How do you use the Boogeyman archetype with adult adventurers.

[Scalenex]

So I wanted to spice up my fantasy world by using some non-Western monsters both for random encounters and major plot elements.

I've been running internet searches for "______ monster legends" checking out South African, central African, Indian, Native American, Aboriginal, and Chinese folklore.

It was only when I read about the the Qalupalik that I realized a pattern.

The Qalupalik is an Inuit legend. She is a vaguely humanoid sea witch that kidnaps children that play near the edges of ice floes unsupervised.

It was at this point that I realized that every culture on Earth that came up monsters, came up with some variation of the Boogeyman. Monsters that like to steal and/or eat children. The edges of ice floes are dangerous places for children and I'm guessing Inuit parents found tales of a terrifying Qalupalik more effective at keeping children from drowning in the ice waters then simply saying "Don't play near the edge of the ice floes, it's not safe!"

When I was four years old. My father was a university employee. My daycare center was in the College of Education and shared a building with lecture halls. So we little kids didn't go bother the students and professors on other floors, my daycare told an elaborate story of a witch that lived in the stair well. I had a phobia of red bricked dimly stairwells for years...Same principle as the Qalupalik but they were not saving my life from drowning, they were saving themselves from an inconvenience.



At first glance, child eating monsters would be a great antagonist for a group of heroic PCs or novel protagonists to slay.

But I'm concerned there are two things .

First, if an animal even harms a child, even if it's not a fatal attack, the villagers will scour the countryside to kill it. I don't see how a literal child eating monster would not be killed immediately after it's first rampage so these monsters would driven extinct.

Second, a monster that preys on children would not be very threatening to an adventuring party of armed battled seasoned adults.


How do you use boogeyman monsters in a heroic fantasy setting?

[Draconi Redfir]

perhaps the boogeyman is too strong / powerful, and / or the villagers too weak and frightened to hunt it down? Could easily justify it by saying it was there since the village was just a small settlement of little more then a single family, back when they didn't have the resources to handle a full on hunt. so every generation living in the village has grown up with this fear of the creature embedded into their mind, possibly to the point of it being part of the village lore.

Alternatively, hunts could be attempted regularly, but the creature either evades detection, evades death, or somehow comes back despite being killed every time. maybe it's magic, or maybe there's more then one of them, who knows?



You might be able to stir some interest among adult adventurers' by setting up that they all grew up with myths and stories of this creature as well, possibly even having known or been friends with children who were taken. this would embed a pre-existing fear into them. Like you said, your daycare told you of a witch in the stairs, and you were scared of dark stairways for a long time after. I was scared by the "One living under your bed" from Nightmare before Christmas, and even at 31, a pair of eyes looking at me from behind a veil of darkness still makes me freeze up.

On that note, perhaps session zero / session one / the first couple of sessions could have the players start as children with them being told that you're setting up some backstory stuff to flesh out the game, and/or establish some bonuses and treasures they might get as adults. Have each of them encounter the boogeyman as a huge, terrifying monster they can't possibly beat, maybe they just barely escape with their lives, or loose an NPC friend to it, really establish that this thing means business. Might be more effective if you do this to only one or two players at a time come to think of it. have each member have a different encounter with the creature.

Alternatively, potentially the creature has grown in power and is now hunting down larger prey, or has recently targeted the family of one or more of the PC's.


I'd strongly recommend looking up what does and doesn't work for horror movie monsters. For example "not showing what the creature looks like for the majority of the movie" (in this case campaign / plot) would be a good one. keep the mystery alive, and let the players minds work against them.

[InvisibleBison]

First, if an animal even harms a child, even if it's not a fatal attack, the villagers will scour the countryside to kill it. I don't see how a literal child eating monster would not be killed immediately after it's first rampage so these monsters would driven extinct.

Who says that it's possible to drive boogeyman monsters extinct just because you can kill them? Maybe a dead boogeyman comes back to life when the person who killed it dies, or maybe a new boogeyman is formed whenever a child has a nightmare. If there's no way to solve the problem of boogeymen in the long-term, this issue drops away.

Second, a monster that preys on children would not be very threatening to an adventuring party of armed battled seasoned adults.

