Monsters are commonly understood as terrifying creatures from beyond the everyday human experience. In previous research, they have been defined as creatures that embody “our fear of abnormality and the unknown” by challenging human cognitive abilities, and thus “fill us with awe and terror.” This framework of understanding monsters harkens back to Immanuel Kant’s idea of the terrible sublime, and it argues that monsters are horrific because they exist as transgressive and liminal beings not clearly definable by rationalistic western thought.
Another framework by which monsters can be understood is interested in the procedures by which they are encoded and contained. Jaroslav Švelch maps this tendency from medieval bestiaries to monster codexes created for gameplay purposes in modern tabletop role-playing (RPG) and video games. In this tradition, monsters are not typically presented as sublime creatures in Kant’s sense, but rather as opponents for the player to fight, and ultimately to beat and control. As such, monsters can also be conceptualized as an encyclopedic containment of creatures of myth and fiction through the computational systems in place in games.
Here I seek to define a third way to approach monsters in early crowdsourced RPG design, namely the Fiend Folio tome which was the fourth official rulebook of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). This third framework combines elements from the above two, that is: the sublime and the computational. The proposed third way to approach RPG monster design and ontology still sees them as very much controlled and defined by statistical data, but proposes that monsters are designed in such a way that they are able to horrify players precisely through their use of game rules and statistics. In other words, they terrify through their use of transgressive game mechanics that surpass and overrule the rules normally in place, by employing various “glitches” that make the rules work differently from what the players expect. I will call this approach the computational sublime and proceed to investigate its use in monster design.
The article concentrates on monsters in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), which is widely regarded as the first commercially available RPG. While monster lists were already part of the first iteration of D&D published in 1974, it is with the publication of the Monster Manual by TSR that RPGs fully realized the idea systematically describing various monsters from myth and literature and assigning them gameplay statistics. Following Švelch, I define D&D monsters as taxonomically organized entities that are assigned computational properties in order for them to be defeatable by the player characters. As such, what they mean for players and play culture needs to be approached by investigating how they are defined by the game rules, as well as by their representational elements.
While story can be important for “old school” D&D play, oftentimes the feedback loop of killing monsters, taking their treasure, and leveling up is more important for the player experience. Many “old school” play conventions support this kind of open ended “sandbox” play, utilizing concepts such as the “megadungeon” or the “hexcrawl” to make play possible. In this style of play, the Game Master (GM) has not necessarily set up a story for the players to experience, rather the story is something that happens when the player characters are exploring the various environments that the GM has set up. In this style of play, the GM will further use random tables in order to organize the monsters encountered, and some encountered monsters can be too dangerous for the player characters to defeat. While players seek to control the game world by defeating monsters, many environments can be deadly for the player characters, in order to build tension in the campaign. This type of approach is summed up by user THE-D1g174LD00M, who declares that “[f]ear is a constant in old school gaming” and it is player fear that “makes [the game] magical.”
Methodology
In this article, I explore transgressive monster types that are terrifying because of the transgressive game mechanics they employ. I concentrate on four monster types found in the AD&D Monster Manual and in the Fiend Folio and examine how D&D players talk about them in online forums. Some of the monsters dealt with are relatively well known, including various level draining undead and the Rust Monster in the Monster Manual, but others are less well known, namely the Crypt Thing, the Disenchanter and the Nilbog, which are all found in the Fiend Folio and were designed by Roger Musson.
My research is concerned with whether transgressive monster rules can cause fear in RPG players, and how fear is articulated in online forums. The article is not interested in exploring how players role-play their characters being scared, but rather in exploring how monsters scare the players themselves. The research question can thus be summarized as “how does transgressive monster design cause fear in RPG players”? The analysis is based on close readings of the monster entries in the Monster Manual and Fiend Folio, as well as on close readings and thematic organization of oral histories found in online RPG forums. In addition to player reminiscence, also entries theorizing creatures’ use in dungeon or adventure design are analyzed.
