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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5590297" data-attributes="member: 80487">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.</blockquote>

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