...Some brave soul has done you the favor of prying out the idol's jeweled eyes & they seem to have perished for their trouble. Your trained senses detect the faintest presence of poison but what inflicted this venom? ...

Life & Death.  So this is my third installment of discussing the confluence of these two ideas intersections In Our Hobby.  First – thePhysical with motive force but lacking any anima, and then the Elan-Vital withoutany form.  Zombies & Ghosts. 

I think that there’s a middle ground between the two and that’s where most thoughts of the Undead come from & where it’s easiest to settle into a comfortable groove of ideas relating to stories.  Some of the best stories about living dead people are in this vein – they have the same quality of blood & death & sleep & feeding that people do, just perverted & made macabre.  Naturally we’re talking about Vampires today.

I really like the idea of inherited vampirism, of transmission by biting & generational dilution – all of that.  I really like that but I feel like, also, I don’t have anything to add to that lore beyond approval.  And also – I prefer a different version of the Vampire.  Not the afflicted, not the vaguely biological, and not the hungry dead – rather I like thinking about the Curse. 

There’s the tried & true vampire story – the Mark of Caine & the relevant exposition in Genesis – you’ll be marked & no-one will be able to harm you & so on for being the first murderer.  That’s a solid reason for being a vampire –for The Vampire to come about.

Now, from that you can postulate a fantasyland where sometimes there’s a vampire.  But that’s really in opposition to what I’m interested in considering & talking about.  No Vampire tribes & teams, nosir.  No.  Sometimes there’s not a vampire.  Nope.  Because of That One Catastrophe Now There’s That Vampire.  This is the saga that interests me most. 

(Not to speak against other types of stories, you can have a preference without denigrating the other options – that’s what I’ve got going here.  Communicable vampirism just clings too closely to the physical, and too closely to the prevalent zombie mythos – I don’t need those, not today anyhow.  Today is for cursed people becoming singular & terrible monsters.)

So now I want to think about the terrible things that might occur that could cause there to be something like a Vampire.  I’m working on a list here so maybe I’ll update this as time goes by.

·       

•   The priests of a god all become some-kind-of-cursed-monster when that god is killed off by an adversarial god following some type of protracted war in heaven.  Let’s say that these Vampires, Undead-Horror-Priests linger in their places of worship & that they are compelled to hunger for the music & praise offered other, still living gods – they must consume the faith & love & hope of the practitioners of other religions.  Let’s say that they do this by stealing & eating children.  That’d just about do it no?  A sect of monstrous clergy all venerating a corpse-god.  So – you see – evocative.  Monstrous. 

•          How about the more solitary individual, a mystic, a wizard.  This person has taken to powering her magic with the vitality of the living - sacrificing animals & sometimes people to a point beyond explicable reason.  Even the simplest of her magics begins to demand the shedding of blood – a crushed frog here, an opened mouse there.  Soon she is just the conduit of blood, a crucible in which is alchemically formed not by her wizardly intention – but by its own magnetic attachment to itself.  So instead of being alive with a mentality & ego, this wizard has become purely instinctual, elemental – in helping blood to seek other blood.  She hungers and seeks & still utilizes her magical practices – but lacks for any autonomy & even the rudiments of life & comfort.  Monstrous.

      Or consider the Lothario – a lustful figure of intrigues & base drives, a man of romance in constant search for more & greater passions.  This man who abides, perpetually in love, in a state of constant youth – fueled by the passions & lusts that he inspires in those he seduces – incubus like.  This predator is blameless, though, and at heart remains innocent, uncorrupted by his antics – he nevertheless visits corruption (maybe like diseases?) to those whom he has preyed upon.  Never aging but leaving a string of wrecked homes, dashed hopes & broken hearts.  Perhaps he sustains himself on the forlorn suicides and relishes the perfume on all the fateful tearsoaked farewell notes that mention him by name.  Monstrous.

• ·        Maybe there’s that one.  That’s never grown up, that is or has always been the devourer, born hungry to a withered mother, it, itself withered beyond recognition, it lived though – a sprite of famine, a token of a pestilent year.  This infant grows & prospers without ever being nurtured.  It begins to steal breath & thus vitality – draining the air of its next parent and then its siblings and eventually the whole village.  The starving waif at the side of the road, permanently shivering, eternally famished.  Taken in, it eats up the smoke in the fireplace, the heat from the flame, the savor of the food and yet never does open its mouth – except at the fatal moment in the night when it drinks the breath of its doomed benefactor.  Monstrous.