The data was gathered by doing search functions for monster names and terms such as “terrified”, “memory” in selected online forums. In addition (and because of said forums’ limited search abilities), Google searches combining monster names with terms such as “remembering,” “reminiscence”, “memories”, and “fear”, were also used. In the end, the data was gathered from RPGNet, several RPG themed Reddit forums, Dragonsfoot, EN World,, the Paizo forums, and the comments section of the Tenkar’s Tavern blog in February 2021. The data set was further narrowed down by choosing mostly entries that deal with the original iterations of the monsters in the original Monster Manual and Fiend Folio. Additionally, some entries include discussions about how various creatures have changed from edition to edition and how they are portrayed in similar systems such as the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
Table 1 below conveys information on where sources relating to the various monsters dealt with in this article were found. The data was then further refined by systematically classifying individual entries and by organizing them into thematic categories. Data sources are referenced by the original forum usernames of their posters. They are not anonymized because they do not include any personal data due to forum conventions.
|
Source / # of entries |
Level draining monsters |
Rust Monster and Disenchanter |
Crypt Thing |
Nilbog |
General sources |
|
RPGnet forums |
4 |
1 |
3 |
||
|
|
3 |
1 |
|||
|
Dragonsfoot forums |
1 |
1 |
2 |
||
|
EN World forums |
2 |
1 |
3 |
4 |
|
|
Tenkar’s Tavern comment section |
2 |
||||
|
Paizo forums |
1 |
Table 1: Data sources
Level-Draining Monsters: Resource Mechanic Transgression
Perhaps the most common category of fear-inducing monsters in D&D are those that have a level-draining effect. In this article, I group the many different monsters with this ability together under the heading of level-draining monsters. Level-draining monsters thus include e.g. Wights, Wraiths, Vampires, and Liches from the Monster Manual. Of these, Wights and Wraiths are of lowest level, and thus the most common, as they have a fair chance of being encountered even by low-level parties. As such, they are also the ones that are most often featured in the data, and the ones I will concentrate in the article.
Wights are described as “undead humans who typically inhabit barrow mounds or catacombs.” They are further depicted as “most evil and hateful, seeking to destroy any life form they encounter.” As they “exist simultaneously on the normal and negative planes of the material plane”, they are able to “drain life energy levels – one such level each time they score a hit on an opponent.” Wraiths, on the other hand, are “undead, similar in nature to wights, but they exist more strongly on the negative material plane” and “are found only in dark and gloomy places, for they have no power in full sunlight.” Just as Wights, Wraiths also drain the life energy of player characters they strike.
The level-draining effect is seen as something very undesirable by players. From a game design perspective it challenges “the players as much as the characters”, as user Cirlot points out on an RPG.net thread. The challenge is dealt with by terms of fear and horror, for example on the same thread Illithidbix points out that the level draining ability “creates a tangible sense of fear.” Cirlot elaborates by calling the level drain ability a “metastrike, a threat that transcends the normal resource mechanic,” and further states that it is exactly this transgressive rule ability that “makes [it] meaningful – it’s a threat that undercuts the time and effort I as a player have put into my advancements; it’s the game going after me, the player, as much as my character.”
RPG.net user Redbeard67’s post on the thread highlights the difference between fear that challenges the characters and fear that challenges the players. The post describes being emotionally involved in a game of D&D, and how they “felt tangible fear and heart pounding exhilaration” as a player when their character “was surprised by wraiths.” The relationship between players and their characters thus seems to be closely aligned, and from an old school D&D perspective it might be difficult to separate those two from each other. Redbeard67 goes on to discuss how the level-drain ability, which other users might scoff at as “a poor mechanic,” is actually partly responsible for these strong emotions and player reactions and finishes by stating that if the “possibility of failure” is removed from the game players will “never know when [they have] ‘won.’”
The level draining effect is further contextualized in the data. EN World user Tony Vargas ponders the horror of game effects that target the characters stats and abilities instead of their hit points. They point out that players in a D&D type game mostly worry “for their characters’ continued playability,” which can be affected by many other things than the loss of hit points. They consider how the loss of “irreplaceable item[s], loss of key/defining abilities, forced behavior inappropriate to the character concept, or permanent changes to the character” are potentially “much more concerning” than character death. The way that level-draining monsters transgress the basic combat logic of D&D makes them horrific to such an extent that many have approached them as an example of “bad design” that goes after the players instead of their characters. However, it is exactly this characteristic that is seen as their allure for players looking for a challenge. These intense and discordant ways by which players approach level-draining monsters highlight the ambiguity and controversy of computationally sublime (i.e. “metagame-y”) elements.
