"The next ______"?

[Quasqueton]

From Erik Mona's blog:

But the thing that made the book truly special was the competition to create the next githyanki. ... Design something as cool and as potentially long-lasting as the githyanki.

Is this possible? Is it possible to intentionally design a creature to be cool to the masses? Or does it just evolve?

This reminds me of something I read way back right after The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Aura Singh (sp?) (a character seen only in a brief moment of the film, unrelated to the action) was billed as "the next Boba Fett" -- a character the masses thought was really cool in a badass kind of way.

I argued that you can't make "the next Boba Fett" intentionally. Just like Jar Jar Binks was intended to be "the next Chewbacca", but turned out to be almost universally hated. Well-loved characters rarely can be directly created as such. They kind of evolve.

Does the long-term coolness of a monster (back to D&D, now) come from the MM (or MMII or FF) entry? Or does it come from later expansions on the base text? Is the long-lasting coolness of githyanki (or any other creature you care to posit) come from their first exposure in the original FF? Or did it come from what someone did beyond that entry?

If is possible to create a creature of long-lasting coolness, what are the ingredients?

Didn't I read somewhere that the desmodu were supposed to be "the next drow"?

Quasqueton

 

[Mark]

I think you can avoid some of the pitfalls that prevent something from catching on but it's hard to design something to be the "next big thing" (like GABBO!)

 

[Henry]

I, too, don't think you can "engineer" coolness; if you could, parents would be a lot happier about what their teens were doing at parties and music concerts.

You CAN do it if you have your finger on the pulse of what's generally hot at the time; but finding that one thing, and specifically exposing it in the proper circles, is a daunting task.

 

[Crothian]

Sure, someone can design what they hope to be the next big thing, but it is out of their hands if it becomes that. But the writer can try to tip the scales on it a bit.

 

[francisca]

Dunno. Maybe you can. Personally, I have a superpower I call "Contrive-o-meter". When the power kicks in, I can tell when someone is trying to purposely engineer "The Next Big Thang".

I give the NBT a cursory look, then usually abandon it.

 

[Gez]

You know, faced with the choice between a drow-heavy campaign and a desmodu-heavy campaign, I'd choose the bats. I'd play a desmodu and call him Lars.

That they tried, with the Fiend Folio, to create the "new githyanki" is not a shocking revelation, as it was already in the designer interview (search the page for "githyanki").

The contenders were, I think:

• Ethergaunt (very cool villains, but useless for PCs, too smart and too weird and too genocidally xenophobic to become D&D party members).
• Shadar-Kai (they have potential, but seem overlooked, maybe they tried too much to be cool).
• Kaorti (again, very cool villains, but very bad PCs).
• Maug (cool construct PC race, but sadly for them, the nimblewrights from MM2 predated them, and the Warforged are not crippled by a massive ECL).
• The Nerra. They're rather nice, but they look too much like the Silver Surfer.
• Maybe the Khaasta and/or Saarkrith -- don't know whether they were new or not.
• Maybe the Jackal Lord.

To answer your other question, I think that "long-lasting coolness" derives more from first exposure than from expansion.

Example: reading the Creature Collection when it came out, yowza, one monster struck me as being totally awesomely cool, the Savant Hydra. Details were sketchy, rules were bogus (it's the first printing CC!), and nobody ever expanded on them, but they're still cool.
Example: Drow where considered cool, so dozens of novels, sourcebooks, and adventures have been released, all drow-centric, and they're spawned an entire subcategory of comics, the drow manga webcomic. Most hard core gamers here will agree that drow were more cool back when the FF entry and the GDQ series was all we got about them.

 

[gizmo33]

Oh!!! They wanted something cool. I see. Has anyone ever had a competition to create a boring monster?

The whole thing sounds like some marketing people somewhere thinking that "coolness" is a quantity somehow equivalent to putting more sugar in soda. Doing something "like" something else is either derivative or meaningless. The Githyanki filled a niche and had a personality that was a great combination of familiar and exotic. If there is any formula IMO, that's it. Chewbacca was an example of this - a typical side-kick role for an untypical creature (maybe a little bit of Clint Eastwood's chimp sidekick, I dunno). Accessible yet different enough to be interesting (this goes for movies and music as well). Of course this is easier to judge after the fact. Being creative is about finding this combination (the proportions of what works can depend on the audience), and if there would ever be a formula or some ability that could be consciously exercised, it would cease to be creative.

 

[Gez]

Another point: engineering cool things is hard. To look at that same 3e FF, Erik Mona scored massive coolness with the Ethergaunt, and reached the depth of embarrassing lamerhood with the Century Worm.

 

[Desdichado]

Example: Drow where considered cool, so dozens of novels, sourcebooks, and adventures have been released, all drow-centric, and they're spawned an entire subcategory of comics, the drow manga webcomic. Most hard core gamers here will agree that drow were more cool back when the FF entry and the GDQ series was all we got about them.

I think the old FF entry was cool enough (helped by one of the rare competent illustrations in that book, I might add) but it was the GDQ series that really propelled them into astral regions of coolness.

If Mona, or anyone else, wants to really propel something into being the next githyanki, you've gotta do more than just create it. You've got it feature it in something cool that gets lots of exposure; a whole series of Dungeon adventures with tie-in Dragon ecology articles or something like that.

Or better yet, replicate the conditions when GDQ was printed, there weren't many alternatives for adventures, and pretty much everyone played what was printed, thus imprinting it on the collective consciousness of gamers all over.

 

[Morrow]

Is this possible? Is it possible to intentionally design a creature to be cool to the masses? Or does it just evolve?

Oh, It is absolutely possible. It just takes hard work and determination. As we speak I've got a crack team of designers chained up in my basement working on the next Phantom Fungus.



...What?



Morrow