Who Doesn't Love a Good Monster?

One of my favorite things when I was a teenager was the loose leaf pages of the AD&D 2E monster manuals. I loved how the best entries treated the monsters they covered with the seriousness of an 18th century naturalist, positing theories on how a goblin exists inside its corner of a wider ecosystem. And as these entries evolved through the 90s, they started to include entries for singular monsters. Tim the Werewolf rather than werewolves.

I fell in love with this evolution, so much so, that the very idea of multiple fantastical entities fled my imagination. When I would play games, read fiction, wrote my own, or created art, the very idea of types of monsters was anathema. That is probably why when I started working on my first book, this rent free idea manifested itself in this way:

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Names, there has always been power in them.
The giving. The taking. The renaming.
It traps the shapeless to a single form.
It binds it. Makes the unknowable known.
And so Dshef bid me bring forth my book.
Thus did Dshef give the nameless their names.
Each Horror he bound to a sole purpose.
All save the greatest, whom he bound with two.
And so I wrote. Day and night. Page by page.
The Book of the Five Hundred and One Names.

When I wrote that bit, I paused and started a spreadsheet of all 500 and 1 named Horrors, giving them brief descriptions. It came a lot easier than I expected. A sort of literal exercise in expelling demons with no intention of ever using the material. But then, after I finish the principal work on my book, I started casting about for my next project.

I landed on a magazine, Yggdrasil MGZ to be precise. This exercise has pulled me back into my love for tabletop games, particularly the Torchbearer RPG. That said, a quarterly magazine doesn’t scratch all my itches, so here we are, a substack centered on the monsters in my head.

The idea is that each week I am going to post about one of the Horrors from the Book of 500 and 1 Names. Each post will be a bit of mythology, maybe some fiction, once in a while an illustration, and always a stat block for Torchbearer like the one below (an example from Issue 2 of Yggdrasil MGZ). Maybe when I am done I will make something physical out of it, but for now, I hope you enjoy this little bit of fun.