Dark Bestiary

Since their inception as an element of fantasy gaming, monsters have become little more than an obstacle for heroes to overcome. Even those well-thought out monsters with a complex background, story and motivation are, when all is said and done, put there to be defeated, so the player characters get their experience and return home a few levels richer. Maybe not now; maybe the monster is the whole saga’s final villain and everyone will get to fight it in an epic battle at the end of the campaign. Yet it will be fought, there is no doubt about that; if it will be fought, it is because the player characters are expecting to beat it someday. Let us face this awful truth – villains are put there so the hero can defeat them in the end, period. This is of course quite reasonable considering that adventures are about heroes (even if they stop a few alignments short of the literal term), and the creatures they destroy in the way should be there for them to reassert themselves as heroes and nothing more. After all, what is a hero if he cannot overcome a few dangers, right?

The problem lies precisely there – roleplaying games see so many of these heroes and monsters that they become routine, causing players and Games Masters alike to forget that the measure of a hero is the quality of the obstacles it must overcome. Roleplaying games feature so many of these obstacles, so frequently, that it becomes easy to lose sight of what made a monster worthy of being slain by a hero in the first place. The vision of monsters as a collection of traits, special abilities and combat tactics has only worsened the situation, causing bad guys everywhere, from tavern brawlers to ancient undead dragons, to get much less respect than they deserve.

In the beginning, way before they were made into a gaming gimmick, monsters represented terror. They were an embodiment of everything humanity did not understand or acknowledge. They were the creeping feeling under people’s thoughts, which everyone tried to deny and push down – the thought that there existed something more out there, something dangerous and horrible that does not belong to our civilized, organized and controlled world. Heroes were precisely those who dared face these monsters instead of simply pretending they did not exist.