East Lake Bestiary
Introduction
So a few weeks ago, I jumped in on The East Lake survey. Essentially, all the participants were given a list of monsters to define (most were classic fantasy monsters, like Giants and Ghouls). After defining these creatures, we were then supposed to key some hexes on a hex map, making sense of our version of East Lake by the way our monsters were written. If that sounds interesting to you, the challenge can be read about in full here
If there's one thing you can say about Mr. Mann, it's that he likes hexcrawls. So naturally I jumped in. I'm going to share my Bestiary here, partly to boost the reach of the East Lake Survey and partly because I rather like the stuff I came up with. My version of East Lake makes more sense if you've read my Setting Pitch, but if not I'm sure you can still make something useful from all of it. I trust you.
I'm not putting out the hexfill just yet because I want to finish stocking the rest of it!
The Bestiary
Chimera
A whirling mass of bestial potentiality, floating 3’ off the ground and snapping out at things more enformed than it with the teeth of ten thousand links on the evolutionary chain.
Demon
They are You, dear reader, a sliver of your imagination stuffed full of id and rage. This overfilling has turned them inside out, heart and lungs and beating brain in full display. They do not forgive you for the horror that you inflicted them. Their powers are your own; monsters and locales bleed from its mind, slowly, over the course of days.
Doppelganger
Fishermen always carry a bag of stones. Beware the polished surface of a mirror or the clean, smooth reflection of a lake. Your reflection would crawl from their home and take your place. Were you always here, on this side of the mirror?
Dragon
The last few squares of an ancient quilt that sought to smother the world. They fold themselves around cold piles of metal, chasing the comfort of performing their function. Their breath is a tangle of threads that smother and crush.
Dwarf
Leave a tree in a quiet patch of the forest for a millennia, unmolested by anything save the passage of time. A dwarf, life to stone to life again, is the product. Guardians of The Unheard Sound.
Elemental
Every quilt is made of threads. They cluster around dragons and those who would wield magic, eager to be weaved once again.
Giant
Bedposts at the Corners of the World, holding it down with their many hands. They are made from a dark, abyssal glass that has many cracks and craters.
Ghost
Chemtrails of a people who long ago rent the quilt. Their memories remain, within corporeal form no longer.
Goblin
Their mandibles clack and chitter against one another in polyrhythms. Their whole body vibrates as they rip and tear into flesh. What are they looking for? When they find it, they will become men.
Golem
Small pieces of abyssal glass, pieces of a whole. Each of them a small copy of the original. Many hands, much height, darkly dangerous.
Gnoll
Drown a dwarf, weigh her body down with stones. Drown a man, fill his stomach full of lead. Drown an orc, tear the whistle from their throat and cover it in lake water. And so the river runs atop and twixt the many gnolls. They do not take kindly to those who still breathe air.
Invisible Stalker
A handful of wizards so powerful that, when they died, their souls still plucked the threads of the Weave. They cluster around new wizards like mirages do in deserts. Waiting for a weak moment that they may take control. Wizards do not sleep in East Lake.
Lizardmen
Scraps from the last Great Dragon, shredded by a score of Golems. They roam East Lake in packs, trying to Become again.
Orc
They say the First Orc was made by accident. A war whistle, buried by a widow. What rose sang songs, for all it knew was music. The songs have many voices now.