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Monsters

(Just for right now this info is for players to see, and it will end up in the Bestiary. The GM will have more comprehensive info.)

Monsters come from these places:

Fae

Weakness: iron

The fairy cultists needed teeth,
they stole them in the night.
For ritual, for altar pile—
to teach the dark to bite.

The Smallfolk

Godlings (Changeling)
Fairies (Pixies)
Redcaps
Gnomes

The Greenfolk

Satyrs
Green Elves
Dryads
Naiads

The Darkfolk

Scrael
Hags
Wendigo / Leshi
Skin Dancers
Gorgons

Undead

weakness: fire

Ghouls (zombies, create a name for each different way it formed)
Revenants (human consciousness in dead & decomposing body)
Liches (a revenant but on purpose, not decomposing)
Vampires

Spirits

weakness: silver

Ghasts

Wights (human ghosts, not malicious just trapped in a cycle/unresolved loop)

Wraiths (malicious ghasts)
Spectres (chaotic/loose malevolent forces),
Shades (used to be people, mutated evil),
Banshees (revenge spirits, might have been a person),
Shadow Puppet / Fettershade (specific kind of shade. think like Nazgûl. specifically created by people for a dark purpose)

Elementals

Djinn
Golems
Sentient goo
Elemental spirits (will’o’wisps, dust devils, ents)

Demons

weakness: Augury or invoking the divine

Demons - very powerful
Imps
Hellhounds
Possessors

Beasts

weakness: various Alchemy

Cockatrice
Griffins
Giant Spiders
Wyverns
Basilisks
Dragons (no true weakness)

Goblinoids

weakness: getting them alone

Knolls
Bugbears
Hobgoblins
Goblins

Giants

weakness: Order Flux

Trolls
Ogres
Giants

Anathema / The Cursed

weakness: different for each

Botchlings (empathy)
Kikimora (fire)
Strigga (bell sounds)
Torviches (silver)

Other

Baba Yaga
Other legends (gotta figure out which)
The Unicorn
Sea creatures
Cursed Earth
Cultists, Zealots, and other meddlers

Folk Names

Basically this is for the GM to use to hide the type of monster. It's the common folk calling the monster its local name, not its name in the player/PC bestiary.

Demons
Devils
Fairies
Shamblemen
Fiends
Phantasm
Nightwalkers
Nixies (fairy, pixie, naiad)
Sprites
Gremlins
Powries
Kobolds
Riksits
Ghosts

design notes

abandon all hope ye who go beyond here

Quinns fixes Vaesen investigations,
timestamped link to video with full context, or jump to 23:10 for the quick version. Ends at 24:20.

I'm going to steal this and it's how I'm going to do monsters.
So my game is Witchery and will involve some level of fighting spooky monsters.

Sometimes you'll have this kind of fight which doesn't require any special monster-fighting knowledge (but definitely could, like weak points or how to definitively defeat it), but most of the time you'll have something much more like this (silver is effective against it, wait til dawn and it turns back into a human).

This is also really similar to the 1 HP dragon, I've wanted to achieve this kind of monster design for a while now.

There would be a bestiary on the player's side where it gives you as much information as Quinns gives his players.
The players can only look in those sections in the game book when their PCs have physical access to books/their organization's bestiary.
(This ^ idea in particular needs consideration and may not stick around.)

On the GM side there will be the full monster info, and sometimes locals will know too because of folklore/myths (but obviously sometimes the locals will get info wrong).

HOWEVER
there is an issue with this!

It makes adding your own monsters after the game has started potentially tricky and/or unfair. If a GM has really cool monster idea, but the monster isn't in any of the players' sources, what do they do?
Adding it to their sources would be a giveaway, but not adding it to their resources could feel unfair.

(Obviously there will be GM advice on how to write monsters, and it would be easy enough to make a blank template for whatever stat blocks end up looking like.)

To deal with this, you'd do a few things:

1. Encourage the GM to reskin existing monsters. Have the locals explain the difference:
   “Oh you know people call them kikimoras but they are actually korenaks and have specific different features…”
2. Place a local expert who tells the PCs about an unknown new monster. (This does limit monster creation to: it can't be a folklore-y monster that everyone knows about.)

The important thing is to give the minimum info to the players, like Quinns did. Most of the rest of it is behind the screen, just like monsters in the bestiary.

It doesn’t fully solve the “give away what the monster is” problem. But it makes it so the players still have to do some experimenting to figure out what to do about it, which is the more important for the purposes of this game.

Then the rest of the time you can lean on the bestiary. “Oh is this a striga or a hag?”
That moment is cool & I want it! But it’s not vital (like it might be in Vaesen).

Monsters as a game focus

Monster hunting is awesome and I want that to be part of the game, especially the reward for figuring out and problem-solving ahead of an encounter.

But I feel like they are potatoes. Great to have in a lot of meals, but maybe not every meal and not as the main course.
(Eating a meal, in this metaphor, is the act of investigating. Chewing and swallowing is Conflict.)

Stealing

relevant monsters from

• Witcher bestiary
• DDB 2014, DDB 2024
• couple of Vaesen beasties
• Wikipedia legendary creatures, see also folklore by region
• A Quainte Compendium of Folke Belief
• Princess Mononoke demons

Categories would be something like...

• Demons
• fae
• undead
• spirits
• beasts (griffins, giant spiders, dragons, these fuckin' things, ankhegs)
• giants (trolls, ogres, giants)
• Goblinoids (goblins, knolls, bugbears,)
• "anathema"/cursed
  (a catch-all for human-created or uncategorized monsters— lycanthropes, botchlings, animated revenge-bent plants, magical plagues)
• Misc?

No "hybrids" that reproduce sexually— centaurs, harpies, lion people, mermaids, etc. But they are fine if they are created-abominations by humans, fae, or demons.

The more monsters there are, the more their origin needs to be accounted for. Why the F are there so many monsters in this world?
Touching the realms of fairy, hell, and undead/spirits covers a lot of ground.
Beasts, giants, and goblinoids reproduce normally. Giants from ancient past divine influence, goblinoids from some ancient past ritual gone wrong (ape common ancestor)
Anathema are typically the result of intelligent, immoral actions.

Elves & Dwarves get their own lore sections.

bestiary thoughts

ways to purchase info (with xp, contacts, gold, etc?)
Knowledge of what is unknown (it has X defense but we know it also has YZ defenses that we don’t know about)

fighting monsters

index cards or similar to indicate the clear obstacles that need to be overcome (and to track clocks)?