Body-snatching jungle aliens called the Kelledros roam the prehistoric, stone-punk of Planegea, a new setting for D&D 5th Edition by Atlas Games and designer Dave Somerville. Learn how identity and mystery shape the nature of horror in your D&D game.
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasgames/planegea
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Music by Audionautix
You wake up to alien wailing and something's
David Somerville:screaming in the jungle.
David Somerville:You get up from your tent and you run past the clan fire, looking
David Somerville:for the source of the noise.
David Somerville:And as you move through the jungle, you come to a clearing where, peeking
David Somerville:out from behind these trees, you see a roughly constructed ziggurat.
David Somerville:Crooked-limbed creatures, humanoids with fungus-white skin and baby blue
David Somerville:eyes, are crawling up it, dragging a bound saber toothed cat to the
David Somerville:top where one of their kind waits.
David Somerville:The cat is lifted onto an altar at the apex and held down while
David Somerville:the waiting creature screeches and wraps its arms around the
David Somerville:saber tooth in a ritual embrace.
David Somerville:Just at that moment, you feel a dart sink into your neck.
David Somerville:Three more of the creatures emerged from the forest around you.
David Somerville:As you try to fight off the toxin, that's trying to put you to sleep.
David Somerville:They grab you and drag you to the foot of the ziggurat.
David Somerville:The creature at the top of the pyramid stands, but now it's taller and
David Somerville:broader with shaggy white-yellow fur sprouting out of its wider shoulders
David Somerville:and it bares two long, sharp canine teeth from its newly cat-like mouth.
David Somerville:The Keledrosians have you.
David Somerville:Now you have to escape or lose yourself to the embrace.
Lucas:Let's play D&D
David Somerville:Yeah, let's go!
David Somerville:You can get out of there!
David Somerville:Roll a Strength saving throw!
Lucas:Ah, different podcasts.
Lucas:Um, jeez.
Lucas:Ooh.
Lucas:Okay.
Lucas:Hello, and welcome to Making a Monster.
Lucas:I got an email this summer from Atlas Games about a Kickstarter project,
Lucas:somewhere between Journey to the Center of the Earth and Horizon: Zero Dawn.
Lucas:This is Planegea.
David Somerville:I'm David Somerville and I created Planegea, the
David Somerville:stone-age setting for Fifth Edition.
Lucas:Is this your day job?
David Somerville:Man, from your lips to God's ears?
David Somerville:Uh, no, it would be great if it was my day job.
David Somerville:No, I am a designer creative director for my day job.
David Somerville:This is my very early in the morning job.
Lucas:When did tabletop role-playing games become a part of your life?
David Somerville:It was 2014.
David Somerville:It was just before Fifth Edition dropped.
David Somerville:I grew up very conservative, in a family that just assumed that like,
David Somerville:if you played D&D you'd be like ushering demons into the house.
David Somerville:So we didn't, because no one needs that stress and, uh, You know, I
David Somerville:kind of knew was out there, but was pretty sure it was going to destroy
David Somerville:my soul if I did anything with it.
Lucas:Well, jury's still out on that.
David Somerville:Yeah, that's true.
David Somerville:Well, you know, we'll find out, uh, wait, waiting for the final grade on that one.
David Somerville:But the, uh, but it's funny how many D&D-like things I did, it's almost like I
David Somerville:was like searching for D&D my whole life.
David Somerville:I have notebooks where I made basically a campaign setting and
David Somerville:didn't kind of know what to do with it.
David Somerville:Cause I didn't want to write a book about it.
David Somerville:I just wanted the world to exist from like middle school and was really interested
David Somerville:in like choose your own adventure and any kind of emergent narrative thing.
David Somerville:We had a game that we played where we like sketch little medieval mazes
David Somerville:that you went through and you had to find the key from over there and
David Somerville:bring it to the door over there.
David Somerville:And we had no idea that it was D&D, but it was, which didn't know it.
David Somerville:Formally though.
David Somerville:I grew up, I got a job in DC and I was hanging out with a nerdy crowd there.
David Somerville:And I was like, looked around at everyone else one day and was
David Somerville:like, we're all a bunch of nerds.
David Somerville:Has anyone here played Dungeons and dragons?
David Somerville:And none of us had, and I was like, we should probably, I
David Somerville:feel like we should do that.
David Somerville:Like, I feel like we need that badge as geeks.
David Somerville:So we got together, we played a couple sessions of fourth edition.
David Somerville:It was great.
David Somerville:I was hooked and then fifth edition came out and I was hooked even more.
