What if D&D Monsters had Latin Names?
Feb. 15th, 2026 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerToday we played D&D again. It was the second full session of my game, The Collector's Menagerie. After an action-packed session 2 weeks ago where the group got through a lot of challenges today they.... Well, it's not so much that they "hit the skids" as that they fell over laughing.
The laughs today came from two things. First, I came up with names for the menagerie of monsters they're fighting in the mansion. No, I don't mean names like "Sammy the Stirge". I mean names like... if you saw these monsters at a zoo, what would the placards in front of their cages say? Because part of the story here is that these monsters literally have cages. And they were put there by a collector... who wanted to show them off. Hence they'd have labels!
The group came back upstairs out of the basement and ventured into the Gallery next. The gallery is the large room where the collector literally had most of his exotic monsters displayed in cages. And because the collector was a bit snooty— I mean, if you've got exotic monsters in display cages between your Hall and your Ballroom you're going to want to be snooty about it— I decided the placards would be in an ancient language known only to the most learned scholars. Ergo, for roleplaying props, they're in Latin.
But how do you say "Owlbear" in Latin? I punted... and marked the cage "Ursa Noctua". Bear-owl. 😂
One of the PCs is actually fluent in my game's ancient scholarly language. And the players had fun trying to guess the monsters from their high school Latin lessons before his character translated them. I gave them these 6 monster labels:
To preserve an element of mystery there were two cages with missing labels.
The group choked a bit on the Sneaky Skin-changer— which they interpreted (correctly) as a Mimic, a classic D&D monster. They kind of assumed it, anyway, the moment they saw the treasure chest with fangs chasing someone in the cover pic (above).
The group really choked on Large Spiders. Even worse than worrying aloud that every piece of furniture they came across could be a Mimic, they fretted that there might be spiders ready to drop down on them from the shadowy recesses of the high ceilings. 🕷️
The one I thought was funniest, though, was the last one in the list. The Shit Elephant.
I came up with that monster'sLatin in-game ancient language name, Belua Excrementum, by starting with the name we came up with when the group fought it in the last session, Shit Monster. "Shit" translates obviously to excrementum, but "monster".... In Latin, "monster" really refers to a thing of enormous size. Like "jumbo". "I have a monster headache" is like saying, "I have a jumbo headache." And the word for very large thing happens to be the word for elephant. Belua. So the Otyugh got the Latin name Shit Elephant. 💩🐘🤣
The laughs today came from two things. First, I came up with names for the menagerie of monsters they're fighting in the mansion. No, I don't mean names like "Sammy the Stirge". I mean names like... if you saw these monsters at a zoo, what would the placards in front of their cages say? Because part of the story here is that these monsters literally have cages. And they were put there by a collector... who wanted to show them off. Hence they'd have labels!
The group came back upstairs out of the basement and ventured into the Gallery next. The gallery is the large room where the collector literally had most of his exotic monsters displayed in cages. And because the collector was a bit snooty— I mean, if you've got exotic monsters in display cages between your Hall and your Ballroom you're going to want to be snooty about it— I decided the placards would be in an ancient language known only to the most learned scholars. Ergo, for roleplaying props, they're in Latin.
But how do you say "Owlbear" in Latin? I punted... and marked the cage "Ursa Noctua". Bear-owl. 😂
One of the PCs is actually fluent in my game's ancient scholarly language. And the players had fun trying to guess the monsters from their high school Latin lessons before his character translated them. I gave them these 6 monster labels:
- Ursa Noctua : Bear owl (Owlbear)
- Versipellis Furtivus : Sneaky Skin-changer (Mimic)
- Arinerum Magni : Large Spiders
- Aves Sanguinarii : Blood-drinking Birds (Stirges)
- Scutigera Cadaverosa : Carrion Crawler
- Belua Excrementum : Shit Elephant
To preserve an element of mystery there were two cages with missing labels.
The group choked a bit on the Sneaky Skin-changer— which they interpreted (correctly) as a Mimic, a classic D&D monster. They kind of assumed it, anyway, the moment they saw the treasure chest with fangs chasing someone in the cover pic (above).
The group really choked on Large Spiders. Even worse than worrying aloud that every piece of furniture they came across could be a Mimic, they fretted that there might be spiders ready to drop down on them from the shadowy recesses of the high ceilings. 🕷️
The one I thought was funniest, though, was the last one in the list. The Shit Elephant.
I came up with that monster's
