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Invent new monsters and/or revamp preexisting ones

Have been thinking a lot about Mass Effect's Thorian lately.

Ya know,

More specifically, an iteration and explanation of the Thorian (or "Thoi'an"), that discusses how they would operate and basic set-up of their interstellar empire, as devised and rationalized by LogicalPremise. I don't especially care for a greater swathe of their worldbuilding reinterpretations to Mass Effect (one million different ancient competing super conspiracies a plenty and the usual Terran Empire drivel), but this idea is fun.

Essentially, a Thoi'an is what would happen if a Portugese Man o' War decided it wanted to become a fungal/floral von neumann probe. Multiple species working together to operate as a kind of superorganism, made to subsist and solidfy itself into essentially any environment it can, while influencing the behaviour of other species or consuming them — to create bio-engineered facsimiles that can act as a further instrument or component of itself. Which might sound simple enough, but explored outwards, I feel like there's a potentially fascinating and really nicely unsettling kind of alien faction or even "big bad" in that.

I just have had this mental image motivated inwards from "the Thorians as a significant spacefaring empire" of them essentially being this kind of grim, horrifying industrial force.

Monolithic ships that exist as essentially life supporting incubators for a Thorian, a terraforming vessel that doubles as a warship. They mould a part of a continent to their liking with 'rods of god', redirected asteroids, or any other number of means, and necessitate the appropriate gardening of more fertile grounds for a Thorian, and then release their spores, birthing a Thorian that will create its own progeny of sampled 'servant' races, who will mine the planet and create the necessary infrastructure to build the planet up to their own liking.

Or, they come over an enemy colony/homeworld, and fire their own spores down at the planet, subsuming them through bioweapons of their own devising, ensnaring them under their own control, and breaking down the captured cities and populations as fodder and fertile soil for a Thorian to rise out and subjugate/ensnare the world.

Alien invaders that actively subvert and terraform the world by their own existence and creep outwards to corrupt and innovate and subjugate. A kind of middlegrounds between the Zerg and the Flood, if that makes any sense.
 
An evil Leshy that's built more like a wooden golem than a human. Imagine walking through a dark forest in the fall after a storm. Dead branches and orange leaves litter the forest floor, and everything feels dead. You hear a rustle and look to the side to see a shape. It's vaguely humanoid with jagged branches forming the frame, jutting from a skin comprised of patches of mulch and rotted leaves. It's still, and you can almost believe this is some demented creation of kids with disturbed imaginations, then it moves. Branches slide in and out of it's skin with each step, and it's arms lengthen as it picks up more branches and debris from the forest floor...
 
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A creature mostly made of nerves and pain receptors. It plugs into your spine and causes you to feel the maximum amount of pain two people combined could experience, until your brain burns out.
 
Skerples' Thomas Infolded.
Thomas Infolded by Skerples said:
Straight from a nightmare I had.



Thomas Infolded is, by most definitions, a cannibal. He eats people. Technically, he infolds them. He weighs twenty two and a half tons, but he can fly.



And he looks just like anyone else.


Imagine the outline of a human being on a sheet of paper. That's a normal person.

Thomas has the same outline, but the paper inside the outline is crinkled and warped and extends backwards and forwards. There's more surface area. There's more Thomas. A lot more Thomas.

He eats people by touching them and folding them into his body. For a few seconds, they look like they're falling into his flesh, as if he's much farther away (and much larger), or they're shrinking. And then there's a ripple and warp and he's whole again.

He eats people to gain their memories and their powers. He's a polymath. He speaks most languages. He's a very powerful wizard (but keeps it hidden in his infoldings, so you'd be hard pressed to detect it from a distance).

Stab him, and fresh hearts swim to the surface. Thomas's outline is human, but the filling isn't. Not really. Not anymore.

Thomas has a lot of HP. Physical damage is irritating but rarely dangerous. He's eaten people who can regenerate; he heals very quickly. He's hard to assassinate; his infoldings have eyes in all directions. He's hard to poison and hard to trick. He can fake his own death (he's done it more than once).

