Mixed Up Monsters

Plagarising childhood games for ttrpg usage as per. I once gave my players a zoombinis puzzle. This stuff's a bit more pen and paper.

A friend and I recently played a version of the draw-and-fold creature making game with a dnd spin. For anyone unfamilliar, in the normal game you take it in turns to draw a section of a creature, folding the paper before passing so that the other person doesn't know what it is they're adding to. We added a spinner with different things you'd find on a monster's stat block, such as actions, armour class, speed, etc and the idea was the section you drew had to show this attribute of the monster. We also had a timer, to keep it quick and evocative. Then at the end, we gave the monsters minimal stat blocks with the relevant features, and anything else that seemed fitting based off the whole drawing's vibe. It was lots of fun and I'll upload photos of our monsters here when I next see her.

This could be quite a fun way to come up with puzzle-style monsters- as well as ending up with something unique and strange, each attribute is tied to some striking localised physical feature, encouraging an approach of addressing each element of the monster strategically, rather than just rolling to hit. For example, representing a fire resistance with an extremely active slime gland on the ankle gives players something obvious to work around before they start throwing fireballs. What could be quite a boring aspect of a combat suddenly becomes a real focus.

Thinking about this today, I was reminded of another game I loved as a kid, which too could be easily twisted into some rpg form. Growing up, we had two spiral bound books with split pages which created mixed-up animals or fairy tales. Each page was a creature or story, and because they were each cut into 3 or 4, you could rearrange the sections as much as you liked. The creature one had 3 things that were combined each time- a picture, name element and information text. 3 ways to make it funny, inspiring pretty much endless combinations. The visual element is particularly evocative, and the words being chosen to work in any configuration without using an obvious formula creates some great combinations.

For an rpg version, this is basically a carefully made set of tables. If we're making monsters, you could add statblock features to each section, or go for a more diegetic approach, emulating the example of Fantastic Animals. You could use the same system to make spells (I've never looked properly at Maze Rats, but I think it might do something like this?), magic items, traps or puzzles. Maybe even dungeons. The main difference of this compared to a set of random tables is seeing the aspects combined- instead of just sparking an idea you're given something fully formed, and can easily notice and change any unappealing aspects. It's obviously a fair bit more work too, requiring some careful writing and a spiral-bound notebook for the full effect, but replicable with 3 sets of cards or something. The increased specificity also limits their use a bit compared to tables. I might write a follow up with some examples- I have an idea for how to use this in my ongoing game, for chimeric creatures used by a sinister underground cult.

Fun art on the inside cover of Remarkable Animals.