So make your boogeymen in such a way that the challenge in killing a it is something other than being good enough at violence to actually defeat it. What if only children can see boogeymen? If the PCs have to bring a kid with them on the hunt, that completely changes the nature of the challenge. Or maybe the boogeyman is outright invincible and can't be harmed by traditional adventurer techniques, but dies if anyone ever laughs at it, so the PCs have to find a way to make it look silly.

[Sapphire Guard]

Easy. The problem isn't beating this thing in combat, it's finding it.

The sea witch can't be hunted down, because they can't search the entire sea. Pennywise can't be found, because he has a giant sewer labyrinth to hide in, has dominating effects, plus is only active every 28 years.

The monster doesn't kill every week, it wanders over a large territory and is an opportunist that takes only prey that is lost or isolated.

Perhaps the party has to lure it out by having one of them transformed into a child, with the vulnerabilities that entails? They have hidden backup, but are still taking a risk.

The monster can still be a respectable fighter, but you have to corner it first otherwise it hides or flees.

[Quizatzhaderac]

The fact that the creature targets children doesn't mean necessarily mean children are the most it can handle, they just might be around the right size for it's appetite, or weight to carry far off.

Generally they're going to pursue targets way below their threat level. Winning and being wounded is a disaster for them as they may have to fight a member of their own kind or a bigger predator. So the fact that it has a 95% chance or surviving walking into the village square and grabbing someone, still makes that a terrible idea.

Also, who's to say the villagers can scour the countryside? The wilderness is incredibly dangerous in D&D games! Maybe a local dragon will object to a human posse rampaging to closeby to it's nest? Or some sprits that can't be hurt by the commoners weapons?

[Easy e]

Most monsters of this nature are spiritual in nature and have immunity to "common" weapons. They can typically only be harmed by specific items, especially connected with local lore.

[Yanagi]

At first glance, child eating monsters would be a great antagonist for a group of heroic PCs or novel protagonists to slay.

But I'm concerned there are two things .

First, if an animal even harms a child, even if it's not a fatal attack, the villagers will scour the countryside to kill it. I don't see how a literal child eating monster would not be killed immediately after it's first rampage so these monsters would driven extinct.

Second, a monster that preys on children would not be very threatening to an adventuring party of armed battled seasoned adults.


How do you use boogeyman monsters in a heroic fantasy setting?

So the problem is that comparing the concepts to predators is fundamentally incorrect; boogeymen are the consequences of transgression embodied as a being. It's also notable that bogeyman aren't just used to threaten children, they're also the consequence of failures by adults...screw up parenting and your child gets taken. They are the thing just beyond the pale of societal norms, a condensation of whatever kills you if you don't respect rules. Their method of action is not the point, the point is that reaping axiomatically follows sowing. They are closer to a curse than that of a stalking animal: they don't have an ecology or a long-term objective.

Push the taboo button, the Rube Goldberg machine cycles, the prize is a disappeared or dead kid.

Folklore often reflects a worldview that is alien to people that live in highly-manipulated human spaces and see "nature" as a thing that is apart and distant: the safe and knowable world is often not exclusively a location, but proximity to other people and proximity to certain key things that are numinous/have mana, but the perimeter is not physical but social-cultural--to be safe is to follow the rules. The bogeyman is a thing of world beyond human control...which is very close by and must be respected because it cannot be avoided or blocked. Bogeymen come at night because it's the portion of the day when that distinction--the small known space of people versus the uncertain space of everywhere else--blurs the most. A safe space is defined, and passage beyond that safe space can be both a matter of proximity (don't go there) but also of disobedience (don't do this) often at the same time. What the bogeyman threatens is never being able to return to safety, whether that's a literal place or the figurative closeness of family and community.

You don't beat bogeymen, you render them incapable of completing their action by avoiding the transgression. If they could just be defeated or warded against they would be something else--and child-killing things that can be fought or killed are a distinct class of beings...dead children are a primal fear, and for most of history kids die pretty darn easy so the cultural structures built to cope with that existential horror are manifold and nuanced. I mean "things that kill babies in the crib" is an entire class of monsters found worldwide.

