How I Made BIND's Monsters

BIND began as a D&D-reaction. “Mathematically, these rules stand some serious improvement”. After that, I only wanted some generic fantasy monsters to make an example game.

Unfortunately, art costs money, which I didn’t have. The first RPG I’d made lost me a lot of time wandering through cheap stock-art, with a licence stating the buyer can use the image (but of course, not own an actual image for €3.75). Every one showed a plethora of weird creatures some artist had made for an existing campaign, or some cobble-together creature. One collection had a couple of weird octopus-creatures, another a smooth-skinned giant humanoid with an orb for a head.

I decided to fit my world to them - to create their ecologies, their stories, and slot them into the world as creatures. The giant spider I named ‘chitincrawler’, because the shell is known as ‘chitin’. The octopus creature would have camouflage, so presumably the predator would watch people secretly. People would warn of hidden ‘spies’ in the woods, watching them, so the name ‘woodspy’ seemed logical enough.

After discovering the GNU Public Licence, all those images had to go, including the images for the monsters. Of course the creatures remained - developed into something new by this point.

And eventually, I found a little money for new art.