Alternate Creature Interpretations (Feel free to add your own additions)

Red Caps carve their hats out of actual mushrooms, which remain alive after carving. The mushrooms then begin to spread spores, allowing Red Caps to passively increase the areas from which they can harvest more mushrooms for their hats. The spores also make it so that wherever a Red Caps was just standing is essentially covered with kindling for a moment, and anyone who is headbutted by the Red Cap (or otherwise gets a full whiff of spores) will suffer effects not unlike smoke inhalation.

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Originally Posted by Grim Portent

Easiest option for goblins would probably be to make them malicious shapeshifting trickster spirits. Leading travellers astray, attacking the lost, harassing livestock and so forth. Still more of a nuisance than anything to the prepared, but something a bit different from just being primitive bandits.

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Could serve, thanks!
Maybe hobgoblins are similar, or even unrelated fey acting like @brian 333's idea, despite the name.

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Originally Posted by Xania

Could serve, thanks!
Maybe hobgoblins are similar, or even unrelated fey acting like @brian 333's idea, despite the name.

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Folklore had them as house spirits similar to some versions of kobolds and brownies, helpful for simple chores but also kind of *******s from time to time, so perhaps they could be the domestic form of goblins?

Short, hidden fey that live in or around houses and farms and help with chores, but occasionally become enough of a nuisance that they need to be driven out by exorcism and may try to resist violently.


I've mentioned it before, but the route I've gone with fey is mostly Celtic inspired with Germanic elements, so I just use hobgoblin as one of the words for kobolds, brownies and bauchan rather than trying to make them distinct*. They're all shapeshifters, all helpful at times and hindrances at others and all have certain payments expected in exchange for service and can be offended by accident leading them to become outright dangerous. They're set apart from other fairy folk by having struck their own bargains to stay in the world above ground when the others were forced below ground, and widely derided by the other fey for this reason, and outright hated by the more vengeful ones. A house with a helpful one is somewhat protected from things like kelpies and changelings.

*Though if I ever try to figure out the details of the various 'invader' factions (basically Norse, Romans and Saxons) homelands I will need to decide what their local house spirits actually are, since the fey are local to one area of the world. That's the issue of mashing together multiple mythologies I guess.

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Originally Posted by Grim Portent

Folklore had them as house spirits similar to some versions of kobolds and brownies, helpful for simple chores but also kind of *******s from time to time, so perhaps they could be the domestic form of goblins?

Short, hidden fey that live in or around houses and farms and help with chores, but occasionally become enough of a nuisance that they need to be driven out by exorcism and may try to resist violently.


I've mentioned it before, but the route I've gone with fey is mostly Celtic inspired with Germanic elements, so I just use hobgoblin as one of the words for kobolds, brownies and bauchan rather than trying to make them distinct*. They're all shapeshifters, all helpful at times and hindrances at others and all have certain payments expected in exchange for service and can be offended by accident leading them to become outright dangerous. They're set apart from other fairy folk by having struck their own bargains to stay in the world above ground when the others were forced below ground, and widely derided by the other fey for this reason, and outright hated by the more vengeful ones. A house with a helpful one is somewhat protected from things like kelpies and changelings.

*Though if I ever try to figure out the details of the various 'invader' factions (basically Norse, Romans and Saxons) homelands I will need to decide what their local house spirits actually are, since the fey are local to one area of the world. That's the issue of mashing together multiple mythologies I guess.

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I like the domestic goblin idea, also they being the same of brownies, for what i found there is little difference between them.

MM kobolds as such exist, but feels strange to call them kobolds, so because they don't have a dark counterpart as elves and dwarves have, "kobold" it's just as a tittle for nasty gnomes.

Dragons, being inherently magical creatures, cause the area around their lairs to become suffused with magic. Often the water, flames, earth, or even air will simply get up, stretch its limbs, and walk away.

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Originally Posted by Sizzlefoot

Dragons, being inherently magical creatures, cause the area around their lairs to become suffused with magic. Often the water, flames, earth, or even air will simply get up, stretch its limbs, and walk away.

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Kicking a dragon out of town will lead their timely volcano lair to pack up bags and move with them.

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Originally Posted by Squire Doodad

Kicking a dragon out of town will lead their timely volcano lair to pack up bags and move with them.

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And if a dragon is in control of a river that just so happens to be the town's main water supply, well, time to pay up.

