The Old Weird

Just an ordinary Joe ...

Something I'm going to be doing is running a D&Dish game (Into the Odd) for people who've never played RPGs before. Actually, I've done that few times recently, but it was either incremental, with new players introduced gradually to an ongoing campaign, or the players were well versed in RPG tropes (through wargames or video games).

This time, though, all (or all but one) of the players won't have played RPGs at all. And nor do they have much of a sense of D&D's flavour. None of them know what a mind flayer or a rust monster is.

That got me thinking about just how strange many canonical D&D monsters are. We're going to be using miniatures (as I have many) and floorplans (which I will draw), so I've been casting about for some genuinely weird and surprising beasties, given Into the Odd's typically unique and disquieting monsters. But now that I think about it, I'm not sure I need to.

I have in miniature an owlbear, a rust monster, a carrion crawler, a huge purple worm, a shoggoth, black puddings and various other staples of the Monster Manual. And most of those are quite peculiar enough, both appearance-wise and mechanically, to give the players a genuine taste of the weird.

And even common-or-garden D&D humanoids are pretty strange. Hyena-people? Tiny horned dog-men? Militaristic apemen who happen to be bright orange with blue noses?*

You'll hate my guts ...

Or what about a skinny green giant with blank, black eyes that reflect no light and body parts that craw back together when hacked apart? And whose intestines try to strangle you when you spill them from its belly?

Weird enough? I think so.

Rust never sleeps.

*It's interesting how much weirder folklore-derived D&D monsters seem if you don't use their names. Hobgoblin and troll are among my favourite words, yet outside RPG circles, their connotations have very little in common with those that they have in D&D.