they go around collecting information, and that they are neutral. Occasionally a sphinx will pop up in one of my dungeons disinterestedly commenting on the action and possibly willing to trade information.

Of all the monsters with the heads of women-the sphinx is the most catlike and so can combine the fuck-off-ness of cats with the fuck-off-ness of beautiful women. It's a formidably vigorous hybrid fuck-off-ness.

Spider

Completing the scary trio of classic archetypes--with skeletons and snakes.

What is it about spiders? The many legs, the many eyes, and especially the webs suggest intelligence--but a totally alien intelligence. Snakes are just pretty clearly the enemy--they are predators with heads full of poison--but you look at their heads and it has a face that we recognize: clean shaven, but still following the plan.

The spider is something else entirely, even if we don't feel that they're a threat to us, we could see them very clearly being cruel on their own scale in basements and windowsills. Is there any other animal that nearly everyone on earth can say: I have seen it hunting, I have seen a trap it laid, and I've seen, moreover, that they have a continuous and coherent world existing in the margins of our own world.

Plus, spiders can actually kill you. Which seems ridiculous. But obviously something deep in your DNA knew it all along. Spiders are perhaps the smallest animal which the caveman part of your brain still registers as deadly. And it's right. And this is maybe another reason a spider seems crafty. If you find a black widow in the garden or in the garage or--worse--a funnel web spider, part of you will think "this thing's been living in my house for god knows how long and it could have killed me at any time--it's just toying with me."

So: inscrutable, discreet, alien, deadly, crafty, unique, poisonous--and all that even before you make it into a monster.

Sprite

It's hard tot ell a sprite form a pixie but if something has crazy hair sticking out in all directions it's gotta be a sprite.

Squid, Giant

Because of its pointy head the squid seems a little bit dumber than the octopus, but because it's streamlined it also seems a little more malevolent.

Giant squid exist and are still, to this day, mysterious. A 50ft squid will leave a 4" diameter sucker mark on a sperm whale but 16" diameter sucker marks have been found. The corresponding 200 foot squid has not been found but scientists conjecture it may exist.

Cephalopods have a sort of lite version of the unintelligability and craftiness of spiders, but they're a little more relatable. In the mating frenzy male squids have been known to miss the females and accidentally inject their own arms with sperm.

Stag

Stag-headed monsters are scary enough that I can't think of too many reasons to use a regular old stag unless you're doing some kind of chivalrous hunting thing so I haven't much to say on the subject.

But here's a new monster while I'm at it--it's a demon with a body like a man and the head of a stag. Entwined in its antlers are candles made from (something gruesome) its weapon is a long thin brass staff with an ever burning candle at either end. They generally wear long white robes.

Stirge

I have nothing against the concept of the stirge, but the original pictures look like angry sparrows wearing bad halloween costumes. If I want a blood sucking bird I'll make it like a nightingale or something.

Strangle Weed

Aside from being a perfectly decent minimum-wage-utility-monster the strangle weed also has a pretty decent mechanic attached to it:

"A victim compares its strength against the frond or fronds which have entangled it. The difference in the victim's favor is it's chance of escaping, i.e 1 equals 10%, 2 is 20%, etc. A negative difference, a balance in favor of the weed, indicates the victim has taken that number of points of crushing damage, i.e a victim's strength of 18 compared to the 3 fronds holding it, 30, so the strangle weeds inflict 12 points of damage on their prey."

Su-monster

I think the su-monster is supposed to be some kind of pseudo-Asian evil monkey though I'm not really sure what the point is supposed to be. Anybody know? Same problem with the kech.

Sylph

Aside from the wings, the sylph can be distinguished from the dryad and the nymph in that it's both less attracted to-, and less hostile to-, ordinary humans. It can be distinguished from the SILF by the fact that it's not related to you.

Scarecrow

When I do hex maps I tend to be interested in the cities and the forests and try my best to ignore all that farmland that, in any reasonable facimile of medieval Europe, should be in between.

The only thing that tempts me to maybe stick a farmhouse in is the possibility of getting a chance to use a scarecrow.

Slaad

The key for me to making these demonic frogs convincing is that they aren't all round and bouncy like Mister Toad--their skin hangs and sags around their aging eyes. I always imagine a slaad leaning on a poleaxe, both hands holding it high up on the shaft, its head sinking into its old man neck folds: bored with you, bored with life, bored with your plane of existence. The neutralest evil.

Baudelaire:

But here among the scorpions and the hounds,

the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,

monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,

in all the squalid zoo of vices, one

is even uglier and fouler than the rest,

although the least flamboyant of the lot;

this beast would gladly undermine the earth

and swallow all creation in a yawn;

I speak of Boredom which with ready teats

dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.

