Where do monsters come from in your setting Veeky Forums?

Where do monsters come from in your setting Veeky Forums?
Do they have a unified origin or are they just random?

From ur mom

Depends on the planet you are on. There is a lot of different origin stories for each creature. Just normally it's kind of hard to solidify which is bullshit and which is real.

Semi-unified. There's two major sources of them, but it basically boils down to dangerous animals that sprung up more naturally, or the servants of an evil god.

Among sapient races, there is a roughly one-in-five chance of newborn children possessing some sort of abnormality. It might be their skin, or their limbs, or their extremities, or any combination of details of their body. They are fundamentally different from their parent race not only in body but in mind as well. While they are capable of sapient thought, they lack any sort of empathy for any being that does not also possess their condition. Some instinct compels them to shun their parent races and bond with their own kind instead. When these mutants breed, the result is inevitably another mutant, possessing more sophisticated mutations than the last. After several generations of breeding among their own kind, these lumpy wretches become something no longer recognizable as humanoid, such as ropers, trolls, ettercaps and other things.

Different cultures throughout the world react to this phenomenon in different fashions. Some put them to death upon birth without mercy, while others consign them to slave labor and a life as chattel. In some cases they are cast out in the wilderness to live as beasts, out of pity for their state, while others seem that as something greater than baseline humanoids, putting them on pedestals and worshiping them as creatures touched by the gods. Yet for every culture, there are also deviants - those who smother their mutant children rather than suffer the social stigma of birthing such a monstrosity or those who raise them in secret rather than subject them to a cruel fate.

There is no known origin for this condition however, nor is there any explanation for how it occurs. Each religion has its own name and origin story for them and there's a dozen different magical theories yet ultimately, it is a mystery and every child that is born is a roll of the dice.

I try to incorporate them in a "fantasy fauna". Most monsters are just animals and behave like animals. Why should a goblin be considered a 'monster' and an alligator just an animal? They're both ugly and dangerous. They should both be considered just monsters or just animals. Some creatures, though, the ones that come from other planes, are beyond that, so they're considered demons or something. And no one knows their origin.

>goblins
>ugly
Fine.
>alligators
>ugly
YOU SHUT YOUR FUCKING WHORE MOUTH!

Hmm... I would cut a lot of the mental affliction part for the first generation or two. Make it more that they don't really find others of their races without their mutation atractive. After a few generations the result does become increasingly reclusive and lose desire for interaction with the unmutated.

You need the first generation though to make the choice harder. If they all are amoral killers, executing them at birth makes sense. If they are just kinda wierd at first it is a real moral dilema.

A monster is any non-sentient creature that goes out of its way to menace and attack other creatures in and outside of its ecosystem for reasons that are not natural. Signs that you may be dealing with a monster are:

> An inordinate number of the creatures kills are not consumed or used in any way.
> The creature is actively destructive to its ecosystem and/or environment.
> The creature demonstrates a willingness to go above and beyond what would be expected of a predator in pursuit of food, such as a willingness to scale fortified walls to kill those living within or attacking powerful creatures when easier prey is clearly available.
> Persistence to the point of recklessness.
> A willingness to incur injury in order to attack others.
> A willingness to fight on even having sustained wounds that would cause a normal animal to abandon its hunt.
> Any behavior that can be construed as "cruel" or "malicious" on the part of the creature where a rational explanation for the behavior can not be found.

I essence, a monster is just an animal that can be said to act out of malice instead of any identifiable natural instinct. As such, any animal has the potential to be a monster for any number of reason but the most common are madness, curses, or mutations brought on by exposure to large quantities of negative energy.

Nothing intelligent enough to explain its reasoning is considered a monster. Those are just bad people.

That crocc is so cute

The four crystals that govern the forces of nature, the World Seeds were placed on the moons of Emla to terraform them and seed them with life. These crystals contain the accumulated knowledge of the Praacheen who created them, and designs for creatures they created, including the people who now inhabit the moons of Emla.

However, in ancient times, long before the Praacheen passed into the celestial realm, there was a malevolent arcanist among them who corrupted the crystals for his own designs. The inhabitants of the moons call those centuries the Age of Fiends, when their burgeoning civilizations teetered on the brink, until finally the arcanist was imprisoned outside of time and space and his vile influence on the crystals was broken.

Monsters still exist, distant descendants of the monsters from the Age of Fiends, but they are feeble imitations of the mighty creatures and in much smaller numbers than the hordes that once threatened civilization itself.

Monsters are

>Fallen divine beings
>People who have committed such evil that they degenerated
>Creations of more powerful evil beings

I'm thinking of working on a campaign inspired by Geneforge, where the players will be shipwrecked on an island containing ruins of a laboratory where Shaping was first discovered. The players will become the first true Shapers in a long time and create so many lovely abominations.

In my current setting, generated by the true goddess of magic because she really fucking hates people using magic like it's electricity.
So every time magic is used chaotic energy is generated that eventually forms into monsters.

No offense, but your goddess of magic seems like a cunt.

They lived long under the earth, haunting caves and abandoned mines. Waiting for the chance to strike when the things above were weak again.
They venture out sometimes, and delight in the flesh of the humans. Creatures so utterly delicious to them that their consumption is orgasmic, addicting.
Just their scent is enough to make their mouths salivate and their guts to kick into overdrive just in the expectation of that taste again.

The God of Evil. All monsters worship him, and he made all the monsters through rape, incest, and general grossness.

All sorts of places. Some are merely part of nature, some are cursed or corrupted beings, some are divine punishments or mistakes, and at least a dozen species of monsters spawned from the curse of the giants.

Does a monster stop being a monster if they renounce him?

