The difference between monsters in myth and folklore and monsters in gaming is that the latter are well-defined. Myth and folklore is vague and ambiguous about its monsters, their capabilities, even distinguishing them from each other. Game bestiaries, on the other hand, go to great lengths to explain monsters taken from myth and folklore in clearly defined terms often at odds with the source material or combines completely unrelated concepts.
The genies of gaming are actually a combination of Arabic folklore and medieval alchemy. Arabic genies were merely made of smokeless fire like humans were made of earth. Medieval alchemy invented the idea of elemental beings like sylphs and salamanders. D&D combined these to create the various genies and other elemental creatures.
D&D also makes arbitrary distinctions between elementals, fey, giants, demons, devils and so forth when myth and folklore just treated them as a great big mass. Pathfinder goes a step further and pigeonholes devils and demons and so on into different species based on which real world myth they've been very loosely inspired by and ends up creating a nonsensical "everything and the kitchen sink" cosmology.
D&D also forces every single monster into some kind of ecological role a la real animals in modern science when the original myth treated it as a weird result of natural magic, but I already wrote a post about that.
I'm discarding this for the most part because it's silly and OCD. I'll try to preserve a semblance of D&D's distinctions, but I will examine them critically and see if they are indeed necessary. Furthermore, I will do so in a holistic manner rather than making stuff up as I go along and slapping it on without accounting for stuff already written or trying to world build backwards by forcing new monsters into an existing straight-jacket. Monsters will generally be less restricted in their nature and habits, with any variations from any editions adopted under the same umbrella to keep adventurers on their toes.
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