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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zelda Themelin" data-source="post: 25059" data-attributes="member: 167">Uh, If I'd write better english I'd try to, now it feels like half of my meanings get lost in more simple matters. I got a feeling this would become too elobrete.My thought on that problem -- that symbols get overused and thus lose their impact -- is that it comes from bad writing. Or DMing, whatever. The symbols, the archetypes, are ALWAYS scary. They ARE the things that scare us. If they're poorly delivered then we aren't affected and we say, "Oh, vampires aren't scary," and then BOOM! something like Alien (which can, on several levels, be seen as a vampire story, not the least of which is the sexual subtext) shows up and blows audiences away.I agree that STARTING from archetypes and building your NPCs around them is a bad way to go -- you're very likely to end with really cartoony bad guys who are SUPPOSED to be scary but aren't. I was just observing that the bad guys in my campaign, which have been very effective at scaring my players (they get really freaked out -- it's very gratifying), all relate to mythic tropes that permeate our culture and history. I didn't plan it that way, but I don't think it's a coincidence, either. </blockquote>Mmh, you make IMO few really good points here.But sometimes, it really comes down to that 'too much the same thing', no matter how well written or presented. It's a bit like with favourite food, there comes a point when you just have to eat something else. For example in Creature Collection 1 by Sword & Sorcery there are creatures called Unhallowed. For me they were scary and I could imagine few situations, where I woudn't want be with such creature around.Then there was template/creature called Bloodless in CC2. None of my RL gaming friends who read about that monster thought it was good idea to use, or even scary. It just lacked something that feeds imagination and scares, though it had a lot of elements. Maybe that's just it, it had too many of them. Checked, it still makes me go 'yawn', maybe it's partially that 'Poison Elves'-style picture.Ok, any imaginative dm, who gets good ideas of it, could use such monster well.Many people in net have liked the monster, however. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Your npc's sound really interesting, exepct for Yuek Man Chong, but that is probably her personality strikes out to me as universal female enemy stereotype of certain long-term dm of mine. If not for that, she seems nastily effective. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I have certain symbol-thing I use all the time; colors. Eye color, hair color and clothes' color for npc:s as most common. My color symbology is not picked from any book, so it derivates from popular 'icons', but it also has some similarities. I don't always do that on purpose, so somebody who is familiar with my style, has tendercy to guess things about npc or their potential part in later part of campaing. I wonder how common habit this is. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />[/QUOTE]

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