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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carpe DM" data-source="post: 3927894" data-attributes="member: 677">Paizo does a great job of taking cultural references and using them to remind us what D&D monsters really were before they became stat-blocks.Paizo's take on Goblins in Rise of the Runelords 1: Goblins as little weak green humans?  No.  Goblins as Labyrinth-style Monsters under the Bed, mad, bad, and funny in a black-humor kind of way?  Yes.Paizo's take on Ghouls:  Just another undead?  No.  Children of the Corn?  Yes.Paizo's take on Ogres: Big orcs? No.  "You got a purty mouth," Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes?  Yes.What I am getting at is that D&D "names and stat-blocks" approach takes something out of monsters, something of the fear and horror of these things.  Paizo remembers what makes monsters monsters.SO.I am trying to do the same thing in a new campaign I am developing.  The first adventure is an attack on a Kobold lair.Kobolds.  Not scary.  Little lizards meant for first-level adventures to cut their teeth on before forever disappearing?  No.  So I'm looking for inspiration.  Here's what I have.  I'd appreciate whatever thoughts you may have in addition.Rule 1: Never state what a monster or an effect is.  I am not calling them kobolds.  Nobody uses that word.  The players don't know what the "things" are.Rule 2: Cultural resonance.  Aliens.  The movies.  Those lizards were scary.  Not because they were unstoppable.  In the second movie they got wasted left and right.  No, they were scary because they were skittery, because they came out of the walls, because they were fast and brutal, because they dismembered you one by one.So far my kobold lair is Giger-decorated.  The walls are the bones of victims.  Faces are built into the walls.  The kobolds pack people away in the walls, with only their heads sticking out, and save them for later.  The most recent part of the lair is built out of new dripping corpses, plastered into the walls.  The old parts of the lair are age-blackened bones.Cultural resonance 2: the Saw movies.  Kobolds are trap-masters.  What if the traps were not just war-style booby traps.  Those aren't scary, they're comprehensible.  A 10' pit is threatening, but not intrinsically terrifying.  A kobold trap should be terrifying.  The trap *starts* when you are already trapped.  Once you are trapped you should have a chance to escape.  And it should nearly not work.  And you should leave a limb behind.  And the kobolds should appear later, eating it.Any thoughts?  Additions?  Other monsters that would benefit from this treatment?cheers,Carpe</blockquote>

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