#make a monster

[catschimericalcreations]

help Cat's Chimerical Creations design a frankenplushie!

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Voting ended onMar 22, 2025

[les-bane-bea]

LETS MAKE A BEAST PT5

Pt4

last time we figured out its as big as a cat....(my bad guys)

now where does it live!

alongside humans (domesticated)

alongside humans (not domesticated)

Arctic

jungle

desert

snowy forrest

forest

ocean

underground cave

lush cave (like minecraft!)

Voting ended onJan 30, 2024

[writeblrsummerfest]

It's that time again - game time!

We're going to be making a fun, spooky, creepy monster together using a reblog chain!

I'll start it off.

The monster can only come out at night...

Now, you take up the next step! Continue from here to make your own reblog chain, or follow up from someone else's continuation!

[niwawings15]

Behold! The Blue Cup Sandhill Chicken! He is a big angry thing who lives in caves and violently protects his nest. He eats fungi and prefers to move around in the dark. He can’t fly but he flaps his wings and wiggles his head around when angry.

[dancflorhardkor]

Creatuanary 2023 Day 21: Lobisomem

This werewolf is native to South America and is sometimes refered to as a ball of fire... I wonder why

[simonalkenmayeris-still-dead]

Making a Monster 1/?

Someone asked what I think would be a better way to write a character like Simon.  I’m gonna tag these posts “Make a monster” if you don’t wanna see them, btw.

We’re kinda lucky that we basically know what the idea behind Simon is.  If we believe that wayback machine link, which I am inclined to do, then it was pitched as Hannibal Lecter meets Julia Child. 

Now I’ve never much been a fan of anything to do with the Hannibal Lecter character, mainly because I was traumatised by Silence of the Lambs as a child.  But there’s an overview of the character on the wikipedia page and basically it’s exactly what Simon’s personality is intended to be.

All media in which Lecter appears portray him as intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music and cuisine.

"He is a dispassionate, brilliant machine, superb at logic, deficient in emotions."

So now we know where Si is coming from with their writing.  They want to write “what if Hannibal Lecter wrote a cookbook”.  Julia Child is just code for cookbook in this idea, sorry Julia.

Somewhere along the way, Si decided that instead of writing about a cannibal, they were going to write about a literal monster.  Regardless of where that idea came from, when you’re writing about a character who eats people, you need to know if they’re doing it because they need to, or because they want to.

My pet peeve about Simon’s characterisation is that he eats people because he wants to, but it’s written about as though it’s a need (I’m talking about physical needs, not psychological needs here).

Si has straight up said that Simon eats people because if he doesn’t, he becomes slow and dull witted.  There are others of his species who don’t eat people and they are less intelligent than him, and he does not want to be like that.  So eating people is something he chooses to do so he can have a better lifestyle, basically.

I would get around this whole problem by making a monster who wants to kill people, but doesn’t need humans as part of their diet.  

It’s very done for the monster character in a (usually tv) series to become overwhelmed by their nature and accidentally attack one of their friends, and then mope around for the rest of the season while their friends reassure them that they know that wasn’t really them, and it wasn’t their fault.  It’s much more compelling for the monster to attack someone because they wanted to, and to have to deal with the fallout from that.

[oldtumblhurgoyf]

Ikoria: Card Overlays

Y’all ever played the card game Gloom? You win the game by making a family’s life miserable before killing them off. You change their experiences by playing cards over top other cards.

As you can see, the cards are clear and have bits that modify parts they cover up. So that top card would cover up the -10 on the card below it, but the -15 on the card below it would still show through.

What if do this Magic card?!

Reality check real quick, I don’t think this can happen. These cards are plastic and a bit thicker than Magic cards I think. They obviously feel and look different outside a sleeve, and probably even inside a sleeve. There are issues like with DFCs and sleeve use and these are worse for a few reasons (namely that you would have to unsleeve them to use them properly). Also Mark has been clear that while whatever’s in Ikoria is a highly innovative design, “The mechanic is only in Ikoria. It’s not adding a new component to the game like planeswalker cards did” (x). I’d say clear card overlays qualify as adding a brand new component to the game, even though transparent cards obviously aren’t something that they would do very often. It would be more comparable to DFCs than to planeswalkers.

But let’s dream for a second. How could this work in Magic?

To answer that, let’s examine the anatomy of a planeswalker card for some ideas.

