A Monster is as a Monster does
If you ever decide to develop a role playing game, might I suggest conscripting a few kids to help you? I’m not talking about child labor, but a very ready source of out of the box imagination.
When we first started working on A’Kyria, my husband sat the kids down and asked them to create creatures for the game…and, man, did they deliver! We have a huge folder of the improbable, the weird, the impressive and the downright creepy that is still growing. There is nothing like a kid to bring the dreamy and the nightmarish to life.
Of course, it takes some tweaking by the grown-ups to make most of these creatures work. If my middle son had his way, every creature he has created would kill you just by looking in its general direction. Space Tentacles immediately come to mind. He came in with a picture and a name and an explanation that made us wonder how he ever gets to sleep at night! The creature essentially floats in low lying atmospheric asteroids and when it sees movement below, it reaches down, snags the unfortunate, springs it out of the atmosphere where it suffocates to death and then is slowly digested in its center mass. Yikes! How do you fight something like that?!
And there’s the rub of having children advisors. Reality, even game reality, has little to do with what they come up with, so you have to stretch your imagination to make it work. Take my daughter’s first creature installment: Pussy Willows. We were at a restaurant and she was doodling on her napkin. She shoved the napkin over and said, “Look! They’re pussy willows. They are tiny kitties that stick on you and you have to pet them and make them purr to get them off.” She, and we, had no idea what they did, but her picture and idea was something we kept coming back to. The Pussy Willows eventually developed into one of the more annoying nuisance creatures in A’Kyria.
There is also the challenge of bringing a child’s creature to life through pictures. What do you do when your son comes to you with a creature that has three legs, four arms, three mouths and numerous eyes, noses and ears? Well, you stretch yourself and try to draw something with three legs, four arms, three mouths, etc. and hope it looks like something that could actually wander the plains of A’Kyria. Enter the Kead; a sentient warrior race of creatures that would just as soon cleave you in half than speak with you. Excellent! Just because it seems implausible, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
My sons cornered the market on the brute strength, instant death, monsters, but my daughter wins hands down for coming up with the creepiest. In fact, we are all a little scared of my daughter since she came up with The Black Widow. She shows us a picture of a little girl on one side of the page and a spider on the other. She then tells us that you will be walking along a forest, doo-de-doo, when you find a lost little girl who looks like she’s starving and alone. You bring her back to your camp and when night falls and everyone is asleep, she shifts into an enormous spider that poisons you, spins you in a web and carries you off to her lair to snack on at her leisure. Yeesh! Oh, and the little girl has solid black eyes and the shadow of a spider if she gets caught in the sunshine. We walked really carefully around our daughter after that one!
I imagine that, because of our little minions, A’Kyria has creatures you may have never encountered in a game before. And, yes, we really enjoy the creepy things our kids have come up with…and I imagine you will, too!
We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!
