Credit: Joe Sparrow, from Dungeons & Drawings
Manticore
Credit: My Heart Beats Like Thunder by Kate Clark
Remember in the entry on the chimera, when I said that I was opposed to giving them wings because there's already plenty of winged lions in D&D?
Twist! I'm also generally anti-wing for manticores, too. I can certainly be talked into it, but good lord there are so many winged monsters. It's so extra. It dilutes the impact of facing a great flying beast, and it creates very same-y combats. Which is especially bad in this case because, generally speaking, fighting flying monsters suuuucks.
It's funny that so few depictions of the manticore include one of their most interesting features: their many rows of teeth. I guess "lion with a human face" is already a compelling enough visual on its own. But picture for me, instead, a manticore lounging up in the branches of a tree like the Cheshire Cat, riddling travelers and grinning at them, baring its terrifying smile. Creepy, right?
Medusa
I wrote a whole blog post about this monster a few years ago, so I'll just link that here. Honestly, it's probably more interesting than the entire rest of this post.
Merfolk
Credit: Sergey Kolesov
I really love this picture. Making the mermaid enormous is... unsettling, somehow? Maybe the reason Ariel is "the little mermaid" is because she was the only one who was actually human-sized.
I've only grown to like mermaids more and more as I've gotten older. When you were a little kid, they were one of the main fantastic creatures, y'know? I feel like they don't get enough love in grown-up fantasy.
Don't get me wrong, the tempting, dangerous siren makes for a good monster encounter. But of all the classic mythological beasts to elevate into an entire "society," this is the obvious choice. If I were in charge, they'd be one of the "main" races found in nearly classic vanilla fantasy. If I had to cut down the list of non-human sapient species to only 5 or so, I'd sooner keep merfolk than I would gnomes or halflings, even.
There's just that problem with the legs. I'm not sure which "solution" I like best. Allowing shape-changing under some circumstance so they can walk on land seems necessary to enable most story possibilities. But I wouldn't want to allow them to swap between legs and tail freely. Some ideas I've heard include: 1) acquiring legs only on their home island, 2) acquiring legs only when they're totally dry, 3) acquiring legs at will, but they do have a time limit for how long they can be out of the water before they "drown," 4) acquiring legs at will, but it takes a while to shift and it's painful, 5) steal from selkies and give them a "fish skin" they take on and off.
On the other hand, the difficulty of not being able to walk on land is, of course, a classic source of conflict for the mermaid. Some might argue that this limitation is key to the whole idea, and that trying to find a way around it undermines the entire point of the mermaid.
Merrow
"Aquatic ogre" isn't a bad monster. D&D 5E makes them merfolk who were mutated into this form by Demogorgon, which I like. It also says they "tie the rotting corpses of dead enemies and drowned sailors to strands of kelp to mark the borders of their territory" which is unbelievably metal.
My only problem is the name. That's just the Irish word for mermaids. If anything, I'd prefer it as the gender-neutral name for mermaids, since I think the word "merfolk" sounds fucking stupid. What, then, do we call our horrifying, demonic sea-ogres?
Mimic
Credit: Joe Sparrow, from Dungeons & Drawings
I've always thought it was weird that the mimic came from D&D, rather than a more visual medium. It makes perfect sense in a video game because they can have passive visual scenery. The presence of furniture isn't conspicuous because the game's environment is going to be populated with believable details anyway. After awhile, you take mundane furniture for granted, allowing the mimic's trick to work.
But in D&D, the players only perceive whatever details the GM relays verbally. And most GMs will typically spare you of all the miscellaneous fixtures throughout every room you enter. The second they make mention of a desk where previously they wouldn't have, it kind of tips their hand that something is up. But if they make an effort to always mention lots of mundane objects in every room the PCs enter, exploration becomes monotonous and annoying. How do you telegraph the danger properly?
This is especially important for how it shapes the players' behavior over the course of a game. If the players never suspect mundane objects of being mimics, they get punished for it occasionally and are made to feel like incompetent jerks. But if their only recourse is to probe everything as a potential mimic, it ruins the experience by turning the game into an tedious and unrewarding slog.
