With special thanks to Purplecthulhu for the challenge.
The challenge for this prompt is "futility of categorization", and then "perpetual motion" and "resurrection magic" for the Joesky tax because my response to the challenge is too fluffy & self-indulgent.
It's an immense joy when I come across a new work by one of my favourite mangakas (that is: a writer & illustrator of Japanese comics, for you baka gaijin). Just the other day I found a short manga by Atsushi Kaneko-sensei which was relatable to me.
The manga was about a perfectly ordinary man who believed himself to be the yolk of an egg laid by a great green caterpillar covered in glitter, who is to the universe as a hot dog is to its bun, destined to one day metamorphose and bring the solar system under his rule.
I too am a normal man. I obey the laws of my country, and those of other countries I visit. I pay my taxes in the full amount owed. I have no physical or mental irregularities. But that has nothing to do with what I'm about to talk about.
The futility of categorization... not the way I see it. The issue isn't that categorization is futile, because it isn't, and part of making rules and worlds legible enough to play, the issue is lame categorization - having goblins and hobgoblins and bugbears and thouls and hools and scrags and koalinths and so on being 1 HD-step-up versions of each other or simple aquatic flips of each other or whatever else.
There's a web serial writer who goes by Wildbow whose works I have enjoyed (who has recently been laid low by an escaped American bioweapon). Two of these works are Pact and Pale - urban fantasy stories set in a shared kitchen sink universe reminiscent of World of Darkness. The supernatural beings in these stories can be categorized into a great variety of kinds - fairies, goblins, horrors, echoes, typhlotics, spirits, oddfolk, dolls, incarnates, lost, bogeymen, oni, and so on and so on - and each of these kinds have particular tendencies in appearance, symbolism, abilities, weaknesses, etc., that you can make a game of looking at just about any fantasy/horror picture and fit it into the Pact/Pale-verse. As well, these are not generally mere naturalistic species, but socio-politico-magico-religio-yadda-yadda-yadda groupings.
Consider the case of three sorts of evil outsiders in D&D: demons, devils, and yugoloths. What, really, is the distinction between them? One is chaotic, one is lawful, and one is neutral, and I think one has acid resistance or something, but this is lame - we can do better.
Demons - there are no longer "vrocks" or "type II demons" or what have you. All encountered demons are now randomly-generated Boschian kludge-terrors. Perhaps demons under the same demon lord share an aesthetic and behavioural through-line - e.g. Lolth's demons share arachnid features and a tendency to subterfuge - but overall when dealing with demons you're going in ignorant of what exactly they're capable of.
Devils - classic horned & hooved primary-coloured & richly-adorned sorts. This has roots in heads of cattle as the basis of capital. Big on ranks and titles. Devils, of course, are bound by the letter of their word, but each kind also locks something down as law. Perhaps they always strike true but the damage is variable, or you can fight or hide from them, but never really run. There's always an element of certainty in dealing with devils.
Yugoloths - DiTerlizzi, ooo we love DiTerlizzi, don't we folks, we love the art of Tony DiTerlizzi - but a lot of his guys come out to the same long-faced or animal-headed sameyness. Yugoloths are now cenobite-esque guys. Their thing is that they don't interact with damage the way other monsters do, they're beyond pain and wounds and mutilation and so on. Maybe they regenerate, maybe they just shrug it off and keep coming as a cloud of ground meat patty, maybe they're just untouchable, whatever. But they're tenuous - they come when called, and they need an anchor to stay - an artifact, a ritual, a broken heart, whatever, and disrupting the anchor banishes them (as would typical stuff like turning & spells & so on).
Now you could say "Evil spirits shouldn't be categorizable at all! This is disenchanting!", to which I reply "Thunder fire you". I like all the weird cruft that's built up in D&D over the years, and doing it up like this hits the right intersection of interesting gameplay and worldbuilding for me.
Joesky Tax: The Hearts of Concentric Spheres
Lichdom, that is to say, the acquisition of immortality, is held by wider occulture to be the highest achievement of magic (and by liches to be the first step in serious pursuit of magic). It is an acquisition which becomes harder over time, for the gods of death are dutiful sorts, and each lich who finds a narrow path to eternity has the way closed behind them.
One lich (now known only as the Star-Lich, for tying their biological processes to the movements of the heavens and becoming able to hibernate through eons) once tried to share their sort of immortality, via the creation of a set of artifacts.
The Hearts are intricate orbs of metal about the size of two fists held together. Constellations are etched into the metal. The orbs are made of many overlapping partial spheres, connected to the layer above and below them by clockwork and wire, always in motion with no apparent power source.
Stick a Heart in the torso of a fresh corpse to activate it. Dismemberment and other wounds of the corpse will be corrected by extruded wires, so long as the parts are laid nearby. Afterwards, the corpse will spring to life, good as new.
It's an uncomfortable sort of new life. The resurrected can feel the wires twitching in their flesh at all times, and they can no longer sleep - and fortunately no longer need to. They must be constantly moving, and if they try to lie still will convulse as if electrocuted.
The first time one of those resurrected by a Heart remains in the same place longer than a day (place here being a hex or town or dungeon or suchlike) a hellhound comes for them, invisible and inaudible to anyone but them. The day after it's two hellhounds, then four, and so on and so forth. The clock never goes down - if they return to a place they've already been it continues just as they left it. This continues until they are torn apart and dragged off to a terrible fate.
In Pb, the difference between a demon and a beast is whether it can speak, and a lesser and greater demon are distinguished by whether or not they're afraid of ankhs. I always like monster categories that players can identify within the fiction, and I'd love to see more like this: defining more categories of monster, like demon, devil, and yugoloth, and what employable traits determine them.
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