Lately, while redrawing the thumbnails for the last 30 or so pages of King of RPGs volume 2, I’ve been thinking about my favorite creatures in the fantasy genre — or more specifically, the Dungeons & Dragons/Monster Manual bestiary. Like it or not, the depictions of mythological creatures in D&D has effected how I’ve thought about them, from the idea of demons and devils and gods having hit points (so you can kill ‘em), to the idea of goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds and bugbears all being different types of distinct creatures, rather than fairly vague terms for vague fairytale/sprite/”bad thing” presences as they probably were originally intended. (With regional variations to assert that here, goblins wear red caps dyed in blood, or here, they have one big foot and hop around, and so on.)
I’m generally not that attached to the most ‘iconic’ D&D creatures (mind flayers, beholders, etc.). I’m more interested in general types of creatures that can fit into any campaign world, rather than ones which shout “Greyhawk” or “Eberron” or “Forgotten Realms.” With that in mind, here’s a few of my favorite types of beasts in fantasy, with a nod to RPGs specifically.
* Slimes and Oozes: I think I’ve loved and been chilled by slime monsters ever since I saw “The Blob” (the ’80s version is so great and disgusting!) and even earlier, when I read the Dr. Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Green, gray or ochre, they’re great monsters in D&D, and they represent a sort of primal fear of absorption, as well as of environmental degradation — the “gray goo” apocalypse. There are few if any blob monsters in actual mythology, perhaps because ancient peoples had more concrete, immediate scary things to imagine — lions, tigers, one another, etc. But in the 20th century, as people have had to face the existence of chain reactions and bioweapons (pollution, nuclear catastrophe, chemical weapons) that could destroy the world, they’ve come into their own as horrible, horrible, compelling monsters.
* Plant Monsters: They don’t get nearly enough play in D&D, but Clark Ashton Smith wrote some great plant-monster horror-fantasy stories (The Demon of the Flower, The Maze of Maal Dweb, The Seed from the Sepulchre, etc.). There’s a long tradition of myths about man-eating plants, certainly based on exaggeration of real-life pitcher plants and venus flytraps. And of course Little Shop of Horrors, the ultimate talking-conniving-carnivorous plant story!
* Oldschool Goblins: I like them, but I’m bored by the D&D stereotype of goblins as one of a million low-level goombah monsters. I far prefer goblins as depicted by Brian Froud in Labyrinth (and, in a sense, in the novel Mythago Wood), as inscrutable, quizzical mutant muppet-spirits of insanity.
* Lizardfolk, Troglodytes, Sahuagin, Kuo-Toa: I love reptilian monsters!
* Dragons: How could you not love them? However, I prefer the more snakey, amphibious, reptilian ones to the more majestic, ornate ones commonly depicted in D&D. Things like the “wyrms” which sometimes inhabited wells and other watery places in Medieval lore. Or gigantic, titanic forces of primal darkness.
* Demons and Devils: Of course these are awesome, particularly when you can stab ‘em instead of them just being invisible and formless. Daemonology is such a chaotic and complicated mess, it’s interesting to see it refined & codified down into hit points and statistics.
* Composite Beasts: By this I mean chimeras, sphinxes, griffons and all kinds of creatures made from fusing two or more beasts together. It’s a simple way to design a monster, true, but it’s super classic, as composite beasts figure into the mythology of every human culture I can think of (Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, etc.) To create a believably mythological ‘composite,’ just fuse a few creatures which are native to the area, and you’re good to go. These types of monsters also remind me of a Woody Allen humor piece which he wrote in the form of a Medieval bestiary. The best line: “The great roe is a mythological beast which has the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion.”
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