D Monsters at the Opera

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Credit: Graphite Prime

Welcome to the D's. Demons and dragons will get their own posts. This one is crowded enough as it is.

Dark Creeper

Yes, the image is evocative and interesting. But doesn't it just look like, y'know, a thief? The suggestion that this thing is a creature of some kind is very intriguing. Patrick Stuart's rendition of "thieflings" seems to understand the idea here. It's the kind of thing that exists as a "monster" in the imagination of a child. It's like something that would be the bad guy in an episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Darkmantle

Ben just prefers this to the cloaker. Creepy deep sea creatures are great monster fodder. This was the original stalactite mimic before the roper was retroactively made into that. It still works in that role. Instead of shooting ink, it shoots magical darkness. I like that a lot. Overall I think this is a good addition to the underdark ecosystem.

Death Knight

Being a lich is a consequence. It required a ritual of some kind. There's an explanation for a lich. But there's no need to explain the Death Knight. I mean, come on. Paladins who are made undead don't rise as mere zombies. When a legendary evil warlord dies or a great knight has their soul destroyed or whatever, they are taken by dread power. They become a boss fight. Just look how much mileage Dark Souls gets out of these. I went as a "death knight" for Halloween in the second grade. Had I ever seen a D&D book at that age? No, I hadn't. But even at 7 years old I intuitively understood "knights = awesome, undeath = awesome, knight + undeath = way more awesome."

Derro

The drow were a good idea. In classic D&D fashion, they took a good idea and made it kinda dumb. "What if every overworld race had an underdark equivalent?" And for some reason, the dwarf gets... two?? So yeah, since one of my biggest complaints about the monster manual is just redundancy, it doesn't get any worse than the derro and the duergar. I think duergar are way better (see below), but "derro" is an infinitely superior name.

Thankfully, both Pathfinder and Patrick Stuart salvaged these guys by reworking them into a pulp fantasy equivalent of the classic conspiratorial "grey alien." The translation into the fantasy genre works remarkably well. It helps that the underdark is full of aberrations, helping it to fulfill a lot of the tropes that would normally go with outer space.

Dinosaurs

God I fucking love dinos so much. You guys, I really love dinos. Like, I still like dinos in the way that a 4 year old likes dinos. Ben likes how Akira Toriyama does it: they're literally just animals in that world. Either that or go with the Hollow Earth and fill it with dinos.

Disenchanter

Well it's definitely not, uh, cool. But it works for what it is, I guess. I just wonder sometimes who felt like there was such a scarcity of existing cool and interesting creatures that they needed to start coming up with stuff like this.

Displacer Beast

Very far on the pulp end, but not the kind of pulpy that really does anything for me. I'm not entirely sure how this guy achieved "classic monster" status. In fact, it's one of the handful of trademarked monsters in D&D... which is weird since this one was actually stolen directly from another work, unlike the beholder and umber hulk.

Extra legs and tentacles are distracting from the more powerful root idea here: ethereal cat. Final Fantasy recognized the compelling thing about the coeurl, and I must say that this painting by artist Erik Olson inspires me quite a bit.

Djinni

I really like djinn, mostly because I really like Middle Eastern folklore. But for that very reason, I have a hard time bringing myself to use them in anything outside of, well, Middle Eastern fantasy. Centaurs and manticores made their way into the medieval Western European imagination, but djinn have always been pretty firmly rooted in their native cultural origins.

D&D does the classic D&D thing of stripping away most of their details and cultural ties and replacing them with some generic 20th century high fantasy silliness. It's a big disservice. Basing them around elemental subtypes is both lame and unnecessary. But at the same time, most of their substantive details are tied not just to Middle Eastern folklore, but specifically to their role within Islamic mythology (mostly through some hadiths, I think. Not so much the Quran).

I guess we use angels and demons in fantasy worlds all the time, so it shouldn't be that weird. Djinn can simply be the "neutral-aligned outsider" to correspond with those two, since they possess moral agency just like humans (unlike god-serving angels and sin-tempting shayatin). Still, hard to bring myself to include them in a scenario if I haven't also done the diligence of blending in lots and lots of other Middle Eastern influences, too. It's like if you're in Middle Earth and all of sudden a sphinx or a coatl is thrown in there. It sticks out by itself.

Doppelgänger

I already have a blog post about these, as they're one of my favorite monsters. They are an entire genre unto themselves. But I only considered them as a game object, a level design construct. Not as a story with lore.

D&D has a history of giving them a sci-fi flavor, much like the aforementioned "grey alien" inspiration for derro. I like the design in Dragon's Crown where they're transparent and you can see all their inner organs and bones. But I feel that might be the wrong angle of attack. Something about it is spoiled by having a "true form." I'm more inclined to make them literally just come from mirrors. Evil reflections and all that.