Lucas:How did you go from " let's get that geek badge"
Lucas:to, "let's write a game"?
David Somerville:Yeah, well, it was from DM-ing really, I was,
David Somerville:running a game for two friends.
David Somerville:I had never really run a game before.
David Somerville:You know, I was a young father of young children and didn't have the
David Somerville:time or the people in my life to get together an in-person game.
David Somerville:So I had a couple of friends on Twitter and I was involved
David Somerville:in the board game space.
David Somerville:Then I, I designed a game that was kind of popular for a few years
David Somerville:called Vast the Crystal Caverns.
David Somerville:So I had a bunch of like gaming interactions on Twitter, but
David Somerville:totally over on the board game side.
David Somerville:And two of the people who I had met over there were down to play a, basically a
David Somerville:play by post D&D game in Twitter DMS.
David Somerville:So for like a year and a half, we played just a two-player campaign in that space.
David Somerville:And it didn't start as a world.
David Somerville:It started as a cottage in the rain.
David Somerville:And then as I was playing, I was like, well, I need the village nearby.
David Somerville:Well, I need like bandits nearby.
David Somerville:And it all grew out into this world.
David Somerville:That's not the world that I'm working on now, but that, that bug of like, oh man, I
David Somerville:love working on this, uh, hit pretty deep.
David Somerville:And then I stumbled across Keith Baker's Manifest Zone,
David Somerville:where he talks about Eberron.
Lucas:Yeah.
David Somerville:and I was outside of the hobby enough that I hadn't
David Somerville:heard of the Fantasy Setting Search.
David Somerville:I didn't know about Eberron or where it came from.
David Somerville:And so hearing about him responding to this call for a world.
David Somerville:I was like, oh man, what would that be like?
David Somerville:Like what would I do?
David Somerville:What if I had been like around them?
David Somerville:I mean, I wouldn't have been Eberron, Eberron's awesome.
David Somerville:but what would I have done?
David Somerville:And the stone-age setting, Planegea that I've been working on is the answer.
David Somerville:What really made it like, okay, I have to do this as I, I drafted up something.
David Somerville:You know, a one-page description in a map and I posted it on
David Somerville:Reddit and it completely blew up.
David Somerville:Everyone was like, where can I find out more about this?
David Somerville:Where are you sharing about this?
David Somerville:Like, I want to plan this in this world.
David Somerville:You have to start a subreddit.
David Somerville:You have to start discord.
David Somerville:I literally did not know what discord was.
David Somerville:So people, other people made subreddits and discords for me, I was like, and
David Somerville:they were like, come here, post here.
David Somerville:And I was like, if you would say so so I did and here we are!
David Somerville:Planegea is the Stone Age setting for Fifth Edition.
David Somerville:It's a stonepunk world where there is no writing, there are no wheels,
David Somerville:there's no advanced technology and metal literally doesn't exist.
David Somerville:So it is a world that is permanently locked into a Stone Age.
David Somerville:You have brilliant minds and immortal wizards and all of the
David Somerville:like savvy, cunning, awesome heroes that you have in the world of D&D.
David Somerville:In fact, you have everything that is D&D, but they're unable to escape the Stone Age
David Somerville:because, uh, there is something out there called the Hounds of the Blind Heaven.
David Somerville:And they have these, these taboos, which you dare not break.
David Somerville:You can't write.
David Somerville:You can't create the wheel.
David Somerville:You can't create coins.
David Somerville:There are these certain things that if you sort of like pass this very low
David Somerville:technological ceiling, Something that happens and what that is is a mystery.
David Somerville:But you, you cannot, you dare not break the Black Taboos.
David Somerville:And so you have this world that would progress, but cannot, and
David Somerville:is therefore having to find other ways to survive and develop.
David Somerville:So it's full of factions and threats.
David Somerville:The gods have not yet fully developed.
David Somerville:You have "proto-gods" where, you know, you don't have the "god of fire", you
David Somerville:have that bear over there on that hill who's lived there for so long that
David Somerville:now the people fear and revere him.
David Somerville:And because they've done that, he's gotten divine power.
David Somerville:And so the gods are hyper-local and hyperphysical and they're just starting
David Somerville:to turn into celestials and fiends.
David Somerville:So everything is like at the beginning of time.
David Somerville:The valley where mortals live is surrounded on all four sides by the
David Somerville:empires of giants who are stronger and bigger and more sophisticated than them.
