Gryphons
A Design Diary
Gryphons is mostly inspired by something I read in London Under by Peter Ackroyd.
“Griffins were carved into the walls of Aldgate East, St. Paul’s, and other stations; the griffins were the monsters that protected gold mines and buried treasure, and thus suitable creatures to guard the Underground.”
This one-page monster starts with a description of carvings and statues of gryphons as markers for entrances into the underworld, sometimes indicating a path to treasure. If gryphons are real, and if they’re still around, no normal townsfolk has seen one. I find this version of the gryphon romantic. It’s also a random generator disguised as a little poem.
Statues and carvings mark entrances into the earth:
on tombs, tusks, tapestries, vessels,
manuscripts, and tattoos.
Living gryphons are legend,
said to guard mines, tunnels,
crypts, and treasure.
Rolling a d6 and a d4 turns the poem into the following equation.
You’ve found the image of a gryphon on a:
Tomb
Tusk
Tapestry
Vessel
Manuscript
Tattoo
Which indicates the path to a:
Mine
Tunnel
Crypt
Treasure
Gryphons is related to an ongoing project of mine, The Train Must Go Through, which had a short playtest and is still a rough draft. In The Train…, I’m trying to make monsters less defined, less of an entry in a bestiary. It creates a mysterious or investigative tone, makes players reconsider their metaknowledge, and gives them an opportunity to better catalog the creatures they come across.
Every gryphon is unique:
The head and wings of an eagle on the body of a lion.
The head of a horse with the beak and wings of a raven on the body of a dire wolf.
A simian face on the body of a giant ram with the wings of a vulture.
An antlered head of a hawk and the wings of a moth on the body of a panther.
The head of a basilisk and insect wings on the body of a giant boar.
The head of a badger and bat wings on the body of a stag.
It also plays with the idea of superstition and ignorance. The people of the setting often lump anything they don’t understand into simple categories. So all monsters are called demons, except for a few that get special consideration. Gryphons are one example. But even then, gryphons all look different and come in a variety of archetypes. Are they really all the same creature, or are the townsfolk painting with a broad brush again?
Gryphon Archetypes
The Griffin. A classic take, divine or royal power, guardian of treasures, a symbol of the courageous deeds of men.
The Dragon. A hoarder, devourer, destroyer.
The Sphynx. A guardian of more than just treasure, lover of puzzles and riddles, almost alien.
The Chimera. A fractured nature, a mutant, chaos and impossible dreams.
The Basilisk. A cursed being, radiating death or paralysis, danger in proximity alone.
The Unicorn. Grace, healing, and purity, drawn to sorrow, vanishes before the unworthy.
If players happen to run into a living gryphon, probably at the end of whatever tunnel they’ve followed, the quote by Sir John Mandeville acts in place of a stat block. It tells you its size, strength, and motivation.
“The griffin has a body that is larger than eight lions and larger and stronger than a hundred eagles, since he will carry to his nest a large horse with a man on top of it.”
Gryphons is also related to a concept I call collage games, in which collage plays a role at any stage of game design or in the finished game, whether in the design process, game mechanics, or illustrations.
The illustration is an analog collage that I scanned and edited. The poem is a collage of things about griffins that I read elsewhere. And if you roll on the four random tables, you end up with a collage of a creature.
Why did I choose the spelling I did? I don’t know, I guess I just think the ‘y’ and the ‘ph’ give it something extra. And by spelling the archetype ‘griffin’, it sets ‘gryphon’ apart from the strictest definition of a gr(y)iff(ph)i(o)n.
Download Gryphons in color, black and white, or printer-friendly.
Great post, thanks!