Credit: Mike Mignola
Lamia
The traditional depiction of Lamia involves snake parts in some fashion, typically a human woman upper body and a snake lower body. It's a classic monster from, stolen for Medusa by Harryhausen and the Marilith in D&D and the naga in anime art. Everyone loves a lady with a serpent tail.
That said, I can understand if someone thought that D&D already had too many snake-based monsters in it. But there's no way you could also claim it needed another lion-based monster. Seriously?
I've heard that the D&D version instead takes inspiration from this depiction in the 17th century book The History of Four-Footed Beasts, by Edward Topsell. Here's a link to an excellent scan of a 1658 printing of it, with the Lamia on page 352. I've reproduced a couple passages below:
This word Lamia has many significations, being taken sometime for a Beast of Lybia, sometimes for a fish, and sometimes for a Spectre or apparition of women called Phairies. And from hence some have ignorantly affirmed, that either there were no such Beasts at all, or else that it was a compounded monster of a Beast and a Fish, whose opinions I will briefly set down. Aristophanes affirmeth, that he heard one say, that he saw a great wilde Beast having several parts resembling outwardly an Ox, and inwardly a Mule, and a beautiful Woman, which he called afterwards Empusa.
...
Plutarch also affirmeth, that they have exemptile eyes as aforesaid, and that as often as they go from home, they put in their eyes, wandring abroad by habitations, streets, and cross ways, entring into the assemblies of men, and prying so perfectly into every thing, that nothing can escape them, be it never so well covered : you will think (faith he) that they have the eyes of Kites, for there is no small mote but they espy it, nor any hole so secret but they finde it out, and when they come home again, at the very entrance of their house they pull out their eyes, and cast them aside, so being blinde at home, but seeing abroad.
Like Medusa, the Lamia is both female and yet also frequently bestowed with mixed sex characteristics. While you were staring at the hilariously-displayed boobs in that illustration, you had missed the spiky penis underneath, see? "The monstrous androgyne" is a very old motif, thankfully pretty absent from modern fantasy.
Yet it's not like we replace the old stuff with anything good, either! Reducing that mesmerizing medieval description to just a "lion-woman centaur" is so fucking lame, man. Lamia, both as an individual mythological figure and as a category of monster in medieval folklore, is so rich with gameable details that it's kind of astonishing D&D could drop the ball so hard. As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of any monster that eats babies and/or children. But the stuff about pulling out her eyes? That's a fucking adventure hook right there. "Steal the eyes of a lamia from her lair."
Leprechaun
Credit: Vincent Coviello
I'm afraid that leprechauns have been permanently tainted by pop culture and are now unusable. It is irreversibly cartoonish, mascot-like, and silly. And kind of racist, if we're being honest. What was once a type of fairy somehow just became "stereotypical Irishman caricature." What are we to do with this boy?
Leucrotta
This is the perfect example of a monster that's hard to imagine and hard to draw and that's holding it back. As a monster, it has the interesting trait of mimicking human voices, which I guess makes it something more than just a beastie. But still not enough to be worth using.
Lich
Hey, why the hell doesn't D&D brag about this more? It's weird to me how rarely anyone acknowledges that this monster is totally a D&D original.
Yeah yeah yeah we all know Clark Ashton Smith used the word "lich" or "liche" or whatever to refer to a corpse or something. But using it to refer to a "powerful undead spellcaster" comes from D&D! They protect the mind flayer and beholder and even shit like the umber hulk as precious IP, but they just gave the lich to the whole world to enjoy for free. It's gotta be one of the game's single biggest contributions to popular fantasy fiction, and yet it isn't associated with D&D in the same way that the beholder is.
Think about the three biggest fantasy properties of the last century: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and let's say Game of Thrones. You know something they all have in common? The main villain in each one is a lich variant. Sauron? A deathless Necromancer whose mortality is bound to a sacred object. Voldemort? The most blatant lich ripoff imaginable. The only thing Rowling didn't steal was making him a skeletor, probably because having skin was necessary for the whole snake motif to work. And the Night King? He's just a lich with Fighter levels.
I'm not claiming that D&D created the idea. But they deserve credit for giving it a name. Recognizing it and codifying it. Don't get me wrong, it's better that each of those three works presents its villain as a "unique" entity. But if you had to meld them all together into one form, the distillation of pure fantasy villainitude, you'd get the lich. That's something powerful.
To me, the biggest downside of the lich is that the classic, vanilla version is so iconic, it would almost feel hackneyed to use. No matter what you do, they'd just end up being Xykon from Order of the Stick. You gotta do some kind of subversion.
Say hi to St. Valentinus. Catholic saint relics make for such good lich imagery.
Locathah
Continuing my theme of opposing the proliferation of humanoid species, we have a perfect example of a completely superfluous race that serves only to bloat the roster of an already-unfocused fantasy milieu.
Properly speaking, "aquatic person" is a niche I feel you only need to fill once. And in classic fantasy, the time-honored mermaid is sufficient. Adding on top of that fish people, shark people, squid people, dolphin people, gilled people, "sea elves," etc. is gratuitous. Each one has to work pretty hard to justify itself. I've previously said some nice things about the kuo-toa, but only because I feel like they did the work. But this? A second fish person, almost identical to the kuo-toa, but more boring? Come the fuck on.
(Chronologically, I think the Locathah might actually pre-date the kuo-toa in D&D. But even with its head start, it still managed to fumble. Kind of a hydrox / oreo situation.)
