OWL-2: Drawing Your Own Monster Manual

The Rest of the F#@king Owlbear

This is the second in a series of articles I call “The rest of the F#@king Owlbear” about making art for tabletop role playing games. This month I want to talk to TTRPG players about drawing their own monsters.

Monster Manuals are for DMs

Playing tabletop games with your friends is all about creativity. Together, we get to shape the raw material the DM provides into something fun and interesting.

I find that everything is more fun when I engage with the world with curiosity and wonder. As a group we are limited only by what we can imagine. I think that the potential for novelty in these games needs to be embraced by everyone involved – abandoning the idea of a monster manual is key to this.

Discovery is Interesting

First a word to DMs: please stop telling players what the monsters are.

I have played TTRPGs for a long time, and consumed a lot of media around them. I know the usual suspects. But even the most run-of-the-mill goblin attack can be interesting if it is handled the right way.

“You enter the cave and see three goblins standing around a campfire” is a boring way to present these monsters.

But if you tell me that my group spots a group of short humanoids with greenish skin and gangly limbs wearing a motley mixture of dirty clothes and bits of mismatched armor, I’m still 90% sure I’m about to have an encounter with goblins but at least there’s 10% wiggle room there for me to wonder if something weird is about to happen. Maybe they aren’t goblins… maybe they are weird goblins?

This is probably an obvious point, but let your players identify the monsters and name them themselves. Let them be wrong about them. Let them learn about them from experience.

Let them make their own monster manual.

New Player Class: Bestiary Keeper

Figure out who in each party is the natural doodler and encourage them to start keeping track of the creatures and weird stuff the party encounters in a journal style. They don’t have to be great drawings, just something that records what the monster looks and acts like, where you found it, and how mean it was.

The Black Hack 2nd Edition Monster folio booklet is a good design to borrow from (or your party could just all chip in for one. The booklet is full of blank entries your party fills out itself:

You can see it’s pretty minimal. There’s a spot for a name, a doodle and what info you can glean from the encounter.

I tend to be the doodler in my group though others do draw now and then and while we’re playing the doodles are very basic. I’m usually not keeping a separate journal but doodling and mapping as we go.

Our DM is very sparing with the info about the creatures we meet and we’ve slowly learned to ask a lot of questions and not to assume that things are hostile because of how they look. We’ve had some bad experiences with friendly-seeming creatures, too. Getting the descriptions of the creature is just the beginning.

What is really engaging about this is the wide open field of things we might encounter in the world and the shared experience of discovery that we get from exploration of the world.

Some Ideas About Monster Entries

I like to draw so the doodle of the monster is important to me, but the other key bits of info that I think need to be in your in-world bestiary are:

Name - something descriptive - bonus points if you get the DM using it. “Blue skinned nerds” is pretty basic, but that tends to be the type of name I come up with… “tentacle faced weirdo”, “sparkle flapper”, “ball of legs thingy”
Location - just in case you need to find them again.
Communication - body language, sign, elven only ... again just in case you meet them again.
Demeanor - hostile , bribe-able, friendly etc.
Notes: motivations, likes/dislikes, only appears after midnight, etc.

Sample Entry:

You get the idea. If you’re a ttrpg player, become a bestiary keeper or buy a small notebook for the doodler in your group. Never look at a Monster Manual again, make your own.

Collective Feedback

A member of the Carouse Collective gave me this feedback on the column that I thought everyone might be interested in. Patchwork Paladin wanted to add these two ideas: “1) I have had the idea for a monster slayer guild that will give XP for monster pictures and descriptions turned in; 2) quite independently the bard in my Dolmenwood game produced a whole rhymed bestiary!!”