ITT: Underrated creatures/archetypes

Just curious, what do you find interesting about gargoyles? Or chimeras, I can't tell.

Ugly Americans was a neat show, but it wasn't a good fit for Comedy Central.

Doppelgangers are not underused in my gaming circles.
They're my most hated enemy of all time. Those fuckers can ruin your reputation with incredible ease.

Eh, to me, I haven't really heard of wendigoes outside of cool horror art, some attempts at creepypasta floating about on Leddit, etc - I'd have to go dig for it.

It's a shame - there's a huge treasure trove of Amerind stories, and everyone ignores 'em. Sherman Alexie, please write moar

I'm pretty sure there were several horror movies about the concept, also that PS4 game I just forgot the name of.

Gargoyles. And it's interesting to me that they're one of the few "benevolent" monsters in western culture.

Benevolent or semi benevolent urban monsters are something I want to see more of.

Ah, I see.

Hmm, as for me, I'm not really sure, I don't think I have a monster I'm especially attached to. Maybe Skeletons. Well, I think people tend to underrate the cyclopses. They're usually just seen as dumb brutes, but there were some that were smiths and created Zeus's lightning bolts for him.

Lion-dogs seem to be more or less the same idea, but in eastern Asia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_guardian_lions

Yepp.

Zombies

Not much love for Qilin/Kirin/Girin/the Southeast ASian variants, too.

Oh, Until Dawn? imo they were more traditional zombies.

Sea zombies and all sorts of undead from the remains of drowned sailors. Sea-faring campaigns are awesome.

Leprechauns.
I have literally never seen a leprechaun in a D&D game.
>Urban leprechauns
>They fix broken electronics that are too small for humans to easily work with
>They gave up on the shoe industry after mass-production but will bust out the books if a human does them enough favors.
>The shoes are superior to anything that can be found in stores and are magical to boot (heh)

Never heard of those before. Cool, thanks.

Ugh, I've never liked zombies much. OK, "real world" zombies. If it's magic and necromancy and stuff, I'm all for it. But I've never been able to tolerate "real world" zombies without my suspension of disbelief shattering into a million pieces. How do these dumb things that can barely shuffle along pose a threat to anyone? And why do they always seems so weak unless they get up close to a human, then they can tear off arms and chomp off necks like nobody's business. And don't even get me started on "fast and not actually undead" zombies. They're not zombies, they're freaks with rabies.

>Leprechauns
So gnomes but more mystical?

More like wingless pixies with a greater knack for crafting.
As far as I've heard, leprechauns are supposed to be tiny as fuck, about the size of a soda can or smaller.
They make 'leprechaun traps' in some places that are shoebox-sized.

One of my games featured a necromancer who kept a dead leprachaun in his shirt pocket. It brought him good luck.

agreed

World War Z did a decent job. The main threat was the fact they ignored conservation of energy: An enemy that never tires, has no morale failure, and needs no logistics- most of modern warfare is attrition and logistic interruption. Furthermore the defiance of conservation of energy allows for a certian nonsensical durability. Destruction of arms, legs, or torso fails to incapacitate the enemy. You can still step on its head accidentally 150 years later and whoops, you're infected and irreversibly dead.

Zombies also have the cascade effect. Every casualty they inflict is a new recruit. That gets out of control fast. Same mathematics as a bioweapon, and plagues are scary in and of themselves.

desu? I'd like to see a scenario based on the closest thing we've got to zombies (no fungus stuff) - rabies. Like, make it as realistic as possible or even containable if caught early enough, at worst, amp it up to still realistic levels (takes a day to incubate and victims are also notably more violent).

Did they account for ongoing damage by exertion to the zombies? Humans only have our muscle recovery because we breathe and sleep and eat to keep ourselves functioning properly. A zombie that goes into a 'coma' to minimize energy use would make more sense than one that keeps going and going, and eventually they would have to eat and drink to keep their own energy and self-repair up (though they could turn on each other to suffice).
In fact
>Zombies that look like ordinary people from afar rather than rotted corpses
>Zombies that can go into temporary hibernation to keep energy costs low
>Zombies that need to eat to keep their energy up, so they become more desperate and aggressive
>Zombies that can feel pain in such a way that identifies their injuries
These sorts of things could be pretty terrifying in their own right. Imagine entering a room to recover goods and then find someone sleeping on the couch. Do you shoot them in case they're a zombie or do you risk checking by waking them up?

