Ecology of the minotaur: cults and herds

While many minotaurs are solitary monsters that endless haunt the halls of their accursed mazes or aimlessly rule over them like the beast in Beauty and the Beast or the ogre in Puss in Boots, others form social groups.

Cults of Baphomet

The traditional depiction of minotaur "society" has most commonly been the cult of Baphomet, who fantasy gaming made into the god of minotaurs. In traditional gaming lore, a minotaur or group of closely related minotaurs live in a maze. Since they are an all-male race of cannibals, they reproduce by abducting human females, raping and impregnating them, then eating the poor girls once they no longer serve a purpose. According to 5th edition, minotaurs were originally (and still are being) created by subjecting human cultists to a ritual that made them minotaurs and their descendants inherited this without needing to perform the ritual over every new birth.

As I said before, I do not want to treat the minotaurs as just another race of beastfolk and I feel that a convoluted ecology makes them less magical and drags them further from their mythological roots. So at least in my setting, the cults of Baphomet have to perform the rites whenever they wish to make a minotaur. Because of the profound physical and mental changes, adult initiates will demonstrate a weaker self-preservation instinct compared to those transformed as children or unborn. Although the ritual may hypothetically be performed on women, the orthodox cult seems to only recruit men.

Herds

Herds are a social structure introduced in the third party product Maze of the Minotaur: Masters & Minions, Horde Book 2. There minotaur herds are structured in a manner reminiscent of lion prides and to a lesser degree beehives. The social statuses or castes afford to minotaurs include bull lord (the leader of a herd), minotaur (which I label "brave" to distinguish it), minotrice (female minotaur), minotrice maze mage and tauron (underdeveloped minotaurs used for manual labor). Due to influence from Mazes & Minotaurs, in my setting the castes display various degrees of anthropomorphism and mutation.

Now you may have noticed a contradiction. Masters & Minions gave the minotaurs a naturalistic ecology (at least more so than their disturbing AD&D ecology) and I previously criticized naturalistic ecology as being unnecessary. Well, now I am being a hypocrite and including both cursed minotaurs and a naturalistic ecology in the same setting.

To be honest the herd ecology is not really natural: it is being artificially maintained above and beyond the standard curse. Normally the curse is never so consistently prevalent across generations as to create a self-sustaining race. Alternately, these herdfolk are bovine beastfolk that suffer the curse of the minotaur. Either way it results in the herd society as laid out in Masters & Minions. I would not sweat the details too much.

To be detailed...

• Tribes (Herdfolk)
• Minoans (Golden Minotaurs)

Ecology of the Phrenic Scourge

Of all the substitutes for the mind flayers in third-party products, my favorite has to be the Phrenic Scourge.

Nomenclature: aquane, brilkoun, durlans, mind eater, nyarl, ochthichthuruch, paretiophage, psycholus, starspawn of Cthulhu, thought ripper, the worm that walks,

Description: writhing masses of seafood with prodigious psychic powers and dark designs on the hero's love interest

Mythological and folkloric roots of hungry dead

Zombies

Zombies originate from Haitian voodoo. Evil sorcerers use magic to capture the souls of the dead, reanimate their corpses and use them as labor slaves. This was especially terrifying to the Haitians: at the time they were enslaved by the colonists and thus it made sense they especially feared being enslaved after death. Haitian folklore has attributed other supernatural powers to zombies, such as transforming into smoke to get around barriers.

A similar belief appeared in Chinese culture, where funeral directors were once believed to use magic to reanimated dead bodies to make them easier to transport to their homelands where they would receive last rites. The reanimated were called 僵尸 jiāngshī meaning “stiff corpse.”

D&D zombies and skeletons are more or less identical to the Haitian zombie.

Ghouls

Ghouls originate from Arabic folklore, where they are a type of genie that haunts graveyards and consumes corpses. They are said to have traits of donkeys, like pelts, tails, hooves, and large ears.

The wendigo from the folklore of the Algonquin peoples bears similarities to the ghoul due to their carnivorous nature, though the wendigo is sometimes claimed to be a human transformed or possessed by a wendigo as punishment for cannibalism.

Ghouls appeared in some of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and his followers, where they were attributed to kidnap human children and replace them with their own (similar to the changeling, a European fairy) and to transform humans into ghouls through some manner of black magic (similar to some stories of the wendigo).

D&D ghouls drawn some inspiration from Lovecraft's ghouls, but are mostly conflated with the "ghouls" from Night of the Living Dead.

Vampires

In 20th century fiction and beyond, both zombies and jiāngshī would be attributed ghoul- or vampire-like hunger for the flesh or vitality of the living. Meanwhile, ghouls would be conflated with zombies as a kind of flesh-eating undead creature. These modern monsters bear more resemblance to the vampires of folklore than to the zombies and ghouls of folklore.

The modern vampire retains the hungry nature of its predecessors, but has acquired overtones of power and sexual lust. This movement started with Dracula, was refined by Interview with the Vampire, and reached its nadir in the Twilight books. That being said, the folkloric vampire has made resurgence in counter-cultural fiction.

D&D vampires are taken straight out of Dracula.

Some lore and ideas concerning lycanthropes

Lycanthropes are an interesting part of D&D history. What follows are some ideas of mine for fleshing them out.

Ecology of the intellect devourer (aka mind eater)

In this post, I decided to expand on the intellect devourer. It is a standard D&D monster, but has surprisingly little detail attached to it. There are few variants, no consistent ecology, and not enough done with the premise.

Reimagining dwarves?

So I've seen a number of proposals for reimagining dwarves beyond the Tolkien-derived stereotype. For example, dwarves as "maggot men of the mountains" a la Norse mythology, or dwarves carved as adult men from living stone, or dwarves as a relative of trolls due to both being earthly elemental beings. Here are a few links to different proposals:

• http://gneech.com/talk/the-my-dwarves-are-different-trap/
• http://grognardia.blogspot.com/search/label/dwarves
• http://lonelygm.blogspot.com/2013/03/changing-gamers-assumptions-about.html
• http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Racism_in_Tolkien's_Works#Dwarves_as_Jews
• http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2014/01/27/ravenflight-part-1-my-halflings-elves-and-dwarves-are-different/
• https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-722953.html
• https://ogresvstrolls.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/dwarves-part-ii-maggot-men-of-the-mountains/
• https://www.farmcodegary.com/post/insectoid-dwarves/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/72m4bg/what_other_kinds_of_dwarves_are_there/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/5278kz/is_there_any_actual_difference_between_dwarves/
• https://dwarvenglory.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/maggots-of-the-earth/