The Geometric Qualities of Living Creatures

Some time after the beginning, Gods created Life. Some say they merely found it, but that is a blatantly false statement. They can create mountains, ground and everything that is static; how could they not create the sea of emerging possibilities that is life?

Swimming downwards the stream of the Gods’ will, Life was thrust into the World. The Gods had defined boundaries for it, discrete forms it could use and adore them in; Gods revel in adoration, and as Life was made, taking the form the Gods intended and adoring them was the only possibility in their mind. Gods are absolute, as their Will and their decisions are.

Life, however, is a little less absolute. It took those Godly thoughts and caressed them in a multitude of ways, from a stream of discrete forms to a river of contiguous possibilities, to an endless sea of unforseen chances. Forms became components and components were twisted and changed; that’s why there are so many differences from Man to Man. Such is the way of life: a way of possibility and new horizons, not one of stillness and uniform willpower.

Soon Errors emerged from Life, which the Gods didn’t see as right: the Sun was made to wipe them out and to encourage Life to take beautiful, God-abiding forms; but Life can not be shackled nor any will can be imposed on it, so it gave its unwanted sons ways to escape, hiding from the Sun beneath the crust of the World, deep beneath the rocky veins that the Gods checked for unwelcome pulses...

Life has had enough of your shit, God!
Man of Many Mothers cover by Luca Coppola

Creatures as a Vectorial Space:

DISCLAIMER: this whole idea was sparked by me wanting to create ugly, barely predictable monsters and Luca rambling about colors as a geometrical space and impossible colors being part of that space for data completeness’ sake. We might just have been very drunk, but we also found this to be a very interesting concept that could spawn very interesting results. Interesting enough to be worth sharing, at the very least.

In OSR games, stat blocks are usually very slim, if there are any. Rather than stat blocks, things tend to stay discursive and focused on abilities and special tools, noting what’s different about a creature rather than a list of probably boring and often unused or otherwise uninteresting facts (like a full list of Ability Scores which are exactly the same as a normal man but without Intelligence for undead). Rather, OSR-style games seem to be focused, at least in my experience, on very interesting and distinct stuff; oftentimes with horror tints or at the very least with limited knowledge about what the players are about to face. Creature abilities usually do not intersect, sometimes might be unique, but are always a distinction from a baseline human, in exactly the same way as class abilities are a distinction from a baseline human.

SO. MANY. VECTORS.
Mutant by priapos78.

Long story short, that kind of OSR-inspired creature seems to be a perfect match for what I like to call “Creature-Space” (ok I just came up with a name that sounds somewhat cool) and which I plan on using on the next adventure we’re writing. The root of this idea can be found in the oldest and most common OSR tool, the almighty random table, and the idea itself can be summed up like this: instead of defining a creature as a “generic creature” for a certain type, writers could define a space (as in “vectorial space” for those of you more math-minded) which contains your generic creature and other interesting variations. It could be best described as an extension of random qualities tables such as the evergreen “1d100 mutations”: where those tables add a single dimension of variance on creatures and makes each of them “slightly unique”, imagine if the whole of a creature category was defined by a series of tables! Due to them being defined by “skills and particular things” in OSR style games, with the rest coming with the ruleset rather than with the adventure, it is quite easy (at least on a conceptual level) to envision creatures as a space of possibilities to be discovered rather than as definite building blocks. It is, after all, just a little step beyond Encounter Rolls as “the space of encounter possibilities” being explored and discovered in real time, and could even work as part of it if one was willing to put some extra work into the idea.

There’s an actual example of a two-dimensional creature space, usable for generating a fey creature by rolling 2d4 in order:

1. Butterfly wings (fly speed equal to land speed)
2. Snail Tail (leaves behind a bioluminescent track, which damages all creatures that touch it and prevents healing)
3. Fawn Legs (small runes glow on it’s hooves, each hoove holds a single random level 1 spell)
4. Horseback (triples land speed and can attack while moving)

1. Crabshell (+2 AC, is immune to fire)
2. Thirsty Claws (2 claw attacks, regenerates HP equal to half damage inflicted)
3. Witch Nose (can track underage creatures by smell)
4. Plaguecarrier (can't attack, halves all movement speeds, can’t run, inflicts constant damage to those within 9 meters; those attacking must Save or be nauseated by the blighted blood, losing a turn and taking double damage from the plague cloud)

We are DEFINITELY going to use a system like that for whatever we’re going to write next.