Thread #97625513
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It's late 1800s Europe. What are good monsters for a hunter to fight besides vampires, dhampirs, nosferatu, werewolves, invisible men, headless horsemen, Doctor Jekylls and Mr. Hydes, fishguys, evil dolls, Frankenstein's Monsters, Kings in Yellow, swampmen, opera phantoms, spring-heeled jacks, sorcerers, slashers, Dorian Grays, mad scientists, and men in the iron mask? And what's a better name for the generic version of whatever Dorian Gray is?
+Showing all 51 replies.
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>>97625513
How the fuck did you forget ghosts? They're a thing in other periods but the late 19th is practically the peak of seances and the like.
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>>97625513
Portrait liches?
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Witches are #1
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>>97625513
Depends what you're going for. If you're in the 19th century, the most obvious tropes are:
Gothic horror
Lost world
Steampunk

So you could just as easily be doing dinosaurs and cavemen and saber tooth lions and lizard people.

Or robots and fascist police and pollution-mutants.

Or really whatever the flying fuck you want. Goblins and dragons invade. Do your thing.
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>>97625529
I wanted to avoid intangible things.
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>>97625562
Not bad.
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>>97625513
Hellhounds, if you have a monster hunter in the East Anglia region of England you can have him be on a quest to hunt down Black Shuck. Theres a ton of black hellhound esque dogs in the British Isles now that I think about it.

Some of the other black dogs are Gytrash, Padfoot, Church Grim, Black Tyke and Moddey Dhoo
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>>97625513
Mummies, mothmen and tail-dragging lizards from the hollow earth
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>>97625513
Shadow Hearts might be a good reference to use since it was set right around before WWI.
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>>97625651
Tangible ghosts then.
They weren't as strictly categorized into intangibility back then.
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>>97625513
anarchists, communists, gypsies
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>>97625513
>Dorian Grays
I mean in practice the guy was essentially something like an accidental Lich, one that had a bad interaction with his phylactery. I don't think that's a fitting term for it though. I'd be more accurate to say the guy had some deal with the Devil, and the manifestation of that deal can vary wildly.

Also, mummies, absolutely mummies shipped to Europe with their fucking egyptian curses.
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>>97625513
So many classics, how did you miss Mummy?

Golem

Banshee, they're not intangible

Rusalka and leshy, Slavic nature spirits

Nachzehrer and other revenants

Ghoul, ghast, wight, all intelligent

Alp, look that one up, it doesn't mean a mountain range

Homonculi, tiny little perfect humanoids

Doppelgänger

Time-traveller or time-displaced villain or a regular person who only causes havoc because confused.

Legendary hero who either causes trouble by being heroic in modern era or isn't as heroic as legends claim

Time-displaced, alternate-reality beast, maybe just hungry or looking for a home or nest

Possessed person
-spirit from a spiritualist seance
-cursed item from Asia, New World, Africa

Imp, demon, devil

Tulpa, a physical entity thought into existence, meant to be created by a skilled lama but this time it's a layman who can't control or reabsorb it

Hound of the Baskervilles

Nuckelavee, like a skinless horse with a skinless rider only it's all one monster

Kelpie and other related water creatures

Artefacts imported by museum or collector could come to life (I only thought of Night in the Museum while writing the first one)
- amixsak, a walrus not given water when killed, its skin is left on the ice without being cut up, the animate skin attacks and sinks boats
-stikini, an actual live owl the bird collector doesn't know is a shapeshifted woman, yes it is werewolf like
-chichipischekwan, syllables are chi-chi-pi-sche-kwan I think, a man eating rolling head that arises from the grave of a murder victim

Zombie, the kind controlled by a priest, not the humans got a virus kind

Something Hellenic like a chimera or sphinx, or old-fashioned like a cockatrice or basilisk

Serpent or wyrm aka dragon, only the needle firing French or well-dwelling Lambeth worm kind

Giant spiders, classic

>Dorian Gray
The Reflected
name because metaphorically they seem nice but are bad, less metaphorically damage they would suffer is reflected in the object's state
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>>97626126
I will now play your game
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revolvers
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>>97625513
Beasts of Gevaudan

>>97626100
A "tangible ghost" is just a revenant
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The tortured spirit of Edgar Allan Poe who seeks to recreate in life some of the machinations or the despairing conditions about which he wrote.

