The Revenant Lake

 

Looking around on wikipedia earlier today, as one does, I came across the entry for Tulare Lake. This is a lake in California which, although once the biggest lake by surface area west of the Mississippi, is now 'ephemeral'. It dried up in the second half of the 19th century but periodically reappears, for instance when there are high levels of snowmelt, or rain. The most recent such event was in 2023.

The photo above is from the wikipedia site and it has the arresting subtitle, 'Part of the revenant Tulare Lake near Alpaugh'. The revenant lake! God bless you, anonymous wikipedia uploader, for that turn of phrase and the image it conjures - a lake not just returned, but brought back in undeath to seek revenge on those who have wronged it.

I do not picture the revenant lake to be one from which a horde of zombies simply pours forth, although that might be a good premise for a film. Rather, what I imagine is that, long ago, there was a large lake (perhaps even a huge one like the now-almost-disappeared Aral Sea) which dried up for Wizard Reasons - probably because a powerful archmage needed to use all of the water for a spell or to power a mighty golem or something of that nature. It now lies bare and dry and salty, a little like modern day Moynaq without, of course, the Soviet-era fishing vessels:

But periodically, perhaps only every few centuries, the lake returns, bringing with it the ghosts of those who once lived in and around it (and in it!). For a year or so, a lost world is present. There are great fish, aquatic beasts and birds, serpents and water-dragons. And there are the people who long ago dwelt in and around the lake too - fishers, hunters, and also more organised groups whose civilisation was destroyed when the lake disappeared. 

The inhabitants of this lost world are, I think it is safe to say, hostile. When the lake disappeared their livelihoods and lives went with it. And so when the waters rise they emerge also, preparing to exact vengeance on the 'quick' for what their ancestors did long ago. But they had a civilisation of their own - old temples, palaces, and water-gardens - which they bring with them, and the trappings of this civilisation also return, ripe for exploration. 

When somewhere is ripe for exploration, what typically tends to happen in my experience is that D&D adventurers come and explore it. You may have found this too. When the revenant lake returns, the local people hide themselves away from its dangers. But PCs go where the locals fear to tread - and bring back with them whatever treasures, magicks, and ancient knowledge they can find...

The useful thing about this setting would be the opportunity to develop rules for underwater gaming, or even systematising a quasi-saltbox (freshbox?), both of which are in my list of 'incompletely systematised campaign types'. Anyonymous wikipedia uploader of photos - I salute you!

Why Nerd Games Matter

I was born in the opposite of a crossfire hurricane. My home town, New Brighton, lies at the end of a peninsula, and in the 1980s it felt like the end in every respect - the road to nowhere, literal and figurative. You may be familiar with Morrissey's song, 'Every day is like Sunday'? This is what it felt like to grow up where I grew up having been born in 1981:

Trudging slowly over wet sand 

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen 

This is the coastal town 

That they forgot to close down 

Armageddon, come Armageddon 

Come, Armageddon, come

Things have revived now, as is the way of things, and the old place has become something of a hipster boomtown, full of AirBnBs and microbreweries. But back then it was just pubs, houses, and the faded trappings of a near-derelict resort town gone past tawdriness and into sadness. 

The photographer Martin Parr famously captured the New Brighton of that era in a book called The Last Resort. To look at its contents is almost unbearably nostalgic for me, now - this almost literally is my childhood. But at the same time, the nostalgia is leavened by memories of how small and tough life felt back then. The world was warmer, because it was a world of community and togetherness - a world of 'popping in for a cuppa', a world of neighbours chatting over back garden fences, a world of people sitting on their front doorsteps watching life go by, a world of whistled tunes and flirting and shared jokes with strangers - and things have got gradually colder in the time since. But horizons were narrow and aspiration and inspiration were hard to come by:

That world felt as though there was nothing really in it except us.

To an imaginative kid growing up in that world, books mattered. My family had nothing back then, but there was a library not far away, and the library had things in it there were not from my world. They were from different galaxies. They had pictures on them of things like dragons, swords, and mountains. And they told stories about things like empires, jungles, volcanoes, and epic journey. And to somebody like me, reading them didn't feel like escape - it felt like release. It felt like being given license to imagine that there was more. Not just more physically (more than litter, fish and chip shops, football and the promenade), but more emotionally and even spiritually: adventure was a thing - adventure was something that you could do.

The best of these books were Fighting Fantasy books, because they were not just books; they made you the adventurer, and the experience of reading them was more visceral than any novel. To a 45 year old writing in 2026 the flaws are visible everywhere, but to a 9 year old in 1990 they were a super-drug far more potent even than The Lord of the Rings. You were not just watching but partaking, and in the partaking you were learning, almost through praxis, that you could reach above, and beyond, and outwards. D&D of course, when that became an option, only concentrated and focused that feeling, 

Fans of Fighting Fantasy and other nerd games may enjoy some YouTube video series I've recently been enjoying, in which the series is reviewed.

This guy has been working his way through the Fighting Fantasy books, and the bulk of his reviews are of those, but he has reviewed some Lone Wolf volumes and others, too. His videos are pleasingly understated and genuine, with a very natural, conversational style.

This guy, on the other hand, is more polished and slick, and makes great use of visual aids; the downside is that he is taking his time getting from book to book, and has only so far covered the first half-dozen or so.

This guy, meanwhile, is short and to the point. English readers familiar with Match of the Day will see something of Martin Keown in him - he's intense, no-nonsense, makes everything sound important. Watching these videos is a bit like getting into a conversation with a passionate enthusiast in a pub. 

I sense kindred spirits in these fellas and give them plaudits and kudos. Maybe they were from places like New Brighton too. 

