When Gygax adopted the term for D&D, he made wyverns somewhat weaker than true dragons, and unable to breathe fire. Traditional illustrations often show two-legged dragons with snake-like tails ending in a sharp point, and this became the poison stinger seen in D&D. Perhaps following on from this, there has been a tendency in fantasy fiction to make wyverns weaker than four-legged dragons, although that's perhaps turning round again more recently - in both the books and TV series, for instance, the fire-breathing and deadly dragons of Game of Thrones only have two legs.
Tuesday 22 June 2021
D&D Monsters: Wyverns
Tuesday 8 June 2021
D&D Monsters: Carrion Crawlers and Purple Worms
The worm-like body plan is a common one among real-world invertebrates, being found in a wide range of creatures that aren't all that closely related. But, on the whole, they aren't very fearsome, and the different types don't have the recognisability factor that spiders, scorpions, praying mantises, or whatever, might have. Even in D&D, the primary threat from the purple worm comes from the fact that it's just really big. The carrion crawler is a different matter, but, then it is rather less wormlike. Both creatures have 'Ronseal' style names, although, at least to my mind, 'carrion crawler' is, like 'mind flayer', one of the more evocative ones.
Thursday 20 May 2021
D&D Monsters: Rust Monsters
Albeit, like displacer beasts and piercers, one whose name is just a rather bland description of what it does.
Tuesday 11 May 2021
D&D Monsters: Remorhaz(es)
1E
Tuesday 27 April 2021
D&D Monsters: Cloud and Storm Giants
1E
Tuesday 20 April 2021
D&D Monsters: Ettins
In any event, "ettin" is simply another, and older, word for "giant". In D&D, however, it specifically refers to a kind of two-headed giant; this is original to the game, but has been adopted by some other writers and computer game designers since.
Thursday 25 March 2021
D&D Monsters: Frost and Fire Giants
Both frost and fire giants appear in a range of fictional sources, of which perhaps the most obvious are the Mighty Thor comics. These predate D&D by over ten years, although it's likely that their appearance in the game is an independent creation from the same mythic origin, since they're quite clearly different from the comicbook versions. In D&D, they are the third and fourth rungs on the six-step ladder of increasing giant power and strength and are portrayed as more technologically advanced than the smaller hill and stone giants.
Wednesday 17 March 2021
D&D Monsters: Hill and Stone Giants
As is common where variants of the same idea for a monster exist in 1E, the six basic giants are arranged in a clear hierarchy of power, with each type having one extra hit dice, one extra point of strength, and delivering one extra die of damage than the one below it. Unlike some other creatures, while the details change, this progression of power remains the same in later editions.
Tuesday 23 February 2021
D&D Monsters: Bulettes
Incidentally, Gygax originally intended the word to be pronounced as "boo-lay", and official material from WoTC, and TSR before them, used to insist on this - and maybe still does. This raises a question, often seen in fantasy literature more generally, of "then why didn't you spell it that way?" In this case, I'll note that both the spelling and the supposed pronunciation appear vaguely French, which may be intentional - although, obviously, they don't match up with one another in that language either...
Sunday 31 January 2021
D&D Monsters: Stirges
The strige is a creature of Roman myth, derived from the earlier Greek strix. It was said to be a nocturnal bird, albeit one that hung upside down like a bat, which drank the blood of infants and possibly even ate the remains. The Greek version of the name has since been adopted as a scientific name for a genus of owl, and, blood-drinking aside, the general description does seem to match owls more than anything else that might exist in the real world. The name later also became associated with witches and with a more humanoid form of vampire, the strigoi.
In D&D, of course, the name mutates again to the form "stirge". While it looks even less owl-like than the mythic creature, it's still clearly based on it... but is more inclined to attack adults than babies.
Friday 15 January 2021
D&D Monsters: Manticores
When the creature was adopted for D&D, however, Gygax made a major innovation to the mythic creature: he gave it wings. (At least, this is true by the 1E Monster Manual; the original version of the rules apparently doesn't mention the feature). Although this is original to the game, it has become a common trope of manticore pictures since, even outside of D&D, although it's far from universal.
Sunday 27 December 2020
D&D Monsters: Griffons and Hippogriffs
The hippogriff, however, is much more modern; it first appears in a poetic work of fiction written in 1516, where it is described as the offspring of a male griffon and a female horse (which, since griffons were thought to kill and eat horses on sight was intended as something miraculous). Although the existence of one may well imply the other, it's possibly more common than the griffon itself in fantasy fiction, with the most famous modern example being that in the Harry Potter books.