It might be possible to kill him by letting him eat someone unpalatable or fundamentally unstable.

He's strong, but not overwhelmingly strong. There's only so much muscle you can cram into a human-shaped outline. He's smart, but his brains still take time to process information.

But he's been alive for a long time. He's eaten several immortals. He's not done eating yet.
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The Bird said:
Chupacabra, then? Or demonic bigfoot?
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The Bird said:
Not exactly. Early renditions of the Bigfoot tale ascribed odd powers, often otherworldly/contradictory , to it. Same with the chupacabra, of which the only consisted detail is that it kills livestock.
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Sasquatch are human. Genetically anyway.

Humans are heavily neotenous, meaning we retain juvenile traits into adulthood compared to other primate species. Another dramatic example of neoteny are axolotol salamanders, who, under artificial conditions can be induced to metamorphose into a form like the adulthood of their evolutionary predecessors.



Sasquatchs are basically the same thing, they're "adult" humans. Sagittal crest, brow ridge, much greater prognathism of the jaws, much furrier, a smaller braincase and eyes to face ratio, larger and less social, etc.

Just as iodine will trigger metamorphosis in axolotols, there's some unknown substance or phenomena with the same effect on humans and whatever it is, it can be found somewhere in the North American forest wilderness and mythological descriptions of a "curse" that transforms its victims into cannibalistic subhuman forest monsters indicate it's been there a while.
 
Warpwing: Flying monsters that live in the great interconnected caverns of the underworld, warpwings are large predators named for their signature ability; they can warp space around themselves.

Physically they vaguely resemble a dragon, with slender scaled bodies trailing a long tail, large fanged maws and batlike wings. However rather than legs they have six long, powerful tentacles along their underside, and their head is eyeless. Their wings are heavily built and well armored, as they are not built for flapping in the air but to aid in maneuverability.

This is because the warpwing doesn't fly via conventional propulsion; rather, it uses its spacial manipulation abilities to affect local gravity so that it "falls" in the direction it wishes to travel. Warpwings seldom land, they simply float in their own personal bubble of zero gravity when they wish to stop or rest. Their dependency on gravity manipulation for movement does limit their ability to use it offensively; in fact one of the few times when they land is when they intend to attack an opponent gravitationally.

Perhaps their most spectacular use of spacial manipulation is to distort the local spacial metric; altering the shape of local space to make it larger or smaller as desired*, as well as doing something similar to themselves. This is key to their ability to freely fly through the underworld; narrow tunnels and low ceilings temporarily become large and tall enough to let them fly though them without hindrance. They also use their ability to temporally warp the effective size, shape or length of their own body parts as needed. And, they constantly warp the space immediately around themselves defensively, rendering them very hard to hit and making themselves appear to be a constantly twisting and distorting shape, disorienting to look upon.

* Yes, Vista of Worm did partially inspire this idea.

While blind, they have sense related to their ability to warp space that lets them "feel" the local shape of space and the matter filling it. This renders conventional stealth and even things like invisibility useless agaisnt them; however, it also means they can't perceive energy effects without touching them. As a result melee weapons are nearly useless against them since they'll sense the weapon coming and warp space so it fails to make contact; but they'll blunder right into things like fire, much less lightning.

As warpwings age, their ability to warp space not only becomes stronger but becomes broader in application. A "Young" warpwing has the basic abilities described above. An "Adult" warpwing can not only do so more powerfully and precisely, but can fold local space creating short-range portals it can reach or travel through. And the feared "Elder" warpwing can not only do all that, but temporally "slide" out of normal space entirely and back in at a desired location; teleportation, effectively. Worse, as it can still sense the world as it travels outside of it, the Elder can choose to appear at a location granting it guaranteed surprise; the first warning of the attack of an Elder is likely to be something like it appearing with its mouth over the head of a victim, already snapping shut as it manifests.
 
