#or at all anymore honestly; fuck these guys lmao i'm so fucking steamed

[ampleappleamble]

stouffer's. you have inflicted violence against me and my family this day.

[axemetaphor]

Hey, I'm that guy from ao3. I was wondering, do you have a specific place you get inspo for monsters in Auckland? I'm making a DnD campain in the J&D world, aaand I kinda need help haha. Yours are like perfect <3 (Also, if you wanna join us, you can, we haven't even had our zero session and we're not playing actual DnD, I don't know how to play that, so it's ok if you don't know that, it's super easy and fun i swear, you can get a link to our discord, love you)

:0 oh shit hi !! a jdate DnD game sounds cool as fuck! im really bad at games like that tho so im gonna politely pass on that one but wish y'all the best of luck!!! 

as for making monsters my inspo is Kind Of Weird? i mean i look at a lotta horror art for sure (my favourite artist atm is Trevor Henderson aka slimyswampghost on most medias, u may know him as That Guy Who Made Sirenhead but he has a lot of other fantastic art as well!), but since i dont wanna feel like im rippin other people off i actually Dont often use that as inspo! aaaand heres where its gonna get a bit weird

aside from the times i pluck a creature from my nightmares (and boy, do i have a lotta material to work with there), i usually either look into folklore (bein mindful of closed cultures like, i believe most Native American monsters are off-limits for non-Natives to write; im white as hell so i try to stick to british/irish/more recent american shit) or... i look to this one game i played Obsessively when i was in elementary/middle school: Spore (which you can find on Steam i think or their hilariously hasn't-been-updated-in-a-WHILE website). I literally played it so much I can just kind of... imagine the whole creature-creator process. I think it’s a curse. I think Todd Howard cursed me for the crime of Having No Friends.

Now, if you dont wanna download a probably-poorly-aged EA game from 2007 (i dont even know if it’d run anymore if you Just Now bought it, i remember the security measures that thing had damn near broke the game before i could even play it, thanks EA) and play through the first two stages (theyre Long) to unlock the creature creator and all the Bits for it, you can either watch people play that shit on YouTube (Monster Factory is a favourite of mine, they did I Think a 3-video run of Spore) or, 

You can also do somethin that I once did as an assignment for Character Design class: go to a random animal generator, let it spit out 2-3 animals (or as many as you like, i guess, but i find 2-3 to be a Manageable number) and mash those motherfuckers together! Hell, you can even start to mix in stuff like objects/minerals/whatever the fuck too. Make something that’s a dog, hammerhead shark, and the concept of entropy. Go nuts! Here’s an example, some shit I made for that class (which mayyyyyy appear in Auckland...... perhaps. if i feel like it) :

They can range from “cute” to “nightmarish” as you please! Fun fact, that spider/shark/scorpion is meant to be the size of a house. I honestly come up with a lot of messed up shit by just asking myself "What's the worst thing I can think of right now?" and then I just Go For It with whatever my brain's thrown at me. I did that with Nightmare E.T. and the fucked-up ostriches. 'Scary' is often a sort of personal thing for people, like phobias and shit, you know? Lookin inward can be pretty helpful there. Not like you have to make something of your phobias, just maybe run with something that disturbs you a little. If you press yourself for why it bothers you sometimes you can find something deeper and maybe more universal in it. I'm not talking about unearthing trauma or anything tho that likely Wouldn't Be Healthy just like... if you think spiders are creepy, ask yourself Why: is it the eyes? the legs? the venom? the way they just kinda creep up on you, like, you dont notice em til you see them? etc.

As for the monsters in Auckland while most of them aren’t gonna be references (maybe a few more in future chapters...) I will admit the “morning wood monster” is a reference to the Pokémon Trevenant; the "most fucked-up dog [Dave had] ever seen" was a creature from The Moomins just described as horribly as possible--I can't find it on the wiki anymore??? it was from the 2d animated one, though; the Shitsucker is a regular ol’ Wraith (following a specific mythos where they aren’t just Random Ghosts but beings that feed off negative emotional energy, I can't re-find which one I'm sorry lmao); and the haunted ship thing at the beginning is a vague reference to the Buzzfeed Unsolved episode on that big ass boat. Isn't directly tied to it (obviously, 'cause Buzzfeed Unsolved never has much Actual Ghost Activity, let alone one Throwin Shit At Em jhgfds), more just inspired by it.

Maybe when the thing is done, I’ll sort them all into one of three categories--references to stuff/folklore, things i had nightmares about, and things i just kind of thought up. Make a post on here about it, idk

wow! this was fuckin long. i hope at least some of that is helpful!! also im adding this here cause i just remembered some people use Spore to sculpt like?? beautiful monsters and shit?? like i Know i watched a “speedrun” of someone creating a beautiful ass dragon in it. there’s probably a whole community of people out there making epic and/or fucked up shit and you could watch them build it or just scroll through thumbnails for inspo, but i do feel like Building Stuff Yourself is best, cause it just kind of Feels Nice to make something yourself and go “hey man, look how fucked up this is ! scary, right?” and get that Success Feeling when the other guy recoils and goes "yeah man what the fuck though"