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Nov 2, 2013 - 01:25 PM |
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Pt. 6: I missed Halloween but let's talk about monsters anyway. |
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I've made a couple of vague overtures in the direction of including magic in the game (even if it won't bear much resemblance to the LET ME LOOK AT MY SPELL LIST mechanics of most RPGS). So if we've accepted that the game world is allowed to be a little unreal, it's perfectly reasonable to have some monsters. But monsters need to be, you know, monstrous: that is, not just people wearing rubber prosthetics. They should be properly alien. Let's examine some tropes. I probably won't keep the names in-game for the same reasons zombie movies rarely actually drop the Z-word, but I'll use them here so we all know what we're talking about.
The Undead: Zombies and skeletons are always good throwaway enemies in any RPG largely because they don't need much in the way of motivation and because they represent a morally-uncontroversial kill. The undead are mindless, have no families, and pretty much always want to murder you. Here's the thing: how do they even work? Ok, yes: A WIZARD DID IT. That's dull. Your real enemy is the wizard, then. These bony jerks are just vacant hurdles between you and your actual foe, and "forestalling the conclusion for forestalling's sake" is a shitty reason for a fight.
I don't know if I mentioned it before, but magic in the game, such as it is, operates on a sort of rough animism. There are spirits in everything, and these spirits have their own opinions and their own problems. Necessarily, a human body has a spirit, and while that person's alive, it identifies with the body: it is that person. Now, let's say the body dies... and the spirit doesn't move on to a new home in, oh, a frog or a river or a famous hat. Let's say it's stuck. In this corpse. There's your zombie: a hard-to-stop dead man with no fear. But that's the distinction: he's a dead person, not merely an ambulatory corpse with no motivations of its own. Maybe Mr. Boddy is horrifically traumatized by his condition; maybe he thinks it's rad and wants to get some unstoppable revenge going. Either way it's only a matter of time before decay renders him immobile. Of course, a decaying corpse eventually turns into a skeleton.
It's tempting to attach the same principle I'm using for "zombies" to justify animated skeletons, but the problems with bones is that, divorced from their meat, they eventually detach from one another. Then you have to ask, which part of this rapidly-disassembling boneheap is Mr. Boddy? Arguably you can affix the bones to one another by various methods, but if you're creating undead out of malice then working with an intact corpse seems obviously simpler and an accursed skull has no means by which to assemble his own rattletrap. So let's say: no Skeleton Warriors. Intelligent bones, sure. The petrified femur of an ancient chief, demanding redress for long-forgotten insults. Might make a good bludgeon.
Ghosts are easy. It's a spirit with no dwelling and, consequently, no sense of identity or purpose. This drives them absolutely fucking nuts, and odds are good that they have a relationship of mutual hatred with every other spirit in the vicinity.
A D&D style "ghoul" — a dead guy who eats human flesh — is just a zombie with some weird ideas about how to fix his problems. The Arabian concept of the ghul is basically a form of djinni or demon, about which more later.
Vampires are a special case because they're "dead" in only the most trivial of ways. So vampires in our game, such as they are, won't be "undead"; they'll just be (incredibly long-lived) people who made really ill-advised and lopsided bargains with something. And they won't be particularly interested in blood. Blood is just a macguffin, isn't it? What vampires want is to not die, ever, at the expense of other people dying sooner than they otherwise would. And if we're willing to dispense with blood, it's trivial to dismiss shit like "scared of sunlight" and "can be killed with this one weird trick discovered by a mom".
Liches. Oh man, why would you become a zombie on purpose? Look at you, all leather and bones, keeping your mandible attached to your skull with a bit of deer tendon. Sad. Yeah, whatever, conjure the spirits against me. Your robe look like a dishrag, damn.
Orcs: There are basically three approaches to orcs in RPGs. Either they're previously-normal people (or elves, or whatever) corrupted by evil, or they're just inherently evil creatures that just exist because the world is a shitty place, or they're just... green people who are less civilized than you are. D&D generally takes this third perspective, and usually recommends you wipe out these savages to the last. That's a little fucked up! We don't really need orcs (or an orc-equivalents like, say, lizardfolk), because if we want mean-spirited humans we can just have that, with all the ethical wibbly-wobbly of dealing with people who are just as human as you despite their disgusting ways. If we make use of non-human humanoids they should be expressly inhuman in ways beyond their appearance, and at that point it is hard to justify giving them a human-like cultural structure. If nonhuman cultures still exist, things like elves or dwarves or gnomes, they're even worse off than the humans are, which is really saying something. The handful or survivors are probably pretty resentful about the state of things.
Ogres: Are unusually large and violent humans, outcast from society thanks to their enthusiasm for cannibalism and other unseemly business. Probably more well-fed than the PCs by a good margin, if subject to more than a little mental instability.
Dragons: A tricky business. D&D and its descendants are always chock full of huge, voracious, intelligent, nearly invincible reptilian predators — and the human villages who somehow exist a mile away. Oh, sure, there's always call for some bloody-handed mercenaries to get rid of the damned thing, but how did both parties survive to this point? Realistically, the villagers pack up shop and get the fuck out, provided they have the sense to do this before the dragon has killed and devoured all of them. It almost always makes more sense to flee a dragon than to fight it; it represents a threat on a scale almost incomprehensible to people who routinely die after an encounter with wolves or bears. In the long term, of course, this guarantees total draconic hegemony, but that's hardly your primary concern right now, just take what you can carry.