The "R" Monsters

All of the monsters: R.

Rakshasa

The smoking jacket is the key. Without it, it's just one more organic impediment with a zoomorphic head. Strangely, the game often ignores the smoking jacket and all it implies and treats the Rakshasa as just one more high-level nasty. A recent WotC product has a beholder summoning one as a kind of bodyguard.

A quick perusal of the wikipedia finds no mention of the tiger head at all--the Rakshasa is just a sort of catch-all magic cannibal demon. The tiger head,gives the D&D Rakshasa a distinct identity: tigers have both the coiled poise of housecats and the pimpiness of their striped orange coats. Tigers seem to be saying "I know you know I'm right here, and I know that you know that I know that there's nothing you can do it about it. Because I'm a fucking tiger." Ferocity and royal ease. This eastern demon is not a tempter but a tyrant. Shere Khan acts like Shere Khan for a reason.

Ram, giant

Slightly more dangerous and slightly less interesting than Goat, giant.

Rat, giant (Sumatran)

Giant rats appear all the time in dungeons, they're the monster that tells you that you're in a dungeon but you haven't gotten anywhere that anybody else hasn't managed to get yet.

Giant rats do actually exist and--aside from horses--probably therefore qualify as the real animal most likely to appear in Dungeons and Dragons. The giant rats in the Manual are size S which means that they probably aren't yet riding-animal size, but that never stopped people from writing them that way.

What I like about the idea of a goblin or something riding around on a--say--wolf-sized giant rat is the image of the rat getting up on its hind legs and sniffing the air while the goblin scouts around. Perfect thing for going around a dungeon on.

Ray

It's strange how modern rays seem. It's difficult to picture anyone before the Sherlock Holmes era having anything to do with them (except maybe in Japan).

Judging from the Monster Manual, Gygax apparently regularly had need of rules to determine what happens when a PC gets swallowed whole by a giant version of a regular animal. He also seems extremely prepared for the prospect of PCs looking for treasure while they are in there. "The manta ray's stomach is the repository of indigestible items--such as the treasure types indicated."

I catch myself wondering if Gygax's original players didn't spend half the Greyhawk campaign just wandering around temperate salt water biomes hoping to get swallowed.

Remorhaz

A remorhaz is another one of those sci-fi type monsters that you can't really picture properly unless you've seen an illustration. The job with the remorhaz is to distinguish it from the purple worm and (later) from the frost worm. The only thing that really makes it come alive is the original Trampier picture.

When I was younger I never realized it, but I realize now that he had a peculiar talent for defining things. Whether or not any individual one of his pictures was spectacular or memorable, the Trampier picture always etches the substance and the aura--the idea of the monster--very clearly. I can't immediately think of any comparable artist in that regard in all of art history.

With, for example, Ian Miller or Erol Otus' expressionism you always seem to get more mood (or more Otus, or more Miller) than monster--not that this is a bad thing, it's just that they're more about the image than the thing.

Other artists can define a thing, but in the way a dictionary does--they generally rely so much on realism that it ends up looking like the thing has been observed rather than summoned. A Bosch demon, for example, just looks like he just saw that bug-faced five eyed thing walking around in the Netherlands somewhere and painted it. Durer's work looks like every monstrosity he ever drew resulted from careful scientific study of the beast in its habitat or on a dissecting table. Frazetta seemed to be trying to carefully re-create vividly-colored dreams using all the technical tools at his disposal.

Trampier stylizations, on the other hand, seem to be neither expressions or observation--he looks rather as if he has lived with the legend of the remorhaz as did his father before him and his father before him and so when he's called upon to depict it he gives you a sort of codified but still vital representation of this thing--his work is a sort of pulpy equivalent of the eerily specific monster sculptures produced by early Chinese and Mesoamerican artists with a sort of supreme cultural confidence that the monster has a broken tooth right there and a third arm right there and that you have a sort of sacred responsibility to represent it properly.

Anyway, he makes me want to make the girls want to know what a remorhaz is.

Rhinoceros

I can't really picture my campaign including a rhinoceros, although I can imagine my PCs seeing a bizarre print on the wall of the library depicting one and wondering what the hell kind of crazy monster that is and wondering whether there is any treasure in its stomach.

Roc

See Eagle, giant.

Roper and Rust Monster

I would maintain the roper is superfluous and the rust monster isn't.

Superficially, they have a lot in common: both are original to D&D, both are sort of sci-fi-ish, both have tentacles.

But the roper is basically nothing at all interesting without its tentacles--and so many other things have tentacles. And if they don't then you can easily stick them on.

The rust monster, on the other hand, has a unique ability, is less shapeless in the mind's eye (a roper is "cigar shaped" whereas the rust monster is basically a giant four-legged bug), and the rust monster has personality.

