Hellhounds and other fantastic canines

In this post, I will direct my attention briefly to the numerous varieties of fantastic canines in fantasy gaming.

There are a bazillion varieties of magic dogs in fantasy gaming and world mythology. In D&D we have hellhounds, nessian warhounds, yeth hounds, shadow mastiffs, moon dogs, foo dogs, blink dogs, death dogs, winter wolves, cooshees, barghests, worgs, and in third party products we get hounds of Sir Du'Glouse, church grim, moddey dhoo, canideimos, maggot hounds, cerberi and Cerberus himself. World mythology has way more, like the Garm, Fenris, Skoll, Hati, Laelaps, Cerberus, Orthrus, hound of Hel, golden dog, black dog, she-wolf of Rome, Asena, Medeina, cadejo, kresnik, Cŵn Annwn, Cú Sídhe, church grim, Yamraj's hounds, etc. The British Isles alone have dozens of variations of the "black dog" myth.

All magic dogs in mythology essentially fall into one of three or four archetypes: hunter, guardian, portent and—rarest of all—parent. For example:

• the Norse Garm, Fenris, Skoll, and Hati (duplicates of the same figure) are hunters
• the Greek monster brothers Cerberus and Orthrus are guardians
• the black dogs of the British Isles are portents
• the She-Wolf of Rome, the Turkic Asena, and the Quillette's lupine ancestors are parents.

In some editions of D&D, the death dog is mentioned as a possible descendant of Cerberus from Greek myth. Could all magic dogs in fantasy gaming trace their ancestry back to a mythic canine like Fenris or Cerberus? (Cerberus is actually given statistics in the Tome of Horrors.)

Cerberus ("death-demon of the dark") himself is son of Typhon ("hurricane") and the she-dragon Echidna ("poisonous viper"), and grandson of Tartarus ("hell") and Gaia ("earth"). Cerberus is a massive hound with three heads, a mane of serpents, and the tail of a dragon. He has a brother named Orthrus or Orthus ("twilight" or "the straight"), another massive dog with two heads and the tail of a dragon. Greek monsters were freaky like that. By comparison, the Hounds of Yamraj were described as having four eyes.

D&D initially started off with hellhounds, but soon magic dogs in their many varieties lived across the planes. For example: the moon dogs and foo dogs live in the upper planes, the hellhounds and cerberi live in the lower planes (and sometimes the elemental plane of fire), blink dogs and yeth hounds live in the feywild, and winter wolves live with frost giants. In general, you can divide all D&D magic dogs into variations of the fiendish dog, the celestial dog, and the fey dog.

In future posts I should like to go over the D&D magic dogs in more detail and compare their mythological inspirations.