The Crypt Thing and the fear of uncertainty
The Crypt Thing is one of the eleven monsters in the Fiend Folio that was designed by Roger Musson. It is described in the Fiend Folio as a skeletal being “which always wears a brown, hooded robe.” Despite its skeletal visage, the creature is not technically undead. Instead, it is neutral aligned, and thus cannot be turned. More importantly, the monster’s transgressive special ability is not connected to level draining, and instead is has the “unfailing ability to cast an improved form of a teleportation spell on a party”, which will result in those characters “who fail to make their saving throws [being] instantly teleported” to a random location according to an intricate table. On top of this, the Fiend Folio also establishes the Crypt Thing as a liar, as “if it is questioned on the disappearance of some members of a party, it will not reveal its power but will instead maintain they have been disintegrated.”
In this context, EN World user The Jester writes about the most memorable Crypt Thing encounter they have experienced, where the monster “teleported several pcs into a deadly room full of wraiths while the ones that made their save against being teleported… realized that they had better find their buddies in a hurry!” While the reminiscence does not directly address the issue of fear and horror, there is an allusion to the underlying dread of having to split up the adventuring party, with player characters encountering monsters on uneven terms, which transgresses the implicit assumption of D&D that player characters operate as a single tactical unit.
To this uncertainty it can be added that the Crypt Thing is lying about what has happened to the characters. Dragonsfoot user Xabloyan talks about the lack of information as a source of fear in connection with the Crypt Thing, as the creature obscures its transgressive teleport ability by straight-out lying about it. This means that the novel (for the time) monsters that are found in the Fiend Folio are scary because players have no way of knowing what kinds of special abilities they possess. This uncertainty is something that GMs enjoy, and Crinos mentions how their “favorite part about the Crypt things is that they tell the other adventurers that they disintegrated their friend.” On r/Pathfinder_RPG Wuju_Kindly further elaborates on the Crypt Thing, stating that it is a “really neat enemy that can leave your party in a complete panic if the spots it can teleport to are different rooms”, even more so if “it’s a complete maze making it difficult for them to find their way back.” As such, the Crypt Thing is a widely feared monster that taps into players’ fear of the unknown by transgressing normal play assumptions. This is done by the monster promoting uncertainty and by it using its special ability to split up adventuring parties and thus dividing party resources. The Crypt Thing can also be seen to disrupt the players’ ability to systematically map their environment – a central feature of RPGs set in dungeons – as it sends them to unknown locations and thus makes mapping more challenging.
The Rust Monster and the Disenchanter and the fear of losing items
Player fear is not only connected to level draining monsters or lack of information. The Rust Monster is another monster that instills fear in players by its transgressive abilities. Created by Gary Gygax based on a set of toys purchased at a discount store, it was first included in Supplement I: Greyhawk, and later canonized in the Monster Manual, the Rust Monster is one of the most iconic monsters of D&D. According to the Monster Manual, Rust Monsters roam “dark subterranean places […] in search of their food -metals of all sorts, but principally ferrous based metals such as iron, steel, and steel alloys (such as mithral and adamantite arms and armor).” The Rust Monster’s dreaded special ability is connected to its hunger for ferrous metals, as it is able to corrode said metals (both magical and mundane) by merely touching them with its antenna.
This makes the Rust Monster a feared monster, as it transgresses conventional game logic by which characters acquire magic items from monsters and instead makes the players (and their characters) risk losing their acquired items. Tenkar’s Tavern user Capheind writes about how there “is no other monster in the history of the game that can upset a parties tactics and make the players think on their feet” and about how the Rust Monster “should have all the terror factor of termites, and yet due to the singular need for iron they become fearsome foes not to be trifled with.” On the thread Steven continues by noticing about the Rust Monster how it is “amazing how such a (relatively) weak creature inspires such fear in almost all enemies,” and that there is for the GM nothing “much funnier than watching your proud dwarven warrior running down a tunnel with a rust monster in pursuit.”