[Sidebar 1: Consider that for most of human existence big predators and megafauna were a threat between slasher movie villain and local manifestation of the divine. Your average bear during its active season is a pants-soiling unstoppable terror that will wreck most people's **** while your local ambush-predator big cat can, in fact, steal somebody in the night with no-one being the wiser. You might have to kill an animal that consistently hunts people...but that's nothing something taken on lightly, because an animal that kills people is one that's gotten savvy to the standard behaviors humans use to outwit animals. Never go full Captain Ahab, folks.]

The folkloric realm is all about the smallness of human beings, the indifference of existence to human desire. (myths, by contrast, are explanatory structures illustrating or just expositing on how the world governed by a system--and often a dude or group of dudes--and what rules to follow so that the dude(s) will protect you from the bears) You could compare the idea to cosmic horror--like Lovecraft beings, bogeymen just have their own logic and are unresponsive to human assignments of "why" and "how"--but also to mechanistic-horror of things like the curse in Ringu--once the process is started it has no off switch, this is just how its goes when the taboos are breached.

[Sidebar 2: all of the above is re-processed in modern, non-folkloric bogeyman tales...the ones to scare kids to not play after dark, inform stranger danger moral panics, and the ones that play out in slasher movies. In them there's no longer a wild, uncontrolled landscape to be respected but an uncertain moral topology beyond the safety of home (usually, suburban home) and community (usually the nuclear family) and social norms (American post-War bourgeois norms) in which lie...many kinds of dudes that will mess you up. The fear is no longer the indifference of nature, but the perverse interests of human beings.

That a character like entirely-human Michael Meyers is indifferent to bullets and basically teleports to kill by surprise, and over multiple films has to be made supernatural to explain how he functions, aptly represents how folkloric bogeymen work.]

None of this meshes well with the core conceit of heroic fantasy, where problems can solved by finding the correct dude and hitting them.

I mean, Jenny Greensleeves can just be a hag in the woods luring kids until she gets punched by adventurers...that would technically be a bogeyman story but it's also just...the structure of every low-level rescue quest ever. In a world where monsters are understandable and want things, where the supernatural is not mysterious because there are methods of ascertaining truth about its nature--dudes or critters wanting stuff--the core conceit of the bogeyman is dampened because you can't lay the ambiguity of folklore atop the very tidy lore required to establish a setting's fluff and its crunchy mechanical backstage.

The way to capture the feel of a bogeyman story would be to acknowledge how scale and atmosphere works in fantasy: most monsters are supposed to be understandable, because that's part of beating them but also part of "solving" the central problem of an adventure. Bogeyman aren't meant to be solved or understood--they just do their thing--so at some point you have break the mould, but up until that moment you can create mystery by making them something that's not on-screen, that leads little evidence, and requires speculation and exploration on the part of players to perceive.

A creature that takes children in accordance with some kind of rule, that has the power to identify and capture while evading detection...in a setting where most stuff is mapped, nature itself isn't chaotic and threatening because most people live in anachronistic English villages, and there's straight up "find stuff" spells...is something powerful and likely has some magic real estate, whether that's a dungeon or a little chunk of plane. It's probably not one janky dude working solo, it has minions or offspring or something. It's maybe not even one dude, but like a conspiracy or cult of dudes. Part of the story is just decoding how the abductions occur, what strange magic or mystery has resulted in the specific scenario of [person does the thing] --> [bogeyman takes a specific kid relevant to person that did thing].

However, to give players a rising action and a denouement, eventually you have to break the conceit and introduce some form of winning condition. Maybe that looks like a straight fight, maybe that looks like Koshchei the Deathless--a big old quest to find the MacGuffin--or maybe it looks like Vasilisa the Fair--where the monster creates conditions by which the players can win.

[akma]

Some ideas:
1) The players could be the boogeymen, but maybe as good members of that race\s - they want to show the world that not all of them are bad, make the world safer for those of them that don't eat children, and kill those that do. Or maybe straight up child eaters.
2) There could be some sort of corruption involved - the boogeyman is allowed to operate freely, as long as it occasionally kills political rivals of the governor. When the players would want to find that monster, they would have to face the city guard. Maybe even the governor's wife is the boogeyman.
3) There could be a whole organization around the child hunting, so it would be much more complicated than taking down a single monster.
4) The boogeyman could be very cunning.
5) The entire legend could be a misdirection - it could be a human or a cult that pretends to be a monster to hide its trail.
6) The boogeymen could kidnap to adopt, and transform the kids to more of their kind. Reaching and fighting him might be simple, but then, what will the players do with the partly transformed children?

