The Chupacabra

Well, I''m not really a radical, I guess, so there's that.

Anyway, here's the first draft of a monster entry - the Chupacabra.  In an ideal world, each creature gets its own page, including art, statblock, and description.  We'll see - I may need to give each creature two pages to fit in all of the content that I want.

I'd appreciate input on this - for obvious reasons, I keep the bestiary a secret from my players, which means that I'm the only person who's seen this, until now.

Chupacabra

“We were probin Sahargeen’s edge, tryin to see how far round she went.  One a the erlier xpaditions.  Sommat spooked the pack donkeys and they near draged the handler off wiff em.

“Jus then a big critter, wiff long spines on s back, came chargin out a the trees.  We gave chase n folowd it.  We ran and ran.  Fainly we caw up tu it in a clearin.  It had long fangs covered in donkey blood and a cupl a our donkeys lay bleedin’ on the dirt.  Must a bin scared by all of us shoutin’, cuz right then it ran out on us.” – PM

“The species colloquially called chupacabra are primarily found in flatland and hill environments, where their dun-colored skin patterns allow them to blend in with the shrub vegetation.  They stand approximately 2 yards tall and weigh somewhat more than a human male, resembling them in gross anatomical features.

“Dissection revealed both the fangs and claws of this creature are capable of wicking blood out of scratched or bitten creatures, potentially causing fatigue from blood loss.  Overall muscle density is quite high.  Presumably, the back spines are vestigial – they appear to be a hardened cartilage substance, not bone, and therefore do not serve any real offensive or defensive purposes.

“Behavioral studies are few and far between – most creature research teams are forced to put the beasts down before bringing them back to the Catacombs for full experimentation.  It would appear, though, that their pain tolerance is fairly normative, despite their fierce appearance.

"More research is also required to fully investigate the reproductive cycles and mating behaviors of this species." - TAS

Ongoing Projects

With all of my medieval music research right now, I've been rolling the idea of the cantor class around for a while now.  It'll be done when it's done - as I commented earlier, classes/trades strongly contribute to player engagement with the world because it is a momentous choice made at character creation that directly draws upon the world's lore.  While I restrict first-time players in my world to a small subset (Researcher, Soldier, and Thief) of all of my trades, my experience has been that players will draw almost exclusively from the more specific trades for subsequent characters.  Changing that pool is a huge step - even Alexis, with an entire wiki of house-rules, has not really changed the class distribution (he's rewritten and revamped most of their abilities, but all of the AD&D classes are present in his world).  So I want to make sure that the cantor provides a meaningful, new way for players to engage with my world.

This post is not about the cantor.

I have mentioned several times that I am not really playing D&D anymore - it's a new RPG that I call Prodigy.  The first ongoing project (4 years and going strong) is the creation of a book that details all of my rules.  There are hundreds of RPG books on the market already, and I am aware of the perils of being a small RPG publisher trying to push a brand-new game into an already well-saturated market.  While I will sell it, the book's purpose right now is to give me a central rules Bible that I can give to players - my version of Alexis' wiki.

The second project is one that I have not mentioned before on the blog, but has been growing in importance over the past year.  To complement my source book, I am writing a Bestiary.  Sadly, good books of monsters are almost impossible to find, and most of them focus upon truly aberrant and weird creatures that are "original."  We are living in a postmodern age and valuing "originality" is quite the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm.  While I absolutely applaud "brand new" ideas, I don't think that they are necessarily better than "old" ones.

Part of the appeal, I think, is that there are perhaps a dozen monsters that are tragically over-used by most DMs, like goblins and orcs and vampires.  They have become troped to death, reinvigorated only by new paradigms (Paizo's depiction of goblins [initially expressed in Rise of the Runelords] is quite different from Wizard's 3rd edition view of them, and it has radically changed how goblins are perceived - they've appropriated a lot of traits historically associated with D&D kobolds).  Zak S. wrote about what he calls 'countertexts,' ways to take an existing idea and subvert it, producing a completely new way of experiencing that idea, and that is exactly what these paradigm shifts are with regard to hackneyed creature concepts.

