Art | Writing | Roleplaying Games
Creating Monsters: The Three Ingredients of Great Bestiaries
Monster as actor, monster as story, monster as art piece
If there’s one form of tabletop RPG book that most enchants me, it is the monster book. In the greatest bestiaries, each creature is at once an actor, a story, and an art piece.
A monster is an actor in the sense that it plays a part in a world. It is someone’s monster. It has motivations, and it motivates others. And when something has motivations, it also acts on the mind: we can’t help but imagine what it might do, and untold adventures start springing to mind.
A monster is a story in that the writing describing it unravels a tale — a mystery or a tragedy or a warning. Each entry in a great bestiary is a standalone piece of fiction that draws us in to read to its conclusion.
A monster is an art piece because it shows. Through graphic design and illustrations, the core concept and feeling of a monster spill onto the page, even without words.
To many players of big-name RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, these points may sound overstated. The bestiaries in those games leave a lot on the table. Their monsters are more generic, so their enchantment is weaker.
In this article, I will illustrate each of the three ingredients of a great bestiary — motivation, writing, and presentation — through examples from some of the best monster books from the indie RPG scene, including
- A Folklore Bestiary by the Merry Mushmen,
- Fire on the Velvet Horizon by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess,
- and Volume 2 Monsters & by Luke Gearing
as well as a few honorable mentions along the way.
Monsters as actors
Monsters’ purpose, insofar as they are part of a roleplaying game, is to spark and propel compelling adventures and scenarios. For monsters to serve that purpose, a bestiary must provide two things: the monster’s perspective — what it wants and why — and the world’s perspective on the monster — how others respond to the monster and why. When at least one of these components is compelling, the monster becomes an actor in many untold stories.
Perhaps no monster book does this better than A Folklore Bestiary by the Merry Mushmen. The compendium contains thirty-eight creatures drawn from the folklore of modern and historical cultures around the world. Each monster receives about two spreads of space, including a brief folktale describing it, game mechanics, art, motivations, and multiple tables or lists of ways it might interact with the game world. Its creators put it this way:
We all know that for a referee, having an encounter is better than just having a monster. But we Mushfolk are of the opinion that an adventure is better than an encounter. Our bestiary gives you exactly that: enough material to design whole scenarios around each monster.
And the book delivers on this goal. For example, take the boitata, a giant serpent from Brazilian folklore whose scales show the story of the world. It eats the eyes of intruders and gives them knowledge in return. This entry treats us to lists of possible answers to five questions:
- “What does the boitata want? What is the boitata doing?”
- “Why do you seek the boitata?”
- “What secrets can you find in the boitata’s moults?” (shed scales)
- “What presents lie forgotten in the boitata’s cavern?”
- and (on a final page not shown below) “Who is seeking the boitata?”
The entry concludes with four specific story hooks, each of which could immediately inspire an adventure. For example:
A king who has [his] eyes taken by the boitata has grown to regret bargaining with the ancient serpent. The rewards to find the eyes in the boitata’s belly are hard to turn down. (p. 54)
Through the sheer volume of creative ideas, every monster in A Folklore Bestiary suggests countless stories to play out. We always know what the creature wants and its place in the world — its perspective is both clear and compelling.
But there are less direct ways to turn monsters into actors in their worlds. Luke Gearin’s Volume 2 Monsters & reimagines classic fantasy monsters in the form of short poems. Each entry boils a creature down to a single, unique concept that often subverts the creature’s usual tropes. Rather than supplying story ideas directly, Gearing invites us to fill in the blanks. Take, for instance, the ghoul:
Hollow yourself out and make a home for hunger.
Once you’ve let it in, it will gnaw at the cage.
It will reach up to your heart and crush it.
It will reach up to your brain and gently mould it.
One who does this on purpose is reviled by thosewho fell victim to it — yet they assemble in courts.
Hunger and loathing. (p. 21)
That’s it, aside from some minimal game stats. Yet those seven lines — especially when read a few times — establish enough to give the ghoul a unique origin — a person consumed by hunger — as well as two partial perspectives that beg to be filled in: people who willingly give themselves over to hunger (who would do that?) and people who are overtaken by it involuntarily. A metaphor for addiction is one interpretation (Monsterhearts 2 did something similar and touching with the ghoul), but there are other possible meanings.
We’re also left with the tantalizing, unexplained hook “yet they [who voluntarily become ghouls] assemble in courts.” Thus, another interpretation — ghouls as those hungry for power. A dark, compelling world emerges: an aristocratic class of ghouls who never had to go hungry but craved power to their own doom, and a second class of ghouls whose starvation was no choice.
Volume 2 Monsters &’s reimagining of giant animals shows even more starkly how it departs from your average bestiary:
Animals become giant when their diet is reduced to human flesh.
