Low Fantasy: How Monsters Change Civilizations

Comments · 403

• CO

  @coolnamebro7363 · 1 year ago

  When you're trekking through the Appalachian forest in the dead of night when suddenly all the crickets and birds stoop making noise and you feel a pair of almost-human-but-not-quite hands running along your back.

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• BR

  @brandondoane332 · 1 year ago

  I'm imagining humans living underground like you described, and essentially being like termites. Dragons like many real world animals might learn how to dig up our settlements to eat us en mass.

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• BR

  @brandondoane332 · 1 year ago

  Billionaires are just shape shifting dragons

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• M.

  @M.Melnick · 1 year ago

  Shape changing dragon's owning or being major players in the world is part of the ShadowRun game's history. It generally has the effect you appear to predict. The major difference is that they all do not get along, all the time, so that changes their impact.

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• CH

  @chaossin7425 · 1 year ago

  To be fair, Smaug was the runt of the liter of dragons in Tolkien's works anyway.

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• DE

  @denisj.3208 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm9ASXg84Fs&amp;t=1270">21:10</a> If you&apos;re interested in this type of development, humans evolving underground to avoid a world where dragons are at the very top of the food chain, check out Sawyer Lee&apos;s channel where he worldbuilds exactly that

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• V.

  @v.y.o. · 1 year ago

  Frankly, if shapeshifters are able to perfectly mimic other individuals, even if only for limited amounts of time, I don&apos;t see them being allowed to exist freely or openly. Similar to how psykers are treated in Warhammer 40k, theirs is a skillset that is both so useful for and dangerous to any authority, that any authority will feel the need to ensure absolute control over them.<br><br>The only way to steer away from themes of totalitarian excess is to limit shapeshifters&apos; ability to reliably/easily impersonate arbitrary individuals.

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• FN

  @FND-Studio · 1 year ago

  That was profoundly eye opening. Over two decades of dming and not once this occurred to me. Wow. Yes! Obviously people wouldn&apos;t want giant sea monsters slithering about in their waters. They would have choke points in rivers that only lets in certain sized objects or have breeds of dogs that&apos;s specialized to defend/detect the geologically prevalent predator. I haven&apos;t checked the comments, probably already suggested and in someway refuted but.. if there are shapeshifters, they would be studied. There would be tricks, tests, maybe potions. And of course many myths about it.

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• MA

  @Mario-tj8nu · 1 year ago

  I think you make a great point when how on a large scale giant monsters or roaming bands of monsters work like climate or natural disasters. I mean realistically how different is a dragon vs a forest fire. The dragon may move quicker, but it also needs to rest and can be negotiated with.

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• TH

  @themanformerlyknownascomme777 · 1 year ago (edited)

  I don&apos;t know if I&apos;d go full underground, least not universally. Cause something fantasy authors tend to forget is that the world is a very big place, and an apex predator like a giant dragon wouldn&apos;t be that populous, there would simply be too much space for people to settle that would mean that underground cities wouldn&apos;t be a universal nessesity.<br><br>It&apos;d be like WW2 Aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean: there is only so many of them and they only have so much range and the Pacific Ocean is so vast that the best defence is just the shear unlikelihood of being discovered (though the US neutralized this with their breaking of Japanese Military code, but that is irrelevant to this discusion)

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• IT

  @italucenaz · 1 year ago

  I think you missed the exemple of the the eastern european dragons, that are evil, relatwd to the devil, but still mischevious, shapeshifting and more relates to folklore, they were the ones that actually kidnapped princesses and such

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• CH

  @chillax319 · 11 months ago

  Good example of a terryfing side of nymphs that you could&apos;ve use are dryads in Warhammer Fantasy. Use the human/nearly human nymph when everything is calm and peaceful and use Warhammer kind when stuff needs to get violent. Their dryads are agile, fast, mini-ents with claws or whole limbs turned into a woody knives, lashing vines, with tough bark for skin and so on. Even without outright manipulation of the environment around them you can easily imagine a dryad like that to scewer someone with ease, spray them with poisonous pollen, choke them and/or cut with tentacle like vines covered in barbs(bonus points if they are also poisonous). And thats only one kind of pissed of nature nymph.

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