The Characters Create BEMs
By Nelson McKeeby
Bug-Eyed Monsters began in Negentropy as things the characters might encounter, but they could not remain simple monsters for very long. The moment a player asked a practical question, the creature had to acquire another piece of biology. How did it find us? What did it eat when nobody was here? Why was it living beside this ruin instead of somewhere else? Could a ranger follow its tracks? Would the local people know when it bred? What happened to its body after it died? A creature that existed only to attack the party could answer none of those questions. A creature that belonged to the world had to answer all of them.
This became one of the quiet ways in which the players helped build Negentropy. I might begin an encounter with a body plan, a behavior, a habitat, and some idea of what made the animal dangerous. The characters supplied pressure. They approached the creature with their own knowledge, occupations, equipment, and habits of observation, and their questions forced the initial idea to become more complete. A hunter wanted tracks. A medic wanted tissue and wounds. A mechanic wanted to know what had damaged the equipment. A biologist wanted samples. A farmer cared about what the animal ate. Someone responsible for getting the team home wanted to know whether another one was likely to be waiting along the same route. None of those questions existed merely to add description. Each could change what the players did next.
A Monster Becomes a Question
One of the most useful developments came when characters stopped treating a dead BEM as the end of an encounter. A carcass was evidence. Tracks leading into the site were evidence. The place where it had waited, the food in its stomach, the condition of its teeth, the material caught in its claws, damage to surrounding vegetation, and the wounds it had produced all had potential value. Even an unsuccessful encounter could leave something behind that made the next one less mysterious.
This changed the purpose of a BEM. Combat could still happen, sometimes violently, but killing the creature was no longer the only useful outcome. Avoiding it might be better. Watching it from a distance could be better still. Following tracks without being detected might tell the team where it watered or nested. Talking to people who already lived with the animal could reveal seasonal behavior that no short Project observation would discover. The characters gradually turned an encounter from a tactical problem into an investigation of an organism.
The same process made local knowledge important. People living in the future already share their country with these creatures. A farmer may know which burrower appears after heavy rain because it damages irrigation banks. A herder may know which predator follows animals weakened by fire. A fishing community may recognize that one stretch of water becomes dangerous during a particular season. Such people may have no interest in Project catalog numbers, but they have accumulated information through repeated contact. Troubleshooters can compare that knowledge with their own observations and carry both forward.
That distinction became important to the way I wrote BEMs. The Project catalog provides a common language. It allows a creature encountered in one place to be compared with reports, tissue, photographs, and observations made elsewhere. Local knowledge provides the detail of living with it. The two kinds of information are strongest when they support one another. A Project number can tell a Troubleshooter that two distant reports concern the same organism. A shepherd can tell the Troubleshooter that the animal starts taking calves three weeks after the dry season begins. The catalog gains meaning from the country in which the creature actually lives.
The Table Names the World
Some BEMs were shaped by the players in an even more direct way: the names themselves came out of play. The Spock Criers are an early example. The unnamed creatures were built around a simple ruse. They could imitate a familiar voice and use a cry for help to draw a character toward an ambush. The immediate inspiration came from Star Trek, Season 3, Episode 22, “The Savage Curtain.” During the confrontation, an illusion of the Klingon Kahless calls, “Help me, Spock!” The line was memorable precisely because it turned a familiar voice into bait. Gene Roddenberry developed the episode with Arthur Heinemann and Arthur H. Singer late in the original series, when shrinking budgets increasingly limited the expansive adventures the program could stage. Kahless was played by stuntman and actor Robert Herron, a practical casting choice that avoided requiring both a separate actor and stunt performer for the role.
When I adapted the idea for Negentropy, the creatures themselves had no formal name. Their important feature was the trick: an ally seemed to be calling for help from somewhere nearby, and the characters had to decide whether the voice was real. Around the table they became the Spock Criers. The name was originally a reference to the particular television line that had suggested the encounter, not an attempt to describe their biology. It survived because everyone immediately knew what creature was being discussed. Once a name becomes useful at the table, it acquires a kind of inertia. Years later the Spock Criers developed into a much larger biological complex, with several forms adapted to different habitats and hunting methods, but the improvised name remained attached to the entire lineage.
The Mogs emerged from Campaign 82 in a different and more accidental way. That campaign introduced the Dwarrow, whom I had decided would speak Sumerian. This seemed manageable because one of the characters could speak the language and the party had recovered a piece of X-technology capable of translating through their networked radios. I supplied the players with a working Dwarrow vocabulary. The term intended for a creature that seized prey was a-dar. During play, however, the Communicator character used murug, meaning “the middle,” for a clawed creature the Dwarrow watched as an indicator of the health of their tunnels.