A mix of leftovers from the divine experimentation that eventually resulted in angels and demons as the setting knows them, standard issue a wizard did it weapons projects, and anything that's been exposed to the beating heart of raw chaos that's been steadily oozing into the planes after the last major magical apocalypse. Usually life that comes into contact with that raw chaos just dies, but anything that survives the contamination is bad, bad news.

Also man. Man is the real monster.

I mean, wouldn't you get kind of pissed every time some autistic wizard thinks he's found out a clever 'loophole' in the system you've made in order to do something dumb like enslave an army of small elementals just to have them till fields and haul crops to market?

Its her magic, why can't she give it out as she chooses and punish people who try and make perpetual motion machines?

They're either just pissed off wild life or the product of genetic engineering and magic gone wrong

>and at least a dozen species of monsters spawned from the curse of the giants.
Tell me more.

>having a unified origin for monsters
>having no origin for monsters
Both of these are stupid.

>Where do monsters come from in your setting Veeky Forums?

Normal animal sex, normal plant sex, curses, undead plague, magical construction, forgetting what your soul looks like, and SPACE.

>Do they have a unified origin or are they just random?

Not directly, no, but about 95% of the settings original pantheon was killed during the Titanomachy, with the Titans winning a pyrrhic victory. So, consequentially; the settings contemporary pantheon is composed almost entirely of "Mother(Father) of Monster" God(esses) who've allowed the world to remain wild, savage, and absolutely slathered the place with dinosaurs, dragons, and other such monsters.

So you've got a bunch of Monster God(esses) who're eager to please; clumsily trying to learn 'new celestial trades' so they can apply for new worshipers circles while spending all that sweet prayer on monster conservation.

What? How?

The Giants were once the greatest of all races. Stronger, smarter, longer-lived, tougher, all of that. Their only weakness, food consumption, was solved by the fact that they were the first to invent agriculture.

Though scholars disagree on exactly who (or what) put the curse upon the Giants, nor do they know how it was done, the curse-maker certainly foresaw that this great race would rule the world if left unchecked, choking out all the small-folk. And so the Giants fell under the curse that a pure-blooded giant would never again be born.

This was first observed when the queen of the giants, expecting a child, simply doubled over one day, and shortly after, the first troll tore itself from her body, born with evil intent. Numerous other beasts were born, some a mockery of their parents (such as ogres) and some simply abominable.

The Giants, with their population only going down, diverted a whole lot of resources to curing themselves of this curse, and failed horribly. Their failures birthed yet more monsters, which also accelerated their population's decline.

Now, they're believed to be extinct, though a few exiles might still exist. Their vaults are a home of beasts now.

How many of them have figured out that mortals will worship you merely for keeping your monster pets out of the place they live and work?

monsters are different. they should come from many different places, not one.

Well that depends, if for example, the focus of the campaign is to fight aberrations invading the Material Plane, one would think that all the monsters would come from the Far Realm.
On the other side, if you're running a horror campaign, leaving the origin of the monsters intentionally vague could help to add to the sense of mystery.

No, but they would break the cycle of reincarnation and spirit bondage the evil God puts his followers through. They would live their last life in peace and repentance, and after nobody knows. Pretty hard to find acceptance among humans, and they may just become a rogue monster group, no less cruel but no longer serving their Red Father.

I go with the Silent Hill route in that they're manifestations of traumas, fears, anxieties, guilt. Their shapes are largely symbolic and abstract.

Most are just magically dangerous creatures. But the really spooky ones were created when a group of angels decided that they're worth being worshiped by mortals as gods. At that period, some creatures ended up being born, like centaurs. But then god showed up with his archangels and killed, imprisoned, or relegated them.

For the ones that "died", their spirit roams the earth, and sometimes corrupts and creates monstrosities.

They're former humans who got corrupted and transformed by the tortured soul.

Things we would consider monsters in our world are fairly standard flora and fauna in my setting.

Wolves the size of Moose with a limited ability to walk on their hind legs and their front paws have longer digits (and thumbs) giving them limited tool using ability while domesticated version are even capable of limited speech. Carnivorous trees who use pollen that can cause illusions to trick animals and people into exhausting themselves to death making it easier for the trees to drag the bodies back to the roots and Sea lion like creatures that will actively predate on humans.

That said, most monsters are actually created or called in some way or another usually some kind of construct or biological horror like a frankenstien's monster or homoculous or calling demons or torturing trapped souls to turn them into evil spirits that attack living things on sight.

They are entities from other worlds and dimensions. Reality itself does not permit them to access the world of the setting, but they bypass it through various loopholes so they come out twisted and monstrous

Abberations (and a lot of corporeal undead) are the result of incursions from Lovecraftian outer horrors that swim in the infinite dark outside of the realm, who whisper promises of power and eternal life to madmen and warlocks (and mad warlocks).

Fey type creatures have escaped from/been brought from an umbral Dream Realm common to all sentient minds.

A lot of the monstrosities are the results of the Three Beast Kings, animal spirits of the Cult of Thirteen that stole powerful magics from the Lords of Necessity, made themselves into demon-gods, and warped their human and animal followers into weird shit like Naga and Manticores and the like.

Plant and Beast type monsters are either primeval creatures dating back to the earliest times, and have been empowered by primal sites of natural power and/or tended by witches.

Incorporeal Undead are simply spirits of the once-living, who occasionally venture out of the Shadowlands because of some intense connection to the living.

I don't have non-human races outside of Ice Gnomes, a reclusive and primitive race from prehistory and the Time of Giants.

The Giants and Trolls are gone, their slain forms are the mountain ranges. The occasional volcano is the dim echo of their furious spirits, and the Elementals are the ghosts of their once absolute power in the time of Ice and Fire.