Literary Monsters of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 27, 2017

For this last Bestiary 6 post (the book officially released yesterday, so I can't really call it a preview post!), I want to build upon last week's post, where I talked a bit about monsters from mythological sources. In this case, since these creatures aren't protected by copyright law and aren't the intellectual property of content creators, the field is wide open—we can create specific creatures based on these things in the same way we can stat up things like donkeys and rats. But there's another category of inspiration that we often draw upon that's a bit trickier—literary sources.

In this case, we've either opted for simply taking inspiration for a monster and making up something entirely new, but that's not exactly what I want to highlight here. When we look at older stories that are now in the public domain, there are a huge number of interesting creatures we can "import" into Pathfinder. We've been doing this in every Bestiary, from the first one (which has H. G. Wells's morlocks and Lovecraft's shoggoths for example) on. That doesn't change in Bestiary 6.

Of course, since I was the one picking the monsters, it should come as no surprise that my favorite author, Lovecraft, has some strong representation here. In some cases, the monsters picked up from his stories are specific creatures he took time to describe and explore (such as the yaddithian and the Great Old Ones). In other cases, they're creatures he wrote entire stories about but never really named, so I came up with specific names for them (the Leng hound, from his short story "The Hound", and the unrisen, the lively awful remnants from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). And in one case, they were just name drops with only a few words of tantalizing description—the urhag is a throwaway reference in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" where they're described as things flying in the sky along with bats in a creepy corner of the Dreamlands. In this case, other than "they fly" we were able to create an entirely new monster to provide context for the creature.

But Lovecraft wasn't my only source of literary inspiration. Like the urhag, the whisperer is never mentioned by name in the story that inspired it, but those who have read Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (one of my all-time favorite stories) will recognize its themes and the weird wounds its touch causes in flesh, I hope. The other, the horla, is the opposite—a creature that not only heavily features in Guy de Maupassant's story, but gives that story its name: "The Horla." The fact that the horla is invisible in the story gave us some leeway in creating its appearance for those who insist on using methods like see invisibility to peer into the unknown, but its creepy abilities to feed on slumbering victims and secretly drive them to murder and insanity are right out of the pages of the tale. I've actually been trying to get the horla into print as far back as Bestiary 2, so I'm glad the critter finally gets to see the light of day!

Illustrations by Rafael Rivera, Will O'Brien, and Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director

Mythological Monsters of Bestiary 6

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Now that Bestiary 6 is making the rounds and folks have had a chance to get over the shock of seeing archdevils and kaiju and qlippoth lords and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and empyreal lords and all sorts of other powerful creatures like the ones we spoke of last week, I'd like to thank humanity as a whole for being such an endless font of inspiration. We've been creating monsters to fill our stories and myths since we first started telling stories and weaving myths, and over the thousands and thousands of years humanity's been around, well, that's a lot of time to create a lot of monsters!

While there's always been a core collection of monsters drawn from mythology in fantasy RPGs, the ones that have appeared in print only scratch the surface. Whenever we start gearing up for a new Bestiary, one of the first places we go to is real-world myth and legend. Bestiary 6 is no exception. From the very first monster in the book, the blood-drinking alp, we drew from mythology to populate the book with a diverse array of critters. As the book came together, I was amused to see a few unintentional themes develop among these mythological monsters—I think my favorite is the "creepy monster with one eye." The ghole, the mapinguari, and the psoglav all come from myth or cryptozoology, and it was a fun challenge for me to make sure that, while all three are similar in theme (vaguely human-shaped one-eyed menaces), they all fit different roles in the game.

Another theme that I was delighted to finally explore in a Bestiary was no accident at all. The Wild Hunt was one of the initial monsters I had in mind for the book, and for some time was my go-to in house when folks would ask me "Are there any monsters in this book that I've heard of that aren't in print yet?" or its variant, "Are there any monsters in the book that I'll be surprised HAVEN'T been put in one of our products already?" The Wild Hunt, which expanded from a single entry into several, is a prime example—a well-known entire category of mythological monster that we've done nothing with, until now. I love what Linda Zayas-Palmer did with these things, and how the art ended up making them all look of a kind even when they include such diverse shapes as horse, hound, or humanoid.

Of course, not all of the monsters inspired by myth had one eye or were part of the Wild Hunt. Check out the following three examples as proof! And I'm eager to see if folks can pick out all of the other mythological monsters from the book in the comments below!

Illustrations by Nikolai Ostertag, Rafael Rivera, and Florian Stitz

James Jacobs
Creative Director