Thursday 3 May 2018

The Semi-Unique Monster

Monsters in RPGs tend to fall into one of two camps: the species and the unique. The tarrasque is a unique. Orcs are a species.

Creatures in children's TV programmes and books often fall in the middle-ground: they are semi-unique. There are four teletubbies. Are there more? It seems unlikely: they are a race unto themselves. In In the Night Garden, we encounter the tombliboos (three creatures who always seem to be kissing each other whenever I watch it), the pontipines (a family of ten tiny people with no feet), and the tittifers (a small group of hyper-real birds). They are each apparently a species in their own right. In the Clangers the titular creatures - weird pink things with long snouts - are a single family of beings who inhabit a hollow planet far away.

The reason for this is, of course, because children's stories are often about families, don't need bestiaries, and don't need to make any sort of particular sense - that's not the point. But nonetheless, I find the implied settings in which these semi-unique creatures live fascinating. Worlds in which a single family or a small group of similar beings can exist on its own, living on its own terms, without being part of a bigger whole.

In fantasy for grown-ups, the semi-unique monster takes on a slightly disturbing tenor that isn't present in children's stories. Isn't there something terrifying and horrible about the idea of being part of a group of half-a-dozen creatures who are all there is of your species? I don't mean because of the threat of extinction; I mean because however hard you search in life for a sympatico, a soul mate, somebody who truly understands you, well, this is it, the entire pool you have to draw from.

There's also something compelling, though I can't quite put my finger about what it is, in the idea of people in a D&D world being able to refer to an entire creature type, found nowhere else in the world except in their little local 6-mile hex, as a collective noun. "Watch out if you are travelling through the Old Forest tonight. That's when the pontipines come out." Is it just because it harks back to the kind of thing I might have read in the tales of my childhood? Very probably, but I like it, all the same. 

17 comments:

  1. As you are doubtless all too aware, things like the tonbliboos and pontipines become ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING when you have to turn to them, night after fruitless night, to try to lull a recalcitrant infant to sleep ...

    I think this is a great concept. And it's one that works very well in D&D, with its vast reserves of humanoid monsters. My preference is to assume that "goblins" (used to encompass the traditional humanoid spectrum, from kobold to bugbear) are vastly different from one place to another, and are differently named. You get a much more folkloric effect that way: the ogres of Stone Valley are the Three Weepers and are scaled like fish; Black Annis is the ogress of the Dane Hills (and there's only one of her); and the Seven Grey Brothers are the ogres of Flint Mountain. None, of course, would be described as ogres during a game - except in the loosest sense.

    Oddly enough, I just wrote a blog post on some "local" goblins here:

    https://hobgoblinry.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/have-you-seen-jack-in-green.html

    I've had another underway for a while about how one benefit of gaming with miniatures is that you can start to think of a group of monsters as a "party" - there are only seven Black Orcs of Khuzdul, so going up against them is more like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than the Mines of Moria.

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    1. Yes, more folkloric for sure - I think also Tolkien somewhere wrote that an "orc" is just a word for a demon or evil spirit and there could presumably be many forms of them.

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  2. It's perhaps also worth noting that the semi-unique monster is an absolute staple of mythology: the gorgons, the cyclopes and the Eddic dwarfs (originally, at least, it seems). And then you have a semi-unique group of unique monsters in the children of Typhon and Echidna: Cerberus, Chimera, Othrus and a few others, depending on the telling.

    In fact, the "species-ising" of monsters is mostly a recent phenomenon. I don't think there's much conception of a species of goblins before George Macdonald and JRR Tolkien, for example: goblins were local and heterogenous creatures. Trolls certainly are in many of the sagas: Hrolf Kraki's Saga has one that looks like a boar and another that's more like a dragon.

    So perhaps tending towards the unique and the semi-unique gives you a game that's more mythically or folklorically resonant than one which echoes Tolkien and his imitators.

    Against all that, the Far East does seem to go in for monstrous species: while yokai are highly varied, oni, tengu and kappa can slot into an RPG bestiary in a way that traditional Western goblins can't. And the same goes for fox-spirits in China and Japan.

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  3. Reminds me of the type vi demons.

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  4. Making a monster semi-unique would be a good way to make a boring monster interesting. Maybe there are only thirteen xvarts, they all like in a big hollow stump in the Duskydingle forest and their naming conventions are based on social status or a defining characteristic, like the Moomins or Smurfs. Grandpa Xvart, Baby Xvart, Grouchy Xvart, etc.

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    1. Definitely. Although I think all Xvarts are probably a little bit grouchy... ;)

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  5. Here's a stray thought:
    All the PCs must be human. The PCs are the only humans.

    You could really evoke the lonely/ horror/ danger feelings that way.

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    1. That's a cool concept for a campaign. The problem is if somebody dies how they get replaced.

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    2. Obviously you have a friendly non-human join the party.

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    3. Ok, the PCs must be human, The PCs are from the only tribe left of 50 or so humans. That way the loss of even a single human is still a very bad thing, but there is a small pool of potential replacements.

      Bonus: You probably already know and have personalities established for the replacement.

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    4. Your solution is better and evokes the danger better then humans getting gradually replaced with weirder creatures that are still people.

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  6. Such a concept sounds a lot like post-apocalyptic fiction (at least of the Gamma World flavor) where small pockets of "tribes" have grown up that feature like-mutated individuals (green men, orlens, bird people, etc.). See also cartoons like Thundarr (ape-people, lizard people, shark people, etc.), comics like Komandi, and Vance's Cudgel (Dying Earth) stories for the cultural equivalent of this idea.

    Not sure it works as well for D&D when part of the design concept is PCs integrating themselves into a functional society as they develop over time (i.e. establishing baronies in the existing feudal hierarchy). That doesn't really fly when society is a patchwork hodge-podge.

    [and IF humans (or other civilized folk) are the only consistent functioning society, one would assume they'd stamp out these smaller groups of snarks and grumpkins in short order]

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    1. But what if the snarks and grumpkins are magic and self-spawn?

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  7. [OT:] I found a store in Dublin that sells these Glencairn whiskey glasses for €7 a pop, so I'm picking up a pair next week. I hope my nose is not too big to fit inside for the full experience. Do you have a special glass for that special scotch?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencairn_whisky_glass

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  8. I've long toyed with the idea of superspecies of monsters that share little besides the genetic sequence that allows them to rework their offspring's genetics Lamarck-style.
    That way all your Echidnas and cerberi and Typhons can be wildly unique but plausibly related. Typhon could be unique, Echidna decided there only had to be 3 of herself at any one time and cerberus propagated a whole species off the one template.

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    1. That's a cool idea. There's also something, well, monstrous about deliberately manipulating your own children into weird and wondrous new forms.

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  9. As a kid, certain versions of this creeped me out - notably Gree-Grumps and Hakken-Krakks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVmtpJ8LdX4 - and Heffalumps and Woozles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnADKgurvc

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