Incidentally, while talking to Rob, I think I finally came up with a way to explain the concept of Keys & Kingdoms that won't be immediately met with the question of how I'm going to avoid being sued by Disney. Namely: I'm creating a fantasy world and roleplaying game that feels as if it's taking place in a Disney film. Feels. Just feels that way. Actual Disney characters are not appearing anywhere, stop asking how I'm gonna pull that off.
It's definitely not a crime to project an atmosphere that feels like you're living in a Disney film. To wit, look at every 2D-animated feature film ever made that wasn't made for adults; they look and feel an awful lot like Disney films, don't they? Disney didn't sue any of them. Except Filmation, but they were trying to pass off their Snow White and Pinocchio films as actual sequels to the Disney versions, so, you know, really shouldn't'a did that.
No judgment on other companies from the 2D era for using Disney-esque designs and animation, incidentally; it's the only animation style I actually like. I freaking miss it, man.
Episode 3: Creatures - written by Sage Mann
In this episode, the characters introduce the fourteen creature types. These are, naturally, exactly the same as the fourteen creature types in D&D 5th Edition. It's a really good system, I don't really want to mess with it too much. Here are the fourteen types, in the order in which they're described in the short I wrote:
Humanoid: Basically, people. A flesh and blood creature with a human-like body plan, a language and culture, and not a huge amount of inherent magic -- that's a humanoid. In the short, most of the races described in the first episode are displayed; but not all! I'll get back to that in a moment. We also see some imagery of assorted other humanoids: a gnome, goblin, orc, gnoll, kobold, lizardfolk, and sahuagin.
Gnomes are worth mentioning: they've been a core race in D&D from the beginning, but nobody ever really knew what to do with them because they were the only core race without a Tolkien counterpart. They've evolved over the years into a combination of elves, dwarves, and halflings, with a few unique traits such as their tinkering with steampunk technology, their affinity for illusion magic, and, basically, their overall silliness. I didn't make them core races in K&K, but I definitely plan to incorporate them... in the style of a traditional pre-D&D gnome, about a foot tall with a short white beard and a pointy hat, since we need more creatures who can operate on the scale of the myshkas and pixies. Still have no idea how to make that work gameplay-wise, you know, it's gonna be more interesting, surely, than just everybody in that situation having one hit point. As for the others besides gnomes, you know, just your basic D&D opponents. Goblins and gnolls appear in (the current version of) the first season of The Choices, so I wrote 'em up for the WorldAnvil blog, we'll talk more about them in that entry. Or entries.
Beast: Described in the D&D book as non-sapient creatures that form part of the natural ecology. Put more simply, if it's an animal that exists in real life, or used to, it's in the beast category. With a couple of exceptions, such as fictional "dire" or "giant" versions of real animals, and, for some reason, the stirge. The stirge is basically a giant mosquito, but different enough from one that I wouldn't have put it in the beast category were it up to me.
In the short, Zaya demonstrates beasts by displaying a tyrannosaurus and a frog, respectively the strongest and weakest beasts in the game rules. Well, maybe the frog isn't the weakest; it's one of two creatures in the game that have what I call a "00" challenge rating -- a creature that not only has a challenge rating of 0, but also grants 0 experience points for defeating it since it's completely incapable of causing harm. The other is the seahorse, and a frog is more versatile than a seahorse, can go on land and jump and stuff while a seahorse can do nothing but, you know, swim slowly. So, if we're tiering the 00s... you get it.
Dragon: Definitely important enough to merit their own category! Half the title of the game, after all. In D&D, there are ten types of true dragons: the five kinds of chromatic dragon (white, black, green, blue and red), who are usually evil, and the five kinds of metallic dragon (brass, copper, bronze, silver, and gold), who are usually good. Each has their own unique breath weapon (yes, only a few of them in fact breathe fire), a unique type of habitat where they like to make their lairs, and a unique culture and personality -- it's all rather impressive. The dragon category also includes most creatures that are vaguely draconic, such as the pseudo-dragon, the faerie dragon, the dragon turtle, and the wyvern.
Giant: One might assume that giants could just go under the humanoid category, I'm pretty sure Pathfinder did that, but I like this, I think giants have a bit of magic to them, plus they have a caste system that includes all giants and only giants, so it makes sense for them to have a cut-off point where one is in fact a giant rather than just a really big humanoid. As with dragons, there's a lineup of the true giants -- storm, cloud, fire, frost, stone, and hill, pretty sure I correctly ranked them top to bottom there -- plus an assortment of other people who qualify for the giant category, such as the ogre, troll, cyclops, and ettin.
