Piggybacking on a good post.

I am someone who constantly fixates on dungeon ecology questions like “what do they eat” and “where do they shit”. Joe’s solution – “they don’t, they just got here” is honestly really good, something I wish had occurred to me sooner.

And in a way, it sort of did. For a long time now I’ve had in my head a loosely-enforced principle that if you key a monster to a room, it should be because it’s always in that room. Otherwise, put it on a wandering monster table.1 It’s basically the same idea as Joe’s: If you run into a monster in a room, it’s either because it just got here, or it lives here.

This actually leads to some fairly interesting corollaries:

1) The Dungeon Exists To Keep It Here

This actually goes back to the old association of dungeons with prisons. The point of the room, or complex, or whatever it’s keyed to, is for that monster to be there. This might imply some system of food sources and/or latrines, but they don’t need to be localized to the dungeon or directly accessible to the monster. Like real prisons, the point might specifically be to make it dependent on its captors for its survival. This, incidentally, makes food-laden adventurers a whole lot more interesting.

2) Its Job is to Be Here

It’s guarding something, or it’s posted as a sentry, or a spy, or whatever. Maybe it’s here to feed the monster that’s imprisoned here. It serves some purpose to the dungeon which, again, may be provisioned for externally rather than part of the local environment. There are 4 goblins in this room. They are here to guard a treasure. Every week, 4 more goblins arrive with a supply of food and water and relieve the previous group. Being goblins, they are comfortable and in fact delighted to leave their waste all over. Moreover, they are desperate for any distraction from sitting in this stupid room.

And/or, my personal favourite…

3) It Defies Ecology

In Old D&D terminology, “monster” is a technical term designating “any character that isn’t a player, has stats, and might be found in a dungeon or wilderness.” Chimeras are monsters, but so are bandits. In the worlds I run, however, “monster” often has an additional, taxonomical meaning, designating a creature that does not need to eat, but eats for pleasure.

Historically, people believed in all kinds of critters that don’t quite live the way humans do. Mice, rats, and all kinds of other animal did not reproduce but spawned from the dirt at random. Some creatures existed primarily as a kind of moral lesson, and their needs and habits were subordinate to their didactic purposes.

Such a being doesn’t make a world less naturalistic if you live in a world where nature has a place for them, as indeed our ancestors did.

In brief, why is the chimera on top of the mountain? Because the mountain exists to house the chimera, and the chimera exists to test you. Why can it live here for centuries without a scrap to eat? Because it doesn’t need to eat. Why has it started flying into town and eating people’s herds? To teach them a lesson. And because goat is delicious.

  1. I actually now do a Secret Third Thing, but that’s for another post. ↩