What I'm Reading - Part 1: Taxonomy of Monsters

One of the best non-book yet literary experiences I've had recently is a video game called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It's the closest thing to feeling like you're the protagonist in a novel, ever.

The game's quests are like a series of mystery novels, and you are the detective. You go into a mission, look at the clues and evidence, and draw conclusions. Sometimes it was a monster that did the crime, sometimes a person, and sometimes a person unleashed a monster. It's really great, and sometimes the quests have big twists.

Like, your character rides into an abandoned town. As you approach, you hear shrieking and moaning. Then, out of nowhere, a ghost appears and attacks you. You, as a monster hunter, kill it. However, the ghost returns for some reason. You begin to explore the surrounding abandoned buildings, and you read notes and find tokens that allow you to piece together what happened. A woman was killed, and a curse was set upon her. An object you found binds her to the town, to forever haunted and attack anyone near. You discover that she's a noonwraith, a specific type of ghost, and then you brew potions and oil your blade with specific items to prepare. Then, you must then break the curse and kill the ghost one last time. As you do, her human soul calls to you and thanks you for setting her free.

This is one of the quests I remember, and it was so awesome to figure it all out like a detective.


What makes the game's stories so great is probably that it is based on writings by Andrzej Sapkowski. I began reading his short story collection, The Last Wish. I've finished the first story, and it is really great. It's a monster mystery. 

If you want to see my review of The Witcher 3, click this sentence!
 

 

Monster Manual

One of the things that inspires me about the game and the writings are the way monsters and beasts are classified. There are subgroups, laws and rules that the world stands by for how the monsters look, how curses are laid out. Noonwraiths appear at noon and are bound to the world by objects. Nekkers have warrior leaders. Trolls can be intelligent and persuaded to give up their actions and avoid fighting whatsoever. 

The game has a system of classification. Giants, trolls, and nekkers are Ogroids. They share weaknesses and similarities. The same blade isn't effective against Katakans as it is on werewolves, because katakans are classified as vampires and werewolves are classified as cursed.

Ever since I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I always wanted to make my own Monster Manual, filled with my own designs. I've actually started one for my novel, and it is inspired by the idea of monster taxonomy. Each monster is sorted into a system. Monsters in one group share similar physical attributes, weaknesses, organs, etc. I like it when magical worlds are forced to conform to a set system of laws and logic, and that's one of my goals with my writing. Anything magical needs to be bound by rules, otherwise magic becomes a deus ex machina.



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Creatures and Monsters of The Unraveler - PART 2

My novel is filled with crazy beasts of my design. On this side project I'm working on, I'm creating nice artwork and describing some of the lesser-seen monsters of my world. So, to show a few of the creatures, I'm compiling a best-of monster list of creatures that exist in my novel.

Click the names to go to the full post about each creature! (...or start at Part 1)

Munlo

Description: Munlo are one of the most eaten creatures in the Unraveler universe. They are two-legged lizard-like creatures that are about the size of a pig. They have a taste comparable to bacon, however more chewy. They have a main of white fur along their spines, webbed feet for ease of navigating rivers, and a slithering tail that can latch on to the surroundings. The fangs are defensive, and only rarely are able to kill anyone. The teeth within their mouths are no more dangerous than the teeth of a toothbrush. They are aggressive to deal with, however, the ease at which they reproduce keeps them too valuable of a food source to not use.

Szip

Description: Szip originally evolved from living on the hides of giant creatures with rocky husks. Back then, they would use their needle mouths to feed off of blood. After the rocky giant creatures went extinct, however, szip addapted to live in the mountains. Now, they tend to simply go after smaller insects and small mammals for food, but are more often prey themselves (and prey for each other!).

Latcher

Description: The Bull Latcher is the largest (and scariest) of the three, and is the featured image at the top of this post.  It has evolved teeth and extended spines. It tends to latch on the biggest creature it can find, usually onto animals the size of whales. The Bull Latcher is about as tall as a human. Bull Latchers are the most aggressive, and if a giant predator is threatening its host, it will detach and attack the predator and then reattach to its host if both have survived.

Bewildered Vat

Description: The Bewildered Vat is a very strange creature. It is a slow liquid in a hardened outer shell. The liquid is acidic and poisonous, and it can launch bubbles rapidly to attack. It eats insects and dissolves them into its core. As strange as it may appear, it actually is fairly intelligent, having a soupy brain that is comparable to a sloth's. People have given this creature several nicknames, including, Death's Soup, The Living Cauldron, and the Reaching Pot.

Arbuscula

Description: The Arbuscula is a sentient tree creature. It has four spiderlike legs and a great maw of a mouth. Some of the leaves are light-sensitive, which give the arbuscula a sense of sight. Arbuscula come in a variety of appearances and several different tree-breeds have been discovered. Although they are very hostile, they will often sit quietly and wait until their enemies leave. Any small-sized prey, however, will be killed if the risk is low enough.