Monster: Actually, in D&D 5E the word used is "monstrosity", but I find that an unnecessary amount of syllables and, you know, a bit excessively mean, so I refer to creatures of this category as simply "monsters". Of course, in D&D terminology, any creature you can encounter is called a monster, but, well, that's why we have the word "creature". In D&D, the monstrosity category is basically the "other" category. Effectively, a creature can be classified as a monster if it's a creature of flesh and blood -- whether or not it has origins in nature -- but doesn't fit into any of the above four categories. In the short film, I illustrate this category by displaying a minotaur, a griffon, a basilisk, and, in one of the few strokes of originality in this episode, a cecaelia. Cecaeliae are very obscure mythological creatures; only one member of this species has made any particular impact on world culture, namely, Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Ursula being a very prominent Disney character, her people should have a fairly prominent place in Cosmos.
Fey: Creatures with strong ties to nature magic and the wilds. Displayed in the episode to demonstrate are a satyr, a dryad, and, for the darker side of fey folk, a hag. There are never very many creatures in this category, for whatever reason, seeing as arguably most creatures in mythology belong in this category. Now, here's an interesting thing: in D&D, all playable characters go under the "humanoid" category -- I think the only exception is one elf subrace who are close enough to nature to be replaced in the "fey" category -- but in K&K, two of the core races, the fairy and the pixie, are most definitely fey. And I think it would be really cool to think of playable characters of non-humanoid categories. The cecaelia is a good example, maybe the ogre as well. Some other fey? We'll see.
Ooze: An iconic creature type in D&D, not exactly prominent but so freakin' weird that they have to have their own category, they just don't fit anywhere else. Amorphous creatures made entirely of digestive acids, most famously the gelatinous cube, which actually managed to get itself a cameo in a Disney film earlier this year. The gray ooze, the ochre jelly, the black pudding, and... that's pretty much all of them. There used to be a green slime, but I think that's a kind of fungus now, not an ooze. That's too bad, I liked the green ones.
Plant: Any plant or fungus creature falls into this category, regardless of how sapient and humanoid it is, such as the myconids, giant mushroom people, or the treants, Tolkienesque giant tree guardians. Good place to stick some playable peeps.
Undead: A pretty easy category to identify; any time a dead thing is reanimated by dark magic, it ceases to be the creature category it was before and is now an undead. The undead can be divided into two basic subcategories: the kind that are effectively walking corpses, from the lowliest mindless zombie to the dominating vampires and liches, to the kind that are incorporeal spirits, like ghosts, banshees, and shadows.
Construct: Creatures made out of raw materials and then shaped and animated by magic. Most famously, the golems, which come in four basic forms: flesh, clay, stone, and iron. Me, I like coming up with new things to make golems out of, I wonder if I still have my old Christalss notes on the subject. Most constructs are essentially mindless, but in this short, I was sure to mention that some have enough capacity for independent thought to essentially be people, something I wanted to establish early to foreshadow what I've been calling "heart constructs".
Or was it "soul constructs"? Meh, I dunno. Anyway, before I came up with the myshkas and syrsas, the ten core races were filled by two other kinds of characters, and one of these was the heart construct, meant to be the race representing any constructed character, be they made from magic or art or science, granted sapience and morality by the love of their creator, a race that could represent Disney characters as diverse as Pinocchio, Tron, Olaf, or Baymax. It just wasn't working out, as far as figuring out the mechanics for a single race that in fact could encompass all these characters... so they won't be a core race in 1st Edition Keys & Kingdoms, but such characters absolutely have to show up eventually.
Elemental: Creatures of the elemental planes, who embody air, earth, fire, and water in their purest forms. There are the four kinds of true elementals, and some other creatures that have four varieties, such as genies; and plenty of other creatures who embody only one element or two, or stuff that's vaguely elemental, such as ice or storms, or combinations of two elements such as magma (fire and earth) or smoke (fire and air). Plenty of those. Elemental creatures include phoenixes, gargoyles, salamanders... again, genies... and that's about it for the creatures that'd be recognizable to non-gamers. K&K's gargoyles are, of course, humanoid, not elemental. And I have all sorts of ideas for depicting genies, seeing as there's a fairly well-known one in the Disney catalogue that you might remember.