Ice, Jungle, Desert

Among my many sins, I once sat through the complete director's commentaries to the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. In my defence, these are fascinating artefacts in their own right. Much of the commentary is, somewhat eccentrically, provided by the Ben Burtt - the sound engineer - and he goes into exquisite detail about how many of the sound effects were captured. In between George Lucas himself appears, to offer pearls of gnomic wisdom and litigate old disputes (for example: it was an outrage that they wouldn't accept Frank Oz as a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his perfomance as Yoda in Empire), and every now and then up pops some other Star Wars luminary - Carrie Fisher, sounding like she's strung out on heroin; Lawrence Kasdan, hoping somebody realises who the fuck he is; Dennis Muren, talking about how it was that they made blaster shots look like they are moving; etc. The sheer amount of thought and effort that went into making the original Star Wars films is hereby revealed to have been extraordinary. It has been observed (I forget where) that the Big Hollywood Blockbuster circa 1980-2000 was a feat of human achievement akin to one of the ancient wonders of the world, marshalling huge amounts of energy, intelligence, craft and logistical energy over the course of years, and while this may be slightly hyperbolic, listening to Hollywood insiders talk about the process of film-making during that era makes you begin to see the point.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about here was an observation George Lucas makes during the commentary on one of the films (possibly Return of the Jedi) in which he describes the trilogy as being dominated by three geographic themes - desert (Tattooine), forest (Endor), and ice (Hoth). I have always remembered this, as while it initially seemed a very banal point to make, its impact has grown on me. There is something archetypal about deserts, forests (particularly jungles) and icy wilderness. They function, at least to the civilised, developed-world mind, as exotic geographic 'others'. And we see them emerging a lot in fantasy literature and video games, where every setting seems to contain within it a deserty bit, a jungly bit, and an icy bit, alongside the typical, generic, bucolic temperate zone which tends to be where adventure begins.

(Indeed, while I can't think of an example right now, readers will be able to tell me about a raft of old platform games which even contained an 'ice level', a 'desert level', a 'jungle level', and so on.)

The OSR is quite light on straight up icy, deserty, or jungly settings. This is not to say that there are no products which are set in such environments, but they tend to be small-scale hexcrawls rather than deep, detailed settings-proper. 

I think this is for two key reasons. The first is practical difficulty. Arctic, rainforest and desert landscapes are unfamiliar and there is a sense with each that the environment ought itself to be a major driver of adventure and danger. This is difficult to systematise and make interesting (although there have been attempts to do it - The Bitter Reach being an example that pops to mind). 

The second is lack of familiarity. The Tolkienian tropes on which we still tend to rely do not seem to sit comfortably in non-Tolkienian environs. The furniture is just different. And therefore it feels as though the monsters, character classes, races, even magic systems ought to be different, too. This means extra work. 'My desert world is populated by desert orcs, desert dwarfs, desert elves and desert giants!' is boring - granted. So what is it populated by, then?

If I was to come up with such a setting, I think my approach would be to start with those issues in reverse order. What makes a setting really sing is its content, and the building blocks for that content would need to be gathered together first. 

And Step One in that process would I think be to get together the crew - who are going to be the main inhabitants of this world I am making up, and what is the relationship between them going to be?

An initial exercise here would just be coming up with some lists and seeing what fell together. And you could do a lot worse than just looking at what's already there. If one were to create a jungle setting, for instance, what might one jot down as likely inhabitants while flicking through the Monstrous Manual?

A trawl through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual contains the following, what I would call, exclusively 'jungly' creatures (not including those which can be found 'anywhere', or bog standard things like giant insects and big cats): 

• Bullywug
• Catoblepas
• Coautl
• Black dragon
• Emerald dragon
• Ettercap
• Jungle giant
• Grippli
• Ixitxachitl
• Kirre
• Lizard man
• Locathah
• Weretiger
• Mold man
• Muckdweller
• Rakshasa
• Winged snake
• Tabaxi
• Tasloi
• Wyvern
• Yuan-ti
• Zaratan

Let's now thing about how we might use this list to inspire some setting ideas. I jot down these notes simply as I think of them, as it were in 'real time'; you can of course add your own.

1. Zaratans. Floating island turtles is too good an idea not to include in any tropical setting, and therefore my putative jungle setting would include them - probably within the context of a huge Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system which regularly floods. I would want these floating islands to be populated, maybe by Rakshasa sorcerer-lords who have a very decentralised, anarchic union, each family ruling one Zaratan together with their lizardman slaves. 

2. The Rakshasa sorcerer-lords probably I would make ape-like, rather than big cat-like. If they were big cat-like, this would clash with the flavour of tabaxi and weretigers.

3. Weretigers I would want to make more of than just occasional, werewolf-style individual 'baddies'. I would like there to be a weretiger polity in which the nobility can transform into tigers, and the hoi polloi - naturally, when you think about it - do their bidding. Would I reskin them as werejaguars? Very possibly. 

4. Any setting ought to have some region of the map which was once home to a great empire now ruined and debased, and populated by the degenerate former inhabitants. For some reason, I am struck by the idea that the setting once contained a tabaxi empire (think Maya temples and the like), but that this was conquered by a great grippli horde long ago, under the direction of a mighty couatl king. That conquest was short lived, however, as in the long-term the grippli could not be made to cohere into one whole, but split apart into many factions and minor kingdoms. Sooner or later bullywug warlords also moved in, and that entire region is now a very dangerous, chaotic jungle badland with no centralised authority. 

5. The Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system would also contain locathah and ixitxachitl polities, probably engaged in internecine warfare. Maybe the rakshasa sorcerer-lords use these aquatic beings as pawns in their own conflicts, playing them off against one another and deploying them where possible to make life difficult for rivals. 

6. Yuan-ti should clearly feature somewhere, but are such a distinctive concept that it almost seems pointless to fiddle with them. There is a Yuan-ti empire; it is hostile to all others. It exists in the background as a constant, looming threat, and it has agents throughout the rest of the setting.

7. Where do humans and jungle giants fit in? Some humans live in the weretiger policy I mentioned earlier. Many others are enslaved by the Yuan-ti. Others still live under the rakshasa. But perhaps also this setting contains a city-state (presumptively where adventurers start off) with a mostly human population but which is ruled by jungle giants. And perhaps the jungle giants are, in fact, akin to Amazons - tall, powerful, female rulers who hold sway over the humans but offer them protection. 

