Constructing Cosmos: Part 9, The Canon (1/3)

This entry is about various ideas I've had about the Keys & Kingdoms universe thus far based on the progress of the Keys & Kingdoms segment on the TAPAS podcast -- ideas I've had while watching a massive collection of Disney films, collecting elements from those films to reinterpret them into the Keys & Kingdoms universe. I don't think I've ever once implemented any of these ideas into the world, so, uh... should probably start doin' that.

I began, as they say, at the beginning -- the first Disney feature, Snow White, from 1937. As of this writing, I've just finished looking at films released in 1994. Which isn't as much progress as it sounds like -- the halfway point of the main collection comes in the year 2003, because, as you might imagine, the more time goes by, the more Disney films are released per year.

I currently have all the ideas sorted by which film they came from, maybe I ought to categorize them in... some other way. Yeah, you know what? I was just going to show you the highlights of the ideas granted by all the films thus far, but I think I'll show you every single thing I currently have in that document, start off with a clean slate, and put everything I've casually jotted down over the course of the Disney collection project into the Campfire thingy.

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And, okay, I seem to have accidentally lost the document where I had all this data sorted by which movie it came from, apparently Word crashed and that file was lost. But that's okay! All that data is here on the blog now, just in a different order. Maybe I can reconstruct it later, or maybe I don't have to.

Anyway, I'll be listing all that data now by category, as follows:

• Themes
• Creature Size
• Creatures
• Legendary Characters
• Universe
• Magic
• Magic Items
• Storytelling
• Gameplay
• Art and Design

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THEMES

When originally conceiving the system, I knew I wanted a combination of "all things Disney" and "all things tabletop gaming". So I considered seven "themes" to include in various campaign settings of Keys & Kingdoms, adding an eighth later after some deep thought. As follows:

• Fairy Tales: The most Disney-esque theme, as these types of stories are Disney's signature style; definitely the one that dominates Cosmos. Of course, since all my Cosmos writing so far has been from the perspective of low-level adventurers, we haven't seen much in the way of royalty, or epic magic, so that ought to come into play.
• Mythic: More epic and heroic stories as seen in myth as opposed to fairy tale. "Sword and sandal" as opposed to "sword and sorcery", I suppose? The gods of three mythologies, of course, exist in Cosmos -- indeed, they are at this point the most well-developed aspect of the world! But I've been strongly resisting adding too much mythological inspiration to Cosmos's story so far. People have made suggestions for cool things to happen in The Choices which I've turned down because they're too awesome, I see our characters as being first-level adventurers, nowhere near the kind of heroes who would get up to anything resembling the exploits of Hercules or Odysseus or Achilles. Heroes need to work their way up to that, and apparently I don't know a lot of people who are accustomed to this idea. For instance, the fact that two of the main characters of The Choices are largely defined by which gods they worship? That alone strikes me as far too large in scope for the story we're trying to tell. So maybe this Mythic stuff is more... for mid-to-late-game stuff, not early.
• Pirates: Yar. While movies about pirates have always been known to be rather lackluster, everyone loves to imagine themselves sailing around, hunting for treasure, and speaking in a bad Bristol accent peppered with made-up slang terms. A worthy gaming genre.
• Cowboys: The Western, like all things piratey, is one of those things that remarkably found itself being a genre all its own -- two decades of American history in the late 19th century led to a boom of literature and cinema about that era that lasted much longer. Westerns are fun, especially those made sometime post-Blazing Saddles, when filmmakers remembered that the Old West was in actuality rather filthy, smelly, and hairy, and updated their art direction accordingly, gave the genre the grit that it should have had all along. A modern trend I adore is the "weird west" -- western-genre series set in speculative universes full of magic, high technology, or both. It's never really found a mainstream grip, but I've seen some great indie stuff in the genre. So... I doubt I could personally design a setting or rule system devoted entirely to being a western, weird or otherwise, but I'd certainly like to see one.
• Tribes: Barbarian fantasy. The muscular and unclothed, yet sophisticated, wild hero from a primitive land, who travels an unforgiving world, mowing down legions of lesser warriors, defeating evil sorcerers by the skin of his teeth, and bedding every one of the equally-unclothed beautiful women he encounters. Blood and thunder! Conan. Fire and Ice. The Eye of Argon. Even Den and John Carter, combining the barbarian genre with a rare adult example of "portal fantasy" (e.g., people from our world are taken to another). These stories tend to be absolute shit, but, you know, guilty pleasure.
• Aliens: I call it "Aliens", but I really just mean science fiction in general. Spacecrafts, computers, robots. I'm particularly interested in cyberspace and simulated realities, for reasons that'll become clear as we discuss my notes.
• Urban: The modern world; despite the name, not necessarily the urban parts of it. I figure this theme can take a number of forms. Mundane drama. More exciting drama, perhaps involving espionage or military. A world with a secret magical society. A world with a not-remotely-secret magical society. And, of course, superheroes.
• Wildlife: A later addition. Some call this "xenofiction"; stories told from the perspective of animals or other non-human lifeforms. The most famous example is probably Watership Down, in which we see the world as rabbits do. For Disney examples, think Bambi, where we never see humans onscreen; The Lion King, where we see no sign that humans have ever existed; or even Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians, which firmly take the point of view of the dogs and their perspective on the human world. I wasn't sure how to handle this, but now that I'm ditching the 5E framework and looking into other systems to take inspiration from, I think this can work.

What I hoped was that every campaign setting could take aspects from every one of the themes, with Cosmos in particular being the setting devoted to the "all things Disney" theme. ...I don't think that's gonna work. Most of the themes can coexist pretty easily, but Cowboys, Aliens, and Urban wouldn't mesh very well with the fairytale/mythic aspects of Cosmos or Christalss. So... we'll look into other settings that can develop more ideas for the less fantasy-friendly themes. Focusing for now on Cosmos as a setting.

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CREATURE SIZE

This game mechanic gets its own section, because not only has it always been an aspect of gaming and creature design I find a lot of fun, but I've always known it would be far more important than usual for this particular game system.

A very early idea I had was one of size-shifting, granting a very different perspective on the world you're in, as seen throughout Alice in Wonderland or the level in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep in which Ventus experiences Cinderella's story from the perspective of one of her mouse friends. And sometimes it's not shifting, but merely always having been much smaller than other people. Changing size in D&D... I get the feeling it used to be very complex, because in 5th Edition they simplify the hell out of it. You can only change by one size category -- that is to say, your height is either doubled or halved -- and the only mechanical effect you get is a boost or penalty to your Strength.

One thing I've always wanted to see in tabletop games is colossus climbing -- when dealing with an enemy much larger than yourself, climbing up their body or surrounding landmarks to get at their eye level, or at least get at their vital organs. In tabletop games -- heck, in most games that aren't Shadow of the Colossus -- when you're fighting a much larger enemy, one gets the impression that you're just hacking away at that enemy's ankles until it dies. I so want colossus-climbing mechanics, some system by which you can only do lethal damage to a large enemy if, by some means, you can reach its vitals.

Size-shifting ought to be a regular thing as well, I think -- primarily shrinking for exploration purposes, while growing larger for combat purposes is harder to come by and doesn't last as long. In The Three Caballeros, size-shifting is used throughout the story, and Jose describes it as "black magic". So, somethin' to think about. Lest I forget, shrinking can also be forced on someone, to make them weaker, easier to squish.

When I saw Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, I figured that was the final nail in the coffin to the size-shifting mechanic. No way can a character be shrunk down that much, I figured I could never figure out how that would work in-game, and that was the end of it, I figured: 5th Edition had it right and creatures and objects should change size by only one category. I briefly considered maybe a legendary plot-relevant action can shrink down the party and then your battle maps can treat it more as if the entire world grew, and you can populate those maps with giant bugs that are actually regular bugs. But no, that's not how tabletop games work, that's not a good simulation. So I decided to totally abandon the size-shifting idea that had previously been a central part of the game's conception.

But no, I don't think that can be the end of it. We still have three core races who are only around a foot tall: they should have a vastly different play style from the regular-sized fellas. Had a thought! Not while watching the movie collection, but just now.

One of my earliest gaming experiences was with Baldur's Gate II, a computer RPG based on 2nd Edition D&D, so that's still my baseline for how many hit points a creature should have, a baseline most editions of D&D continue to follow. A tiny animal -- say, a cat, or a chicken -- has one hit point. Assuming a mediocre Constitution score, a 1st-level wizard has 4 hit points and a 1st-level fighter has 10. And, for additional reference, your average schmo swinging a club deals 1 to 6 points of damage with said club.

As D&D evolves, character growth, and therefore the growth of the challenges they face, escalates a bit more substantially with each passing edition. For example, a 3rd Edition ogre has 30 hit points and a 5th Edition ogre has 60 -- but the 3E ogre has a challenge level of 3, the 5E ogre only 2. In Baldur's Gate II, the biggest, baddest, toughest bosses in the entire game -- which were usually ancient dragons -- had about 200 hit points. In 5th Edition, the most powerful ancient dragons have about 550 hit points instead, and the biggest baddest monster in the entire game, the Tarrasque, has about 675.

But that's tabletop game stuff. Video games, meanwhile, tend to have much higher hit point totals... which can be attributed to the fact that those have computers doing the subtraction instead of relying on the players to do that themselves, but whatever, it's subtraction, it ain't that hard. Selecting an arbitrary example, let's take a look at Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator. In UEBS, a chicken doesn't have one hit point, it has 20. A simple medieval guardsman has 200, a knight has 500, an orc also has 500, and an ogre has 2,000. The chicken deals 10 damage with its peck attack, and the ogre deals 200 damage with its nasty flail.

I don't think, in most games, that such big numbers are really necessary, but for this system? Maybe that's the answer. In D&D 5E, a pixie has one hit point, but has more powers in its arsenal to defend that one hit point than a chicken does... and maybe that's the way it has to be with our pixies and myshkas and whatnot here in K&K: a pixie simply lacks the hit point total and physical damage output of a human of the same level. That's why fans are never quite onboard when D&D tries to make pixies playable, because this isn't the case even though it logically should be. I think that vast gulf is what we need to get that unique gaming experience I've been after. A human, even an incompetent one, can easily kill a chicken with a single swing of his sword. A myshka, on the other hand, at least one just starting out on his adventure... a chicken might give him a little bit more trouble. And a chicken should have a hit point total that reflects that not everyone can kill it with a single blow, and a simple human commoner should have a hit point total that reflects his superiority over a chicken.

These wildly different game experiences based on your hero's size category, well, that's not exactly a balanced combat system, is it, it's more... simulationist. Hmm, I remember the last time I heard that word. Not quite a year ago, the first time I was publicly musing about coming up with a rules system for the Keys & Kingdoms RPG, Randy Wolfmeyer showed me the work-in-progress ruleset of his own homemade RPG, Mistrunner, and warned me that the system leans in a simulationist direction. I skimmed it and didn't think about it too hard, because at the time what I was aiming for was basically some 5E homebrewing. Now that I'm distancing myself from that, it might be time to give the Mistrunner system another look. Ooh, it had a magic system too. Been needin' one of those. And evidently a bit of backstory and world-building which the rules documents I've been given only allude to. I think I'll talk to Randy about that when I'm done here.