It has personality because while the roper is just one more yellowish brown blob trying to kill you, the rust monster has the subtle agon of all insects--it means you no harm, it's simply gross and in your way and wants to eat something you happen to value.

In an actual fight, the roper is going to lash out and try to eat you and if it doesn't then what's the point? The rust monster, on the other hand, has a million different uses: goblins can prod it toward you or drop it on you, it can simply be in your way minding its own business in a narrow tunnel you need to get through, or hundreds of them can infest a town like rats.

Mandy wants to know if--when you drop them--they helicopter slowly to the floor with their propeller tails.

Now is as good a time as any to mention that when I complained about the gelatinous cube in the G entry, the nice people at Otherworld Miniatures sent me a very nice deluxe cube and also threw in a pair of rust monsters. I'd like to put a picture of them here but I had a hell of a time gluing them together and I wouldn't want my hamfistedness to reflect poorly on them. Anyway, point is they make some pretty good rust monsters over there at Otherworld.

Rot Grub

I'm sure there's some story about some circumstance that made this incredibly boring kill-your-players-immediately monster seem necessary when they were originally invented.

I feel like if I was an entrepreneurial lower planes creature aiming for Demon Prince of something, there's unexploited psychobioarchetypal real estate in the Lord of Rot Grubs, Cerebral Parasites, Ear Seekers and Other Creatures That Are Ubiquitous, Almost Undetectable, and Almost Always Fatal niche. Why isn't there that guy? He'd be the boss in no time.

Revenant

Classically, a revenant refers to someone who's dead, walking around, corporeal, and still in possession of all or most of his or her faculties. So: not a ghost, not a zombie, and not a vampire (the revenant doesn't necessarily have any special powers).

The interesting thing about this kind of revenant is that if it's still walking around and thinking, then what--in practical terms--makes it dead? For this reason, the revenant asks you to define "soul" in one way or another, in order to define, therefore, what it would mean to be "soulless".

In the medieval mind, the soulless were considered animalistic (thus vampires), in modern pop terms we think of soullessness as almost the opposite. "Soulless" suggests to us something Kafkian--without emotion, without appetites or drives, mechanical. Without the passions of the animal.

Strangely, we think of the soul as the animal and the body as mere machine, whereas early Christians though of the body as the animal and the soul as the restraining mechanism.

At any rate, revenants in a campaign that already has ghouls or vampires would be modern Kafkian constructs joylessly going about repetitive rituals or bureaucratic tasks. Better than ghosts, in my humble.

2 Decent Monsters Start With Q

"Q" makes for an easy day to do the Alphabetical Monster Thing. One from the Monster Manual, and one from the Monster Manual 2. Which is good, because I have a siege to run this evening...

Quasit

Like the imp, the quasit is a special evil familiar able to go retrieve six answers from Hell. Unlike the imp, it's a little less clear just from the name exactly what a quasit is. I mean, an "imp" is clearly some little mischief monsters. Quasit?

So: is it worth pulling out the Manual to point to this strange picture and say "the creature sitting on Red Vorjoon's shoulder looks just like this?" I think it is. It is a convincingly fiendish thing and its open mouth gives it a hollowed-out post-vomit look.

The imp delights in pushing you over the edge, the quasit sinks its claws into you and drags you down. The imp has personality--the quasit is a frce off nature. You get the feeling the imp will be rewarded and transformed into something bigger and eviller when it's all over whereas the quasit is just a small sucking malice now and forever.

Quickling

Glancing at the DnD 4 Monster Manual I notice that the foppish quickling (a sort of superfast fairy elf) had been turned into a more standardized feral elf/gollum hybrid. I don't like it. (Shocking, I know.)

The new quickling is just another goblin with a trick up its sleeve--the old one suggested an entire lunatic section of forest full of lace clad hyper-Keeblers doing everything fast all the time with fast clocks and fast weapons and fast holidays and fast fasting and fast duels and fast weddings and fast divorces and fast funerals and fast pets.

P Monsters...

All the monsters--P.

Pegasus

I feel like there should occasionaly be a pegasus or at least the rumor, possibility, or threat of a pegasus. However, someone riding a pegasus is a dicey proposition. It's like biting the head off a bat--that's somebody else's bit you're doing and--one way or another--it hasn't made it into Open Style Content. I feel you'd have to make it real weird to make it work again.

The subtext of the modern conception--especially in a DnD context--of the pegasus is a unicorn. You can talk about a unicorn and maybe not remind someone of a pegasus but it's hard not to do vice versa. The unicorn is a clearer construct--it symbolizes purity and untamability.

It seems to me a pegasus should be a much wilder beast. Its mother was, after all, Medusa. The idea of being bit by a unicorn is stupid--I can very easily imagine a pegasus biting someone.