That would do for starters. I haven't really done anything with the tasloi or dragons, yet. Certainly, I could see space for an emerald dragon dwelling in a dormant volcano somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps he or she has a black dragon rival, too. But we see a setting take shape, and this would obviously be a productive way to approach designing icy/deserty settings too. 

'It Has Killing In It'

What was the first piece of media you consumed which 'had killing in it'? 

I ask because a certain girl I happen to know has recently been reading the Warriors or Warrior Cats series at bedtime. For those who don't know it - and I should stress I know almost nothing about it - it seems to be a sort of cross between Redwall, Harry Potter and Rainbow Magic. A coterie of authors writes the novels and they involve, well, warrior cats doing, er, warrior cat things. There are clans to which the characters all seem to belong, and the plot of the first book appears to involve a Muggle housecat who runs away from home and finds a new one with his wizard warrior compadres. There is not, I should make clear, a 'sorting collar' and the clans are not called Gryffinpuss, Slithermiaow, Hufflepurr, or Kittyclaw. 

Readers familiar with the books will be able to tell me if they are dreadful doggerel or surprisingly good, or somewhere in between. But what this post really occasioned was my daughter's remark, made to me last night, that she feels the books are very advanced because they 'have killing in them'.

I took this to mean that violent death is a feature of the books. And I reflected that she was probably right. There is 'killing' in Harry Potter. But most of the material she will have read up to this point, including things like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Lottie Brooks etc., will have been fairly milquetoast. There won't have been a lot of jeopardy or high drama. 

This set me off reminiscing about being a child. I think I too had this conception in my mind that there was a distinction to be drawn between kids' entertainment and that for adults, with 'having killing in' being an important aspect of the difference. The type of books I was reading at the local library aged 7 or 8 or so would not I think have had killing in them. But then I got onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Fighting Fantasy books, and so on, and this felt like a major watershed moment. Suddenly I was reading books in which people killed each other. I was a big boy, now.

What is curious about this is that the young child appears to have in his or her mind, even from toddlership, an idea that 'having killing in it' is a distinct category from fairy tale death. Fairy tales have death in. Admittedly many fairy tales are Bowdlerised these days to an absurd degree - the three little pigs befriend the wolf and teach him how to be a vegetarian, etc. - but you can still find versions in which characters are eaten, drowned, burned and so on. Yet children appear to be able to separate fairy tale death from acts of actual killing in their minds. It is only when one graduates to books that have killing in them that one has move beyond the fairy tale, which concerns death and yet which at the same time somehow doesn't.

I can't remember the exact moment I first encountered a book with killing in it, but I am fairly sure that it was The Hobbit, and I can vaguely remember the thrill it gave me when I realised that the cartoon violence with which I was familiar had been superseded by something much more serious and grand. This the point in a life in which one puts away childish things and starts reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.

The River and the River

Near the Amazonian city of Manaus there is a place where the Amazon proper (the upper section of which in Brazil is called the Rio Solimões) meets the Rio Negro, which flows in to meet it from Colombia. The Amazon is cooler, faster, and carries sediment from the Andes; the Rio Negro is slower, warmer, and full of decaying plant life. For a period the two run alongside each other in contrast, until they gradually integrate:

This is one of those places in the world which screams 'Make me into a setting for an RPG, you fool! Do it at once!', and the setting indeed almost writes itself. Clearly, the two rivers bring with them two very different sets of fantasy furniture, and where they meet there is a great city which incorporates both. Perhaps, indeed, that city is even a kind of neutral zone where two otherwise hostile ways of life can live alongside one another in something approaching harmony. And naturally, there's a megadungeon underneath.

The Dark River is organic, magical, sensual, amoral, ritual-based, and fecund. But it also partly originates in, and incorporates, death and decay; many of its inhabitants are undead. It is powerful in the sense in which a jungle is full of green vibrancy and dangerous life. 

The Light River is inorganic, holy, rational, moralistic, honour-based, and productive. It ultimately comes from the mountains; it is imbued with elemental energy. It is rich in the sense that mountains bring forth the wealth that is buried beneath the earth. 

It is too easy to say that the Dark River is feminine and the Light River masculine, or that the Dark River is yin and the Light River is yang, or that the Dark River is right-hemisphere and the Light River is left-hemisphere. But it is hard to get away entirely from those binaries and they exist for a reason and are enjoyable to problematise and poke and prod at. I would want the setting to hint at and echo them without trading on the distinction too obviously. The contrast between jungle energy and mountain energy seems more 'right' to me somehow. 

The peoples who dwell along the two rivers are mutually antagonistic for all manner of reasons, but the city imposes order on them. It is a city which I think ought indeed to be ruled by a race of giant warrior-women, the Amazons of legend, who forge the two river-worlds into an uneasy but cohesive polity. Presuambly, that city is situated on a river island around which they both flow. Maybe it is even situated on a river island that lies in the middle of a delta: maybe these two rivers come together only at the very point at which they meet the ocean:

What lies beneath? What do PCs who come to the River and the River explore? The science fantasy impulse suggests that buried beneath the island is an alien space vessel; the straight fantasy impulse suggests the ruins of a lost civilization; the horror impulse suggests the corpse of a dead river god, filled with demonic entities. The PCs venture down to bring forth what treasures lie buried there.

These are the thoughts which occur to me sitting in my office idling away when I ought to be working. What are yours? 

Why Build Worlds?

 

The creation of a world - mapping it, populating it, chronicling its history - is in itself a hobby. I suspect for a lot of DMs it is indeed actually the main purpose of RPGs. The game is really just an excuse to indulge in Tolkienian sub-creation. 

There is nothing wrong with this: I consider it to be my hobby too. But I would like to use this post as an opportunity to probe into where its pleasure comes from.

