Sunday, May 9, 2010

Y Monsters? Why not?

All the monsters--Y.

Like "x", "y" is a lonely letter, with only 2 monsters. Soon I'll have to actually think before writing blog entries again.

On the other hand, all Y monsters are all good. Not even "D" can say that.

Yeti


The proper image, if you can find a way to evoke it in the players, is the wampa--not the toy with the hugging arms but the way it looked and seemed on the screen when you were a kid--when Luke first wakes up--long-haired like an Afghan hound, bent over, devil-horned, but human enough that the word "cannibalistic" still seems to apply. Until he Forced that lightsaber into his hand, that was a horror movie--maybe the first one most of us ever saw.

Like a mummy, the monster has to be detached from it's cartoony associations (and various cartoony names) in order to imagine how frightening and believable a goatmanbeardevil hidden in an ice cave really is if you're trapped alone in a landmarkless wilderness.

Yuan-ti

These snake men work, how could they not? Snake-anythings work.

I don't like the South American/South East Asian associations of the name, as it suggests--in a D&D context--that they come from far away. I prefer the idea--like in Conan--that they come from the same place, but an earlier time. In my campaign, they're called Librarians--for reasons I'll explain in some post in the future.

11 comments:

mordicai said...

What the heck are the name of those four-armed yeti dudes in Lovecraft? Or at least Call of Cthulhu? Crap, I can only think of that albino ape with a horn from Star Trek now.

Ben L. said...

The Librarians. For some reason, I find that terrifying.

Brandon said...

I am most certainly not a Yuan Ti, though I am trying hard to be a proper librarian. I may be creepy, though, you never know.

Menty said...

@Mordicai Gug, I think.

huth said...

Is it because they've been eating people for untold millions of years and have a library of people inside them?

Jeffrey Runokivi said...

The four armed yeti dudes in lovecraft are the gnoph-ka.

LurkerWithout said...

I like how with the 3 kinds of yuan-ti you can have all kinds of degrees of snake-human freakshowness...

Anonymous said...

Do they have the Library Police?

Menace 3 Society said...

Are you thinking of Gugs? The big creatures that eat ghouls?

PS: The word verification for this post is "kultes". They know!

mordicai said...

No, not gugs...those are taxonomically dream creatures! Gugs is where my brain stopped though...with their sideways vaginadentata faces...gugs. Is it gnoph-ka? Google image search is not helping, dammit,

thekelvingreen said...

Gnoph-keh, is what you're looking for.