Adventures require monsters that fit into a variety of types.  This is the root of the problem, I think - there will almost always be some sort of mook enemy, whether goblins or reskinned kobolds, or whatever.  There will always be a need for some kind of trick enemy, that requires special preparation and tactics to fight it effectively.  There are only so many entries in a given book of monsters, and the reuse of these creatures leads to monster apathy.

One of the solutions is to completely abandon these older creatures and use "original" monsters.  Of course, such an approach constantly needs new monsters coming down the pipeline, and while that works for some DMs, it doesn't work for all of them.

The other solution, the one I favor, is the reinvention of these creatures by paradigm shifts.  This builds upon the cultural capital of [goblins] and [orcs] but changes how players interact with them - Joseph Manola has done this by incentivizing his players to talk with "enemies," finding social solutions to conflict.

My goal is to do that for the entire monster hierarchy.  One of the more straight-forward ways to do this is by looking at the mythic history of creatures normally found in monster manuals - defining a kobold as not an artifice-driven dragonkin creature but as an earth elemental, or a ghoul as a shapeshifting creature that devours the recently-dead.  This led me to incorporate many creatures from folklore traditions all over the world - kappa, maenads, psychopomps, tanrrilla, chupacabras, and so on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Prodigy is the absence of active Heaven-like and Hell-like constructs.  The driving narrative of most planar arrangements (the use of alternate topologies populated by creatures drawn from a common theme) tends to be that of alignment conflict, either Good vs. Evil or Law vs. Chaos or whatever.  Arnold K. does a fantastic job problematizing and destabilizing this construct, but I wanted theistic culture clash as a central theme of my world and could not easily include such a place.  Instead of angels and demons/devils, I have Sidh and Yokai.  Sidh are fundamentally magical, sapient creatures that feed off of specific psychic emanations from other (non-Sidh) sapient life.  Nymphs consume love, Black Marauders despair, and so on.  Yokai physically consume a specific body part of sapient creatures.  Chullachaqui eat femurs, redcaps drink fresh blood, shabiri steal eyes, etc.

Another method is taking traits normally assigned to a specific creature (like a goblin's madcap glee, penchant for profanity, and inefficiency) and assigning it to another creature, creating a cognitive dissonance for players familiar with the original presentation of the creature.  I'll usually take this pair and give them a strong relationship so that both sets of traits are displayed in tandem, but separated.

Obviously, creating new paradigms does not 'solve' monster apathy as a problem.  No solution that focuses upon changing the monsters will fix it, because the problem does not stem from the actual monsters themselves - it stems from how the monsters are used.  By giving each creature a more detailed rundown of goals as well as talking about their interactions with other creatures, I hope to give DMs incentive to use their monsters better.

The other major goal of the Bestiary project is in changing how people perceive them.  Every monster manual I've seen presents its information as infallible, an ideal text from which DMs derive TRUTH.  As a musicologist, the idea of any text as an authoritative document, especially one professing no bias with regard to the information it purports to share, is laughable.  Bestiaries should include wrong information.  They should be incomplete or misleading, requiring DMs to fill in the gaps.  Just as we do not accept our rulebooks as written, we should not accept our bestiaries as written.  We do this already in adding new monsters or tweaking monsters here and there, but we treat this as exceptions to the text instead of a 'proper' way to interact with it.

To this end, I present the Bestiary as Finnola Finnsdotter's doctoral thesis for the University of Reyjadin, a document compiled from the work of three other authors with emendations and author notes.  I'm appending the Bestiary's Forward, which situates the book into its fictive context, as well as the table of contents to give a sense of the project's scope.

This text is a compilation of key works detailing the creatures inhabiting the areas adjacent to the Sea of Shadows, including the Dunes, the Sahargeen jungle, Greatpines forest, the expansive Wildlands, and the Azintheen ruin of Sha’aryam. This is an attempt to synthesize prior research into a single reference document, distilled to an easily referenced size for future researchers and explorers. Primarily, this text uses Baraka al Tarluskani’s Collected Stories, Patrick MacAlan’s [sic] Jurnl Of A Jungl Explrer, and Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s A Concise Guide to the Flora and Fauna Surrounding the Sea of Shadows in 53 Volumes as sources.

The creatures within this text are grouped via apparent similarities in taxonomy and behavior, drawing from Thinker Alexandrakis Sofia’s extensive categorical system. While her methodology may seem pedantic, it is the organizational schema adopted by this text in lieu of any other categorical structures.