Simulationist RPGs are a bit out of fashion these days. Games that are actually fair are what's been in vogue for a decade or two. But taking this simulationist approach... it strikes me as the only way to depict this world. Hey, there are loads of reasons you'd want a pixie on your team. Those reasons just don't include fisticuffs, is all. Lack of concern with balance also means I don't have to feel so guilty about so many of the core races possessing flight, or aquatic capabilities, or shapeshifting, or other unbalancing things. We still don't want one party member to solve everyone's problems, a major concern of 3rd Edition wizards for instance, but let's try to encourage stories where every single character can be useful even when there is a wizard. People make fun of the Avengers for keeping Hawkeye and Black Widow around when they have the Hulk and Thor; those people overlook the fact that, despite the power difference, Hawkeye and Widow are there, facing down the same threats, and kicking ass, and thanks to the skill they've developed that more powerful superheroes lack due to raw power, surviving. And that's awesome. That's what we're going for here.

So, let's get back to the subject: creature size categories. 3rd Edition and Pathfinder use the following system:

• Fine: a creature less than 6 inches in length or height
• Diminutive: a creature between 6 inches and 1 foot in length or height
• Tiny: 1 to 2 feet
• Small: 2 to 4 feet
• Medium: 4 to 8 feet
• Large: 8 to 16 feet
• Huge: 16 to 32 feet
• Gargantuan: 32 to 64 feet
• Colossal: more than 64 feet

4th and 5th editions did away with the Fine, Diminutive, and Colossal sizes, so creatures range from Tiny to Gargantuan. 5th Edition incorporated size into hit point total, by way of dice -- a Tiny creature uses the d4 for its hit dice, a Gargantuan creature uses the d20. I thought that was a pretty brilliant system the first time I realized that's what was going on, that's pretty cool they came up with that.

Now, for myself... first of all, I do think Fine and Diminutive creatures absolutely need more love and deserve their place in the game system. When I watched The Sword in the Stone, I noted how the shapeshifted Arthur was often menaced by rather small predators -- a hawk when he became a bird, a pike when he became a fish. By D&D rules, both predator and prey in that situation would be equals, even in older D&D rules, because even when size categories smaller than Tiny existed, Tiny animals like the hawk and pike still had only one hit point. So, definitely some merit in my new "more hit points" idea. By most systems, a sparrow has a 50% chance of defeating a sparrowhawk; really shoudn't be that way.

I also have a personal fondness for creatures that are too large to be physically possible. Big Godzilla fan. So one early attempt, well over a decade ago, to start designing a Christalss RPG included this notion of, ah, expanding the size categories a little bit:

• Colossal: now reserved for creatures between 64 and 128 feet
• Amazing: between 128 and 256 feet
• Unbelievable: between 256 and 512 feet
• Impossible: more than 512 feet... keeping the pattern going, that puts 1,024 feet as the hard maximum, which certainly works, that's real fuckin' big... let's keep the Impossible size category extremely rare, shall we?

I'm gonna bring that back, because kaiju are super great. Oh, and maybe also say "gigantic" instead of "gargantuan"? Seems a bit less pretentious. Nah, probably not, "gargantuan" is too iconic. And, actually, the range of the Fine size, zero to six inches, that's a bit much when looking from the perspective of a Diminutive creature, so how about this:

• Fine: 3 to 6 inches
• Bitty: 1 to 3 inches (rounding down when ending up with a fraction, in D&D tradition)
• Infinitesimal: less than an inch

That makes seven "big" categories and six "little" categories, but that's okay, because the seventh big category is called "Impossible", because it's real special! I considered one more, but no, we don't need a category for creatures between three-quarters of an inch and an inch and a half.

So! In K&K, let's make size category an extremely significant attribute, not only having a much more significant impact on hit points and damage output than it is in 5E, but also bringing back the rule from 3E and Pathfinder that size category impacts your defense rating and attack accuracy! Medium characters have normal defense and attack, and those two attributes get better as you get smaller, and worse as you get bigger -- because little things are much harder to hit, and big things much harder to miss, you see. Naturally, size changed one's stealth stat in the same way.

With this much emphasis on creature size, and with allowing the little guys to have significant impact, perhaps we should expand not only the range of hit points, but also the ability scores. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. As of 5E, those operate on a scale of 1 to 30 -- 10 is an average human, 20 is a perfect human, 30 is the absolute godlike maximum. Thinking of Strength in particular regarding these size mechanics we're working on, maybe we expand that range? Or maybe not.

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CREATURES

Before I ever started, I knew about the ten core races, which I'm gonna now call "peoples". Humans, elves, and dwarves like most fantasy settings, but also gargoyles, merfolk, fairies, and pixies, as inspired by their Disney depictions, and another three, the native, myshka, and syrsa, to represent the anthropomorphic animals of Disney.

The myshka and syrsa look the place of two creatures from my first idea for the ten races: the nemo, based on the Kingdom Hearts Nobody, and the heart construct, any artificial being with sapience and emotion. Not quite gonna work for core rules, but I'll figure them out.

Another thing I knew pretty much straightaway: the Disney catalogue doesn't have a whole lot of monsters, so the K&K world would have to be populated with creatures more typical of fantasy gaming. I knew right away we'd have to start with goblins, orcs, and ogres -- basically, the traditional humanoid opponents of most fantasy adventurers, respectively small, medium, and large. But let's take a look at what sorts of creatures Disney does have.

Humanoids

Myshkas: So, ideas I've had for myshkas from seeing their inspirations in Disney films. First off, seeing Dumbo, I had the idea that maybe myshkas have an affinity for elephants, kind of a twist on that old myth that elephants are afraid of mice.

The mice of Cinderella might offer an interesting look at myshka culture itself. Most cartoon mice have the cultural motifs of the humans of where they live, and I figured that would mostly be true for myshkas as well, that their society parallels those of the humans and they keep to the sidelines -- but Cinderella's mice have a culture all their own, with distinctive outfits and even a pidgin language. Something to look into!

I do wonder how myshkas can be used as fanservice. It's certainly been done: there's the burlesque dancer from The Great Mouse Detective, and many people who grew up on the Chip n' Dale TV series have professed attraction to Gadget. Myshkas are a bit more rodentine than Disney's cartoon mice -- for one, I decided they don't have permanent breasts, those being exclusively a human trait in reality -- but, I'm sure they still look good in certain outfits. In my view, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being sexually attracted to any adult sapient being, so I don't imagine humans ogling myshkas is particularly taboo in Cosmos, at least not in foreward-thinking societies.

The first Disney project to feature the Muppets was The Muppet Christmas Carol, and... I've got lots of ideas about the Muppets. Looking over every Muppet in the now-Disney-owned Muppet franchise and figuring out what kind of creature they are is a task for another day, for now, just focusing on the main ones. Say, Rizzo the Rat. Is he a native or a myshka? Indeterminate; he appears to be about two feet tall, exactly between a myshka and a rat native in height. I'm gonna go with myshka, since just about every other animal Muppet is a native, so, there ya go. Muppet films give me the vibe that there are certain towns where natives, myshkas, and humans do in fact live in pretty good harmony.

Kenku: Placeholder name, being named for the raven-like humanoids from D&D. The culturally-insensitive crows from Dumbo make me wonder if maybe there should be an avian equivalent to myshkas... or maybe just some talking crows. Who's to say.

Natives: The debut of Jose and Panchito, Donald's friends from the World War II-era Latin America duology, had me thinking about making a list of what kinds of creatures players can choose for their natives to take after. Eventually, I made the decision that players can simply make that decision by scanning the list of beasts that exist in the game world, knowing they're restricted to air-breathing vertebrates. More specific ideas can be provided by assorted gamebook illustrations!

When I reached The Wind in the Willows, I wondered how to handle D&D monsters that are essentially anthro animals -- gnolls, bullywugs, lizardfolk, and others -- in a world where natives exist. I figured I'd start off by making them more scary and monstrous than natives, and Naty suggested such people are descended from magically corrupted natives. I think that works! Willows had a really weird quirk: its anthro animals were very nearly life-size (as in, the size of a real toad, rat, and mole) despite interacting with humans. Nice examination of how myshkas and other diminutive peoples might interact with the world.

The island of Naboombu in Bedknobs and Broomsticks gave me a few ideas for natives. The fish civilization existing outside the island led me to the "air-breathin' vertebrate" rule. The inhabitants of Naboombu are explicitly uplifted animals, so I want to make it very, very clear that natives are not that. They're called "natives" because they were the first people -- there was no one around to magically uplift any animals. In my opinion, uplifted animals (also called awakened animals in D&D) should just gain intelligence and speech, not become bipedal and civilized. Oh, and the king of Naboombu's secretary is a secretarybird, I just... I thought that was really funny. Real classy joke about a very obscure animal species, I liked it.

Right after Bedknobs came Robin Hood, Disney's first film with an all-furry cast. The first thing I noticed were Prince John's soldiers: some were wolves, some hippos, some elephants, some alligators, and each species had a different job. This made me think that native societies probably operate on a caste system -- what kind of animal you're born as determines your job opportunities and who you can date. So, a mention in previous entries about what happens when two natives who are different species reproduce, it's actually a rare occurence. The fact that Maid Marian is a fox whose only known relatives are lions? Probably means she's illegitimate, or at least that her conception was rather scandalous.

And so, Marian's family situation is what led me to conclude that natives work like faunus from RWBY: two natives of different species will have a child of a third, totally unpredictable species. I ultimately decided against that when I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, in which the Cratchits, played by Kermit and Miss Piggy, have two pig daughters and two frog sons. I decided to make a chart of all the native-qualifying beasts in the current D&D meta and use a random generator to determine what their four children would actually be if a frog native and pig native had four kids by these rules, and ended up with an allosaurus, aurochs, giant badger, and owl. Yeah, that's just... too bizarre and random. It works for the faunus because they look human with the faintest trace of beast, but natives look so beastly that yeah, even keeping in mind that inter-species dating is exceedingly rare due to the caste system, the completely random version is too wacky.

So, how about this: a frog and a pig, two such very different creatures... they give birth to either frogs or pigs, and exactly the kind of frogs and pigs their parents are. Hm, I'm tempted to say girls have the mother's species and boys have the father's? That's a time-honored cartoon tradition. But no, let's not do that, I don't like that predictability. And speaking of unpredictability, okay, whatcha think of this: the caste system is based very specifically on species, so lions, leopards, and cougars have different places in the hierarchy. But if two parents are of different species but the same animal group (the exact taxonomy of my "group" categories varies, real taxonomy is just too complicated), their child has a chance of being a third species in that group, and therefore of a caste different from either parent, see, since a lion and a tiger would be pretty close in the system, but if their child was a lynx? They belong elsewhere. ...Caste systems are pretty stupid, I'd like to think natives are too evolved and mature to blindly follow traditions like that, but... wouldn't be much conflict in a story if everyone was fair.

The faunus idea did, though, lead me to think that natives should face similar prejudices as the faunus do, discrimination being a common theme in RWBY. I knew from the very beginning that "toon" and "furry" would be racial slurs against natives, so... probably took me longer than it should have to make that leap, that they do in fact face a lot of racism.

A very early thing I knew I wanted to establish was that natives don't have any animal-like powers. Donald cannot fly and is not an exceptional swimmer; Goofy does not have heightened senses of hearing and smell; Mickey does not have a liking for cheese, at least he didn't when Walt Disney was alive, later writers seemingly didn't get the memo. Natives are humans that look like animals -- indeed, they're less than humans, not greater. Of course, since they have animal heads, that means most of them, by default, have better teeth than humans, or a beak, and some of them have horns and stuff, so I guess that does mean that most natives have a natural weapon on their head, so... yeah, give them that stat, I'll allow that, the one thing they have that humans don't.