Peryton

"...likely the result of the same sort of experimentation as brought about the owlbear." Would that be experimentation with an x-acto knife, a hot glue gun, and a bag of plastic woodland creatures?

Not quite, the peryton originated either with Borges or with a medieval manuscript he refers to in his Book of Imaginary Beings and, consequently, is way creepier than its fellow mash-up monster. The stag's head adds not only crypto-satanic associations to the bird of prey but also useful weaponry, while the owlbear is just a bear that can see you real well--which, frankly, never seemed to be something bears needed to work on.

Plus, whoever invented the peryton tried so much harder--there's the tearing out human hearts thing, the enslaving people thing, and the fact that it has the shadow of a person.

Further peryton lore from Borges: the peryton is allegedly only allowed to kill one person and then it can kill no more. When it does, its shadow will match its body again. Also the species was apparently "instrumental in the fall of Rome".

Piercer

Should I just make fun of the piercer or should I make fun of what the girls would think if I told them that they suddenly saw a piercer or should I realize that life is short and move on to the Pike, giant?

Pike, giant

What I wanna know is why whoever invented the swordfish and the flail snail didn't bother to invent a pikepike.

Pixie

I just now noticed that there's no entry for "fairy" in the Monster Manual or the Monster Manual 2 or the Fiend Folio. Instead we get pixie and sprite (and maybe slyph if you wanna stretch the synonym sprawl a little further). The Manual produces no significant conceptual differences between the pixie and the sprite--they seem to have the same taste in shoes, headgear and weaponry.

So anyway, we might as well talk about the fair folk now. Like elves, they're a little aristocratic and--like elves--it's implied that there's something natural about their aristocracy. On the other hand, they are much more like children and do not necessarily have the grave Tolkien-esque austerity sometimes associated with elves.

Are these just metaphors for the children of the rich as seen by the hardworking people paid to keep an eye on them? Playful, mischevious, demanding, possessed of strange powers, obedient to mysterious but inflexible rules, not all bad but likewise ignorant or bemused by human morality.

These creatures, these sort of assistant gods, were used by mothers to keep their own children in line. "Don't do this or the blue fairies will get you and take you away." If we imagine the standard Christian threat ("Do right or a half naked Jewish king will send you to Hell.") sort of Bowdlerized for the consumption of Victorian children--here's the threat, the fairy folk.

Of course, long before they were scaring children and floating around in lacy dresses they were nature spirits. The implication is not that nature is hostile to us or that nature is our friend but merely that it has a life and a morality that does not intersect our own and which does not acknowledge our own. It is, in its way, a very wise philosophy.

The Renaissance-thru-Victorian idea of fairies is interesting in this way--my off-the-cuff impression is society had passed the point where these nature spirits were considered essential you-must-propitiate-them-if-you-want-shit-done envirospiritual bureaucrats but hadn't yet reached the point where everyone knew they were bullshit. Therefore they were just different than us. They had a parallel world that did not necessarily intersect ours.

I don't feel as though the fairy folk really should have to have any well-defined ideas about people. An adventure involving fairies should be about culture shock on both sides. Your armor and your magic should seem as ridiculous to them as their shoes do to you.

Porcupine, giant

I have never seen any uncute photo of a porcupine. While I'm sure that many of you have harrowing tales of porcupine quills, I'm just not going for it. I feel the girls would probably refuse to fight it on general principal anyway.

Portugese Man-O-War, giant

There's no Jellyfish, Giant in the Manual but there is the Portugese Man-O-War, Giant. So I'll use this as a catch-all for all the variations of jellyfish monster.

I think there's no reason that jellyfish monsters shouldn't be intelligent. They lose nothing by being real villains and they gain quite a bit. Slow and murky and alien.

Eyes are, if not the window to the soul, then at least supposed to tell you quite a bit about the soul, and an animal without eyes can't help but seem sinister. The floating brain in a jar is never a good guy. The jellyfish monster is like the floating brain in a jar adapted for life out in the world--sleek and malleable and with its translucent head full on invisible thoughts.

Pseudo-dragon

See dragon.

Purple Worm

I'm glad that the worm is purple.

Purple is regal (because it is rare), purple is weird (because it is unnatural in animals), and purple is pulpy (because pre-twentieth century imagination rarely dreamed of purple animals). If it were just a giant worm it would just be another gross thing only big. The purple worm has a dignity granted by it's exoticism. In the original illustration it's black (one of the two available colors) which suggests it's the color of grape soda--black for the most part, but a rich violet in the highlights.

