What If Your World Only Had 10 Monsters?

[Kaodi]

This is meant as a bit of a creative exercise. What sorts of worlds could you create if you took all the fantastic monsters out of the game and allowed only humans, animals that live right now, and ten singular varieties of monster (so saying "dragon" does not mean you get to keep all ten colours, just one)? What sort of story would that tiny list say about the world?

Example:

1. Zombie
2. Wraith
3. Elf
4. Doppelganger
5. Retriever
6. Spirit Naga
7. Djinni
8. Stone Giant
9. Kraken
10. Red Dragon

 

[trancejeremy]

You sort of saw that in Conan. He'd pretty much either fight ape-men or snake based monsters. And I think a vampire.

 

[MortalPlague]

1. Elf
2. Dwarf
3. Ogre
4. Goblin
5. Mind Flayer
6. Red Dragon
7. Gnoll
8. Stone Giant
9. Purple Worm
10. Black Pudding (had to pick one of the oozes)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm going to cheat a bit.

Were I to go that route, I would not be quite as specific; I would take the approach to Dark Sun undead. As you may recall, undead of that world were each somewhat unique.

So my dragons would be giant flying reptiles with breath weapons, but they wouldn't be color coded for BW type and- because they're intelligent- alignment.

In a way, that is just a variant of RW speciation. So there would be, in a sense, creature types and templates.

So, my list would look somewhat like this:

1) Dragons (see above)
2) Undead (corporeal or incorporeal, of any species)
3) Mind Flayers
4) Fey (elves, sprites, gnomes, dwarves, goblins) all having weaknesses to cold iron & certain plants)
5) Accursed/Spelltouched (lycanthropes, Wendigo, anthropomorphic animals etc.)
6) Giants (Ogres, Trolls, Titans)
7) Giant insects (oozes would be replaced by insect swarms)
8) Outsiders (demons, devils, angels, etc.)
9) The Green, The Grey (intelligent plants & fungi)
10) Nephilim (creatures of any kind that have been crossed with outsiders)

 

[delericho]

That doesn't sound too hard... working with a limited palette can be quite good fun.

The only problem would be deciding which ten monsters to take. Which would depend on what type of world I'd like to run, and that changes every few months. Hmm...

Good topic.

 

[Tonguez]

10's easy, I can do it in 5 including humans

Gothic (Ravenloft)
1 Human
2 Vampire
3 Ghost
4 Lycanthorpe
5 Ancient Dead

Fairytale
1 Human (witch)
2 Pixie
3 Hill Giant
4 Goblin
5 Dragon (fire breathing)

Conanesque
1 Human (LE Scorcerer)
2 Yuan-ti
3 Girallon
4 Ghoul
5 Gibbering Mouther

 

[Tonguez]

You sort of saw that in Conan. He'd pretty much either fight ape-men or snake based monsters. And I think a vampire.

he also fought at least two abberations and a dinosaur

 

[Dioltach]

he also fought at least two abberations and a dinosaur

And a giant spider (in The Tower of the Elephant)

Anyway, the first version of The Dark Eye (at least my Dutch version of the German original) only had six monsters: Goblins, Orcs, Ogres, Kobolds, Dragons and Trolls. I didn't think twice about it back in 1985, but when I bought the Basic and Companion boxed sets I was blown away by the fact that they included about a hundred monsters each.

If I were limited to 10 monsters, I'd like a range that challenged the PCs in a variety of ways: magic attacks, melee combat, mobility, disguises and illusions, special defences, numbers. And I'd like their respective challenge ratings to be scaleable to suit the PCs' current power level.

 

[Jhaelen]

ten singular varieties of monster (so saying "dragon" does not mean you get to keep all ten colours, just one)?

Is this meant to be a D&D-specific exercise? Most games don't make such a distinction and a world featuring dragons would probably treat every dragon (or at least most of them) as a unique individual.

The following is a condensed list of the monsters I used in my 3e campaign:
- elf
- orc
- goblin
- frost giant
- mummy*
- ghost
- werebear**
- kuo-toa
- mindflayer
- aboleth

*: actually I used a template (mummified corpse?) to create different kinds of mummies.
**: Werebears were the most important 'animal tribe' I used, but the campaign also featured other types of lycanthropes (again, created with the template); each of them using a different type of humanoid as a base creature, e.g. elf - wereeagle, orc - wereboar, goblin - wererat, frost giant - were(polar)bear, etc.

In 3e it was easy to work with a limited 'palette' and still have lots of variety because of templates and class levels. The campaign was set in an area that was almost completely covered by cold marshes and forests with plenty of lakes and a large coastal area.

 

[FireLance]

I think the world would end up looking something like the Birthright campaign setting.

Anyway, I've occasionally toyed with the idea of running a campaign along those lines: some Mass Super Magical Empowering Event creates a limited number of unique monsters, and the PCs (who may or may not also have been affected) Gotta Catch Kill Them All.