Dragon Turtle

Giant turtles are good. Turtle islands are good. Making it draconic is unnecessary and takes away from the joy of turtle. If you really need to complicate turtles further for some reason, lion turtle is way better. Not to mention that it feels a far more appropriate rival to dragons.

Dragonne

The name is unbelievably bad. But the image is good, and I will happily accept this in lieu of draconic manticores and chimeras. But can I instead talk you into... Gajasimha??

Credit: Prasanna Weerakkody

Drider

I don't think anyone has ever drawn anything as obviously cool as this. Their place within the greater tapestry of drow worldbuilding is pretty good, but I encourage you to find a place to include human-spider centaur monsters even if you aren't using Forgotten Realms dark elves. You can even give it a name that doesn't suck: Arachne.

Credit: ugh Google's reverse image search got nothing. I ran it through another one but it only found a deactivated DeviantArt user called "kakolukia24"

Drow

No other fantasy creature breeds spinoffs and variants quite like elves. It's a proud tradition going all the way back to their origins in Norse mythology. As long as there have been elves at all, there have been "dark elves" of some kind. And for all their edginess and cringe, I admit I have always really liked D&D's take on the idea. Few things are so delightfully, purely evil as the drow. They're on a level with Sauron or Maleficent.

Of course, as a general rule I tend to set aside the worldbuilding that feels specific to the D&D brand. Chromatic and metallic dragons, demons vs devils, that sort of thing. So as I see it, the two main threads to follow here are 1) Underworld elves (think like the Falmer in Skyrim), and 2) spooky haunted forest elves (what most elves should be anyway, honestly). There's plenty of good ideas to plunder from drow for both of these ends. The real question is: which one inherits the spider stuff?

Credit: Anna Ignatieva AKA maruhana-bachi

Dryad

There's a particular category of monster that is nearly universal in human folklore: evil temptress. Succubi, sirens, selkies, nixies, vampires, kitsune, kishi. Most of these are just "woman wants you and that's bad" because men have a lot of weird hang ups about sex and even more hang ups about women. I'm not a fan of this trope, although I'll concede that there's some value in using stories to warn young folk about, like, smooth-talkers. Or, uh, STDs I guess?

Modern fantasy fiction has always lumped the Greek nymph into that category, which is... wrong. Nymphs don't pursue, they are pursued. They mind their own business. It's typically the human who becomes the monster when a nymph is around. Their intended role is to serve as minor nature spirits and servants to deities, almost like low-level angels or demons. It's a shame, then, that D&D reassigns them to an already-oversaturated (not to mention somewhat problematic) category of monster.

Oddly enough, the ancient Greek nymph already had a very nerdy taxonomy, with a terrain-themed scheme for subtypes (dryad = tree nymph, naiad = water nymph, oread = mountain nymph, etc.). You'd think D&D would be all over that. Instead, it takes the two words that Gary probably knew, divorces them entirely, and reduces one of them to just "seductive fairy" and the other to "seductive plant."

Ben says he'd rework it based on the Alura Une, a blood-drinking sexy plant monster from Castlevania inspired by a German horror novel inspired by the sexual superstitions regarding mandrake roots. I definitely dig this.

Duergar

Despite what I said about derro, I actually do really like "evil dwarves." It's a pretty easy prompt to work with. The reason I think that duergar have never seemed to resonate with D&D fans the same way as drow is because, well, 1) their names suck, and 2) their lore kinda sucks too! They're pretty much just "dwarves, but mean" plus maybe some stuff about psionics and slavery (both of which are already everywhere in the Underdark anyway so it's not exactly distinctive). And to what end? D&D's answer is "to serve demons." That feels like a cop out.

The classic dwarven vice is greed, which is easy to make evil. But their focus on labor is also pretty easy to make evil. A society built on slavery. But like, chattel slavery or debt slavery rather than slaves taken from war. If dwarves were inspired by the Hebrews, duergar are surely the pharaohs. This gives you an insight into their motivations for building. Dwarves are driven to build for largely the same reasons as us humans. They value fine craftsmanship. But for duergar? It's pure mania. Obsession, ego, maybe even paranoia, forces them to constantly build more and more monuments. Pyramids, obelisks, arches, towers, statues, everything. The need to finish the project justifies any atrocity, any tyranny, simply for its own sake. And when one project is done, they immediately move onto the next one. They're a nomadic society moving at a glacial pace, leaving behind abandoned structures everywhere they go.

Another one of the more sinister qualities of dwarves is the rigidness of their minds and culture. Taken to its extreme, maybe duergar society is like the worst, most confusing, most complex, and most evil bureaucracy imaginable. Nothing makes sense, everything is unfair, there's endless layers to every process, and corruption is rampant. As an extension of that, I'd like to imagine that the typical duergar dungeon, or even duergar settlement, is a literal maze. Like their default way of organizing space is a labyrinth, as they need to rework reality to fit their twisted, byzantine minds.

-Dwiz