Torturing people in the pit, hypnotising them at the point of death or maybe taking inspiration from 80s horror and seeing what the other side is like, taking the form of a raven that foretells only doom, murdering people in seemingly impossible ways, burying people alive, living in a house that seems alive

Elves or faeries from the Unseely Court

Gods taking a trip to Middle Earth
-the Wild Hunt
-competing for worshippers or trying to re-establish their worship
-one last hoorah before heading off to retirement or greener pastures

Krampus, Santa Claus

A flood of shoemaker or other skilled elves and brownies emigrating out of their traditional homelands and putting humans out of business

Goblins and trolls, good old fashioned pre-Tolkien goblins and trolls
-have them take over a town at Christmastime because they want presents, not because they got fed after midnight

The Green Man, trying to put an end to industrialism

A hill figure like the Uffington White Horse or the Cerne Abbas Giant animating, hopefully the giant doesn't want a wife
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>>97625513

Capitalists.

More seriously, as in >>97626292 make the colonies fight back, at least if you go in the tragic monster route.
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Use more scifi of the times.

Wells in particular, but even something like the coming race is good for
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>>97625513
Selenite invaders from Earth's Moon.
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Also the word robot wasnt invented until 1920 but you can still have Mechanical Men and Automatons
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Graverobbers. (Ghouls)
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>>97626513
>A "tangible ghost" is just a revenant
No, I mean one that can still teleport and vanish and do all sorts of ghostly things, but it can grab you can you can grab it and learn about Christmas together.
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>>97625513
mesmerists
voodoo zombies and witch doctors
all manner of devils and devil worshippers
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>>97625513
>late 1800s
The cult of the "New Motive Power" would be a good baddie for that era. They were basically a Victorian version of the Adeptus Mechanicus who claimed to have received the designs for a mechanical god from the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. It was actually constructed and various accounts of it supernatural qualities are attested, but ultimately it was destroyed during a schism within the movement.
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>>97625513
Vampires and nosferatus are the same thing
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>>97625513
Angloids, Germanic golems and southern demons.
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>>97625513
Djinns from an imported antique lamp. If you want to import exotic monsters and spirits, you can also look through folk tales in India, China, and Indonesia. Japan has some neat stuff but it wasn’t really colonised so the theme is much weaker. Bigfoot and other modern cryptids are often as old as that or older, too, but you have to import them.

Living haunted houses.

>>97626292
>Legendary hero who either causes trouble by being heroic in modern era or isn't as heroic as legends claim
In England, there is King Arthur, in Germany, there is Barbarossa; look up ‘king under the mountain’ for a long list of fairy tales. Bonus points for him being a herald of the darkest period in history the country will ever face.
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>>97625513
Socialists.
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>>97625624
Gothic Fiction is Medieval
Why don't people who talk about gothic fiction read it?
90% of the original stories written in the gothic age of golden literature, 1760 to 1820 were set in the middle ages.
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>>97626126
Weren't gypsies Dracula's minions in Stoker's Dracula or am I misremembering?
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>>97626597
I am so fucking tired of you /pol/fags making everything about modern politics, goddamn.
>b-b-but I hate /pol/
You are perpetually obsessed with politics and shove your culture war where it doesn't belong. You ARE /pol/, deal with it.
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>>97628108
Yes.
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>>97625513
strange crossbreeds between the native monsters and foreign monsters created by mad scientists
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>>97627966
>Gothic Fiction is Medieval
When your needle gets unstuck from you'll realise that not only was that not true in the golden age you keep on going on about but it's moved on in the last 200 years.

