Non-D&D or at least non-MM Monsters

[steeldragons]

This was actually sparked by Boz's Demon Lord thread.

1) How much do you either A) Create your own monsters or B)Incorporate monsters into your game that are not from the system you're playing?

2) What are they/have they been?...and Where did you pull them from? (obviously)

3)How did it go over with your players?

For me, the one that comes first to mind is a "Storm Demon" which I culled from a Talislanta book, iirc. Not-so-ironically, it was a dark grey or black female-appearing humanoid with billowing storm clouds for hair...Being an avid X-Men (and Storm, in particular) fan, I scooped her/them right up! hahaha.

My players LOVED them! Well, "hated" them because of their powers )which I basically made duplicate to Storm the X-man and was not so far off from how they were written) and how hard they were to defeat...but thoroughly enjoyed the concept and got to a point where every rain storm or change in temperature they encountered had them on edge as to when/if a "storm demon" was up in the clouds getting ready to attack.

What're your best/favorite "You've never encountered THIS before" creatures?

--Steel Dragons

 

[the Jester]

I homebrew tons, sometimes swiping certain things from other systems (deodanths, phraints).

It goes over just fine, but I don't do anything like say "You meet some Klingons!!1!" or anything so immersion-breaking.

There was once a dm I played under who used stober (Beware the stober!).

 

[Diamond Cross]

I tend to homebrew my own villains for superhero RPGS.

Especially when I'm stealth running a plot from a printed module.

By stealth running I mean I use the module for the general plot but use my own characters and places.

 

[Croesus]

Back in the 1E era, I created my own version of the Legion of Super Heroes as villains. Ferro Lad was the inspiration for a guy whose skin was like armor. He could make himself invulnerable to physical attacks, but would then have no defense against magic. Sun Boy was a wizard with a fetish for fire effects, and so on. The players hated those guys, as they were tough opponents, but mostly because they couldn't figure out what was going on.

For 3E I stole the idea of winged serpents from the old Might and Magic VII game. Roughly the size of halflings with large wingspans, some could spit poison, others could constrict, the biggest could breathe fire. One player was running a monk who climbed a tree and jumped on the back of one. I ruled there was no way the serpent could support his weight, so they crashed to the ground, where the party made short work of it.

 

[Ariosto]

I have often used monsters from the Arduin Grimoire and All the Worlds' Monsters volumes. Those were written up with OD&D in mind, but far fewer people have encountered them at all than are familiar with the Monster Manual roster. Empire of the Petal Throne is another good source (The Ssu! >shudder<).

Mutants from Metamorphosis Alpha will "keep 'em guessing" along with Random Creatures From The Lower Planes a la 1st DMG Appendix D (or The Random Esoteric Creature Generator from Goodman Games).

Fiction -- including mythology and folklore as well as science-fiction stories and monster movies and the like -- is of course a great source, from which the majority of "classic" D&D monsters came (often with some modification in the process).

Jack Vance had some interesting ones in The Dragon Masters (which was also inspiration for the board game Chitin: I) and the Tschai: Planet of Adventure series.

The "vampires" and "ghouls" of Niven's Ringworld are interestingly different from the usual bunch, and I had "sunflowers" guarding daytime skies around a place in D&D.

The Talking Beasts of Narnia appealed to me (The Silver Chair having been perhaps my first exposure to modern "heroic fantasy").

Certain of Abe Merrit's novels (especially The Face in the Abyss, The Moon Pool and The Ship of Ishtar) have provided inspiration in many ways, but the short story "The People of the Pit" comes especially to mind for monsters.

The latter is reminiscent of Lovecraft, many of whose creations were in the old Deities & Demigods, and not only his but other writers' contributions to the "Mythos" have appeared in various game-related works. Robert E. Howard's "worms of the earth" must be counted among those. Both his Valusian serpent men and C.A. Smith's Hyperborean ones influenced the conception of a reptilian species I have employed.

I have adapted the situations from a number of stories pretty whole from all three of those gentlemen, with just a bit of tweaking. Those have gone over well, and the players who recognized the sources seemed to get an additional bit of pleasure.

There are actually quite a few borrowings I have made from reading, and cinema and TV together probably account for a bunch more. There are also some critters from the movie MirrorMask that I want to use but have not yet.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

There was once a dm I played under who used stober (Beware the stober!).

Props for the stober! (since I can't give you exp yet.) Tunnel in the Sky is one of my favorite Heinlein novels.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

1) How much do you either A) Create your own monsters or B)Incorporate monsters into your game that are not from the system you're playing?

2) What are they/have they been?...and Where did you pull them from? (obviously)

3)How did it go over with your players?

I regularly reskin monsters for my own purposes, or swap flavor around to suit.

Usually they're from my own mind -- large, stealthy owl-headed humanoids who are servitors of an ancient group of wizards are straight out of MM1, just reskinned; while a chimera with a white dragon head instead of a red dragon head, with other heads redone to match a wintery climate (snow leopard and ram) was just a minor tweak -- but I've also used [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Spiderwicks-Fantastical-Spiderwick-Chronicles/dp/0689859414]Arthur Spiderick's Field Guide[/ame] to reskin a scrag to suit my sensibilities a bit more. (A giant frog-like troll works better in the woods, to me, that whatever the lumpy core D&D troll is supposed to be.)

 

[Crothian]

I use monsters and creatures from other games all the time. It is one of the reasons I have a thousand plus gaming books. The gaming library is to borrow the best ideas at the time I need them no matter what game I'm running or what source the idea comes from.

Rarely do the players know without me telling them what source the encounter comes from. That's not important to them.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I almost never use monsters from non-D&D sources. There are so many good D&D monsters available and so little time.

I do customize a great deal and use templates/class levels/etc., so nothing I run is straight from a book. For this reason, and because I do use a lot of D&D books that my players don't have, they often don't recognize monsters. Last time I ran a bodak, which I thought I described pretty clearly, but they never figured out what it was.

I have created a few monsters out of inspiration; long ago a creature that was essenially an undead air elemental created out of the essence of a person's last breath. I liked it, but the players were pretty indifferent as I recall.

 

[Doug McCrae]

For my last D&D game, I got quite a few monsters from myth and folklore, and made up some stuff, simply reskinning in almost all cases.

Wild Men use stats for wilden, gnolls, satyrs, shifters and owl bears. Tallemaja AKA Jack-in-the-Green AKA Moss Maidens (plant people) are dryads, nymphs, wood woads and treants. Jack-in-Irons was a chain golem I think. A lavellan is a basilisk. Gurks were my name for sort-of bugbears. Skogra were vaguely Pictish ginger-haired mostly orcs, and some hobgoblins. I called the kenku Squawks because I wanted a more European feel. Bogles were MM3 scarecrows. The daughters of the River Sar (Rhinemaiden types) were never statted because I didn't think the PCs would fight them. The nuckelavee, grey man of the mountains, pechs, hag of Beare and spriggans never got statted because the PCs wouldn't meet them for a while. I was also going to maybe use a bunch of ridiculous old D&D monsters like the al-mi'raj, aurumvorax and froghemoth.

I then realised that I was being too conservative with my reskinning. I didn't really need to use bestial monsters for Wild Men, I could use the stats for pretty much any humanoid monster. Likewise I didn't really need plant monster stats for tallemaja. I could use a troll for a quick healing tallemaja for example. But I stopped running the game before I had a chance to put this idea into practice.