Reading over the monsters in various bestiaries, I notice that almost all are written with pseudo-realistic life-cycles and a place in the world's ecology. For example, the cockatrice is written as being a chicken that turns you to stone. Not some freak hatched from a rooster's egg incubated by a toad or snake, but a magic chicken that mates and lays eggs and eats bugs like any normal chicken. Mythological one of a kind monsters are turned into whole species little different from a non-mythic animal aside from magic. Monsters are typically given fairly stale boring ecologies like that, written as cryptids and aliens rather than fantastical beasts from the imagination.

Are there any alternatives to pseudo-naturalistic ecologies for monsters?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;920754Are there any alternatives to pseudo-naturalistic ecologies for monsters?

Yes.

Just ignore the ecologies and make up your own. In fact I had to jettsion about 25% of the 5e MM fluff as they kept re-writing established monsters as now this or that demon spawn. Others contradicted known ecologies and so on and so fourth. The 5e MM fluff is a mess.

So say you want your Cockatrices to be spontaneous monsters. BOOM! Done. Welcome to the club. I did the same for a campaign.

In fact there is even room for both. and more. There might be natural cockatrices. There might be spontaneous cockatrices, there might be product of experimentation cockatrices, product of curses cockatrices, alien cockatrices brought from other planes/worlds/dimensions, posession, spontaneous transformation, transformation from disease, crossbreeding, some freak quirk of stone to flesh/flesh to stone, and so on.

but really. Make monsters whatever you want.

A cockatrice in particular more or less is a freak chicken. Perhaps if a cockatrice mates with a hen, you get hens, cocks, and cockatrices (rarely). I rather like the idea of a cockatrice being basically a toxic chicken with a really bad temper. Yes, it's a bit risible, but it's still deadly dangerous.

Quote from: Omega;920755There might be natural cockatrices. There might be spontaneous cockatrices, there might be product of experimentation cockatrices, product of curses cockatrices, alien cockatrices brought from other planes/worlds/dimensions, posession, spontaneous transformation, transformation from disease, crossbreeding, some freak quirk of stone to flesh/flesh to stone, and so on.

I really like this suggestion. I cannot explain why.

Don't worry about ecologies at all.  Just forget about it.  Cockatrices just are.  Why do they come from?  No one knows or cares.  They just show up sometimes.  People are only concerned about getting rid of the nasty things when they appear.  Fantasy ecosystems don't have to make real world sense and it doesn't matter at the tabletop anyway.

How about Pliny the Elder's Natural History?  Or the old ideas about spontaneous generation?  There are a lot of freaky, gameable things in real world myth and bad science.

It's interesting to me that not many people have followed the pathway opened up by Dune. The ecology in that book was so important and so original - as you understand the life cycle of the sandworms the whole world system is explained. Those kinds of natural histories are more interesting to me than "And then this king died and his heirs fought over the throne."

I think it's an under utilized possibility in gaming. I appreciate what D&D tries to do with regards to monster ecology... but I haven't seen much in the way if rules for terrain and biomes.

It's something I'm looking into for my game, but well see how far I get.

Ecologies seem out of place in fantasy. Save that for science fiction.

But people are afraid of "magical thinking" in their fantasy, for some reason. Even though you see that kind of thing rampant in, say, superhero comics.

My own explanation for monsters is that spells of summoning create beings out of nothing, and they go back to nothing when the spell ends... Normally. But sometimes they don't, and the monsters we see in dungeons or attacking towns are those remnants. They can't die from disease, they don't age, they don't even need to eat, but they get hungry. Very hungry, if they've been locked in a room below ground for a couple centuries. There are also curses and forced transformations as possible sources of monsters. But mundane breeding? I figure most of those creatures are incapable of breeding.

I have been turning more to folklore and mythology. Many of the stranger creatures in my current campaign come from the lands of Faerie, no further explanation. A few are the results of wizard's experiments or are just there. Most people don't know or care where the monsters came from or why. They just want to know how to be rid of them.

My entire campaign map covers an area about the size of Scotland, or Vermont and New Hampshire. This means a few really special powerful monsters and don't worry about many entries in the Monster Manuals because those creatures aren't found in this part of the world. No Orcs for example although there are Goblins of various sorts and sizes. Only one dragon, and it is currently sleeping.

The ecology is pretty much the same as in our world, the monsters are for the mostpart unnatural and therefor outside of ecology.

Quote from: talysman;920874But people are afraid of "magical thinking" in their fantasy, for some reason. Even though you see that kind of thing rampant in, say, superhero comics.

I don't know if they're afraid so much as unfamiliar... unsure about how to bring that feel into the setting. Similarly, so much RPG magic is rational/technological in the way it functions.
Which games do a good job of pushing 'magical thinking' into play?

Quote from: talysman;920874Ecologies seem out of place in fantasy. Save that for science fiction.

I agree with this.  I prefer monster books to give the bare-bones version of the creature/monster.  Less is more for me.

Quote from: Simlasa;920886I don't know if they're afraid so much as unfamiliar... unsure about how to bring that feel into the setting. Similarly, so much RPG magic is rational/technological in the way it functions.
Which games do a good job of pushing 'magical thinking' into play?

Hardly any, that I can think of. What I usually see is hacks and fragments that can make RPGs more magical.

Surprisingly, there were a couple GURPS books that I think fit the bill. GURPS Goblins had the rule of rolling for the reaction of God to see what the goblin's luck was going to be. That helps a bit. And GURPS Fantasy II: The Mad Lands had inscrutable gods that weren't just big, tough monsters, undead monsters that are created when a living person lacks something (heightless, fleshless, bloodless,) and one or two magic systems that had no rational/technological explanations.

Oh, and there's TOON, which is another kind of fantasy, but at least it encouraged breaking away from real world physics and chemistry.

Quote from: Simlasa;920886Which games do a good job of pushing 'magical thinking' into play?

Everway?  A couple of the sample adventures are best resolved by the characters figuring out the symbolic/mythological resonances set up in the Sphere and "fixing" them, rather than just beating things into submission.

House of Cards is a game very, very heavy with Tarot symbology; you're going to succeed by leveraging your understanding of Tarot symbology, not by lateral thinking or smuggling in anachronistic knowledge.

For magic, any system that leans more towards the Goetic will help with that feel; if all magic is technically done by a sentient extradimensional being you have to negotiate/intimidate/bribe into doing what you want, you can't get quite so presumptuous about your spell always working the same way all the time.

Honestly, I'm having trouble thinking of any game systems, though.  I mentioned this exact problem on another thread, and the example I gave is a lot of classical mythology: In Mythic Achaea, monsters are there because the gods willed it to be so, either as guardians, punishments, or they're just left over from the war against the Titans.  In Babylonian mythology, monsters all spawned from Tiamat, who was killed by Marduk and corpse-mongered into the world; monsters are either still kicking around from before that or maybe her dead body just spits them out now and again as it decays.

wanking about ecology, beyond the most basic level, has always been abhorrent to me.

But how many people actually give detailed description of the ecology of their monsters beyond a brief note here or there, or possibly a simple food chain diagram ("wolves eat villagers' sheep, ogres eat villagers, dragons eat maidens")? Aside from the authors in Dragon Magazine, I mean.