The first is generic to all hobbies: when engaged in some aspect of world-creation it is easy to get caught up in the activity and enter a flow-state which is in itself pleasurable. This is something akin to what lay people sometimes refer to as 'mindulfness', but it is really the absolute opposite of that. It is a state of being in which one truly presences, reflecting neither on one's physical self nor on one's thoughts, but simply being in the activity itself. One is allowing oneself to be carried along by the act of doing, as  though on a river. This is enjoyable for its own sake. It is a retreat from intrusive thoughts and quotidian activities, to be sure, but it is not merely escapist. There is a kind of happiness (dare I even say 'joy'?) in the feeling that one's conscious, subconscious, and physical self are all bent towards the same goal.

The second is that it is escapist, and there is nothing wrong with that. Life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short even when not in Hobbes' state of nature (Spinoza once said that we never leave the state of nature, anyway). And we therefore take what pleasures we can find. Drawing maps and thinking about elves is a lot more wholesome and worthwhile than watching TV, if retreat from the sheer banal horror of your humdrum existence is all that you are searching for. It is an opportunity to create something which, even if nobody else even looks at it or knows of its existence, can be pleasing to your eye, your mind, your soul. So why-ever not? 

The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one single planet. It is even more grotesquely unfair that there are many more universes that can be imagined and we will never be able to explore any of those. This - the fact that we are able to imagine places we can never go - is a monstrous constraint and one about which we should be outraged. Channel that rage into something useful: get as close as you can to possessing all of reality and all other realities as your oyster by, God-like, detailing your imagined corner of creation. 

The fourth is that it is also a small act of rebellion against the banality of small-mindedness. There are lots of people out there who not only want to stay swimming in their own tiny intellectual fishbowls and never go out into the ocean of the mind, but want everybody else to be the same way too. Well, remember Cinderalla's admonition - they can order you to do all kinds of things, but they can't order you to stop dreaming. 

And the fifth, related pleasure is that it is so liberating. Debbie Harry sang 'Dreaming is free'. I have always loved that line. Dreaming costs nothing. But it also frees us: in the world of dreams there are no constraints. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how crappy your home life is, how lonely you feel, how bored you are. You can get a piece of paper and a pencil and, within your relationship to those obejcts, make yourself free. 

The world needs a bit of subcreation here and there. So what, really, is stopping you?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Setting I Created

 

When my first child was born, I had already been working on something called Behind Gently Smiling Jaws for a year. The first post I made about it can be found here.

That was more than ten years ago. The idea has never gone away and I have never stopped working on it. It is just that 'working' is being used here in a particular sense: I have not been working on it so much as working it over. It has been like a big lump of dough in my mind that I have been mentally pounding with my fists, or a big lump of chewing gum I have been slowly chewing into flavourlessness, or the hide of a beast I have been turning into leather; I have been worrying at it and squeezing it and tugging it and twisting it and gradually shaping it into something that is comprehensible and usable. 

That process is at an end and I can now earnestly say that I have worked it up something that may eventually be the framework within which a book can be written. As Woody Allen might have said, 'Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.'

The problem that has posed the most difficulty is that the idea is complicated. I have not wanted to sacrifice that complicatedness, as it is important to me: it all makes sense to me. But it has made it a challenge to make it presentable. I now know how to do that. 

The principle is straightforward. An ancient, and immortal, crocodile, born at the dawn of time, created a memory palace within which to store everything it had witnessed in its long existence, and went into dormancy in a lake in what we call Papua New Guinea.

The Naacals, the ancient inhabitants of the continent of Mu, ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Harappans, found the crocodile, and discovered a way to live inside its memory palace. Aware that a cataclysmic event was in the offing (the sinking of Mu and the ruin of their civilisation) a number of them went to live in the memory palace permanently. 

Some Naacals remained on Earth and retreated into hermitude or stasis underground before the cataclysm. Others remained, and after Mu sank (roughly 10,000 BC) became debased, going on to fragment and form what became the Egyptian, Mayan, and Harappan civilisations. 

Meanwhile, those within the crocodile's mind founded a great city, called the Unremembered City, where they all lived among the crocodile's many memories. 

So things would have remained, but over the course of the centuries seven human beings (known ever since as 'the Seven') found their way too to the crocodile's memory palace, and merged with its consciousness, bringing with them their own memories, myths, and ideas. These were:

• Ebu Gogo, a homo floriensis woman from a remote Indonesian island where a remnant population survived until shortly before the time of Christ
• Xu Fu, a Chinese explorer who went in search of Mount Penglai
• Anak Wungsu, a Balinese trader-king
• Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, a neo-Platonic philosopher
• Jorge de Meneses, a Portugese conquistador
• Pape Jan, Ethiopian king who inspired the legend of Prester John
• Sese-Mahuru-Bau, a Papuan hunter who went in search of a lost lover

With Sese-Mahuru-Bau's coming, however, the crocodile's memory palace became too full, and it erupted - everything in it spilled out into the real world, in what we know of as the late 18th century. This brought 'ordinary' human history to an end, and the Crocodilian Era began.

The Crocodilian Era began with the complete shattering and destruction of pre-existing human civilisation. The Crocodile's memories included the dinosaurs, the other beasts of the prehistoric era, a race of aliens who had once lived on Earth, the ancient Atlanteans, and so on, and the Seven brought with them their own myths (Xu Fu brought Chinese dragons and ghosts; Anak Wungsu brought Garuda and the like, Jorge de Meneses brought Goetic demons, and so on and so forth) and the result was chaos. The human population of the Earth collapsed to a few thousand individuals. 

But, fast forward 10,000 years, and things look very different. 

The Naacals who lived in the crocodile's mind, called the Young Naacals, mostly live in the Unremembered City - a flying island-city, like Laputa, which floats about in the sky. The Young Naacals keep themselves to themselves for the most part.

The Naacals who remained hidded on Earth after Mu sank are called the Old Naacals. They live as hermits, scholars, and wanderers - dangerous and mad, for the most part.

The ordinary human population rebounded, over the centuries, and found ways to survive and even flourish amidst the wondrous beasts and strange creatures now populating the planet. 

