What are some interesting things about deer that I could make a monster out of...

Deer skull as a helm is always an option.

/thread

FOE, FOE, FOE

This is what most herbivores do to get their calcium fix.

This goes from small critters to the big ones.

Before a deer's antlers finish growing/hardening for the year, they are covered in fuzzy skin, complete with blood vessels.
As the antlers finish growing and become pointed, deer scrape this coating (Google term: "deer velvet") off by rubbing their antlers against trees and stuff.
Sometimes you'll see strips of bloody skin hanging from small trees. Sometimes you see pic related.
In real life, some people eat this stuff, some people use it as a dietary supplement.
No idea how you can base a monster on this, but the idea of bloody strips of skin hanging from antlers is pretty metal.

Awesomely horrifying desu.

The deer is but an unwitting host to the horror that is the death tick. Preferring the rich blood of carnivores and omnivores, the death tick has evolved to only ride on herd prey such as deer, attacking it's prey as they feast on a fresh kill. Slowly crawling onto, and often enough inside the mouth of, the predator eating the deer. Before long, they find themselves covered and engorged with the offspring, eating their way out from the inside.

The actual Native American wendigo wasn't a deer; that's Hollywood talking. The original legend was just a ghoul that was created when humans cannabilized others.

My group wound up with some deer that were more than deer after some regular ass deer were kicking our asses too much. Examples include humanoid deer with boxing gloves, deermancers, and recursive deer exploding into more deer.

Yeah, "cannon" wendigos looked like a grey emaciated figure that brought an aura of cold with them and grew with age.

Often they would gnaw their fingers, lips and shoulders in their hunger.

...

...

The deer often eat the velvet themselves.

Maybe you could make some kind of crazy "dire deer" that grows antler-spikes out of its spinal column and has to rub off all that velvet, making it look like a bloody, stringy mess for a while. They look innocuous in the winter, have fuzzy buds in the spring, in summer they go full metal, and in fall they look like some angry buck raided a hunting lodge and stole all his buddys' antlers back, and is wearing them to seek revenge.

>just a ghoul
who could run so fast their feet were consumed and turned into blackened stumps
who also brought the cold of winter wherever it went, and breathe cold air

a gigantic king of the forest who is a white magical deer with a literal crown of horns

...

watch "The Ritual"
it's on Netflix

Surprised no one mentioned that Faroe deer kill and eat birds while they sleep.

Make them a nature spirit, like a deer but somehow...wrong. Deer work really well for this because they have this sort of regal, innocent look to them that has a good impact when perverted.

Basically make a less cliche unicorn.

Make 'em big.
Irish Elk were fuckhuge, and ask anyone who shares an environment with them how little you want to fuck with Moose - who are fairly closely related.
Sharper antlers, large herds (moose are solitary, most deer are not) and increased aggression can all make big deer a fair threat.

And if you want to make them a part of a wild hunt or something similar, or as elven cavalry.

No that was Blackwood's fanfiction.

Same way they made monsters out of rl wolves: have them want to kill people in the setting

Undead Great Irish Elk.

they're a lot like bigger dumber rats

I saw it the other day and loved it!

This. It was kinda amazing. The fact that Keith Thompson designed the thing adds to it.

This
Go to /k/ or /x/ and look for greentext/story threads. There are plenty of stories for inspiration

Take cues from this thing
youtube.com/watch?v=Ire2EkWra5I

they make the most fucking stupid spitting noise.
scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.

Fauns.

I'd have to dig it out of storage but i ha e this book full of legends of various creatures of each tribe.
The wendigo has some insane amount of variations though ranging from my tribes where it flies and it runs your feet across the ice so fast they burn and all they find of you is a mile long streak of ash or blood to a cautionary tale of contagious cannibalism and all it takes is one person to start the process so you better kill him before he kills you all. All with the same name which is odd because you can find the same creature across multiple tribes but they have different names.

Primer: deers are retarded so you're gonna get some odd ideas from them.
Idea 1: during mating season bucks will crack horns over territory. Sometimes when they do this the horns actually get forced together and become stuck and one deer usually ends up dragging the carcass of its dead rival around.
Make a giant flesh eating deer monster where it's massive rack of "horns" are made up of interlocked horns and skulls of other lesser deer it killed for food and maybe have some with the flesh still on the skull. Perhaps it becomes a monster when it starts hunting for skulls and food beyond deer or that it's body grows in size to support the growing "horns". Perhaps they sacrifice some stat and gain a minor minion by sheering off one of the skulls that grows into a deer zombie.

