Wiki-Diving

Been reading D&D wikis lately. This one: https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page and this one: https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_and_Dragons_Wiki mostly.

I feel like a prospector, going out into the hills with nothing but a shovel and a crusty gooch, looking for nuggets of gold:

Deep Bats

 

These types are, in order: some kind of winged eel, reanimated bat skeletons, a bat with a mermaid tail instead of legs, a flying manta ray, and guys with an infectious curse who can turn into bats.

I really like this. It's downright medieval, like classifying whales and beavers as fish. Gives the setting some lived-in messiness - easy to imagine the weird bestiaries, scholarly debates, religious taboos, and suchlike that resulted in and sprung off from the idea of "deep bats".

Hook Horrors Know What Friendship Is

 Did you know that this guy could talk:

Art by Thomas Baxa

Did you know he's got friends and loved ones, and also that his hands are in demand by alchemists to make elixirs? Not even evil alchemists, just your regular, shop-on-the-corner, puts their pants on one leg at a time alchemists. To be fair they shed their exoskeletons every now and then, but how many poachers wait for elephants or rhinos to keel over of natural causes before taking their tusks/horns?

More D&D beasties than I thought can think and talk. Displacer beasts for instance. DBs also apparently begin to "hate all life" when they reach adulthood. Why? Correspondents reported "liberal morality play bullshit" when polled. Have displacer beasts ever acted like sapient, talking creatures? The one in the movie didn't talk. Seems like an oversight. If it's on sight with DBs just based on their species-essence, why even make them able to parley? Why not just hungry animals? Odd.

Displacer beasts in Pathfinder are telepathic (they're also called "coeurls", which if I remember right is what they're called in the book DBs were inspired by) - that's neat, let's work off that. OK so DBs in the wild are animals, they're telepathic but they're about as smart as your average bear if they only encounter other animals. If they come into telepathic contact with humans, that does something to them, some bicameral mind, master-slave dialectic shit that awakens self-consciousness in them. DBs most likely to come into contact with humans are the old and sickly who can only catch humans anymore, or those whose territory is being eroded by human expansion - so besides the "I am a hungry apex predator as smart or smarter than you are" thing, there's probably also some upfront animosity. Maybe if you encounter a displacer beast and it runs away, and you roll a displacer beast on the encounter table again, it's that same displacer beast, only encountering you awakened it to abstract thought. This isn't a moral relativism thing, evil is real, it's an objective phenomenon that exists in reality, I just think this adjustment makes displacer beasts more interesting.

Also, there's a lot of monsters in D&D that are basically just big cats with one thing tacked on, like an extra pair of legs. There's one called a thylacine that I like, but not the name because that's also another name of the real-life (thought not anymore (extinct)) Tasmanian tiger, because it's got the ability to create the illusion of a person. It's not a smart cat like the DB, it's just a normal cat-brained cat with the ability to create the illusion of a person. From my experience with cats I don't think it's going to get very complex with the illusion, it'll might get somewhat clever, but a lot of the time it's just gonna be uncanny*. Imagine being out in the tall grass - you see some guy shambling towards you, blank-faced, It Follows-style, then while you're confused by that BAM, a big cat's severed your spine and your carotid artery. That's scary.

Anyways, just give that ability to some DBs on top of the telepathy, it's a subset of their telepathy now.

Strange Connexion

OK so there's this living demi-plane called Neth, nobody knows where it came from, not even it. It's obsessed with interrogating and absorbing creatures to figure that out.

Then there's this ancient fallen empire called Netheril. It had flying cities, arch-mages, the works. It's got successor states - more fantasy worlds should have successor states - including a pseudo-Tibet that's so lazy they just call their Dalai Lama-analogue the Dalai Lama. Anyways, Netheril warred against these giant magical sea anenomes called phaerimm, and the phaerimm put this biomantic curse on Netheril that eventually destroyed it.

Biomancy, curse, Neth(eril) - maybe one of those flying cities had all its citizens smushed together and kludged into the astral plane. I don't know. As good an explanation as any.

Why Can't I Hold All These Trickster Gods?

OK, so Chult, it's kind of like the Forgotten Realms Africa. Anyways, there's these guys called the Nine Trickster Gods of Chult. I like that name. You have one trickster god? OK, by the book. Two, three trickster gods? Stepping on each other's toes. A whole pantheon of trickster gods? We're getting somewhere. There's a god for each point on the Good-Evil/Law-Chaos grid, and all of them are tricksy, even the lawful good one. Neat. They're also all represented by / can manifest through an animal/monster - including weirdo D&D monsters like the flail snail. Also neat.

That's about all I've read about them. This bit won't go nowhere. There's something to be said, with regard to refreshing cliché, of simply putting the pedal to the metal. Elves like trees? Do like Glorantha do, make them trees. Dwarves like mining? They mined so much they mined into hell, a lot, that's where volcanoes come from. They've got whole procedures now.

Oddmen & Weird Little Guys

The Forgotten Realms - has a reputation, as a setting, for being overly generic. Don't think this reputation would bear out, if you were to use all of the material. In the cold north, there's these furry insect-centaur guys called sha'az, and they feud with broods of psychic parasitic worms called hauns over giant slug-beasts called haundar, and over the sha'az's eggs which have telepathy-enhancing yolk. There's tyrant wizards coming up from the south, setting up outpost-forts and backing the hauns as their comprador-proxies. That's a cool scenario.

There's boulder-shelled jellyfish-squid-things that live in forests, right alongside elves and unicorns and shit on the encounter table. Ormyrrs, look those up.

There's stork-men. They're not really stork-men, not like lizard-men are lizard-men anyways. They're just big, intelligent storks. They're also called eblises. Eblis, or Iblis, is basically the Islamic version of Satan. Imagine a species of puffin-guys called satans. Odd.

There's So Many Kinds Of Dragons, I Know It's Called Dungeons & DRAGONS, But Come On, At Some Point You've Got To Realize That There's A Problem, Systemically - Energy Could Have Been Better Spent Making Some Unique Dragons As Characters, Writing Up Their Lairs, Plots, And Whatnot Rather Than "Brown Dragons" (Colour Of Poo, Not A Draconic Colour) Or "Force Dragons" (Come On)

* Cats can be pretty dumb, but I was talking to this zookeeper at a bar the other day, and you know what? Crocodiles are SHARP for creatures with brains the size of walnuts or whatever. Will plot out your routes, your routines, try to snap your elbows off when you're leaning over a railing. Can plan like a month in advance. So I've heard.