The normal answer, for traps anyway, is to include a clue of some kind. A subtle "tell" that the GM can include in their descriptions. Observant players who pick up on this know they only need to probe some objects as potential traps, rather than brute-force checking all objects for traps.
Again, this translates to visual media quite well. In Dark Souls, the mimics have a passive visual "tell" in the form of a subtle breathing animation. But does that work in D&D? Can you subtly mention that the treasure chest is breathing? I'm not sure what the right clue for a mimic would be, but I know that they're really tricky to use in a way that's actually fair and interesting.
EDIT: In the time since I first wrote this, I played in my friend Finn's game which contained an excellent mimic taken from The Monster Overhaul. The "tell" was that it had fur, which we immediately found suspicious, yet also just weird enough in that special D&D way that it seemed plausible for a treasure chest. Turns out, Skerples came up with a bunch of these tells for the book which I think are really solid.
Mind Flayer
Credit: me, many strange aeons ago
Once upon a time, this was my favorite monster. When I was a wee lad, first getting into the hobby, my daydream ultimate D&D campaign was going to be all about a mastermind mind flayer villain bent on summoning the elder gods into the Material Plane. So much of my earliest worldbuilding involves illithids and their different societies and goals and gods and whatnot. The second dungeon I ever made had three floors: on top was a classic wizard's tower, then below that was the aberrant lair of the illithid who the wizard had turned into, and below that was the Great Old One Tsathoggua, who the illithid had been regularly feeding. I wish I still had it, especially to see my 7th grade take on the classic "inside a giant monster's guts" dungeon.
As for a whole mind flayer-based campaign, I've given up on that naïve ambition. Their appeal has definitely been... diluted by their, frankly, ridiculous overexposure in D&D-related media over the last decade. More than that, anything "Lovecraftian" has just become so oversaturated in fantasy it makes me want to vomit. Which is a shame, since I really do love that genre deep in my heart.
In my mind, the perfect mind flayer is a singular archvillain master of their own dungeon. That said, imagining them as part of a colony of some kind, I've always wanted to adapt the movie Dark City as a mind flayer adventure. If I ever return to this monster, that's where I would start.
Minotaur
Credit: Deran Wright
This is another monster where I feel a bit paralyzed by my many options.
In classical mythology, the minotaur is a singular creature, with a very specific origin story. A really good one, too. It works particularly well as a unique creature.
But it also works really well as a type of monster, too! One that reoccurs throughout the world in some fashion. When the party explores a dungeon and stumbles into a wandering monster, it's easy to just say "there's a bloodthirsty minotaur!" and everyone knows the deal right away. I even think minotaurs make an especially potent shape for other monsters to take. Robot minotaur, glass minotaur, skeletal minotaur, demon minotaur, you name it. Ben notes that the Tauren from World of Warcraft are also pretty solid, if you want to take it even further and make them a society.
The minotaur is a great candidate for a "boss fight" monster. Something that you can make huge and scary and threatening against an entire party of adventurers. Yet I've also grown to really like the simple human-sized depiction you typically see in classical artwork. Just a regular guy with a bull's head, both more unnerving and yet also pitiable.
I reread House of Leaves recently, which may be the definitive minotaur story for me. Except it's sort of only a metaphorical minotaur... maybe? There might be a literal beast in the house, or it might be psychological. Maybe you'll indulge a little bit of analysis below, since it's fresh on my mind.
Credit: I don't know! I had a very difficult time finding a source for this image
All passages referring to the minotaur are written in red ink and are crossed out. We're told this indicates that the author intended to remove these sections from the final work, yet they've been preserved against those wishes.
My initial thought was that the author decided to strike them because those sections are the source of some danger capable of escaping the text itself and threatening the person reading it. Which it definitely seems to, based on the effect the book has on its editor! This parallels the minotaur's role as the intangible, invisible manifestation of the house's threat against its inhabitants. Remember, the house = the book describing the house.