David Somerville:So they're dealing in the shadows of these mightier fearsomer,and
David Somerville:hostile civilizations, that act both as the boundaries of their world,
David Somerville:but also protect them from the even scarier things that lie beyond.
David Somerville:And so it's just sort of this Petri dish of adventure all
David Somerville:set in this Stone Age world.
Lucas:Love it.
Lucas:I'm glad you're here.
Lucas:You have however, done a thing.
Lucas:There are a couple of things usually happens when people come on the show,.
Lucas:One, they mention the name of Lovecraft, and I have a protocol for that.
Lucas:You've done the other thing, which is.
Lucas:you said punk, you know, steampunk, solar punk, X thing, punk.
Lucas:I have an idea of what that means, but you said it.
Lucas:So now you have to tell me why is it stonepunk?
David Somerville:I will, I would love to tell you that.
David Somerville:First off, it's not, it's not right.
David Somerville:Like it is absolutely gamer jargon.
David Somerville:And it doesn't mean what it once meant.
David Somerville:Uh, I recently was super lucky enough to read Neuromancer for the first time.
David Somerville:And that book is brilliant and it took me a minute to get into it.
David Somerville:And then when I did, I was just in it And that's punk.
David Somerville:I mean, cyber punk was like, fight the man, be a punk.
David Somerville:Like it actually had that like punk, anti-authoritarian
David Somerville:aesthetic, anti commercialism, like rage against the machine.
David Somerville:And that was a real thing.
David Somerville:And both of those words were meaningful.
David Somerville:Cyber was meaningful and punk was meaningful and it meant the
David Somerville:mashing up of these two things.
David Somerville:I feel like in geek culture, punk has become a shorthand for this thing, but
David Somerville:a lot of it and sort of exaggerated.
David Somerville:So we're going to take whatever comes before punk and crank it to 11 and build
David Somerville:all of our assumptions around that.
David Somerville:So if you have pirate punk, it just means it's very pirates.
David Somerville:And if you have, you know, whatever steampunk, it's very steam and it means
David Somerville:that all the aesthetics are going to be exaggerated and intensified and It's it,
David Somerville:I think it implies like a less safe world.
David Somerville:Like I think whenever you have punk on there, there's sort of an
David Somerville:implication that that those extremes are going to cause a lot of tension.
David Somerville:So in that spirit it's stonepunk.
David Somerville:And I think that.
David Somerville:If I step back and ask myself, is it actually punk?
David Somerville:It's, it's not very early on, not very punk.
David Somerville:There is a rage against the machine kind of thing.
David Somerville:in like, uh, being against the giant oppressors.
David Somerville:I actually use the word tyrant a ton in the book, which I wasn't planning on, but
David Somerville:I keep on going like, you know, tear down this tyrant or don't let that tyrant and
David Somerville:it probably says more about me than about the setting, but I do think that there's
David Somerville:something in there about like throwing off oppression and sort of surviving by any
David Somerville:means necessary that that does feel kind of rebellious and punk, but it just mostly
David Somerville:means a lot of stone age, cool stuff.
Lucas:Okay.
Lucas:Yeah.
Lucas:Fair enough.
Lucas:you held your own feet to the fire on that one and I appreciate it.
David Somerville:I'm here to play.
Lucas:Well, let's talk about the kelledros.
Lucas:Who are these?
Lucas:What is this?
Lucas:What it do?
David Somerville:Yeah.
David Somerville:Good question.
David Somerville:So, uh, these are the Kelledrosians, or the kelledros.
David Somerville:The Kelledrosians are body snatching jungle aliens.
David Somerville:They live in the wild, completely deadly jungle that surrounds sort of
David Somerville:the heart of the world, in Planegea.
David Somerville:And they are spreading like fungus out into the world and they are
David Somerville:actively trying to steal the powers and beings and bodies of other
David Somerville:creatures to strengthen themselves.
David Somerville:They have a ritual called The Embrace.
David Somerville:And if the Kelledrosians get you, then they are able to suck out your life
David Somerville:force and add it to their own, in a very physical way and sort of become stronger.
David Somerville:So it's this sort of mixed, mutated species that is, you know, onekelledros
David Somerville:to another, one might look like a giant gorilla, one might look like a dragon.
David Somerville:One might look like exactly like a human depending on whose, lifeforce
David Somerville:they've been able to steal.
Lucas:So obviously there's a couple of things that spring to mind when we
Lucas:talk about body snatching jungle aliens.
Lucas:And I don't think anything is derivative in like the pejorative sense.
David Somerville:
:Everything is derivative.