>Did they account for ongoing damage by exertion to the zombies?
Not him, but the only thing I've seen like this was in the Walking Dead comic, there were zombies that ran out of energy basically, so they were just lying on the ground, slowly decaying.

>World War Z did a decent job.
Go away Max

>just lying on the ground, slowly decaying.
so... ordinary dead.

>Did they account for ongoing damage by exertion to the zombies?
No. The lack of conservation of energy explicitly removed this concern in its premise for the purpose of the book.

If you account for decay, a zombie plague lasts 3 days max. Bodies decompose fast.

Not that user but more like laying on the ground groaning and trying to move but unable to

Nice quads.

Alright, because the extent to which 'energy conservation' is held in a zombie apocalypse seriously affects its expected length, like you mentioned.
I was expecting a negative on that answer but asked because it just doesn't make sense for a zombie to stop rotting halfway, if you get my meaning.

At least they got the aesthetic design right. Everyone else thinks demon deer men or Hannibal when you mention them.

In the Survival Guide book it's stated that the virus makes most bacteria and all scavenges avoid them, putting their life spa- er, death span, at about 3 years, lasting longer in the desert or arctic and much shorter in the jungle.

That is not how viruses and bacteria work

If it functioned as the bodies immune system, fighting off other infections besides itself, and maybe acting as some sort of poison to other things besides humans, then it might be technically feasible, but the main problem would be that if that was the case, it would have to be very complex and variable as to not harm the host and to be able to survive multiple generations spanning different humans.
That being said, it's very unlikely to be possible or work like that.

>Ctrl + F
>No mermaids
>No merfolk
>No lamia
>No nagas

Seriously?

>Le WWZ memery
Fucking kill yourself already

>Legend
>Classical story of "don't do this shit, because it's bad" from neolitic society

Still, wendigo is great. Grab fitting music
youtube.com/watch?v=yy5xlq5lKKE

Everybody knows. The premise is that zombies are fucking magic anyway, so a magical virus is the only answer

>I'm pretty sure there were several horror movies about the concept
(wendigos)

Ravenous (1999). It's on Netflix.

>No lamia
>No nagas

Ehhh, those are currently popular with that guy who's not a furry (or at least keeps it to himself) but always wants to play monsters. I wouldn't say underrated.

Not him, but this is 2017. At this point wanking about Brooks is not just memery, it's stupidity. Not because his books were bad per se, but because his fandom is fucking brain-dead. He wrote Guide as fucking PARODY. A joke. A tongue in cheek handbook...

... which autistic morons took 200% serious and demanded entire franchise based on it, making Brooks a hostage of his own "success"

>autistic morons took 200% serious and demanded entire franchise based on it
Would that happen to be us?

Hey, I've posted music from Ravenous, so it's not like we are unaware of it.

And currently we have "snek" meme going, so it's something. Maybe not what I would like to have, but at least it's around in some degree. I remember my GM about a decade ago where I had to explain him the hell naga is concept wise and his bewilderement how I'm planning to play with something that doesn't have legs.

>Food's scarce.
>Better curse Carl into eating forever and never feeling full, and hey, maybe he'd eat that one annoying prick. Win/win for all.

Dunno. But whenever I see someone bringing Brooks, I'm instantly assuming it's a retard who took joke serious. Kind of like people who consider Idiocracy not a high-concept screwball comedy, but a fucking serious movie about the importance of eugenics.

They did that in 28 Days Later too. They "won" because all the zombies started dying of hunger.

Not sure you understand the socio-economical reasoning for this myth. As in:
Cannibalism is bad. Eating your own people or any people at all is bad. Especially when you start killing other people to eat them.

Kind like how in most (unfortunately not all) cultures there is at least one myth why you shouldn't marry your cousin, not to mention own daughter. You know, inbreeding and stuff, but those usually wrap them in some magic hocus-pocus.

Djinn.

Never encountered one in any games myself and most went to a pretty high level.

>28 days later
>Zombies
TRIGGERED!

I know they play the role of zombies in the stories, but they are not dead and not voodoo zombies. They are pretty normal people that happen to be on constant adrenaline rush. Hence shanking them works just as good as any other way of disposing of them, including fucking gassing.

Nah, they're zombies.

You have shit GM then. Or one not interested in the slightest in Arabian Nights.