Idea 2: deer are fucking stupid and they'll mistake reflections of themselves as rivals during rut. They'll charge into anything that reflects themselves on it at full speed be it car window or a houses sliding door or the large window in a kindergartens class full of kids. So perhaps a fractal reproductive deer of some sort? Every time they see themselves in a mirror, window, or the still surface of a lake they charge full bore at it and shatter whatever surface it hits like glass, even the lake surface. If you look closely for a split second each shard of the material seems to have a reflection of the deer on it right before each one reflects that image onto the world and suddenly you have a new fractal deer per shard. Now you just made a minor encounter into some sort of non-euclidean hyperbolic cloning SHTF encounter.

Idea 3: that pagan god thing from the netflix movie The Ritual.

Watch Black Mountain Side. Steal the creepy deer thing.

youtube.com/watch?v=i2JmjCioya4

Hot damn, user, that's some great material right there.

deer with antlers anything close to that are like fucking ghosts
there could be one living in the woods around your house and you would never ever see it with your own eyeballs, maybe a trail cam like your pic if you're very lucky
you might see deer everyday, but you'll never see this one

Leshen.

Deer are opportunistic carnivores at times and will often nibble bits off a fresh corpse. You could play with this a bit as it can be really unsettling to see what we view as a harmless herbivore eating bloody meat off a body.

I need this book, for science.
I've got a neat old readers digest book with info on cults and rituals, but no in-depth mythology/folklore.
Meanwhile all internet sources seem to just have modern 'pan-american' legends.

>baby deer
>skepticalanimegirl.webm
Was that the guy who put estrus on himself?

They have to be to have lived that long.

Don't fuck with a Deer Woman.

Give it an exceptionally large penis

Pfft. They don't eat birds. They eat the bird's heads. Just the heads. They leave the rest of the body behind.

They go into bird nesting ground to only rip the heads off birds and eat their babies. It's thought they do so to get iron or calcium or some other nutrients.

Those antlers deer have are practically a death sentence in some cases. Unlike many animals whose bodies can stop growing structures like horns if they are starving, deer cannot. So if they enter the rutting season in poor condition their body will say "fuck you, growing antlers anyway", and will proceed to give the deer a severe form of osteoporosis, which can prove fatal.

Also some deer have saber teeth. Indeed, the ancestor of all deer had saber teeth. It's just the group with the really big antlers that lost them.

All antlers are are bone that grows much faster than normal and ends up ripping itself out of the animal's skin to finish growing.

Give the deer exceptionally large genitals whose products are sought after as folk remedies: testes, phallus, seminal fluid, mammary flesh, etc. Doesn't even have to be lewd

>They will breed themselves into starvation if left unchecked.

All animals do this. Including humans. No animals has ever looked at its entire population and decided, "We're breeding too much. Better cut back."

That's just not true, though, famalam. Some of the names are close, but they also range from wechuge to witiko to wendigo to chenoo to giwakwa, etc. Likewise, they weren't even necessarily the same origin from tribe to tribe either. Sometimes they were just evil giants, sometimes they were ice monsters, sometimes they were people cursed after cannibalism, etc.

For those who just want a spoopy monster. It's actually even creepier up close, since instead of a head it has two attached human torsos with one holding up its horns in its hands while the other is used like mandibles. And that's not even getting into the attic full of tree-zombies.

"Just stick a deer skull with antlers on it" will add scary to quite a few designs.

If the thread is up when I get home I'll go find it.
That's what I was getting at in my post. The book goes by alphabetical order and they're stories submitted by the tribes so its at least more reliable than most. There's a decent chunk for all the entries under "Wendigo" alone. As i said earlier though they're all fairly diverse stories but the same name. Most seem to be allegory in the form of "Don't do X" like don't leave your shelter during blizzard like conditions or don't go into the woods alone or don't start the donner party.

If you want to make monsters out of deer you need to make a monster out of nature. They're the roaches and plague rats that spread it. Maybe draw some stuff from the edgier depictions of The Wyld in the old Werewolf the Apocalypse.

Deer are infinite, stupid, and unpredictable. If not constantly slaughtered they eat away at the edges of civilization. You and your people try to throw up some huts and start a village? Nature tries to reclaim if, and if you don't keep it at bay one day there will be a buck outside of your hut. A week later it might casually and without warning impale your neighbor. A couple days after that you find a couple deer in your son's room, gently licking his blood off the floor.