While the Rust Monster has changed from edition to edition, which has made its attack less powerful, even players of modern D&D variants have come to fear the creature due to its transgressive mechanics. User Demontroll writes in a Pathfinder context about how the Rust Monster is “the most feared monster, is of course the Rust Monster, because it can destroy a character’s equipment.” EN World user Doc_Kluelessexplicitly connects this fear to the Rust Monsters attack that does not affect characters hit points, but rather goes around that and has other kinds of consequences, such as the “loss of equipment.”
Another creature that can similarly transgress the normal combat mechanics of the game is the Disenchanter. Originally designed by Roger Musson for “the Fiend Factory” column in White Dwarf issue 6, it was later collected for the later Fiend Folio release in 1981. Described in the Fiend Folio as a “spindly dromedary-like animal with a long, flexible and muscular snout which can extend as much as 5′ from the head in attack”, it is “pale electric-blue in colour and slightly translucent; sometimes it may even be seen to shimmer discernably.” While the Disenchanter’s appearance is rather benevolent, its horridness is closely tied to its special ability to “detect magical dweomer […] on which it feeds, drawing its sustenance from the powerful enchantments such items carry.” This special attack is done with the help of the creature’s snout, which it will try to fasten to the item in question, and if it manages to hit its target, “it will drain the magical power, leaving the item unmarked but non-magical.”
As Doc_Klueless notices in the above, the Disenchanter shares qualities with the Rust Monster, as both tap into players’ fear of losing their magical equipment. As items are an important source of player strength, especially in old school D&D, losing a hard-earned magical item might be more horrific than losing a character, even. As seen, players interact with the game world through their characters, but their interest in the game goes beyond those characters, as powerful items can be much more important sources of player power and they can be handed down to new characters, as well. While the Rust Monster only affects weapons and armor, the Disenchanter is potentially more horrific as it can use its special ability to also affect other, potentially more powerful, magic items and artefacts.
The Nilbog: The Thin Line Between Anger and Fear
The Nilbog is another creature from the Fiend Folio designed by Roger Musson. It can be described as a “metacreature” that transgresses and changes game rules – even its name is an inversion of the word Goblin. The Fiend Folio defines it as looking “exactly like a normal Goblin” and having “all the characteristics of that race […] with one important exception – it suffers from a curious spatio-temporal reversal.” This means that “encounters with these strange creatures are dreaded and, as a result, normal Goblins tend to be treated with extreme caution lest they turn out to be Nilbogs.” The Fiend Folio continues by adding that no other creatures have “been afflicted with nilbogism,” but in other sources it is stated that nilbogism can also affect other creatures, for example a “Llort” is a Troll suffering from nilbogism.
It is perhaps no wonder that many players and GMs find Nilbogs silly and somehow objectionable. In the data, we see that the Nilbog does not cause fear as much as anger and resentment. It is a creature where D&D “went too far” (as in a title of a forum thread on RPGNet, where the Nilbog gets plenty of mentions), and it is seen as too whimsical for many peoples’ D&D games. On that thread the user Battlechimp states that they “refuse to find [..] Nilbogs cool.” On other forums users explicitly expressed their anger and hatred of the Nilbog. Dragonsfoot user MrNexx states: “Nilbog are a “<expletive deleted> you” monster, really.” On the same thread PJ Garrison describes their feelings of hating the Nilbog because of its “messy design” which just makes their “job as a DM harder.” PJ Garrison continues, arguing that the Nilbog’s “opposite effect is one of those things that is super-annoying to adjudicate,” which makes it not “much fun for the players either.”