[Yakk]

First, if an animal even harms a child, even if it's not a fatal attack, the villagers will scour the countryside to kill it. I don't see how a literal child eating monster would not be killed immediately after it's first rampage so these monsters would driven extinct.

Second, a monster that preys on children would not be very threatening to an adventuring party of armed battled seasoned adults.

So, it kills a child. A posse is formed. The posse is found dead. Rinse, repeat until the villagers have learned helplessness. The creature harvest children. You avoid it by following the rules. Some of the rules work, some of the rules are superstitions. The villagers don't know which.

Players show up ignorant of the rules, villagers are horrified.

One of the rules is you don't talk about the boogyman, or it will come for you or your children. So the villagers don't explain why they follow the rules.

Some of the rules are strange rituals they perform. As strange and creepy as you can get them to be.

At least some of the rules should bar solving a problem the villagers have that seems simple for the adventurers. When the adventurers inevitably violate the rules, and the boogyman strikes, the villagers tell the adventurers the rules they broke. The boogyman attack may have absolutely nothing to do with the rules the adventurers broke.

[Scalenex]

Even a fantasy world with real monsters could have parents and day care workers tell fake stories to scare children. The Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. Martin has real monsters like wights and white walkers and they have fake children's story monsters like grumkins.

So the ultimate bad guy of my world are Void Demons. Creatures from outside of creation that hunger for souls.

Thousands of years ago, they nearly destroyed the world until the gods repaired the Barrier that keeps them out. The Barrier is flawed so small number of demons can still sneak through but not the armies of yesteryear.

They kill everyone, old, young, noble, common, sick, healthy, male, female, goblin, elf, human, dwarf, dragon. Anyone with a soul.

But my friend brought up the idea that parents could say that Void Demons are especially likely to attack naughty children (or adults who used to be naughty children). Centuries later when Void Demon attacks go from being common to being rare, maybe most people believe that Void Demons prefer to go after sinners.

[SpoonR]

So the problem is that comparing the concepts to predators is fundamentally incorrect; boogeymen are the consequences of transgression embodied as a being. It's also notable that bogeyman aren't just used to threaten children, they're also the consequence of failures by adults...screw up parenting and your child gets taken. They are the thing just beyond the pale of societal norms, a condensation of whatever kills you if you don't respect rules. Their method of action is not the point, the point is that reaping axiomatically follows sowing. They are closer to a curse than that of a stalking animal: they don't have an ecology or a long-term objective.

Push the taboo button, the Rube Goldberg machine cycles, the prize is a disappeared or dead kid.

Reframe taboo or behaving badly, as a contract. In D&D terms, make the boogeyman a type of LN Inevitable. Someone breaks the rules, they become property of the Boogey. In exchange, community are protected from some evilbad. (Depending on flavor, the children might or might not be rescuable.) Adventurers find & defeat boogey, now the village has no protection from being wiped off the map. (I think this is the killing Galactus problem?)

In general, for an adventure I think a neutral entity would be better than evil. Evil child-stealing monster, but child-stealing that is more beneficial or live-withable “needs of the many” would make the adventure more memorable.

Eta: Also, there’s the idea that breaking the rule gives the monster power over you. Maybe it’s powerful abilities ONLY affect something that broke the rules, adventurers are the only adults “stupid” enough to break the rules.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Second, a monster that preys on children would not be very threatening to an adventuring party of armed battled seasoned adults.

The obvious answer to this one is that it doesn't hunt children because they're the limit of what it can safely fight, but for some other reason. It's not hunting them for meat (of which adults would have more), so perhaps it feeds on innocence, fear, potential, or even the suffering of their families.

[the_david]

It's simple really. The boogeyman doesn't exist. It's a red herring. A little kid tells the heroes about a harpy living in the canyon near the village and the heroes take of on a wild goose chase. This may lead to the heroes discovering something else through serendipity.

[brian 333]

Horror is subjective. Psycho frightened audiences worldwide when Hitchcock made it. Kids today see more graphic depictions on cartoons. What frightens villagers might be a laugh to players.

The trick is to describe how the characters react and don't worry too much about jaded players. If they are role players they will go along for the fun.