Fiend: Fiends are creatures of evil, hailing from what the D&D cosmology calls the Lower Planes. I think in K&K, I'd call such places "hell dimensions", a la Buffy. Most fiends are either demons or devils. What's the differencce? Well, demons are chaotic and devils are lawful. I like the alignment system, though many find it philosophically obsolete. Basically, demons want to destroy the universe, while devils are more about gaining power and influence through trickery and deception -- two different flavors of evil.
D&D's reputation for evilness in the late 1980s caused them to remove explicit mention of demons and devils from their pages -- so, D&D's 2nd Edition, which was current from 1989 to 2000, instead referred to demons and devils with the totally awesome made-up names of "tanar'ri" and "baatezu", respectively. These terms are no longer in use in modern D&D, but I still use them in my own D&D campaigns, because they make a demonic or devilish villain's boasting so much cooler. Can't use them anywhere else, though; still trademarked. The yugoloths, neutral counterparts to the tanar'ri's chaos and the baatezu's order, are still called yugoloths, because as it turns out, their former name of "daemon" is actually pronounced the same as "demon". And apart from those three categories, there are plenty of fiends of other origins. All evil and from evil places.
Celestial: Celestials are the opposite number of fiends, hailing from the heavenly realms, or Upper Planes, instead of the hell dimensions, and are pure embodiments of goodness -- though, it's acknowledged, it's slightly more heard of to find an evil celestial than a good fiend. There are very, very few celestials found across the various D&D monster books -- after all, most creatures in the book are for the characters to fight against, and most heroes don't spend very much time fighting the forces of good.
In all the 5E monster books I have, of which I've made a list for use in my campaigns, among all the hundreds of creatures, only eight are celestials, and three of those are different types of angels. Other than that we have the pegasus, the ki-rin, the unicorn, a couple of more obscure things. I personally would have made the unicorn a fey, not a celestial, but I actually like it better this way. Unicorns are awesome and super-important, I should think. They represent not just nature, but the gods of nature. That's way cool.
Aberration: And finally, the aberrations. Effectively, they're the fantasy-genre version of aliens, creatures from the stars and from other dimensions outside the normal cosmology, who have found themselves in D&D worlds. Tragically, D&D's most famous aberrations who so often serve as villainous masterminds -- the mindflayer and the beholder -- are trademarked, while the one really famous one that isn't trademarked, the otyugh, is a simple predator, not really villain material. I been thinkin' that Disney films such as Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet have a ton of neat alien designs (which come with absolutely zero alien lore) so they can probably provide some inspiration for original aberrations.
And that's it for the short film and the creature categories that currently exist in 5E. There's another thing I wanted to look into: the creature categories that exist in 5E's predecessors, 3E and Pathfinder.
- Aberration: In 3E, whether a creature went into the "aberration" or "magical beast" category seemed to be almost entirely arbitrary. Granted, every confirmed alien went into the "aberration" category, but so did a lot of creatures that were not aliens and are now, rather sensibly, in the "monstrosity" category.
- Animal: The animal category was used for all modern-day animals and their "giant" or "dire" versions whether such things existed in real life or not.
- Beast: The beast category was used for creatures that don't exist in real life, but have animal-like behavior and no particular magical powers, such as the ankheg, griffon, and hydra. Dinosaurs, weirdly enough, also went in this category. Pathfinder retired this category, instead placing dinosaurs in the "animal" category where they belonged and all fictional animals under "magical beast" regardless of how magical they actually were.
- Construct: A distinct category that's gone through no particular changes.
- Dragon: As it is now, this category was used for both true dragons and for dragon-like creature. Back then, any creature that was half-dragon (dragons enjoy shapeshifting and apparently get laid a lot when they do so, and the offspring always looks like a half-dragon version of itself) was also designated with the "dragon" category; they don't do that anymore, in 5E a half-dragon still has the creature type of the thing it actually is. Oh, hey, you wanna know something else crazy? In 5E, all of the true dragon species come in four age categories: wyrmling, young, adult, and ancient. That way you can fight a dragon at any stage of your adventuring career... which kind of misses the point of dragons, if you ask me, they should really be saved for later in your adventuring career, I don't see anything honorable in fighting a child, even if it is a dragon child. But 3E? It had stats... for all ten species of dragon... at twelve friggin' different stages of life: wyrmling, very young, young, juvenile, young adult, adult, mature adult, old, very old, ancient, wyrm, and great wyrm. Like.... WHAT?! In what universe was that necessary? We did not need one hundred and twenty different sets of dragon stats. A few other creatures in the manual had two or three age categories, but... seriously, yeah, what the heck was this? I still kinda think that the four sets of stats 5E has for all ten species is a bit much. Plus, as Order of the Stick author Rich Burlew points out, it means that statistically speaking, a lot more dragon children got killed over the history of 3E's existence than the children of any other creature...
