Bats come in two varieties. The flitty screechy things like tattered bits of darkness you're afraid will get stuck in your hair; even the vampiric ones you're not so much afraid of the bite as you are the crazed mindless presence of the thing. If little bats were made of sound they would be nails on a chalkboard, grating and discordant in ways nonsensical but impossible to ignore. Big predators you want to run away but somehow a panicked bat is even worse. The embiggened types feel wrong somehow if they're larger than a pony, but I could see them making great mounts for goblins.
The other type of bat is the giant fruit bat. Like the little bats these things fly out in huge numbers at sunset, but a group of giant bats feels more like a procession than an swarm. They're so silent and still, like they're floating and the wings just move them along, like you're looking up from a riverbed at boats being rowed across still water. Beautiful and kind of unnerving. Giant bats are the best mounts for wraiths and banshees - dark shadows, the slow flap of endless wings, then a harrowing death shriek from the rider.
Bears suffer from overexposure I think. At national parks you're always told to lock your food up because bears can rip open your car like a tin can, but that just makes them seem like desperate and pitiful scavengers, like if you're not careful a bear will come into your camp and wreck your stuff. There's something oafish about bears, like they're just big clumsy louts. A person turning into a wolf is scary, but turning into a bear is comic relief, no matter how much effort you put into describing its rage and its bulk and its great slavering jaws. (Counterpoint: armored polar bear warriors are pretty sweet, and someone riding a bear of any sort is not a person to fuck with.)
Beetles are a lot cooler than they're given credit for. The Boring Beetle, most famously, is... well it's hard to get around the name, isn't it? But reading the Monster Manual entry they're so rich with potential, though more often as part of the scenery than as combat encounters. Let's see...
- Bodies eaten by beetles get chewed up so thoroughly only a wish will restore life - I'm thinking a fantasy equivalent of the gangster's pigs in Snatch, with uncaring hitmen tossing bodies into a pen of ravenous clattering bugs for disposal.
- Some beetles (according to the MM) form a hive mind when they gather in swarms and learn to grow their own fungus farms. That's pretty sweet.
- So are caravans of pack beetles winding their way through the Underdark, with cages on their shells full of slaves for the neogi fleshmarkets.
- Speaking of the Underdark, glow worms (not really beetles but close enough) are a wonderfully evocative and strange source of light, without being as overused as glowing mushrooms or as twee as fireflies.
- A setting where armorers work with shells and chitin more often than metal is a setting I'd like to play. Or at least see pictures of, since that's basically Dark Sun.
- Mountain-sized acid-spewing beetles make way cooler doomsday monsters than some half-assed Godzilla knockoff.
- Scarabs are beautiful.
Behirs are like dragons for when you don't want the mythic connotations of fighting a motherfucking dragon. They also burrow through sand instead of flying, so they can't follow you everywhere but on their home ground they're better at ambushing you despite being 40-foot twelve-legged lightning-breathing serpents. So like, if you had a giant desert, and you wanted a reason no one crossed the Great Silt Sea without an airship, you could fill that desert with behirs. If your cosmology had a "backstage" plane no one was supposed to visit full of bright orange sands and peyote nightmares, you could fill that plane with behirs. They'd be like the most metal "No Trespassing" signs ever, and lo, it would be awesome.
(Fig 1: You hate 'em, right?)
Beholders are also Be- monsters, but they get their own post, because beholders.
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