D&D Monsters: Hill and Stone Giants

Giants are a recurring figure in myth and folklore, appearing in the stories of just about every real-world culture. There's something fundamental about the idea of people who look vaguely like us but are much larger and stronger. There is, of course, considerable variation among cultures as to what giants are supposed to be like, and even D&D reflects this by having six different core types, even before we get into one-mention specials or other creatures that are, in some sense, gigantic humanoids (such as ogres).

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. 

D&D Monsters: Bulettes

The bulette is a creature original to D&D. Like the owlbear, it's based on a plastic toy from Hong Kong, in its case probably meant to represent some sort of kaiju, although it's hard to know for sure. It's one of a minority of original monsters to have an actual name right from the start, rather than a descriptive term ('mind flayer', 'carrion crawler', 'trapper'). 

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...

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.

D&D Monsters: Manticores

Manticores are creature not of Greek, but of Persian, myth. The name literally means "man-eater", and it's at least possible that it originated with a "traveller's tale" style exaggeration of man-eating tigers. They were supposed to be hungry for human flesh - something retained in D&D - and were often described as having a "scorpion-like" tail, although most historical illustrations show a cluster of spikes on the end of the tail instead.

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.

D&D Monsters: Griffons and Hippogriffs

The mythic origins of griffons lie in Ancient Greece, if not earlier - a combination of the king of the beasts and the king of the birds. The specific form of that combination was largely cemented by the late Middle Ages into the one we are currently familiar with, and griffons ('griffin' and 'gryphon' are equally valid spellings) are common features in modern fantasy, especially in RPGs. 

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.

D&D Monsters: Mummies

The concept of the mummy as an undead monster is really a 20th-century invention, beginning with the 1932 horror movie The Mummy. While mummies and immortal Ancient Egyptians had featured in earlier fiction, they were not really in the form we're familiar with now, or that formed the basis for the D&D monster, and still don't date back any further than the mid-19th century. Since their 1932 debut, however, they have appeared in a number of older-style horror films, and become something of a cliche, if not quite as popular as werewolves and vampires.

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.

D&D Monsters: Giant and Phase Spiders

The first edition of AD&D includes a number of giant invertebrates, mostly insects. The idea behind these may be influenced by the "big bug" films of the post-WWII era, starting with Them! in 1954, and they provide the possibility of exotic-looking monsters that nonetheless have to look no further than the natural world for inspiration. 

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.

D&D Monsters: Unicorns

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Unicorns are probably one of the best-known mythological creatures of medieval Europe, perhaps on a par even with dragons. Their origins are likely earlier than this, with the general concept of "one-horned magical beast" going back to at least the Ancient Greeks and having counterparts in other cultures, too. Some of these were aggressively dangerous, but it's the medieval version, appearing in religious bestiaries as an object lesson in virtuous purity that we're most familiar with and that forms the basis of the D&D creature. 

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.

D&D Monsters: Doppelgangers

Doppelgangers are one of those races that, were they really to exist, would surely have a significant effect on the world and be much on the minds of the general public. That they aren't in the standard D&D universes is largely thanks to the great number of other sentient races that exist, many of which are even more threatening.

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).

D&D Monsters: Medusae

While the exact details of the myth evolved over time, in the best-known version of the Greek original, Medusa was one of three monstrous sisters known as the gorgons. As the only one of the three who was mortal, she was eventually killed and her severed head used as a magical charm. As a consequence, she is far better known than her sisters, who have no independent myths. In D&D, for some reason, the word "gorgon" is used for an entirely different type of creature, and "medusa" becomes the generic term for the type of being, rather than a specific individual. This has since caught on in other fictional contexts.

(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).

D&D Monsters: Dryads

Looking again at D&D creatures derived from Greek myth, we come to the dryad. In the original myths, dryads are a type of nymph, or female nature spirit, associated with trees. Originally, the tree specifically had to be an oak tree, but later on the term seems to have been used more broadly for woodland spirits in general. The term "hamadryad" was used for a dryad so closely bonded to her tree ("hama" means "together") that she would die if it did, but others seemingly had no such vulnerability. So far as one can tell, they were supposed to look like regular human women.

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.

D&D Monsters: Zombies and Skeletons

As I have noted previously, undead in D&D represent at least three different broad categories of being: mindless corporeal, sentient corporeal, and noncorporeal undead. Zombies and skeletons fall into the first of these three categories, distinguished by the fact that they have no will of their own and are effectively automata under the control of their creator. They are also the weakest form of undead, a problem only for low-level characters.

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.

D&D Monsters: Satyrs

Like centaurs, minotaurs, and harpies, satyrs have their origins in Greek myth. The original versions are wild nature spirits and, in particular, representations of unbridled male sexuality... this survives today in the psychological term 'satyriasis' for uncontrollable sexual desire in men. As with centaurs, this part-bestial nature is represented in their physicality, which combines various animal-like features with an otherwise human, masculine, body.

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.

D&D Monsters: Minotaurs

Minotaurs are another creature with their origin in Greek myth. In the original, there was, of course, only one Minotaur, trapped in a labyrinth and slain by Theseus. Contemporary Greek illustrations show a male human with the head and tail of a bull, more obviously a hybrid than the D&D version, but at least broadly similar. However, some of the myths were vague as to exactly what the Minotaur was supposed to look like, and in the Middle Ages an alternative with a centaur-like form, albeit often with horns on the human-like head, started showing up in art. The latter form had some popularity (it was the first illustration of it I saw as a child) but has declined in modern depictions.