David Somerville:
:Everything is a remix.
Lucas:Right.
Lucas:So can you point to specific things that were your influences for this creature?
Lucas:Or interestingly, can you point to things that definitely were not?
David Somerville:Sure.
David Somerville:Well, I've never seen invasion of the body snatchers, so I can tell you that that's
David Somerville:not one of the direct ones, so, okay.
David Somerville:Uh, the reason the kelledros exist is because in my first draft of this, I
David Somerville:was running out the jungle andI was like, oh, and the yuan ti are there!
David Somerville:The snake people from D&D and I was like, yeah, they're definitely
David Somerville:down there because Planegea is designed to say yes to all of D&D.
David Somerville:So everything that is in fifth edition should be in Planegea somewhere.
David Somerville:Although it may be in a different form.
David Somerville:So I was like, that's where they go, that's it.
David Somerville:Then I learned about the Open Gaming License and what is and isn't allowed
David Somerville:and yuan ti are not public domain.
David Somerville:You can't use them.
David Somerville:So I was like, all right.
David Somerville:So something, something like the yaun ti.
David Somerville:And here's what I knew about the yaun ti.
David Somerville:I knew that they were sneaky.
David Somerville:I knew that they were jungley.
David Somerville:I knew that they had temples and I knew that they had different shapes of their
David Somerville:bodies, like different versions of them.
David Somerville:There's one, that's more snaky and one that's more person-y.
David Somerville:And I did a thing kind of on purpose where I didn't read more about them.
David Somerville:I was like, I'm that's all.
David Somerville:I know.
David Somerville:That thing is kind of the thing that I want.
David Somerville:What can I make up?
David Somerville:And I didn't read more.
David Somerville:I don't want to step on their toes.
David Somerville:And so the Kela DROS were the answer to that.
David Somerville:So original inspiration is the idea as if your buddy had told you about the yaun
David Somerville:ti that's about how much I know or less.
David Somerville:So the, the broad idea of the yaun ti.
David Somerville:I always gotta credit Space Jam as a, as a inspiration here.
David Somerville:Those little shrimpy guys taking the power of, uh, the world's greatest basketball
David Somerville:star as is definitely the vibe here.
David Somerville:Like the yuan ti are not an impressive species.
David Somerville:They look like, you know, the classic gray aliens small and weak and
David Somerville:fragile, but they've figured out this way to suck the life force, the
David Somerville:physicality of another creature out.
David Somerville:And I don't know, like something about space damn is terrifying.
David Somerville:Like that idea of like being able to just like rip that away and use
David Somerville:it against a person is real scary.
David Somerville:So Space Jam, man.
David Somerville:Um, And then, uh, a third, I would say is Alien.
David Somerville:The original, it's one of my top five movies.
David Somerville:And I think later in the franchise, you see the xenomorphs.
David Somerville:For anyone who hasn't seen it, they're very scary aliens and
David Somerville:they basically infect you and then you hatch one of these aliens.
David Somerville:But I think in later films it becomes clear that whatever they
David Somerville:infect hatches a different kind of the same alien and there's that
David Somerville:diversity through the creature.
David Somerville:The parasitic element I think is from that and the idea of this
David Somerville:race that takes whatever it needs from those around it to survive and
David Somerville:be sort of as powerful as it can.
David Somerville:So those are three of the big ones.
Lucas:Great pulls.
Lucas:What are some of the relevant game statistics that every kelledrosian has?
David Somerville:It's a caste system.
David Somerville:And, uh, the sort of base kelledrosians are in the bottom.
David Somerville:And then you sort of have warriors and priests and arch priests, and
David Somerville:then like the horrible monster that happens when everything goes wrong.
David Somerville:you know, We build it intentionally from the bottom.
David Somerville:So it's, we started with the base kelledrosian which is not impressive.
David Somerville:It's a medium monstrosity.
David Somerville:It is like got a minus two strength and charisma plus one to
David Somerville:dex and zero to everything else.
David Somerville:It's very much that like goblin, kobold.
David Somerville:And really all it has going for it is it can do this embrace ritual
David Somerville:and they're like, come preloaded with a blow gun and a net.
David Somerville:And then what we did is we built from there.
David Somerville:Based on assumptions about what it embraces.
David Somerville:And we have different varieties.
David Somerville:So we have and this is all like, again, credit to Daniel Gable who
David Somerville:did the, the technical work on the monster design here and is just
David Somerville:a complete artist of his craft.
David Somerville:So created a few different approaches for, okay, well, let's assume
David Somerville:it embraced a big, scary beast.