One through three don’t really matter here but check out numbers four and five. This image exemplifies how the planeswalker rules box is divided into three equally-sized segments. What does that look like to you?

How about the middle of a Gloom card?

So we start with essentially a planeswalker card frame, except we are putting rules text only in certain specific parts of the box, leaving the rest transparent. We’re also not making planeswalker cards here. Instead these are things that get attached to creatures. That means they’re gonna be some sort of enchantment or artifact subtype probably, though I could see using a parallel to Host/Augment in that the overlays here function like Augments and can only be attached to a specific kind of creature card. For now I’m going with what I think is the simplest execution though in reality you’d want to play around with the options I just mentioned and likely others.

Which gives us this rough up of the idea.

There are three things I think most important to hit on here that need more work or deserve more thought as to if that’s the best execution:

1. The enchantment purposefully doesn’t say “Enchanted Monster has haste.” The emphasis is on it directly modifying the text box of that creature. This would be defined in the way Parts work as an Enchantment subtype. I suppose you might make Part do the work of a Aura in this case, but since it targets the supertype Monster specifically, I figure it’s good to let an established game rule most players are aware of do some work in explaining how it works.

2. The use of a Monster supertype and the Part subtype. I’m not sure that either are necessary, but this gives a way to care about them mechanically and is the simplest execution to ensure Parts only ever get attached to Monsters since those Auras would specify what to attach them to (I included reminder text to that effect on the Monster on the bit that “Enchant Monster” on the Aura would cover up, but that’s redundant).

3. The enchantment as-is would cover up too much of the creature card. Ideally it would have its name, cost, and typeline shifted in some way so that you can still see the Monster’s info through that. I’d also make the bottom right of the enchantment card transparent so the Monster’s stats show through. Ultimately I’m not sure how well such a frame could be handled, but that would be the ideal.

Speaking of what’s transparent and what isn’t, the Monster would have full art. And in my dream world then all the enchantments overlaid on Monsters would have mostly transparent art boxes as well with the actual art covering up a part of the Monster that makes sense. That’s going to be tough to coordinate and especially tough to remain tonally resonant with the sort of thing black border Magic normally does, but I absolutely do think that would be the coolest execution of this idea.

Last few notes about the examples, Living Corpse with Swol Legs attached to it would have both haste and deathtouch. Imagine I had put haste on Swol Legs one box lower. If that had been the case then attaching Swol Legs to Living Corpse would cover up the deathtouch and thus it would only have haste. Like Big Brain here:

While I did this other card to highlight how part of the text would be covered, note this is a different potential execution of the mechanic, more similar to Host/Augment in this case.

The main thing here is that the parts are not also creatures (and again, I’m not sure how relevant both supertypes are (monster and part) but for now I’ve included them both and used them as reference for rules/reminder text)

The spot on the type line where creature types go is now also transparent. That’s sort of cute, but I’m concerned it might imply that the part of the type line that isn’t transparent is modified like the rest of the rules text, which is not the case. Just a potential different execution there

You still end up with spaces that you want to e transparent, like the bottom right of the Big Brain card so the original monster stats show through (and presumably you could have some parts that just modify that space instead). You want the name and mana cost and probably also the type line actually in different spots of the card so that original monster’s stuff shows through, save for the areas in the rules text box that are intended to be covered

Note you could use both Big Brain and Swol Legs on Living Corpse and the end result would be a 2/2 creature with a rules box that said:

Haste Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, draw a card.

This creates a whole new “text box space economy” akin to the board game Mystic Vale. Personally I find that really exciting though it does come with a host of development issues like the fact that there usually are not many enchantments in a set (Bestow might make a good return here if you can make Bestow Monster a thing and manage to fit it all in the rules box, which seems unlikely), and the card disparity that normally comes from plopping enchantments on a creature only to have it killed with a removal spell. Last of all, you really need to figure out how to make those spaces in the text box and determining what to play matter. It needs to lead to important and fun choices with times where the best option is to cover up a different ability.

Final hurdle to this is board complexity/difficulty reading the board. That thing’s got 4 overlays on it. Which one is giving which abilities? If I destroy that overlay then which ability shows through? Is the transparency actually transparent enough that I can read the text of the original monster through 4 other sheets of plastic?

Yeah, in the end this seems like a bit much for Magic. But man, it also seems cool as hell. Victor Frankenstein couldn’t do better.