Guide to World Building - Monsters
Header Art: Harpy-Monster-Thing by Helge C. Balzer
As you are working on filling out your world, one important question to ask yourself, especially if you are building something for a TTRPG is… what monsters are out there? When you leave the safety of a city, what monsters might you come across? What has been there role in the creation of your world? How have they shaped the landscape and nations around them? Are all monsters truly monsters?
You don’t need to think about every monster while working on your world, only the ones you think are especially important and may have had an impact on the world. You might even be wary of using pre-established monsters, not wanting the baggage of what being a hobgoblin or gnoll implies. In addition, the term ‘monster’ could mean a wide variety of things as it could include elves, dwarves, dragons, kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, or anything else that you have decided is not appropriate for civilization.
Part 1 - What is a Monster?
When I say monster, I mean the force that works against society and civilization. The force that wishes to destroy settlements and cities, to consume, devour, and destroy what has been built up. I’m not only talking about trolls, but also anyone, including humans, who are seen as dangerous and as the inhabitants of the wilds.
You might decide that certain factions of humanoids are destructive members who seek out the end of civilization. More often than not though monsters are simply creatures who seek to destroy life; even if they have no malicious intent. If you have kaiju that wander the world but are almost mindless, they don’t destroy because they enjoy destruction but because they were wandering across the landscape and someone put a city in their way. It isn’t the kaiju’s fault about that, they are just minding their business.
Part 2 - A Monster’s Role
The role that monsters are going to assume is the aggressor against your characters. They are meant to create tension and create problems that characters, nations, and more have to work to solve. It could be that gnolls are a major problem across the windswept plains and so nations are forced to build trading routes that circle around the plains, thus making it so that there are cities around the plains but none within its interior. In addition, these cities might have specialized defenses that counteract the raiding forces of gnolls, like having stone walls, watchdogs on walls, or maybe rely on the help of birds to provide some form of surveillance for them.
Then again, maybe monsters are a bit more insidious than that. Dragons are great treasure hoarders and so some have disguised themselves as humanoids, designating themselves as king over a kingdom. They have a spouse and children, but continue their reign, with none the wiser, by staging their death. They kill their heir in secret and assume the heir’s form, continuing their reign for generations until someone learns of their secret and puts an end to their reign. Or perhaps dragons are celebrated as rulers, seen as the true Royalty of the world and followed by the masses at large.
When thinking of monsters keep these ideas in mind:
Challenge
What new challenge does having a monster’s major presence impact a world? In a setting like Eberron, troll meat is used as a near limitless resource that hags treat and make safe for consumption. The impact of trolls is less as creatures to murder with fire, but rather as a herd animal that can create limitless food. This means that if a city, that utilized troll meat, were forced to endure a siege, they wouldn’t have to worry about starvation as they use trolls. This could become a major component of wars and sieges where spies are sent in to destroy the city’s troll stockpile, thus making the city susceptible to starvation (and the city might not have a backup plan if all their trolls are killed!).
Another challenge that a monster could present is that they make leaving the cities very dangerous. There might be a reason why there are no small villages in the world, and its because it is too difficult to defend hundreds of small places. Instead, kingdoms create fortified cities and rely on only having a few cities that are well protected. This might create an environment where the further one travels from the city, the scarier and scarier the monsters get with titanic creatures in the far-flung wilds that most believe only to be rumors. It also means, that if you meet anyone out in these wilds, that they must be incredibly powerful to survive on their own.
Type
There are a wide variety of different monsters out there from oozes to dragons to humanoids and more. Not every monster might be appropriate in your world, like having orcs in an all-human world. If you want dragons to be very rare in the world, the world might treat them more like myths and legends than actual fact - which would make the sighting of one be treated with a lot of eye rolls.
In a more fantastic world, there are going to be a greater variety of monsters. In a gritty realistic game, you may only have other humans and wild beasts as the ‘monsters’ to fight, with hags and giants only myths. Once you have decided on the focus of your world, changing it up should only be done in very extreme circumstances. It wouldn’t make much sense for the players to go asleep one night and then wake up the next with thousands of fantastical races and horrific monsters if they had only ever known there to be humans. These events could happen, but should be major plot points within the world, like a rupture between the worlds where the Plane of Faerie collided with the Material Plane, unleashing these strange horrors upon a ‘normal’ world.