If 90% of it is set in the medieval, and I'm not conceding that it is because I really don't believe it, that does nothing to change the fact that a curated list of the top 100 stories and novels from the golden ago would have a spread close to 50 to 60% Early Modern to nearly-contemporary with the date of composition, 30 to 40% medieval and 10 to 20% then-contemporary. Even if the majority were set in the medieval, the majority of the good stuff was set post-medieval and why would we focus on the bad ones when it's the good ones that we enjoy and want to emulate. Radcliffe, whom people did want to emulate, wrote six novels, one was medieval. Now you probably know who she was but for everyone else reading this, she was one of the most popular gothic writers of her day. She was acclaimed then and is today by critics and fans of the genre. She didn't concentrate on the medieval.

>Why don't people who talk about gothic fiction read it?
They do. A lot of people have read Frankenstein. It's gothic. It's not medieval. Published 1819 so it's in that golden age. You fixate on limited and wrongly identified aspects of the genre.

>gothic age of golden literature
I also let that go by uncommented but it was just too amusing to read.

>1760 to 1820
There can be no golden age of gothic fiction in 1760 when the first gothic story dates from 1764. You've even got a pic featuring the first one.
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>>97628532
*almost let that go
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>>97628532
>When your needle gets unstuck from you'll realise that not only was that not true in the golden age you keep on going on about but it's moved on in the last 200 years.
When you actually start reading Gothic Literature instead of of browsing wikipedia articles you'll understand how wrong you are.
>If 90% of it is set in the medieval, and I'm not conceding that it is because I really don't believe it, that does nothing to change the fact that a curated list of the top 100 stories and novels from the golden ago would have a spread close to 50 to 60% Early Modern to nearly-contemporary with the date of composition, 30 to 40% medieval and 10 to 20% then-contemporary. Even if the majority were set in the medieval, the majority of the good stuff was set post-medieval and why would we focus on the bad ones when it's the good ones that we enjoy and want to emulate. Radcliffe, whom people did want to emulate, wrote six novels, one was medieval. Now you probably know who she was but for everyone else reading this, she was one of the most popular gothic writers of her day. She was acclaimed then and is today by critics and fans of the genre. She didn't concentrate on the medieval.
By Medieval I refer to what the people of the time referred to as the "Gothic ages" meaning from the fall of rome to the early to mid 1600s.
Spenser, despite not being medieval, was referred to as a "Gothic Poet", for example. As was Herrick.
And you saying how the "majority of the good stuff" is post medieval shows your ignorance.
>Frankenstein
Frankenstein is not a work of gothic literature. It has gothic elements but is not purely gothic.
>I also let that go by uncommented but it was just too amusing to read.
Autistic nerd pointing out typos.
>There can be no golden age of gothic fiction in 1760 when the first gothic story dates from 1764.
Gothic literature had its antecedents with works like Thomas Leland's Longsword, published pre otranto, ESL.
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>>97628532
>>97628552
So when we actually look at the Gothic Golden Age's core works we can see that they are nearly all set in the Gothic Ages.
And before our ESL starts sperging out Gothic, in the time of the 18th and early 19th century, meant pre enlightenment, medieval and renaissance. Gothic Literature did not mean spooky. The term was used by Horace Walpole to describe his book being set in the middle ages.
Castle of Otranto takes place in the time of the crusades.
The old english baron also takes place in the time of the crusades.
All but two of Anne Radcliffe's books takes place in the gothic ages, and the two that don't have enough Gothic Machinery such as ruined castles and abbeys to make it so they're considered part of the Gothic Genre.
The Monk is set in 16th century spain.
Melmoth the wanderer mostly takes place in the 17th century.
And this isn't accounting for all the other gothic books and short stories that take place in the middle ages and renaissance that you have no doubt never heard of because they don't have a wikipedia article because your knowledge of gothic literature is surface level
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>It was left for Walpole to launch ‘ Gothic’ on its way as a critical term in prose fiction. ‘* This literary impulse, if anything, can be called the true starting-point of the Gothic Revival.” His archaeological studies fostered his medieval interests. “It is impossible to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man without being struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his Mediaeval predilections. His Castle of Otranto was perhaps the first modern work of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel which was afterwards imitated by Mrs. Ratcliffe (sic) and perfected by Sir Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn but virtuous damsel, the castle itself, with its moats and drawbridge, its gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and first employment,” says Eastlake. The thought of ‘ Gothic’ brought to his mind not only “‘ the dark ages” of superstition and church domination, but also the days of chivalry and the Crusades. And he transplanted these ideas in The Castle of Otranto. “The castle was gothic; terror and superstition were gothic—chivalry and the Middle Ages were gothic ; ...and at the head of everything Gothic, with his ghost story, and the house at Strawberry, stood Horace Walpole.”
Why don't ESL's read Gothic Literature instead of spouting shit?
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>>97625513
Archons, dragons, ice giants, elves, aliens, wizards, and addiction
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>>97628108
It was a business relationship, he hired them to do jobs for him because they were outsiders and none of his own subjects trusted him any more
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>>97628116

