Since nothing will ruin a good fantasy
more than a dully-imagined monster—ok, ok dully imagined anything,
but bear with me—we spent a good solid two hours messing around
with a few ways to free up their imagination.
Hour One: The Exquisite Corpse
I set the
classroom up talking about historical bestiaries, those great,
colorful catalogues of creatures strange that issued forth from the
intellectual fog-of-war of the medieval mind. Thumbing through a
slideshow of images from the Physiologus,
the Aberdeen Bestiary,
the Queen Mary Psalter,
and other works of the time we discussed how many of the most
fantastical creatures were composite monsters drawing from a
combination of 2-4 different animals.
Then we got down to the
hands-on exercise. I handed out pairs of index cards instructing them
to draw a front and rear half of any animal or monster they could
think of with an eye to having them mostly line up to about an inch
and half in the center (and labeling each half for reference). After
all had drawn 2-4, we collected up the cards randomly shuffling them
into front and rear decks. I then had the kids draw them one by one,
naming them and assigning characteristics and fell powers to each as
we went.
The resulting list was
fairly hilarious. We had the dreaded Pigama, a piranha-headed hog with
its razor sharp teeth and wallowing, nudging up to the snobby
snake-dog hybrid Snog and the poison-farting Snalf. Striking the
proverbial iron in its heated state, I had them write them up and
people their own budding worlds which has compounded since with a
flood of ever-stranger fauna.
All in all an enjoyable exercise that can
certainly be carried over into monster creation for a fantasy rpg
campaign.
Next up, a run-down in
the second hour of building clay monsters and fighting them out in
our classroom arean.
This is very cool. It could be a way to get player input on the world at the beginning of the campaign. They could draw favourites or things they'd be interested in seeing, with the GM then matching them up alone, extrapolating the world from the final natures and showing the pic if necessary the first time a given example is met.
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