I am digging into a final pass through a bunch of new creatures, getting ready to add those creatures to the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package v1.1 update. While that’s happening, I thought I’d post a few choice creatures here, giving folks a playable preview of a few favorite monsters of mine, and offering a smattering of thoughts about what goes into a CORE20 monster, design-wise.
•
The giant owl has been a mainstay of campaigns since the AD&D days, where they were noted both for their ability to surprise prey 83 percent of the time, and for being intelligent creatures who spoke their own language. But that second part has always raised the question for me of: Why does a creature with their own language not get to use that language for the name others use to refer to them?
For me, the answer in a very broad sense is a) lazy writing, but also b) colonialism. Because the colonialist mindset lurking at the heart of D&D via its evolution from tabletop wargames works very much around the idea that the fantasy realm is human-centric, and that humans decide what place all other creatures have in “their” world. And though the names of classic D&D monsters are absolutely the least of colonialism’s evils, they’ve always nagged at me, so CORE20 has taken a shot at fixing them.
As with the eapachni (from the giant eagle) in the first version of the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package, the ohoomwi is understood to be named from their own language, as is true of all other sapient creatures. When coming up with the name (because I don’t speak Ohoomwi, unfortunately), I wanted something that not only had an owl-like echo to it but felt intrinsically non-European. At some point, I tripped across a reference to “hohomisiw” as meaning “owl” in one of the Cree languages, and from my childhood, I remember “ukpik” (which I learned as “ookpik”) as the Inuktitut word for the snowy owl, and “ohoomwi” fell out from that.
(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)
