One of the most important things for a DM to do if he wants to innovate is to switch things up with monsters. You know the problem: orcs, elves, goblins, ogres, dragons - we've seen it all; we know them; they are hackneyed and trite. This is not to say that interesting things cannot be done in the arena of Bog Standard High Fantasy Furniture (TM), but these are tropes which have become more than over-familiar when in their standard packaging.
I would like to here offer one useful way of shaking things up when drawing up a new campaign or adventure site, and it is to unlock the creative power behind the 'Organization' line in a Monstrous Manual stat block.
What does this mean? Well, take a look at the stat block for a su-monster:
From this, we derive the notion that a su-monster comes in the package of a 'family/clan', and in the text we are told that:
'A su-monster family is composed of two parents (adult male and female) and two young. When two or more families live together, they form a clan.'
Well, let's imagine we keep everything about su-monsters the same (including their psionic powers, not listed above) except the 'Organization' line. And let's change that to: 'Empire'. Now what? Suddenly we have a campaign setting in which there is a su-monster empire. What does that imply? It certainly has a sword and sorcery vibe (I mean, it's an empire of psionic monkeys, for heaven's sake) but it also raises important other possibilities. Empires (Rome, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Persian) are built on the rule of one group over many. What are the groups the su-monsters rule over? Presumably they are the elite caste, ruling a portion of the world's surface due to psionic mastery. Are humans their slaves? Their foodstuff? Their servants? Perhaps their empire is a genuine conglomeration of different races - manscorpions, lizardmen, thri-kreen, aarakocra - each occupying different geographical and social niches. Perhaps this is a tropical region of the campaign world (we can infer that from the image of psionic apes constructing cities and temples in vast jungles beneath the heat of a red sun at dusk); what, in turn, does that suggest about the setting as such?
Selecting a monster at random and fiddling with the Organization line, as you I hope can see from this, has a way of unlocking vast creative potential. Let's pick some more examples, all taken from the 'S' section of various bestiaries:
Selkies live 'solitary or tribal' lives, it says here. Well, what if we were to change it to 'Monarchy'? I'm picturing a selkie queendom. Selkies are seal-like beings which can change into a human for a few days each month. Clearly, this is going to be a semi-aquatic monarchy formed in the deep fjords of a remote temperate or subarctic land - something like the south of New Zealand, Norway, Tierra del Fuego, or the coast of Alaska. Many of the settlements are in semi-submerged caves (seals do need to be able to breathe air now and then) or perhaps on the beaches of defensible coves and bays - or else floating off-shore, having been constructed on rafts. The selkies can wage war on land for limited periods and are also capable of raiding and capturing shippings, which is the source of much of their power, but they are restricted by being unable to go across land for extended periods of time; perhaps they employ (or marry?) true humans who act a messengers, traders and emissaries where required?
Shargughs are a race of forest-dwarf types, with a bit of hobbit mixed in. They have symbiotic relationships with the plants in their territories, and can even move from place to place within their territory through the plants within it - a kind of vegetal teleportation. Well, what if instead of living solitary or family-based existences these instead formed a 'Druidocracy', ruled by a council of powerful elders? Here, the implied setting is I think a temperate rainforest, verdant and filled with constant wet and slimy growth; the shargugh druidocracy would have constructed into the very landscape a labyrinthine communal home, formed from the vegetation itself - the trees, the mosses, the ferns, the vines and creepers. The shargughs would use this huge, interconnected network of plant life to shift about from place to place, allowing them to traverse great distances within short time-frames - the many hundred square miles of their territory would be theirs, and accesible to all of them almost at any given moment. This would result in a genuinely communal, almost hive-like collective psyche at the individual level, and outsiders would find it bewildering to comprehend and almost impossible to access. Its enemies would be the myconids and vegepygmies constantly threatening to undermine it from beneath with the spread of decay - or, perhaps, an encroaching desert fostered by the magic of a vile conglomerate of githyanki sorcerers....
A simurgh is labelled a 'king of birds', but is described as one of those good-guy quest-dispenser type monsters along the lines of the ki-rin, gold dragon, sphinx, and so on. The path is therefore open to a genuine reconceptualisation as indeed a monarch of birds - with a literal kingdom under its command. Here, one imagines a vast mountain range peopled by rocs, giant eagles, and the like, as well a lesser 'normal' birds and perhaps bird-men of the aarakocra style, with simurghs at the top as a sort of brahmin or noble caste. The question then immediately becomes: what does their kingdom live off, and how do they organise their society? The answer, I think, is that they use their intelligence and mastery of the sky to dominate the peoples who go about on land. Humans in particular are formed into a serf-caste beneath them (in every sense): they farm the crops to feed the vegetarian birds, and also provide the livestock to feed the predatory ones. But, naturally, a ritualised pseudo-religious pattern governs the relationship between serfs and overlords; certain humans are elevated as priests to commune with their feathered rulers, while for the ordinary person birds are considered almost as demigods - their every movement studied, and their every cry interpreted as fraught with prophetic significance. Their societies are stratified into various clans modelled after different types of bird, and their religion includes a doctrine of reincarnation, with those who are the most deserving being granted the chance to be reborn as the lowliest sparrow or starling...
Anyway, you get the idea. The point is that by changing the 'Organisation' of the monster one is then forced into imagining the world in a different way: what would it need to look like in order for an empire of dryads, eblis or rust-monsters to make sense?
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