David Somerville:It would look like this and you can kind of flavor that differently.
David Somerville:Let's assume it embrace a spell casting creature.
David Somerville:Here's what that looks like.
David Somerville:And Daniel came up with this thing that I absolutely love.
David Somerville:It's a feature called Embraced Weapons.
David Somerville:And it says the kelledrosian has one or more of the following
David Somerville:attack options provided it has embraced the appropriate creature.
David Somerville:And then it has bite, claws, slam, and spit.
David Somerville:And so you, as the DM can decide how you want this kelledrosian to behave.
David Somerville:Has it embraced one of those like spitting dinosaurs from Jurassic Park?
David Somerville:Alright, there it is.
David Somerville:You got, this guy is totally different than something that's
David Somerville:slashing you with claws or trying to sink its things into you.
David Somerville:And that, embraced magic, embraced weapons, that continues
David Somerville:through all of the varieties.
David Somerville:And sometimes it says one or more, sometimes it says three.
David Somerville:As the power scale levels up, they get access to more and more, and
David Somerville:more impressive, versions of those.
David Somerville:So by the time you're at the sort of the hybrid mystic priests, they
David Somerville:have, you know, elemental orb and storm grasp which is a pretty far
David Somerville:cry from, you know, bite and slam.
Lucas:One of the things that makes D&D and their approach to, antagonists
Lucas:narratively and monster specifically, is that they don't level up.
Lucas:Heroes level up.
Lucas:So you have to kind of create this family tree or this
Lucas:Pokemon evolution chain of, of
David Somerville:Yeah.
David Somerville:That's exactly what it is.
David Somerville:Pokemon evolution is a perfect way of describing this.
Lucas:It hits a couple of my other questions too.
Lucas:So let's take them as a group.
Lucas:Cause I assume there's never just one.
David Somerville:Yeah, if there's one by itself and something
David Somerville:has gone very wrong with their.
Lucas:Yeah, So let's take them as a group.
Lucas:When a Planegea player encounters this monster, what do you want them to feel?
David Somerville:Yeah, first.
David Somerville:I want them to feel nothing.
David Somerville:Because the first encounter they're going to have with them ideally would
David Somerville:be, there's a stat block for a kelledros called an Infiltrator, which has
David Somerville:specialized in looking like a person.
David Somerville:The only way to tell a kelledrosian is, is one, is their eyes always
David Somerville:remain this baby blue color.
David Somerville:So if you are someone who, has been around the setting for a while, and you
David Somerville:encounter someone with like bright blue eyes, you'll be like, oh, okay, hang on.
David Somerville:But you know, if I, your DM and just like, oh yeah, and there's there.
David Somerville:And then this person comes up to you and they have blue eyes and they say this, I
David Somerville:don't want you to think anything about it.
David Somerville:Except like, oh, that person's kind of charming and kind of interesting.
David Somerville:And and then when that person is like, Hey, I have a secret to tell you, like we
David Somerville:should take a walk and you're like, yeah.
David Somerville:Okay.
David Somerville:You seem cool.
David Somerville:It's very much intended to be sort of a, an ambush an ambush monster.
David Somerville:At its start the first time you meet them.
David Somerville:One of the things I've done in the book is scripted out quest hooks
David Somerville:at all four tiers of play for each threat, including kelledrosians.
David Somerville:And so in the book is sort of like hints for how you could approach
David Somerville:an entire kelledrosian campaign.
David Somerville:So certainly that surprise thing only happens once.
David Somerville:At the start, I think it's sort of like nothing, then
David Somerville:surprise, trick, trapped, angry.
David Somerville:And then I think as you deal with them more, and you sort of encounter this this
David Somerville:theft of power and this total disregard for the rights of other beings or the
David Somerville:identity of other beings, I think sort of this horror and repulsion, ideally.
David Somerville:I have art of the kelledrosians where blanking on the name, the monster from
David Somerville:Spirited Away that has the white mask?
Lucas:Oh, No-face!
David Somerville:No-face, yeah.
David Somerville:So I have art of that, where it's a kelledrosian face that's attached to
David Somerville:sort of this like much larger bestial, monstrous body with the blue eyes again.
David Somerville:And I think that the, the feeling that you should feel as you're dealing with
David Somerville:them and trying to solve the problem of the kelledros is just this, this
David Somerville:overwhelming sense of they're everywhere.
David Somerville:They can be anything and they have to be stopped.
Lucas:What do you think makes it effective?