Someone will no doubt point out in the comments that it was originally unillustrated and spelled purple wyrm with a "y"and so maybe was some kind of dragon. I imagine that beast as being kind of perfect in its unimaginableness. I'm instead thinking that the Purple Wyrm should never be imagined, visualized, or illustrated, not as a cartoon purple dragon and not as one of TSR or WotC's athletic uber-lizards with a different palette but instead as some entirely literary cousin of a dragon. Like the questing beast or the bandersnatch or the boogeyman, the purple wyrm should never have a miniurature and should be spoken of only in reverent and hushed tones.

Para-elemental

Ice, smoke, magma, and ooze. I've already complained about how boring ordinary elementals are, why not have all of these guys on the chart too--or instead? Magma is good--probably best represented by those big red guys who fought Crystar the crystal warrior and the lava children.

Smoke, ooze and ice, unlike air and water, actually have an emotional meaning.

Phoenix

It it strange that the phoenix didn't show up until the Monster Manual 2. I like it understated--a small beautiful red bird that just happens to live in fire and is also unimaginably important and magical.

O Monsters Are Not Like You and I

It's time for the Alphabetical Monster Thing.

Maybe it's just me, but I notice is a faint hint of linguistic family resemblance lurking under the O monsters--O monsters are notable for their otherness. They are more likely to be neutral than evil, but are always decisively separated from humans by some quality suggesting they come from a different world. Odd, other, outside. A word that begins with o is a thing that comes together only after an empty and open moment.

Demons are self-evidently like us--they are us taken to extremes--as are halflings and giants and imps and demon dogs and hellcats and vampires. The "o" monsters suggest the DNA trail is all different--or at least that some point-of-genetic-no-return has been passed. They don't want what we want.

Obliviax

I like the obliviax a lot. It's moss and it eats your memories and turns into you. The best part is the only way to get your memories back is to eat the moss. You can get someone else's memories by eating the moss. This is a great all-purpose plot hook injector especially if you have the kind of players who will put anything in their mouth so long as they found it in a vial.

Ochre jelly

Pick a color, pick a synonym for goo, pick a weakness, look you've invented a new monster! Green slime, gray ooze, black pudding, I'm sick of it. I'm protesting it. Especially since I just got that Lankmar book and got reminded about how cool Cold Woman is. Now that's an interesting ooze.

Octopus, giant

Like a lot of the giant ordinary animals, the entry for the giant octopus has a fairly complex set of special rules--in this particular case, for dealing with the octopus' tentacles. (Many of the other animals have systems for what to do if you are swallowed whole.)

I don't automatically think this is a bad thing, at least in principal. If you are a DM with time to prepare, setting different monsters up as if they are their own special minigame can be kind of interesting--especially if taken to an extreme. Each encounter can be just a whole new thing. I mean, that's how combat is presented in novels--each as a unique challenge requiring the hero to completely re-orient him/herself. You have to be fast to avoid the octopus' tentacles, tough to survive the stomach acids of the giant Slorr, wise to see where the displacer beast really is...

In other news, in case you're wondering, according the Manual, the giant squid is in all ways tougher than the giant octopus though the octopus can squirt ink and camouflage itself.

As for the beast itself, I've spent a lot of time looking at octopuses and I feel there's something inherently round and bubbly and feckless about octopi and other cephalopods such that, despite their weirdness and alieness, they often seem sort of innocent (vampyroteuthis infernalis notwithstanding). I feel like I have to give any octopus I use a toothy mouth on each sucker or some other sinister mutation--otherwise the girls are likely to decide to try to tame it and keep it as a pet, mount, or "friend".

Ogre

Ogres are stupid, ogres are hungry, ogres are lonely. If they are not lonely, then they are in a tribe, and if they are in a tribe the lonely hungry weirdo aspect, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect--falls by the wayside and they just become sort of big bad guys.

So what's the difference between and ogre and a giant--not in D&D terms, but in terms of what you think when you hear them? The giant's hunger and primitiveness seem incidental and perhaps even optional--the giant's theme is bigness and weird scale, giant homes, giant pets--the ogres primitiveness is absolutely essential to its identity--the ogre has to have heads on spikes and giant warthogs for pets and has to be hunched over. (Mandy always imagines ogres as being bigger than giants.) Point is: an ogre is intractable, insatiable, unreformable, irredeemable, uncivilizable, and definitely cannibalistic. A giant isn't necessarily any of those things.

Are ogres unlike us? I think the thing is: we desperately hope they are unlike us. We would like to get away from neanderthality. They make us anxious in a way that monkeys don't. I would let a monkey into my home so much faster than I would one of those wax morons behind the glass in a natural history museum. A monkey is like some cousin you only see at weddings, over in the corner unsuccessfully stacking hors d'oeuvres or knee-deep in cake--they're funny, they've got character, they're harmless. But the ogre? The ogre is like a brother with some tragic, moany, drooly and brutal mental problem. Sitting very close, and very closely related. And we do not want it to be.

