OSR Discussion: Not Everything Needs Big, Sharp Teeth

I had the occasion to make and stat a monster last week. More specifically, a centipede-ized beholder for the upcoming centipede zine by Chuffed Chuffer, of the blog that must not be named in front of the squeamish.

I was giving it a physical description, and was about to write, 'with big sharp teeth,' when I stopped myself. Why did it have big sharp teeth? Why did it need to? Could I get a better effect with a more detailed description? Or with something less typical?

WHAT did I just say!

I settled on instead writing, 'a great gummy, toothless mouth.' I preferred the image. Instead of coming at you with big teeth, the standard predator fear, its lack of teeth implies another modus operandi. It stays back, speaking to you through a lisping maw, saliva gushing over its gums. If it were to attack you, you would not be sliced and torn, but crushed between moist, soft gums, suffocating you as your lungs fill with sickeningly hot fluid.

Disgusting? I hope so. I don't know what else you expect from an STC reader. But it got me thinking on another tangent.

If you take a moment to really, really think about creatures with big teeth, they're absolutely terrifying. It's a deeply embedded primal fear. Being stuck alone, in the dark with a pack of wolves silently stalking you, unable to see or hear them except for the snap of an odd twig, until they jump on you. If you're lucky, they clamp their mouths around your throat, tear it out with a strong neck motion, and your brain loses all sensation before they start to eat you. If not, they'll cripple you, pin you down and cut through the skin of your belly and eat your intestines, pulling them physically out like sausage links.

Again, that's terrifying. But do you anticipate that when your party is faced down by a pack of wolves in a game? Probably not. The visceral image and the terror is distant from most of us. Part of that is because, thankfully, most of us have no firsthand experience of being hunted and eaten. But it's also because the level of description in a standard monster in a combat goes no further than, 'and it has big sharp teeth.'

There's nothing visceral there. More importantly, it's done to death. It's an assumption. Why is this monster scary? Ehh, it has big sharp teeth. That works with folklore monsters because ancestral people lived in close proximity to creatures that could kill and eat them, and the threat was close to their minds. Not so today.

When that description, that fearful attribute becomes, first, banal, and second, an assumption, it loses all power. That can be circumvented by going into detail, as above. Instead of just 'big sharp teeth', they're needle-like, crushing chompers, or row on row. It can also be circumvented by changing the description to something less typical, something not already included in the listener's brain cache.

'Great gummy toothless mouth' is one option, though not an especially original or distinct thought. I've been working on an Elder Scrolls Bestiary as of late, and one of the weirder, iconic Morrowind monsters is the nix-hound. Imagine a locust, blown up to the size and body plan of a wolf. Then replace its head with the proboscis of a butterfly. It hunts in packs, and instead of tearing you apart with teeth, it mauls you to death and uses its proboscis to drink your moisture. That's a distinct, strange image.

Other go-to options far enough from sharp teeth to be affecting, but close enough to not be incomprehensible, are sucking lampreys, centipedes crawling up your nose and licking your brains, crocodiles clamping down on your body and entering a death roll, parasites being intentionally eaten then poking through your stomach line, and so on.

It only takes a few of the above, interspersed among more typical threats, to create a sense of body horror, fear or disgust.

If I've done anything of value here, it should be clear that this issue goes far beyond the subject of teeth or the lack thereof. It goes beyond making something horrific or scary. Another major example of this is with room keying and description. All Dead Generations' discussion of Descent into Avernus brings up a room dominated by an open sarcophagus filled with blood, in which cultists bathe, and one hides behind it, literally blood-soaked, when the party enters.

If you take a step back, it's a pretty evocative, horrible image. But it's paired with so much 'generic black-robed death cultists' and the relevant elements of the room are so under-emphasized that my immediate reaction isn't, 'Gods above, the horror!' but instead, 'Sounds about right.'

Another example from the same post, regarding Arneson's classic Temple of the Frog. The description here is on the minimal side, and largely predictable at that, in particular the giant stone frog statue on a pedestal.

Again, stepping back, a bunch of frog-worshiping cultists and their frog idols should be weird and evocative. And it certainly was when it came out in 1975. But today, the idea of a stone statue on a pedestal is pedestrian. I'm pretty certain you can short-circuit that reaction with fairly minimal changes. Say, maybe it's a mosaic made from small colored rocks on the floor instead. Maybe they're gems. Maybe it's a crude wooden effigy the cultists periodically burn in rituals. Maybe the statue appears to just be well-painted stone, but at a touch is slimy, and slowly breathes.

This post continues a line of thought that I pull from Fighting Goblins in a Creative Wasteland and Conceptual Density. The first because cliche descriptions take away player curiosity, as well as a real sense of danger and the unknown. In Gus L's words, "the wonder and potential terror that is implicit in a small horrible person/not-person thing trying to kill you with a rusty knife in a dark cave."

The second because these descriptions take up space, sometimes a lot of space, to tell you something you either already knew or could have made up with zero effort. If you have a frog-god shrine with a stone statue of a frog on a pedestal, it's going to feel less wondrous and terrible, and more tongue in cheek at best, or lazy at worst. Whenever any significant element of an encounter, location or character is exactly what any of your players would have made up on autopilot, you lose some sense of a complex world beyond your ken.

So, should we replace everything familiar in our games with gonzo and totally original parts? No, not in the least because that would be exhausting. Instead, a general principle. If you spend more than a sentence on any description, give it some little twist. Add an extra, unorthodox descriptor. Replace it with something adjacent, but less expected.

Not everything needs big, sharp teeth.