Milieu verisimilitude and theme-based fauna

Ok... go with me on this as it's a half-formed idea that I'm trying to coalesce into a solid concept so I might not convey the entire picture in the first post.

Basically, have you ever wondered where all the monsters come from?

I know, I know, it's one of 'those' questions; don't ask, don't tell.

One thing I really loved about AD&D was all the random encounter charts. Man, you had encounter charts for freakin' everything! Particularly in 2e with the Monster Compendium sets. They had jungle, mountain, plains, steppes, you name it, there was a random encounter chart for it.

It wasn't so much that I liked random encounters, in fact, I kinda hated them, especially after getting TPK'd by a great wyrm red dragon just before the climactic final battle of (IIRC) Rary the Traitor.

No, what I liked was that it gave a sense of verisimilitude to the generic milieu in which the characters adventured. You weren't going to face a white dragon in the desert, or a were rats at the bottom of the sea.

Now I realise that any DM worth their salt isn't about to populate areas with ill-suited monsters, but after a recent discussion I had about dinosaurs and the eras in which they lived, it got me to thinking about restricting monsters to settings, and even further to specific geographical areas.

But that's not far enough. To make a setting really unique, you could excise a bunch of monsters and then explain why it is this small set of monsters dominate and exist in the setting whereas others do not.

In essence, I guess I'm trying to come up with a way of explaining a method by which to eliminate the 'mixed bag' feeling I get with D&D these days. It'd be nice to play in a game where if I was travelling to a certain area, I would generally know that I could hunt for giant elks but should watch out for the terror birds of the plains, or that I could search the Mountains of Mist for a Roc mount but would have to appease the local aarakocra.

So, anyway, I thought I'd throw it out there to see if others could better define the concept.

Assuming a group of adventurs faces about 200-300 encounters in their careers, every time a monster is repeated makes one less monster they will encounter out of the MM. In fact, it is safe to assume that half of those encounters, at least, are duplicates, and more than enough to make up for multiple monster encounters. Even if you threw the kitchen sink at them, it is unlikely they would actually meet all the monsters of a given terrain type. Thus, the smorgasbord of monsters is really only a potentiality. Every game restricts the available monsters to a subset.

I remember in the D&D Expert set, a section of crafting encounter tables spelled this out, stating that a random encounter table should be crafted for each area and that encounters mght be tied to fixed encounters. The Isle of Dread was offered as a worked-out example.

I try to avoid the "made by god XYZ" explanation whenever possible, personally.

This is one reason I always liked the Frequency of monsters in 1e. Common, Uncommon, Rare, Unique - gave me a gauge to help decide how likely they were to come up on my random monster charts.

And yes, I make up my own random monster charts. I used to do it in a notebook, build the table, and then pre-roll a bunch of encounters. Now I do it in Excel, then I can double-check some of my assumptions with summary calculations and have it churn out some random encounters.

I always make sure to include only monsters (and other NPC) encounters that would be pretty reasonable. Grassland appropriate encounters for grasslands, etc. And mundane more common than really weird or fantastic.

As a DM, I try not to throw random monsters at the party - I simply keep a theme in mind. However, I've also embraced a sort of "lamarkian" ecology instead of mundane darwinism - many monsters spring from mundane roots. Wild lions can give birth to chimera or manticores, and cocktrice from barnyard hens. Etc. So I get a monster without having to explain how a whole pride of them survive in the area.

I try to include lots of abandoned shrines and angry nature spirits so I can have animals and beasts be more aggressive than normal.

Like I said, the idea wasn't about random encounter tables, rather it was about the verisimilitude those tables gave a milieu. It gave me a sense of the world having some sort of logic behind it.

This stemmed from a discussion about terror birds. They once ruled the wilds much in the way that the dinosaurs did before them. Massive creatures that stalked their prey with incredible speed and deadly precision. They could kill with one blow of their huge beaks.

The idea spawned that they'd make a great D&D monster. Then I started thinking about other large versions of creatures and got to wondering about how such creatures could be the norm in a D&D world instead of their lesser kin. The world hasn't evolved the lesser creatures because the world is still a primordial place full of danger, where large predatory creatures still rule the wilderness.

In other words, something like one of these terror birds would be the dominant predator in a specific geographic area. You wouldn't have ten other types of predator because these ones, for whatever reason, are perfectly suited to that area and other predators of similar size can't survive in competition with them.

I'm talking about giving a certain amount of logic to a milieu. Where even random encounter tables have an understandable verisimilitude to them. Not just randomly selecting creatures from the hundreds or thousands that are available. By creating some sort of generic resource for something like this so that there's a shared comprehension of what a properly structured generic milieu should look like.

Maybe I should start a wiki...

I got where you're coming from, though I think your query about "where the monsters come from" is misleading. It doesn't matter where the monsters come from - what matters are what monsters are there when the PCs pass through. There's nothing wrong with theming them - I think most DMs do that anyways, actually, if only by deciding certain monsters are too "silly" or just don't fit the tone for whatever reason. I certainly lean towards a "fey" stance in my games, and my monster selection overall fits that theme. I narrow the focus for specific geographical or cultural areas (dwarves tend to bring certain creatures with them, for instance).

I guess I'm not sure what answer you're looking for, if not other people sharing vague anecdotes. Is theming monsters good? IMO, yes.

Kzach said:

Not just randomly selecting creatures from the hundreds or thousands that are available.

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You make it sound like DMs in general don't do this. I'm guessing, instead, quite the opposite - I expect most homebrewers do put some thought into what kind of critters are found in a given area. They pick and choose to match the flavor they want, rather than at random.

Kzach said:

This stemmed from a discussion about terror birds. They once ruled the wilds much in the way that the dinosaurs did before them. Massive creatures that stalked their prey with incredible speed and deadly precision. They could kill with one blow of their huge beaks.

In other words, something like one of these terror birds would be the dominant predator in a specific geographic area. You wouldn't have ten other types of predator because these ones, for whatever reason, are perfectly suited to that area and other predators of similar size can't survive in competition with them.

Click to expand...

They used to be a D&D monster actually, in 1e as the Axebeak.

A rich enough area can actually have several large predators, frex the great plains of africa where you have lions, hyenas, leopards and cheetahs all in the same area. Even so D&D does tend to over do it with the apex predators even in very narrow niches. "Something is burrowing towards us!" "Well what is it? An Ankehg, bulette, purple worm, Umber hulk? Be more specific!"

In any area the ultimate apex predator is going to be a dragon. Pretty much nothing can touch them.

As for where they all come from. I'm a fan of fantasy lamarkian evolution myself. But other explanations include "love springs' like in the Xanth books, magical experimentation (owlbear), gods amusing themselves, mutagenic effects (magic places, mystic fruit, funky mushrooms), or alien worlds/dimensions.

And some monsters can simply be made. Everyone knows how to make a cockatrice for example. The only hard part is getting a rooster to lay an egg.