Given that crawling around in subterranean labyrinths is part of the point of the original D&D, it's unsurprising that the Minotaur would be included in the game. Here, of course, it becomes a race of beings and thereby loses its capital letter. (As an aside, both "mine-otaur" and "minn-otaur" are legitimate pronunciations in UK English, although the latter seems to be preferred in the US. In Ancient Greek, it was apparently "meen-otaur", so, hey...).

D&D Monsters: Wights

The word "wight", as D&D books are always eager to remind us, originally just meant "person". It was common enough in this sense in medieval English, and into at least the seventeenth century (Shakespeare uses it, for one). After that, it becomes somewhat old-fashioned, and it's unlikely that anyone much has used the word in this sense for over a hundred years, at least outside of poetry. In 1869, however, a translator used the term "barrow-wight" (literally "tomb-person") to describe a form of undead from Norse legends. This term, of course, was later borrowed by Tolkien in Lord of the Rings. Gygax abbreviated it back to "wight" again for D&D, while retaining the "undead" meaning.

It's likely Gygax's coinage that influenced George R.R. Martin when he chose the word to describe his own, more zombie-like, beings. However, in his universe, it's the White Walkers that most closely resemble D&D's wights, although there are a number of clear differences, not least in terms of how they are created.

D&D Monsters: Harpies

Harpies are one of a number of D&D monsters that owe their origins to Greek myth. However, the story is not quite as simple as that, since they actually combine two different Greek monsters into a single being: the harpies themselves, and sirens. Both were said to be creatures that were part bird, part woman, but beyond that, there is little similarity between the two in the original sources.

Although very early descriptions of mythic harpies portray them as beautiful, the great majority show them as monstrous. As is often the case, there isn't complete consistency in the descriptions of which parts are avian and which parts humanoid, although something at least resembling the D&D form is the most common. Sirens were even more variable, and some early Greek artwork shows male examples as well as females. In essence, though, it is really only the signature attack - the siren call - that copies over to the D&D 'harpy', which in other respects, is more closely based on its namesake.

D&D Monsters: Ghouls

1E

The term "undead", as used in D&D actually refers to (at least) three different categories of being. First, there are the mindless undead, such as skeletons and zombies, which are effectively automata that happen to be made from corpses, rather than from inanimate matter. Then there are what we might term the "wilful corporeal" undead, where some kind of intelligence animates the physical body of the deceased, and finally the incorporeal undead, which are a different kind of entity altogether. Ghouls belong to the second of these categories, although they are unusual in the degree of physical transformation that they apparently go through.

Ghouls are originally a creature of Arabic folklore, in which they are a kind of demon (as in the name of the comic-book character Ra'as al-Ghul) that lives in the desert and lures people to their doom in order to kill them. In the eighteenth century, this was introduced to Europeans by Antoine Gaillard, who added the additional detail that they live in graveyards and eat the dead buried there.  This has remained the standard version ever since, although with significant variation.

D&D Monsters: Lycanthropes

In the real world, "lycanthrope" is just another word for "werewolf"; the word literally means "wolf-man" in Ancient Greek. In D&D, and many other RPGs, however, it's meaning has been expanded to refer to a general class of shapeshifters, of which werewolves are merely the most common example. While others have appeared in supplements from time to time, there are four core types other than werewolves. All of these operate in the same general way, in terms of how the moon, silver, and so on, affect them, and how they pass on the condition, so that what I've already said about werewolves typically applies to all of them, too.

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1E

Wererats

Wererats as such appear to be an invention of D&D, although some other legendary creatures (such as vampires) or evil sorcerers have often been said to be able to transform themselves into rats or similar vermin. Non-shapeshifting "rat-men" do predate D&D, but even they are a 20th century invention, appearing in stories by, among others, H.P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber. These are most likely the source of Gygax's inspiration.

Wererats are the lowest rung on the stepwise progression of 1E lycanthropes, although they already have the hit dice of a bugbear, the second highest creature in the 'evil humanoid' progression. Unlike the other lycanthropes they can, right from the beginning, transform into both rat and rat-man forms; the latter, unusually, retain human feet and regularly wield weapons. They live in communities of a dozen or so individuals and, according to 2E normally only breed with humans; the condition is passed on to the child only if the mother is the wererat (which makes sense for a bloodborne pathogen). 

D&D Monsters: Werewolves

Werewolves are a longstanding feature of European folklore, with references to men who can turn into wolves dating back to at least the Ancient Greeks, although the belief does not seem to have become widespread before the Middle Ages. For most of this time, however, werewolves seem to have been thought of as evil sorcerers or (in pre-Christian times) one-off individuals cursed by the gods. This "evil sorcerer" version most closely matches the sort of werewolf seen in the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and is quite different from the D&D version.

That instead borrows from horror fiction, most notably the Universal Pictures Wolf Man films of the 1940s. Many of the tropes we associate with werewolves today were made popular by those films, and, in fact, often don't date back much further than the 19th century. In these films, however, as in some more modern examples such as An American Werewolf in London and Harry Potter, werewolves are portrayed as (mostly) tragic individuals, while in Twilight they seem relatively benign. D&D, like many other RPGs, makes them definitively evil although the potential for tragedy is still implicit in their ability to pass on the condition to others.