Part 3 - History
If monsters are included in a world, they should have some impact on it. Not every monster needs to have affected the world, but there should be ways that having monsters around does change things from our own past or from a world with no monsters. Commoners are going to have some idea of the more common types, like goblins, and may even scoff at the idea of more exotic monsters, such as rust monsters or mimics that only adventurers ever encounter.
The impact of monsters should help shape kingdoms and even be used in the usurping of power in different ways. Few are going to remember that a king was assassinated, but plenty will recall that one time when a king was assassinated by their advisor who transformed into a dragon and ate the king. Then again, an army of the dead might split a kingdom in two, this rift of undeath energy attempting to consume the entire kingdom who is fighting trying to eliminate the threat and unite the kingdom into a single entity again, though there are forces at work on both sides trying to convince one side to rebel against the other and become an independent nation.
As a catalyst, monsters can be used in a wide variety of ways and, if they are to be included in a world, should have some say on how that world formed. If monsters just exist, like medusa, and never appear within the world’s history, then that either means there are so few of them that their impact is incredibly tiny, or that there is a strange juxtaposition where so many of them have done nothing for thousands of years.
Magic & Gods
To go along with history, if your world features magic, than monsters could be the founders of that magic or creatures of that magic. There are plenty of monsters whose origin stories where that a wizard combined multiple creatures and out popped the horrifying owlbear. To go along with that, intelligent monsters are also going to have their own gods that they worship, which can help give them a greater presence in the world. A city might allow orcs within their walls but outlaw any worship of orc gods, this situation could be understandable by all, if orc gods are generally evil and focused only on killing others, or it could be seen as a form of subjugation. That the orc gods are just as varied as other gods and they only have a bad reputation, making it so that secret worshipers within the city, who are completely harmless, are hunted down as cultists and executed for their religious crimes.
Part 4 - Playable Monsters
The question of whether monsters should be playable or not comes up a lot within RPG communities. My opinion is that if you make a monster playable, it gives those monsters greater dimensions and turns them from just creatures to be destroyed to creatures to be understood. If orcs can become a playable character, it means that not every one of them is the ultimate form of evil and that they can work with others, like humans and gnomes. Then again, if you can only ever fight and kill gnolls, it begins painting them in an unappealing light. The players are only ever exposed to their savagery and violence, creating a specific idea of what all gnolls are like.
By making it so that certain monsters are playable, you can further expand their place in your world. If orcs are playable, then that means they can fit in with society and have some say in shaping the world’s history outside of just violence. There could’ve been orc wizards who created new spells, kobolds who build out sewer systems for cities, and trolls who work in the food industry.
Now, not every monster will be playable in the traditional sense since some offer stronger abilities than the baseline for many games. Instead, playable can simply mean that they appear within the cities as part of civilization, helping to further the end goals of society. They aren’t solely looking to destroy and bring about the end, but rather pay taxes and run businesses.
Then again, what if your world only features humans and wild beasts as the monsters to be fought? In which case, magic could transform wizards into mythological beasts, like dragons, and what impact might that have on the world? It could be that all ‘dragons’ are just transformed wizards who created what they thought to be the most destructive force ever. Those who can harness the power of ‘dragon’ are archwizards with few equals and highly valued by royalty and nations. This turns the mythological into actual monsters, but they only very rarely arise, meaning that if a player ever gets to ‘play’ as a dragon, it is because they are in the upper echelons of all wizards that have ever come and gone in the world.
Monsters In Practice
There are always monsters in the world, be it dangerous and foul and magical, like rust monsters or otyughs or dragons, though they can just be as mundane as a human or a wolf. Monsters are those that, whether by choice or by instinct, hunt and destroy society, civilization, and its people. Monsters are to be fought against, their influence pushed back, and to be roadblocks to a party’s ultimate goal of completing their tasks and adventures. Monsters should have an influence on the creation and shape of the world because they create the drama, tension, and obstacles that stop its advancement.
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