·        

•             Possibly the dancer.  The model of grace & poise, silent in this world, expressing all through movement.  Drifting, confidently, between life & death as another might stride in and out of a room.  The dancer is too fleet, too evasive to ever succumb to death itself, but is too unreal & ethereal to be properly alive either.  This grace is not without its own demands though, and the Dancer Macabre must afflict others with agues & catarrhs – ailments of the joints & breath as they shrug off age they shed infirmity into the prematurely aged.  Disease & misfortune is the coin with which the dancer buys an immortal fame.  Monstrous.

·        

•            The Warrior.  Essential in this milieu is the one who fights.  This one fights death itself, a knight, killed at war but unwilling to cease the battle, who rises again & again to launch arrows & fire cannon, to cut down the rabble of the opposition.  The blood-covered-warlord whose unlife is made of endless war.  Perhaps guarding eternally against an invader – the city’s last wall & hidden tower, a fortress of a warrior slaked only on repelling the living & destroying them likewise.  Monstrous.

So in my examples I’ve just matched the sorts of monster-vampires to one of the six traditional statistics each.  Just as a guide – a common sensibility that’s reasonably shared among Our Community.  I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to match each of the examples to the CHA – WIS stats. 

Let’s very briefly hold that the six examples above are sufficient explanation for the why of Vampires.  And Vampire here – well, maybe it’s a loose term bandied with some negligence – but we’ll accept it as the placeholder to encompass – dead things that also have dead souls – that’s the bulls-eye for our discussion and now we’ll look at how distantly we can track from that and still have the thing be the thing.  So that answers the what. 

I think that the how is the best area to focus on now.  How do you persist in living when your body & soul are dead?  Traditionally it’s been the eating of blood & sometimes breath that keep the Vampire going - let’s extend & elaborate on that.  Life, other life.  That’s what you’ve got to live on.  Which is strange because – well, that’s everything alive, except I guess plants – and even plants, well.  They’re pretty mercenary in their own ways too.  Life eats life – so why is the Vampire unwholesome?  Maybe we’ll linger on the stalking & hunting of people (ALWAYS unsavory) and bring that up for closer inspection.  Maybe the Vampire needs to eat something more essential than the life of the people it feeds on.  More than the blood or the breath – let’s use those as markers shall we?  Let’s.  Let’s think that blood & breath represent vitality.

Now – in This Thing We Do – we’ve always or frequently had recourse to the draining & removal of Levels.  People don’t so much have levels in real life, but the system of levels really shines in the RPG as a functional mechanic only when levels are things that can be won & also lost.  Just knowing that around the bend there’s that one creature – you know the one –the WORST ONE –that steals your hard won levels, that bites of your HD and chews up your attack bonuses.  That One’s The Worst. 

Which I think is just right.  It sets the monster up as being truly fearful, menacing.  It’s dangerous in a novel way & a somehow more serious one.  It’ll do things to you that aren’t easily undone.  That’s the most monstrous thing. 

Of course this tracks as a meta-game concept but it’s hard to translate into story – one of those instances where game concepts can fill in blanks that we lack precise language for in storytelling.  There, in that world, you’ve got to use metaphor – The skulking creature fell upon her neck, a broad crimson stripe at its mouth as it eased away from her throat, having slaked its thirst and left her hollow and yet, still alive.  Well, she’s hollow & he’s less hungry?  I mean, there’s so, so many ways to look at this that all refer back to biology – eating, sex, life & death, disease – it’s fine – all of those are fine.  But none of them are metaphysical enough to really rub me as I wish to be rubbed. 

So I think you have to go to sins.  Wickedness – bad-deed-doing.  Let’s make the feeding a component of this – that there has to be a sinister act affiliated – now you’re into sneaking, and eating up innocent people, children if you want, or virgins, or maybe one’s own family members?  Make the killing & eating really Terrible and then you make your monster a Monster and not just a kind of person you might end up being.

Which is the line, in the end, that we’re drawing here – in the sand – between people and Monsters.  We’re making a circle around us and then describing everything on the outside of it as a monster.  In this instance we’ve gone and made concentric rings – In the middle – Us.  People.  So you take something away and end up with a monster – I think, curiously, that the first step of removal is to take away the physicality.  That the ghosts & spirits are closes to people and least monstrous.  Next are the zombies & skeletons, the dead bodies without souls – they’re horrible, sure, but not abstractly alien so much as displeasing, depressing.  Furthest away is the thing with a dead-soul & a dead-body – the predatory monster-person who looks at you not as another & not as a peer – not even as prey.  It looks at you as something to brutalize & defile – and that doing so will grant it some furtherance of its brutal, defiled existence.

