Quote from: RPGPundit;1061488Was this posted in the right thread?

Yes. I may have read the thread differently than most, but for me the most influential thing that's changed the way I game has been my work experiences, particularly in team building and engagement. I'm better at it now than when I started running games in the late 80s. I can notice and correct player issues much more effectively, and I can also see when a player issue isn't likely to be correctable (and then I don't waste time on a misguided attempt to salvage). "Manage up or manage out" works on players as well as on employees.

If this isn't a relevant outside influence, I apologize.

My influences include:

• Stormbringer franchise
• Hellraiser franchise
• The extremely detailed monster mythology encyclopedias by authors like Theresa Bane and Carol Rose
• Medieval bestiaries, such as The Medieval Bestiary and Dave's Mythical Creatures
  
• Fairy tales and fables, such as The Golden Maiden and other folk tales and fairy stories told in Armenia
  
• Legends & mythology, particularly Norse, Greek, and Arthurian
• D&D-inspired Japanese cartoons, which are over-saturated right now
• Various internet resources on cultural mythologies, such as the yokai project
  
• RPGs and supplements based on specific cultural mythologies, such as Mazes & Minotaurs, Trudvang, Relics & Rituals: Excalibur, and Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas series
  
• The "warriors of myth" wiki includes lists of lesser known mythical and folkloric monsters. Although there are rarely citations, the names are enough to do a more comprehensive search through google books
• Rich's pegopedia which was really helpful in ascertaining both ancient and modern mythology concerning mythical horses
  
• And so many more

These have caused me to grow dissatisfied with RPG cliches and stereotypes.

Many RPG campaign settings are extremely systematized when mythology and fairy tales were much more amorphous and mysterious and generally fantastical.

For example, many monsters in game bestiaries are taken from mythological and medieval bestiaries but almost inevitably the gaming books strip away everything that made them interesting. The mandrake root was harvested as an aphrodisiac and many other remedies, but in gaming books it is just a generic plant monster to kill and you cannot use its body parts as remedies. The lamia was a Greek bogeyman born from the souls of spurned lovers that try to recapture the feeling of love they lost, but in gaming books they are a generic race of man-eating lion-centaurs. The peryton was originally the cursed soul of a long dead traveler from Atlantis who could only rest after killing a human being, but gaming books write them as generic monsters and try fruitlessly to make their comical appearance look threatening. (I wrote articles about these on my blog, basically arguing that you should ignore the monster manuals and just take their attributes from the original myths and then add whatever twists you like. For example, I posited that when lamiae are not eating people in vengeance they are trying to play house and this can lead to more interesting adventures such as and this is just off the top of my head the PCs rescuing a lamio's human bride when he tries to convince her to become a lamia by hunting and eating raw fish with him and the end is a tragedy because her two sons have already become lamioi and now she has no choice but to join a convent to save face because her village thinks she is crazy and her hubby is an adulterer who ran off despite the PCs vouching for her. When the PCs later visit the convent to pay their respects, they learn she claimed to be hearing her husband's and sons' voices calling her for weeks and ran off into the woods never to be seen again. The PCs still get the XP for the encounters despite not killing anything, but the whole adventure is meant to be unsettling and to show that this isn't your conventional D&D setting where everything is systematized.)

One of the many interesting (and surreal) concepts I found while researching was the Selenetida (pl. Selenetidae or Selenetidæ) aka "moon woman", who supposedly laid eggs that hatched into giants.

I am particularly interested by the fearsome critters of lumberjack folklore and the yokai of Japanese folklore, mostly because their appearances are often quite surreal and even comical. They might seem silly to include in a D&D setting, but D&D is no stranger to silly monsters as headinjurytheater attested in a two part series of articles.

The writings of John Mandeville are an endless source of entertainment. He actually thought cotton was a plant which grew sheep, which is an awesome idea to include in a fantasy setting. The writings also detail loads of weird peoples that he thought actually lived in Africa and Asia, like the "Panotti" and "Pandi" who had elephantine ears that hung to their knees. Which is also an awesome idea to include in a campaign setting and I don't care if anybody thinks it is funny, the loads and loads of furbaiting beastmen that already exist are a funny idea too. (A number of his descriptions refer to creatures mentioned in other bestiaries of the time.)

Seriously, why is there no bestiary about all the weird medieval bestiary creatures like the Panotti and Vegetable Lamb, or the fearsome critters of American folklore, or the Japanese yokai? Why are bestiaries only including creatures that meet an arbitrary standard of cool factor and, worse, mutilating their folkloric descriptions in the process?

I got so fed up with D&D that I started a blog which originally started out as some ideas for making planar adventures more interesting a la Planescape, but expanded to include all sorts of peeves with D&D world building especially the boring over-saturated bestiaries. Like, my ideal concept for a D&D adventure path is playing a group of genies on the elemental plane from level one and exploring all the amazing cultures, geography, wildlife, etc that has to offer.

One of my earliest series of articles, which I am still working on over two years after the first entry because I am super lazy and easily distracted, is a series on how to make minotaurs more interesting by taking inspiration from mythology and other sources I liked (e.g. introducing the "plane of maze" as the home plane of all minotaurs, introducing the minotaur curses which randomly turns humans and beastfolk into minotaurs, a Ravenloft-inspired idea that minotaurs eventually become unable leave their personal mazes, a minotaur pantheon consisting of baphomet, taurus, asterion and lovecraftian star-angels who love mazes, tying directly into the original Greek myth, introducing a bazillion minotaur variants to keep them from getting stale such as pyrotaurs and minotrices and gorgotaurs, etc).

I haven't even gotten started on my problems with the giant monster taxonomy. Norse and Greek giants are super weird, yo!

Quote from: HappyDaze;1061649Yes. I may have read the thread differently than most, but for me the most influential thing that's changed the way I game has been my work experiences, particularly in team building and engagement. I'm better at it now than when I started running games in the late 80s. I can notice and correct player issues much more effectively, and I can also see when a player issue isn't likely to be correctable (and then I don't waste time on a misguided attempt to salvage). "Manage up or manage out" works on players as well as on employees.

If this isn't a relevant outside influence, I apologize.

Oh, no, OK, now I understand, and that's actually an interesting perspective.