David Somerville:It's that feeling of happening upon
David Somerville:something that is so hostile to you and so doesn't care about you.
David Somerville:I think that there's a deep sense of the kelledrosians that they.
David Somerville:And I think this is one of the ways in which Alien influences it, like
David Somerville:you just don't matter to them, right?
David Somerville:It is that cosmic core that we were talking about?
David Somerville:It feels like they just want what they want.
David Somerville:They have no regard for life or identity or anything.
David Somerville:And I think that the way to twist the knife is continually
David Somerville:having them succeed, frankly.
David Somerville:I think that there should be a feeling of, there are always more of them.
David Somerville:They're always taking on new forms.
David Somerville:This is not a threat with a single source that is going to be easy to stop.
David Somerville:It's like when you're trying to get rid of pests in your house.
David Somerville:And there's just like always another nest of them.
David Somerville:I think there's always another nest of kelledros and it's just like a
David Somerville:problem that isn't going to go away.
David Somerville:It's also not going to stay the same.
David Somerville:You know, we're living right now in COVID times and talking a lot
David Somerville:about like the virus mutating.
David Somerville:And I think that there's a bit of a feeling like that, right?
David Somerville:It's like this thing is going to keep changing and keep being a problem.
David Somerville:I think that's a very recent and very strong example of sort of the way that you
David Somerville:get this to feel ominous and omnipresent.
David Somerville:If you want that, right?
David Somerville:If you want to have an extended campaign with it.
David Somerville:If you just want a short, like one-time hit kelledros adventure, what you do is
David Somerville:you load up like a pyramid of these guys where they get scary or you fight the
David Somerville:little one and then the medium one, and then the boss one and then the crazy one.
David Somerville:And it's like, well, how many forms does this thing have?
David Somerville:I think that's the way to do it in a quick, like one shot, kind of a venture.
David Somerville:Because Planegea has a very pulpy setting, right?
David Somerville:It's meant to just be like, throw yourself off of the back
David Somerville:of the mammoth, like axe raised!
David Somerville:And so if you're just looking for a pulpy good time and you're not looking
David Somerville:for horror, just play that and have fun, like dealing with all of the
David Somerville:different, many forms of the thing and finding new creative ways to fight it.
Lucas:I have to break in here cause I didn't really explain it
Lucas:very well during the interview.
Lucas:But this bottom up gauntlet of challengers is a story structure
Lucas:that I first saw watching Bruce Lee's last and maybe most influential
Lucas:film Game of Death with my dad.
Lucas:It's completely opposite of the top down dungeon delve, more typical of D&D in the
Lucas:seventies and eighties, which probably has something to say about Western and Eastern
Lucas:attitudes toward power, I don't know.
Lucas:Game of Death showed Bruce Lee's character fighting his way up the floors of a
Lucas:pagoda, each one guarded by a master of a different martial arts style.
Lucas:The last of these was NBA superstar, Kareem Abdul Jabbar who at seven
Lucas:foot two made an other worldly contrast to Lee's five foot seven.
Lucas:If you watch this movie more carefully than I did as a kid,
Lucas:you can see Bruce Lee expressing his philosophy through his fights.
Lucas:And maybe where I got the idea for Making a Monster in the first place.
Lucas:The martial art Bruce Lee invented, Jeet Kune Do, rejected the rigid
Lucas:traditional styles of martial.
Lucas:In favor of a chaotic flexible style of know styles drawn from a wide variety of
Lucas:athletic disciplines, including street fighting in game of death, you can watch
Lucas:Lee read his opponents habits and then adapt countering slow hits with quicker
Lucas:ones are closing inside and opponents superior reach professional players at
Lucas:the top echelon of video game tournaments, like Tekken and Street Fighter,
Lucas:call this adaptation "the download."
Lucas:Which shows you just how extensive Bruce Lee's cultural influence actually is.
Lucas:So David's kellodrosians create a deeply layered, but truly terrifying counterpoint
Lucas:to D&D's established meta-narrative where only the heroes progress through
Lucas:experience, but the monsters are limited to unchanging stat blocks.
Lucas:What you've done with the kelledrosians is you set up something really scary,
Lucas:which is they are learning from you.
David Somerville:Yes.
David Somerville:And if they don't have what they need to beat you they're going to go out
David Somerville:and get it and then come back stronger.
Lucas:We could do miles of work with this.
Lucas:Uh, I think at some point we're going to spiral away from what it actually is.
Lucas:So before we do that you mentioned a couple of these already.
