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.