Well, Mints is going to kill me for this, but I just got thinking about various things during work today. Y'know, pushing the very bleeding edge of what could be made for BD.
The areas I'm curious about:
-Humanoid: I remember that Mothman was disallowed, for a variety of reasons (I wonder if calling it "Point Pleasant _______" would help? Naw. Pity.) I digress. Anyways, other creatures that have me puzzled are the apelike ones that stand on that boundary. The Yeti, Fear Liath Moore (Sp?), etc. It's a very blurry line, no?
-Origins: Since the Jabberwock was allowed, what else would be? Of course, this does have to be within reason, lest people try to make monsters from Harry Potter, but would say, the original Lovecraft mythos be acceptable to draw sources from? (Namely Cthulhu?) I'm not personally attached to the space-bending brute, but I know that there are about a billion fans of it kicking around.
-Cryptidity: Would the Chupacabras be permissable? It's treated commonly as both a cryptid and an alien, but its origins are in public folklore, so it's another really hazy fellow. It doesn't help that its descriptions do all kinds of nutty stuff, so it CAN be a humanoid, or it can be just a hairless dog with fangs... Of course, since BD leans towards the more outlandish portions, I could see that being strongly discouraged, with its tendencies towards "webbed, spikey hunched over dinosaur/kangaroo/vampire thing".
One last point to discuss: I'm assuming that B-Monsters get considerably more leeway, no? Mayhaps that's where the Pond Square Chicken and Giddyfish will go when I get around to drawing again...
Anyways, I know this'll just bug Minty, but I did want to bring it up for discussion. It's a very interesting thing to bandy about, especially for those of us that straddle the cryptid/mythology line with a wide stance.
[Edited by LeeTupper on Jan 16, 2009 18:07]
[Edited by LeeTupper on Jan 16, 2009 18:12]
MintMan
Posts: 4061
Member #1
Jan 16, 2009 20:00
Apes were originally considered "man-like monsters", in just the same way Bigfoot and Yeti are described when not described as ape-like instead. If the banned features are arms and legs stickin' out of a head stacked on biceps stacked on an abdomen, then yeah, apes would be disallowed. It isn't the "Man" in the Mothman that is banned; it is its appearance as a whole.
This isn't even close to a blurry line. I thought only things like Shedu and Celphi and Harpies would cause confusion as their humanoid components are much more partial.
Cthulhu? Wasn't that dude either not described at all or humanoid? I mean, no matter how many tentacles are on yer head, if ya look like a DnD demon, that's a bit too humanoid. The idea behind the anti-humanoid philosophy in BD is to prevent things that shouldn't be pets from being pets. Y'know, animaly.
Anything Lovecraft would also suffer greatly from the fact that HP only made, like, what? 1% of actual Lovecraftian lore, the rest being vomited out by others after his death?
Jabber had the advantage of a single, incredibly official image on which to be based. And while it lacked a whole of action other than dying, it did have a lot of neighboring descriptions from which to make spells.
Potter could be a thousand years old, and I'd still disallow it on account of sucking hard. When a writing style is less advanced than folklore, no one should be reading it let alone young and non-young adults. Seeing Spot run is more riveting, in my opinion.
Chupacabra isn't legendary or a cryptid, really -- just recent stupity over how a cow's corpse bloats in the sun. Dude is, like, what? Twenty years old? That is more the realm of urban legend than anything else.
Oh yeah, then the mange-ridden dogs. No one would have ever thought "Hey, that is a monster!" more than two decades ago. They woulda thought "Hey, a dog with mange just ate my chickens!" People actually tried to invent the Chupacabra by square-pegging it into a mundane and incredibly unfantastic situation.
And for the most part, you are relying on a description of the Chupacabra which is based on poor and vague descriptions, meaning that you are making up stuff about something that was already pretty much already entirely imagined. I mean, how do you get so many varying descriptions in such a short time? Oh, right, the little-green-men fad of the nineties spurred by The X-Files. Chups wouldn't even exist if it weren't for that show and the scene-kid-of-yesterday sweating the creature on whatever the Hel blokes sweated stuff on before blogs existed.