Lucas:What issues or questions does encountering a kelledrosian ask
Lucas:your players to grapple with?
David Somerville:I think there are a few, I think one is identity, the
David Somerville:sense of body snatching and anyone could be one is a strong theme
David Somerville:and paranoid fiction of all kinds.
David Somerville:I think imperialism is one.
David Somerville:I the formal name of the threat in the setting is Kelledros Ascendant and
David Somerville:they consider themselves an empire and they are described as an empire and
David Somerville:see themselves as taking whatever suits them and spreading through the world.
David Somerville:Right.
David Somerville:So there's a strong feeling of, I like that.
David Somerville:It's mine now.
David Somerville:If you wanted to explore imperialists themes, they are ripe with those.
David Somerville:Also similarly I think ableism is in there.
David Somerville:I think that the idea of the perfect body is weirdly mirrored here.
David Somerville:Kelledrosians define themselves by their bodies and start in a place
David Somerville:of loathing their natural form.
David Somerville:The way they were born is the lowest level of their caste system.
David Somerville:And it's all about how can I make myself more strong, beautiful, perfect,
David Somerville:powerful, whatever I see myself.
David Somerville:So that idea of like the body being the most important thing is in there.
David Somerville:And then I think a final thing is jealousy.
David Somerville:I think, or covetousness like kelledrosians are a race or species that
David Somerville:inherently covets what other people have and are, and they stop at nothing to take
David Somerville:it and don't care what gets in their way.
Lucas:Okay.
Lucas:That's meaty.
Lucas:I mean, that's a lot.
David Somerville:Yeah, and I don't think you need any of those
David Somerville:things to enjoy playing with them.
David Somerville:Right.
David Somerville:They can just be like blue eyed monsters, and that's great.
Lucas:I do want to give you a chance, cause I know there's going
Lucas:to be someone in my audience.
Lucas:Who's going to push back on this.
Lucas:The idea that a race is predisposed to something, especially a
Lucas:personality trait like covetousness.
Lucas:That's gonna ring a few bells.
Lucas:do you want to respond to that?
David Somerville:I hear that.
David Somerville:No, that's a good point.
David Somerville:First I want to be careful with the word race here.
David Somerville:I think I've used it accidentally a few times and that's just, I'm
David Somerville:working to retrain my brain from the linguistics of D&D to the
David Somerville:lingo of linguistics of society.
David Somerville:So it's important for me to say, they are not a race, right?
David Somerville:They're a species, they're a creature type.
David Somerville:And I think there is a really great question that the RPG
David Somerville:world is having right now.
David Somerville:What is a monster?
David Somerville:What is a person and how do the, what we've believed so long about one
David Somerville:overlap to the other or vice versa?
David Somerville:Here's what I'll say about the theme of jealousy.
David Somerville:I think that the theme of jealousy is runs throughout their archetype
David Somerville:and the abilities that they have.
David Somerville:Right.
David Somerville:Taking what someone else has, because you want it for yourself.
David Somerville:is an archetypically covetous story, but I have drafted a kelledros player race.
David Somerville:And haven'tplay tested it yet, but I fully anticipate, I mean, when
David Somerville:I dropped this, the first thing someone said was "I want to be one!"
David Somerville:And I think that there are a lot of really interesting stories to tell about
David Somerville:about groups of kelledros who are not this, who walk away from this principle
David Somerville:or individuals who, who are not that.
David Somerville:It's fun and interesting when you're doing world design to create archetypes that are
David Somerville:sort of like, here's the big paint brush.
David Somerville:And you know, if you watch Bob Ross paint, he always starts
David Somerville:with that big paint brush.
David Somerville:Right.
David Somerville:But Bob Ross, isn't done when it's got a blue sky, he's adding in those
David Somerville:happy little trees and he's like filling in all of those details.
David Somerville:So the big brush is like scary jungle body snatching aliens.
David Somerville:And then the stories we tell with that, by definition in contrast
David Somerville:to that backdrop make the picture.
David Somerville:And I think that while it's really useful, in my opinion, for DMS to have
David Somerville:like a starting place for monsters.
David Somerville:And I think that.
David Somerville:Some DMS will only ever be like, yeah, these are scary monsters.
David Somerville:And they're just like bad.
David Somerville:And there you go.
David Somerville:I think if an, if a DM or a table wants to explore more nuanced story, there
David Somerville:are a lot of them because I don't think there's anything inherently in the
David Somerville:species that is like, and they're evil and they just take whatever they want.
David Somerville:I think I think there are a lot more interesting versions
David Somerville:of those stories to be told.
