Concept art for the “Baneling” Zerg in Starcraft II

A new species of termite was discovered recently. That, in itself, is hardly news. New species are discovered all the time, and in fact, I recall hearing that there are many thousands of undocumented insect species in particular. But what makes this species worthy of note is that they explode. No, seriously. When the worker termites grow old, they can fill a cyst on their backs with toxic crystals which have been produced throughout their lifetime. Once the ‘backpack’ cyst is full, it bursts, killing both the termite, and any enemies unfortunate enough to be caught in range of his toxic explosive.

My first thought when I read about these was “Wow, all those video games with exploding insects suddenly have a lot more grounding in reality.”

The scientists who documented this find even released some brief video footage of the phenomena. It’s a little difficult to make out, and it only shows the cyst filling, not exploding. None the less, it’s a fascinating discovery, and one which prompted me to finally cover a subject which I’ve been thinking about for several months now.

Animals are strange. Exploding termites aren’t even the most bizarre creatures I’ve heard of. Did you know that many species of shark fight their siblings to death while still growing in their mother’s womb? Or that some species of hermaphroditic gastropods fight each other to determine which one of them has to be the female? And then there’s shit which just looks strange, like the soft shelled turtle. And for me, the strangest part about these creatures, is that I’ve never seen anything in a tabletop game based on them. The world is filled with potential monsters, all we need to do is make ‘em big enough to eat an adventurer.

Angler Fish: I’ve linked before to The Oatmal’s excellent description of the life of a male angler fish, but I’m linking to it again, and if you haven’t read it, you should. Anglers are fascinating, and still very mysterious, creatures. You could base a dozen different monsters off of them, but here I’m specifically interested in the fact that the skin of the female absorbs the male, and uses his remains for reproduction. A Pathfinder monster could do the same thing. Except instead of luring the males of the monster’s species, the creature could instead lure male adventurers. Once their skin touches the monster’s flesh, the contact poison the beast secretes would begin to melt the adventurer, until nothing was left but his testicles. (Or, if you’d like to go more creepy and less vulgar, nothing is left but his expressionless face).

Speaking of angler fish, I just noticed…were they the inspiration for the modern design of the Beholder?

Traumatic Insemination: One of the most interesting things about animals is the way they have sex. Often that’s where the truly unique and bizarre aspects of an animal really come out. I’ve made an effort to avoid filling this list with dicks (which was not easy, let me tell you)! But this one has fascinated me for years, and it translates well to a game.

Essentially, many species of invertebrates do not have external female genitalia. Not even a Cloaca. So since there’s no opening, the male’s phallus makes one. It stabs the female in the abdomen with a sharp phallus, and that’s how insemination is handled. It’s gruesome, kinda disturbing, and a perfect way to fuck with your adventurers. I’m not saying your game should be filled with dagger-dicks (though I did once post a dick-dagger…) but why not have a prehensile blade extending from a monster’s chest, or back? The creature gets an extra attack with it, and upon scoring a critical hit, the monster implants a parasitic larva within the victim, a-la the Alien films.

The Almighty Squid Worm I really don’t have anything specific to say about this creature, or how it acts, or the abilities it has. But I marvel at it’s profoundly alien shape. These are the dreams of a mad god.

Photograph of a Teuthidodrilus, or “Squidworm.” Source unknown.

The Hagfish: Ocean life is often the most unusual. As humans, we’re at least somewhat familiar with what it’s like to live on land. Legs are a good way to get around, warmth is needed to keep our bodies functional, light is useful to help us understand our surroundings, and so on. Creatures which have adapted to living deep underwater need none of these things. And, as such, serve as perfect inspiration for game masters hoping to create interesting monsters.

The Hagfish is one such creature. For starters, it has a skull, but no column of vertebra. To my knowledge, it is the only known species where this occurs, and that is awesome. But far more interesting to potential monster-creators is its slime. Hagfish can exude insane amounts of slime which reacts with the water around it. If the Hagfish is captured, this slime can clog the gills of an attacking fish, suffocating it. And after it does so, the Hagfish needs to literally tie itself into a knot to clean itself off, restoring its own gill function.

Imagine a creature which could excrete goo which expanded into a foam capable of filling dungeon corridors. Or a giant hagfish which waited until adventurers tried to swim across its pool, only to quickly turn the water around it into a thick gooey substance which is impossible to swim through.

