Monsters vs Daemons
So since this has come up a bit here and there I figured I should specify what things in BE are actual animals and what are daemons (completely magical entities who fade away eventually once killed).
Monsters
Monsters are basically always animalistic. They’re animals, after all… just an animal that is mutated and grown (or simply even just evolved) to be… monstrous in some way. They also aren’t mythical creatures, though they can resemble them. A Rok Falcon is named after the legendary Rok but… isn’t a Rok. While something like a unicorn or a manticore are too specific and are daemons (unless… someone actually made a manticore).
You can have things that resemble other things. Like a horse called a unicorn that has a horn that doesn’t quite look like what people imagine unicorns as but resembles one… or a big bear like bird that might be called a griffin but looks different. A shitty feathery winged lizard with stony skin thats called a cockatrice but doesn’t turn things to stone. A common monster is various types of winged giant reptiles. Wyverns and stuff are monsters (I mean they’re basically big ol dinosaurs). Giant spiders, giant crabs, whatever. Anything that would be called a “dire (blank)”. Krakens are probably a thing. Things that become monsterous are usually fueled by magic to some degree (which is what allows them to grow and survive at such large sizes), so a big electric bear or something could be a thing.
Not every monster is a species, as some are just animals mutated by growing in strong magic areas. Things like gigantic wyverns are probably usually an aberration and most usually don’t get that big?
Daemons
Daemons are ideas in the astral plane that congeal and grow together and drop into reality. As such they can be anything. They can be a perfectly normal seeming animal. They could be a rock, really.
A lot of fantasy monsters that exist in BEP are daemons. A medusa, a vampire, dragons, ghosts, demons, giants, orcs and goblins, whatever. Daemons can exhibit some degree of human like intelligence (again, coming off like a very well scripted game NPC when interacted with long enough). In fact, thinking about them as programmed entities in a game is probably the most useful way to think about them.
A daemon does not even have to be one thing. The skeletons at the ski camp could be thought up of one daemon that represents all these skeletons. The gnolls who knew what each other knew were a single daemon. Such daemons may not pay much head to the individual lives of its parts as it is actually one entity. Daemons like this may grow and ‘reproduce’ in various ways that mimic real life, but its performative and the ‘rules’ that govern the daemons are arbitrary. A daemon might only reproduce by eating a lot or it might just eat because that’s its impulse. Some might just slowly grow and ‘lay eggs’ when appropriate or whatever… or new members of the ‘group’ might just phase into existence when there is spare energy for them.
Daemons are not necessarily bad. A helpful faerie daemon might lead someone out of the woods or heal someone.
While daemons represent mythological ideas, they still diverge from expectation. As they bounce around in astral space they rub off on other ideas and mutate and as types of daemons exists, peoples perception of them creates NEW versions of them No one exactly how this process works and most of it, in world, is theory, but people are pretty much sure “These are bits of magic that come from human ideas and they tend to appear close to where their imagined” (because certain regions have different common daemons).
As such its possible to try and create daemons or modify them and then try and get them to split. Where Beth comes from, Orso Moldano, they breed daemons for war. and seem to be one of the few places that can do this with some consistency.
Sometimes daemon intelligence can become self aware and actualize as an actual soul. So you could say… have an ancient dragon that’s very intelligent. The eye daemon that stalked Sinlen was likely intelligent to some degree. These examples would be extremely rare though.
Hybrids
Things like Beth. This can happen to animals too. Most are unstable and die quickly (Beth was unstable but naturally had a way to correct for that by draining energy). Some are stable. You could have someone born with angel wings or someone born like an orc, or even a giant (though it hasn’t come up much, there is a non-hybrid version of this for people in the 7-8 foot long range that’s kinda another thing similar to having fay features, but here I mean like GIANT giant). Again, very rare, especially for a human, but others exist!
Magic is probably the only way to practically telling the difference between a Daemon and a Hybrid without killing it (the hybrid won’t fade away after dying ever)
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