A Kind of Vampire.  A Mean One.

This…  To me this story, of the addict, sick with despair & hungry for help – who sees people as mere instruments to aid & feed the addiction – that’s the demeanor of the Vampire, properly expressed.  Who else is so desperate and in turns pitiable & terrifying?  So that’s my who of this monster – the person made monstrous, stripped of persona & agency – left only with unrelatable drives & hopeless wants. 

So that – Is That.  On the three genera of undead monsters this is my assessment.

... Regards you with cold indifference, it is the seven-armed visage of the mother of monsters, the four legged, nine faced goddess of wicked births, the pretty jewels that once inflected her eyes lay at the idol's base, surrounded by the cursed but intrepid dead...

As for the matter of ghosts. 

Looking at the physical remains as reanimated (thus horrifying) machines proposes the corollary question – what of the spirit or soul or consciousness removed from the corpus?  In a lot of ways the Ghost is the opposite of the Zombie – it’s the unliving spirit-consciousness without any ambulatory form.  While the Zombie is physical and can be physically destroyed through trauma to the head (traditionally) a ghost is immortal and must be busted in a different way – possibly using unique methods or tools. 

While the physical undead are the remains of things – the spiritual undead are the shadows of ideas.  At least this is the construction I’m interested in developing.

Disclaiming – I personally gravely doubt the existence of a thing called a soul or any spiritual component to identity & personality.  I also am very confused about what this can mean for imagination, ontology & the relationship between fiction, reality & unreality & so on.  I think thinking hard on these matters can’t help but persuade you against pure materialism – but I don’t, in the world around me, find a compelling way to experience the unreal except as fiction.  So!  But! 

We’re here talking about fiction – so we can design whatever metaphysical logic / illogic we want & use that to govern our expectations & world-building.  So let’s consider the Soul/Spirit as being The Idea Of Self That Survives Without A Body.   This interpretation is useful, I think in a lot of ways, that refer to things like magical healing (what is the most-healed you can be?) and resurrection & reincarnation (what are you when you’re not you?  When you come back?) and Ghosts – what’s the idea of you that persists?  

My preference is to consider the soul as the idea of the Self the Cogito that ergo’s the Sums & to consider the spirit as the idea of the Other the Cogito that ergo’s Est.  So a Soul is a self and a spirit is a them – and that’s helpful for when you have creatures with limited senses of Self but which you want to return from the dead.

Right now I’m thinking about the Ghosts of Dinosaurs.  We have ideas about what dinosaurs might have been and taken in aggregate I speculate on a spirit-dinosaur that can be considered a ghost.  Spirit-Wolves, Spirit-Bears all the spirit-animals aren’t Ghosts imposed by their unincorporated consciousness – but by metaphysical forces causing an apparitional version of the imagined creature.

Man that’s esoteric.  That’s downright impenetrable. 

But you know – when you’re putting together theories of mind relating to the collective gestalt idiom of the dinosaur as a holographic presence interacting with the physical world?  It’s times like those that you realize that We Have The Best Hobby. 

But back at Undeath.  Ghosts as Undead I think need to have an amount of permanence.  There’s a stasis to the Self-That-Lingers-After-Death since after all there can be no new interactions that would inform or help that self to grow or change or even decay.  There’s just this one mode of the soul that persists.

So for me the Ghost is a Robot – it’s a programmed sequence that operates according to a pattern without excess deviation.  Doing only what the living self once did and doing only those familiar things forever and ever.  At least that’s the image of persistence I’d like to see for a ghost that’s comprised of a soul – the self-idea or a spirit – the other-idea. 

Fictional ghosts are motivated, often enough, by something unfinished or some material tether.  The Ghost must accomplish something that the self died attempting.  This ghost is intention and it has goals, a mission & possibly a plan.  It can still be the programmed hologram that continues – but it continues not in an aimless repetitive pattern but rather a straight line. 

Then there’s time. 

Really, questions of undeath as they relate to corpses are a lot easier than those that relate to ghosts.  Spirits in all their varieties really increase complexity overall – the whole universe must answer for the existence of even one ghost, once you begin to describe varieties of ghosts – now you’re into layer upon layer of details about the universe itself & it’s related universes. 

