Work in Progress – Masterwork Monsters and Aranea
While the bulk of my week has been spent editing products rather than writing, I have found a little time to squeeze in a few hours on one of my labours of love. Since I’m not terribly comfortable speaking for CGW’s freelancers, I figure I’ll kick things off by talking about the motivation behind one of my current projects.If you’ve picked up one of CGW’s Masterwork products, you’ve probably noticed the Design Notes sidebar that gives you a rough guide to what the writer was thinking when the put the material together. Looking over the Masterwork Monster books that I’ve written over the last year, I notice that I’ve often left out the two fundamental goals that have gone into every release. Whenever you pick up a Masterwork Monsters book and read the new crunch included within, I usually want you to start subconsciously thinking two things:
1) Wow, I never thought about this monster that way.
2) Damn, this critter is so damn cool I’ve got to use it in my very next game.
I tend to think the first point is important because you, the customers, are paying me to write this stuff. If I’m asking you to pay money for my ideas, I only think its fair that I try to provide material that aren’t something you could have come up with on your own. I try to keep it as subtle as possible, implying the new direction through mechanics, but if you look closely enough its there.
The second point is only really important for purely selfish reasons – if I’ve written a Masterwork Monster’s book, it’s normally because I think the monster in question is damn cool and I want to convince everyone else that I’m right. Fortunately most of my favourite monsters tend to be critters that have some interesting nugget of information in their write-up, a kernel of untapped potential that could make them unfeasibly cool if you started to wonder what that really means. I find kobolds cool because they are one of the few humanoids with sorcerer as a favored class, which has always raised all sorts of questions about their relationship to magic. I find bugbears cool because they are goblins who manage to achieve the dangerous trinity of being stealthy, smart and strong.
I find aranea cool because they’re giant, intelligent spiders who can transform into humanoids and cast magic spells. What confuses me is how this complex package of abilities found its way into a monster that hasn’t ever achieved the kind of traction that’s been given to similar monsters like the doppelganger or the drow.
I’ve known that I was going to write a Masterwork Monster PDF about the aranea since Adam first came up with the concept for the line. They’ve been one of my favourite monsters in any game system since I first encountered them in the Isle of Dread adventure, alongside a bunch of similarly nifty monster ideas that aren’t OGL. I started putting together notes for the product at the same time that I started putting together notes for a product about kobold mutants. Unlike kobolds, the aranea product never really seemed to come together.
Here’s the thing: while I love the aranea as a monster, I’ve only ever had one encounter with them in the last three campaigns I’ve run. I’ve only used them a handful of times in the last twenty years, despite the fact that I dutifully converted their stats into a half-dozen different game systems. After sitting down and looking at my notes for an aranea product, I came to one very important realization: I have no idea
what the aranea want as a race.
To put it another way, the aranea just don’t seem to be an easy fit into the ecology of your standard d20 fantasy setting. The may be shape-shifting, spellcasting spider-folk, but the fact that they’re neutral and forest dwelling means they aren’t really equipped to be a long-term adversary the way evil races such as drow, doppelgangers and orcs are. They lack the motivations that usually define the iconic neutral critters – they don’t want to save the forests or maintain the balance, they just want to be left alone to spin webs and cast spells. They specialize in looking like humans and mastering enchantment magic, but don’t live among the civilized humanoid races where such abilities will see the most use.
For a very long time I kept looking at the notes I’d made for an aranea product and putting it off, worried about how I put a new slant on a monster that I wasn’t entirely sure how to look at to begin with. No matter how much I wanted to write it, I just wasn’t sure what to cover and where to go. I’d open the file full of notes ever couple of weeks, add a few lines, then close it and begin writing about a monster that was easier to handle.
A couple of weeks ago I pulled out the file and looked at it again, wondering if this time was going to be the one where I finally worked out how to put a new slant on the spider-folk and their not-quite-evil talent for magic and poison and shapeshifting. I looked at the notes I’d made about the difficulties of fitting the aranea into the campaign, all of it fairly similar to what I’ve written above, then looked at the two reasons that are behind the Masterwork Monster’s line in the first place.
Most of the time, finding a new slant on an old monster relies upon its usual niche within the standard campaign. This time around, it was time to start looking for a usual niche the aranea could inhabit and making it cool enough that
I wanted to use it in my next campaign. In short, this one was going to be a labour of love; it was time to make me start re-thinking the aranea’s role in the game.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
clockworkgolem's journal