The Little King and the Khalkotaur

I painted up this Reaper Bones basilisk for D&D/Whitehack. Looking over the basilisk stats in the Monster Manual and OD&D, I remembered something that bemused me as a child: D&D basilisks turn people to stone.

This always seemed unsatisfying, because the basilisk of antiquity and folklore has a glance that was merely deadly. The creature is characterised by its venomous nature, which seems wholly appropriate for the "little king" (basiliskos) of the serpents.

The petrification, in contrast, treads on the toes (or tail, if you take the Harryhausen approach) of the gorgon. That's the medusa in D&D terms, of course, because Gygax and co. picked up on a seventeenth-century relabelling of the catoblepas, probably via  A Fantastic Bestiary, which was published in 1969. The D&D gorgon is more like the Colchis bulls or khalkotauroi, but has picked up the ability to turn people to stone along the way.

That leaves D&D with three well-known monsters empowered with petrification. A bit much, I think. The "statue garden" is a tremendous, eerie RPG trope, but having players guess whether a basilisk, medusa or gorgon is responsible renders the bizarre commonplace, somehow - like trying to tell whether you've discovered the spoor of a fox, a coyote or a wolf.

That's not to say that a statue garden might have been produced by something other than a (snake-haired) gorgon; there's nothing wrong with a White Witch, for example. Or with a statue garden in which the statues are animated and hostile. Or one in which they're just ordinary statues: perhaps the PCs have stumbled into the long-lost studio of some great sculptor of the past.

As for the bull-like "gorgon": a fire-breathing brazen bull is surely more resonant than a petrifying one, with its echoes of Moloch. And "khalkotaur" is a much better name for one than "gorgon".

But the basilisk should be all about poison. Its lair, its breath and most of all its eyes: all should be venomous. And there should be a risk, too, from attacking it with a piercing weapon, as the venom can travel up the shaft to afflict the wielder.

I see the basilisk's lair as a section of the underworld that has to be braved at considerable peril; perhaps the fumes that the Little King emanates are so sapping that they drain a hit point per round of exposure, even if the beast is not particularly close. Its vulnerabilities are mirrors and mustelids (and mongooses too, of course).

RuneQuest's basilisk was more faithful to tradition than D&D's, with poison, rather than petrification, being the main threat. But the Gloranthan cockatrice did petrify its prey, after first injecting them with  venom from its beak. That, I suspect, was the TSR influence. And I gather that it even reached Hogwarts - JK Rowling's basilisk is generally deadly, but has a petrifying side-effect. The arm of Gygax has grown long - something I'll return to in future posts.