Lucas:I do want to take this one step further, from this
Lucas:grab bag of issues that a body snatching jungle alien can give us.
Lucas:Is there any that you feel are useful toward navigating
Lucas:the world that we live in now?
David Somerville:I do.
David Somerville:I think that It will be different things depending on what
David Somerville:you're trying to bring to it.
David Somerville:One thing that I think a lot about the Kelledrosians is as they're
David Somerville:written, the mainstream of their culture is entirely inward facing.
David Somerville:They are out for themselves as a people, again, not talking about every single
David Somerville:member of the species, but the force that represents a threat in the game,
David Somerville:which may not even be the majority of the kelledrosians, we don't know.
David Somerville:It could just, just be a sect that's threatening, and maybe most of the
David Somerville:kelledrosians live in peace and in the jungle or are enacting totally different
David Somerville:stories, but the threatening part of them are spreading out into the world
David Somerville:and they don't care about other species.
David Somerville:They only care about themselves and they are convinced that they're
David Somerville:right and have the right that they're to do what they're doing.
David Somerville:And everyone who opposes them is just raw material to be consumed.
David Somerville:And I think there is a total absence of emphasis.
David Somerville:A complete lack of seeing other sentient beings as worthy of
David Somerville:dignity and understanding.
David Somerville:And I think what I take away when I think about the kelledrosians is how,
David Somerville:you know, when we see others as stepping stones to make ourselves the way that
David Somerville:we want to become in some ways, like there is a danger that we turn into
David Somerville:monsters that reflect our own egos and the echo chamber in which we live.
David Somerville:So Planegea was inspired by this question of what does D&D
David Somerville:look like if it's not medieval?
David Somerville:Planegea as a world and the kelledrosians as monsters come from that desire for
David Somerville:like a big, pulpy, primal adventure.
David Somerville:Right.
David Somerville:It's just like, they're scary and they're out there and it's a jungle and
David Somerville:oh no, there's a zigguratt and they're ripping your body out of your body!
David Somerville:And I think that that's great!
David Somerville:I think that that's great for those kinds of stories.
David Somerville:And I think at the same time, the hobby is evolving.
David Somerville:The stories that we're telling are evolving, they're getting smarter,
David Somerville:they're getting better and more nuanced.
David Somerville:And so I think that what I am hoping to create with these monsters and
David Somerville:with everything else in this setting is a world that invites you into
David Somerville:big meaty, raw edged, fire -burned adventure, and then adds on layers
David Somerville:of, but what if, and, but what else?
David Somerville:And, but why?
David Somerville:And I think that a race that in so many ways is obsessed with pursuing
David Somerville:its most perfect form at all costs but maybe not all of them do and maybe
David Somerville:there's a much larger story that's buried just out of sight, hopefully
David Somerville:those stories can be told I'm, I'm excited to explore them in my end games.
Lucas:Thanks for listening to Making a Monster.
Lucas:Planegea is live on Kickstarter until November 17th and it is smashing its
Lucas:way through stretch goals after becoming fully funded in only 30 minutes.
Lucas:It's a fully produced campaign setting, including the core source book, the GM
Lucas:screen, adventures like In the Lair of the Night Thing and a stone-age soundtrack.
Lucas:It's a long way from the middle school spiral notebook, where it began and
Lucas:David's work on the kelledrosians is just the tip of the ice age.
David Somerville:So the best way to find out more is to go to
David Somerville:planegea.com, it's P L A N E G E A.com.
David Somerville:That'll kick you over to the Atlas Games website.
David Somerville:You can also just go there.
David Somerville:And that has links to our setting, preview our Discord, Twitter the
David Somerville:upcoming Kickstarter campaigns.
David Somerville:Alternately.
David Somerville:I'm also Planegea on Twitter.
David Somerville:And, uh, yeah, I'm easy to find if you Google "Planegea" you'll find me.
Lucas:If you want to go deeper with Making a Monster, I have some free TTRPG
Lucas:extras from past guests to level up your games, including stat blocks for
Lucas:monsters on the show and discount codes for top selling DMS Guild products.
Lucas:Just go to scintilla.studio/monster that's S C I N T I L L a.studio/.
Lucas:Monster and click on.
Lucas:Yes, I want those there.
Lucas:You'll also find a transcript of this episode and links to everywhere.
Lucas:You can find Planegea on the web.
Lucas:If you're willing to trust me with your email address, you'll also be the first to
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Lucas:Spire of Secrets guys?
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