Showing 6 blog posts matching 1 tag: Bestiary 6
Literary Monsters of Bestiary 6
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.
Mythological Monsters of Bestiary 6
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!
Powerful Monsters
Bestiary 6 is slithering out into the world, but even though the book is out there, I've still got a few more things to chat about the contents. Going forward, we'll continue to sow off some art from the book but these posts will be more "behind the scenes" than "monster previews."
Dragons of Bestiary 6
It should come as no surprise that, in Bestiary 6, when you turn to the "D" section, you'll see some welcome and familiar reptilian shapes. I'm talking about dinosaurs of course. Who doesn't love dinosaurs?
Blights of Bestiary 6
So here's a secret about the text we create for the back cover of our books and the blurbs that go on our website and catalogs. They're usually done at the last minute by a developer who's been working on the product possibly for many months. In my case, that means I get a chance, finally, to play around with some writing of my own, even if it's only for a few paragraphs. When I wrote the blurb for Bestiary 6, I mentioned something called "strangely sentient oozes," because of the new category of ooze I came up with to include in the book. I didn't want to reveal their name or theme yet (that's for this blog post... read on for more!), but I did want to mention them in some way that felt nice to read and fun to write. And so I came up with the phrase "strangely sentient oozes," because I enjoyed the sound of the phrase; its consonance makes you hiss when you read it, which evokes in the mind (in theory) imagery of something slithering and sliding sloppily in subterranean sloughs or sepulchral sewers. See? I wasn't trying to give folks hints as to a new system of calculating intelligence for ooze monsters or trying to make folks deduce the nature of how a primordial ooze might become self-aware. It wasn't a clue as much as it was an attempt at lyricism.
Demigods of Bestiary 6
Thursday, March 23, 2017