Ogre mage

Obviously all that about the ogre makes the ogre magi difficult for me to wrap my head around. Basically an ogre mage was D&D's interpretation of an oni before oriental adventures D&D introduced a monster called the oni (like the original monk and the gold dragon were sort of half-assed stabs at Asian ideas that would get fleshed out later) (D&D 4 has just gone ahead and replaced Ogre Mages with Oni).

Anyway the point is, for me anyway, the ogre mage makes no sense with the western connotations of the word ogre. An oni is a big crazy tusked fat thing kind of like a demon but definitely large and physical and with a face like a face on a samurai mask. The magic use is sort of incidental. This is a big, primal creature or spirit that is more made of magic than it is a magic user. Like the plain old ogre it is wild and insatiable, unlike the ogre it is part of a metaphysical web, often tying it to a specific position within a spiritual hierarchy or to a physical place, and almost always to a system of taboos.

Moreover, the ogre is a metaphor for that which is feral and wild within humans whereas the oni is about the inherent wildness and feralness of nature personified in a semi-human form. I have yet to see any version of the ogre mage that seemed like anything other than a marriage of lexical conviennce between these two profoundly different ideas. The ogre is the idea of a human gone wrong and wild, whereas the oni is about things that are perfectly natural in their wildness yet take human form. Or to put it another way, both are feral, but in the ogre the feralness is a failure or falling away, whereas in the oni, the feralness is to be respected as well as feared.

Orc

Thanks to Peter Jackson, "orc" is no longer merely a term but actually a word. That is: an idea I can refer to via a verbal designation and expect other people who speak English to know what I'm talking about regardless of what they do on the weekends. The other edge it has over "kobold" (despite that word having a more organic etymology) is that "orc" is actually a pretty good word.

So lets look at that word "orc": J.R.R. Tolkien--who invented the word (in its current usage--thanks comments)--was, against his better judgement, a 20th century writer, and "orc" is--despite his best efforts--a 20th century word. It has less magic in it than "goblin": an orc won't be turning a baby into a loaf of bread or live in a river of liquid spiderwebs. Another thing is: orcs obviously grunt. The word sounds like a grunt. Nothing called orc could possibly not grunt.

This subconscious thread ties the pig-faced orcs so beloved of old school fetishists to Jackson's athletic cannibals. Mundane, greedy, shameless--pigs are a 20th century animal: Orwell knew it, as did Hunter Thompson. Maybe Tolkien knew it, too. Snorting and unenchanted--no wonder they hate elves.

Otyugh

Like I said in the entry for neo-otyugh, this thing is fine if you have a decent mini to go with it. The kind of thing that might spill out of the mouth of a vomiter (maybe named after the noise it makes as it comes out).

Owl, giant

The frighteningness of an owl doesn't depend on physical intimidation but on the alien inner world implied by those eyes. "The owls are not what they seem" (Twin Peaks) "It's not an owl" (Paranormal Activity). Making an owl bigger is a little like making Jason in his hockey mask bigger--the wrong trait is being exaggerated.

That said, I like a giant owl much better than a giant eagle, and there's nothing wrong with giant owls as elements of the environment--I just don't want anyone trying to convince me they're extra scary because they're big.

Owlbear

I admit it's fun to say "owlbear" but seriously fuck this monster.

"N" Monsters Believe In Nothing

All the monsters: N.

N is a dangerous letter. Nastiness, nihilism, nothingness, and the night all start with "N". There are no giant animals, amiable bumblers, or typical PC races under "N". Even the nymph is, as wrtten, one of the deadliest things in the book.

Naga

"Naga are snake-like creatures with good brains and magical abilities". (Good brains?)

In real life, nagas are still very important in parts of India. I find the idea of humanoid creatures worshipping a naga (an "ordinary" naga--not some ethereal naga god) interesting since--assuming the naga has a range of desires and interests broadly equivalent to an ordinary aristocratic human--then a naga is esentially a kind of royal invalid. Unlike a dragon or something, the naga might actually need its worshippers--"Charles, would you mind turning the pages of this book for me, I've dreeadfully tired of these papercuts on my nose"--and risks becoming pathetic without them.

Neo-otyugh

I suggest that the otyugh is a tedious, uncompelling, and redundant monster unless you have a really cool and gross little miniature of it, in which case it can make a very pleasant unpleasant pulp diversion. The neo-otyugh doesn't even have that going for it.

Night Hag

So there's a hag meaning like just an old witch and there's a hag meaning like a sort of stringy gross giantess, and there's a zone in between. Either way the hag is always a GMIWNLF. That thing Jack Nicholson makes out with in The Shining also partakes somewhat in the horror of hagness.

