Writing and Creating Monsters and a potential resource
Pulled from the book “Writing Monsters” by Philip Athans. I had skimmed a copy at my local Big Box Bookstore (Only one in town for new books, we have an excellent used bookstore as well that I had visited today and got 3 books on Investing and Stock Trading for $11.50).
I got a couple of chapters in and jotted a few notes from it as inspiration for gaming and writing. Lots of great ideas in the first few chapters, and enough as I skimmed it before us leaving (due to weather) to prompt me to put it on my list of must haves.
So here is the Table of Contents from the book. Just skimming over the ToC is enough to give me ideas. You could even just copy and paste it into a document and then fill in the blanks after stripping off the Chapter titles and headings, and then using it to do some monster making. So look over the below list and see what it sparks in your horror gaming and writing.
Part I: What They Are?
Chapter 1: What is a monster?
Chapter 2: What makes a monster scary?
Chapter 3: Transformation
Chapter 4: Where do they come from?
Chapter 5: Monster or Villain?
PartII: Why They’re here
Chapter 6: How “Monster-Rich” is your world
Chapter 7: Monsters as metaphor
Chapter 8: Monsters as obstacles
Chapter 9: Monsters as agents
Chapter 10: Monsters as sources of pity
Chapter 11: Monsters as sources of magic or technology
Chapter 12: Bringing out the good and evil in people
Part III: How to write them
Chapter 13: Setting the rules
Chapter 14: Size
Chapter 15: Powers and Abilities
Chapter 16: Weaknesses
Chapter 17: Description
Chapter 18: The Five Senses
Chapter 19: Staging the reveal
Chapter 20: Isolation
Chapter 21: Originality: Cliche vs Archetype
So now pulled out of Chapter 2, What makes a monster scary? These are essentially headers in the chapter that were expanded on. It looks like you could use the list as a framework or almost blueprint for monster creation. In example in the first section, the What are people afraid of?, the author of the book illustrates that they had looked up a Top Ten List of Phobias and used them as a basis for a novel in fact.
l What are people afraid of?
l They are unpredictable?
l They have a disturbing capacity for violence?
l They exhibit an “otherness”
l Our imagination makes them scarier
l They are amoral
l They are beyond our control
l They are terrifying in appearance
l They turn us into prey
So go check out the book and pick it up for yourself and get some great tips and ideas
