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The tarrasque is one of Dungeons and Dragons’ most iconic and feared creatures; but what is this strange turtle looking creature from medieval France that shares its name?
Hello, I’m Conan of Coco’s Homebrew. For the past 6 months, I've been hosting a podcast called 'From Mythos to Monsters', where I discuss the origins of monsters to figure out how they went from being legends of history to becoming staples of fantasy and TTRPG gaming. I've decided to start posting the blog versions of these podcasts on EN World for those who don't wish to watch the video version.
If you like this series and want to support me in making it, check out my Patreon where I make homebrew content for D&D as well as other things.
Today, we’re going to be talking about the Tarrasque. I thought I’d kick this series off with this creature in particular because it’s not only one of D&D’s most iconic creatures, but also very different to the mythological creature that serves as its namesake.
We begin the tarrasque’s story in 12th century France, near the sunny southern coast of the Mediterranean in the region of Provence, where legend says that the town of Nerluc near the River Rhone was being terrorised by a grotesque and powerful monster.
According to the 13th century manuscript known as the Golden Legend, the tarasque, spelt in the original legend with only one R, was said to be a dragon-like creature that shared anatomical traits with various other animals, such as a spiked shell and scorpion or serpent like tail.
The tarasque’s preferred way of reigning terror was devouring people, and by expunging bodily fluids that were said to burn people on contact. This fluid was either spit or breath or dung, depending on your preferred interpretation. The idea of a tarrasque spewing naughty word that burns your skin like a xenomorph's blood is certainly terrifying in its own way.
The locals tried to fight the tarasque, but its shell was impenetrable to attacks- an aspect of the creature still consistent with its modern interpretation, although some people believe this detail might have been added a few centuries later to make it easier to build effigies of it for festivals, hiding things like the wheels used to parade it around (we’ll get into that in a bit).
So, what were the people of Provence to do? At this point, they had to rely on a miracle- and luckily for them, they got one. They sought the help of a saint named Martha, who fearlessly walked up to the beast holding a cross, sprinkled it with some holy water, and placed a leash around its neck. The holy water calmed the tarrasque and by that point it was essentially domesticated, and allowed itself to be led by Martha through the streets of Nerluc. Yes, that’s really all it took to defeat the tarasque, and if you’re familiar with how the creature is described in D&D, that probably surprises you.
Anyway, the people of Nerluc rejoiced, and were so grateful to Martha that they all converted to Christianity and renamed the town Tarascon. Some adaptations even say the locals proceeded to slaughter the tarasque as it was led through town. What a lovely ending… I guess.
Martha must have loved the attention she got, because she stayed in Tarascon for the rest of her life. Tarascon is still the name of the town to this day, by the way, and you can even go and visit Martha’s tomb there. Not only that, but the locals also hold a ‘tarasque festival’ every year where they parade the creature around just like Martha did to celebrate the legend. During the festival, people dress up in pink outfits and wheel around a pretty terrifying effigy of the tarasque through Tarascon’s streets.
Well, by the time we get to the modern day, you’ll notice that the effigy that’s being paraded around in Tarascon is more than a slight bit different in appearance to the monster of the same name seen in games like Dungeons & Dragons.
D&D has popularised the modern image of the tarrasque thanks to it cementing itself as one of the game’s most memorable monsters throughout its various editions, but D&D’s tarrasque shares very little in common with Martha’s monster.
The tarrasque first appeared in Dungeons & Dragons in 1984. Its game interpretation was designed by Gary Gygax himself, the game’s creator. Gygax was known to love reinterpreting mythological beasts as enemies for his game, but when it came to the tarasque, he wasn’t too interested in its historical roots: he was definitely more interested in having a show-stopping, near-invincible enemy for high-level parties, and decided for some reason that this particular legend would fit the bill.
In the monster manual where the tarrasque first appears, it is depicted as a bipedal behemoth, described as being fifty feet in length. This was in direct opposition to how the tarrasque was drawn before this, with it normally being depicted by artists as a quadrepedal creature whose size was more similar to a dog or at most a small horse. It certainly still had a dragon-ish appearance and a big spiky shell, at least, but you can see Gygax’s tarrasque looks more like something you’d fish out of a toilet in Chernobyl than the tarasque that had been seen in tapestries and legends.
In this inaugural edition, the tarrasque is also said to spend most of its time laying dormant before awakening to rampage and feed only once over the course of a number of years. Parallels can be drawn to legends surrounding dragons, which suggests that Gygax probably took inspiration from these when envisioning his very different take on the tarrasque. One final point of note is that Gygax’s tarrasque was also essentially immortal, constantly regenerating wounds and being incapable of fully dying without being literally wished out of existence by powerful magic.
As time went on, the tarrasque kept deviating more and more from the original legend, becoming less of an ugly turtle-shelled abomination and more of a heavily armoured dinosaur. People often draw comparisons to D&D’s tarrasque as being the game’s equivalent of Godzilla, and it’s not hard to see why.
While no longer immortal, by the time D&D’s 5th edition was published in 2014, the tarrasque had become bigger, meaner and even more destructive. While the actual tarasque of legend was a nuisance that terrorised a small community of fishermen only to be calmed down with some stern religious lecturing, by this point in D&D’s timeline the tarrasque has become one of its most powerful creatures in existence, a living incarnation of cataclysm. It’s not throwing around poo or spitting at people; now, the tarrasque is a colossal kaiju levelling entire districts of cities with each attack, and its shell is no longer just a piece of armour, but a magical carapace capable of reflecting almost any attack or spell. Well, you can't say it’s an underwhelming adaptation, but it’s certainly not a very faithful one.
So what happened to our fearsome French friend along the way? Well one big problem in the original recorded legends about the tarasque was the vague and confusing language surrounding descriptions of its appearance, not helped by the fact that people seemed to keep adding on new traits to the creature the more time went on. It’s unclear whether traits like its scorpion tail, turtle shell or lion face were part of the original story, or whether the creature’s appearance was warped over time by people tacking on new additions; it’s a bit like a game of telephone that’s lasted almost a thousand years. In that regard, it is to some extent forgivable that D&D went so left-field with their own vision of the monster, since there is no one ‘true’ version of the tarrasque.
So, how do we as storytellers consolidate these two very different versions of this creature? Well, believe it or not, this has actually been addressed before by the official D&D magazine, Dragon: in 2005, the magazine published the article ‘The Petit Tarrasque and Other Monsters’, where it admits that the creature presented in the Monster Manual isn’t very similar to the tarasque in Martha’s legend, or the ‘Gaul Tarrasque’ as it refers to it. To compensate, it provides a guide on how to modify the statistics of a young bronze dragon to create a creature more similar to the Gaul Tarrasque, namely by removing its flight and granting it regeneration and the ability to control water.
Well, while this would go some way to bridging the gap between D&D’s tarrasque and the Gaul Tarrasque, it’s a bit too Frankenstein for my liking.
If I was going to write an adventure that merged these two ideas of the tarrasque, I would instead have Martha’s story unfold as it does in the original Golden Legend, but I would change the underwhelming ending into something a bit more exciting: just when Martha and the people of Tarascon think they’ve finally defeated the tarasque, they feel and hear gigantic footsteps shaking the entire village, and with a horrible, sinking realisation understand that what they’ve just slain is merely the young child of something much more horrifying.
Well, on that note I think it’s time to close the book on the tarrasque and conclude the first instalment. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the legend of the tarasque, and that it was interesting or at least gave you inspiration for writing your own legends.
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