My final Robin Hood note, there are mice in that film which are mouse-sized instead of being roughly human-scale like most of the cast, and so that gave me the idea that myshkas and syrsas are very welcome in native communities, less fringe than they are in human settlements.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit gave me a few ideas for depicting natives; as I said, I figured "toon" would be an anti-native slur, even though a toon can be anything you can imagine while a native is very specifically an anthro animal. So, toon discrimination in the film can inspire aspects of native discrimination, like how the only way they can make a living is as entertainers, how they can't visit the venues where such performances are held, and how they live in some sort of "toontown" district. All metaphors for African-American treatment in the era in which the film is set, of course... I don't really like that kind of racial allegory, where "humans = white people" and "the story's non-human minority = black people". There has to be a less moronic way to make a statement. I would not make it so much a 1:1 parallel; there are only so many kinds of discrimination, but I'm definitely going to try not to evoke anything so specific. And, back on the subject of toons, well... maybe there was a particularly gruesome period in history where natives accused of crimes got dipped in vats of acid. Oh, yeah, that's some kind of nasty.

Maleficent's Goons: Maleficent has an assortment of squat, green-skinned, black-armored henchmen known simply as her "goons". So, what are these guys? I'm sure if you labeled any individual among them as a "goblin", no one would bat an eye, but when they're all together? Every one of them is totally unique, so labeling them "goblins" as a group would only make sense if goblins were artificial beings... which they are in some stories, but, I think, not here. Seems like a neat idea, to mass-produce goons the way Saruman manufactures orcs, but... I don't see the need, not when the world is already so full of goblins, orcs, and kobolds. And most of Maleficent's guys can be interpreted as being one of those three things; like, close enough, except the ones who have hooked beaks, what might they be?

Gnomes: I've discussed gnomes a bit; was reminded to include them here after seeing Darby O'Gill and the Little People, which is about leprechauns, not gnomes, but y'know, leprechauns reminded me there should be gnomes too.

Merfolk: My original intent was for merfolk to be able to talk to fish, but one look under the sea will tell you, the place is made up of way more than fish. ...Well, okay, talking to just fish is actually pretty good, but... most of the cool things in the ocean are non-fish. So my current idea is that merfolk can communicate at a base level with any animal that can breathe underwater, and speak fluently with cetaceans (that's a fancy word for whales and dolphins, if ya didn't know). From The Little Mermaid, well, we don't get a whole lot about merfolk culture, but I'm hoping we learn more over the course of the Little Mermaid TV show, which I seriously need to get back to watching. You know what I like? The animals and the rhyming instruments they play in "Under the Sea". Which is more a matter of animals and instruments than merfolk, but, y'know, part of their culture.

Goblinoids: I've already discussed goblins. Basically, D&D goblins, but smaller. For smaller adventurers. Now, in most editions, there are two other kinds of goblinoids besides the regular goblin: the hobgoblin and the bugbear. While goblins are very small, hobgoblins are human-sized and bugbears a bit bigger. I'll consider later how to adapt them.

What brings up the subject of goblins? Gurgi, from The Black Cauldron. As a prominent character in a Disney film, I have to figure out what he is and put his species in the setting. The Disney wiki identifies Gurgi as a "wood troll", while the wiki for Cauldron's source material, The Chronicles of Prydain, says that Gurgi is a creature of unknown type and origin. Trolls are giants in D&D and I like them that way, so that's out. I do like the idea of creatures who are unidentified, but -- that's for gaming when someone fails a lore roll, and stories when characters just happen not to know what a creature is. In an RPG gamebook, every creature should actually be identified. So I'm thinking? Forestkith goblin, a very obscure and hairy goblin subspecies I saw in a 3rd Edition monster book once. Gurgi lives in a forest, he's hairy, he's enough like a goblin, it'll work. If we have forestkith goblins, I suppose a few other subspecies are in order, so, er, how's about snow goblins and amphibious hobgoblins. There, good enough.

Myshka Equivalents: I don't want to go too far down this path, but I have certain observations. In many of the "mouse world" stories that serve as myshka inspiration, for some reason or another, the villain's henchmen consist mostly of mice but with a few lizards thrown in, as seen in The Great Mouse Detective and the Chip n' Dale series. Also in Mouse Detective, the most prominent of the henchmen is a bat, and in a particularly odd moment, we see an octopus of all things as a cabaret performer. So -- do we have myshka-like creatures who are lizards or bats? I'm not sure. At least, maybe such things shouldn't look quite as much like normal animals as myshkas do. As for the tap-dancing octopus, meh, maybe he was just a regular octopus, that might be an interesting thing to see in tiny-people communities.

Humans: Yes, I learned something about humans from watching Disney films, who'da thunk it? Specifically, the Muppets. Many Muppets appear to be human, but with exotic skin colors. Maybe that's an upper-class fashion trend, like in the Capitol in The Hunger Games: dyeing one's skin. And since the Muppets also have a powder-blue eagle among other things, maybe natives mimic this trend.

Spiderguys: In The Muppet Christmas Carol, the character of Old Joe is portrayed by a Muppet character who had never been seen before and seldom since: a spider. As I think I've said somewhere else, maybe even very very recently here on this page, if natives are air-breathing vertebrates and syrsas are insects, there should be humanoids or monsters representative of every other type of animal. I've already put some thought into some fishfolk (it helps that D&D has two major kinds of fish people, the sahuagin and the trademarked kuo-toa), so Old Joe got me thinking about spiderguys. Er, the word "spiderguys" originates from a skit I wrote in the third grade; good spiders were at war with evil spiders for territory, and the bad guys called their adversaries "spiderguys" as a slur of some sort, which was noted as being rather hypocritical. It wasn't funny or nothin', but the term "spiderguys" still crops up now and then in my work. Perhaps the spiderguys are in fact ettercaps, spidery humanoids from D&D. Usually not humanoid enough to be in the humanoid category, they're usually monsters, but maybe we can change that.

Shadar-Kai: Placeholder. And we need something better than the usual placeholder, "shadowfolk". See, the shadar-kai in D&D are the people of the Shadowfell, and to survive in the gloom and depression of that realm, well, they're very intense, and I always pictured them expressing that intensity through extreme sports and, like, lots of tattoos and piercings and junk. Now, what if, I asked myself, the K&K equivalent, the people who live in the Shadowfell, have very extreme body modifications... like a double-sided face that rotates with their emotions, or a hinge on their skulls so they can literally pick at their own brain. That's right, the more human-like inhabitants of Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas, like the Mayor and Dr. Finkelstein -- it fit together very well, as I assumed from the beginning that Halloween Town was in the Shadowfell, so... might as well!

As for other inhabitants of Halloween Town... well, I'll talk about the major characters in detail later on, but I do also need to examine the various background-ish citizens. Some of them are familiar Halloween monsters, some are more unique. I won't go into a whole lot of detail, but at least I'll take this moment to list all the semi-notable residents:

• Humanoids: The Undersea Gal, she's clearly a lagoon creature... "lagoon creatures" are technically called "gill-men", but I've always preferred "lagoon creature". Then Mr. Hyde, seems to be that in name only, there's no sign of Dr. Jekyll; instead, Hyde's gimmick is that he has two tiny versions of himself living in his hat. So... add that to the regular Hyde mythos, I guess. There's a Wolfman... not thinking too deep into lycanthropy yet, just that I'll be using the five types of were-critters that have been in D&D for ages: the wolf, bear, tiger, rat, and boar. And I'm thinking they just transform between humanoid and animal form, no hybrid form, because that's too much like a native. And finally Igor... I have a lot of thoughts about "Igor" and how he became such a big part of the "evil scientist" mythos, mostly leading me to think I ought to watch the classic Universal horror films from the 30s, and also actually read Dracula and Frankenstein, as they've never been faithfully adapted to film; everything we know about them comes from the Universal versions.
• Monsters: Two of the creepiest monsters in Nightmare are the The One Under the Bed and The One Under the Stairs. I'll take what I can from their appearances and see about building some lore.
• Fey: Halloween Town has two Witches, and by witches, I mean hags -- more on that later, hags definitely get their own entry.
• Plants: The Hanging Tree, that can be a kind of tree guardian, has an entry below... maybe even an undead tree guardian? Trees can be undead, I've seen it.
• Undead: There are four Vampires in Halloween Town, and one young Mummy. D&D undead with well-established histories, I'll think about them later. Meanwhile the Corpse Family and the Jazz Band have me thinking about undead that look like zombies, but aren't actually zombies, because zombies aren't self-aware. Wights, maybe? Oh, and when looking up a list of Halloween Town residents, I saw that there's also a Grim Reaper, which I had never noticed, I had to do an image search, sure enough, there he is in the background of a few scenes, that was a fun realization.
• Fiends: Plenty of these in Halloween Town. There's a regular ol' Devil, and two rather unique beings I'm rather fond of who are identified as demons, the Harlequin Demon and the Withered Wing Demon. Finally, there's The Clown with the Tearaway Face, who... if clowns aren't always demonic, the ones who tear off their own faces, yeah, those ones are.

Beasts

Beasts in General: As in D&D, the beast category is applied to animals that really exist in our world. Or used to. Or are close enough. In Disney, animals are super-competent; generally they can't talk to humans, but they can understand all instructions they're given and have enough loyalty to be as helpful as they possibly can. I wouldn't want to go that far, as for one thing, it would make eating meat in such a world an absolutely monstrous act, and for another, it would dilute the impact of the Wildlife theme, which requires animals to be not quite able to comprehend human motivations or technology.

All the same, I'd want all animal species to have enough of a mind to be tamed or trained, and to have empathy with their owners, which is basically already true in D&D. Animals don't quite understand the goings-on of civilized people, but they know when they've been treated well and, as a rule, are fiercely loyal to those who have shown them kindness. Basically, this can never be a normal setting with normal animals. In Oliver & Company, we see that even in the modern New York City of the Disney universe, people with pets take them everywhere they go; after all, they know that their pets can take initiative and help them achieve their goals.

101 Dalmatians introduces us to the Twilight Bark -- a system of long-range communication animals use to spread information in an otherwise human world. Maybe we can work with that somehow. The howl of a wolf, the roar of a big cat, the song of a whale, any given bird call -- lots of animal sounds are designed to be audible at a great distance, so perhaps they're more sophisticated than we're aware of.

Some Disney characters, such as Mowgli and Tarzan, are humans raised by beasts, and as a result, can fluently speak the beast language. Tarzan has to learn English and is also capable of teaching humans to converse with animals (while any language barriers in The Jungle Book are glossed over if they exist at all). Now, D&D already has a speak with animals spell, so clearly that's a thing you can do, speak with animals. To do so without magic? I'd say the only way to do that is to spend the first ten years of your life among animals, with absolutely no exposure to any other language; then you have that skill. Teaching others to do so, can't be done.

From there, I saw The Rescuers Down Under, and it made me realize... Australian fauna is very underrepresented in fantasy! Makes sense, if you think about it. Most fantasy is set in a place that resembles medieval Europe, so European, African, and Asian wildlife is fair game, and then you have writers from the Americas who just stick North and South American animals in there anyway, but Australian animals, they're just so distinctly Australian that putting them in a story just instantly screams "Australia!" Not really fair -- all beasts deserve to be represented.

A good adventurer needs a steed, and while there are a few magical options at higher income levels, most riders will be mounted upon a nice sturdy creature of the beast category. As seen in Down Under, maybe even a snake can be a riding mount... if you're of a much smaller size category than the snake. And only in water. Normally, common sense permitting, you can ride any creature if it's at least one size category larger than you, but I figure snakes need a little asterisk there. And remember, when I said all animals can be tamed and trained and loyal, I meant all animals, let's not remotely restrict ourselves to the kind of animals that can be trained in real life.

In Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, we learn that dogs and cats can speak to each other but can't understand human speech, resulting in much confusion and fear. I mean, I totally loved that when I realized that's what was going on, it really captured what I've always thought being a pet must be like, loving your human caretakers with all your heart but always being very frustrated at not knowing what the heck is going on. As awesome as it is, I don't think it'll work here, I much prefer Disney moments such as we see in, oh, an example from Beauty and the Beast comes to mind -- in which Belle's horse comes home without her dad, she asks the horse to take her to where he left her dad, and the horse totally does it.

But Homeward Bound is a pretty good exhibition of the way animals think, and why the dog is man's best friend. Speaking of that psychology and our examination of it in K&K, let's talk about the dark truth about domestication: essentially, domesticated animals are those that our ancestors bred to have the minds of children. The ancestors of our dogs and cats? They didn't bark or wag their tails, they didn't meow or purr; in the natural world, these are things baby dogs and cats do. But those that have the minds of children into adulthood, they end up dependent on humans and so they stay with us (certain optional canine traits like floppy ears and curly tails are also signs of our dogs basically being oversized babies). So, well, when examining the Wildlife theme, when dogs and cats interact with other animals, we might have to roleplay their childlike mindset.

We see a certain amount of social structure in wildlife-theme movies; the deer in Bambi and the lions in The Lion King both have royal families who watch over the entirety of their lands. What monarchy actually does in such a setting, what the job entails, I can't be entirely sure. It may very well be purely ceremonial. As to the fact that in one of these two stories the royal family are the apex predators who presumably eat their subjects on a regular basis, well, anyone who lives on the African savannah knows perfectly well that that's just the way nature works. As Jim Unger once said, if a zebra named Maurice breaks his leg, well, you don't see a lot of zebras in wheelchairs amongst the herds. The other zebras will keep their distance from Maurice, safe in the knowledge that the lions are getting him today, not them. They're not bad people, the other zebras, they're just people who know their way around nature.

The Lion King provides a few additional examples of the culture animals might have. Elephant graveyards? Real thing, kinda. Elephants have places they go when they know they're dying, and very primitive funeral rites. Hyenas? Second-class citizens willing to riot to attain equality and civil rights, #HyenasDidNothingWrong. And the primate character is the only one in the film who possesses any semblance of technology and magic, which makes sense. Maybe any animal that's developed tool use in reality is also capable of simple magical cantrips.

For a final note about beasts in general, there do exist in the world of Cosmos animals who are "uplifted" or "awakened", words we can use interchangeably. A mid-level spell of awakening can grant any animal human intelligence and the power of speech, making them no longer part of the Wildlife theme but a true member of society. Iago from Aladdin is implied to be such a creature; in The Return of Jafar, Jafar taunts Iago with the fact that he was an ordinary parrot before they met, making Iago either awakened or, perhaps, Jafar's familiar; I doubt the latter, since the pair don't seem to be magically bound together in any way -- Jafar can't read Iago's mind, and in Return Iago eventually betrays Jafar and joins the good guys, and survives when Jafar dies. An awakened animal can be a delightful companion, but I imagine it's not an easy life. Animals granted human intelligence probably wouldn't have a whole lot of civil rights, or respect in polite society. And they'd be lacking in sexual partners, as their attraction to their own species would be very inappropriate and no mentally-well humanoid would be attracted to them. And, you know, still no hands, which limits how well you can function in civilization. So... think carefully before you uplift your animals, is all I'm sayin', they might not be happy afterward.

Ungulates: In Snow White, the dwarfs use deer as beasts of burden and, in the final action scene, riding mounts. This was a cool detail and the thing that inspired me to make sure dwarves in this universe are small enough that they can ride deer.

In Darby O'Gill and the Little People, the leprechauns ride around on tiny horses. I like that idea, tiny horses for diminutive riders -- though maybe such things would be fey, not beasts. You know what would be beasts? Giant horses. I just kind of like that image. Horses. But huge.

Dinosaurs: I do so adore dinosaurs and other extinct beasts, so watching the "Rite of Spring" segment from Fantasia, well, reminded me to put them in here, not that I needed it.

Insects: Namely, giant insects! Fun and Fancy Free includes giant dragonflies. Ooh, I'm glad I wrote that down, because on my list of beasts to include in K&K, I seem to have forgotten giant dragonflies. I've always had the assumption that giant dragonflies are way bigger and deadlier than most giant bugs.

Snakes: Aside from their limitations as riding mounts I mentioned above, I've had a certain macabre fondness from a very young age for the giant, tree-eating orange-and-black snake from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Such a thing might be too monstrous to be a beast. Might.

Dragons

True Dragons: I mentioned earlier that core D&D usually has ten dragon species. 3E gave each of the ten species 12 different age categories, which was extremely excessive; 5E cut it down to just four apiece, which is still a little much when there are ten species, but I think that's as far down as they can possibly cut it. That being said, I do also think creatures other than dragons should have rules for the stats of their young, which do exist for some other creatures but not many. Just so the game master thinks of them and knows to represent them; let's for sure establish that there's no honor in fighting children. Because fledgling dragons are children; dragons are far more intelligent than humans and, while intentionally uncivilized, are very cultured and sophisticated.

When I saw The Reluctant Dragon, well, there wasn't much to gain from it, basically just got me thinking about how to depict dragons, and making the decision to go with the D&D model of dragons: chromatic dragons (red, white, black, blue, and green) and metallic dragons (gold, silver, bronze, copper, and brass) with all the same details -- the breath weapons, habitats, cultures, personalities, and lairs that each one has in D&D. Must have been hard to come up with that stuff for ten different species of dragon! I have no interest in messing with it, it's a classic.

In The Sword in the Stone, Madam Mim sets some parameters for her shapeshifting duel with Merlin, one of the rules being that they can only become animals, another being "no make-believe things like pink dragons and stuff". Her finishing move in the duel is to become a purple dragon, which she insists doesn't break the "make-believe things" rule. Putting aside the fact that a dragon wouldn't count as an animal in most game systems (to be fair, she means animal as opposed to vegetable or mineral, allowing Merlin to win the battle by becoming a virus... and taxonomically, obviously a dragon is an animal), evidently purple dragons exist in the Sword in the Stone universe but pink ones don't. Sounds about right! D&D sometimes includes types of true dragons outside of the ten main ones. Other chromatic dragon types include purple, gray, and brown, and those seem legit. There are other types of metallic dragon as well, but... they're all dumb, not gonna use them. And sometimes there are more than two sub-categories of true dragons -- there can be gem dragons, planar dragons, catastrophic dragons... and they're cool and all, but I have to wonder: in a world where there are so many species of dragons, how has there not been a dragon apocalypse? Add onto that the long dragon lifespan that means every species has at least four different stat blocks, and it's a bit too much to handle. So -- just a couple of other types of chromatic dragon and that's it. With the main five having clear superiority, and the chromatics outside the main five not being able to go toe-to-toe with the metallics.

Pete's Dragon provided a bit more dragon lore. Elliott the dragon has the power of invisibility, and I do remember fighting a dragon with such a power in Baldur's Gate II -- I imagine it would be a staple of dragon spellcasters! And, according to the film's villain song, every little piece of a dragon has valuable magical properties: liver cures the cold, bone powder grows hair, cartilage keeps you thin, tears clear your acne, fat soothes burns, and blood is a potion of youth. Not a lot of those are the kind of things adventurers look for, but at least they can find a market for selling these substances. So I really want to dig into that! The medicinal properties of all magical creatures -- potioneering and the collection of magical components being a vital aspect of K&K magic sounds like tons of fun, though I could be wrong, maybe that would only be fun in a video game. In addition to what Pete's Dragon tells us, we also know from D&D that dragon scales make for a bitchin' suit of armor, which grants protection not only from weapons but also magic and the dragon's particular element. Generally you get one suit of armor from each dragon you kill, but I dunno, they're pretty big, I imagine some hide can make leather armor, some bigger scales can make scale armor, maybe you can even get plate armor from a really big one. Meanwhile in another universe, as I'm sure you're aware, the heartstrings of dragons, along with the tail hairs of unicorns and the feathers of phoenixes, make for useful "cores" of magic wands, while the blood has twelve uses. Twelve uses, all of which were apparently discovered by a young Albus Dumbledore. No one before him ever thought to use dragon's blood for anything? Makes sense to me.

Half-Dragons: In D&D, dragons are known for shapeshifting, and known for getting laid while they do it, giving birth to half-dragons -- people, animals, and monsters who are, in essence, the species of their non-draconic parent, but have some of the powers, and a whole lot of the looks, of their draconic parent. I considered giving half-dragons certain attributes from a Disney property that's not actually on my list: American Dragon: Jake Long, in which "dragons" can willingly shapeshift between their human and dragon forms. I'm not sure about that idea anymore, it might not be an interesting idea for half-dragons to be able to blend in with normal people. I gotta think about it.

Wyverns: Wyverns are dragon-like creatures, one of very few creatures of the dragon category to be of merely animal intelligence. They'e very dragonish, but with more serpentine bodies, grasping talons like an eagle, a stinger tail, and no arms. That is to say, their forelimbs are just wings, like a bat; that's become a lot more common in modern depictions of dragons because it's biologically possible, vertebrates always have only four limbs. But I think dragons are too special to be biologically possible, so I prefer my dragons six-limbed, with legs, arms, and wings. Clearly, I'm not alone there, because many people will claim that any dragon without arms is actually a wyvern, but those people are dorks, fuck 'em. Anyway, wyverns. Can't have a high fantasy setting without them, and the gwythaints from The Black Cauldron are wyvern-ish enough to be an excuse to bring them up.

Giants

Cloud Giants: Willie the Giant, best known for playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in Mickey's Christmas Carol, made his debut in Fun and Fancy Free as the giant in "Mickey and the Beanstalk". In addition to swinging a mean morningstar, as cloud giants tend to do, Willie is also a shapeshifter for some reason -- possibly a trait borrowed from the ogre in the Puss in Boots story, another castle-dwelling fairy tale villain of the "giant" persuasion. I'm thinking not all cloud giants are shapeshifters, but maybe they have a tradition of that particular druid circle. Ooh, sudden brainwave: maybe when a druid first learns shapeshifting they're restricted to creatures of their own size category, and can branch out as they develop.

Other Giants: With no other giants in Disney films to speak of, I just wanted to throw in a bit of information about the D&D model. The six types of true giant are storm giants, cloud giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, and hill giants -- in that order! It's a caste system, see: the lowliest storm giant bum still has authority of the king of the cloud giants. Less organized, but at the very bottom of the caste system, are other giant species, like the ogre, troll, ettin, cyclops, and others. I assume that, in theory, as far as giants are concerned, any giant is better than any non-giant. Now, Norse mythology has the Jotun, the gods of the giants... mostly fire giants and frost giants, but let's say all types of giants owe something to the Jotun. Well, cyclopes are Greek, maybe not all.

Monsters

Centaurs: Fantasia's "Pastoral Symphony" segment showed off a lot of magical creatures, mostly Greek, and the centaurs took center stage. While my impulse would be to put centaurs under fey, after consulting my think tank I'm keeping them under the monster category, as they are in the current D&D model; despite their close association with satyrs, I think it makes sense for them to be a bit less mystical, a bit more mortal, than satyrs. Being mortals, there should naturally be both male and female centaurs, as depicted in the Fantasia short. The idea for my centaurs involves a caste system, a hierarchy of some sort, based on the fact that there are some centaurs in the short who have the bodies of zebras or donkeys instead of horses, and all of them are servants or entertainers. Also, those centaurs' human halves are hideous caricatures of non-white people, so... not gonna go with that part. And I was gonna say I might make the differences more subtle, as it doesn't make much sense for some centaurs to look like different equine species, but as the guy who invented myshkas and natives, that would be rather hypocritical of me.