And the Seven became Gods. Each made a home for him/herself in a certain spot on the globe, and created a realm to rule. These can be seen on the map, above:

1. The Kerguelen islands are ruled by Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, who has turned it into a single, vast university
2. Lake Issyk-Kul is the home of Pape Jan - a fortified inland sea from which he governs a slowly-expanding crusader empire
3. The mouth of the Congo river, where Jorge de Meneses has a pirate city whose ships go in search of plunder across the globe
4. Sardinia, where Anak Wungsu rules over a trading thalassacracy spanning the Mediterranean
5. Benbecula, in the Western Isles, home to Sese-Mahuru-Bau, who has turned all of the surrounding islands into a huge hunting reserve
6. What was once Sao Luis, in Brazil, ruled by Xu Fu - where there is now a sort of equatorial-cum-Chinese Mount Olympus, ruled by him as a sorcerer-king
7. The island of Chiloe, where Ebu Gogo births the bizarre spawn of humans and the amphibious beasts of the Carbinoferous world

In between all this are all manner of different civilisations and wildernesses - the Earth geographically is as it was, but it is an Earth roamed by dinosaurs, aliens, Atlanteans, and the like, mixed in with the human inhabitants and Old Naacals. And of course the agents of the Seven, who are all rivals, are everywhere, working to undermine each other and subvert each other's designs. It's a scene, in other words. And it can all be yours... when the book is written.

The Great North Title Opinion Forming Braintrust Assemble

Regular readers will know that I have a project, long in the pipeline, titled The Great North, that is now more or less complete and ready to be Kickstarted. Here is the cover:

And here is the intro text:

Once, there was an Emperor, who had already made half of the known world his own, yet grasped endlessly for the rest. At the zenith of his strength, when he was perhaps already sensing its impending failure, he reached out, straining in defiance of age and time, to clutch once more at conquests. The touch of his fingertips in one of those final desperate grabbings brushed against the shores of a distant, wild land of heather-moored hills and deep narrow valleys, wind-seared beaches and damp-cold forests, where magic was strong and there were powers that were old, and strange, and rooted in the ancient earth and rock on which they stood. The Emperor ruled parts of that land, here and there, but he could never fully tame it, and as he grew old and feeble and his Empire shrivelled back upon itself, it was the first of his provinces that he abandoned to its fate. 

The Great North has since lain free for long eons. None rule it. It was wild once, and so it remains. A frontier land where the tide of civilisation once washed before retreating, leaving fragments of flotsam behind it to lie where they may be found. A cold land. A fierce land. A debatable land. And a land of opportunity for those willing to grasp for it, much as the Emperor once tried in the faded past.

I am now going through the process of setting up the Kickstarter page for this. However, I have had a sudden stab of anxiety: having Googled it, there is already something called 'The Great North' in existence - an animated comedy to do with people in Alaska.

Tell me, oh great, esteemed and wise readers: will this be an issue? Is it sensible to do a last-minute name change? Should I just keep it? I AM INCAPABLE OF MAKING DECISIONS FOR MYSELF.

The Succinct History of the Crocodilian Apocalypse

 

250 million BC (approx) - The crocodile is born

131,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile begins creation of its memory palace

130,000 BC (approx) - The crocodile completes its memory palace and enters its final slumber

100,000 BC (approx) - The Naacal civilization arises on the continent of Mu

51, 547 BC - The crocodile is discovered by the Naacals; its memory palace is first entered 

49, 211 BC - The thesis becomes accepted that cataclysmic volcanic activity will cause the continent of Mu to sink by 49, 101 BC; preparations begin, with some groups settling other land masses, and others entering the memory palace 

49,101 BC - Mu begins to sink beneath the ocean and the Naacal Dark Age begins

49,100 BC - The Naacals in the memory palace begin construction of the Unremembered City

49,100 BC (approx) - The Naacal Dark Age commences in the world; survivors of the cataclysm begin to form polities in isolation from each other in what will become Mexico, Egypt, and India

12, 000 BC (approx) - Ebu Gogo, first of the Seven, enters the memory palace

210 BC - Xu Fu, second of the Seven, enters the memory palace

971 AD - Abu Yaqub Al-Sijistani, third of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1049 AD - Anak Wungsu, fourth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1175 AD - Pape Jan, fifth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1537 AD - Jorge de Meneses, sixth of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1687 AD - Sese-Mahuru-Bau, last of the Seven, enters the memory palace

1793 AD - The first figments begin to appear in the world; the Crocodilian Apocalypse begins

1796 AD - The Unremembered City emerges from the memory palace into the world; the Naacal Dark Ages come to an end

10,000 AD (approx) - The timeline of Behind Gently Smiling Jaws begins

Recommend a 'Read Everything By...' Project

Some years ago, I read more or less everything that HP Lovecraft wrote and blogged about it. 

Years later, I read more or less everything Jack Vance wrote and blogged about it twice. 

I have also, more recently, read almost everything that William Golding wrote, but I have not blogged about it on the basis that it may not be revelant to my readers' interests.

I have really enjoyed these projects - I have found that after a while they get a momentum of their own and motivate further reading, and there is something about getting to know an author's personal arc that itself almost functions as an overarching novel-within-a-novel: you read the fiction, but can also get an overview of the linkages between the works so as to provide a coherent whole.

I would like recommendations for other fantasy/SF/horror authors to get to grips with. Here are some baseline requirements that Must Not Be Violated:

1. The author should have published at least 7 novels. 

2. The author should not be JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, George RR Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erikson, Julian May, David Eddings, China Mieville, or Gene Wolfe, because I have either read all or most of their stuff already, or know that I don't particularly like them.

RECOMMEND AWAY. And show your workings. Sell me on your recommendation!

Why Psionics Fails

It is often said that the world is divided into two classes of people: those who like Van Morrison, and those who have met him. 