Elephants: A long time ago, Elephants captured the imaginations of the western world. They were huge, majestic, and interesting. And because of the way Elephants captured the imaginations of our ancestors, they had become ubiquitous by the time we were born. While we were growing up, we regularly saw elephants depicted in drawings and cartoons. Most of us even saw them up close at a zoo. I personally, find them somewhat boring.

Then I remember that they have a FUCKING THIRTEEN FOOT LONG, PREHENSILE NOSE. WHAT THE FUCK!?

It’s funny, actually, because I have a difficult time imagining a fantasy creature where such a thing doesn’t look goofy. Yet on an elephant it has a certain majesty, appearing almost regal.

Vampire Squid: Vampire is an acquired template which any intelligent creature can gain if their life force is completely drained by another vampire. But if a mer-person gains the vampiric template, surely they don’t turn into a vampire bat, right? So what do they turn into?

This:

Based on what I’ve read, the Vampire Squid is quite unique. Its order is somewhere between that of a squid and an octopus. It is almost entirely covered in a special organ called a Photophore, which can produce light. The creature can either use a quick flash to disorient attackers, or can sustain its light for several minutes at a time. The vampire squid’s “cape” is covered in spines which, while technically harmless, look quite dangerous. When threatened, it will turn its cape inside out, making itself appear larger, and covered in dangerous-looking spines.

This post could keep going on forever. There are hundreds and thousands of creatures with unusual anatomies or abilities ripe for use crafting monsters. I’m sure the subject will come up again in the future–though someone with a better grounding in biology would probably do a much better job than I can.

The sun and I are not on good terms.

We’ve got an uneasy sort of détente. It stays out of my realm, and I stay out of it’s. For the most part this works for the both of us. I only need to go outside when travel to work or the game store. But then, all I need do is scurry through the sun’s realm from my front door, to the car door. And since I live in the pacific northwest (the Seattle area) the sun often doesn’t even show up to harass me during that jaunt. Clouds and rain do, but I get along with them just fine.

Then I let a woman with plans to become an ecological scientist move in with me. This was a bad idea. Every so often she drags me, clawing at the carpet, into the natural world. I try to explain to her that the Sun will view this as a breach of our unofficial treaty, but she seems to think that I’m just being melodramatic. Somehow she doesn’t view the sun bombarding me with potentially lethal radiation as proof enough of its malice.

One minor benefit of these harrowing excursions is the inspiration I’m able to draw from them for my games. As I’ve mentioned many times before, reality is filled with amazing facts, many of which can be used as inspiration for gaming. Today I encountered a number of different natural environments at the two nature reserves we visited. And there, I discovered three things which I thought might be fascinating to use in a game.

At the first location we visited, we saw this large space filled with nothing but mud and death. Apparently this area is, naturally, an estuary. Simply speaking, an estuary is a meeting of fresh water and salt water, where rivers reach the sea. When early settlers moved into the pacific northwest, they blocked off the salt water, and used the land around the estuary to create an orchard. The land has since become a nature reserve, though, and the dike blocking the salt water was recently removed. As it flowed back into the landscape, it killed off all of the fresh water plantlife, resulting in this deathlike landscape. In a few years, salt-tolerant plant life will reassert itself. Until then, however, tell me this doesn’t look like a perfect environment for undead to live in? There’s nothing visibly alive out there. Just dead plants, murky water…and mud-caked undead ready to attack foolish adventurers?

As a game master, you really don’t need an excuse to create an environment, since most of your players probably won’t be too picky about how a given environment came about. But if you strive for accuracy, just put an abandoned settlement and a dike that crumbled from age.

It was as we were looking at this creepy landscape that my ladyfriend also took the opportunity to tell me about Bog Bodies, which you should totally check out if you’re a fan of undead stuff like I am.

The second location we visited is apparently somewhat unique to our area, and somewhat mysterious as well! Scientists are not entirely sure what causes the formation of Mima Mounds, which are sort of like tiny hillocks. The tallest are a little taller than an average person (about 7 feet), and they apparently occur primarily in areas of plains/prairie. What I found most fascinating about them, from a tactical perspective, is that they are almost invisible. Since the entire area is a field of grass and small plants, it can be extremely difficult to identify the mounds. In the picture above, they are only clearly apparent because that photograph includes the treeline for them to intersect. Check out this photo where the mounds don’t block your view of the trees. I promise, there are a bunch of mounds in this shot:

This would be an absolutely perfect place for an ambush. Particularly for small creatures like halflings, gnomes, kobolds, or goblins. Four or five of them could hide behind each mound. The small field I visited today could cloak several hundred warriors, all able to appear instantly to charge across the flat ground between the mounds.

