VelvetViolet
Adventurer
Roleplaying games have a long history of taking monsters from mythology and turning them into encounters. Often the monsters are rendered barely recognizable compared to their mythological origins, assuming that said origin had any interesting aspects that got shorn off. Plenty are already so vague and simplistic that the transition didn’t seem to hurt them overmuch. This is very pedantic, I know.
Sometimes this is a cosmetic thing like the D&D gorgon and wight actually corresponding to the mythological catoblepas and draug. Or an undead sorcerer being called a lich, even though that only means “corpse/death” as shown by English words like lich-gate, lich-field, lich-way, lich-owl, lich-wake, etc. This should be easy to rectify by using compound names to maintain continuity: catoblepas gorgon, gorgon medusa, draug-wight, elder lich lord, lich mage, etc. For example, Pathfinder tweaks the demilich (literally meaning “half corpse”) to a decayed and weakened lich mage, with the awakened variant being a more powerful lich mage.
Sometimes this is a simple matter of shorning an interesting background to a simplistic killer monster. The Greek Lamia wasn’t just an arbitrary femme fatale, but the ghost of a woman who died for love. The Greek Minotaur couldn’t solve mazes, which was why it was trapped in a maze. Medieval bestiaries claimed that griffins lined their nests with precious metals, laid eggs with agate shells, and their talons could detect poison, but these aspects are absent in the bland monster manual entry. In my opinion this deprives us of otherwise interesting fantasy story opportunities, like minotaurs being mystically cursed to a personal maze, dwarves using griffins to sniff out veins of ore, an alchemist character hatching a basilisk from a cock’s egg incubated by a toad or snake, or the soul of a hanged man becoming a mandrake root. I don’t know why, but modern fantasy (particularly that influenced by D&D) just feels uncreative and banal in comparison unless you’re reading children’s stories or weird fiction. Sometimes I get the impression that writers think the more fantastical stuff is too silly to include in serious fiction, but I have no idea how accurate that is.
Then there are instances that just have me shaking my head in confusion. For example, the “wendigo” meme (in the dictionary sense, of which image macros are a subset: “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”) that has been circulating—you know the one, a generic horned forest demon seen in google image search—is a variation on Herne the Hunter (and similar motifs in European folklore, like Cernunos, the Wild Hunt, Baphomet, etc) that bears no resemblance to the greedy demon of Algonquin religion besides borrowing the name. Why even call it that?
A related but not synonymous trend is fantasy taxonomies. It’s mostly a problem for 3e/5e D&D and its derivatives because they have an explicit taxonomy mechanic as part of the rules, and it confuses me to no end. It is way more complicated and unwieldy than it has to be. These aren’t just taxonomies in the fluff, but actual physical rules of the game universe. It presents a square peg round hole problem when trying to translate monsters from myth, folklore or fairytale into D&D and derivatives, since the game’s taxonomy is arbitrary and hierarchical. The definitions are annoyingly vague and inconsistent too, and there are even catchall categories that promote lazy design like “monstrosity”. Supposedly it refers to unnatural mutant abominations, but includes griffins, owlbears and centaurs who are otherwise treated as natural parts of the world. For another example, real world occultism organizes fairies into elemental categories (e.g. earth for gnomes and satyrs, fire for salamanders and genies, air for sylphs and pixies, water for nymphs and mermaids) but D&D arbitrarily distinguishes elementals from fairies with no room for overlap. There’s no spirit type despite spirits being a universal concept in world mythology, so one supplement converting the “kami” monsters from Pathfinder to 5e gave them an invalid type of celestial/elemental. The Greek chimera is classified as a dragon in real mythology books, but in D&D it is a dragon-kin, monstrosity or magical beast depending on edition. Even translating from past editions of D&D can be difficult: the definition of some types like aberration and elemental is completely different between 3e and 5e (for the better in my opinion), rilmani (the angel/demon equivalent for neutrality) don’t fit into any 5e type, whereas eladrin and guardinals and hags and blink dogs all changed to fey for some reason (what even are fey anymore? 4e type was so much clearer). 3e has the absolute worst taxonomy rules in my opinion, as it functions as a class system to determine game stat blocks. (Some D&D derivatives, like FantasyCraft and 13th Age, fixed the square peg round hole problem by using simple, clearly defined, non-hierachical tags and only as many as they absolutely needed to. They don’t begrudge you for wanting to play with taxonomy either, as 13th Age Bestiary sometimes includes suggestions for changing a monster’s type to emphasize different fluff.)
I could go on for pages about my beef with the fantasy taxonomy mechanics unique to D&D. But I digress.
All of this drives the pedant in me crazy, especially since it is now trivial to research this stuff on google.
Is this trend creatively bankrupt? Am I making much ado about nothing? Are there other pendants in the audience? Care to share any stories of pendantry as it relates to game monster design?
Sometimes this is a cosmetic thing like the D&D gorgon and wight actually corresponding to the mythological catoblepas and draug. Or an undead sorcerer being called a lich, even though that only means “corpse/death” as shown by English words like lich-gate, lich-field, lich-way, lich-owl, lich-wake, etc. This should be easy to rectify by using compound names to maintain continuity: catoblepas gorgon, gorgon medusa, draug-wight, elder lich lord, lich mage, etc. For example, Pathfinder tweaks the demilich (literally meaning “half corpse”) to a decayed and weakened lich mage, with the awakened variant being a more powerful lich mage.