Winged Donkeys: Winged and otherwise supernatural donkeys appear in both Fantasia and The Three Caballeros... recurring enough in early Disney that I for sure had to think about implementing them. I guess, much like an ordinary donkey, they're a low-budget and somewhat comical alternative to an actual fancy flying mount.

Elephantaurs: Having watched Dumbo, I figured an elephant that flies using its giant ears is one of those things that's just... way too unique to appear anywhere else, can't replicate Dumbo for the K&K world. Regardless, he did inspire me to do something: create the elephantaur, a race of humanoid elephants. Not to be confused for a native who happens to look like an elephant. What are elephantaurs like? Heck if I know, but right off the bat I get the vibe that they're big jerks. Not at all like real elephants.

Krakens: The classic giant, giant, tentacled sea monster! Titans from the dawn of time, powerful enough to threaten the gods themselves. Reminded myself to include them after seeing the iconic giant squid battle in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Now: would it be redundant for krakens and giant squids to exist? In a previous fantasy world, I made the call that krakens exist but squid don't. I think I'll reverse that decision here and allow the two to coexist, especially after seeing a lot of myths and games where krakens don't really look like squid at all, like in Clash of the Titans. ...What was that even about? Why did a Greek mythology story have a kraken in it? Krakens are Norse, not Greek.

Mombi and Wheelers: Ah, first mention of the Land of Oz series, which Disney's tackled a time or two, most notably in their traumatizing 80s film Return to Oz. In general, I find Oz far too fanciful, it's a universe of... just weird and silly stuff. Not a cohesive fantasy world. But there's a thing or two to think about. Like how Mombi, Return's main antagonist, keeps multiple spare heads around, switches them whenever she feels like it, so she's played by three different actresses over the course of the film. What kind of boogeyman can we create that also does that? Then we have her army, the Wheelers. I didn't find them as terrifying as many other people did, but there's some kind of weird and uncomfortable horror in a living creature with wheels, I think I'd adapt them into something other than wheeled humans, yeah, something weird and biomechanical... I was leaning toward aberration for a second, but I think I'll keep these two as monsters.

Cecaeliae: As mentioned, a cecaelia is the name for Ursula's species. Not a very common creature in myth or folklore. Let's figure out a culture for them, give them certain ties to merfolk, see what they're all about. Pathfinder says they're generally nomadic and of a proud and volatile disposition. Place to start. Oh, and I definitely know my cecaeliae do not have the skin that looks like an evening dress, it's a cool design, doesn't make much biological sense for their mammaries to be permanently concealed beneath their own skin, so, yeah, just octopus from the waist down, same as merfolk. And waist up, looking slightly less human than merfolk do, say with the purple skin of Ursula or the green of her sequel sister Morgana, maybe some pointy ears, pebbly skin...

Kalidahs: The kalidah is a creature from the first Wizard of Oz book. In the book, when Dorothy and her two automaton companions worry about lions and tigers and bears, the Cowardly Lion informs them that there's something far more fearsome in the woods: kalidahs, who are basically lion-tiger-bear hybrids. And I'd like to apply the name of the kalidah to a very special creature -- the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. His fascinating character design has the hindquarters of a wolf and the forequarters of a bear, with the option of bipedalism and using hands. His head is that of a bison, of all things, with a lion's mane and teeth, boar's tusks, gorilla's brow, and human eyes. So, a prince was cursed to take such a form, but it's also an actual species. How civilized are they when they're not cursed princes? Probably not a whole lot. And maybe some have the tiger-ish aspect of the original Oz version. Tigers are cool. Other minor variations like that, I notice that a lot of kalidahs are all-black in illustrations.

Fey

Nymphs: The "Nutcracker Suite" segment in Fantasia depicts pixie-like creatures tending to nature and the seasons. Knowing ahead of time that K&K pixies are a bit more mortal than what I was seeing there, I thought maybe I'd call these creatures nymphs instead. Wouldn't be my first time giving the name "nymph" to a creature that looked more like a pixie. And while I later decided that pixies and their power sets would be determined by which season they were born in... nymphs can still also be seasonal, set apart by how nymphs of different seasons look different as well as having different powers, their bodies glowing with seasonal-themed colors just like in the segment. I wondered briefly whether I should keep nymphs pixie-sized... after all, dryads, naiads, and nereids are basically types of nymphs, and my intention was for them to be human-sized. I think how I'll take care of this is that nymphs will be "tiny", only slightly larger than pixies, who are "diminutive".

Satyrs: Seen in "The Pastoral Symphony". Er... I don't remember the details, and all I wrote down was "satyrs", so... yeah, they're here, satyrs. Thinking recently that maybe they're not all-male like they usually are in stories; maybe the women are very physically different. Maybe the men are satyrs and the women are fauns! Just a thought.

Pink Elephants: These guys... I'm thinking they inhabit the Realm of Dreams, and "fey" is the best category I can figure for inhabitants of such a place. They do come from a drug trip, after all. The many variants we see throughout Dumbo's Pink Elephants sequence... well, most forms get way too trippy, so I think I'll just stick with the pink ones. So, what do they do, what do they want? I figure mostly they lurk around giving travelers the heebie-jeebies, that sounds about right.

Fairies: Let's talk about fairy godmothers. Cinderella has one; Pinocchio kind of has one in a sense, and Princess Aurora has three! So, with fairies well-established as a core race in this setting... what precisely is a fairy godmother? A major status symbol, to be sure. How does one make that arrangement? I assume the kind of fairy who's been around since the beginning and maxed out their sorcerer skills wouldn't ordinarily be available for such a job, strictly a neo-fairy thing.

Sleeping Beauty provided some really great fairy ideas, being, as some say, a fairy tale from the fairies' perspective: the villain is a fairy and so are the trio who are the real heroes of the story. The good fairies, in addition to shrinking themselves down a lot for stealth purposes, also do so traveling as little wisps of light; I figure those little wisps, in addition to having some travel utilities, are what fairies turn into when exposed to an anti-magic field, since they're creatures of pure magical energy. Also, when Maleficent is killed, she's left as a black smudge on the ground. Gonna go with that! Not only is it visceral, it also gives you something you can carry around to cast a resurrection spell on; much better than if they disappeared entirely.

Cheshire Cat: Whether an individual archfey or a species of some sort, I'm not sure. I'd want to emphasize his psychedelic aspects, give him some 60s and 70s motifs, and a very sinister bent, behavior far more menacing than just fading in and out and pacing around. As a villain, I get the vibe of him being more of a mastermind than a direct combatant.

Pixies: So, pixie dust, is that still a thing? Maybe it's more associated with nymphs. D&D pixies produce dust which can be used as a spell component, though only pixies can use it to its full effect: they have a list of spells they can cast innately, including a flight spell. That's a bit much for playable pixies, and I do intend to develop four different power sets for pixies, depending on season. Perhaps they can all grant temporary flight.

Leprechauns: The 1959 film Darby O'Gill and the Little People offers a lot of lore about leprechauns which I'm just gonna go ahead and use. They can turn into rabbits to be less conspicuous. They can walk through walls. And if you catch one, he can grant you three wishes. I'd keep them fairly mundane wishes, not sure what the limitations might be, and also maintain the film's rules. In the film, not only are leprechauns capable of the classic tactic of twisting the result of a wish that's poorly-worded, but if you make a fourth wish -- whether you off-handedly wish for something in his presence or he deliberately deceives you by offering a fourth -- not only do you not get that fourth wish, but your first three are undone. And their culture? Drinking and partying, of course.

Will-o'-Wisps: Also seen in Darby O'Gill. Various editions of D&D are inconsistent on what exactly will-o'-wisps are. They've been fey, undead, and even aberrations. As of 5th Edition, they're currently undead. I think I'm going to go with fey, because the creator of Gargoyles figures that the will-o'-wisps briefly seen in one episode might be the sort of life-form that eventually evolved into fairies. As mentioned, a de-powered fairy becomes a "wisp", largely helpless and immobile, whereas a will-o'-wisp, well, since they're wisps all the time, they know how to work with it. And what they do? I guess mostly they get people lost in swamps, but maybe some are more benevolent than that.

Pookas: A puca is mentioned in Darby O'Gill... I forget what it was, I think maybe it was a shapechanger who disguised itself as the protagonist's horse? Sounds consistent with the traditional mythological puca. Regardless, my intent when that name was mentioned was to include pookas in K&K as basically what they are in D&D: sexy bunny girls. What else there is to them? Well, that remains to be seen, for now it's enough that I know they're there.

Hags: So, here's the deal: the beings that fairy tales call "witches", the warty old women who live in the woods, those are in fact "hags", not witches. So what's a witch in K&K? Not sure. It's a term that's been used as the female equivalent of both "wizard" and "warlock", and the real-life practice resembles being a druid if anything. Maybe it's a word for any woman who knows magic... or just a very mean thing to call any woman who knows magic, possibly conflating such women with hags. Or, seeing as witchcraft is a real pagan religion that's increasing in popularity in modern society, maybe nobody in the K&K universe is called a witch, might be insensitive.

Anyway, hags, malevolent fey beings of secluded and spooky environments out in nature. While usually solitary, sometimes they gather in covens of three -- as you see in The Black Cauldron or Hocus Pocus. A coven is much greater than the sum of the three hags that make it up, being able to cast spells as a group on the level of a very learned wizard. I imagine bargains can be made with a coven, for worthy adventurers who don't mind getting their hands, and souls, dirty. Because hags absolutely do eat children -- not all the time, just when they need to; a hag has to eat a human baby in order to get pregnant. Then she gives birth to a baby girl who'll grow up to be another hag. This is D&D stuff, but it works well enough; I appreciate the inclusion of the fact, I don't like not knowing how creatures reproduce. As for K&K hags, well, being that they're fey, maybe their magic has a bit more of a nature flair to it than the average wizard. The hags in Black Cauldron display that they're able to revive the dead, after all; arcane casters usually can't do that.

In D&D, there are three types of hag in the core rules, and it's implied, but not necessary, that most covens consist of one hag of each type, at least I assumed as much. If you put together a coven that way, then each one brings different things to the table. And we kind of see the benefits of that in Hocus Pocus: each Sanderson sister has a unique power. Winifred has her fireballs and lightning bolts, Mary can sniff out children, and Sarah has her hypnotic siren song. That's a nice place to start for building our own three types of hags. Also in Hocus Pocus, we see some classic witchy imagery like their cabin in the woods and the purple smoke coming from the chimney.

Sprites: In current D&D, sprites are kin to pixies. They have dragonfly wings instead of butterfly, and while pixies defend themselves with magic, sprites instead use bows and poison-tipped arrows. Both are free-spirited and good-hearted, but sprites are more edgy and intense about it. "Sprites" seemed to be a good label to apply to the Fair Folk from The Black Cauldron. We don't learn much about them, but they have antennae, their attire is very Germanic and similar to Disney's much earlier seven dwarves, they live in underground tunnels, and unlike pixies, there are sprite children. Place to start for buildin' that civilization.

