The blink dog and the displacer beast are two of the creatures I most remember falling in love with when I started playing D&D. Good-aligned extradimensional dogs ? Predatory phasing cats? An ancient enmity between them? Sign me up!
An interesting thing about blink dogs is that they’re sapient, meaning they’re not only intelligent but they have their own language. In AD&D, displacer beasts didn’t speak, but they gained that ability and an evil alignment in the 3e days, both of which they retain in CORE20. When I shared the ohoomwi, I mentioned that CORE20 is making a point of having all sapient creatures named according to what they call themselves, so that CORE20 names the blink dog as the wurfrur and the displacer beast as the vocoeur. But the naming of the vocoeur actually has an interesting side story to it.
Back in the early 2000s when Wizards of the Coast opened up D&D to third-party development by way of the Open Gaming License, that license called out elements of so-called “Product Identity” that were declared absolutely off-limits for third-party products. If you wanted to make material compatible with D&D using the Open Gaming License, you couldn’t use the name of the game or the titles of the core rulebooks, or the names of a bunch of planes, or a dozen specific monsters — including the displacer beast.
Thankfully, with CORE20 built around the Creative Commons version of the Dungeons & Dragons SRD rather than the OGL version, the limitation on using the displacer beast no longer holds. But what I and a lot of other people found hilarious about the displacer beast being in WotC’s list of “we own this and are protecting it so you can’t use it” monsters in the first place is that the displacer beast was stolen by Gary Gygax when he created it for the AD&D Monster Manual. As Gygax himself talked about openly, the creature’s appearance and abilities were lifted from a short story by science fiction author A.E. van Vogt, in which the creature’s name was Coeurl — with both those names giving the vocoeur their CORE20 identity.
(Click on the stat block header below to download the full stat block in PDF.)