Anon, Das Kapital was written in the middle of the century. Can't get more 1800s than that.
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>>97627966
>Gothic Fiction is Medieval
No, no it really isn't.

I've read every single thing Ann Radcliff ever wrote. It's vaguely anachronistic and specifically early modern which, like the rest of the Romantic movement, it's a fucking response to. What, did you google a wikipedia article, you fucking illiterate?
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>>97626126
Would it be too late to fight monsters from the Dark Continent of the sort Solomon Kane frequently contested?
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>>97625513
Demons
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>>97626126
>anarchists, communists, gypsies
Elders of Zion and other enemies of Tzar
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>>97625513
Don't forget a really, really sexy female vampire as the primary antagonist. Or a cool evil male vampire as the main villain.
Or a demon.
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>>97637179
The Castle of Otranto is set in the crusades you retard.
Two of her books are set in the middle ages. Others are set in the renaissance/early modern era which were defined as the "gothic" ages by 18th century people.
Do you even bother reading you absolute cretin? Stop browsing the internet trying to pretend what Gothic fiction is when you could read an actual book, spastic.
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>>97625513
Weird oversized bug-creatures deep in the uncharted jungles of Africa/Asia that are aggressive and deadly in equal measure but also produce an element that can be used as fuel for the burgeoning industrial powers of Europe and beyond.
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https://archive.org/details/occultlaboratory00hunt_0/page/79
81
https://archive.org/details/descriptionofwes0000mart/page/178

https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_pandmonium-or-the-devi_bovet-richard_1684/page/172

https://newvariorumshakespeare.org/edition/mnd/#tln_0456-row

http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Text%20Series/Folk-stories.pdf#page=85
https://books.google.com/books?id=VZIdDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA13

https://books.google.com/books?id=V3pLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA321
https://archive.org/details/longerscottishpo0000unse_r7o3/page/282

https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/8759/1/Supernatural%20Ballads%20changes%20accepted%20FIXED.pdf#page=147
https://cst.dk/dighumlab/duds/DFK/Dorthe/html/BILL63.htm

https://books.google.com/books?id=jtZKAQAAIAAJ
>celly vichtys

https://archive.org/details/englishconquesto00girauoft/page/17

https://archive.org/details/joanofarclapucel00unse/page/203
https://archive.org/details/ProcesDeCondamnationV1/page/187

https://archive.org/details/fasciculusmorumf0000unse/page/579

https://sussexfolktalecentre.org/wp-content/uploads/Gwyn-ap-Nudd.pdf#page=11
https://www.flickr.com/photos/balliolarchivist/8575316090/in/album-72157633033706125

https://archive.org/details/holygreyhoundgui0000schm/page/6
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90671845/f294.zoom

https://www.ulster.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/939852/0317.pdf
https://archive.org/details/bloomsbury-2024-classical-antiquity-medieval-ireland/page/337
https://www.isos.dias.ie/RIA/RIA_MS_23_P_2.html#555
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>>97625513
Basically every racist stereotype if your playgroup isn't touchy about such things. Voodoo-powered zombies, a horde of pygmy cannibals, chinese sorcerers, gypsy witches.

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