Unlike I did with the companions, I'll conclude by providing some suggested game stats. These will not be for the DWAITAS system, since those stats already exist; this is more an exercise in seeing how other systems might cope with particular concepts. But, rather than sticking to one single system, I'll be trying out five different ones, to see what we get.
At some point between then and medieval times, lamias change again, keeping their powers of sinful seduction, but now becoming part-serpent - physically resembling the yuan-ti of D&D. In fact, outside of gaming, this may remain the most common depiction. In the 17th century, however, an alternative description made them quadrupedal, a scaly hooved creature with a woman's head and breasts. This, combined with a desexualised version of the seduction powers, seems to be the likely inspiration for the game version.
In European myth, dragons are almost universally regarded as evil - rapacious monsters that lay waste to the countryside, have to be slain by heroic knights and, in many cases, essentially breathe hellfire. They are, sometimes literally, diabolic creatures. The same is not necessarily true in other cultures, such as that of China, where dragons may not necessarily be easy to parlay with or recruit as allies, but aren't fundamentally hostile, either.In D&D, the good counterparts to the evil chromatic dragons are, of course, the metallic ones. Indeed, they are among a relatively small number of 'good monsters' to make it consistently through into the core books of later editions. Up until 5E, they are portrayed as rarer, but individually more powerful than, the chromatic dragons. They are perhaps even rarer in games than they are usually described as being in the universe (in two campaigns of Critical Role, the PCs have so far encountered at least seven chromatic dragons, and only one metallic). Doubtless, this is because they are less useful in a typical game if you're not going to fight them - and they're too powerful to be regular allies.
A considerable number of mythological deities are said to throw thunderbolts - Zeus and Thor are merely the most familiar of these to Europeans, with examples known from many other cultures. Actual mythic creatures that throw lightning, however, are much less common, although Chinese dragons are at least associated with thunder and storms. In D&D, however, it seems an obvious attack mode once we've dealt with fire and ice, and, naturally enough, it's associated with the dragon that's the colour of the sky.
In D&D, of course, it was originally decided that the five types of chromatic dragon should be distinguished by each having a unique attack, so that green dragons breathe poison, black dragons acid, and so on. Naturally, the most powerful of all the chromatic dragons was going to be the one that breathed fire, fitting the legends on which the broader idea is based.
In D&D, the basilisk is quite a different creature, and very far from being legless. While the association of poison with serpentine beings make sense, it's not common in depictions of dragons. The D&D idea of certain dragons belching poisonous gas instead of something flammable is likely an original one - something added so that each of the five chromatic dragons had a unique attack mode. And in this case, of course, that's the green dragon, the mid-point in the five-point scale of increasing chromatic dragon power.
Given that they're right there in the name of the game, dragons are obviously fairly key to D&D. In the 1st edition, they receive more detailed options than other monsters, having eight age categories and three size classes, and a suite of special abilities right from the beginning. Furthermore, there are no less than ten different kinds of true dragon, divided evenly between the good 'metallic' and the evil 'chromatic' species.
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.
The majority of giant invertebrate monsters in the early editions of D&D are, at least in general terms, arthropods - the group of jointed-limbed creatures with chitinous exoskeletons to which insects, spiders, and crabs belong, among others. Exceptions include giant octopuses and giant squid, which are at least partially based on real animals, a few aberrations that are difficult to ally with anything real, and, somewhere in between, the purple worm. As originally drawn, the carrion crawler also qualifies, although this changes in later editions.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.
Albeit, like displacer beasts and piercers, one whose name is just a rather bland description of what it does.
The remorhaz is another creature original to D&D, and one of the few such that is honoured with a proper name rather than a descriptive term. It's one of the more powerful creatures in the 1st edition that are described as simply animals, rather than intelligent beings. This is largely because it's so difficult to hurt, although it also has a bite that does more damage than that of most dragons. In later editions, it's toned down, although it remains quite fearsome.
Cloud and storm giants are the most powerful of the standard races of giant in the D&D rules, the two final rungs on the ladder of increasing humanoid power. There doesn't seem to be any specific inspiration for them, although giants are sometimes associated with the sky in myths and legends. They are also the most intelligent, and the most inclined to be helpful, rather than hostile.
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.
Both frost and fire giants, as portrayed in D&D, are loosely based on the jötunn of Norse myth. In the original myths, this was a rather vague term referring to a race of mostly (but not always) gigantic beings originally created by the primordial being Ymir. Ymir himself was certainly gigantic, since the sky is said to be the inside of his blue-coloured skull, and he was also described in the Prose Edda as "ice cold". Thus, while frost giants aren't a specific thing in Norse myth, it's clear where the idea comes from. Fire giants, apparently also descended from Ymir in the original myth, are the inhabitants of the fiery realm of Muspelheim, led by Surtur, whose primary function in the myths is to destroy the world at the conclusion of Ragnarok.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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