- Elemental: A very underused category... it seems that what elemental creatures went in the "elemental" category and which went in the "outsider" category was, once again, completely arbitrary. Pathfinder did away with the elemental category altogether and put all elemental creatures under "outsider"... more about why I think that was a misstep a bit later.
- Fey: A small category then as now, and back then was more focused on the benevolent fey, as hags at the time were classified as monstrous humanoids.
- Giant: This category hasn't really changed from the 3E version, though, as I mentioned above, Pathfinder decided to do away with the category and just classify giants as humanoids.
- Humanoid: A fairly empty category in these two editions... I suppose you were supposed to just give every humanoid creature class levels and stuff and figure out for yourself whether your creation was a balanced encounter for your heroes. 5E gives you a bit more to work with, not only providing a whole bunch of humanoids, including some stats for chieftains, captains, elite warriors and stuff, as well as a whole bunch of generic NPC templates that can be applied to any humanoid character.
- Magical Beast: The magical beast category consists of creatures that are animalistic but also magical... though I'm a seeing a few that don't seem to actually be magical at all, so it seems that once again, we have two categories, "beast" and "magical beast", in which creatures were assigned at random. Most magical beasts have animal intelligence, but the sphinx also went in this category, among other creatures.
- Monstrous Humanoid: Pretty much exactly what it sounds like. In 5E, some formerly monstrous humanoids, such as the kuo-toa and grimlock, were reclassified as regular humanoids, while others, such as the centaur, minotaur, medusa, and harpy (all the Greek ones, apparently) went into the monstrosity category -- it seems the modern-day monstrosity category is an amalgam of the former "magical beast" and "monstrous humanoid" category... though, you know, I kind of actually liked it better when that category was divided into two? I don't like any of the names used, not "monstrosity" nor "magical beast" or "monstrous humanoid" either, but it would be kind of helpful if there were two categories to distinguish which monstrosities are sapient and which aren't, y'know? But, I suppose looking at individual entries is just as well.
- Ooze: Well, as this category in the 3E Monster Manual contains the exact same four creatures as in the 5E one, I guess oozes remain about the same.
- Outsider: Yeah, this? This was kind of a mess. In 3E and Pathfinder, every single creature that comes from the Inner Planes or Outer Planes was given the "outsider" category (except, again, those few Inner Planes creatures that were arbitrarily assigned "elemental" instead). This resulted in an extremely bloated and rather uninformative category. Now in 5E, the outsider category has been split into three: creatures from the Inner Planes are elementals, those from the Upper Planes are celestials, and those from the Lower Planes are fiends. Works much better that way. That being said, there's one tiny problem. See, the Upper Planes are of a good nature and the Lower Planes are of an evil nature, but there are two Outer Planes that are neither good nor evil: Mechanus, the plane of pure law, and Limbo, the plane of pure chaos. Mechanus is inhabited by modrons, who in 5E get the "construct" category as they are essentially robots; Limbo, however, is inhabited by slaadi, and 5E had to make the call, with no "outsider" category anymore, to categorize the slaadi as "aberrations", which doesn't quite fit right, as aberrations are generally from, or at least related to, the Far Realm, the universe beyond the Outer Planes. But ultimately, there's just no better place to put slaadi; by their very nature as being from Limbo, a slaad is neither fiend nor celestial, and a bit too extradimensional to be a monstrosity. Of course, that's not really our problem -- slaadi are trademarked, as are the proper names of the Outer Planes, and I don't intend to use the D&D "rings" model of the universe anyway. More about that later.
- Plant: No notable changes to speak of. Once again, all creatures of a vegetable or fungoid nature go in this category regardless of how ambulatory and/or sapient they may be.
- Shapechanger: Well, that's a pretty silly creature category. Lots of creatures can shapeshift, and they could probably be easily placed into some other category. A few creatures known for shapeshifting did end up in other categories instead of this one. I can see why Pathfinder didn't bother with this category -- indeed, even D&D 3.5 ditched it.