Children of the Corn: Just the first random term that came to mind that evokes creepy kids -- Lock, Shock, and Barrel, the trick-or-treaters from The Nightmare Before Christmas. They're clearly not just kids in costumes, going by Lock's yellow eyes and movable tail, and Barrel's weird feet. Maybe their makeup-wearin' and mask-wearin' and certain magical modifications, like the aforementioned shadar-kai, make them a cultural subset of something else I've cooked up.

That being the elves from The Santa Clause; they depict Christmas elves in a new creative way: they're all portrayed by children, humans think they look like children, but individuals mention being upwards of a thousand years old, and in a throwaway line one mentions being in a relationship. So, I like that idea, a race that mostly resembles human children, perhaps with pointy elf ears or a few other fanciful traits. They'd have to be a fey race, because I like to cover all my bases and make sure all my creatures make sense. And if these creatures weren't fey, that would mean these creatures that look exactly like small children reproduce sexually, and no one wants to contemplate that. So maybe they make new members of their species by, I dunno, growing them inside flowers, sort of a Thumbelina thing? So, they look like children, let's say age ten or so, and have a childlike innocence as well, but are also unimaginably wise and savvy.

Plants

Snow White's Hallucinations: When Snow White travels through a spooky forest, she has a lot of hallucinations, seeing a lot of the forest's plant life as scary monsters. Each of these hallucinations could serve as the inspiration for some sort of plant creature. I especially like when she imagines some floating logs transforming into crocodile-like predators, those things are super creepy and well-designed.

Mushroom Folk: The dancing mushrooms in Fantasia inspired me to implement that ever-classic fantasy gaming trope: mushroom people. Didn't develop it beyond that until just the other day, I've got some pretty cool plans for mushroom people now which, surprisingly, I actually don't want to give away just yet.

Tree Guardians: Actual name pending, but... yeah. Not like treants; treants come from D&D and are copyright-friendly versions of Tolkien's ents, benevolent guardians of the forest who have a certain whimsical charisma in their... tree-ness. So, treants in K&K, yes, but I also think they ought to have a more primitive, sinister counterpart, smaller trees with spooky puppet faces, and what I think would instantly serve to making them creepier than treants, check this out: instead of having long legs, their bodies end in roots, and they walk using their arms. Babes in Toyland had such spooky trees, as do a lot of other things.

Polyps: The plant creatures in Ursula's "garden", the transformed wretches who, apparently, failed to pay her for her services. ...She's got a lot of them, that can't possibly be the origin of every polyp in the garden, can it? But yeah, let's make them something as miserably wretched as those in The Little Mermaid. Now, a "polyp", in biology, refers to the cylindrical shape of a cnidarian, the animal group that includes jellyfish, anemones, and corals. Catchy and sinister nautical name, not an accurate one. So we'll work on that.

Killer Christmas Wreaths: Another of the Christmas gifts from Nightmare that really stuck with me -- none of the living toys did so much, though I suppose I ought to mention them under constructs as well.

Undead

Headless Horseman: Some sort of legendary revenant, I think -- an individual rather than a type of undead. Fun fact, in the original story, his head was taken off by a cannonball. How gruesome is that? And he throws flaming pumpkins and rides a nightmare, so clearly he has some demonic connections. That evil laugh he has in Disney's version despite having no head -- that's super haunting, I'd make that a signature bone-chilling power. Though a normal revenant has a single quarry they want to hunt down for revenge, and they have one year to do it; to be an iconic, legendary character, maybe the Horseman is more unique, more of a mercenary/assassin type of revenant.

Banshees: Naturally, another Darby O'Gill addition. I believe banshees are traditionally fey, but I personally like them better as undead -- the ghost of someone who was so spoiled and so vain that they think it's super-unfair that they're dead, and are now throwing an eternal tantrum over it. Best known, of course, for their bone-chilling scream which can even kill those of insufficient courage.

Grim Reapers: Some sort of stagecoach-driving grim reaper appears in Darby O'Gill. Now, the notion of a psychopomp doesn't really make much sense, for the same reason Santa Claus doesn't, but on a much greater scale, yeah? A guy in charge of taking away everyone who dies -- how does he have the time to talk to all these people before bringing them along, to play a game with everyone who challenges him? Do people who die by a sudden knife in the back see the reaper slowly approaching for a few seconds before it happens? Do people who got their skulls crushed still get the traditional game of chess to determine if they actually survived? I see grim reapers as, not necessarily the people who escort souls to the afterlife, there's really no need for a guy who does that, but maybe they're the people who actively hunt down those that are destined to die -- the important and the powerful, whatever that may entail. And yes, I've been using plurals, I imagine there are multiple grim reapers -- not a whole lot, but more than you'd expect -- and each has a certain specialty.

Ghosts: First time I saw one of Disney's three important versions of A Christmas Carol, I figured there ought to be some kind of undead inspired by the ghost of Jacob Marley. Now that it's time to make a decision about that... I'm thinking that's just the way ghosts work. The general idea is you come back as a ghost if you have unfinished business, and you wander around the ethereal plane, never straying far from where you died, until someone helps you finish your business. A ghost can be destroyed, but they come back a day later until their business is done. For the Marley inspiration, let's say all ghosts have to bear the weight of the evil deeds they did in life, in the form of chains and shackles and stuff. These things make the ghost heavier, slower, and much more exhausted -- but also more dangerous, as they're not only angry, but can attack with their chains, whipping and constricting. Some ghosts, of course, died innocently and bear no chains, there's just something they really wanted to do before they died. Maybe it was sex. Ghosts are sexy, right? Is that just me?

Liches: The Horned King from The Black Cauldron appears to be a lich -- a word for a powerful spellcaster who uses a complex necromantic ritual to become undead so they can, well, keep being a powerful spellcaster for that much longer. A lich keeps their soul in a phylactery, a magical object which they keep safe and hidden if they're not morons. So, er... I didn't write down anything about the Horned King and what he might add to lich lore, I don't know why that slipped my mind, I didn't write down "wyverns" either, these just came to mind just now. Jack Skellington, I think he's a lich too. He doesn't cast spells in Nightmare, but he does in Kingdom Hearts, and, well, he likes learning and studying, so he'd make for a good wizard, and he's very charismatic and has a big personality, so he'd be a good sorcerer. Not sure which he should be, I just know that he can be either now that I'm ditching 5E rules. In 5E, you had to be a wizard to be a lich, and I didn't like that, since Xykon, one of the best D&D-based villains of all time, is a 3rd Edition sorcerer lich, I'd hate to create a campaign setting where he couldn't exist. Jack being non-evil, maybe he's a thing we can call a "white lich", someone who doesn't necessarily have to use their lichdom for evil.

Electric Ghosts: So, there's a certain cast of characters in an indie cartoon that Disney distributed that I really wanted to depict -- but the way their world works can't possibly be the way Cosmos works, so I had to think creatively. I'm thinking we take some inspiration from Rotom, an electric/ghost Pokemon who possesses electrical appliances to change its subtype: it can be an oven (fire), washing machine (water), refrigerator (ice), fan (air), or lawnmower (grass). So I'm thinking something like that, a formless electrical ghost that can take the form of a construct by possessing an appliance. Rather than the elemental theme, the main appliances it can choose from will be a toaster, desk lamp, vacuum cleaner, radio, and electric blanket. You picking up what I'm throwing down? From the same film, we get treated to the simple truth that people who dissect appliances for a living are terrifying, if you happen to be an appliance.

Ghost Dogs: As in Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I recently skimmed a favorite book of mine from long ago, The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures, for some creature inspiration for my own fantasy world, and I found that a peculiarly common creature in myths around the world is a ghostly black dog with glowing eyes who lurks around roads and stuff (also, an aquatic horse that drowns people, that one's everywhere too). Hmm, I think I put that particular ghost-dog down as a fey, but what of ghostly dogs who are actually ghosts? Having a glowing nose is a bit too Rudolph (by design in Zero's case of course, but real animals don't have little cartoony orbs for noses). In the final shot of the film, Zero flies off into the sky and disappears, which always unsettled me as a kid, made me think it meant Zero was off to the afterlife and Jack would never see him again. Let's go with that: a ghost dog can ascend to the afterlife by being a very good dog. ...Well, that doesn't work, no dog would ever remain a ghost, hehe.

Constructs

Heart Constructs: So, I don't think it's quite going to work out for this term, a heart construct, to function as I had originally intended it: a singular race to represent any construct given sentience and emotion by the love and passion of its creator -- be they a work of art (like Pinocchio), a work of pure magic (like Olaf), or a work of technology (such as Tron or Baymax). Too different to really be unified under this single umbrella. For this entry, let's talk primarily about Pinocchio and his type: a work of art and craftsmanship, gifted life by some high-level fairy magic. The reason doesn't matter! It's a spell of a certain level. Other details I observed about Pinocchio: he clearly has some sort of biology, as he's capable of eating, smoking, and apparently, drowning, so, well, less resentment from other party members for being immune to poison and having no need to eat or sleep, I guess: he may not be a real boy, but he's definitely living. Pinocchio needs someone to serve as his external conscience... it's largely symbolic, but I kind of want to work with that concept in a more literal sense, maybe living constructs really do have no sense of morality whatsoever, but they believe and retain what their external conscience tells them on the subject. And of course, his goal is to become human: I imagine that being a common goal for all sorts of people, not just puppets and mermaids. Humans have a lot of versatility, and can probably go anywhere without attracting much attention, and while no doubt there are plenty of people who are racist against humans, most people on Cosmos have probably been discriminated against by humans and would prefer that to end. Becoming human... it's a pretty high-level spell, I imagine, so not a lot of people have achieved that goal.

Wood Sentinels: As I've already discussed, the brooms from Fantasia's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment, with their indefatigable work ethic and insane regenerative abilities, inspired me to create this creature which... maybe isn't quite that OP.

Carforged: I have my doubts this race will appear in Cosmos... maybe a little bit, maybe a few find their way here from other settings, or maybe Cosmos is where they're from, I get the feeling that they're super-incongruous no matter where you find them. This is a very silly idea: combining the warforged, a race of living robots from D&D who were built for war and are now seeking purpose... with the population of Pixar's Cars universe. So that's their origin and... what they look like. Bringing them up here on account of Casey Jr., the living train engine from Dumbo; as we see in the Cars films, a carforged doesn't have to be a car, any motorized vehicle will do; car, train, boat, what have you. So, maybe carforged do exist in Cosmos even if cars don't... or maybe cars do, as exceptionally rare magic items, and then there are also carforged? I gotta think about that. In the "Pedro" segment of Saludos Amigos, in addition to the airplane protagonist, the flight tower also seems to be alive, which is semi-common in "living vehicle" cartoons -- one can at least point out of Pixar's Cars that only vehicles are alive, so, consistency, but I'm thinking about the flight tower thing.

Card Soldiers: The card soldiers of the Queen of Hearts... who, herself, is a great villain archetype, a completely insane monarch, always something worth thinking about.

Animated Objects: Common enough in D&D with an animate objects spell. Generally, its stats depend upon the size of the object, but there are also specific variants, like a suit of armor, a flying sword, or a rug of smothering. In The Sword in the Stone, Merlin has a belligerent sugar bowl among his possessions. The way he packs his furniture and cleans the kitchen strikes me as the sort of spell that only temporarily animates objects -- the fairies in Sleeping Beauty also use magic for housekeeping in a similar manner. And the way Merlin calls for the attention of "everything", and every item in his cottage turns to face him, that gives me chills. So... I guess there are animated objects of both a temporary and a permanent persuasion. Though to have an actual personality, well, I'm thinking maybe Merlin's sugar bowl is more in the vein of the Beauty and the Beast objects, whom we'll get to.

