...You falter & stumble, the cave's entry is muddy, slick, it slopes downward through a mass of flowing mud, crawling things & darkness but you don't fall far, your descent is broken by...

Here’s something we’ve been arguing about forever and ever.  Race in the game.  I said a small piece of my piece on Goblins the other day but I don’t get tired of thinking about these sorts of things so I thought I’d write on this a little more but with some clarification as it pertains to the subject at hand today – which is Monsters. 

It’s always monsters.

You put together your character sheet and right at the top it always has that little piece of persistent Victoriana – Race – It’s not the most appealing thing to consider in real-life actuality because of its lack of actuality and its prevalent role in the complexities of our various societies.  Victorian – and it’s worth seeing the 19^th century as the source for this, our hobby.  Fantasy fiction erupting from out of a fascination with gothic eras, orientalist interest in the further parts of the world coupled with adventurism, confiscation – a lot of complex, difficult – fairly difficult to justify things all wrapped up what’s nowadays called white supremacy. 

Fun stuff right? 

Probably not – I’ll skate through that as it’s much more academically interesting than it is useful as part of a discussion of How To Do All Of This.  Short & sweet – the races as presented in gaming are broad strokes caricatures that make for easy shorthand in terms of motivations, identities, expectations & behaviors and that is Useful at the table because time at the table is brief and quick & dirty portrayals make points.  There’s a reason Sitcom characters are so cartoonish – it’s how you tell a story quickly & well. 

So let’s allow that in our settings there are races and these represent kinds of people who are distinct, one from another.  That’s something. 

Now we’ll take that internal logic and progress it along time & space – as that Is What We Do.

In real life humans out-competed & intermingled with a bunch of hominid species and now we’re the only ones – it seems reasonable that that would happen in a fantasy setting too right?  One of the races over time would overwhelm the others.  Well, only if they actually compete for the same resources and have similar ranges & starting points.  So you can knock off a few of the races from this discussion right there – Goblins & Elves – let’s say – they live in remote, unwelcoming places where the others don’t care to tread – the Elves in the deepest wilderness the Goblins in the deepest Wastelands.  Okay – Halflings?  Maybe they’re like… rats.  Let’s say rats but not with malice – the Halflings just join up and follow the others, they’re a shadow-people, perpetual outsiders living in the margins.  That works for them, maybe they even like it.

And we don’t have to worry about things like evolutionary competition over time because – hey, fantasy.  Let’s put Goblins, Elves and Dwarves into the realm of Fairies.  They’re extra-dimensional or some-such – from the land of dreams & nightmares and they are migrants, only lately come to this world. 

What about Orcs?  Orcs and Humans and Halflings?  Are they all evolved?  Let’s say Orcs and Halflings are – Orcs to be nomads, let’s talk physiology – like the Elves and Dwarfs they’re distinct.  Maybe they can’t physically digest anything but meat – maybe they’re like cats and are obligatory carnivores?  Maybe they have language but their vision makes writing or reading impossible for them? 

And where do humans fit?  They’re the baseline if only because most of the people playing these games are nominally human.  Where’s their niche?  Let’s say that they’re created by the gods.  Let’s put religion & deity into this – because those seem like pretty human characteristics – maybe ones that aren’t shared by the others?  That’d be okay – Humans are created by the gods – the Fairy races came from fairyland – visitors/aliens & Halflings & Orcs were made by nature-  evolved. 

Now they don’t compete exactly, they’ve got room, each of them, so they can flourish.  And naturally have conflicts – there’s not much story without conflict – but we’ve at least tried to set up those conflicts in line with our setting’s internal logic.

So hey!  Good Job. 

Now it’s time for a dungeon and you want to fill it with monsters – maybe a bunch of monsters that can talk & think, that have a kind of civilization.  At least some kind of monster-made ecology that you can populate with tiers of a social order & most importantly their related accoutrements – since what is adventure without reward in the form of loot?