Some point of legend or lore is needed to be a BD monster. Same reason modern-day dinosaurs are no-go.
Blutty 'el, the Auditor makes a better monster candidate than the Chupacabra 'cause at least he's awesome. And older, too.
And you are correct, B-Monsters are allowed to include things that are really there for no other reason than jest. That is why The Snake is allowed to exist. And at some later date, the Auditor.
I hate it when cryptozoology creeps into BD. While I believe that the study has much to benefit from folklore, this game benefits from cryptozoology none. It is all people trying to use the various ways internet nerds and scholars try to explain the fantastical powers and apply them to their in-game move sets.
The last monster candidate that was oh-so-troublesome, the Mongolian Death Worm, suffered incredibly from its allegedly real form, and its proposer kept shoving electricity into it. It kills through kill-power and poison, not electricity. All records clearly state that such an explanation only appeared recently, not legendarily. Use it to flesh out some techs? Sure, maybe a move or two. Make it a type and a spell. Hel naw!
And that was me saying things. * brings forth an UraniumGolem with a breastlies for old time's sake * "When no one was looking, Luthor took forty cakes. He took 40 cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible." ~ DC's The Super Dictionary
MintMan fabricates a breastlies
MintMan uses Geolem with a breastlies
LeeTupper
Posts: 158
Member #42
Jan 16, 2009 22:13
Ah, so pretty much no Primates unless they're full on knucklewalkers, huh? At least, that's my basic assumption since then, they don't have the whole Human stance going on. (Speaking of which, yeah, now that I skim the source text, Cthulhu is described as Anthropoid, at least in torso. It appears my vision of it has been corrupted by the more beastial looking ones, which are more to my tastes.)
Hmmm... Yeah, Chupa wasn't a good pick on my part. I need to go think again about a better example, since the ones coming to mind now (Ogopogo, Loch Ness Monster, etc.) are all ones with a good few centuries under their belts and a solid enough mythological/cultural background. (Now that I think about it, those songs about Ogopogo, though not exactly totally relevant, give some fun options. Mutton? Whale? Earwig? Yet again, moving on. That train of thought goes nowhere.)
So, how exactly does folklore fit into this? American Folklore is really my area of expertise in this sort of thing, to such a degree that it tends to overwhelm all other things. How would creatures such as the Rubberado, Hodag, Rumpifusel, and Jersey Devil fare? (And I'm ashamed that the Rubberado never got mixed up with the Gumbaroo in popular folklore. Then you'd have a giddily bouncing porcupine that made things bouncy and giddy when bit, and would explode violently when a picture was taken of it. That's gotta be a great tech list right there.) I'm also wondering about the Giddyfish and Whirling Whumpus. Both have a fair share of info, and some interesting stuff for techs (like half a page each that I could dig up), but have incredibly sucky names. B-Monsters, eh?
And I concur on the Cryptozoology... though I also find it annoying when they do the opposite thing, and try to justify clearly mythological beings by bringing them into cryptozoology stuff. I swear... I think I once saw a debate where some poor dumbass was trying to justify those man eating cattle of Herculean myth with dinosaurs.
* class changes to Exorcist to clear away misconceptions and lies *
MintMan
Posts: 4061
Member #1
Jan 18, 2009 13:27
Oh, right, there was something in here for me to respond to.
I say no humanoids for a reason. "Primate" encompasses a lot. I don't know of many lemur monsters, but I would not think one would be disallowed. They are more squirrely than anything else, after all.
American Folklore is typically very shallow. Only things like the Jersey Devil are popular enough to have a story evolved enough to attempt monsterhood even. The squonk cries itself into oblivion -- so what? Most lumberjack and frontier critters are only defined enough for a single spell. Most of them even just look like a normal animal, at that. I know not all of them, but most.
Yeah, definitely B-monster city. The Cockfish wants friends.
I should make a picture of Celphie holding a sign reading "You must suck less than this to enter."