Plushie Constructs: Basically, teddy bears brought to life. They're resistant to bludgeoning damage, that much is certain, maybe even immune. Their purpose? To entertain the children of wizards and the obscenely rich. Some varieties bounce. Based on the cast of Winnie the Pooh, I pictured such things looking like, well... like the cast of the movie Christopher Robin. Indeed, a lot of K&K creatures I've imagined have ended up in Disney live-action remakes looking exactly the way I pictured them. And I resent those movies for it; not only do they steal my ideas, they suck at stealing my ideas. Why can't these characters emote? Why is the art direction so ugly, the choreography so awful? Why do they completely abandon all the symbolism and stylization? These stories were always going to be better animated, yes, but they didn't have to suck as live-action remakes, they should have been an actually pretty cool thing to see, Disney should have been able to still make them dazzling. Anyway, yeah, sentient constructs of stuffing and fluff. Who probably end up abandoned by the rich kids they were originally gifted to, because... rich kids. Oh, and there are corrupted versions based on an elephant and dire weasel, because, y'know.

Robots and Droids: Constructs of a more technological persuasion. Robots and droids were first seen in the Disney universe in The Black Hole, which had well-spoken droid assistants (kind of combining R2-D2's looks with C-3PO's mannerisms), human-shaped drones and soldiers (who turn out to actually be undead cyborgs), and one very nasty and scary killer robot bodyguard. Another thing robots are good for? Replacing and impersonating real people, as we saw in The Great Mouse Detective of all places.

Programs: The inhabitants of cyberspace, as seen in Tron. Really want to integrate Tron stuff because, well... because Tron content is in Kingdom Hearts and disproportionately important in the overall Kingdom Hearts story arc, so... have to. So, let's see how Tron works. In that universe, every computer program is a person. Programs are played by the same actor as their human "User", and Users notice this when they enter the cyberspace world. Programs worship Users as gods, but Tron himself takes it pretty well when he learns that Users don't have some kind of grand divine plan.

Most interesting is the Master Control Program -- by hacking into government databases and absorbing all the data contained within, he gains power and intelligence, to the point where he can speak to Users directly, and instead of a human, he looks like an enormous spinning beam of light with a face. So... that's what extreme power does, I guess. Haven't gotten around to Tron: Legacy in my collection yet, sure to learn more about programs that way, but I remember the important details: Legacy introduces a new kind of program called Isos, who weren't written or programmed by anyone, they just came into being and are somewhat angelic; the final moments of the film confirm that programs, or at least Isos, can leave cyberspace and enter the human world. Sadly, that was ten years ago, I don't imagine there'll ever be a third Tron film to tell us how that went.

Oh! And programs don't age -- in Legacy, Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner play their human characters as being 28 years older, but their program characters had to look the same age they were in the first film, so they made a young CGI Bridges and... just mostly left Tron out of this Tron film, since they didn't have time to make a good enough young CGI Boxleitner. Oh again! And there's a deleted scene in Tron in which Tron and Yori duck into Yori's apartment and apparently sleep together, so programs can bang. ...So how the heck to integrate all this Tron lore into Cosmos when presumably it's a fantasy world that doesn't have computers? Probably can't. Maybe in another campaign setting, one with equal parts magic and technology, like in Kingdom Hearts or, you know, most Japanese fantasy now that I think about it.

Scarecrows and Tin Men: The Scarecrow and Tin Man don't appear very prominently in any Disney material, but they cameo in Return to Oz, which features a different dim-witted scarecrow-like creature and emotionless metal man as Dorothy's companions. Don't blame Disney for character-recycling, that happened in the books too. Anyway, I don't much care for scarecrows and tin men, at least not in the Oz style, but scarecrows make for very scary guardians of fey glens, and I suppose tin is as good a material as any for makin' golems. Dorothy's third companion in Return is a taxidermied moose head given life, and... well, that's just messed up, but maybe some people do it, for the same reason as people make plushie constructs, without thinking about the implications.

Artificial Intelligences: I say an AI, as distinct from a computer, because, well, if we're going by Tron rules, then individual computer programs are people, and if we're going by Tron's portrayal in Kingdom Hearts, this is common knowledge. Which works out in Keys & Kingdoms if one assumes computers are magical, yeah? Anyway, AI. What I specifically have in mind is Max, the alien computer from Flight of the Navigator, and namely his character arc: he starts off as an emotionless, toneless computer voice, until he extracts some vital information from the protagonist's brain. In the process, he accidentally extracts some of the boy's personality and pop-cultural knowledge, and turns into Pee-wee Herman. Literally, he was voiced by Paul Reubens the whole time, and then after the extraction, he gains the exact voice and personality of Pee-wee Herman. So, yeah, that was a ton of fun, and I'm interested in examining what it's like to be an AI... which I guess in this universe is quite distinct from being a program... or a heart construct... hmm, kind of a mess, isn't it? Some redundancies in creature concepts, but why not? The real world has anteaters and aardvarks, after all, that's pretty redundant.

Demonic Furniture: The castle staff in Beauty and the Beast are clearly no ordinary animated objects. Twisted, Team StarKid's parody of Aladdin, includes a brief Beauty and the Beast reference that describes the castle staff as "demonic furniture", and... I just like those two words put together, it's amusing. They're part of the Beauty and the Beast story and, I guess... related curses. In this case, they're more lucid than most animated objects because they're humans transformed into animated objects, but I think in our lore you can make a being from scratch, no human component needed. You know what I especially like? The carriage -- a spider-legged carriage in which the Beast puts Maurice so he can get back to town. It was scary as hell, why don't more people talk about that thing?

Flying Carpets: Or as D&D calls it, a "carpet of flying", because they're pretentious I guess. Usually, a flying carpet is a magic item, but the one from Aladdin is quite clearly a character. It doesn't just fly, it flies independently and has thoughts all its own. Joining the mile-high club on such a carpet is doubtless very awkward. So, we'll classify it as a construct creature... we've got a lot of those, it seems. In Twisted, the legend has it that the carpet is possessed by the soul of a lecherous thief. Not a bad backstory! In D&D, the carpet classified as a creature is a "rug of smothering"; a simple animated object and exactly what it sounds like, a rug that smothers you. But Aladdin's carpet, like so many Disney elements, is clearly much more intelligent than its mythical counterpart, so it needs a backstory beyond just being animated. The lecherous thief story will do for, at least, some flying carpets.

Evil Snowmen: Well, a Muppet snowman appears in The Muppet Christmas Carol, and when I think living snowmen, I'm jaded by South Park and Calvin & Hobbes to expect them to be evil and murderous. Still nice and dapper in the top hat, as ever.

Patchwork Dolls: As in Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas! A patchwork doll created by Dr. Finkelstein, very demure and good-hearted, and, er, apparently she has premonitions? Something to develop.

Elementals

Elemental Sharks: One idea I'd had listed in the file that didn't actually come from any film: sandsharks and cloudsharks. Sharks that burrow through sand or live in the upper atmosphere. They only superficially resemble sharks, I should think, so... yeah, elemental sounds like a good place to put them, my first thought was monster, but let's go with this.

Living Mountains: In the "Pedro" segment of Saludos Amigos, Aconcagua itself appears to be alive and malicious. I've long had an idea I've wanted to use in my D&D campaign: heroes visit the Elemental Chaos, and their introduction to the place? They see what appears to be a mountain on the horizon, until it stands up, walks a few thousand feet in a few short steps, then sits back down. Purely a background detail, as no hero could possibly fight the thing. Of course, that applies to D&D, where the largest size is Gargantuan. Maybe in K&K we call go full God of War with it and actually slay some of those mountains.

Nomes: As in the Nome King, the other bad guy of Return to Oz. Aside from changing the name because it's pronounced the same as "gnome", they have a good aesthetic: they move through earth and stone, usually just appearing as faces on stone. Then the king slowly becomes more human as he, uh, gains power or something: from a clay-animated face on the wall, to a clay-animated humanoid figure, to an actor covered in clay; presumably if he hadn't been outwitted, he would have become totally human in the end. So what kind of creature might that be? Well, I just said "clay" a bunch of times, maybe they're an earth elemental creature specifically associated with clay. ...And they're terrified of chickens. That's an oddly common motif in monsters. I think I'll hang onto that as a story idea. Not a race that fears chickens because the crow of a rooster kills them, or because eggs are deadly poison to them, those are stupid, I'm thinking just some individual villain with a pathological fear of chickens.

Genies: Oh boy, I waited so long to talk about this subject! Came up with my ideas for K&K genies well before I finally got around to watching Aladdin in my collection. Let's start with D&D genies: they're elemental spirits made flesh, nearly twice as tall as a human. A djinn is an air genie, a dao is an earth genie, an efreet is a fire genie, and a marid is a water genie. I figure this arrangement will also be true of K&K genies. Aladdin's genie is a djinn, while Jafar transforms himself into an efreet; those two genie types are seen far more often than the other two, it seems.

As for living in a lamp and granting wishes, that's the fate of only some genies. Some genies have spent all their lives in absolute freedom, and they tend to be the nobility of the elemental world. Don't be too nervous about that, though; a genie only has "phenomenal cosmic power" while granting a wish. In any other situation, a genie is "merely" a pretty good sorcerer. Limitations and provisos? Meh, I don't think so. I mean, no killing, no raising the dead, no making people fall in love? Helps the movie have actual conflict, sure, but I wouldn't say it adds up. Killing is a fairly easy thing to do, and in an RPG world, raising the dead isn't absurdly difficult, so what's absurd is to think a reality-warping wish can't do those things; as for manufacturing love, well... I figure that can be done with a very cheap potion, though let's acknowledge that no matter how you do it, it's certifiably an evil act. So, are there limitations to the wishes a genie can grant? Well... kinda. Let me explain.

TV Tropes has a trio of genie-related tropes that talk about the three different ways wish-granters choose to... interpret the wishes people ask them for. You have the "benevolent genie", who honors the letter and the spirit of your wish. Aladdin's genie is a classic example: he puts on a grandiose parade worthy of a wish to be a prince, chooses to interpret a slight nod of the head as a wish to save Aladdin's life, and even when controlled by Jafar, goes above and beyond the things Jafar wishes for. Then there's the "literal genie", who gives you exactly what you wish for and nothing else. Such a genie would have merely given Aladdin a royal birth certificate, and similarly produce the legal documentation that would make Jafar sultan, not help them enjoy and savor that power. This variant is usually done by devils rather than genies, and can of course be beaten with some particularly clever wording. Finally, there's the "jackass genie", who, seemingly for no other reason than his own amusement, goes with the worst possible interpretation of your wish. In the sequel, when Abis Mal wishes for a famous sunken treasure, Jafar sends him to the bottom of the ocean where the treasure is, forcing him to spend his second wish on returning to Agrabah before he drowns. For a non-genie example, in Gargoyles, Demona asks Puck to make it so she no longer has a gargoyle's characteristic vulnerability of turning to stone during the day. Puck obliges, with the twist that the extremely racist Demona becomes human during the day, and also the transformation hurts like hell.

