The ZPND Principle

Two posts in one day?! O_o Woah. The world is collapsing around my ears right now. So in the roleplay I am currently involved in we just encountered something so cliche it was original. It's a fantasy RP, so you might expect there to be cat women or fairies, elves, and of course the most cliche enemy of them all, dragons. But alas for there are many cliches. Legions of ninjas seem to be able to hide in shadows and then spring out of nowhere, until the room clogged with ninjas is invisible to you from all the Sight checks you're failing. Pirates rank pretty close behind the ninjas, raiding into the towns and of course attacking our heroes on their ships. These aren't just any pirates, these are... sky pirates! The new breed of cliche enemy.

With earth, wind, fire and water, our powers combined summon forth captain Elemental. Whether elemental blobs, slimes, atronachs or just plain old elementals, these guys are the moderately more difficult enemies. From small to moderate, undead enemies, most especially zombies rank next on the list. Zombies make every horror movie complete and no horror movie is complete without some form of them. Maybe that's why The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was such a crappy movie. But then again, I doubt even the presence of our flesh flapping friends could have saved that movie. Then you have your slightly more unique forms of undead, from skeletons to wraiths. And finally for the smaller cliche enemies you have the orc/goblin/hobgoblin which really, once you look at the etymology, hobgoblins are actually nice guys prone to playing tricks. They aren't really evil. Orcs on the other hand... Tolkein was the first to use the word "orc", probably from the name for Pluto: Orcus.

And the dragons, demons and gods come in the large section. Dragons exist in almost every fantasy game, story or world. They're the natural boss that people have no feelings for killing. Even in Warcraft where the dragons are sentient and peaceful they're the ones you kill for treasure. Makes you wonder how hard it must be to be a leprechaun or dragon. Everyone's after your gold.

So we went for a more cliche and therefore more original enemy. A zombie dragon. Of course if we'd wanted to go all the way we could have had an Undead Ninja Pirate Dragon. But that'll be for another day. Tolkein would be turning in his grave. He's probably wishing he invested in some net connection down there too.