The oldest have learned to feed on human stories instead.
They tailor their actions to inspire legends,
and seek immortality. (p. 22)
These aren’t just animals-but-big. They’re fascinating characters with tragic backstories (eating people) and a unique motivation (feeding on legends, forever). Important questions linger — if the animals learn to inspire legends, how sentient are they? can they speak? — and Gearing withholds the answers, having already given the essential ones.
After reading an entry in Volume 2 Monsters &, each reader will come away with a slightly different creature in their imagination. But it will always be surprising and evocative — evocative of stories to play out — with a strong reason for being in its world.
Monsters as stories
Monsters in bestiaries are consumed twice: once when read, and once at the gaming table. The previous section was about the monster in play. This section and the next turn to the monster entry as a standalone work. But the two are connected: a monster that presents a compelling story on the page — written and visual — illustrates the type of story and vibe that the monster could bring to play.
A monster is an imagined thing, and everything that shapes the imagination of its reader shapes how it’s realized in play. Thus, storytelling and presentation are essential ingredients in any bestiary, no matter how brilliant its core ideas are.
Patrick Stuart gives a master class in monster storytelling in Fire on the Velvet Horizon. Each of the one hundred entries presents an original monster based on one of Scrap Princess’s enigmatic drawings.
The monsters in Fire on the Velvet Horizon, along with its authors’ other works, Veins of the Earth and Deep Carbon Observatory, are as conceptually inventive as any I’ve seen. For instance:
- a repugnant lawyer-slug in whose presence legal codes become physical law,
- an insect that lives in your peripheral vision,
- a species from the burning-hot Hadean Eon who time-travel to the present to harvest natural disasters,
- and things stranger still.
But it’s Stuart’s writing that sells these concepts and brings them to life in bizarre splendor. He uses three techniques that especially stand out.
First, he opens each monster description with a compelling, even jarring hook. For example, the passage on the Murder Men begins:
The Murder Men are other selves from some other place. They have no ecology and [no] system of [existence]. They simply are. There is nothing they want that they are not about to take. (p. 120)
Many of the passages begin with such bold, absolute statements. Only by reading on do their meanings become clear.
Second, Stuart crafts a consistent language of description throughout the book. Colors receive alternate names. Brown becomes “brunneous,” yellow becomes “xanthic,” grey becomes “griseous,” and so on. Fictional, non-English letters appear in some names. The descriptions often feature archaic subject matter (e.g., kings, oracles, and swords) but use scientific language and modern terminology (e.g., “ecology” and “psychology”). Characters within the fiction — scholars and witnesses — weigh in on the monsters using variants of this strange language. Together, these writing choices suspend us in the sense that we have walked midway through a conversation into this alien, anachronistic world, and each monster feels like a discovery rather than an invention.
Third, Stuart ends many of the entries with a twist. Crucial information recontextualizes the opening hook. Take, for example, the Aeskithetes (spoilers ahead!). The entry begins:
The Aeskithetes are a civilised and reasonable people, focused here from an incomprehensible world where life and heat beat up from the earth in regular time . . . (p. 5)
Later, we learn:
As they describe it, the world of the Aeskithetes is an endless labyrinth of vast keratin pylons that reach up into a blurred and incomprehensible sky . . . The pylon-forests are haunted by silent yet titanic beings. The only place of safety is to tunnel into the life-giving earth. Preventing this [are] boiling rivers of iron running everywhere under the surface of the world . . . (p. 5).
What could this hellish world be, with its hot, pulsing ground; columns of keratin; and subterranean, iron rivers? The answer:
The ‘world’ they come from is a person’s skin. Aeskithetes are very very small, there are probably thousands of them all over you right now. (p. 5)
In sum, the descriptions in Fire on the Velvet Horizon turns each monster into a journey from a gripping inciting incident, to a journey of discovery in an alien world, to a twist revelation.
Where Fire on the Velvet Horizon uses purple prose and vivid descriptions to fuel the reader’s imagination, Volume 2 Monsters & uses minimalism to the same end. Here’s one extreme example:
GOBLINS
When a city dies, the children survive.
They do not survive unchanged. (p. 25)
Setup, payoff — there’s a whole story here, as efficient as can be. Even the one-word title is necessary context for the other twelve.
Besides the length per se, there’s a big difference with this description. The minimalist form changes what we imagine. Almost to the point of frustration, the book withholds its secrets, forcing us, the readers, to step into the role of inventors, whereas in Fire on the Velvet Horizon, we were detectives.
Monsters as art pieces
Whereas writing describes, art and graphic design show us the monster. They create the feeling that frames how we perceive the writing and the illustrations that make our imaginings concrete. Fire on the Velvet Horizon and Volume 2 Monsters & are again strong examples.