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Imagine Drow "dragon riders" with pet Warpwings! :D

Also a new monster :)

Ribbon Reavers: Criminals that were mummified alive, their souls trapped in the enchanted bandages. Unless the bandages are burned with the proper rites (or propery disenchanted), they cannot enter the afterlife, instead remaining trapped in their coffins with only their own dead body for company. Until someone foolish opens the coffin, that is. There are obvious warning signs, albeit the language has long been forgotten by the locals.

The trapped soul is able to control the bandages via telekinesis, to levitate it and cause poltergeist effects - and can possess any living body it touches. This does not free the soul, but a stolen body is better than none, especially after thousands of years of sensory deprivation - for their coffins are impermeable even to their spirit senses. Suffice to say, most of them have gone insane, and often forgotten the limits of living bodies, causing them to seek replacements after their latest body died of thirst, hunger, overeating, alcohol poisoning or exhaustion. While they share the sensations, they cannot truly enter the body, remaining in their ribbony prison until it is destroyed. While it is possible to heal their psyche, neither their current state nor their past experience are conductive to it, and it can take them decades and centuries to even regain sapience.

Those freshly freed by unlucky grave robbers are minor threats - while they have the fury to possess bodies, their souls are no longer used to it and they shable like the risen dead and attack like wild animal. Those who have been around long enough to relearn abstract tought however are a dire threat. Most of them are still criminals, and possessed of a burning hatred against even the descendants of their former empire.
 
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A while back in here I said it'd be interesting to do with werewolves what Peter Watts did with vampires but I had no idea what that would look like.

This morning it occurred to me that you could fit werewolves into the Blindsight setting as a sibling species of vampires:

- Split from vampires shortly after the critical mutation that rendered them unable to synthesize their own protocadherins. Parallels the human/Neanderthal split: vampires were the southern warm-climate-adapted branch, werewolves were the northern cold-adapted branch.

- Reverted to being furry as an adaptation to the cold. Or possibly they were relatively human-looking in warm weather but would grow an insulating coat of fur in cold weather and this was part of the origin of the idea that they were shapeshifters.

- Were chubby muscular bruisers in contrast to the lean gracile build of vampires. Possibly this was related to their hibernation being more primitive so they had more need to fatten up for it like bears.

- Had even bigger and more powerful jaws than vampires, giving their faces a muzzle-like aspect.

- Had inferior night vision to vampires, probably lacking a tapetum lucidum. Instead, they evolved to use hearing, smell, and echolocation (like a bat) to hunt at night. Relatively limited night vision caused a noticeable preference for hunting on nights of the full moon. They had the crucifix glitch but less reliance on vision meant it was less of a problem for them (on the flip side, their more blatantly inhuman appearance would have made it harder for them to "blend in" to human societies).

- Had the same supergenius sociopath-adjacent obligate people-eating serial killer thing going that vampires did, though given differences in ecology, senses, etc. there were probably some differences in detail.

- Had a system of long-distance communication by sound. Much of the information in these signals was outside the range of human hearing, but the "carrier wave" signal was audible to humans and to human ears sounded similar to wolves howling.

- Used techniques similar to the ones Valerie uses to implant seizure cues in Echopraxia to "hypnotize" humans. A werewolf might stalk a chosen victim for months, slowly implanting a hypnotic command. Then when the human was alone and vulnerable they might approach and give the trigger stimulus, causing the human to see them as another human (often as a friend or loved one), at which point the werewolf could simply walk up to them and smash their head with a club. This "hypnosis" could also be used to move among humans to gather information, to trade with humans if that was desired, etc.. This was the main part of the origin of the idea of werewolves as shapeshifters.

- Werewolves being the cold-adapted variant suggests the Americas likely had werewolves but not vampires, as Beringia would have been werewolf country. Shades of Twilight lol.
 
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I dunno if they've been brought up before, but there was an indie horror game that had a very interesting premise that I've never really seen in other games before.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTvwQBZ691A

namely, that keeping yourself in the dark keeps you safe. light exposes you and all the monsters disguised as furniture in the dark can find you and kill you.

