This made me think of Lois Bujold's recent Sharing Knife quartet. The books are post-apocalptic, but the apocolypse was long enough ago that the world is starting to pick up and regrow, and the feel of the books is actually very close to the settlement phase of the american mid-west. (Lois notes that her australian readers said it all sounded very exotic and otherworldly.
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So that's what brought it up in my mind, but it's the monsters of the books that I'm thinking of. They're called either malices or blight boggles and they seem to be bits of some giant uber-demon that brought about the apocalpyse. When they first spring up all they know how to do is eat. And as they eat they learn new tricks and can take new shapes, and they grow steadily more terrifying. The trouble is they don't know how to do anything they haven't tasted. And that includes dying.
In order to kill one you first have to teach if what mortality is. And that's where the titular Sharing Knives come in. The lakewalkers are the decendents of the old mage-lords who caused the catastrophe in the first place, and they have devoted their existence to fighting the malices. They make the sharing knives from the thighbones of their own dead, and in order to 'prime' a knife with the taste of mortality someone must die on the knife. Their warriors carry unprimed knives with them, hoping that if they are wounded in battle they'll have the chance to kill themselves with the knives, thus creating a primed knife, and a weapon that can destroy a malice. The old, and the sick too also will share their deaths if they can.
So in order to take down a malice it first take the deaths of two good guys. One to provide the blade of the knife, and the other to prime it.
Has anyone ever set something like this up in a game? Where to destroy a monster takes some very real sacrifice on the part of the heros, not merely a trip to magic item wal-mart to get the right alchemical metal for the fiend de jour?
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