#ttrpg monsters

[rocketorca]

Want to tell better ttrpg stories using monsters? Check out MONSTROUS, an "oops, all flavor" book with no statblocks, lavish art, and robust system-agnostic tools that help you craft rich backstories that tie directly into the bad guys' motivations and actions.

Hi! I'm Amber and I'm a part of Cloud Curio. Cloud Curio is a 4 person collective designing tabletop roleplaying game supplements both whimsical and strange. (We also have a tumblr!) Part of that collective is Kyle Latino aka Map Crow. MONSTROUS was an idea that was born from his Building Better Monsters Playlist! All of the art you see in this post is by Kyle Latino!

Create custom monsters that uniquely fit your world with MONSTROUS! MONSTROUS focuses on narrative impact and is compatible with any fantasy roleplaying game.

If this is interesting to you, def check out our Kickstarter page. There are a lot of cool updates showcasing how to use this book and the design process behind it! We also have a lot of free ttrpg supplements on our itch.io page! Thanks for your time and attention! -Amber

[monkeyslunch]

Join ussss.

[leafcreature]

Final result for the Nidere print ❤️

[thehomelybrewster]

I just wanna recommend Skerples' The Monster Overhaul, a recent purchase of mine. A fantastic bestiary for fantasy TTRPGs that roughly are comparable to the B/X rulesets and a still fun and useful resource for all other fantasy RPGs, since it also includes a lot of useful random tables and inspiration.

Just look at these two creatures, the bizarre Hatchthing and the funny Hateful Goose!

They're so evocative.

[ajddraws]

making an attempt at an October Art Challenges - choosing between the two monster lists made by @catbatart

here's the first one - The Gelatinous Cube!! im hoping to improve my linework and colours, and i'm happy with this one so far

[makiokuta]

I forgot to post these last month, despite being very proud of them. The november rewards for my patreon: four holiday themed monsters icons! We've got a treant decorated for christmas, a snowman slime carrot and all, a mimic candy cane, and one very jolly, frosty flying skull!

If you join my $5 tier on Patreon, you get access to these four, and 138 other designs. You are welcome to use them in both commercial and personal projects, including games or TTRPG modules or streams. All designs come with up to 4 colour variations.

Patreon Here! if you're interested. Or you can purchase the entire first season of art from 2021 itch.io Here!

Next month's theme will be scifi rather than fantasy! If you sign up now, your first payment will get you access to this next set at the end of the month!

[kaelmcdonald]

I'm sorry, this is sick as fuck??

I accidentally spent 80 hours painting my own take on a Mimic. Please take a look.

Can see higher res here

[eliotbaum]

Two postcard designs by Newt for The Hidden Isle: Forever Hold Your Peace. Only a couple hours left to snag these for free with the Early Bird special reward!

[zephyrbug]

Merikh, student of Astreios and academic of The Bridge 🪶⚜️🔥

Got to play in my first pathfinder2e game with some friends and made this! My strix oracle of ash!! I wanted to go for an uncanny harpy monster vibe (inspired a bit by avatars Wan Shi Tong and dragon dogmas 2 sphinx) and landed on this bearded vulture design! I love my unsettling big bird 🫶

[cinderoo]

[rocketorca]

Want to tell better ttrpg stories using monsters? Check out MONSTROUS, an "oops, all flavor" book with no statblocks, lavish art, and robust system-agnostic tools that help you craft rich backstories that tie directly into the bad guys' motivations and actions.

Cloud Curio is a 4 person collective designing tabletop roleplaying game supplements both whimsical and strange. Part of that collective is Kyle Latino aka Map Crow. MONSTROUS was an idea that was born from his Building Better Monsters Playlist! 

[anim-ttrpgs]

something I don’t get about the disability metaphor is that for eureka monsters obviously it harms another person to eat them. the help a disabled person needs doesn’t actively harm or kill another person. Maybe it’s a difference in perspectives that cannot be resolved

(What I’m about to write could potentially sound very fucked up at first so I’m going to need to trust everyone to read the whole thing before forming an opinion.)

Also this message and response references these two posts.

Eureka’s stance on disabled people is that they (including myself writing this) are, or at least can often be, burdens.

Disabled people often require more resources to live than they are able to “give back,” which, in our capitalist and artificial-scarcity-based economy, is just about the worst thing a person can do.

Anti-ableism sentiment often focuses on the idea that “disabled people aren’t burdens, that they’re just as good and capable as everyone else,” but if they were, they wouldn’t be “disabled” would they? When you say stuff like that, you’re conceding that a person’s worth is determined by how capable they are at doing work, and then having to bend over backwards to justify thinking that a person without arms is just as valuable as a person with arms. Eureka is asking you to decouple a person’s value from how much net resources they can produce.

Often times also, the resources that real disabled people consume are human resources, and those human resources are very much capable of suffering for it. Nurses are overworked, around-the-clock care is absolutely physically and mentally exhausting, people who have to care for their elderly or otherwise disabled relatives on top of their regular jobs don’t get to have social lives or hobbies, etc.

To this end, we wrote the monsters in Eureka to be unquestionably people who “cause damage” to society by literally eating up human resources, because they have to to live, they have no other choice unless they want to just die. Your friend is gone from your life because he has to spend all his free time caring for his comatose wife after a freak car accident. Your friend is gone from your life because a vampire randomly ate him. Providing a metaphor isn't all the monsters are doing, they just work well through that lens.

