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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8692800" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Why does being able to produce offspring take away the monster nature? There are several instances of drakones or drakainai mating with humans in Greek mythology, producing either great heroes, entire cities/cultures, or both. The Egyptian deities usually had animal heads, some of them apparently completely made-up (the Set Animal specifically), yet there was no contradiction in the idea that an Egyptian deity could sire offspring with earthly creatures. E.g. Apis, the cow-god of fertility and other things, was thought to repeatedly reincarnate by being sired by his father, originally Ptah, impregnating a cow via moonbeam or some other divine method. Further, after Imhotep was deified, people claimed one of his parents was a god (either his father was Thoth or his mother was Sekhmet, but never both.) Norse mythology is absolutely packed with distinct races--Aesir, Vanir, Jotunn, Alfr, Dwarfs, mortal humans, etc.--and those various races married amongst one another all the time, sometimes even producing offspring. E.g., Loki is the son of the jotunn Farbauti and the goddess Laufey, and almost always referred to with a near-unique matronymic instead of patronymic; Loki goes on to have multiple children himself (well, herself, since Loki frequently gender-bends when shapeshifting), some of them with monsters or animals, which is where Odinn gets his trusty steed from!Monsters don't need to be viscerally monstrous to be monsters. There's a much, much broader space here. We don't have to be trapped in the false dichotomy of "100% human or totally, completely alien and terrifying." There's a middle here feeling very excluded.Sure. I know some folks who might try, but overall, I agree that mindflayers are a step beyond even vampires in this sense. Vampires could theoretically live in harmony with humans if you develop good refrigeration infrastructure (probably using magic) and get enough people willing to give blood. (We did this in one of my DW games; it turned out freely-given blood is WAY tastier to vampires, so we instigated a rebellion in their ranks, and set up a system so they would get the blood they need to live, and would in return protect the city from stuff that stalks in the night. It worked out pretty well.)Mindflayers, though...they gotta legit kill a person in order to eat their brain. You'd think, if they could, they'd just raise cattle or whatever, since cattle are a hell of a lot easier to raise and work with than sapient beings, who take ages and ages to reach maturity. It's a lot harder to imagine that there's a way to fix their situation. 4e offered an option ("brain moss," which is essentially vegan brain tissue for mind flayers to eat--it's not as tasty as sapient brains, but provides all the nutrients they require) but that particular tidbit didn't really catch on. I think that's because people are legit okay with mindflayers being monsters, they aren't sexy like vampires or werewolves and they aren't inherently ultra-cool like dragons, so there's a lot less appetite for fixing them. Similar arguments apply to stuff like beholders and kuo-toa.Okay. I think that means anyone and anything can be a monster. As a result, if we push things toward deeds being what makes a monster, denying most (though not quite all) options of "monstrous by form," doesn't that mean our monsters should get better pretty much axiomatically?(Really, what it actually means is that more people who relied on the crutch of "monstrous by form" will be revealed as relying on "monstrous by form," so we'll see a lot of poorly-written "monstrous by deed" creatures, not because monsters have become worse but because we have become more choosy about what monsters we'll accept as well-made.)</blockquote>

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