It got me to thinking how many horror games tend to make you feel like staying in the light is safe, and makes you scared if it's dark, etc. but what if there was a monster out there that conditioned you to think of the dark as being safe while the light was unsafe?
 
Makes sense if they can't see you in the dark either.
 
Oh, an extension of my Blindsight werewolf idea:

It occurs to me that if werewolves made it to the Americas the Pacific Northwest "Bigfoot" might be a historically recent or even still existing remnant werewolf population. If Bigfeet are actually Blampire-like supergenius predators specialized to hide from and hunt humans, it'd explain a lot about how such large creatures manage to stay hidden in the age of smartphones while living in close proximity to a highly developed area.

Other famous cryptozoological large ape-like humanoids like the Yeti might also be remnant werewolf populations in this scenario.

If you go with my interpretation of what Divide and Conquer is, modern vampires might be quite interested in meeting such a remnant werewolf population; if anyone could teach a modern vampire how to tolerate being in a room with another of its own kind, it'd be these still-wild cousins who still have a functioning culture of their own. Would be an interesting idea for fanfic.
 
Keeper: A Keeper is a supernatural humanoid, in their natural form looking much like a very tall attenuated monochrome human; with elongated limbs, neck and digits, black hair, chalk-white skin, and completely black eyes. Their natural gift for illusion however means this form is seldom seen.

Their most prominent gift, the one that gives them their name is the ability to supernaturally claim an area as their "domain". This feat requires uncontested residence for some weeks as a baseline, but can be accomplished much more swiftly by symbolically claiming ownership; legally acquiring title to the property works nicely for this. Once they properly claim their Domain, the longer they reside there the more power they gain over it. After the initial successful "claiming" of a territory, each stage takes progressively roughly a week longer; a week for first stage, two for the second stage and so on.

The first ability they gain is a general awareness of everything within their domain, increasing over time until they are constantly aware of everything within it. The second is the ability to draw personal strength from their domain, becoming much stronger, tougher and quicker within it. The third stage lets them teleport to any point within their Domain at will.

By the fourth stage, they can exert their will to slowly reshape their domain, within its nature. That is, if their domain is a house they can make doors, walls and furniture appear or vanish, but couldn't make a tree or the like appear as a tree isn't part of a house. While if they have a forest Domain they can make trees and undergrowth appear or move, but couldn't make artifacts; while in an underground Domain they could make tunnels and the like. A more varied Domain therefore increases what they can do with this ability. They also gain the ability to control non-sapient beings that live within their Domain, and "influence" but not outright control sapient beings that choose to live there (merely being there isn't enough, a sapient has to decide to live there). At this stage they generally try to acquire whatever creatures seem appropriate as defenders.

At the fifth stage they can distort space and time within their Domain; time pass slower or quicker inside than outside, making regions bigger or smaller on the inside, making doors and openings connect to non-adjacent points and so fourth. And in the sixth and final stage they can at will teleport from anywhere outside their Domain into it.

Keepers are both territorial and acquisitive. While not innately hostile, this tends to cause them to at the very least try to drive out trespassers into their Domain, and the more ruthless ones may attempt to kill trespassers to acquire their goods. They aren't stupid, however; a Keeper living in a house in the middle of a town is going to be far more subtle and careful about how they go about such matters than one who has taken over some abandoned castle in the wilderness. And they almost always will use creatures, traps and tricks rather than direct confrontation to deal with intruders.

Keepers can be negotiated with, however; assuming one realizes they are there and what they are, which can be difficult between their illusions and avoidance of personal confrontation. At its simplest this can simply be a matter of apologizing for the intrusion and offer up a valuable item as a tribute in return to being allowed to leave safely; such an offer will usually be accepted and honored, unless the Keeper suspects the result will be the intruders coming back with a force powerful enough to destroy them and/or their Domain. At the other extreme people have been known to offer up dangerous or accursed items with the request that the Keeper prevent others from accessing them, an offer the Keeper's acquisitiveness usually inclines them to accept. Some Keepers have even been recruited as guardians for your classic "sealed evil", and given a Domain encompassing said evil under the condition that they extensively fortify it and strongly defend it.

