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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5631727" data-attributes="member: 54707">I've been thinking lately of using more  folk-legends and fairy tales as well in my monster use. Especially after having  been reading the Last Apprentice series and how the author uses witches and  Spooks in a very brilliant way I think.      I completely concur.      I'm with ya there. I use colored dragons (as  camouflage) but color is not associated with their abilities in any way (and  dragons are rare in my setting), but I also have rarely felt that Elves are  rightly portrayed in most fantasy games. To me they should be very, very  dangeorus and even mysterious and inhuman creatures.        Yeah, that's about how it goes. The vast majority  of opponents are other humans; pirates, mercenaries, other adventurers and  classes, other nationalities (Goths, Persians, barbarians, etc.), and so forth.     That accounts for the "opponents in number."     The mythical monsters tend to be singular  opponents of very great power. Sometimes the players (if they know anything  about the myth surrounding the monster, and many times they do) know basically  how the monster might behave and sometimes they have a good idea of how to kill  it.   But monsters in my setting, being mythical, with  long histories of survival and often with pedigrees relating them to gods or  other beings or powers will rarely submit to a fight on the player's terms and  often flee if really endangered, rather than fight to the death. So a fight with  a single "mythical monster" is rarely a fight, so much as a series of running  battles, sometimes over months or years of game time, until the players figure  out how to exhaust it, discover a mortal weakness, or are themselves killed in  combat by the monster. So a conflict with a monster is often a war on a small  scale, rather than a single fight/encounter. And it's a good point about mythic  monster-scale. My players have learned that it's not just the monster that  should disengage or run or even avoid fights, it's them. Because sometimes the  best thing they can possibly hope to achieve with some monsters at lower levels  is to distract it or slow it down or misdirect it. They have no chance in a  stand-up fight, so they've learned other methods, like sabotage and misdirection  and what we call, "the long war." (Of course we didn't invent that phrase, just  use it to describe an ongoing monster war.)   So the human adversaries are usually the "numbers  danger" (though sometimes they are also a political, military, and ambush  danger) and the monsters are usually the "long-term, not sure of how to destroy  this creature before it kills us" danger.   So the human enemies are often the tactical,  immediate threat (unless the party is at war with another group of people) and  the monsters are the strategic, long-term threat. (To the players at least, in  the wider world I think humans are a much greater long term threat as an enemy,  and much more dangerous than most any monster.)   They usually know how to kill other humans, the  trouble is bringing enough force to the fight and avoiding being outnumbered and  out-gunned and out-maneuvered by their human opponents. The monster is usually a  fundamentally different type of threat, who while being hunted by the party is  also studying the party so that he may learn from every encounter how better to  kill the party. Though in my setting good enemy NPCs and military and rival  party leaders often do the same thing.   And returning to the monsters, the monsters will  sometimes cut deals with the party rather than fight them. That can be  advantageous to the monsters and sometimes monsters can become allies if they  are not outright and overtly evil and destructive. In the same way a Goth  military commander might cut a deal with the party so that both can fight the  Huns.   But if any others use mythical monsters in this  way, or in a similar or even a different fashion I'd be interested in hearing  how you do it exactly. </blockquote>

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