Lizardfolk
So it continues. These are somehow less interesting than troglodytes, yuan-ti, and dragonborn, all of which it's overlapping with. Just another "vaguely tribal unga bunga warrior-race" humanoid. They shouldn't be hard to make more interesting. Warhammer and The Elder Scrolls both have quite good lizard-people.
One time Mr. Prismatic Wasteland and I created a setting together, and it featured a tribe of lizardfolk in one area. They lived in a region that was the corpse of a dead god, a swamp of flesh with trees of bone, rivers of blood, and a wayward spinal column rampaging through the land like a massive worm. The lizards lived in the teeth of the god's massive skull, and were led by a xenophobic archon, who relied on a (often deceitful) oracle as his translator. Like in D&D, our lizardfolk were all about hunting and eating. But we made it about more than mere survival, instead treating the hunt as a sacred cultural ritual.
A lizard youth journeys to the humming swamp to complete their rite of passage, attuning to the natural rhythm of the earth. Swinging from vines, leaping from treetops, or gliding through its waters, they become one with their swamp. But they're forbidden from eating during a hunt, required to bring their full kill back to the God-Head to be rationed out fairly. They would sooner starve to death on a barren hunt than break this taboo.
I think our original material is pretty solid. Makes me enjoy lizardfolk just a teensy bit more. And yet, reading back through all this, I still can't help but feel like... like this could be improved 100× over by swapping out "lizard" with "dinosaur."
Lycanthrope
This seems to have been a dumping ground for furry races that, for whatever reason, someone didn't want to make into a full race. There's an alternate universe where D&D did get ratfolk, boarfolk, and bearfolk, yet the lycanthropes include the werelizard, werehyena, and werehippo. It seems pretty arbitrary. Half of these, I'm not really sure how the idea is enhanced by being a human shapeshifter.
Bear shapeshifters have pedigree. Berserkers from Norse myths, Beorn from The Hobbit. Classic fantasy stuff. But tying it into werewolves kind of dilutes the idea, to me. We're taking the bear-skin viking barbarian guys and mixing it in with a disease that involves the phases of the moon? That's a whole different thing!
Meanwhile, when it comes to werecats, it's not hard to find sources on the internet talking about "wereleopards" in Africa, "weretigers" in India and China, and "werejaguars" in Mesoamerica. Are any of them substantiated? Most of them seem like bullshit to me. When they do come with some verifiable details, they seem to just be describing a shapeshifting creature or character that has little else in common with lycanthropes. The rakshasa is a more authentic "weretiger" than this.
Of course, this is yet another result of applying a "fantasy ecology" framework onto mythology. It's not like they're actually trying to incorporate those monsters from other mythologies. They're just swapping out wolves for every other zoo animal and calling it a day, bloating the Monster Manual with more stat blocks.
Credit: Darkest Dungeon
The thing that speaks to me about werewolves is the idea of a "beastly curse." Something that damns you to devolve into a violent rage demon. The "wolf" part may be a little arbitrary, honestly. The abomination in Darkest Dungeon is maybe what this would look like if you distilled the idea into its purest form.
But hey, I like wolves. Who doesn't? It's cool that there's a single, specific animal that came to be associated with accursed wrath. I can only speculate as to why it was this animal and not some other predator. But I suspect it may be for the simple reason that, in Medieval Europe, getting attacked and killed by wolves was a very real danger.
In the actual middle ages and early modern period, werewolves were most associated with witchcraft. It's been argued that the witch trials were primarily motivated by a patriarchal consolidation of power, a classic backlash justified by "moral outrage" (which I think we're all quite familiar with). But maybe another factor, on the small, individual, personal scale, is just people coping with those fucking wolf attacks. It seems only natural that someone victimized by such a traumatic event might project their experience onto the people they dislike, wanting to attribute some kind of blame for such a senselessly violent ordeal.
Reading through those wiki articles, I especially like the account of one accused werewolf that he received his "wolf disguise" by a mysterious "man in black," presumed to be the Devil. Enough with lycanthropy being spread by bites like a disease, I say. Let's bring the Devil himself into it. "Beware the charming stranger offering free wolf skins during the cold, dark winter. You may pay a price you cannot afford."
The full moon thing is a modern idea, originating in Hollywood. Most myths instead feature people either being turned into a wolf permanently, recurring every few days, for a one-time period of several years, whenever its nighttime, or even just "at will." I am down for any of those, but I also quite like the moon addition. Not only is it something that players expect, but it's also a very evocative and tangible rule they can work around.
One of the problems with the full moon thing is that you're only really a monster for a small portion out of each month. A vampire is always a vampire, a ghost is always a ghost. But a werewolf is basically a normal guy the vast majority of the time. Makes it seem like a monster of a much lower caliber. One of D&D's more interesting ideas is that "you only have to turn during the full moon, but if you embrace your curse and stop resisting, then you can learn how to shapechange at will." Makes the evil werewolves a lot more formidable, a threat actually fit to rival vampires or witches.
The movie An American Werewolf in London also finds something compelling to fill in the time between full moons. The werewolf is haunted by the ghosts of all his victims. Because he killed them, they cannot pass on until he's dead. So, naturally, they urge him to commit suicide. All the time.
They also mention the idea that a werewolf can "only be killed by someone who loves them." The movie seems to treat this metaphorically, but I think it would be really interesting to see that treated as a literal rule.
-Dwiz
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