Dungeon Master
Posts: 553
Joined: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 10:12
"Giant" animals
Crawl has an unusual proliferation of monsters with "giant" prefixed to their names. I pulled this list from the crawl.chaosforge.org wiki but it looks like it's mostly still up to date. Most of these are animals.
Giant amoeba
Giant ant
Giant bat
Giant beetle
Giant blowfly
Giant centipede
Giant cockroach
Giant eyeball
Giant firefly
Giant frog
Giant gecko
Giant goldfish
Giant iguana
Giant leech
Giant mite
Giant mosquito
Giant newt
Giant orange brain
Giant slug
Giant snail
Giant spore
Giant toad
The trend seems to be for unoriginal monster names to be changed (or for the monsters themselves to be replaced). For example, giant lizards were replaced, the boring coloured snakes all got names, and there are no giant iguanas (making the list I copied at least a bit outdated).
I've always found this "giant" thing to be a bit odd, partially because there are so many "giant" enemies, and partially because most of them aren't actually giant (giant bats are actually tiny). Plus, there's the fact that a lot of enemies aren't named "giant" and yet aren't any smaller.
A couple of these are appropriate - giant eyes, giant orange brains, giant amoebas, gaint spores, and giant mites. The first two because they are weird and interesting, the latter three because they are microscopic. As for the rest, I don't think "giant" is really necessary - some of these animals are normally quite small, but we can all assume that if they are in a fantasy dungeon and they are rabidly attacking you, they probably aren't ordinary animals.
Is this just some quirky crawl-ism that causes animals to be named like this (if so, there's nothing wrong with that, but it would be interesting to know if that's an actual reason)? Or otherwise, is there a reason "giant bats" aren't simply renamed "bats" besides them always being called that, going back to pre-SS days?