Thanks for checking these out! Let's be twitter friends (@Oxyborb). Here are the other parts to this series:
Part 1

Halloween Decorations 2014 - The year of BONES

This year my Halloween decoration theme was BONES. I wanted to do something different than my usual, so I bought nothing but a bunch of skeletons and bone-creatures. My favorite is this little skeletal bird that I got at Target for 8 bucks! What a steal!

I also wanted an awesome full-sized skeleton, so I got a really high-quality posable one from Spirit  and stuck a sword through him. I hung a bunch of bones around the house with rope and then sprayed them with this quart of fake blood. I also love the skeletal rats I got, mostly because my novel, The Unraveler, has a skeletal rat in it!

Creatures and Monsters of The Unraveler - PART 1

My novel is filled with crazy beasts of my design. On this side project I'm working on, I'm creating nice artwork and describing some of the lesser-seen monsters of my world. So, to show a few of the creatures, I'm compiling a best-of monster list of creatures that exist in my novel.

Click the names to go to the full post about each creature!

Umi

Description: The Umi is the smallest form of a chain of ostrich-like bird-lizards. During the life of the young Umi, its brain divides, it grows two new eyes, and the bones in its neck and skull duplicate. When an Umi sheds its skin, that means that its head is ready to split into two, and from them on the two-headed creature is referred to as a Miras.

Kudanite

Description: Capable of breathing both water and air, Kudanites are highly intelligent beings that occupy the nation of Weskernoth. They consider it a challenge to live on the land, and they call those that stick to the seas as savage and uncivilized. They fight against themselves almost as much as they fight other species, however they still find value in trade, money, and creating allies. They have arms like humans, but with tentacles instead of hands.

Mothroven

Description: Mothroven choose the form they want, so you might see them as as men with two arms and two legs, or as a jumbled mess of limbs and features. Although many people believe that they are ghosts or spirits, Mothroven are not capable of the normal ghost tropes. For example, they cannot walk through walls... they can, however, usually fit under them. Their form-changing, nearly-weightless bodies are flexible enough to fit into the smallest of cracks.

Cauli

Description: Cauli are another creature, like Sneidlatter, that bear the anti-gravity puffball organs called buoyaffs. The puffballs contain a magnetic mineral that push away from the center of the planet, which allows them to defy the force keeping them attached to the ground.

Walking Mouth

Description: With four strong legs holding it up, the Walking Mouth has a surprisingly easy time navigating all types of terrain. While a hunter by nature and a frightening sight to behold, this beast usually never kills its prey. In fact, it only hunts for buoyaffs-growing beasts such as Sneidlatters, Driffon, or Parsers. The Mouth has evolved in this way specifically to snatch off the antigravity organs, which it stores in the sac at the other end of its body. The tall teeth are actually used defensively, more often than not.

Orcs kill because they are evil

an ogre I sketched, more of my drawings here!

For a writer, productivity is balanced against sociability. I had hardly any social life this past month, but I was insanely productive. I called it, “Unraveler History Month,” because I worked tirelessly on the historical background.

One thing I love about books like Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings is that sense that the world is lived in. There was history before the events in those books, and it makes those books feel real. I want that element in my book. I want to know about the wars that happened in my world, how particular cities got their names, why there is an abandoned castle in the middle of the forests, and how all of that figures into the motivations of my characters.

because it’s evil

Something that I don’t like in novels is mindless evil. Orcs, ready to kill and eat manflesh simply because all orcs are evil. Creepy men wearing black eye shadow that want to kill you for no apparent reason. A monster that emerges from the depths because it was prophesized to kill everyone because it’s evil.

Evil itself, I feel, is not a reason. Prophecy is not a reason. It’s not logic. Did XXX kill everyone in town simply because he’s evil? No. Often, though, creatures like orcs are willing to do their master’s bidding for no other reason than they have black hearts, but that seems like a cop-out to me.

My “evil” characters are driven by true motivations. My monsters have reasons. Even my environmental antagonists have reasons. Logic that reads more that, “Because it’s evil. Why else?”

So, my history.

I’ve been working on building a timeline that spans over 4000 years. It lists EVERY single King or ruler during that time period… for all five nations in my book. For some, it even gives details on how they died and why so-and-so replaced them instead of so-and-so.

So, I’ve been working on that, noting every major war, battle, triumph, gain, loss, marriage, event, etc, for a span of 4000 years. I’ve also been building my giant family tree, listing all of my major characters and their families (hundreds and hundreds of names). I’ve been preparing myself for a new read-through (I always make a giant list of things to work on as I read, and also mark up my document with comments with smaller stuff to weed out before the read). I’ve been reworking this system I had for mystical/magical stuff, too.

I might write more on magic later, though.

Hope your day is going well! Thanks for reading! Keep in touch; follow me on Twitter: @Oxyborb

Halloween Decorating: 2013

This is the first year in a long while that I’ve had a house to decorate for Halloween, and I did it hardcore this year. Notice the cat prop by the grave, the hanging severed limbs. I also have a vulture on my roof, peering off. 

Click the jump to see my gallery of photos: