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Invent new monsters and/or revamp preexisting ones

101001101 said:
I think there is a monster from a Lovecraft story that is similar to that. The Worm-That-Walks is what I think it's name is. It's when a evil wizard who knew Mythos magic dies and isn't burned to ash, he "revives" as a kind of zombie made up of the worms that devoured his foul corpse.
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"Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl"--The Festival
 
People sometimes mention that's it's strange that dragons are described as breathing fire when really they exhale it, Ima use that bit of pedantisim as inspiration.

A dragon is a species of powerful fire elemental, when one is beaten in one of their frequent territorial struggles they are sometimes expelled from the elemental plane of fire entirely, those that end up on the material plane cannot survive in air, they quickly turn desperate to find or create a place with a firey enough atmosphere to not suffocate in this cold and alien place. They will start forest fires, torch citys and scour the land to keep from burning out just a little longer, most dragons only survive a for a few days of chaos after arriving before running out of anything flammable nearby and/or being hunted down. Dragons that realise they need to ration and live with a degree of cold may survive months or years, slowly turning kingdoms and forests into wastelands. It is considered better if they just rampage with all fury they can muster, at least it's over quickly then.

Attempting to fight a dragon with an army will only provide it with fuel, if there are no legendary artifacts or powerful mage orders around the most common method is for a succession of knights on horseback with heavy fire retardant leather armor to harry and distract the dragon as much as possible while the rest deliberately burn a huge perimeter around the dragon before it can or arrange a trap such as a dam ready to burst or a grouping of prepared wizards. Wooden bolts do nothing to a dragon, defenders of a city can use capapults with water balloons or ballistas loaded with solid metal bolts, it is hard to actually hit a flying target with siege weapons, let alone enough to actually kill a dragon with their semi-solid bodies but it can drive them off or delay them long enough to evacuate.

A lucky few dragons find coal veins, natural gas vents or fire spewing volcanoes that can sustain them for centuries, these will develop a degree of caution and willingness to plan ahead seldom found in dragons in their native environment. From these lairs they'll hunt for things like oil, fatty beasts and objects imbued with elemental fire that can actually feed them rather than just keep them from suffocating and freezing.

On a handful of occasions kingdoms have managed to tame dragons, but beyond the difficulty of getting these proud and violent creatures to listen few civilizations have the resources and the logistics to maintain a perpetual pyre grand enough to keep a dragon in good health making it rarely practical.
 
I don't think I have ever seen a monster like this, but it just popped into my head.

A small fog bank that can turn into a solid animal, likely a wolf. They are usually reported as individuals, because that when people survive it. Larger packs of these mist-wolves are usually quick encounters that don't leave much evidence. When they haven't fed recently they are the white/grey of natural fog, but after feeding they turn a crimson red. The red slowly pales into pink and eventually back to white over the course of a week or so.

A few alternatives to this mist-wolf idea: use a different animal (I could see mist-moose being rather terrifying); instead of one animal or a pack, make it a single fog-bank over an entire forest that manifests a variety of animals, like some sort of water/air aligned Genus Loci; instead of fog, it is a cloud of ash, with the animals coming out in shades of black and grey, riddled with cracks that glow in yellows, oranges, and reds; and finally, combining the last two with a bit of necromancy, make it a large cloud of ash that can form into multiple creatures, empowered by the deaths of a larger number of beasts in a wild fire.
 
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they are a horribly warped offshoot of humanity that use dark magic and have amorphous forms.
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Machen Fairies Grim Again

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance. To some p…
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I've seen stories with fae being homely at best under all the glamourie . . .
 
Did anyone ever think about elementals, but made of artificial materials or/and substances of present day? Elemental of plastic, or gasoline, or maybe even insecticides? Like, if elements of nature could suddenly get autonomy and power, why artificial elements in enough quantities gathered in one place for enough time cannot give birth to similiar entities? Maybe there is even some organisation, which controlls them, prevents them from appearing or destroying danerous rogue elementals, so they could not cease or destroy some important human infrastructure.​
 
I've definitely seen petroleum elementals - I think it was in that one CYOA with access to limited-range omnipotence which might have been called Immunity? It was definitely pretty cool.
 