Over last decade I've got 4 different GMs. Each of them happend to use djinn more than once. In fact, one of them set entire game in his Oriental homebrew, but then again, he was doing a Ph D in Iranian studies, so... yeah, go figure

Socio-economic reasoning for this myth
More like one time the following conversation went down
>Remember what happened to Dave when we started running out of food? He went fucking nuts and killed people for food, started wearing a skull on his head and the skin of the people he ate as clothing like they were animal skins.
>That's fucked-up, man. No human would do that. Bet he was cursed or something.
>You think a demon took over his body or some shit?
>He was crazy enough and they like human flesh, right?
>Settled. Eating people lets demons enter your body and drives you fucking nuts.

To qualify, they had to be reanimated corpses. Which they aren't.

Spellswords should really be as popular as paladins. One is divine warrior, the other is his clear counterpart - arcane warrior. Dark Souls proves that spellswords are extremely fun to play.

Either way, it's a perfectly reasonable taboo with a myth to strenghten it. After all, we are talking about cultures that can transmit their knowledge and traditions in very limited way, hence myths stick better than anything else.

My DM won't run anything that isn't Low-Magic Grimdark. He's a good guy and does it well but it gets tiring after a while.

Just to do something different I'm running the next campaign and I'm having it set in a very edited version of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor from mtg. None of my players know the lore so it should be fun.

I might include Djinn in there actually because I've always had a hard on for them.

They aren't underused, you just haven't discovered who they are yet.

I liked SK's take on zombies. Evolving psychic hivemind zombies.

Undersea adventures - just immediately forget about swimming mechanics. Introduce equipment or magic that allows the characters to walk on the bottom of the sea like they do on the firm ground. Anybody who has ever dived will agree that it's the most stupid idea ever for an RPG with any action at all.

>Low-Magic
Where do I sign-
>Grimdark
God dammit. I just want to write one campaign where there's no magic but things don't constantly suck.
Or better yet, all magic is divination, enchantment, or illusion and there's a hard limit on what it can do.

Find new GM? I'm not saying you should dump your current one, but just add variety by playing with different group/at least different GM.

Which is literally repack of his older "evil alien hive mind invasion" wankery. As much as I like King, that car accident really affected him and quality of his writing. Shame.

Winged, angel-like humanoids are fucking cool and never ever a race in Generic Fantasy settings.

>My DM won't run anything that isn't his setting
>He's a good guy
Way to destroy your own argument.

In most systems magic is already balanced not to be stronger than melee combat. By weakening it but leaving it in the game you just make it completely useless.

He's really new. The rest of my group likes it as well. It's not bad and he's going to try running something different after this next game.

He's just more comfortable running it in that setting.

>In most systems magic is already balanced not to be stronger than melee combat.
By saying "most systems" you mean "in 3.X", right?

I think you should first play low magic games and then complain about magic being useless, unless you are capable of calling a meteore strike. Or games with decent crunch design.
And preferably - both.

Because right now you sound like someone who never played a low magic game/setting in his entire life, but complain about it anyway.

Yeah, but I'm in the d20 trap:
>90% of games use either a d20 system, WoD, or FATE
>Teaching everyone something else is hard as brass balls when I don't have experience playing or DMing it myself
>People who don't play non-d20 systems are generally not interested in playing
>There are generally reduced resources for non-d20 games
>People get mad when things don't work the way they're used to
>I have to constantly re-check rules to make sure I don't botch them
So I end up using 5e for anything because I figure I'll just suck it up and homerule away my major gripes with the system and the designers.

>>There are generally reduced resources for non-d20 games
The fuck that even suppose to mean?

Rest are just a basic, entry level learning and it takes a game or two, depending on what game are you playing. Either way - a fucking baby cry yet again how complex and hard non-d20 games are. This meme is getting really stale. What next? GURPS being too complex?

Grow a fucking pair. And preferably change your group, because the more you post about your GM and players, the more I'm convinced you are trapped with those people. No game is ALWAYS better than bad game.

I could say the exact reverse - I never was able to wrap my head around d20 games, because aside from rolls, everything else in them is a convoluted mess of patchwork rules that need fuckload of memorising and extensive knowledge of how to ABUSE the game, rather than play it, or you die horribly.

The original zombie wasn't a reanimated corpse though

And like I've already said, they are not voodoo zombies either, so what are you trying to pretend here?

So, basically, a ghoul or proto-vampire?