Another such division that lies across the heart of humanity is those who can tolerate psionics in D&D and those who cannot. I wish to go out on a limb and say that most people who play D&D do not like psionics, and I will go even further out on said limb - indeed, to the point where it begins to bend so outrageously and strenuously that breakage becomes imminent - and say that this is even more true of grognards and those associated with the OSR. The chief complaint would be that AD&D psionics made things unnecessarily complicated, were overpowered, duplicated what magic-users or clerics could do, and ruined the tone of the game. 

The last of these complaints bites most forcefully. Ultimately, it is not beyond the wit of man to develop an elegant and interesting psionics system for D&D and related games. But it is the tone which is the real issue. And this is because the existence of psionics is predicated on a metaphysics which is fundamentally incompatible with those of the typical fantasy world.

What I mean by this is simpler than it sounds. The point of psionics is that mind triumphs over matter. The stuff of the universe can be bent, twisted, and otherwise manipulated by the latent power of the brain. And the psionicist therefore simply decide whether he wants to attempt to shape reality, and does so if he has sufficient puissance. The point of magic in a fantasy setting is that it is supernatural - it is a mysterious overarching force which can be channelled so as to supervene in the physical world. Obviously it requires intellect to learn spells, but spells themselves are not outgrowths of happenings within the brain. They are things written down and memorised, yes, but their origins are extrinsic to it. 

These different metaphysics tug in diametrically opposite directions. Does mind triumph over matter? Or is mind subordinate to supernature, which it taps into but never dominates? There is no right or wrong answer to these questions, but they tug themselves apart all the same. In practice, what I think this translates into is simply a sense that psionics 'feels wrong' in a high fantasy campaign setting. It discomobulates our sense of what 'fantasy' entails. This is not, though, due merely to genre expectation. It is a function of the fact that psionics and magic each require the individual to simultaneously adopt two, mutually contradictory, ideas about the nature of reality. Does it conform to (or can it be made to conform to) the mind? Or does the mind channel what is 'out there' in nature (magic) into real-world effects? 

Beautiful Sample Contents from The Great North

Once summer holidays are out of the way, I will be launching the Kickstarter for The Great North, described long ago as 'Yoon-Suin but in Northumberland'. All the text and art is finished, and layout is commencing. 

Here are some little fragments from the prototype of one of the chapters, mostly close-ups (i.e., not full pages or spreads) so you can see it in some of its final glory and get a feel for what the book will look like. Art by Tom Kilian, layout by Solomon VK.

I am very proud of this book, and can't wait to get it out there.

The -Rider Gambit

An important and useful way to tease out weird new fantasy cultures or civilisations is what I am going to christen here the -Rider Gambit. The way this works is you imagine a race of people (or orcs, or elves, or whatever) and then find an unusual animal species for them to ride. And you then build a culture around that. 

We are familiar with human horse riders, goblin wolf riders, orc boar boyz, and so on. But what about elves who ride around on giraffes? Goblins who ride giant anteaters? Dwarfs who ride giant snakes? What would the cultures and geographies from which these mashups spring look like?

Here is a table to help:

1d12	Race	Rides
1	Human	Giraffe
2		Giant anteater
3		Rhino
4		Lion
5	Elf	Giant hyena
6	Dark elf	Gorilla or other giant ape
7	Goblin	Giant secretary bird, ostrich or emu
8	Dwarf	Okapi
9	Orc	Water buffalo
10	Kobold	Zebra
11	Halfling	Bison
12	Gnome	Giant tortoise

All you do is roll 2d12, and mash together what is in the two columns to come up with a culture of -riders. You could even do this to inspire the creation of part of a game world, because the combinations will tend to suggest particular aesthetics and landscapes. Hence, to quickly jot down three examples I have just generated:

Kobold bison-riders: Clearly, these inhabit a 'great plains' region; the kobolds here have figured out a way to domesticate bison to use as mounts, and this compensates for their own physical fragility, making them powerful in combat. The result is great confederacies of kobold tribes who rule the plains, sometimes in alliance with each other and sometimes at war.

Human giant tortoise-riders: These are a simple, clan-based culture of semi-nomadic pastoralists who guide flocks of tortoises around a grassy landscape, moving on from place to place as the available food stock depletes. In times of war the warriors ride their tortoises into battle, with often a dozen or so on each beast, firing arrows and flinging spears; the tortoises are trained for aggression against those owned by other clans. The ferocity of these clans spares them from outside domination, and they are fiercely autonomous from the rule of the large empire which abuts the region in which they dwell.

Elf lion-riders: I imagine a race of elves who use a special language they have developed to communicate with big cats. As a result of this they are able to enter into reciprocal relationships with, among others, lions, and indeed one way for an elf to achieve knighthood is to persuade a male lion to allow himself to be ridden as a mount. But the relationship between the elves and lions is based on equality, and lions are known to refuse cooperation if their own needs are not adequately met. 

You get the gist. As ever, a bigger table with more options would work better still. 

The Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch Ground Rules

One of the most perillous moments in any D&D campaign is the Interdimensional Space Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch. If you do not know what that is, let me explain:

It is when the players move into a different dimension and/or break in space-time such that things become Different to How They Were.

Two examples from my own life:

a - PCs are in a dungeon where they encounter a place where, due to a gigantic lightning strike, a rift has opened into the quasi-elemental plane of lightning and all sorts of entities from that plane have come pouring out. For reasons best ascribed to momentary insanity, the PCs go through the rift an emerge into the quasi-elemental plane.

b - There is a room in a dungeon which although only a dozen or or so yards in diameter contains, tardis-like, a region of desert dozens of miles wide, where a djinni is held captive in a certain hidden location.

Such moments are dangerous because they shift the tone of the campaign and may frustrate an expectation that has been allowed to build for weeks, months or years that things are a certain way. This may not manifest itself in howls of outrage, but it can feel like a clunky gear change, and it can all of a sudden make for a different 'feel' that results in verissimilitude-breaking incongruity. 

