Sometimes while browsing the internet or flipping through a fantasy book I see something and I think "that's neat, can I work that into a setting?" The following is a list I made of random stuff that struck a cord with me. I want to be perfectly clear that the vast majority of this stuff was all someone else's ideas. A few items have comments in blue.
-Metallic dragons are fully bipedal, Chromatics are partial bipeds/quadrapeds
-Cave creatures: can climb, have claws, blinded by light
-Bound outsiders, produce different effects based on type
-Crystalline creatures created by a plague; Elemental evils involved
-Flesh plants: plant creatures made of meat
-Miniature (>6 inch) fiends and giants?
-Weredisplacer beasts, Wereorcs, Weretreants
-Nocturnal template: light sensitivity, low-light vision
-Primitive template
-Prismatic/rainbow creatures; prismatic castes
-Quadrepedal mutants: general form of horse/lion, elongated torso/neck, paws instead of hands
-Quadrapedal Succubus turns into beautiful horse or livestock to lure mortals near
-Elder beasts: Animals almost as old as the world itself; sapient and capable of speech
-Demi-"Gorgon"
-Enchanted creatures exposed to too much magic/fey
-Efreeti...forbears of Tieflings?
-Evolved magical hiveminds
-Endless twilight swamp plane home to hags and other muck-fiends
-Madness Giant: crawling, many-faced, chaos servant
-White Beast: infused with sacred energy, guardians of nature vs undead
-The dragon concept always sat right with me, because I always pictured Malal as this daemonic ouroboros-like monstrosity mixed with a hydra: Constantly eating his own tail to swallow himself whole in an endless, suicidal loop, but every now and then spawning new heads to consume himself in even more twisted ways while also ensnaring everything around him in a chaotic maelstrom of pure, chilling hate. One anonymous poster's version of Malal, a now-retconned Chaos god from Warhammer.
- (OC) Intelligent, giant golden crocodile demands tobacco or meat for passage through his swamp Inspired by part of the Bangles' Walk like an Egyptian (gold crocodiles oheoh/they snap their teeth on your cigarette)
- a "young" world, one that was created in living memory. In the beginning there were no steel weapons, no written language, and only a few generations’ worth of history.
-"Good people are like extremely rare gems. They are something to be highly valued."
-Chimeric Chimera: an eight-headed creature with five dragon heads, two goat heads, and a lion head (kind of like a mutated aspect of Tiamat). The lion head is in charge, though the other heads offer opinions and try to assert authority from time to time. The dragon heads span the evil chromatic types for interest; if you're a purist you can give it four green heads and a red head.
-The golems and other animated guardians created by the ancients simply remained at their posts, patient and silent, awaiting new orders that would never come. Eventually, the elements wore down even these ancient constructs, and their bodies fell apart from disuse.Yet so strong was the binding magic that anchored the animating elemental spirits to these ancient golems that when the bodies died, their elemental "souls" died as well -- yet they did not return to the elemental planes once their bodies wasted away. Still bound to a body that no longer existed, these disembodied elemental spirits transformed into strange undead known today as golem remnants.
-Poachers and hunters are naturally drawn to certain creatures whose body parts are valued as trophies. Unfortunately, beasts that are slain by hunters sometimes rise as undead monsters cursed to forever stalk those who inflicted such a distasteful end upon them.
-What at first appeared to be a fast-moving cloud of volcanic ash resolves into something far more terrible. Thousands of burning bodies and blackened skeletons tumble and roil in the cloud. The unliving bodies emit a constant thunderous scream, as if a volcano had learned to wail in agony from the fire in its core.The necroclasm is one of the largest forms of undead; fortunately, they are limited in range to the volcano that spawned them. One of WOTC's old Far Corners of The World monsters.
-A large, brass chest, large enough to be a coffin. It contains the corpse of whoever opens it. This effect is similar to the clone spell except that the clone comes out dead. The corpse has all the same scars and body markings as its living counterpart, but it does not have any clothes or possessions. The chest can be used to produce an infinite number of corpses.
-Reptilian variants of races: were they created by interbreeding, gods, or dragons?
-Insectoid variants of races: see above
-Winged variants of race: ditto
-arctic apes worship evil ice deity
-vampires based on the egyptian god Shezmu; Lion-related rather than bat-related
-Fetid Heath of the Death Giant Overlord A pastiche of the classic D&D Giant modules I was wanting to make for All Flesh Must Be Eaten
-"I wish that I was the sultan...that I was always the sultan!" Supposedly the original version of Jafar's wish from Disney's Aladdin. I like the paradoxical situations it creates, such as a sultan existing before the nation or even the city did.