Other posters enjoy nilbogs’ transgressive qualities. While Dragonsfoot user Marco sees the Nilbog as “goofy, contrived, or designed to screw over meta-gamers” and as “a challenge” for GMs to include in their campaigns, they still feel that a truly clever GM “can find a well-integrated use for almost anything.” What some users find hateful, others cherish. EN World user Sniktch reminiscences about how they have a “special place in [their] hart for the Nilbog,” and continue by telling about the “first time one of these appeared in one of my adventures the party had smacked him up to over 100 hp before they realized something was wrong, and by that time they had nowhere close to enough healing power to kill the beast.” Sniktch closes by stating “as I recall, they grappled him, tied him up, threw him over a cliff into a deep canyon, and then ran as fast as they could away.”
Running away from the creature can have happened due to various reasons, but it is clear that the players were running away from the fact that they could not understand enough to be able to defeat the monster. EN World user Cordo adds: “I guess they were hard to adjudicate but I have a special place in my heart for them as I used a single Nilbog to tear down the neighborhood campaign when I was 13 years old – a single Nilbog against the gods.” The memorability of the Nilbog, which “tore down” an entire campaign, speaks volumes about the transgressive abilities of the Nilbog, which are seen to give it godlike powers. While the Nilbog is perceived by many to be the one monster where “D&D went too far” due to its “messy design,” it is also a monster where the line between annoying and horrific is most blurred, and one which can also be cherished because of its qualities.
Discussion
In the above, I looked at four different fear inducing monsters or monster categories, and analyzed topics dealing with them that were found in the data set. As seen in the analysis, transgressive game mechanics can take many forms. In the following, I will further discuss the findings and group them under more high-level concepts. In the following, I present three conclusions that can be drawn from how the data talks about these creatures and their effects.
First, players fear transgressive monsters because they have ways of making players lose control of their characters’ actions. Loss of control terrifies players because the player character is the interface through which they experience the game world. 5ekyu writes how a monster that can use an “ability to disrupt pretty randomly who can act and what they do will drive PCs or players nuts,” as players are no longer able to control their characters actions in the game world, and in that way the game world itself. As players experience RPGs through their game characters and control the game world through their abilities, the fear of losing control of those characters can be seen as horrifying. There is thus a fine line between monsters that are perceived as challenging and horrific, and monsters that are perceived as annoying and whose use is seen as “playing against the rules” by the GM. Newer editions of D&D and similar game systems might have a harder time in generating a sense of fear, as players know the rules protect them and ensure that they stay in control. In the data we see that loss of control is not always perceived as fair, especially by players of newer D&D editions.
Secondly, the less the players know about the properties of monsters they encounter, the more they fear those monsters. This is also reflected by the fact that some GMs change monster abilities in order to withhold information and thus keep their players on their toes. User Aebir-Toril for example cites the unknown as a potent source of fear, claiming that they tap into that by inventing and using “new monsters with abilities unseen in standard monsters,” when they GM. Fear is in this manner connected to the potential power of the GM to alter the rules of the games according to their needs and perhaps in their favor. The question then becomes whether the GM can change monster properties and do arbitrary rulings or should the rules always protect player characters and ensure that the game stays just and non-transgressive. Transgressive special abilities are horrific since they target characters (and by extension their players) in ways that the players are not normally used to.
Thirdly, the potential of transgressive creatures to horrify players is context dependent. As user Steven ponders in the above, many GMs use transgressive monsters such as the Rust Monster for fun, while players fear them, or even hate them. Others have called out transgressive monsters as the result of bad design. As seen, the Nilbog’s opposite effect makes GMs and players alike hate them because of their “messy design”, making them a “<expletive deleted> you” monster. What is interesting, is that fear is often combined or even surpassed by feelings of hatred and anger, as there is a fine line between horrifying and annoying, as well as serious and silly. The computational sublime is thus connected to how monsters are defined by game editions, but also to different and shifting play cultures and player expectations. Playing an old school D&D game where transgressive abilities are seen as challenging due to the horror it provokes in players is very far from newer editions where players see transgressive abilities as unfun and unfair. Players that enjoy and appreciate transgressive mechanics see them as intentional rather than as the design flaw that they have been regarded as in the context of newer editions.