You may be familiar with the old Holodeck episodes of Next Gen, which had that kind of a quality to them. You were sitting down to watch regular Next Gen only to discover that, this week, the gang would be trapped in the Wild West/the 1920s/the 1800s/Sherwood Forest* chasing Moriarty. You had wanted phasers, tricorders, weird aliens and the Riker Maneuver. Instead you were getting silly costumes and an end-of-term, demob happy cast playing dress-up. There was a sense of vague deflation and discombobulation. And this can happen during Interdimensional Space-Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch moments, too.

This does not mean the Interdimensional Space-Time Continuum Bait-and-Switch should be avoided at all costs. There is nothing wrong with a shift in gears if you've been pootling along the M6 in fifth gear, stuck behind a lorry, and the fast lane opens up for you. My ground rules would run as follows:

1. Make sure an entrance to another dimension has a readily available exit. That way the players can explore if they want, but don't have to. ('You accidentally stepped through a doorway into another dimension and there is NO WAY BACK EXCEPT THROUGH SOME OBSCURE OR SECRET METHOD!' is, I think, screwing with the players unless it is the entire premise of the campaign from the outset.) 

2. Do not make the other dimension markedly more dangerous than the current dimension the PCs are in without hints that it will be so.

3. Rifts to other dimensions suck if they could be used to facilitate setting-destroying flows of technology, magic, and so on - again, unless it is the premise of the campaign. You are perhaps familiar with the Chronicles of Amber, specifically (I think, from memory) The Guns of Avalon, in which Corwin uses interdimensional hijinks to bring gunpowder weapons (from memory, assault rifles) into Amber to destroy his enemies by kitting out an army. That type of step-change is fine in a novel, but likely in a D&D campaign to just mess things up too much. 

*Yes, yes, okay, that was a Q episode, but you get my drift.

Intelligent Fighters, Charismatic Dwarfs, Strong Thieves, Oh My!

Sometimes, I like to post on this blog in a fashion that is more along the lines of thinking-out-loud than having a coherent message or purpose. This is one of those occasions. 

You may recall that long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, The Simpsons was funny, and nobody had yet heard of Baby Shark, there was a thing called d20 Modern. It was not, I think, a great success - I played in a few games of it, but the marriage of D&D mechanics and modern/cyberpunk/superhero aesthetic didn't quite work. Hit points, which are ok in the context of a fantasy game, feel odd in a setting with guns, and I thought the way it handled wealth was plainly and simply loathsome badwrongfun. It certainly felt like a step backwards from, say, Cyberpunk 2020, which itself at that point was already very old and outmoded. 

But there was something that was interesting in the system, which was the idea of character class deriving directly from attributes. Those who played the game more extensively than me may remember this better, but the system was predicated on the existence not of fighters, thieves, or what have you, but Strong heroes, Intelligent heroes, Wise heroes, Charismatic heroes, and so on. The idea here I think was that it was less hide-bound. Instead of being tied to particular roles (a hit man, a scientist, a burglar, or whatever) you had freer rein: in a game set in the modern developed world, as an Intelligent hero you could be a scientist, or a computer programmer, or a businessperson, or even a hit-man for that matter depending on how you shaped the character; as a Tough hero you could be an MMA fighter, an endurance runner, or a scuba diver; etc. By defining roles very broadly, you gave the players room to get creative.

I am not sure if this would have any usefulness being directly translated into old school D&D. 'Fighter', 'Magic-User', 'Cleric', etc., are already loose enough concepts; D&D players have no problem with the idea that a 'Cleric' could look like a Knight Templar, Van Helsing, a Tengri shaman or a Zulu witch doctor and still be mechanically the same, or that a 'Fighter' could be a viking, samurai, conquistador or Sioux warrior or something else entirely. However, there is something interesting about making attributes more salient and more choice-bearing than simply being prime requisites that define what class you are.

Consider: imagine that instead of just picking a class (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Dwarf, etc.) players also picked a prime requisite that had a mechanical consequence. So instead of just being a Fighter, you would be a Strong Fighter, an Intelligent Fighter, a Quick Fighter, and so on; instead of just being a Dwarf, you would be a Charismatic Dwarf, a Wise Dwarf, a Tough Dwarf; instead of just being a Magic-User you would be a Quick one or a Tough one; you get the drift. 

This would have an aesthetic impact, obviously, and would help add flavour to a character, even setting aside mechanical considerations. What does a Quick Dwarf look like? What about a Wise Fighter, or a Tough Elf? But the option to assign a highest score to a suboptimal attribute exists already, and most players already tend to visualise their PCs in accordance with whatever their stats are. The question is whether it coul be made to have an impact on the actual game itself without doing too much violence to the way old school D&D is played. 

One way of doing this might just be to free up prime requisites and separate them from class, so that any class could be given any prime requisite. Consider: you roll up a character, Simon the Sorcerer, and you parcel out his attributes as follows:

STR 9, INT 13, WIS 8, DEX 11, CHA 6, CON 16

You want him to be a Magic-User, but his highest stat is CON, so you make him a Tough Magic-User with CON as his prime requisite. Because his prime requisite is 16, he gets the 5% XP bonus (or whatever it is for the ruleset you are using). He also gets the relevant bonus to his hit points each time he levels up. Now, would this affect how he is played? Would you, consciously or subconsciously, steer him towards situations in which having a higher CON mattered? At the margins, it might make you less risk-averse than you would be playing a 'regular' Magic-User?

Consider: you roll up a different character. Pippy Longstockings, and you parcel out her attributes as:

STR 10, INT 9, WIS 17, DEX 12, CHA 10, CON 7

You decide she is going to be a Wise Thief. She, again, gets the XP bonus from a high attribute, and also perhaps magical resistance and better saving throws depending on the ruleset. Whether this would affect how she is played I am not sure - it probably would change how you would evisage her during play, which may itself have a certain impact on things. 

I'm not sure whether this tweak would make a huge amount of difference to the price of tea in China. You may have your own views. But it certainly would at least add some variety. I did warn you I was thinking out loud. What did you want, coherence?