There's some pop psychology quiz where they ask you how you'd react to seeing a naked member of the opposite sex that's 50 years older than you. The answer is supposed to be how you feel about death.

This is thinking about death in a different way than the way the undead make you think about death. The skeleton's about simply being gone--simply not being there any more. The hag is about all the humiliating, pitiless, flabby, gooey things that are going to happen to you on the way to bodily extinction. Horror of age, the body, the skin, physical need. There's a reason they're always cooking.

Nightmare

It is a mare of the night. I feel like the nightmare as presented is a little too big on bluster .

I mean. look at a hell hound--what's it going to do? It's gonna leap through the air with its paws on fire and land on your throat and chew on you. The nightmare? Not so much. And while it is true that horses bite hard, the symbolic point of the nightmare is that it's just something for something considerably more badass to ride around on.

You don't need a nightmare. If you go look at the cover of Death Dealer that guy's just riding a horse. It's a big, black, tough, scary-looking horse but it doesn't have webbed ears. Likewise, the steeds upon which The Nine ride in the movie are just horses.

Horses have inherently understated faces--their eyes are looking down at what they are doing--they concern themselves with chewing up ground and leave the rest to you. Horses with wide eyes or crazy expressions usually just look like they are doing their job wrong. If you really can't do without a flamboyantly menacing transport I suggest a skeletal steed.

Nixie

Apparently "nixies delight in enslaving humans" and also apparently a nixie won a gold medal in the Olympic 40 meter freestyle and had its smiling, waving portrait taken for the cover of a Wheaties box and also apparently a black and white version of this picture graces the otherwise very menacing entry in the Monster Manual.

Since they are supposed to appear in lakes rather than the ocean, the idea I guess is that Nixies are supposed to be frightening aquatic fairy folk of the indifferent-to-human-morality-variety. They need a better pr department.

Nymph

The nymph both has higher standards than the dryad (it takes a male with an 18 rather than a 16 charisma to catch her eye) but she's also less desperate (the dryad steals desirable men away whereas the nymph merely has a chance of being "favorably inclined" towards the person.)

Mechanically, the nymph as presented is little more than a trap--you have a pretty good chance of dying or going blind just from looking at her and if you manage to pass your saving throw she'll probably unleash some 7th level druid trouble on you just for coming near her house.

The nymph represents a common Monster Manual solution to making good creatures interesting, that is: find a way to make them hostile.

It seems like playing a nymph as a Gandalf-esque, charmingly manipulative schemer rather than some sort of fragile woodsy xenophobe is the way to go. And, needless to say, in my campaign they're pretty much useless unless they can get over their strict heterosexuality.

Let's Talk About "M" Monsters

Writing about all the monsters in alphabetical order soothes my unquiet mind.

So, M's....

Manticore

Somebody sent Mandy a copy of All Known Metal Bands. There are five bands called Manticore. That's how cool the word "manticore" is.

It almost doesn't even matter what the actual monster is like, if it's called a manticore you know that it's badass, and you know that telling everyone how you slew it with mighty and vorpal blows will transfer said badassness to you.

In truth, what it looks like is someone about eleven years old and male got ahold of a sphinx and decided it was boring so drew batwings and tail spikes on it. Being eleven myself, I wholly approve.

Footnote: The manticore picture in the D&D 4 Monster Manual is actually pretty good.

Masher

There are no known metal bands named "Masher". When you have a word that means "one who crushes violently" and still no metal band is willing to touch it, you know you've got yourself a sucky word. They couldn't even get anyone to illustrate it. And get this-it doesn't even mash. Its gimmick is actually poisonous spines. Poor masher.

Mastodon

There is a metal band called "Mastodon", and they're sometimes good. Also, the word "mastodon" means "tit-tooth". (I just sat down and I'm too lazy to get up and check to see if there's a band called "tit-tooth".) Mastodons alone are just too hairy for my taste, but severed mastodon heads are awesome.

Medusa

Unlike the Greeks, we can actually look at the medusa. Then the question becomes which one to go with: elegant medusa, fierce medusa, snake tail medusa, human legged medusa, mutant medusa, I think I want to use them all.

Men

"There are many types of men which are commonly encountered in the wilderness or in dungeons, always appearing in groups..."

"J'ai une âme solitaire." Apparently not when playing D&D.

That is perhaps the most bizarre fantasy in the whole game.


Merman

In the Manual, a female merman is, curiously. called a merwoman. Mermen are of course boring, mermaids aren't. Why is that? Perhaps because the idea of exerting martial force with only a tail for leverage doesn't quite click. A mermale might make a convincing wizard or something.