-Each has a unique name and when this name is spoken, the creature is released from the ___ and immediately makes its way to to the speaker of the name. It's sole purpose is to kill the speaker and return to the ___. Part of a monster description from an old AD&D netbook. The monster didn't impress me but this part did.
-Blinded Medusae/Gorgons are immortal, hunt by scent.
-Giant that bleeds snakes Pretty sure this one came to me in a dream. I don't know how it works.
-1945-1960. The sudden rush of magic into the world means that a whole new arms race is just beginning, and the fear of Red Witches is everywhere.
-Ant-Mimicking Spiders are weird. They look like ants. But they're spiders. And they go into ant colonies all incognito, and eat ants when no one is looking. So do that, but have them be Human-Mimicking Spiders. Don't ask me how that works. It just does.
-You could do GIANT ANTS that Anteater-men hunt for their meat and carapaces
-Demigods who embody ideals: not immortal
-BatMonkey Vampires devolved from bigger vamps
-Gang war between two gangs of intelligent weapons.
-Planetoid on fire: inhabited by salamanders, mephits, etc
-Cult/sect seeking to combine specific gods into a single entity
-Essential words for fantasy languages: to, from, above, below, beside, son (of), daughter (of), man, woman, hill, mountain, tree, bear, river, forest, plain, desert, meadow, canyon, great, big, small, dry, wet, [colors], N/E/S/W, horse, city, village, dangerous, fire, wind, water, rain, cloud, holy, cursed, peace(ful), famous From a very good article in Dragon magazine.
-Am-heh, "eater of eternity" "devourer of millions", dog-headed demon-god of the Egyptian underworld
-Hezur, deified baboon/reincarnated ancestor. Egyptian.
-Erlik, bear/pig/man god of evil, death, and the underworld. Turkic/Mongolian.
-Whiro, eats the souls of uncremated dead, grows stronger, threatens to break out of the underworld. Maori.
-Ancient frog deity served by frog-men and frog-things
-Witches can't affect clerics or genies (djinn/efreet) Just an interesting tidbit from Dragon magazine
-"Gnolls"-Troll/Gnome hybrids Chainmail-era Gnolls seem more interesting than the hyena-men we got later.
-Green and red monkeys: reds are lust monsters European bestiaries are pretty whacky.
-"Troglodytes": maned apes
-Multiple Camelots (or other archetypical/mythic realms...Atlantis?) reflecting a different facet of alignment/mortal emotions. Specifically cribbed from an old AD&D website but this idea has shown up in other places too. The Atlantis spin is an original idea donut steal
-Elementalist cults that worship evil elementals
-Black gods (Olmec) vs White gods (Aryan): Obsidian Giants vs Pearl Giants? From a pseudoscience website run by a Russian geologist. I almost immediately discarded his original racial schema in favor of shiny space gods inspired by Jack Kirby's comics and DC's Millennium Giants.
-Petrification as fantasy equivalent of cryogenic sleep
-Shamen wear skins of monsters to prove their mastery over them
-Aaatxe: the evil storm-bull
-Abhiyoga: Spirits of rain and darkness
-fire+earth+water=clay; metal+water=rust Just fleshing out elementals a little more here. I made a much longer list as well.
-Bardha: white-skinned, underground-dwelling elves who demand cakes and sugar
-Bes: Dwarves + lion ears/tails. Evil
-land of the dead is literally in the west; land of the gods is literally in the east
-Army of severed undead hands
-. . .an expanse of earth that has been scoured of all fertile soil . . . No ground can be seen, however, because obelisks and pyramids occupy every inche of the surface. Beneath and inside these structures lies a series of catacombs and passageways that are likewise crowded with statues and sarcophagi.
Pretty sure this is from Deities & Demigods or another 3.5 splat. It's Set's realm.
-Greek gods were limited. They couldn't go back on their word. They couldn't change another god's work.
-Naga with an Illithid head
-Lightless seas and the evils that dwell therein
-Drug-using witch cult with super shrooms
-Snakes/slugs with prehensile forked tongues but no arms
-One of the gods is actually a goddess
-Mystic pyramids that keep sand at bay
-Conical pyramids that are the tombs of a legendary alchemist
-Egyptian hobgoblins
-Lawful god vs chaos god This and the next five things are original content. Yay me!
-Chaos god is associated with cats, night, darkness
-Lawful god is associated with frogs/salamanders/amphibious reptiles, day, sun
-Dragons are creations of the Lawful god and are amphibious
-Most cultures worship the Lawful god
-Most cultures hate cats but there are superstitions that prohibit them from directly killing/harming cats
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