Incomplete List of D&D Related Things that Are Hard to Imagine

An important aspect of tabletop RPGs that is insufficiently discussed is the theatre of the mind. When playing a game, we - players and DM alike - picture a great variety of things in our minds' eyes. We visualise what ths room looks like, what this monster looks like, what this NPC looks like, and so on. No doubt we also do it when reading splatbooks and modules: we picture in our heads what is not depicted for us in illustrations. But we don't talk a great deal about how this mind's-eye aspect of play works, how to improve it, and what its implications are.

As a very small preliminary matter, there are certain things that I have always found it hard to envisage - things that, when I try to picture in my mind's eye, I always find either look silly, or actually impossible to make concrete, and I was curious whether readers have their own examples to add. Here are some of mine:

• Bird men which wield objects. If a bird man only has four limbs (i.e., two wings and two feet) then it has to wield a weapon or pretty much anything it cannot hold in its beak with its feet. But the idea of a bird man using one foot to swing a sword or hurl a javelin or whatever is faintly ridiculous. 
• Dragons, or other creatures without primate-style mouths, which speak. How does a dragon's mouth move when it talks? What does that actually look like?
• Melee combat between creatures of obviously very different sizes (a human against a hill giant; a human against a sprite). What does it look like for a hill giant to hit a human with its 12' long club and for that to not kill or at best completely incapacitate that human? How can a human slashing away at a hill giant's knees with a sword that in relative terms is a bit like the short blade on a Swiss army knife do enough damage to eventually kill it?
• A fight against a gelatinous cube, or indeed any other amorphous jelly-like object. Slashing a big jelly with a sword is readily visualised. But slashing it with swords until it dies is not. Let alone stabbing it with spears or beating it with maces or whatever. You can imagine pieces being gouged out of it, or cut off, but that would imply a reduction in HD which the rules don't facilitate. You have to imagine the jelly retaining structural integrity but being 'wounded' enough times to give up the ghost.
• A rakshasa's hands are the wrong way round. Really difficult to envisage.
• A person being slowed or hasted. This is not hard to envisage, but hard to envisage and imagine it with a straight face. It is difficult to imagine somebody being hasted without Benny Hill music playing in the background. And it is difficult to imagine somebody being slowed without it looking like silly for-laughs slo-mo like in Zoolander. 

You may very well have your own.

A New Age of Storytelling

It is easy to be a doom-monger - to literally go out into the world and mong doom. Monging hope is less easy, and tends to have to be done practically rather than theoretically. Doom is monged through words - dire prophecies and warnings, or elegies for times past. Hope is monged through doing, rather than telling. A hope-monger shows the way.

There is a lot of doom (ok, ok, I will stop with the whole 'mong' thing now) being spread about in respect of reading these days. A lot of people are worried that people aren't reading as much as they used to. Apocalyptic scenarios are envisaged: The End of Reading is here; a New Dark Ages is dawning; the era of Post-Literacy is upon us. And, for what it is worth, I share many of the concerns being expressed. I am a fan of the written word and I read a lot of books, as I always have. I think that screen-based entertainment does not facilitate viewer engagement with the subtleties and complexities of the human condition in the way that a good book does with its readers; I think reading great books cultivates empathy, judgment and wisdom, that watching great TV mostly just passes the time really well, and that doomscrolling rots the brain. I also don't think that reading books is something that should have to be defended in instrumental terms. Most of the best things Western civilisation has produced are books - why wouldn't any sane adult want to imbibe cultural artefacts that have been recognised to be great by vast numbers of discerning human beings for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years? 

With that said, my feeling is that if it is true that the end of reading is upon us (I have some doubts about this, but that is a subject for another post), then there is nothing that anybody can really do about it, and it is certainly not a problem that it is open to politics to solve. It so happens that a few days ago the cross-party Education Committee of the UK Parliament issued a report on the sharp decline in reading for pleasure among the young and what to do about it. No doubt the people who wrote it are well-intentioned but the recommendations in it - automatic library enrolment for children from birth; a state-funded library in every secondary school; a national 'Decade of Reading'; and so on - are either faintly ludicrous or highly unlikely to make much difference. No: it is not in the state's gift to save us from the New Dark Ages. We have to resurrect reading on our own, in our own small ways, and in the meantime accept that the culture is moving away from print.

Part of that acceptance means reconciling oneself to, and taking advantage of, new media, and here is where hope comes into play. There is no doubt in my mind that although reading print literature is in decline, and although that trend is lamentable, other opportunities to tell stories are presenting themselves, and humanity is finding other ways to generate the type of narratives that non-televisual modes of communication provide. The problems with screen-based story-telling are: a) that, while a great actor can give some insight into what the character he or she depicts is thinking or feeling, it does not allow the viewer to inhabit somebody else's thoughts and experiences in the way print fiction can; and b) because the narrative is visual it does not require the viewer to use much imagination.

Books are the opposite in that their main strengths are precisely to do with cultivating empathy and imagination. But as books decline other forms are filing the gap. RPGs, I am convinced, are one of them, and it is probably not a coincidence that as fiction-reading loses cultural cache RPGs are gaining mainstream popularity - again, because they allow the player to inhabit somebody else's thoughts and experiences, and because they require such extensive use of the imagination. 

I also think that the type of theatre-of-the-mind mixture of RPG and fiction that is present in something like Tale of the Manticore will become more popular for the same reasons. We will lean into the convenience and intimacy (that word is the appropriate one to use, I think) that is provided by the spoken word. The result is a differently textured experience to novel-reading. But it can scratch similar itches in a way that screen-media cannot.

This, to come back to hope, is worth embracing. It is a cultural catastrophe that millions of children are now growing up without having a love of reading cultivated in them, and without any experience of living in a print-based world. That represents a devastating loss. Yet all is not lost. Those who love books can still read them. But they can also explore new possibilities for creativity and expand into new frontiers. This needs to happen through practice rather than theory: more people have to just do it. Yet it is within our power all the same. 

On the Hidden Creative Power of Monster Organization Manipulation; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Su-Monsters, Selkies, Shargughs and Simurghs

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?