This is accentuated by how user Crazy Jerome writes about how there “are single things in D&D (all time periods) that are lame and juvenile in one context that I might run and imaginative and awesome in another context […] the Nilbog is a very good example of that, as is the mimic.” They further state that the “line between lame and juvenile versus imaginative and awesome is often a very fine one”. User Ooftagoes on to state that “one person’s terrifying is another person’s annoying.” The same applies to the line between realistic and too videogame-like monsters. Junglefowl26 writes about how they would not “normally […] care much for claiming that something is too video-gamey or meta….but that is how I feel about the Nilbog” and how the “whole idea of damage and healing being reversed really only works on a metagame level, as “damage” covers a lot of different physical processes. I mean, what does that even look like – you stab one and it grows more flesh somewhere?”
But others see transgressive monsters as a result of intentional design. User WyMANderlystates that level draining monsters “inspire terror” and that Wights are scary and that they are meant to be that. He further elaborates by noticing that the mechanics make level draining monsters something to be feared, and that it participates into building the “mythology of the undead” which is based on “game mechanics.” TheOtherRic chimes in by stating that every “character or every level should *prefer* to flee” the undead, since “level draining undead are (and are meant to be!) the freakin’ boogeyman.” As such, the transgressive elements of computationally sublime monsters are seen as intentional, and even welcome, elements of the D&D game.
The qualities dealt with above show that the computational sublime exists in different ways in different RPG games. As the findings presented in this article are a first step towards analyzing the computational sublime, it is crucial to remember that this article is somewhat limited by an epistemological tension in its setup. While the sublime is a metaphysical and perhaps even ontological quality of certain real and imagined phenomena, it is analyzed above through players’ experiences of the game, and other assorted online writings. The methodology chosen for the article does not necessarily reach the philosophical depths required to deal with the topic to full extent, but it does point into potential avenues for further study.
Other kinds of future research might want to look further into the thematic of “unfair” monster design alluded to in the above, and into the relationships between fear and annoyance. As already seen in the analysis, some players see the Nilbog or even level draining monsters as unfair, but some see them as a welcome challenge challenging players and characters alike. Future research could also look more closely at the relationship between the crowdsourced monster design of the Fiend Folio and examine how it seems to be more prepared to transgress existing rules, which has resulted in horrific on one hand and playful, silly, or metagamey monsters on the other. This could be done by examining how monsters transgress old school play conventions and player expectations. Many of the transgressive or metagamey monsters in the Fiend Folio seem to focus on specific play conventions, such as players’ reliance on being able to map the dungeon environment, the need to break down dungeon doors, resource management in the form of used torches and expended hit points, and the importance of treasure. Computationally sublime monsters are interesting challenges for old school players specifically because they upset player expectations with their transgressive abilities.
Conclusion
In this article, I have looked at online writings about four different D&D monsters and monster types –– level-draining monsters, monsters disrupting player cooperation, magic draining monsters, and monsters playing with appearances –– and examined how players talk about these creatures in the context of fear and terror. As seen, the analyzed creatures do not horrify players by their descriptions or liminal properties, but rather through the way they transgress and expand on the established rules of the game. The analysis shows that transgressing “normal” game rules can scare players (instead of their characters) and that there exists a category of monsters that are feared exactly for their transgressive computational properties.
This category of monsters is based on an effect that has in this article been called the computational sublime. As seen in the analysis, these monsters inspire fear in players because they do the unexpected, or make players lose control over their characters. As the character is seen as an avatar, i.e., the user interface by which players experience and control the game, losing control of the character or its abilities can be shocking to players. Still, as play expectations change depending on game edition and take different forms in different groups, the computational sublime is also a scene of conflict, and transgressive monster abilities are either seen as a welcome part of the D&D game or as a sign of bad design.
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Featured image is “ash wraith 5” from fantasy-art.tel. CC-BY
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Niklas Nylund is a museum researcher and curator working for the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, Finland. His PhD Game Heritage: Digital Games in Museum Collections and Exhibitions (2020) deals with the heritagization of games in museums and hobbyist heritage communities. He is also an avid role-player who is also interested in the history of role-playing game conventions and past practices. His other research interests include game preservation, game history, exhibition design and questions of cultural heritage and inclusivity.