If you fight dragons, it should be matter in which you have absolutely no other choice, and a battle in which you absolutely expect to die horribly. You'd never even use the word "dragon", because the genetic identity of the thing is meaningless. It might have a name (which practically doubles as a curse), what you'd neither know nor care precisely what a "dragon" is. A dragon is death in the form of something huge and malevolent and unstoppable. By this reckoning, things like Beholders, Tarrasques, and Purple Worms are also "dragons". Every dragon is a unique specimen who will destroy you and everything you have cared about, and killing them — if it's even possible — should involve a Pyrrhic victory of the worst order.
Where do dragons even come from, whatever shape they might take? Well, I reckon they're demons (about which more later) who made themselves really nice and comfortable. Not every mortal shell can endure dragon levels of distortion, but sometimes you get lucky and end up with a real world-beater. A dragon is what results when a demon keeps getting whatever it wants and nobody stops it. You want to keep an eye on that.
Kobolds: "Tiny lizard man" isn't a super interesting idea. "Pathetic, desperate people who willingly serve dragons is exchange for a tiny, tiny scrap of the spoils"... that's something. How do you even get a dragon to listen to your pleas of mercy? And if you somehow destroy a dragon, what do you do with the kobolds who survive the fight? These people clearly aren't trustworthy.
Golems: Golems are essentially man-made things imbued with rudimentary intelligence Sometimes they follow orders, sometimes no. They're pretty easy to fit into our setting: it's not hard to imagine a half-crazed spirit being trapped inside an old department-store mannequin, or a robot, or a monster truck. Or, depending on how advanced we want to make the precursor cultures, you might have the occasional straight-up legitimate AI wandering around.
Demons: Unusually old unbound spirits who have grown cynical and nihilistic with the passage of millennia. Time has given unto them certain awful secrets about the nature of things, and they gladly use this knowledge to gather power for its own sake. Being devoid of any real form they lack the ability to present a direct physical threat, but they will gladly barter for the chance to borrow any interesting body that passes their way. You might get your body back when the demon is done with it — if you still want it, after the... modifications. Demons are the original source of things like centaurs, gorgons, owlbears, hydras, and other distorted creatures that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the natural and the sane. Whatever they offer you, it's probably not worth it.
Trolls: What if we took the debased, shameful thing that we've called an ogre and offered it something like the ugly, lopsided promise of longevity we've given vampires? Not that the comparison is entirely fair, since the vampire retains some semblance of cognition and will and could theoretically elect to willingly end their blighted existence. The troll's spirit remains trapped inside its underutilized brain as its bloated, scabrous body unthinkingly destroys and devours everything in sight. Fun!
Gnolls: Basically smart dogs that hate people, running in packs. Let's just do that, it's a lot more interesting than putting them on their hind legs and declaring THEY WORSHIP THE GNOLL GOD WHO LOVES MURDER FOR REASONS.
Ooze: Toxic chemicals are quite threatening enough, thank you, but if you'd like to have demons or angry ghosts wield them like drippy carcinogenic puppets I won't stop you.
Troglodytes: Oh hey, it's the pale men in the caves! You were hardly introduced. Again, more or less human, though after ages of separation neither you nor they would readily acknowledge any relation. Something went wrong in the past. Some kind of accident, a disagreement. Your ancestors went one way (into the hills), theirs went another (into the dark underground). It's been rough times for everyone, frankly, and you still exist in a state of mutual loathing. As long as they do no more than crouch in the mouths of their tunnels and stare, it's not worth the risk of confronting them. Certainly there's no profit in destroying them unless you're into newt bones and lichen. They've got tons of that crap.
Ankhegs, Giant Spiders, Carrion Crawlers: Do you know what's scarier than one really big arthropod? A whole shit-ton of slightly-larger-than-normal insects. The essential terror of creepy crawlies is defeated when you make it plausible that they could be killed by a well-place bullet. Don't have the PCs open a door and find one big spider they can shoot an arrow into: open a door onto a writing black carpet. If you a want a big hungry bruiser animal that's why we have BEARS.
Elementals: It is hard to find a meaningful distinction between Elementals and Golems, in terms of their place in gameplay or story. Seriously, what is the difference between a stone golem and an earth elemental? Oh, right, the elemental comes from... the PLANE OF EARTH, where he has... earth culture... and an earth... family... what the fuck. Who needs fire elementals? Fire isn't hard to get, we don't need a dude who is literally made of fire. It's raining, Jim, we can't use you on the front lines today. Elementals. Christ.
Giants/Titans: I don't think I've ever used a giant in any campaign. They're just not interesting. WHAT IF A GUY... WAS BIG? Seems like something you'd have done TO you, while you lay there crushed by gravity, struggling to breathe, desperately hungry. Eventually enough dirt settles on you that you pass for a hill. Maybe some animals will wander into your big stupid slackjawed mouth! You think some lichens might be growing in there.
| Currently Playing: Ennio Morricone - Silhouette of Doom |
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