Notably this pattern of behavior often results in a known Keeper's Domain being a regular target of thieves and adventurers trying to steal or recover items the Keeper has acquired. Keepers generally regard this situation someone philosophically; while irritating, they tend to gain at least as much loot from fallen adventurers as they lose from successful ones. Many treat it as a game or sport, with rules of fair play as long as the intruders don't actually try to do something like set fire to their Domain or find and kill the Keeper themselves. An example of such rules would be not changing the shape of their Domain on an intruder who is playing by the "rules" themselves, and refraining from dog-piling them with every creature under the Keeper's control.
 
Seerling:

Seerlings are tall, attenuated, androgynous humanoids whose most noticeable difference from most humanoids is their lack of eyes. They also lack ears, but as they typically have waist-long hair that's not as noticeable.

Their biggest differences are less visible, however. Seerlings have extremely powerful extrasensory perception; clairvoyance, precognition, postcognition, telepathy, and so on - the origin of their name. They are also completely non-sapient, and in fact have essentially no intelligence at all - because they don't need to think, not when they can see.

Seerings don't learn, not even basic motor skills; they simply reach out with their minds and see what has to be done. They don't learn how to walk - they see how anew with every step; they don't know how to use tools, but build elaborate dwellings anyway because they see how to do so. They have no understanding of language, yet can hold entire conversations because they can see what the effects of those words will be. The capacity to learn and think that other species possess is in their case replaced with the capacity to perceive a torrent of extrasensory information far beyond what other mortal creatures can handle.

This by the way is part of why they are classified as "monsters", rather than people. They perceive and they feel; but they don't think. They don't plan, or understand, or reason; they perceive and they react.

Seerlings care about their descendants, their own welfare & comfort, and occasionally creatures or things they find likeable or interesting; in that order. However as their perceptions are nearly independent of their own time and location, the cause and effect of their actions is difficult to impossible to determine. They constantly perform apparently meaningless acts that will have an effect far away in time and space; a Seerling might act out of a desire to protect a descendant or compassion for a human they've taken a liking to, but that human or descendant might not even be born until a century after the Seerling's own death. Distance in time or space means little to them.

This is the other reason they are classified as monsters. While usually not directly dangerous and occasionally even helpful, they are reacting and acting on things that can't be perceived by others, for effects that can't be predicted. And on occasion they will suddenly act with violence, typically for no reason a non-Seerling can perceive. And in combat they are incredibly dangerous as they use their Sight for that as they do for everything else; and even if they lose, it can be safely assumed that their loss occurred in order to achieve whatever vision the Seerling had rather than any skill of their opponent.

Seerlings have a distinctly uncanny valley aspect to their appearance and behavior, acting almost but not quite like people. They wear clothing, but in a patchwork of styles as each piece is made or acquired independently from the other. Their homes are constructed apparently with great skill, but are a mishmash of apparently random construction styles and methods that somehow mesh into a structurally sound whole; even a single room is likely to shift material and style more than once across its length as the Seerling draws on random perceptions drawn across time and space to create its dwelling. And they are constantly doing apparently random things, including saying things that can be anything from apparently meaningless to shockingly revelatory.

Unsurprisingly attempts to exploit the Seerlings' perceptions has been made, to uneven success. Attempts at coercion have consistently either failed entirely - it's difficult to capture a precognitive who can foresee and act to evade your attempt before you were born - or succeeded while resulting in disaster. Almost certainly because the occasionally Seerling foresees that letting itself be captured and questioned will lead to a great enough disaster to discourage future such attempts upon its descendants.