So time.  Let us say that the ghost is an idea or intention – a mental concept that is so powerful that it owns a bare existence – it comes to be in a phantasmal way because the mentality that caused it was so deeply focused.  The exterior focus of the mind on an idea of the other creates a spirit – What used to be called the Familiar Spirit.  The Genius Spirit is the interior focus of the mind on an idea of the self – it’s the Soul.  Then there’s the idea of place & time that evolves a ghost-  a spirit of location – that’s what used to be known as the Tutelary Spirit. 

Without hanging too closely to roman metaphysics we can still decide to incorporate some of these ideas into our worldbuilding. 

So far:

-          The Soul:  A sense of self so profoundly realized that it manifests a phantasmal presence.  The presence is the Self of a person no longer living & is an overwrought caricature of their mortal identity.  E.g.:  Jacob Marley

-          The Spirit:  A powerful sense of the other that is generated by collective experience and belief.  The idea of the thing so powerful that it becomes an overwrought caricature of the other’s physicality.  E.g.:  The Big Bad Wolf

-          The Ghost:  An intention or goal so strong that it continues after the death of its bearer, an idea of success that persists after failure.  Single-minded, it’s a caricature of the wishes of the dead. E.g.:  Hamlet’s Father

-          The Haunt:  A ghostly presence tied a place that continues after the death of a protector or owner, a caricature of the place’s qualities that possesses the location after it’s abandoned & who make problems for interlopers. E.g.:  A Haunted House

-          The Apparition:  A phantasm linked to an idea out of time, unrelated to the existence of a thing the Apparition is a foretelling of what is to come based upon the dreams of the living.  It is a caricature of ideas & plans, visions of the future.  E.g.: Ghost of Christmas yet to come

The names are necessarily arbitrary.  You’d fix them up to match whatever you want such things to be called in your setting & your adventures.  You could also link them together – multiple definitions & hybrid types.  The Headless Horseman is maybe a combination of the Haunt & the Apparition.  The Poltergeist is a combination of the Ghost & the Haunt & Etc…

Now to the revulsion, to the scare. 

In all my defining of terms I kept circling back to - The Caricature of – These things can’t look like living things, and their intentions & motives can’t be relatable.  These are monsters, after all, and must be made monstrous.  Caricature is my move.  Exaggerate the appearance, when it appears, throw out a lot of moving parts & mutable looks.  Make the ghost seem to flow & drip as if the ectoplasm is a continuous boil of energy & mass, something pressing into the world from outside. 

A ghost appears before you.  You aren’t a bit confused about what it is or why it is here, it is a ghost and it doesn’t want you to be in this house.  It’s startling, certainly that, but not ambiguous.  You can feel in your head, a pulse like a voice it rises & seems to keep rising never cresting it is constant crescendo Leave.  It wants you to go.  It’s been building, this voice and just now it’s clear – it’s getting louder, louder.  And the way it looks.  It seemed like a woman, at first, dressed in an obsolete style, wearing that tiara, of all things.  The color wasn’t right – none of them, she shimmered, like she’d been doused in emerald dust, glittered even.  That turned to undulation, the sparkle at the edges of her eyes, the gleam on her bared teeth, that twinkle became a wave and then she started to vibrate, concentrically, she began to cascade outward and then back in on herself – too many dimensions and all at once curving in on themselves.  Her voice rises up in your mind as she chases you – you’re running, have been running because she’s chasing you.  Her voice is increasing and the vibration, of her weird translucent body – suddenly appearing in front of you – shepherding you down hallways – her weird body, translucent, pours into itself, her eyes like a liquid dribble into her mouth while they reform in her head, her hair is rose-bushes and thorny arbors but twisting in jerks & fits, and falling & sliding down her body as it cycles up, up, along with her voice.  You look away and she’s in front  of you again, you run away and she’s turning you left, now right, now you’re out the door – and you hear it slam closed, hard – shaking the house’s foundations. 

That’s how I’d do a ghost, one of them.  There’s kinds – monstrous varieties and all the endless variations on the focal theme of death & the refusal of death. 

Here now, I’ve contended on the matter of the thoughtful dead and before on the matter of the walking dead and no doubt I’ll have some consideration of the undying, of some unity of these characteristics – some monstroushybrid that lives on the life energy of the living & masquerades assuch.  I wonder what I’ll call such a being…

...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.