d10 Monster Weaknesses

Drawing from Arnold K's post about shitty dragons and some of his posts on G+ about making weakness as integral a part of monster design as strength.

1. Monster is afraid of something. This could be something stupid, like cats or bards or children. It could also be something that humans are afraid of, like darkness or heights or talking to people.
2. Monster is very old. If it breathes it's wheezy and asthmatic, if it has bones they're fragile, if it has memories they're unreliable. If it's an ooze then maybe it's tough and rubbery, like old Blu-Tack.
3. Monster is lonely and depressed. It desperately wants friends, but it also still wants all the other things that monsters usually want. Which is probably why it doesn't have any friends.
4. Monster is vain. It won't kill anyone who is actively bolstering its self-esteem. You can distract it with flattery, gifts, or easily-refuted objections to its favourite line of intellectual argument.
5. Monster has creepy obsession with one specific person, who thus exerts a measure of control over them.
6. Monster has awkward deformity, like teeth where they shouldn't be or a useless extra head.
7. Monster collects something. This could be something stupid, like cats or bards or children. It could also be something that humans collect, like paintings or teddy bears or Magic cards.
8. Monster is lazy. It's overweight, has unhealthy eating habits, doesn't stir from its lair before midday and has a hard time really committing to any project. If killing you looks hard enough it might just not bother.
9. Monster is hiding from other, scarier monster. It might owe them money or just be lower down on the food chain.
10. Monster is just incredibly dumb. This is probably funnier if it thinks that it is incredibly smart.

These fall into a few distinct categories. Physical peculiarites (age, deformity), character flaws (laziness, vanity, stupidity), conflicting goal systems (avoiding something, collecting something, stalking someone). The last is probably the most useful of the three. The tension between wanting to do X and wanting to do Y seems likely to lead to some interesting emergent behaviour.

Anyway you should ignore all this because I have just discovered that Googling the phrase "awful taxidermy" is a better summation of the ethos of this blog than any words could ever be. This blog is about awful taxidermy now.