>Oh, look, an underused monster thread!
>Le d20 is better because it's easier posting
What next? Trump posting?!

Not the guy you originally argued with, but
>To qualify, they had to be reanimated corpses
is just plain retarded when the original zombie myth came from people who were in fact still alive

So you are not the original guy, but move goalpost anyway, in the same time completely ignoring the fact that, well, voodoo zombies were already adressed?

In short - did you just confessed about shitposting?

Here's the deal. I'm willing to learn new systems. But when I'm DMing for other people and it's my first time to the system, any problems I have the system blow up in orders of magnitude because EVERYONE ELSE either doesn't read the fucking book, or misses something important, and it takes five years for me to correct anything or re-explain everything to the point where it would literally be easier to run 5e because everyone already knows it.
And you know someone's going to ask for something from splatbook X, because of fucking course they will.
As someone who DMs 5e, you fucking know it. I'm not saying d20 is easier (oh hell no), it's just easier to play with a group because everyone already knows it. I've said it a billion fucking times and I'll beat the horse again. D&D is the pizza of roleplaying games. I'm sick of having pizza. I just haven't reached the point where I'm willing to give up making pizza every weekend, because it comes in a nice Digiorno's package and everyone else enjoys my DMing, and I enjoy it when people enjoy my DMing more than I wish I could quit 5e.
Plus I figure I'm just gonna end up moving the goalposts in the long run because I'm on Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums is full of contrarians.
I'm gonna get off my blog at this point, though.

>Nah they're zombies
>To qualify they had to be reanimated corpses
>make retarded statement
>get flustered when people call you out on it

>doesn't read the fucking book
Their problem and fault
>misses something important
A non-issue early on anyway
>it takes five years for me to correct anything or re-explain everything to the point
so are you retarded...
> it would literally be easier to run 5e because everyone already knows it.
... or just plain lazy?

Seriously, it all boils down to "I'm a lazy piece of shit and so are my players and we are not as much scared of leaving our uncomfort zone with a game we don't like as much we simply can't muster ourselves to do anything at all".

Being lazy trash is not an excuse for anything, you mongoloid.

Vodyanoi, and fresh-water aquatic races in general

>Join discussion in the middle of it
>Without reading previous posts
>Try to shift the blame on participants for making retarded statements
>Starting a shitstorm for no reason at all
How about you stop already?

How about you stop making retarded statements?

If you are a Slav (and I happen to be), they are so standard fare in games there is literally nothing special about them. I would go as far as calling them even overused.

One mans fortune is another man dirt or something like that

Not even the other user, but here is your (You), apparently you need them badly

Ghouls.
Not in the sense that they aren't coming up often enough, but in the sense that they are always pretty one dimensional monster/creature type 2nd row characters.

Other than that... Swamp Thing?

I lied about getting off my blog.
You're probably right, but nigh-every time I've run a non-d20 game it went up in flames due to retarded players or people just not wanting to play.
>Ryuutama (two sessions and then people got bored of comfy)
>Dungeon World (Just to try it on)
>FATE (All three times)
>MHRP (2/3 failure rate, the success was a oneshot)
>Never got to play FF Star Wars (psh, the fancy dice are so stupid, user)
>GURPS (Florida Fallout died in the first session)
>Personal 2d6 Homebrew (Died in the first session due to unexpected player infighting)
Meanwhile I'm sitting on three mostly-functioning 5E campaigns, one of which has gone for over two years, as well as two ended games: one that died off after about a year and one I ran to completion in a year.
I'm going to try a non-d20 system for my next game, but the only requests I've gotten were for D&D. It just seems to be the nature of the beast at this point.

Non lycanthrope shape shifters, like swan manes, russian firebird, selkies/kelpies, etc. etc. etc.

I understand that wizards and such can shapeshift with the right spell, but it's not the same thing. I'm not looking for super evil cursed people like werewolves, or overkill flavor of the weak like druids.

Speaking of ghouls - I miss ghouls in their original form. They are almost never used.

I always fucking love that.
Monstro town for life.

>they are so standard fare in games

Please list five or more games with these.

Which one?

I believe he is referring to the shape shifting desert dwelling ghoul. The one that essentially becomes a doppelganger of who/whatever it ate last.

Because I've only ever seen ghouls depicted as undead who lurk in graveyards.

I don't even want to play in a low magic setting because I hate the idea. I always play magic users.