Michelin Star Monsters
A five-year project to rate and review all the monsters in Fiend Folio just wrapped up. This is a review of that review series!
Save Vs. Worm just wrapped up her “Goin' Through the Fiend Folio” series, which has been ongoing since December 2020, which coincidentally is the same month I began blogging. It was a delightful series to read over the years (having only ever flipped through the Fiend Folio), and I wanted to write a little capstone on the whole thing. First, however, I invite you to go read the whole series, helpfully linked below:
Glad she was able to wrap up on a nice, even number of parts.
My first inclination, as a major sicko, was to put the whole thing into a spreadsheet. The average score, across ~165 monsters reviewed, was 2.98, which makes means they were on average about what you’d expect if they were all just assigned random scores from 1 to 5. Interestingly, the scores got lower over time (first half hovered around 3.08 while the latter half averaged 2.88), likely representing higher standards as the project chugged along. The 2.98 overall average is because, while the bulk of monsters (87 of 166) fall into the middling categories of 2 or 3, there are a lot (36) of 4-star monsters and slightly more (22) 5-star monsters than 1-star monsters (20). But the numbers honestly don’t tell us much, other than the fact that there was a wide variation in monster quality across the book. It is more interesting, after reading all of these, to ask what makes a good monster or a bad monster (using the criterion from Mars, the blogger at Save Vs. Worm)?
Mars clearly has a preference for undead, creepy-crawlies and monstrous humanoids, but there is more than unites a 5-star monster as opposed to a 1-star entry. Aside from simply making it a centipede made of skulls or a frog person or something (the series betrays an abiding preference for insects, amphibians, and undead), the main criterion for what makes a monster work is how distinctive it is. Like, sure, Mars may give full marks to the Tirapheg for being “one of the creepiest looking creatures that one could imagine shuffling out of the darkness”, but it doesn’t earn five stars from creepiness alone: it is their freaky veneer paired with their supernatural abilities and status as scavengers that make them an overall appealing dungeon encounter. The Sheet Phantom may be goofy, but it is a piece of cloth that suffocates you to death and turns you into a ghoul that shoots acid from your nose. the Flail Snail isn’t just iconic, it has a unique way it must be fought (incapacitating each tentacle), attracts more monsters when it dies with his death rattle, and leaves behind a powerful piece of treasure.
Maybe these examples of what makes a monster great become more clear when viewed alongside all the ones that stink. That is actually part of what makes Mars’ project interesting and helpful: she could have easily wrote “here are my top 20 monsters from the Fiend Folio” but that would not have given us as fulsome a picture of her monster predilections as spending nearly 5 years (nonstop; I’ve been told that Mars has done nothing but contemplate the fiends since she began this journey) detailing her feelings on the good, the bad, and the many that are simply mid.
Compare the beauty and inventiveness of your average, workaday flail snail against the Gorilla Bear. Mars notes that the entry for the gorilla bear has nothing that makes it unique even from an ordinary bear other than noting that it has the head of a gorilla. (And this is bad, unlike the owlbear, which is good.) Or even the Fire Snake, in the same part of the series as the flail snail. As Mars says, “[t]hey’re just snakes that happen to live in fire”. Also, tribal humanoid monsters that dwell underground like the Quaggoth? Sorry, but it’s been done before. We already have morlocks at home!
The lesson I draw from this is that monsters should be unique and do more than just what you would immediately expect from hearing their name. In fact, if you can hear the name of the monster and immediately know all of its details, I would go so far as to say that is poor monster design. Leave something to be discovered, be it a wailing death shriek or the valuable magic shell the monster leaves behind.
Do you think Mars should publish her own bestiary? I do!
As an aside, while filtering through the Fiend Folio tag on Save vs. Worm, I found the only other post that is not a part of this series: Product Identity Schmoduct Schmidentity, where Mars discusses the Kuo Toa and Slaad. Like I said above, Mars clearly has a preference for the amphibian monsters. But whomst amongst us doesn’t? Was not one of my favorite characters a bullwug knight and do I not always prefer to play as Parish in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast? This post was in response to one of my posts, riffing on the Goin' Through the Fiend Folio series format, Here Be No Product Identity Monsters, where I rate some of the monsters that Wizards of the Coast purportedly “owns” and giving them alternative names that anyone can use. Mars isn’t the only one fond of toads, as Knight at the Opera, in his rebuttal (Product Identity? In MY Monsters?) to my aforementioned post spoke of Kuo Toa as well as Bullywugs.
I also would read "Vs Worms: The Bestiary"