None of us caught the mistake. We were thirteen-year-olds attempting to use Sumerian during a roleplaying campaign, and mastery of the language was beyond what any of us could reasonably claim. The wrong word entered conversation, was repeated, shortened into the name we were using at the table, and became ordinary vocabulary. It was well into Campaign 83 before the error was discovered. By then we had spent roughly a year calling those creatures, and eventually the broader class built around them, Mogs. Correcting the vocabulary at that point would have removed a name that already carried a year of play history, so the mistake became canon.
These names show another way characters create BEMs. Neither began as a carefully designed taxonomic label. One preserved a television reference that everyone at the table understood; the other preserved a linguistic mistake that nobody noticed soon enough to undo. Later writing supplied anatomy, ecology, related species, and Project classifications, but those later structures grew around names created through use. This is one of the reasons I value the oddities that survive from early campaigns. A perfectly systematic name can describe a creature. An accidental name can preserve the history of how the players first met it.
Knowledge Becomes Play
This also fit the larger Negentropy idea that characters advance by learning. A Troubleshooter does not need to gain another level before becoming better at dealing with a BEM. The team becomes better because the characters know more than they knew during the previous encounter. They may learn how the creature senses movement, which ground it prefers, what sign appears before an attack, whether it can climb, what parts of its anatomy are vulnerable, or which apparently effective response only makes the situation worse. The character sheet may remain almost unchanged while the players' understanding of the world has improved substantially.
A second encounter can therefore be different without changing the creature. The first time a team crosses a ruin occupied by an unfamiliar predator, every unexplained sound competes for attention. The second time, they may recognize the tracks before entering the building. They may know to look above rather than ahead, to avoid a flooded floor, to watch for acid marks on concrete, or to distrust an apparently harmless animal whose presence attracts something larger. The BEM has not become weaker. The characters have acquired information that changes the encounter.
This is one reason I resist treating a BEM's intelligence as a tactical rating that tells the Game Master how cleverly it should fight. The useful question is what the species actually does. An animal may remember a productive hunting place, recognize a repeated patrol, learn the length of a dog's tether, or abandon an approach where it was injured before. Another organism may respond only to vibration or heat. Both can be dangerous, but their danger comes from different mechanisms. Once those mechanisms are established, the Game Master does not have to make the creature arbitrarily smarter to challenge experienced characters. The environment and the animal's normal behavior already provide the problem.
The players also expose weak creature design quickly. If a BEM is described as living in a place, they will eventually ask what it eats there. If it is enormous, they will ask how the habitat supports it. If it attacks from concealment, somebody will look for the field signs produced by repeated concealment. If it has a remarkable biological weapon, somebody will want to know how the organ works, how often it can be used, and what evidence remains after discharge. A good answer tends to generate further useful answers. A bad answer usually reveals that the creature was designed as an effect rather than an organism.
From Encounter to Canon
Over time, these questions accumulated. Details created to answer one group's investigation became useful when another group encountered the same creature. A track pattern became part of the entry. A feeding method explained why the animal appeared around one kind of terrain. A piece of local knowledge became a seasonal warning. A recovered specimen turned a guess about anatomy into a confirmed mechanism. The BEM catalog grew not simply because I kept inventing more creatures, but because play kept demanding that the existing creatures become more complete.
This is where the title of this article becomes literal enough for me. The characters do not create the animal by imagining it into existence. They create much of the record by forcing the world to answer their actions. A creature seen for ten seconds across a road may begin with only a few reliable facts. A creature tracked, avoided, wounded, dissected, discussed with local hunters, and encountered again acquires a history. The Game Master supplies the organism, but the campaign determines which parts of that organism have to become known.
The best BEM entries now try to preserve that history of practical questions. They describe body structure because body structure determines movement and feeding. They describe habitat because habitat determines where contact occurs. They describe reproduction when reproduction changes behavior or territory. They describe field signs because a competent character should have a chance to recognize danger before the attack. They describe ecological relationships because no animal exists in a vacuum. Where XNA is present, its classification explains a biological fact that matters to the organism instead of serving as decoration.
This approach has also changed what counts as a successful BEM encounter. Sometimes success is killing a predator that threatens a settlement. Sometimes it is learning that the predator was following another species and avoiding the entire feeding route. Sometimes it is collecting a specimen. Sometimes it is convincing local people that two apparently different creatures are the same animal at different stages of development. Sometimes it is discovering that the safest response is to leave the organism alone. The important result is that the characters have changed their relationship with the unknown.
That has been one of the most durable lessons of developing Negentropy through play. A monster can be invented in an afternoon. A creature that belongs to a world takes longer because people must be able to ask questions of it. Players are exceptionally good at finding those questions. Every time they ask one that matters, the BEM becomes a little less like an encounter I placed in front of them and a little more like an animal that was already living there before they arrived.