- Undead: Another one that hasn't changed in the interim. Quite simple; if it's undead, then it's in the undead category, regardless of what its creature type was before it became undead.
- Vermin: This rather odd category was reserved for, well, bugs. If it's an insect, arachnid, or centipede, it goes in the "vermin" category, whether it's a swarm of regular-sized bugs or some sort of giant bug -- but not if it's a magical bug, those go under "magical beast". Pathfinder also included jellyfish, anemones, crustaceans, worms, and gastropods in this category. (Pathfinder apparently had a thing, to rival my own such thing, for putting exotic real-world wildlife in its fantasy setting) Cephalopods, however, went in the "animal" category, because one of the rules for the "vermin" category was that they had no Intelligence score, and intelligence is one of those things the octopus is known for. Kind of emphasizes just how little sense this category made in the first place, and in 5E, bugs of all sorts go in the Beast category same as all the other animals.
One final word before I go on with my day: I mentioned the heart construct as one of two core races that I shifted out in favor of the myshka and syrsa. The other? The Nemo. Maybe should have talked about this in the Peoples entry, but meh, that one was running long.
The Nemo was inspired by the Nobodies of Kingdom Hearts. In Kingdom Hearts, a Nobody comes into being when a person's heart (heart in the metaphysical sense, not the organ) is extracted or devoured or lost -- sort of a regular thing in the KH universe, at least in the stories set in that universe that we the audience follow. If that person has a strong willpower, then their body and mind continue to act of their own accord -- alive but without a human soul. Nobodies are super-powerful, each defined by an elemental (or elemental-ish) attribute which they use in combat. While they revel in their power and, with a few exceptions, tend to ham it up and enjoy their villainy -- experts on the subject in-series claim that Nobodies have no emotions, and all appearances to the contrary are faked by a Nobody simply acting the way they remember they would act back when they could feel things, which gets called into question a lot and eventually debunked, but that's not important right now -- but regardless, the Nobodies wish to become whole again and are willing to murder millions to accomplish this, as they're tormented by the horror of their own metaphysical nonexistence and, implicitly, the "uncanny valley" vibe they give off in social situations.
Which brings us to the Nemo. In my reinterpretation, a Nemo is a person who is resurrected from the dead -- again, not a normal thing in D&D-esque universes per se, but at least normal in the stories set in this universe that we witness, because they're about badass adventurers with access to some powerful magical mojo. If a person is resurrected, but their soul is unavailable due to having been trapped somewhere or turned into an incorporeal undead creature, they are raised as a Nemo. So they're alive again as planned -- conscious, ambulatory, just as skilled an adventurer as they were before -- but they're not really there.
I removed the Nemo from the core race list because, well, they don't really work as a core race. Becoming a Nemo is a thing that happens to an incredibly tiny minority of people, and a thing that can happen to a person of any race -- clearly, it's more of a template. In addition, I couldn't really think of the game mechanics for being a Nemo. It requires a recipe that eludes me: one, reasons that it'd be pretty cool to play as a Nemo on a long-term basis; and two, a strong incentive to hunt down your own soul and get it back so you can become normal again.
For the first one, like I said, there's those elemental-ish powers I talked about. But those can't be truly extraordinary, not enough for the Nemo to overshadow their fellow party members... maybe some teleportation via shadow? Nobodies can open Corridors of Darkness, after all. But the incentive? Got me. There has to be some drawbacks, and not the roleplaying drawback of "you have to play your character as a clinical sociopath until your soul is restored" -- that's not exactly very much incentive for players to want their soul back, especially if it comes with a power boost. Depends entirely on the kind of player, of course.
So, sure: your character doesn't technically have emotions for a while, and everyone they meet is vaguely creeped out by them even though they don't know why. But what are the mechanical drawbacks to having no soul...? Gotta figure that out. No idea.
As for those elemental-ish powers, well, let's look at the ones possessed by the thirteen Nobodies who populate the Kingdom Hearts series' first story arc, each having a unique attribute:
- You've got the actual classical elements in there: Wind, Earth, Fire, and Water
- Plus some natural extensions, non-elemental things you often see as damage types: Ice, Lightning, and Light
- And then some fookin' weird ones: Nothingness, Space, Illusion, Moon, Time, and Flower
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