Mermaids themselves are ripe for evilization, the cannibalisic mermaid is all kinds of wrong and so, wedded to ideas painting them as distant untouchable magic creatures, a scheming one is even more frightening.

Mimic

"The killer mimics do not speak, but the other breeds have their own language and can usually speak several other tongues such as common, orcish, etc. For consideration they will usually tell a party about what they have seen nearby."

There's an episode of Frasier where Fraiser is trying to go see a movie the idea is that it's a ridiculously pretentious boring obscure foreign film. I forget the name of it but the idea was it was narrated by a stool that had been sitting in the living room of a German family for generations and the stool tells all about what it's seen. Reading this bit about the mimic makes that seem like kind of actually a nice idea, especially if what the stool just saw was like a three headed succubus chewing up someone's soul and spitting it into a giant slug's mouth rather than--say--Wilhelm teaching little Werner how to re-sole a work boot.

Mind Flayer

Probably because of the terrible sub-comic book-y pictures accompanying the original mind flayer entry it took about forever for me to realize that mind flayers were supposed to be some sort of Cthulianized humanoids and not just dumb Star Trek aliens in robes. I think the brain-extracting thing didn't really help. I mean, I'm all for brain-extracting tentacles but it seems to me the mind flayer should be an absolutely static mound of weirdness in opulent clothes that just points to you and you go mad with the realization of your insignificance in the vast and inhospitable universe. All this rushing around and zapping people with wavy lines seems undignified.

Minotaur

What is it about minotaurs? I think it may have something to do with the fact that, unlike a lion-headed person or a tiger-headed person or a snake-headed person the bull suddenly seems more capable and dangerous as a humanoid. The snake has lost its coils, the cat has lost its claws, whereas the bull has gained believably muscled fists and still can stand credibly on its hind hooves.

Writing this around Passover reminds me that the minotaur also has something of the aspect of the freed slave. The bull's eyes and face seem not restrained by its new body but genuinely raised up, able to do to us all the things we did to it, all the things it diffidently dreamed of while pulling our carts and mulling around our slaughter pens. What looks like fatalistic boredom in the face of the bull seems like resigned and unpersuadeably righteous anger in the face of the minotaur.

Mold

The form of conflict suggested by the original entries in the Monster Manual for slimes, molds, oozes, etc is essentially medical. How do I identify this thing and which spell specifically will work against it? It's hard to see this being that fun more than once or twice. These creatures seem most interesting when used as a tool by some other, more sophisticated monster.

Morkoth

The morkoth makes no sense on several levels. It hypnotizes you into coming close and then it bites you but if you come within 6" the hypnotism wears off yet still there's a description of what happens if it tries to bite you if you're hypnotized. What the fuck? But, really, this is--as has been pointed out before--the least of it. It lives in a hypnotic underwater maze and looks like mutant parrot. It seems like this would be way better as a poem than a D&D adventure.

Mule

Seeing as how they are strong, agile, and not panicked by fire, the mule would appear to be the ideal dungeon accessory. Unfortunately, as soon as you bring one into a dungeon the mood police come and decapitate it.


Mummy

The problem with mummies is we're more familiar with cartoon versions of them than with what they actually look like. Real mummies, particularly ones from outside Egypt--like the bog people or the Chachapoya mummies (pictured) are among the most fucked up looking real things ever. If I know for sure that this is what's in the player's mind when I sic some rotting remains on them then my job is half done already.

Mantis, giant

Unlike a lot of insects, a mantis doesn't seem disgusting. Its relatively upright posture makes it seem almost human or at least more human, but it nevertheless seems absolutely cruel.

The decapitation thing is in no way surprising. This is my go-to Awful Insect. The praying part is like a Shaolin monk whose absolute stillness is a threat directly proportional to the speed with which he will annihilate you if you disturb his meditation.

Minimal

We maybe didn't need the Monster Manual 2 to give us the concept of a large animal only made very small but still it's a useful idea. I see them appearing in the center of an excited ring of toothless gamblers in a city on a pseudo-Mediterranean coast. Tiny wolf versus tiny rhino and kept in fascinating cages or terraria.

Myconid

Fungi are disgusting. Mushroom people are ridiculous. Again--like the mummy--the challenge is freeing the creature from our cartoony associations or at least letting the creepy and the cartoony intermingle in an interesting way. Like in Alice in Wonderland (the real one I mean).

I think it's important that they be slow-moving yet somehow still credibly threatening. I think goblins using them as riding beasts and steering them by pressure on their big flat heads is a way to go. It might give them pathos.

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image credits: The Conan cover's by Barry Windsor-Smith, the black and white medusa is me, I don't know who did the excellent medusa at the top, sorry, let me know an I'll add a credit.