Monsters

[alpharaposa]

Ever since the disappointment of the "How to create a monster" panel at Marscon, I've been chewing over my thoughts on the matter in the back of my brain.

The panel was a disappointment because the authors (all published) spent more time talking about various weird things they wrote about. It was interesting, but with the title of the panel, I was expecting to show up and get some pointers on how to create a believable, or at least effective, monster to entertain or challenge my audience. The creation aspect was really not addressed.

*grumble*

So, I'm going to offer some of my thoughts, and I welcome you to offer some of yours. If I can't get a satisfying discussion from professionals, I'm sure I can get a decent set of thoughts from my fellow readers on livejournal.

First things first. What is the monster's purpose?

Is it meant for a horror story? Is it a Big Challenge for a hero to overcome? Is it a plot point in a story that won't have a major role, but is important to have lurking Over There in the Woods?

What you want to monster to do and what feelings you want it to evoke help determine what you do with it. Monsters in horror stories are different from monsters in adventure stories.

Horror Monsters
Horror monsters tend to be scary because they juxtapose the ordinary with the outlandish. Vampires look like normal people until they eat you. Lovecraftian horrors from the beyond intrude into everyday, normal life. A squid in the ocean that kills by draining blood through its feeding tentacles would be interesting and a little scary. A squid of the same sort that swims through your plumbing to kill you while you're taking a shower is terrifying.

Horror monsters breach the boundaries of what is safe. Homes should be safe. Schools should be safe. People should be (more or less) safe. The one Doctor Who episode I won't watch again is the special, The Waters of Mars. In it, water itself, the thing we all need and see everyday, is the creeping killer that turns you into a monster creating more Evil Water. One drop touches you, and you're gone. Blink is another Doctor Who episode that suggests that the statues you see everyday could be alien monsters that can send you back to the past with inhuman swiftness. Freddy Kruegar makes the mantra of "it's just a dream" useless.

Adventure Monsters
Monsters in adventure stories are less about scaring people than providing a big enough challenge for the hero to overcome. The Cyclops is daunting, but we're already on a cursed voyage in the wilds of unknown islands, and the captain of the ship is the grandson of a god, after all. Adventure monsters tend to be larger than life because the heroes that fight them are also larger than life.

Most role-playing games feature adventure monsters. There is a chance that they'll kill you (and they'll probably kill your poor, less capable sidekick), but you're the hero and you have the skills and the knowledge to take it on. While there are people who enjoy playing the hapless mortal who will be consumed by knowledge of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know (I'm looking at you, Call of Cthulhu), most gamers I know want to get together and kill a hydra or two over pizza. Even horror monsters can be reduced to adventure monsters when faced by a well prepared crew of adventurers. (Vampires? I have a flamethrower, a piece of the true cross, and mirror shades. Plus, I have this handy vampire detector thing here so they can't hide.)

Plot Monsters
For plot point monsters, it's less important that we know what it is than that its domain is where people shouldn't go, or that it's the reason why people do certain things. We might never see the monster itself. What it looks like is less important than what it does. Few plot monsters are really a big feature in the stories that mention them. A good example is the shadow in Mirkwood from The Hobbit. Because it's there, Gandalf had to leave the dwarves and Bilbo on their own for a while to help take care of it. As a result, they all get into trouble with the wood elves. We aren't given any hint as to what it actually was until The Lord of the Rings. To us readers, what it is doesn't matter as much as that Gandalf had to leave for a while.

Whew... that's a longer post than I thought! I think I'll stop there for now.

Comments

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

I think that's a pretty good analysis.

I note that in my experience, pure straight-up Call of Cthulhu really isn't all that enjoyable. It can be if you massage it into an "adventure" format, such as with the Delta Green mod (the hapless investigators become an X-Files type commando team, and the nameless horrors are a little less nameless and a little more squishy). Or you can go in a dark-humor direction with the helplessness and end up with something like Paranoia.

[stryck.livejournal.com]

I can't get into role-playing in the horror genre. It always turns into something else if I try.

[drewtiggy.livejournal.com]

The thing I don't like about Call of Cthuhlu is one of the things I struggled with about White Wolf's 1st/2nd Ed. stuff as well: the characters are doomed (in the inevitable sense, not the immediate) from the onset. Whatever they do, if everything else follows the path it's on, they're screwed and there's not much hope of getting around it. That's a pretty depressing mindset to start a game under, in my opinion.