Wikipedia has a panoramic image of the field I visited today. It’s almost 12mb so it takes a moment to download, but it’s a pretty impressive view.

Finally, there was this crazy moss. Neither of us was even able to identify it, so I can’t share any solid information on it. It was growing absolutely everywhere on the Mima Mounds, in huge patches as large as 7-8 feet across. It was so prolific we assumed it probably was not actually dead, yet it sure as hell didn’t seem alive. It was completely dry and brittle, crunching under our feet as easily as snow would. And a lot louder than snow would as well. It would be impossible to sneak up on anyone through moss like this.

On a final note, as we were leaving to head home, we met Spiderbro. He was a bro.

Someday, I want to get paid for this. Not necessarily for writing Papers & Pencils itself, mind you. I somehow doubt I’ll ever have the readership required to make advertisements a profitable endeavor. But I’d like to make a living off of writing or game design, or some combination of the two. I like to think that putting myself out there with this website is the first step in that quest, even if it is the first step of many I’ll need to take. Another step I’m working on is educating myself. I’m trying to take an academic approach to learning about games and game design. I read and analyze anything which seems as though it will help me  traverse the long road towards a career I can be proud of.

I’ve noticed that many of the most renowned game designers – Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Steve Jackson – have been students of military history, and credited that knowledge with helping them in designing games. It seemed only prudent, then, that I should investigate this field of study to see what it had to offer. So while I was grocery shopping this past weekend, I picked up a copy of the June 2012 issue of “Military Heritage” magazine. It seemed like an inexpensive way to take my first glimpse at the subject, to see what I could see.

Most of the magazine deals with more contemporary wars, where firearms are used. Personally I’m much more intrigued in the medieval period, but there is a feature entitled “Fight in the Fog: Vercellae 101 BC,” which is more relevant to my interests. And the modern information is certainly not out of place. In many ways, a war fought with fantasy elements is more like a modern war than a medieval one. Wizards, elven archers, and dragons stand in for heavy artillery, machine guns, and aircraft.

One of the magazine’s regular features, “weapons,” is a fascinating piece on tanks. I won’t attempt to reproduce all of the information here, but the essential tale is about the first time tanks appeared on the battlefield, in World War I. When the British deployed them against the Germans, the Germans were understandably intimidated. The article covers the early German attempts to defeat this new technology, and gauges their success. Some tactics (such as strapping 7 grenades together) were quite dangerous to the soldier attempting to employ them, while others which seemed like a good idea (such as digging hidden pits for tanks to fall into) proved to be completely useless due to unforeseen elements. The article also covers many of the failings of early tanks which gave the Germans a fighting chance. For one, since tanks tended to draw a lot of fire, it was impossible for them to maintain an infantry escort. Another example given is that a foolish engineer once attached a supplemental fuel tank to the armored vehicle’s topside to give it increased range. What he didn’t anticipate is that this additional fuel was vulnerable to enemy fire, and a number of tank crews were incinerated due to that engineer’s poor judgement.

It was when I was reading this article that at least one use for this information crystallized for me. Here are real life examples of people trying new things in dangerous situations, and real life examples of other people trying to counter them. If my players engineered a tank, would my monsters counter with antitank mines, armor piercing bullets, or flooding the battlefield to mire the tanks? They probably should. When players come up with a crazy plan, the GM’s response to it should be just as clever. Because intelligent creatures will always find remarkably inventive methods of perseverance.

The “Fight in the Fog” feature has a lot of similarly relevant information. For example, it describes how  the Roman forces built a bridge across the Po River to provide support to their forward troops, and how their enemy ripped a bunch of trees down and floated them downriver to destroy the bridge. A little later, it describes how the Roman commander modified the design of his army’s spears by replacing an iron peg with a wooden one. This caused the spear to off in the enemy shields, causing the shields to become too unwieldy to use, and forcing the enemy to fight shield-less.

I have not yet read the entire magazine, but if the pieces I’ve read are any indication, this will prove to be not only a useful avenue of study, but a fascinating one as well. And it appears as though Military Heritage is associated with a magazine called Medieval Warfare which may be more my speed. I may well be subscribing to it soon!