DW Monsters: Eight-Legs

The next story we come to is The Monster of Peladon, which, for the most part, features the same aliens and creatures we have already seen in The Curse of Peladon. There is one new alien race introduced, the Vegans (yes, that’s actually their name), but the one individual we see isn’t around long enough to tell us much about his wider race. The tie-in novel Legacy does add that the race can see in the infrared and adds some further detail about their culture, but they remain tangential enough in the TV series itself that I am going to leave them out. Which brings us to the final Third Doctor story, Planet of the Spiders.

DW Monsters: Exxilons

The first two stories of season 11 are:

• The Time Warrior – The first appearance of the Sontarans.

• Invasion of the Dinosaurs – Dinosaurs are real-world creatures and often already statted up in RPGs

The story that follows is Death to the Daleks, which has exactly the main foes that you would expect it to have. It does, however, also feature the Exxilons. While there’s no reason to suppose Exxilons are dramatically different from other humanoids, they can serve as an example of a primitive race and do at least have some minor differences from regular humans. They appeared only once in the TV series, but have appeared twice in audio stories and, because of their history as an advanced space-faring power, have occasionally been mentioned in tie-in novels and elsewhere.

DW Monsters: Giant Maggots

Continuing through season 10, we get:

• Frontier in Space – While the Draconians are undeniably interesting, this is primarily due to their culture. In terms of basic attributes, they don’t seem that different from humans and can probably be described in the same way. Therefore, I will pass on them.

• I will also pass on the unnamed Ogron-eating blob monster from the same story, on the grounds we know almost nothing about it.

• Planet of the Daleks – It’s still not quite time for the Daleks on this blog yet…

Which brings us to The Green Death… and giant maggots!

DW Monsters: Drashigs

The next two stories, moving us from season 9 into season 10 are:

• The Time Monster – while the monster of the title is described as belonging to a race of beings (the Chronovores) we don’t see any others, so it’s hard to know what their generic abilities might be, and I will therefore leave them out. I will also leave the Minotaur until later.

• The Three Doctors – while there are antimatter blobs in this story, they’re more a peril than a ‘monster’, and the real foe is Omega, so this is another one I will skip.

Next up is Carnival of Monsters. Despite the title, most of the monsters are only seen briefly over the viewing screen. The only exceptions, and the only ones that are original to the story, are the drashigs. This is their only significant appearance on screen so far, but they have proved popular enough in the ‘deadly alien animals’ niche to appear in two of the spin-off novels and two of the audios – in each case, making one appearance inside a miniscope, and one out in the wild. 

The audio Planet of the Drashigs makes the most use of them, as a sort of Jurassic Park homage that introduces two new subtypes of the creatures. But I will stick with the version seen on screen.

DW Monsters: Solonians

Following on from The Sea Devils, the next story we come to is The Mutants. The eponymous monsters here turn out not to be “mutants” at all but are instead a natural form of an alien race native to the planet Solos. While they have since received the odd passing reference here and there, they currently remain a one-off race, never appearing again in any of the novels, audios, or even (so far as I can tell) shorter works such as comics.

D&D Monsters: Oozes

We reach the final post in this series with the monsters that are, anatomically speaking, the simplest of them all. The idea of monstrous slime is essentially a modern one; some antecedents may exist here and there, but generally, we're thinking of the likes of the 1958 film The Blob or Clark Ashton Smith's formless spawn of Tsathoggua, which made their debut in 1931. 

The 1E Monster Manual includes a number of creatures that could loosely be described as oozes but only four of these have consistently appeared in the core rulebooks (excluding 4E, as I usually do, which retains just two of them in the MM1). Three of these are entirely amorphous, although the one that's perhaps the most notorious does at least have a shape.

DW Monsters: Sea Devils

Next up in season 9, we’re back to present-day Earth and The Sea Devils. The eponymous race are introduced as a variant form of the Silurians adapted to underwater life and, beyond the aquatic theme, provide a similar role in the TV show – although they do appear to be more inherently violent, presumably due to a warrior upbringing. They return much later in the classic run alongside the Silurians in Warriors of the Deep but were not seen again on screen until almost the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s run. 

Outside of the TV series, they have proved less popular than their Silurian kin, appearing alongside the latter in the 1993 novel Blood Heat, but rarely featuring on their own outside of a few comics and short stories. They have appeared in just a couple of the audios, neither of which feature the Doctor and one of which is part of a larger Silurian plot arc. A mention in a novel that doesn’t feature them directly implies that they are the same as the Deep Ones created by H.P. Lovecraft - although beyond living underwater and being cold-blooded, there doesn’t seem to be much resemblance between the two.