Oriental Adventures: real japanese folklore.

[Agent Oracle]

Ladies and gentlemen, the single best resource i have ever seen for Honest, understandable oriental monsters.

Obakemono

Illustrated in a respectable style without the absurdity of Manga-art or the Final Fantasy-inspired stories. This is an incredibly complete and detailed listing of Authentic Japanese monsters, complete with abbreviated stories and explanations of powers.

Just from a precursory reading, i find that most of these monsters are not truely evil, just chaotic or misunderstood. Some, like the Baku are actually beneficial spirits (the Baku eats nightmares), others are so shy that they avoid humanity altogether, and are only identifiable from great distances or by sound.

 

[trancejeremy]

The "Onmyoji" movies are pretty good, too, for giving a visual reference.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0355857/

(Too bad they only made 2.)

 

[SteelDraco]

Thank you, that's very cool. I'll definitely have to take a look at this later.

I've used a baku in one of my campaigns, actually. The players had a good time figuring it out. The thing had been driven crazy (magic-using creatures were going crazy due to a demon messing with the nature of magic), and put a whole town to sleep. The players had to find it and mercy kill it to wake the town up, popping in and out of the dream world the whole time. Figuring out what was going on in the two different worlds was fun.

 

[Huw]

That's good. Can't wait for it to be complete.

Here's another site, not quite as in depth but with a lot more breadth:

godchecker

Their Japanese section mixes up the Japanese and Ainu mythologies unfortunately.

 

[Matafuego]

Thanks a lot for the links!!
They'll prove very useful...

 

[Ashanderai]

Obakemono is a great site. I have been going to it for quite some time now for research.