Friday 2 August 2019

A Day in the Life of a Monster: How to Make Better Bestiaries

From JA Baker's The Peregrine:

[A] peregrine's day usually begins with a slow, leisurely flight from the roosting place to the nearest suitable bathing stream. This may be as much as ten to fifteen miles away. After bathing, another hour or two is spent in drying the feathers, preening, and sleeping. The hawk rouses only gradually from his post-bathing lethargy. His first flights are short and unhurried. He moves from perch to perch, watching other birds and occasionally catching an insect or mouse on the ground. He reenacts the whole process of learning to kill that he went through when he first left the eerie: the first, short, tentative flights; the longer, more confident ones; the playful, mock attacks at inanimate objects, such as falling leaves or drifting feathers; the games with other birds, changing to a pretence or attack, and then to the first serious attempt to kill. True hunting may be a comparatively brief process at the end of this long re-enactment of the hawk's adolescence.  
Hunting is always preceded by some form of play. The hawk may feint at partridges, harass jackdaws or lapwings, skirmish with a crow. Sometimes, without warning, he will suddenly kill. Afterwards he seems baffled by what he has done, and he may leave the kill where it fell and return to it later when he is genuinely hunting. Even when he is hungry, and has killed in anger, he may sit beside his prey for ten to fifteen minutes before starting to feed. In these cases the dead bird is usually unmarked, and the hawk seems to be puzzled by it. He nudges it idly with his bill. When blood flows, he feeds at once.

Imagine if RPG bestiary entries were written like that.

Now, we can't all be JA Baker, widely thought of as one of the greatest nature writers to have ever lived, and I suppose at some point length becomes an issue. But what we can think about is how to actually describe monster behaviour which is relevant and interesting to the players - such as, what a monster generally does over the course of a day or night. That allows them to learn patterns of activity through observation and/or listening to experts, and to plan accordingly if they are clever enough. If you know that orcs usually nap mid-morning after their breakfast of elven infants' livers on toast, or whatever, you also know when to plan your attack on their village for best effect.

That may be too Gygaxian-naturalistic depending on the style of game you're going for, but the idea that a DM can predict what a monster is likely to be doing at a given time of day is also useful for interesting encounters on the cuff and adding depth to the randomness of the reaction dice: imagine if each monster had a different set of reaction dice values depending on the rough time of day - not all that hard to pull off, and not requiring two paragraphs of Barkerian purple prose either.

16 comments:

  1. Gosh. If monster manual entries were written like that, it would be much harder to fit each monster on an index card and keep my whole monster manual in an index card box.

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  2. The (AD&D 2nd ed.) Monster Manual I grew up with and reference still today makes faltering attempts at this, providing Habitat/Society and Ecology sections for each entry. They're mainly filled with broad-stroke information though, and quite dry, even clinical. 90% of the time I ignore them.

    Whereas the except above feels so lush to me in its granular description of the daily activities and behavior! A strong sense of careful -I might go as far as to say caring- observation permeates the writing and really brings the creature and its "personality" to life in my mind.

    Yeah, I think you're onto something with this-thanks for sharing!

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    1. Yes, the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual has a special place in my heart but so much of the information in it is useless.

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  3. I've considered the idea of having a two-part book as a bestiary - the first part basically OD&D-esque with monster tables and brief descriptions, while the second (much longer) part is a bunch of in-world flavor text, lairs, and other things to pick and choose from. Maybe even some contradicting stuff from different "authors", so things are never quite "by the book" and you don't run into boring campaign standardization.

    Of course, considering and jotting ideas is a lot easier than actually finishing the project! But, eventually.

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    1. It is a great idea - I think there have been some attempts at bestiaries like it...one of the Dragonlance ones springs to mind, oddly enough.

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    2. The second edition Shadowrun books all made a kind of attempt at this.

      The conceit was that each splatbook was an in-fiction text, and the fictional shadowrunner personalities commenting on the text in the marginalia offered sometimes contradicting eye witness accounts of the veracity of the text.

      One of my favorite parts of those books.

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    3. You make a good point. This idea would make interesting articles. One article for each creature, laying out an average day.

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    4. I very vaguely remember that now you mention it. I played a shitload of Shadowrun back in the day but never as GM.

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  4. I think a table of what the beast is doing when encountered might be easier and more useful when putting together games.

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    1. I have thought about doing it with reaction dice results - might post about it again soon.

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  6. Thanks for the tip about JA Baker. I had never heard of The Peregrine and a quick search led me to this article:

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/15/the-peregrine-by-ja-baker-nature-writing

    Now I am excitedly purchasing that book at the first opportunity!

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  7. You could do a version of this without resort to Gygaxian naturalism. "Once a year, at the first new moon of autumn, the Leucrotta makes amends for all those it has killed by visiting their gravesites and weeping in the moonlight." One line like that in every entry would go a long way toward rewarding the observation/lore work you describe.

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