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View Full Version : How do you re-imagine classic monsters?



Tragak
2013-07-24, 08:01 AM
After following an extremely terrifying thread about Mind Flayers on another site and hearing things that I had never thought of before, I got the idea of asking you guys if there are any monsters you use that are just as classic as Mind Flayers, but that you feel you play completely different in your games than anybody else does. Do you have any ideas that you think other people would be interested in?

Here are some of mine:

Elementals: don't want to be here. At all. Why would they? A world where the chemistry that they grew up believing comprised the entire real world is mixed haphazardly with 3 completely absurd, nonsense substances would be the most Eldritch Abonination world un-imaginable.

A sparse few might look at the fact that they're somehow surviving in such an Eldritch Universe and think "Challenge Accepted." However, most would either be desperate to find any a portal back to their world, whatever the personal cost, or else go mad from the revelation that such a universe can possibly exist - when by no reasonable definition of matter should it be allowed to - and feel that they have to destroy as much as possible (or at least as many portals as possible) lest anything in it escape to infect the "real world."

Rust Monsters: biological WMD created by unusually evil Druids to bring the more advanced civilizations to their knees, hoping to force them to return to the "real world."

Thunderfist12
2013-07-24, 12:35 PM
I made kobolds master psions from a dead planet in one of my campaigns.

silver spectre
2013-07-24, 01:25 PM
In a campaign I ran about ten years back...

Goblins were the descendants of humans mutated by high concentrations of ambient psionic energy.

They breed true and are occasionally still born to and around psionic individuals (more often where psionic types gather).

Bhu
2013-07-25, 01:23 AM
If the Mindflayer thread you're referring to is mine, please realize I wrote it in the wee hours for the most part under the influence of pain medications :smallwink:

Vadskye
2013-07-25, 01:51 AM
If the Mindflayer thread you're referring to is mine, please realize I wrote it in the wee hours for the most part under the influence of pain medications :smallwink:

You should do that more often!

Hanuman
2013-07-25, 02:57 AM
Give zombies increasing intellect and hate, watch players run faster and faster.

Psionic Beholder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPV01NqoHcQ

Alex12
2013-07-25, 07:19 AM
Not exactly a classic, but I imagine Elans as being related to Illithids, the result of ceremorphosis experiments gone wrong.
I also had a world where everyone except Illithids was some thinly-veiled variety of Jewish. My players, all but one of whom were Jewish, loved it- it was actually comments by them that led to this situation. We still chuckle about "dwarf mitzvah." Illithids were Germans. The nonevil ones were wacky mad scientists, and the evil ones were Nazis.

As a side note, you want to throw up a link to that Mind Flayers thread?

Cheiromancer
2013-07-25, 07:23 AM
After following an extremely terrifying thread about Mind Flayers on another site and hearing things that I had never thought of before,...

Link please!


If the Mindflayer thread you're referring to is mine, please realize I wrote it in the wee hours for the most part under the influence of pain medications :smallwink:

If by chance it *wasn't* your thread Tragak was referring to, I'd like to see it too. Or if you are able to answer first. :)

Tragak
2013-07-25, 08:22 AM
Not exactly a classic, but I imagine Elans as being related to Illithids, the result of ceremorphosis experiments gone wrong.
I also had a world where everyone except Illithids was some thinly-veiled variety of Jewish. My players, all but one of whom were Jewish, loved it- it was actually comments by them that led to this situation. We still chuckle about "dwarf mitzvah." Illithids were Germans. The nonevil ones were wacky mad scientists, and the evil ones were Nazis. I think you win the thread :smallbiggrin:


Link please! The one I found (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/29999767/Mind_Flayer_Advice_Request) was on the Wizards of the Coast forum (my avatar on that site is a Lillend), so it's probably not the one other people are talking about. FYI: comments 2, 7, 12 and 16 are the ones that scared me the most :smallwink:


If by chance it *wasn't* your thread Tragak was referring to, I'd like to see it too. Same here please!


If the Mindflayer thread you're referring to is mine, please realize I wrote it in the wee hours for the most part under the influence of pain medications :smallwink: Well when else would you write about an Eldritch Abomination beyond human comprehension :smallbiggrin:

Alex12
2013-07-25, 03:40 PM
I think you win the thread :smallbiggrin:

To be fair, Illithids have rather more justification to claims of being superior or a master race than the Nazis ever did.

I'm also playing a Dvati (two bodies, one mind. Unbreakable telepathy, even across planes) in another person's campaign, and we worked out that in this setting, they're military communication systems, where one body goes out with some military group, and the other stays with central command, allowing rapid transmission of orders.


In the setting I'm working on, I'm thinking beholders are egotistical sculptors, using precision disintegration to create beautiful works of art, many of which are only comprehensible to those with at least 6 independent eyes.

TuggyNE
2013-07-25, 04:51 PM
Well when else would you write about an Eldritch Abomination beyond human comprehension :smallbiggrin:

LSD? :smallyuk:

Bhu
2013-07-25, 05:13 PM
Link please!



If by chance it *wasn't* your thread Tragak was referring to, I'd like to see it too. Or if you are able to answer first. :)

I did a write up on Carnal Illithids, so called because they were kidnapped and deposited on a Demiplane run by an obnoxious Jester God and had to revert to physical mating. Removed from the Elder Brains and Ilsensine they quickly went a bit insane and used massive experimental psychic surgeries to allow them to reproduce the more traditional way as ceremorphosis no longer was available to them.

Unfortunately reproduction now means they have hormones, which means they also have emotions and desires they are completely mentally un-equipped for dealing with... They're no longer parasites, but they still kidnap enormous amounts of slaves as they need fodder for their experiments to escape the Demiplane, and to perfect their new bodies.

As you can imagine some people find them unsettling.

Arkhosia
2013-08-03, 01:18 AM
Red dragons are artisans, hoarding gold and gems to create magnificent sculptures.