Where do your Monsters come from?

 Hi,

 Just wondering if any of you have a sort of built in cosmology in your games for all the custom or more obscure horrors in your game?

 The NWOD is pretty spiffy since it allows for all manner of creatures aside from the major templates, where do they come from in your world?

In one game I'm running I work pretty much all monsters as having spawned from the Grigori, the angels who fell long before Lucifer did. They taught man enchantment, giving rise to witches, fornicated with beasts, creating Lycanthropes, and supped on the blood of man, creating vampires etc. The Grigori are still kicking around, Azazel from Inferno being one of the primary ones, and form my core of Big Bads.

I don't, and it is intended to be so. I really think that a big part of the interest and mystique of the WoD comes from not knowing about the origins of its supernatural inhabitants. They exist, but nobody knows why. You can fight them, you can study them, you can even become one of them... but you will never know where they come from, or if there even is a reason for them to exist.

I think this approach gives more freedom to the Storyteller, for one, and I'm a firm believer in that when you explain everything, its not interesting anymore. Looking for the answer is fun, finding it is not.

Canada, all my monsters are Canadian, gotten so my players waste anyone who knows what poutine is.

 Well.....I was thinking in terms of having a consitent mythos that runs in the background, that players are prolly not aware of. Its more of an ST framework.

 Obviously, its really not needed. Your monsters should fit the needs of your story first and foremost. I was just wondering if anyone had a larger backstory and found it usefull.

Egyptian Mythology


Lord Set is returning

I go with the Lovecraft approach: This is their world. Its modern man and civilization thats unnatural, and the monsters realy want to turn back the clock. Perhaps they will succed.

Myself? I prefer to use the beast under their beds, in their closets, in their heads.

In other words, I prefer to get psychological with my Hunter players, whipping up the occasional monster that'll really screw with their psyche.

My monsters come from the closet and from under my bed.  But as I am a rational adult, I sleep easy knowing that if the door is shut and my feet are tucked under the blanket, I am perfectly safe.  Also, I try not to let my arm hang over the side.

I tend to use Lovecraftian style as much as I can when I'm trying to really freak people out, so that'd be one of my sources. But my other main source is a kind of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" style, where belief breeds everything, and people bring over their own supernatural creatures when they migrate. (On that note, if you haven't read American Gods and Anansi Boys, you should)

DrBludgeony:

On that note, if you haven't read American Gods and Anansi Boys, you should

Pretty much.

For where monsters came from I personally like using them as sort of Primordial spirits or nature and life and death which have become perverted and debased by mankind's rape of the world. like those are the roots of Vampires, Werewolves Fae, Ghosts and Demons. They just don't know it themselves.

The last time I ran a hunter chronicle, my players didn't really have a clue where the monsters came from. Or even how to best destroy them. They operated based on knowledge gleaned from fiction and field experience.

I run with the idea that Ben Franklin and a few other masons in the Hell Fire club used the sex energy raised by the clubs orgies to cast a veil of seperation between the material world and reality.  It's imperfect, but it was enough to allow for the age of enlightenment and kept most of what we know as supernaturals out.  The veil is also the reason Promethians cause an enviromental disturbance.  Puppets and snowmen becoming the children of childless old couples were once standard issue in fairytale reality, the environmental disturbances are the result of the real world trying to reassert itself through the Promethians.  America's fairyland looks like the cartoons by Max Fleisher, Warner Brothers, and Disney from the 20's and 30's.

Gorilla:

 Hi,

 Just wondering if any of you have a sort of built in cosmology in your games for all the custom or more obscure horrors in your game?

 The NWOD is pretty spiffy since it allows for all manner of creatures aside from the major templates, where do they come from in your world?

   Well I prefer the "more things than are dreamed of in your philosophy" approach of hunter. but something I toyed with is borrowing the Scion cosmology for hunter.  That hunters are fighting the titan spawn and on the front lines of the war that prevents reality as we know it from crumbling.

Gorilla:

The NWOD is pretty spiffy since it allows for all manner of creatures aside from the major templates, where do they come from in your world?

Wow, that is a tough one. The answer is "A lot of different places", but damn if that isn't helpful.

The beasties themselves? Often have an origin in something related to the Major Supernaturals themselves. You can really far out there with what the Core Three and Beyond are capable of. It's even rumored that Mages were behind one of the Promethean lines.

Vampires can do anything with the blood, quite nearly. Devotions, disciplines, bloodline disciplines, and devotions that involve bloodline disciplines can combine to make just about anything. And that power is inherent in the Blood itself. Take that sort of philosophy and apply it to ghouls, mandragora, hellhounds, just about anything. Ghoul families, even! Some of the beasties out there may just be incredibly convoluted hereditary ghouls made centuries or millenia ago by some particularly ancient Crone.

Mages, as we've said, can create some pretty fantastic things. Constructs, bound familiar spirits, things whose origin draw on some echo of the Supernal (or Abyssal) reaching down and brushing this plane. Angels and Demons may just be creatures from the Supernal, who made their way into our myth during a time before the Sundering.

And don't get me started about Werewolves and Spirits. Rank 6+ Spirits may as well be untouchable gods, considering the Spirit Ranking system doesn't even suggest trying to give them maximum statistics for Power, Finesse, and Resistance. Anything which could exist out there probably has some spiritual reflection in the Shadow. There may in fact be perfect Rank 10 Archetypal Spirits which represent immutable ideal constants out there deep in the Shadow. When you can ask creatures like this, or even just their servants, to lend you their power, the possibility for what Werewolves are capable of becomes pretty endless. Even just taking something mundane and jamming a particularly alien Spirit inside of it can make it something inherently unknowable.

tl;dr - I've already got enough within the internal cosmology to make some truly horrific things. The real question is where *exactly* the things that are already established come from. And there are some times where I feel like I know. At other times, I come up with things that are so far outside of the scope of what I've been presented with that I'm really just not sure at all.