But when reading those sections, the main aspect of the minotaur narrative the author takes an interest in is how the minotaur was really a victim of King Minos. The man who should have been its father instead chose to discard it and lock it away. It's no coincidence that the author chose to discard all sections referring to the minotaur, and the editor comes to identify more and more with the minotaur in his own mind. There's a lot of clues throughout the book suggesting that the author may actually somehow be the editor's father, at least in a metatextual sense.
Deeper than that, the minotaur seems to more broadly represent "the unknown" and even "the unknowable." The book famously always renders the word "house" in blue text. This is inspired by hypertext, as House of Leaves was originally released online. The word house appears like a hyperlink, because the titular house in the narrative contains endless depths and layers for you to progress through, breaking the normal laws of space.
Correspondingly, one can't help but ponder why the minotaur sections would be rendered in red text. Many have suggested a Biblical connection, where all of Jesus's words are written in red ink. I don't think that's it, though. Mark Z. Danielewski is Jewish, and the book is filled with Jewish imagery, theology, and scriptural references. A sudden departure into Christianity seems odd. Instead, I make the connection to red hypertext, which, of course, indicates a dead link. There should be a path forward here, but there isn't one.
And of course, the editor's descriptions of identifying with the minotaur recall to me many accounts of gender dysphoria. I'm sure many others could probably tell you more about the trans reading of House of Leaves than I could, though.
Credit: Pedro Requejo Novoa
Despite being so abstract, this feels like a very natural way to deploy a minotaur in a work of fiction to me. I think that speaks to just how psychologically potent it is. Few monsters are so thematically charged as this one, making it feel wasteful to simply throw a "basic minotaur" onto a random encounter table. They're special, the same way a vampire, a unicorn, or Medusa is special.
Modron
Modrons are very popular, but I think that's mostly due to the strengths of Tony DiTerlizzi's monodrone design. Between the cubic ones and the pyramidal one, I feel like they should each be shaped as different Platonic Solids, i.e. the D&D dice. You already own the minis for them!
Years ago, my brother was running a game I played in which featured several modrons. He based each one's personality after a different mathematician on Numberphile, which was very funny.
Mongrelman
They have the look. I like the idea of a victim mutated by wizardly experimenting. The stat block needs to be more interesting, though. The name isn't working for me, either. I'd call it a "mutoid" or something. Ben tells me that Elden Ring has something called the "Misbegotten" that's pretty solid.
Mummy
Ben has a special love in his heart for mummies. Personally, I just feel like it would be nice if we could comfortably divorce them from their original cultural context. They're practically synonymous with "Ancient Egypt," which isn't a milieu I dip into very often. I suppose the Inca had mummies. Legend of Zelda had some mummies inspired by the Sokushinbutsu. Maybe the root idea here is just "undead buried in their riches." Upper-class zombies. But I dunno, that feels like when you stretch the definition that broadly, it encroaches on lich and vampire turf too much.
Maybe the real key feature is the "mummy's curse." We should really be focusing on that part more. Most undead have rejected death, preferring to stay walking around for as long as they can get away with it. But the mummy is pissed off that you get it back up and walking around.
I also find it hilarious that mummies, y'know, mummies... aren't really a monster? Like, in real life. Unlike vampires and werewolves, mummies are a real thing. They're just a thing that looks creepy. Ergo, someone decided that they must be "monsters" in fantasy fiction, not unlike gargoyles and scarecrows. Maybe that's a strength they have over vampires. I can show my players a photograph of a mummy.
Myconid
This one is a no-brainer. In fact, I feel like WotC seems to have severely underestimated how popular these guys are, since they seem pretty under-used as a piece of IP. Speaking of which, I love how many names people have come up with for "mushroom-folk," despite the fact that "myconid" is fair game.
I don't have much more to add to the topic, but Scrap Princess does. Please enjoy one of my all-time favorite RPG blog posts.
-Dwiz
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