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| Kev Walker, Glen Elendra Archmage |
Arnold K’s most recent edition of his excellent monster manual, the MONSTROME, laid out some thoughts on sprites as tiny non-magical winged people. Miniature people are an immediately adventure-ready concept. It’s fun to think about how they would interact with a space, meet their needs, make common objects out of tiny things, interact with animals, and so on. In giving his sprites an interesting combat niche, Arnold seems to dial in on recreating Attack on Titan but with the roles reversed and the PCs in the position of the lumbering giants. In general I like this framework, because fighting a smart little wasp is cool. However, I really don’t care for Attack on Titan, and the model here recreates it too closely for my taste (why do the sprites’ neck razors target specifically the back of the neck on a human and not, say, the throat or ankles?). This got me thinking about other versions of these creature types in fiction, the Gallivespians of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the Twk-men of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth: why I like them, and what seems gameable about them.