While the forwards to each section are my own insights into each category, the texts accompanying each entry are quotes from the authors indicated. In a very few instances, I found it necessary to emend their texts; such corrections are included in [brackets].  I also have appended a threat assessment, also in brackets, to the end of most species’ descriptions.  These values range from 1, least threatening, to 6, most threatening.

After the Bestiary, I have compiled a number of additional sections that are my own, independent research, including both a list of mythic figures discussed as well as some metadata analysis regarding the species of the Bestiary.

– Finnola Finnsdotter

This document has been submitted in partial completion of the requirements for a doctorate from the University of Reyjadin.

The Book of Hours

It's time for a brief history lesson.

Monasteries and cathedrals, i.e. large religious centers, celebrated a series of prayers every day in a sequence called the Divine Office.  The Mass (which I'm sure you've heard of) was the highlight of the day's worship, but the Office exists as a companion, with events throughout the day.  The highlights of the Office include Vespers, just before dark, Matins, in the dark of night, and Lauds at dawn.  Life in these places was centered around practicing the Divine Office.

Now, they did not use the same texts or music day-to-day, year-to-year.  Some texts were constant, but most was recited only once each year.  A number of different kinds of books facilitated remembering these rare events, but that's not the focus of what I want to talk about.

As you might know, Catholicism has a number of saints and has assigned a calendar day to each of them.  While every religious location honored these saints on their day, most areas had regional or local saints that they held especially dear (for example, Saint Martin was revered by all of France).  To especially celebrate these people, monks wrote Offices specifically for them - a collection of unique texts and music sung only for that saint.  Some of these Offices were quite elaborate and long, and (at least before the Council of Trent) multiplied until each location had their own, unique tradition and way of practicing Catholicism (and often did not follow the Pope's commands on that subject).  In fact, nearby liturgical communities would compete over who's Offices were better, and better celebrated a saint both places held in high esteem.  There's an adventure in there.  Or three.

Some really special Offices were added onto the end of every part of the Office - Notre Dame was significant in that it had at least two smaller Hours (each segment of the Office was called an Hour) following each regular one - the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead.

What I wanted to talk about specifically, though, is the book of hours, the most important book of the late Middle Ages (15th-16th c.).  The book was a contained the Hours of the Virgin and the Hours of the Dead with a whole bunch of personalized stuff thrown in the mix.  Everyone who could read had a book of hours by the 16th c., as the printing press dramatically reduced the cost of these books.  Wealthy aristocrats commissioned beautiful books with unique illuminations on nearly every page, while poorer craftsmen made do with stock images.

The basic idea was that a person at home could read along with each of these so-called Little Hours while the monks or priests or whatever were doing them in the actual religious center, bringing sanctity into the home. Those who couldn't read Latin could meditate upon the images and get the same result.

Here's where they get really cool.  People customized these things like crazy, adding in prayers they'd heard once or twice, using special family prayers, venerating saints particular to their family, and all of these required distinct, unique texts designed by the individual or the individual's family (if it was an inherited book of hours).  By that, I mean that a book of hours functions like a religious spellbook.  The texts are completely mundane, but they have a special relationship with their rightful owner and serve as a channel for that person's faith to manifest.

Especially when you start thinking about those monk-scholars I mentioned a little while ago,journeying for new chants and new prayers, this gets very exciting very quickly.

Each (Catholic) cleric begins play with their book of hours.  The book contains a bunch of stock prayers in it, standard in all books - these would be used for all of the common clerical abilities, like healing, blessing, and so on.  Then we'd have a range of unique spells/chants/prayers, from which the character would have a couple (through some sort of random table) and the rest obtainable not through level advancement but through exploration, asking people about their faith and transcribing their prayers into your book.  Looting a book of hours wouldn't work - learning the story behind why this saint was important to this family or what makes this chant special is what gives the magic its power.

This is a very different take on the cleric.  Rather than trying to shoehorn the cleric into this, or make this some sort of weird optional subclass thing, this seems like a core mechanic for the cantor.  As I procrastinate and stay up late working on my world instead of sleeping or doing 'real' work, I'll keep developing this idea.