Big Bad Bigfoots

More Bigfoot-type material here: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2024/08/d6x6-bigfoots-sasquatches-yetis-other.html

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Oh yeah... and if you don't... some giant monkeys will fuck you up.
The giant monkeys are not as dangerous as the danger below, but they're still plenty dangerous.
Your dumb-ass primitive mind probably can't even grasp how dangerous the danger below is.
But it can grasp the danger of a giant monkey ripping your face off... biting off your feet... beating you with a log...
That's why the monkeys are here.
Seriously, don't fuck with these monkeys...
-Sandia National Laboratories Long-term nuclear waste warning message

Recently watched the movie Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes. It's good for a found footage horror movie about Bigfoot, pretty good for a found footage horror movie, and mediocre as movies go.

But that's not important. What's important is it got me thinking about what the niche of bigfoots, sasquatches, yetis, and suchlike in the bestiary could be, to distinguish them from white apes and rock baboons and so on.

The Sandia National Laboratories Long-Term nuclear waste warning message above, translated into many languages and into easily-understood symbols, was one idea that was cooked up to get people ten-thousand years after the fall of technological civilization to avoid nuclear waste dumping grounds. Another idea was symbolically-hostile architecture, like so:

A third idea was genetically modifying organisms, like cats or cacti, to change colour or glow in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation. Now I don't know about you, but if I saw a cat that glowed my first thought wouldn't be "wow! danger!" it would be "wow! cool cat!". Obviously these nuclear ideas-guys should stick with what they know - splitting atoms - and leave the important stuff to smart people like me. A glowing cat isn't going to discourage people from mucking about in nuclear waste dumps, but a giant killer monkey might.

This is the niche I think bigfoots could fit into, in a fantasy-world ecology. It's already a part of the official real-world lore - check the wiki - that bigfoots might not be just another species of great ape, but rather supernatural guardians, and temptingly-buried dangers are classic D&D fodder for good reason.

Fantasy gives us quite a few more potential buried dangers other than nuclear waste - the soul-drinking phylactery of a lich, a great big pond of assimilative flesh like The Thing, RAW and UNFILTERED magic that'll give you tremendous power and fly out of your control, a rift to hell, a spirit-road where ghosts and their juicy ectoplasm can be plucked from under the noses of predators that were never born, and so on and so forth. As a faction this sort of bigfoot wouldn't necessarily be hostile, but would be unerringly dedicated to their mission - room for trickery or coercion. If you steal some of the Awful Buried Power perhaps they can sniff it out, following you back to civilization, showing up as some odd-looking though clean-shaven gentlemen in hats and trenchcoats who'd just like to talk to you privately for a moment. Maybe they've got a compass that points to sources of the Awful Buried Power and you can steal that too. Food for thought!