Let’s say these monsters can talk – this is, to me – the best & most useful designation.  If it can talk is it really a monster?  It’s a kind of person if it can talk and then the game isn’t about adventure so much as it is some kind of ethnic cleansing.  Well – that’s crassly put & certainly not the intention but it is the seeming result.  And that’s hard to love.  We all tell stories about our favorite old adventures – the ones that involved massacring countless kobolds to steal from them… well maybe not the best.  Probably not a high point. 

Now let’s say that they can talk, just not to PCs.  Maybe they can’t talk exactly but they can make & build?  Let’s say any number of things that will differentiate these things from people.  They’re not even a kind of people – not the way that the Dwarfs and Halflings are right?  They’re ALIEN and they’re MONSTROUS.  Here, I find it best to work from physiology & intent. 

Physiology means you make them really different from most living things – maybe they have mouths, heck, maybe they’re covered in them – but maybe too – they don’t eat.  They have hundreds of puppet-mouths that just crunch things up and mash their enemies into crumbs.  That’s MONSTROUS – it’s unrelatable on a physiological level.  It’s clearly outside of our milieu and thus ALIEN.  To me this makes for a solid monster-race.  A group of beings that may be otherwise comprehensible but with extreme differences rendering them unknowable.

Intent means that they don’t want anything that makes obvious sense to PCs, that’s unrelatable on a mental rather than physical axis.  Perhaps these things build massive complexes like huge termite mounds and then use them to pierce the bodies of giants, sacrificing them so that the giant’s blood mingles with the earth creating a slurry of blood which these creatures need to form their offspring from.  Perhaps they gain uncanny sustenance from stealing people’s words, maybe they render their prey mute or incapable of saying specific names.  That’s peculiar enough to make the monsters – MONSTROUS – it makes them something other than a different kind of person. 

So this is part of the rationale in creating the monsters from the last two weeks.  The Masheddenna & the Bawamb. 

The Mashaddenna are made of old panther-skins with ashes sewn up in them.  They extrude flint-like feathers and they hunt smaller folk for the materials to make their own kindred.  They can catch souls in their nets & fling their feathery flints to draw blood.  Now let’s say that they’re new in the world – an emerging next phase of mytho-evolutionary development that stands to gain if any of the other’s lose. 

Here we have Unrelatable Physiology – they’re panther-skins full of ashes.

And we have Unrelatable Intentions – they hate & fear agriculture & water.  They’re anti-life living beings of rock & wind. 

'Art' by Me!  Kind of.

If you were to pepper these through your campaign – you’d earn every bit of fear your players have for you, sure, but you’d also be able to evoke a certain element of wonder & exploration.  “How is this possible?  Why do they hate farms?”  Now there are questions with obscure answers.  Creatures with unknown origins who demand an origin.  This is a superior result to staged colonial expansion. 

The Bawamb are possibly components of a single extradimensional being- a god, perhaps, who casts a minor shadow over this world – and whose shadow is comprised of the Bawamb.  The unthinkable functioning of a god coincides mystically with the growth & movement of the world – so that these massive, horned bats seem to be purely a type of animal, a huge, strange predator.  And yet, they are not, they are shadow-stuff that eat scents & shadows & which communicate with mists.  They are slinking hidden beings and they may exist in many places, many times even all at once.  And is their presence linked to a weakness in the God, can this being of another reality be engaged if one pushes through and past the Bawamb?  Will they allow such a communion or do they seek to enable it?  Questions.

I mean, I mostly made this - but mostly from the works of the generous dead.

There's that Unrelatable Physiology - they eat shadows & scents & they are maybe the atoms of a god.  

An that old Unrelatable Intent - They're just suddenly here for no obvious reason.  

In the end the worst thing that can be said of a monster is that the PCs knew what it would do, and why it would do it.  Surprise is in the end the thing that startles us most, that shocks us into attentiveness, inquisitiveness & action.  Knowledge is the reward for experience – but it shouldn’t be fatal to that learning.