I figure what kind of genie you get depends on their alignment: a good-aligned genie will be benevolent, a neutral genie will be literal, and an evil genie will be a jackass. The example I thought to include in the rulebook is that, if you wish for the power to jump high, a good genie will grant you that power permanently, a neutral genie will allow you to jump high at that very moment and never again, and an evil genie will turn you into a frog and, given half a chance, cook you and eat you. According to the 5E Monster Manual, djinn are good, marids are neutral, and dao and efreets are evil. Alignment, of course, refers to cultural norms these days; any creature intelligent enough to have an alignment can therefore be of any alignment, because they're an individual. So knowing about the four genie cultures might give you an idea of what kind of wish-granting to expect, but don't count on it. Even after getting your wish, you still may not be sure: if you wish for an army to protect you and get an army of bunnies, or if you wish to be able to protect yourself from the undead so the genie brings in some undead to attack you so you can defend yourself... are those "literal" or "jackass" wish interpretations? It's a fine line sometimes.

Final question: are genies capable of time travel? I'm pretty sure that's a fairly common trait in most stories about genies, right, that they can walk freely through time? And that's why Aladdin's genie makes anachronistic references? I'm all for them having some sort of time-themed power, but actual time travel, well, that complicates stories a whole lot. I talk about it later, suffice it to say, I think a race that can do it at will is a bit too story-breakin'.

Fiends

Archdevils: We need some archfiends, archfey, and powerful eldritch abominations to compete with the gods in a setting! Oh, and nature spirits. Not sure why most D&D settings list the gods, but don't bother to talk about who the warlock or druid might owe their power to. ...To sell expansion packs, I guesss. My first archdevil idea: someone based on the Coachman from Pinocchio, who has an ambiguously-human design and a needlessly evil M.O. Throw in his apelike henchmen as ordinary devils, and something based on Pleasure Island as, I dunno, some kind of adventure module.

Demon Lords: Let's start with a fellow called Maldiabos, inspired by Pinocchio's Monstro. No ordinary whale -- a massive interdimensional whale who floats through the Astral Plane, his innards a maze of tunnels in a psychedelic hell dimension. Space whales would ordunarily be aberrations, not demons, but we are talking about Monstro here -- his demeanor strikes me as one of malicious destruction, not inscrutable alienness. As warlock patrons go, he's the kind who has no clue that his parishioners exist, they just draw their magic from his massive demonic bulk.

Another would be based on Fantasia's Chernabog, the demon of Bald Mountain. Had to debate hard with myself whether to make him a demon lord or an archdevil... I'm going with demon lord. While I feel he has some devilish characteristics, the word used to refer to him and other creatures in his short has always been "demon", so I don't think I can break away from that. This unnamed character has a connection to the gargoyle race -- not an especially close connection, it is very inaccurate and offensive to compare gargoyles to demons, but, he certainly looks like a gargoyle, and like them he emerges during the night and turns back into a mountaintop at sunrise, so clearly there's something there, something non-coincidental. I ought to take a look at all the various creatures Chernabog summons during his segment; in addition to easily identifiable harpies, ghosts, and skeletons, there's also some pretty ladies composed entirely of fire and... other, less identifiable demony things.

Nightmares: The pegasus family in Fantasia's "Pastoral Symphony" is led by a very sinister-looking jet-black stallion, quite unlike the rest of his cutesy pony family. That got me thinking about nightmares, pretty scary creatures despite the punny name: jet-black demonic horses, wreathed in flames, flesh-eaters, created by a horrific ritual performed on a tortured pegasus, who accept only the most evil riders. So, er... I guess I should apologize to that pegasus dad for judging him on his looks, but it got the gears going. So, questions for myself about K&K nightmares. Do they fly? And if they do, do they have wings or do they just kinda run through the air?

Devils: Hmm, I had a lot of notes on the obscure Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on a Ray Bradbury work. I don't remember the film very well, so I don't remember much about what my notes mean. Anyway, the mysterious villains of Something Wicked are identified by somebody as "the autumn people, the hungry ones", which sounds to me more like fey, but their behavior to me suggests devils. Devils, in contrast to the pure destruction of demons, spread their evil via lies and trickery. The "autumn people" in the film are often seen granting people's desires but then randomly screwing them over. Sure. Maybe the film's main villain, the dapper Mr. Dark, can inspire a new archdevil.

Nemesis/Terminator: The unknown toon who murdered Teddy Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is never seen outside of his Christopher Lloyd costume; we only ever see his burning red eyes, and his hands, which he can transform into various weapons. So, I'm thinking a similarly shrouded-in-mystery species of monster that can, well, do that with its hands. Needs a name, but at least it has two placeholder names! I thought of "Nemesis" because a character by that name in the Hercules TV series also has this hand-changing power. I gave Nemesis a quick look-see over on the Disney wiki and saw that she's voiced by Linda Hamilton, so clearly Nemesis's power was a reference to the T-1000, giving me another free placeholder name. I suppose the function of these creatures (that's why I decided to categorize them as fiends, so they serve a specific purpose) is, I guess, as mercenaries; people get them to smite their enemies or the people they suspect will soon be their enemies. And some of them might very well have evil plans of their own, like Judge Doom.

Celestials

Unicorns and Pegasi: A couple more of many mythical creatures appearing in Fantasia's "Pastoral Symphony". The pegasus I absolutely know is celestial... while the unicorn, my impulse would be to make it a fey, but the 5th Edition version is a celestial -- not just a creature of nature, but a creature of the gods of nature -- and I really dug that idea. So, very special creatures! Hmm, what about a horse with a unicorn horn and pegasus wings? ...No, I don't think that would work, the two are special enough individually in this particular setting, wouldn't want to overshadow them. Also -- celestial steeds. Magical celestial horses that are just horses. But celestial.

Guardian Angels: While angels in general I'd like to be faithful to the D&D version, I like the depiction of Johnny's guardian angel in the "Johnny Appleseed" segment of Melody Time -- he appears as a red-bearded frontiersman. So, clearly a "guardian angel" can take many forms. Maybe it's a misnomer! There is no religious tradition that claims humans become angels when they go to heaven, but that's what guardian angels are usually depicted as. Guardian saints, I guess, would be the more accurate term.

Spirits of Christmas: As in the three spirits who visit Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Despite identifying themselves as "ghosts", they don't come across as undead the same way Jacob Marley does; they're clearly something much more eldritch. Let's take a look at them individually and interpret them into celestial creatures of some sort, who serve some sort of purpose... a rich-person-terrorizing purpose, I suppose. The three don't have to be any sort of unified force, though; it might be neat if each did their own thing.

• Past: Portrayed in one Disney interpretation by Jiminy Cricket. In the Muppets verson, shown as an angelic, childish, androgynous, floaty figure. And in the 2009 version as a living candle with a head composed of flame. 2009's is an excellent interpretation of the book's version, probably the first to ever have the special effects for it, as the book describes the spirit as being, in addition to rather flamelike, constantly shifting its appearance; who it looks like, how many arms and legs and heads it has, changing from moment to moment. You know what that reminds me of? Angels, as described in the Bible, specifically the kind that are wheels within wheels, covered with eyeballs and with dozens of wings... ophanim, that's what they're called. So, in this cosmology, we're combining the ophan with the Ghost of Christmas Past. Neat!
• Present: Easily the most normal and fleshed-out of the three. Just a jolly giant with a big beard, a hairy chest, a long robe, a crown, a magic torch that makes delightful food, and, seldom remembered in adaptations, a scabbard with no sword to represent peace. He also ages rapidly throughout the day, has one brother for every year there's been a Christmas, and tends to the emaciated children who represent ignorance and want. So, what's the role of this entity in the K&K universe? ...I dunno. He does sound like the closest to having the "terrorize rich people" function.
• Future: Or rather, "Yet to Come". What's up with that? They had the word "Future" in 1843, Scrooge calls it "the Ghost of the Future" at one point, so why is its official name "The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come"? Really awkward. Anyway... considered just lumping this guy in with the grim reaper, but I don't think that's quite right, he looks a bit like a grim reaper, but his purpose is rather different. So... rather than a robed skeleton, this entity is completely concealed in its black cloak except for a single hand (what kind of hand? I'm thinking non-skeletal, but still scary) and sometimes glowing eyes deep within its hood. It never speaks and scarcely moves. In the 2009 film, it's quite literally a shadow, usually seen on walls or floors and occasionally emerging to be three-dimensional, and I love that trope, but I think I'll be using it for undead shadows, not for this guy. So, what's this creature do? I guess he appears, he points you where you need to go, but lets you make your own conclusions. Well, all right, let's think about the function of these three entities in the celestial hierarchy. And which of the three are individuals and which are entire "species" of celestials?

Aberrations

Interdimensional Horrors: Well, that's basically just another term for an aberration. The twist ending of The Watcher in the Woods was about the Watcher, not being some sort of ghost as expected, but... something interdimensional, I dunno, very forgettable movie. But yeah, interdimensional phenomena and creatures.

Puckmarens: In Flight of the Navigator, we glimpse a small handful of endangered alien species, most prominently the puckmaren, a tiny fuzzy creature bearing more than a little resemblance to a flying squirrel. Won't keep the name or design, just the general aesthetic, and I hope to convert many aliens from Disney films into aberrations. Ah, and the Disney wiki has a little gallery of all the other creatures from that film. I'll look at that later.

Whatever: The Great Gonzo of the Muppets is of indeterminate species; in The Great Muppet Caper, a shipping crate containing him was famously labeled "whatever", and he's identified as such ever since. In the film Muppets from Space, made sometime between the two movies Disney made with the Muppets and Disney's actual purchase of the Muppets franchise, Gonzo is our main character and learns he is of extraterrestrial origin. A lot of Muppet fans and Muppet franchise regulars aren't fond of that film, but I like it! And in Cosmos, extraterrestrial equals aberration. So... we learn very little in the film about the culture of Gonzo's race; they share Gonzo's love of daredevil stunts, their leader is called "the Ubergonzo", and they send Gonzo a message in his dreams via a pair of alien-looking cosmic fish... oh, and a sandwich. Those are places to start, and I think the K&K aberration based on Gonzo might also take some inspiration from the D&D nothic, a raving lunatic of an aberration which I read somewhere once is often kept around by other aberrations as a court jester of sorts, and Gonzo would be at home in such a setting. Oooh, maybe a playable aberration? They don't all have to be insane and unknowable. For a given value of Gonzo's sanity.

Boogeymen: Oogie Boogie of The Nightmare Before Christmas is a rather intriguing creature. Identifying himself as the boogeyman, we see in his final moments that beneath the burlap he has for skin, he's millions of bugs formed into a humanoid shape. A common bit of Lovecraftian horror, often called "the Worm that Walks". D&D's version is called a larva mage, and is currently classified as an aberration rather than undead, as the bugs are very much alive; the entity controlling them, that might be a dead wizard... I'm thinking Oogie's consciousness is interdimensional. In Kingdom Hearts, fighting Oogie is time-consuming, but not difficult, as he relies on death traps and gadgets to defend himself -- when you escape the death trap and actually face Oogie directly, he's nearly helpless. In the movie, however, he does demonstrate the ability to breathe in deep and suck his victims toward himself, so, keep that in mind: super-breath. Other things to note about this aberration, whether an individual or Oogie's kind as a whole: He's a gambling addict, and that addiction's diminishing returns mean he only has fun when he puts people's lives at risk. And then he eats them. He also has ridiculously bad luck; every single time he rolls dice in the film, he gets snake eyes. So some kind of misfortune aura. That's not very scary in a world that runs on rolling dice, but let's see how we can work with it. Also, he has some control over his shadow, even casting it over the moon in the opening number, and... he uses a blacklight for his solo number, sure, that's worth noting for some reason or another.

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Oy vey, okay, once again, I have several orders of magnitude more information than I thought I did, so, breaking it up a little. Not to worry, we're already well over halfway through, creatures was definitely the biggest section. Next post!