Attempts to tap into the perceptions of Seerlings more directly have generally been confusing at best, and usually fails painfully. The torrent of extrasensory information a Seerling absorbs every moment is overwhelming to any more normal creature, causing confusion or sensory overload at the attempt.

The most effective method has generally been the simplest and most straightforward; simply bring a gift for a Seerling, typically food and the odds are fairly good that the Seerling will do or say something useful for the gift-bringer. Doing is a method of encouraging further gifts obvious enough that one doesn't need to be a Seerling to foresee, after all. The main reason it isn't a common practice is the danger that the Seerling in question might instead unpredictably do something dangerous, if the results of doing so will in some future no one else sees outweigh the immediate value of the gift.
 
How can they like things if they're barely sentient, though? Or is that not really what's happening?
 
I had an outline of a related idea to what @Avernus describes:
Silent Optics said:
At the far end, there are beings that don't even think or sense anything like we do, but just instinctively know how to minimise the difference between what happens and what their narrative says will happen.
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These beings would be more tied to narrative causality, but this may imply a degree of precognition. One implication might be that their apparent intelligence scales with the opposition arrayed against them. A demon that can outwit and torment a few teenagers in an abandoned house becomes much more dangerous when taken into a government lab patrolled by armed soldiers.
 
Leila Hann said:
Very Blindsight. I like it.
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Hmmm, Blindsight was likely a subconscious inspiration, but the thing that sparked the idea for them was a discussion in another thread a while back on the nature of the Force from Star Wars. Basically, how the Force seems to have a will and influences the universe, but no thought; it is connected to everything and takes little heed of time and space, and so it complexly manipulates and influences the galaxy with direction, but without planning or thinking. Because it doesn't need to plan or think, not when it knows everything.

If I were to put Seerlings in Star Wars, I'd characterize them as a species that is so strongly connected to the Force that they never developed sapience; they simply act as extensions of it, letting it serve as a replacement for thought. "Don't think, feel".

GuesssWho said:
How can they like things if they're barely sentient, though? Or is that not really what's happening?
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They are sentient, but not sapient; sentience is having subjective experience and emotions, sapience is thought. Thus our species name, Homo Sapiens.
 
Shouldn't say 'no intelligence at all,' then, that sounds more like ants.
 
Photogenic Hound

The silent alarm of a bank in ████ was repeatedly triggered, however nothing was stolen and when security arrived there was never any sign of the intruder. Until they checked the security camera footage and saw a creature. And it hadn't left, camera footage of the room showed the creature present while people actually in the room saw nothing. Consistently. The Hound can only be perceived by artificial means. Cameras, microphones, security systems, automatic sliding doors, etc detect it, human eyes don't and it walks out of the way when people try to touch it. Unclear if the Hound actually exists as a physical creature or some kind of bizarre photobombing computer virus inserting CGI clips into footage and if there's more than one of them. Potentially, they're actually quite common, but most places don't have sufficient camera coverage for us to notice.
 
Vanta Moth, bleeding shadow (Scoliodori Erebae)

Unique member of the order lepidoptera they are large manta-shaped, nocturnal, predatory moths with a wingspan ranging between 18 and 25cm. The most salient features of Scoliodory Erebae are its peculiar dark and sound damping coating and it's diverse diet.

Scoliodori Erebae is covered in fine coating of specialized scales and nano setae arranged vertically in a way that create a hemispherical reflectance of 1.2% and significantly reduce flight sound. These traits support its predatory/parasitic lifestyle.

Scoliodori Erebae feeds on insect hemolymph and blood of small mammals it hunts and drains with its proboscis. They are also opportunistic parasites on dying and injured bigger mammals.

Rarely and triggered by unknown factors Scoliodori Erebae can engage in swarming behavior resulting in what are colloquially known as "Devouring Nights" where incredibly large swarms of moths blot out all light and engage larger prey in an uncharacteristic feeding frenzy. The forced evacuation and regurgitation of this continous intake results in the characteristic "blood drizzle" that covers surfaces following a devouring night.
 
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