In Fire on the Velvet Horizon, Scrap Princess turns every page into an avant-garde collage with varying font sizes, hazy background textures, and sketched illustrations. The result looks like the notes or the cork board of a scholar or detective investigating the monsters — a half-finished artifact you just stumbled upon and are asked to decipher. Thus, the visual presentation works with the writing to place you in the position of investigator.
The design of Volume 2 Monsters &, meanwhile, is as minimalist as its writing. Each page is left mostly empty, with a white background, a simple greyscale texture, or a thematically related image (a wave on the page for water elementals), and the text is displayed in a large font in verse.
Without illustrations per se, we must look to the words for answers. The immediate impression: this is a poetry book. And subconsciously, perhaps, we’re cued to read it like poetry. Once again, the design and the writing work together to make the monsters we imagine.
Both these approaches to presenting monsters contrast with that of one of the most influential art-driven RPGs of the past few years: Mörk Borg. Self-described as “a doom metal album of a game,” every part of Mörk Borg is driven by its black-comedy aesthetics. The writing is at least as sparse as that of Volume 2 Monsters & and cedes the work of description to the illustrations and colorful display text that cover each page. The result is that monsters are more concrete in their appearances, and their vibes are vivid and distinct, but their context and their motivations are left mostly unexplored, even more so than in Luke Gearing’s minimalist yet efficient work.
That is, Mörk Borg’s monsters serve as excellent art pieces but less consistently as compelling actors with engaging stories. That said, these gaps may make the entries all the more fruitful for gamemasters or writers looking for visual inspiration.
What all three of these examples do well is that they use visual presentation in concert with the writing and core monster concepts to communicate a specific message: This is a mystery to uncover. This is poetry. This is doom metal in print form. The monsters become art pieces with a coherent vision.
What about the rules?
Conspicuously missing from these three ingredients of great bestiaries — motivation, writing, and presentation — are game mechanics. Of the examples I’ve given, only A Folklore Bestiary gives full game statistics for its monsters. Volume 2 Monsters & provides the absolute minimum — just enough to remind you that you’re reading an RPG book. And Fire on the Velvet Horizon is entirely system neutral.
Thus, great bestiaries can exist without creative mechanics. Likewise, mediocre bestiaries can exist with brilliant, creative mechanics. For example, The 13th Age by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet gives each monster a unique mechanical identity. The game’s combat system uses a counter called an “escalation die” that ticks up each round. Certain monsters have abilities they can use only when the escalation die shows a certain value — an even number, for instance. Other monsters add the escalation die to their attacks or prevent it from increasing. This mechanic and a few other core rules give combat-rich tactical variety and provide subtle ways to differentiate monsters.
But these rules often say little about the monster’s identities outside of combat tactics. What does a frost giant’s aura of deadly cold appearing every other round mean for the sort of being the giant is? A magical trap or an entirely different monster could have the same effect.
The 13th Age’s monsters shine brightest when their mechanics speak directly to their core concept. For example, gelatinous ooze-monsters are portrayed as mindless and unpredictable. Thus, the rule:
Instinctive actions: Gelatinous creatures have no brains, sometimes they just do things. When the escalation die is odd, instead of making an attack or moving, roll a d6 to see what the [gelatinous cube] does. If an option is not viable (you roll a 5 but there is no engulfed enemy), reroll until you get a valid option.
This rule works because it speaks to the distinct sort of monster the ooze is.
Volume 2 Monsters & provides a more basic example of rule-in-service-of-concept: “Save or be petrified when looking upon [the medusa].” Turning to stone is the defining power of the medusa, and the rules must either reflect this power or betray the monster’s core concept. Notably, Volume 2 Monsters & provides no other powers for the medusa, just the minimal basic stats required to import one into an Old School D&D system. That is, the author gives us the rules that support the monster’s identity and only that.
In sum, mechanics are neither necessary nor sufficient for crafting a good monster — though before the monster can be used in play, someone (e.g., a gamemaster) will have to create some rules. When it comes time to do so, add all the mechanics that directly realize the monster’s unique concept within the game system. Any additional complexity may make the monster better as a tactical game element or puzzle, but it does not make it better insofar as it is a monster.
Further resources
In the very best bestiaries, every monster has a compelling perspective on its world, revealed through an engaging story, presented in a visually evocative way. This is hard to do — I’ve tried and am still learning.
The single best resource I’ve come across for learning to craft unique monsters that elevate the stories they’re part of is Kyle “Map Crow” Latino’s video series Building Better Monsters. His forthcoming bestiary with Cloud Curio, Monstrous, currently available only in excerpts, looks as if it may become a definitive toolkit for redesigning classic monsters as compelling actors. I highly recommend checking both out.
Happy monster building. May yours provoke thought and fear alike!
