Leonine Roar

Do your battles with minions ever sound or feel a bit too gamey? 

Do you cringe when your DM describes an exciting combat scene and its terrifying monsters, only to punctuate it with a gamey punch the face, finishing setting the scene with “And, oh, these are all minions.”

And back to board game-like non-immersive reality we go! 

No thanks.  Here’s a Leonine 12 primer on better ways to introduce our beloved minions without ever saying the word “minion” – yet still give our brave, treasure-seeking party enough context clues to suggest the all-important minion trademark: the Number One. 

Use these examples by creature type or theme for inspiration when describing your own minion monsters.

Leonine 12: Twelve Ways to Describe Minions Without Calling Them Minions

1. Aberration.  Their tendrils are badly lacerated and frayed, and you sense that their wild, bloodshot eyes might pop out of their mightily quivering, impossible forms at any moment.
2. Beast or Animal.  The creatures’ faces are pale and thinned out, and their legs and body look equally brittle and narrow, perhaps starving to death right before your very eyes.
3. Construct.  The golems’ uneven casings are riddled with rust-filled dents and smoking cracks and breaks, and they clang along loudly like barely functioning suits of plates and cogs.
4. Demon or Devil.  Their wicked eyes match their malevolent grin, yet their bodies seems frail – perhaps wearied, scarred and misshapen by the countless evil acts of their existence.
5. Elemental.  Fire seems to both tear apart and hold together the elementals, their joints and living fire loosely giving the otherwise vaporous creatures some semblance of form.
6. Humanoid.  The bandits laugh at you uneasily, their small bellies, empty-looking coin pouches, rusty daggers and other poorly kept gear and supplies betraying their bravado.
7. Humanoid, Large or Giant.  The giants are tall, yet seem disorganized, hungry or confused.  They also lack the girth of the other giants, despite nearly matching them in height. 
8. Insectoid.  Their mandibles are misshapen and their chitin is especially dry and cracked, making these insect-like creatures look somewhat fragile.
9. Ooze or Slime.  The slimes sloppily and slowly drag themselves over the ground towards you, the mere effort of doing so seeming to tear their already loose and liquid forms apart.
10. Plant-like.  Their brambles and moss-covered skin are brown and black with rot, and they shamble along awkwardly, clinging desperately to the final rays of warm sunlight.
11. Undead, Corporeal.  As the zombies stumble towards you, they lose pieces of their bodies as they go; elbows, forearms, femurs and more all snap off and thunk onto the ground.
12. Undead, Incorporeal.  The nightmare things stalk towards you, their shadowy forms jerking awkwardly in the air, seemingly about to explode back into the darkness at any moment.

Your Minions

How do you describe minions – without calling them out as such?  Or do you just go ahead and call them minions?  And for the love of all things Red Box, why?

Do you think the above flavor descriptions offer enough context clues to figure minions out?  Are they too short, too long or just right? 

What do like most and least about them?  How would you change any?  And which monster types or themes could we add to this list? 

I invite you to share your own specific minion flavor descriptions, too – I’m excited to see how my fellow DMs and players would like to describe minions and hear them described without saying the “m”-word outright.  Pick a favorite monster or monster type, and flex your narrative and creative description skills! 

Monster Builder Madness

And don’t forget, this week’s Adventure Tools: Monster Builder update means custom creating your own minion is now faster, easier and simply more awesome than ever!  Whether you just want to “minionize” a standard or elite monster, simply change monster levels, or want to custom craft your own with a mishmash of other creatures’ powers or some that are all your own, the Monster Builder now lets you do exactly just that!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Creative Writing, Design, Mechanics & Efficiencies, Storytelling & Roleplaying. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.