I understood it wrong, like this video inverted, with the dragons being the ones attracting certain kind of magic, so their castles and caves are formed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeK_hlwxYRU

Trolls may not exist, being actually young hags who failed to develop as such.

Full Life Cycle of the Gibbering Beholding Beast

Stage 1: Gibbering Mouther
As the 5e MM puts it so horrifyingly, the gibbering mouther is the composite eyes, mouths, and liquefied matter of its former victims. Driven to insanity by the destruction of their bodies and absorption into the mouther, those victims gibber incoherent madness, forced to consume everything in reach.

Stage 2: Gibbering Abomination
As presented in the 4e MM, the gibbering abomination is much the same as the mouther, except that it has developed tentacles, limited levitation, and at least one type of eye ray.

Stage 3: Gibbering Orb
The gibbering orb has developed full levitation, and half a dozen eyestalks able to produce a variety of eye rays. While it remains made of oozing flesh, it favors a spherical shape.

Stage 4a: Beholder
Eventually, through a combination of paranoia and delusions of grandeur, one of the trapped consciousnesses manages to repress all the others, which comes at the cost of the creature's maddening gibber. When this happens, all but ten of the eyes merge into a big central eye, able to produce an antimagic cone, while the remaining ten are mounted on eyestalks, with as many types of eye rays. The creature also merges all its mouths into a wide toothy maw under its central eye, then starts to grow either leathery skin or an exoskeleton. From then on, the creature is convinced that its new fixed form is perfect in every way.

The creature will occasionally regurgitate its recent preys in the form of a new gibbering mouther, thus repeating the cycle.

Stage 4b: Beholder-kin
Sometimes, the process that would create a beholder instead yields a weaker creature called a beholder-kin. There are many types of beholder-kin, such as the bloodsucking "death kiss" or the lobster-like "eye of the deep". Some beholders purposely raise and torture gibbering mouthers, abominations, and orbs so they become beholder-kin, which are then used as minions.

Stage 5: Greater Gibbering Orb
A beholder that does not stay sufficiently alert runs the risk of melting into a greater gibbering orb, the repressed consciousnesses reemerging as a cohesive group. The resulting creature possesses all the abilities of its previous forms, and has virtually no limits in its physical and intellectual growth. Some scholars believe that Hadar, the Ebon Hunger, is a greater gibbering orb that grew so big that it collapsed into a living black hole.
https://i.imgur.com/YUkQ41rh.png
Illustration of stages 1 to 4a

When magic coalesces in a single place, spirits are born. Depending on the people, if any, living there and what people generally see it as, these magical creatures could be demons, devils, or yugoloths, or fey, angels, or couatls. People born in such places are planetouched.

Worgs are undead, a punishment for murderous bandits.
They strive to collect treasure but, taking no pleasure in it. Worgs certainly cannotspend it.

they can talk and plan.Worgs will surround a rural farmhouse and demand tribute. Daylight doesn't kill them but they fade away and waking painfully in their caves.

worgs are resistant to normal weapons. They are vulnerable to silver, and such weapon attacks always have advantage.

Giants, including mutant trolls, ogres, and ettins (all of whom were bred in vats as warrior-servants), are an ancient alien race who came to the world through an interdimensional gateway.

The "mountain giant" name brings the yeti to my mind, maybe they are a bigger and more peaceful variety.

It dawned on me last weekend, that real life has something that could be considered akin to the giant rats of D&D and other fantasy games: a rodent of massive size that eats around ten pounds a day, the capybara.

Granted it doesn't look like a rat, but since when has a minor detail like that stopped anyone?

I'm about to start a campaign where there is a dwarven communist party and a dwarven Russian civil war.

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Originally Posted by Sizzlefoot

I'm about to start a campaign where there is a dwarven communist party and a dwarven Russian civil war.

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Like the dwarven Republic of Mordengard in the Chainmail setting? Those are my favorite dwarves in D&D.

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Originally Posted by Jendekit

It dawned on me last weekend, that real life has something that could be considered akin to the giant rats of D&D and other fantasy games: a rodent of massive size that eats around ten pounds a day, the capybara.

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It's also an herbivore and very tolerant of humans. But the dire capybara, on the other hand...

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Originally Posted by jqavins

It's also an herbivore and very tolerant of humans. But the dire capybara, on the other hand...

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And that's without even mentioning the miniature giant space capybara.