And then Eureka forces you to look at these people as people, and make up your mind as to whether they have value and a right to prologue their own existence. We can’t force you to agree that they do, but if you think they don’t, then you’ll have to make that argument looking at an intelligent person with a life rather than a pure hypothetical or statistics on a chart.

There are some monsters in Eureka where, if the economy or societal structures were changed, they would stop being such severe drains on resources and could exist harmlessly within society, and there are some monsters where no imaginable amount of societal change would solve the problems they cause. This is true of disabled people IRL as well. Some of them would require no further assistance with living if certain things about society changed, and others would still require a massive amount of human resources.

And even when it’s not necessarily human resources, the extra resources that disabled people need also cause huge energy expenditure and create huge amounts of plastic waste, which are things that contribute to global warming and pollution, which do have significant harmful effects on everyone’s lives. Despite this, they are still “worth it” to keep around.

As for actively causing harm, that happens too. I randomly scrolled past this post after we got this message and saved it so I could link it here.

This person and their family had to cause a big stink in a restaurant just to get an accommodation that they needed, and to us reading it from their perspective, we’re obviously on their side, but I can assure you that the overworked staff at that restaurant didn’t see it that way. They saw the disabled person as an aggressive Karen whom they would never in a million years want to have to provide customer service to. The disabled person & family had to get aggressive, and ruin the staff’s day, to get what they needed. That’s actively causing harm - harm we all agreed was justified to cause - but harm nonetheless.

Plastic straws aren’t that big of a deal for global pollution, but even if they were, the point is that this person still would have needed a straw. It doesn’t line up one-to-one, because metaphors rarely do, but a vampire asking if they can drink someone’s blood, and being told No, may find themselves in much the same position. (And if you bring up that some people find vampires really sexy, you’re missing the point. “I would give them a straw if they had sex with me.” is not actually a great thing to announce about yourself.)

I can also come up with an example from my own life. I personally am very sensitive to noise and noise pollution. If there’s music playing at a public space, I usually can’t handle it. (Earplugs don’t work for other reasons I won’t get into - plus, if I just deafen myself to all sound, how can I socialize with anyone in this public space?)

If I want to exist in this space, I will have to actively cause harm to everyone there, or else stop existing in that space. I will have to go up to whoever is responsible and ask them to turn off the music, actively taking it away from everyone else who was enjoying it. I have to take action to ruin their good time if I want to exist in that space at all, and they might, very understandably, be pissed off at me for doing that. Because, like I said in this other post, the people that monsters eat do have a right to prevent themselves from being eaten by monsters. We aren't proposing that the solution is everyone has to line up to be mauled to death by monsters or else they're a bad person.

Who has a greater right to enjoy themselves in that space? That’s the kind of question that Eureka poses, and makes you consider both sides as human being rather than denoting one as just an ontologically evil villain to be destroyed.

We actually don't know of perfect solutions to all the problems presented by the existance of monsters in Eureka, we just know that "exterminate all people who are parasites and burdens to society" ain't it.

[maximumzombiecreator]

On the subject of TPKs and failure in TTRPGs, I gotta say, I love a good mechanic for losing.

I love that Fate gives you metacurrency for conceding a scene, and I love that taking extreme consequences creates a new aspect for your character.

I love that when you die in Blades of the Dark, if you're still attached to the character, you can just become a ghost.

I love that in Monster of the Week, when you need to avoid harm it costs a point of luck, which triggers a character-specific consequence and lets you see when your character's luck is literally going to run out.

I even love that in Cyberpunk they've created an omnipresent group of amoral, heavily armed paramedics, so no matter where your character gets gunned down, there's always a chance of pulling through.

Basically, any game that is set up so that losing is going to make things more interesting, not less, is a game that's going to help great stories happen at the table, and I love that.

[vintagerpg]

Henry Justice Ford is a curiously under-remembered artist of the golden age. He is most known today, if he is known at all, for his work illustrating all twelve volumes of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books (fun fact: despite being known as “Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books,” Lang’s wife Leonora Blanche Lang selected and translated all but the first in the series, The Blue Fairy Book).

This is a fairly thorough collection of Ford’s work from Dover Books: Maidens, Monsters & Heroes (2010). Ford’s ink work is bold and intricate, his color work luminous and often combining surprising colors (perhaps a side-effect of the reproduction process). I tend to gravitate more toward his inks, perhaps because there are more monsters there (though that Chimera is pretty fab). Ford, of all of these artists, seems to have delighted in monsters. Especially reptilian ones, though he has talent for grinning demons and goblins, too. So many of his monsters are downright strange, too — look at that Scylla! WTF?! He has quite an array of giants, as well. Longtime readers may recall my enthusiasm for his Arabian cyclops, which featured on the cover of A Natural History of Unnatural Things.

Unlike the other artists I’m looking at this week, Ford has a direct influence on Dungeons & Dragons. That affable looking giant with the club is the clear inspiration for Trampier’s cloud giant illustration in the Monster Manual and I think generally you can see a lot of resonance between the two artists, particularly in terms of framing and posing. Tramp’s pseudodragon seems to have a lot of Ford in it.

A tremendous artist, flipping through any of his collections is like looking through a Victorian Monster Manual.

[ajddraws]

day 2 of rpg monster october!! here's a gargoyle

[clairebearsparkles]

Hiya, I was just wondering if there were any updates on your TMA TTRPG project because it seems super fun and I am gnawing at the bars of my cage to hear more about it :D

Thanks for asking about it. I unfortunately never found the time to test the system, but I think it’s at a point where people can at least look at it, so here’s my google doc of the PbtA heavily based on Monster of the Week tma system