Fiend Folio Flashback
Opening a copy of the original Fiend Folio brings back a visceral rush of curiosity, excitement, and over stimulation. The line work for many of these monsters is dense and textured in a way I still find almost uncomfortably tactile; I believe many of these pieces are by either Alan Hunter or Russ Nicholson. Assassin bug, caryatid column, disenchanter, giant hornet, kelpie, lava children, pěnanggalan, sandman, thoqqua, and yellow musk creeper draw my eye in much the same way they did when I was little.
I remember how sad the assassin bug made me. I wished they could lay their eggs in a willing host, not die, and that the host could be cared for so that the host didn't die either. Six years old, I fantasized about what being such a willing host might be like. Maybe the flies could take care of me, or maybe I would need someone else.
I wanted to spend time as a caryatid column, one among others, our bodies frozen in peaceful and still stone until called to life by some mission; ride (and snuzzle) a disenchanter through the woods or a giant hornet through the air; spend time with the kelpie as their underwater friend; play with the lava children; nourish a pěnanggalan; find out what dreams the sandman sends you off to; just see the majesty of the fast-moving, red hot thoqqua; and dwell just a little while in the haze of the yellow musk creeper's strange plant mind.
I wondered how slimy the slaadi or grell were, a child's fascination of the boundary between gross and pleasant. I loved how baroque the githyanki's outfits were and was disappointed that the githzerai's were so bland. How bristly were the forlarren's little hairs? And oh how squarely built were the algoid and fog giant! That exuded safety to me.
I didn't pick up on the genuinely gross subtext to many creatures being the result of "unnatural" or "perverse" breeding and unions, though I think there was a sense of being "wrong" myself that allowed me to vibe with terms like that. And it wasn't like I never thought of them as guardians to be overcome for treasure; I was disappointed when I saw that a creature's treasure was "nil." But the visceral imagery or the descriptions of what they did, often held my attention more than the game statistics alone.
So many of them seemed to relate to the world in a weird or alien way, and I wanted a chance to participate in that somehow. I suspect that there may be more than a little influence of Dot and the Kangaroo and some of its sequels in all this youthful wonder. The diversity and strangeness of all these monsters ends up joined to an ecological sensibility about even strange and ugly things having a place in the world that we can learn to better appreciate.
I come away from the Fiend Folio with a keen sense of how important wonder and exploration were to me as a child encountering Dungeons & Dragons. That needs to be central to the game for her. Alongside that, I need opportunities for characters to become part of alien worlds they couldn't usually participate in, and for those alien worlds to be able to meaningfully change them.
I picked up the Cairn 2e Player's Guide and Warden's Guide recently because, well, they floated up during meditation as texts to explore, but I can see more clearly why that is. Cairn's use of growth and scars in place of an experience points and level advancements suits this sort of play better than most other OSR systems. And there is a lot of sympathy between its dark fairy tale aesthetic and my little girl imagination's quasi-ecological wonderment.