Thursday 17 December 2020
D&D Monsters: Mummies
In D&D, they are mid-powered undead, falling into what I've termed the "wilful corporeal" category, given that they retain sentience and intelligence alongside their physical body. Under that scheme, they would fall somewhere between a wight and vampire in terms of power, but they are quite different from both. The look of a mummy does not, of course, change notably between editions; they are bandage-wrapped mummified corpses, sometimes dressed in funereal finery, but more usually not. Like most D&D undead (except vampires) depictions of females are rare, although not quite to the extent that is true of, say, ghouls or wights.
Wednesday 25 November 2020
D&D Monsters: Giant and Phase Spiders
Once we leave insects and look at spiders, there is an even more obvious inspiration: Shelob in Lord of the Rings. While she, and her relatives in other Tolkien works, were likely the primary inspiration behind the original giant spiders of D&D, there are plenty of other fictional examples. The cinematic classic The Giant Spider Invasion is one such (yes, I've actually seen it; there's 80+ minutes of my life I'm not getting back...) and, from more modern fiction, there's Aragog in the Harry Potter books. Giant spiders aren't found in European myth, but there are the Tsuchi-gumo of Japan, which are usually described as spiders (but sometimes crickets) and, at a stretch, Anansi the spider-god of West Africa.
Monday 23 November 2020
D&D Monsters: Unicorns
Brief Plug: I have a book describing a fantasy city out on DriveThru RPG, including over 70 locations that can easily be imported into other settings. If you might find such a thing useful check it out at its page on DriveThru - you can use the "preview" function to see a list of the included locations.
So iconic is the appearance of the unicorn that it's one of the few creatures in D&D that looks pretty much the same in every edition, regardless of artist, and that closely follows its traditional form. Early medieval unicorns weren't necessarily white, and some looked more like a goat than a horse, but such variations have long since vanished from the public mind. Pretty much everyone knows what a unicorn is, and what it looks like.
Tuesday 5 May 2020
D&D Monsters: Doppelgangers
The word "doppelganger", which means something like "double-walker" in German, only dates back to the late 18th century. However, the general concept of a spooky double of a person is a common one in mythology, folk tales, and just plain ghost stories going back for thousands of years. It's also a common theme in more recent fiction, with perhaps the alien in the 1938 novella Who Goes There? being a particular inspiration for the D&D version. (The story was later remade as a film titled The Thing, although the black-and-white version Gygax would have been familiar with at the time features quite a different sort of monster).
Saturday 14 March 2020
D&D Monsters: Medusae
(I am going to use the plural "medusae" here, because that was the way I learned it as a zoologist, so I find it more natural than the form usually used in fantasy games).
Saturday 18 January 2020
D&D Monsters: Dryads
Dryads have occasionally appeared in works of fantasy fiction, most notably in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, which maintains the distinction from hamadryads. In D&D, dryads and nymphs are different kinds of being, albeit with a number of similarities, but the latter did not make it into the 5E Monster Manual, something that's currently one of my criteria for including something in this series. In the first few editions they are, however, said to be "tree sprites"... but it's not clear what this means, since a sprite is yet another distinct creature in D&D, and one that resembles dryads rather less than nymphs do.
Sunday 22 December 2019
D&D Monsters: Zombies and Skeletons
It's well-known that zombies have their origin in Haitian legends, perhaps influenced by older African legends, but probably having more to do with the experience of slavery. In these legends, a recently-dead corpse is re-animated by an evil sorcerer, which it then serves as a mindless slave lacking all free will. The modern conception of the zombie, however, originates with George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Ironically, that film never actually uses the word "zombie", but it has become widely used since to refer to a selection of similar beings in films and other media.
Saturday 9 November 2019
D&D Monsters: Satyrs
In later times, the Romans conflated satyrs with fauns, nature spirits from their own mythology that were part-goat part-man. This is quite different from how early Greek art shows them as looking, but it has become essentially universal in western lore since. Nonetheless, since "fauns" lack the rampant sexuality of satyrs, it was their name that C.S. Lewis used in the Narnia books, and his fauns were far more pleasant than Greek satyrs were said to be. Otherwise, "satyr" has generally been the more common term in fantasy, and that's the term that D&D uses.