names of animals as monsters

Whip scorpion. Its stinger is a whip! Fights like Indiana jones.

Coconut crab. It’s a coconut. Kills you by dropping on your head like a drop bear. Mean and hairy coconut pincers. Delicious coconutty crab meat and milks.

Nurse shark. Only eats your diseased, gangrenous and malformed body parts that you don’t need. Protects people and is generally nice. Sedative saliva.

Lemon shark. So fucking bitter and aggressive. Lemon flesh cures scurvy.

Carbuncle. Like the classic d&d critter but also like the other definition, as a gooey open sore. Lives like a parasite on big burrowing things like bullettes and purple worms. Trades knowledge of buried things, in exchange so that you don’t kill it and sell it since its made of bloodrubies and pus-geodes.

Butterfly. Only eats fats and butter. Like a mosquito that gives you liposuction. Which sucks if your trying to survive in the elements of whatever.

Stag beetle. Fills the exact same ecological niche as deer.

Bell cricket. Same sound as church bells, and functions the same against unholy and undead things and for shattering windows and officiating weddings.

Catfish. Actually a cat. Trying to impersonate a fish to catch them. Like a wolf in sheeps clothing. Maybe the familiar of a river hag.

Shield bug. Really handy shield. Releases defensive smelly gas.

Ladybug. Like a fat geisha. Feed her aphids or god help you.

Horror frog. The original is perfect, but now its big and it acts like a 80s slasher movie villain

Urchin. Both definitions rolled into one

Antlion. Like normal but in ant culture theyre just like lions. Big brave scary things that are the kings of all animals and you fight them in the colosseum.

Spider monkey. Self explanatory

Velvet worm. Its made of velvet, so stylish, wear it around your neck. Shoots goo at people who diss your outfit

Money spider. Makes webs of gold to attract humans. Fights like a venomous pissed off cat, jumping and biting your face and not letting go. Fancy people want their gold silk to make clothes. Funeral parlors want them to wrap up rich people's bodies for fancy caskets.

Dragonfly. Same as regular dragonfly buts so big. Sees everything and moves lightning fast.

Moomins-isms

Tove Jansson loved mythology and you can smell it in her work.. I’m only barely scratching the surface of how weird and cool moomins is. all the fabulous pictures are hers. put these things on your hexcrawl or random encounter table

what more could u want..theres an abandoned ship, a comet, and pc's using stilts

A race of people that eat lightning, they chase storms their entire lives

A giant antlion and a dried up sea

A race of people that keep their ancestors under the kitchen sink

A creature that usually hibernates, has woken up early, it’s confused and horrified of the cold season it’s never seen before

Glowing flowers that contain girls, and an ominous comet

A tiny, rude and scrappy woman, mocking someone who is grieving over a dead squirrel. The squirrel died from looking at an ice-nymph.

Something that kills everything it touches. It’s very friendly, but everyone is terrified of it. It lives a lonely existence.

A gem-lizard, a giant pumpkin and a man-eating plant

A greedy and cowardly kangaroo-rat and a floating theatre

An troll obsessed with creating a flying machine and a giant heron that gives free rides

a nihilist muskrat and an invisible little girl

shipwrecked pirates terrorizing a village, and a hobgoblin magician that rides a flying panther

a boy is obsessed with becoming friends with magical seahorses. The horses are shallow, cruel but beautiful creatures.

A desolate island with a lighthouse on it, the lighthouse keeper has given up his job because the sea is sentient and spiteful

Three gender neutral siblings.A scientist who studies butterflies, a scientist that studies flowers and a scientist that studies stars, they only care about what they study and hate each other

An entire zoo has escaped and a rainforest jungle has grown overnight, in a cold northern place

A volcano that causes floods, and a dragon with bug wings the size of a cat

Someone who hates children is building an amazing playground for them, and a tiny nameless critter has fallen in love with you, it wants you to christen it

A homesick mother painted beautiful pictures of her homeland, and now shes trapped in her painting

An agoraphobic woman scared of natural disasters, and a forest of candy that can’t support a living ecosystem

A sea serpent trapped in a rock pool, and a community struck mad with gold fever

SHADOW PEOPLE

 Shadow people. They look like Asian shadow puppets. Theyre 2D organisms from the 2^nd dimension that have immigrated to the 3^rd dimension. The process of going into a bigger dimension has changed they permanently to be 2.5D, they occupy a space 3D space like anyone else but look the same from every angle. They were sent here to colonise the 3D world, and send back messages, but they failed miserably. Because they are different now they can never go home.

they can become a 2D shadow at-will and stick to a flat surface, In this form they don’t occupy space, they can slip through any small crack and can walk on walls and ceilings. they still get damaged by 3D stuff though, and anyone can grab them and rip they back into 3-d space. Think of it like turning into a super flat slug, or just like that zelda game 'link between worlds' where link can turn into a picture.

shadow people are poor immigrants. There’s big discrimination against them cuz theyre not seen as being “real” like other people are, so they can’t get married or inherit property. they can only legally work as entertainers and artists. (both of these are vague terms though, a bartender is technically an entertainer, any kind of craftsman is an “artist”)  People only want to hire them as assassins and spies.

They live in paper lanterns, their ghettos strung together and hung above the neighborhoods of 3D people. Rarely a shadow person will come into some money, build a house with paper walls and sliding doors, and let dozens of their poor relatives live with them in crowded conditions. Visitors to these shadow homes are weirded out by how there’s no furniture; and how they eat dust and cobwebs and drink light

 Shadow people like to collect things that are flat and look 2D like leaves and coins and paper. Their preferred art forms are origami, knots, silent dance and calligraphy, gentle quiet activities. They miss home, everything here is awkward and uncomfortable and hard to wrap their head around. they miss the simplicity of the 2nd dimension.

if you wanna play one do race as class, your just like a rogue or a halfling but you get the 2D form ability at will.