You could argue that this is just linguistic drift, but I don’t really consider that the case. Firstly, this is limited to game jargon and the words still have their original meaning if you check the dictionary or study comparative mythology. Wiktionary even maintains separate definitions for fantasy fiction. Secondly, these are actual mistakes the writers of early editions made due to a lack of sufficient research material. Topsell confused the gorgon and catoblepas, but still referred to Medusa as a gorgon. Tolkien used wight as part of barrow-wight, meaning “grave men.” The pulp authors who dropped the word lich used it in its original sense as a corpse, animated or otherwise.
Sometimes this is a simple matter of shorning an interesting background to a simplistic killer monster. The Greek Lamia wasn’t just an arbitrary femme fatale, but the ghost of a woman who died for love. The Greek Minotaur couldn’t solve mazes, which was why it was trapped in a maze. Medieval bestiaries claimed that griffins lined their nests with precious metals, laid eggs with agate shells, and their talons could detect poison, but these aspects are absent in the bland monster manual entry. In my opinion this deprives us of otherwise interesting fantasy story opportunities, like minotaurs being mystically cursed to a personal maze, dwarves using griffins to sniff out veins of ore, an alchemist character hatching a basilisk from a cock’s egg incubated by a toad or snake, or the soul of a hanged man becoming a mandrake root. I don’t know why, but modern fantasy (particularly that influenced by D&D) just feels uncreative and banal in comparison unless you’re reading children’s stories or weird fiction. Sometimes I get the impression that writers think the more fantastical stuff is too silly to include in serious fiction, but I have no idea how accurate that is.
To be fair, this is probably symptomatic of the fact that the vast majority of roleplaying involves violence. If a monster only exists for the players to kill it, then it doesn’t need any traits unrelated to violence. Players can’t really appreciate the colorful whimsy of your monsters if they are busy killing said monsters.
Then there are instances that just have me shaking my head in confusion. For example, the “wendigo” meme (in the dictionary sense, of which image macros are a subset: “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.”) that has been circulating—you know the one, a generic horned forest demon seen in google image search—is a variation on Herne the Hunter (and similar motifs in European folklore, like Cernunos, the Wild Hunt, Baphomet, etc) that bears no resemblance to the greedy demon of Algonquin religion besides borrowing the name. Why even call it that?
Again, this could be argued as the natural mutation of myth over time. The issue here is that there are two lineages, one for the Algonquin and one for Euro-American popular culture. The wendigo myth was only really relevant to the Algonquin because of socio-economic conditions specific to them and actually became more relevant as a culture tale after colonization, to point that in modern Algonquin works wendigo are literally depicted as corrupt corporate executives who feed on the spoils of colonialism and capitalism. For Euro-American culture it is just a loan word for some manner of unspecified bogeyman that we’ve applied to European folk motifs because imperialist culture has broken our connection to our own ancient myth cycles. This is how it was used by the authors who popularized the misconceptions: Algernon Blackwood, Theodore Roosevelt, August Derleth, and Stephen King. In short, it’s an apples and oranges problem.
A related but not synonymous trend is fantasy taxonomies. It’s mostly a problem for 3e/5e D&D and its derivatives because they have an explicit taxonomy mechanic as part of the rules, and it confuses me to no end. It is way more complicated and unwieldy than it has to be. These aren’t just taxonomies in the fluff, but actual physical rules of the game universe. It presents a square peg round hole problem when trying to translate monsters from myth, folklore or fairytale into D&D and derivatives, since the game’s taxonomy is arbitrary and hierarchical. The definitions are annoyingly vague and inconsistent too, and there are even catchall categories that promote lazy design like “monstrosity”. Supposedly it refers to unnatural mutant abominations, but includes griffins, owlbears and centaurs who are otherwise treated as natural parts of the world. For another example, real world occultism organizes fairies into elemental categories (e.g. earth for gnomes and satyrs, fire for salamanders and genies, air for sylphs and pixies, water for nymphs and mermaids) but D&D arbitrarily distinguishes elementals from fairies with no room for overlap. There’s no spirit type despite spirits being a universal concept in world mythology, so one supplement converting the “kami” monsters from Pathfinder to 5e gave them an invalid type of celestial/elemental. The Greek chimera is classified as a dragon in real mythology books, but in D&D it is a dragon-kin, monstrosity or magical beast depending on edition. Even translating from past editions of D&D can be difficult: the definition of some types like aberration and elemental is completely different between 3e and 5e (for the better in my opinion), rilmani (the angel/demon equivalent for neutrality) don’t fit into any 5e type, whereas eladrin and guardinals and hags and blink dogs all changed to fey for some reason (what even are fey anymore? 4e type was so much clearer). 3e has the absolute worst taxonomy rules in my opinion, as it functions as a class system to determine game stat blocks. (Some D&D derivatives, like FantasyCraft and 13th Age, fixed the square peg round hole problem by using simple, clearly defined, non-hierachical tags and only as many as they absolutely needed to. They don’t begrudge you for wanting to play with taxonomy either, as 13th Age Bestiary sometimes includes suggestions for changing a monster’s type to emphasize different fluff.)
I could go on for pages about my beef with the fantasy taxonomy mechanics unique to D&D. But I digress.
All of this drives the pedant in me crazy, especially since it is now trivial to research this stuff on google.
Is this trend creatively bankrupt? Am I making much ado about nothing? Are there other pendants in the audience? Care to share any stories of pendantry as it relates to game monster design?