RPG Inspiration: Non-Fiction

Need inspiration? Whether you're making monsters or ending your world, these non-fiction ideas will help you get started.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Creating monsters is one of the many rewarding aspects of game mastering. Paleobiology and speculative evolution provide a framework of what these creatures might look like while retaining some semblance of realism. Conversely, if you want to wipe it all away and start over (or if that already happened in your campaign), there is a rich speculative (and not-so-speculative) non-fiction filled with how things can end.

Paleobiology​

One of the fun elements of worldbuilding is learning enough about something to feel confident about making something up. Or to put it another way, before you invent monsters out of whole cloth, it's valuable to understand when nature spawned something similar. And sometimes those things are stranger than fiction.

In many cases, megafauna existed that was bigger than traditional D&D versions, like a giant millipede that's nine feet long, or fungi that grew 24 feet tall. Alternately, small creatures can simply be made massive, like the bizarre hallucigenia.

Speculative Evolution​

Instead of looking backward, speculative evolution looks forward (or in parallel on another world). These books speculate what alien life might be like, what life would be like after humanity disappeared, and other ways of creating creatures within a logical framework.

Perhaps one of the most well-known work in this vein is Douglas Dixon’s After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future gets even stranger (and much more inspirational) as evolution drifts from humanity's influence.

One of my favorites of this genre is the World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island. The movie's designers went deep on creatures that never make it onto the screen, and it's lavishly illustrated. Even better, some of the larger creatures were released as toys, which are perfect scale for D&D monsters.

For aliens, you can't do much better than the works of Wayne Barlowe. Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials is a hallmark of the genre, envisioning the strangest creatures presented in fiction as realistically as possible.

Speculative Apocalypses​

Apocalyptic settings are frequently the subject of role-playing games, be it a global threat the heroes must face, or a recent or distant past that still haunts the present. For modern campaigns, it’s helpful to understand how an apocalypse might end a civilization and what happens in the immediate aftermath.

It’s worth noting that evidence in our DNA indicates that several times humanity’s diversity became very narrow, known as a population bottleneck. Scientists disagree on why, but it’s possible the Toba supervolcano eruption triggered the near extinct of humanity. More recent data refutes this theory, but it’s an interesting exercise for game masters to speculate how a fantasy world might recover from a cataclysm so widespread that it nearly wipes out a sentient species.

Unlike the other genres mentioned above, these books tend to capitalize on the fears of the current era. Earlier versions worried about pollution and then asteroid impacts, before shifting to zombie apocalypses (I contributed to one of them, Zombie CSU), and most recently the effects of global warming (fictional stories are called “cli-fi”). Ironically, books about modern (non-zombie) plagues are not as common as you might expect, but that’s changing thanks to the pandemic. For fantasy world builders, studies of the Black Plague are insightful in how pandemic can radically change civilization.

Your Turn: What non-fiction sources do you use for inspiration?

 

[Hand of Evil]

There is an old book, Gemstones and their powers, that I always liked. It when on about the history of the stones, where they were found and what magical properties were associated with them.

Another was the Home Book of Medicine; little tidbits of what people did to cure little illnesses.

 

[jasper]

The various types of railroads and gauges. Various historical battles up to the American Civil War. Life in a Middle Age Castle, and the other books in the series.

 

[Mad_Jack]

personally I though I love old travel logues, theyre a fascinating insight into how an individual character interacts with travel and adventure in distant lands encountering strange peoples, environments and creatures.

theres a huge selection of European accounts from the 17th to 20th Century, and before that Arab and Chinese accounts that go back to the 8th Century. Then the earlier Greek and Roman accounts, but those get fantastic fast

Michael Chrichton's Eaters of the Dead (aka The 13th Warrior) is based off of the real-life travel journals of an Arab who traveled all the way to western Russia (and very nearly Europe) in the 13th (?) century, with the Beowulf legend and some Neanderthals thrown in.

I've always loved coming up with feasible ecologies for various weird monsters like owlbears and such, and I like using biological science to come up with new creatures.
I was inspired by the fact that tardigrades were nicknamed "water bears" to once have a party face off against actual "water bears" - large semi-aquatic eight-legged ursines. The party found them mildly disturbing, lol.