As long as it isn't a uranium elemental.
 
I just thought about the whole world, where elementals are just part of it from the start. Like, great voids of space can produce special type of elemenals - Vacuum Elementals or Void Elementals. Giant invisible worms, which usually form in more empty parts of space in millions of years. Can be used as universal highways for fast travel, perhaps even FTL if one smart enough. Sun produce elementals, but environment and competition there are so high, and elementals produced so aggressive in nature, they die pretty fast. So it's ever boiling sphere of appearing and dying Star Elementals, the biggest and oldest ones usually sink down into the center of the sun and are more dormant, usually only 'biting' each other.

For an elemental to be born one need three things:

1. Unchangeable or predictable environment of enough size.
2. Pronounced theme of the environment.
3. And time. Different values for different places.

Usually elementals are so weak, they cannot even interact with physical world fully. These are spirits, usually they lack strong aspect association and exist almost everywhere. Process of elemental birth is mysterious one with many oddities and secret.​
This what I was thinking about. How such universe would function? What could happen? What elements could exist?
 
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Screw-worms

The larva of a special variety of flies, which were bred in the course of experiments by one crazy alchemist. It turned out that you can cross a fly and a screw if you are crazy enough and well versed in alchemy. They look like miniature screws, even have shade of metal or rust, with a head resembling the head of a screw. They usually curl into dead wood, especially rotten wood, and suck out nutrients from it, making it lighter and more brittle. Similar to dry rot. Although in the process, all other life that reproduces in the wood also dies and becomes food for the larvae: fungi, bacteria, some small enough arthropods... They are unusually hard for larva and has some pretty sharp edges - they will try to spin to cut anyone, who disturbs them. At least wood infested by them is harder to burn, or is it worse?​
 
Andre Chaos said:
Screw-worms

The larva of a special variety of flies, which were bred in the course of experiments by one crazy alchemist. It turned out that you can cross a fly and a screw if you are crazy enough and well versed in alchemy. They look like miniature screws, even have shade of metal or rust, with a head resembling the head of a screw. They usually curl into dead wood, especially rotten wood, and suck out nutrients from it, making it lighter and more brittle. Similar to dry rot. Although in the process, all other life that reproduces in the wood also dies and becomes food for the larvae: fungi, bacteria, some small enough arthropods... They are unusually hard for larva and has some pretty sharp edges - they will try to spin to cut anyone, who disturbs them. At least wood infested by them is harder to burn, or is it worse?​
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So what does the adult fly look like? :p
 
Leila Hann said:
So what does the adult fly look like?
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Oh, they look pretty much like normal flies. So alchemist just got really angry, dissapointed and threw away the jar full of these things away. It took a lot of time to combine fly and screw after all, and it was not the resut he wanted. So they kinda started to reproduce on thier own in the wild and became pests.​
 
Evil cabbage. It looks like regular cabbage, tastes like regular cabbage, moves like regular cabbage, but is ontologically evil. Any spell or technique that can detect evil detects these cabbages as evil. Any sufficiently detailed moral system also eventually concludes there must exist evil cabbages.

Legends say they can growl and shake a bit, but that has never been attested. It is not known if the sprouts are evil themselves or if the evilness develops with age.
 
bird_poison said:
Evil cabbage.
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Sometimes, very rarely one can find a newborn baby magically appeared inside of the cabbage. Don't take it to your home. I̴g̷n̸o̵r̷e̸ ̷i̶t̵. Š̶̩t̸̲͝o̸̡̅m̸͇̈p̸̯̄ ̷͙̔t̶̡̆h̴̢̚ẽ̷͓ ̷̰̈e̴̜͑ṽ̶͜ǐ̵̧l̵̻͗ ̴̗͆c̷̯͘h̶̰͝i̷̽ͅl̶̰͛d̷̳͛!̵̤́​
 
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