Fun with Linneaus II

Last year I brewed up a post where I made a bunch of monsters based on cobbled-together scientific names. Now that I'm halfway through The Book of the New Sun the itch has struck again, inspired by Wolfe's love of archaisms and his own Greek and Latin rootwords.

For this installment, I'm expanding beyond creatures and applying it to whatever makes sense for the name.

Acanthomata ("tumor back")

Stoop-backed from the weight of the bulging, pulsing growths that weigh down its spine. Head bowed to the ground, as if in prayer. Yellow eyes burning with the fervor of endurance.

Apulmon ("without lung")

A wizard's homunculus, grown for manual labor in orbit. Paper-thin bones. Shiny black mosaic scutes shield from radiation, solar sails fold against the back when not in use.

Arsenasthenia ("male weakness")

A terribly polite way of saying "vulnerability to being kicked in the dick."

Bidactylocide ("two-finger killing")

A martial art capable of killing a man using only two fingers. Each combination might cause death through a different means - explosion, implosion, liquification, excrutiation, exsanguination, etc.

Electrocrinus ("amber lily")

A rare water flower with petals of fossilized sap. Ancient insects can still be seen inside. Coveted for its conductive properties, used in a variety of folk medicine traditions.

Endodynamodynia ("internal power pain")

A medical condition caused by an inbalance of mana within a practitioner of the thaumaturgical arts. Symptoms include swelling of the lymph nodes, persistent headaches and light-sensitivity, bright discolorations of yellow, blue, red, and octarine starting at the navel and spreading outwards across the abdomen, excessive flatulence, and agonizing pain in the gut when attempting to cast a spell. The condition is not fatal, though any graduate student who's come down with it will argue otherwise.

Glaucoglott ("blue-grey tongue")

A vast salamander thing, twice as long as a man is tall. It can never completely reel its tongue back into its mouth, and uses the bright and flicking tip as a lure for creatures along the shoreline.

Homohippus ("man-horse")

The body of a horse, the legs of a man. The skull is twinned: a tilt of the head up or down reveals one face, and then the other. One neighs and whinnies, the other screams and stops only when it passes out.

Lacrimognosis ("tear knowledge")

With certain secret alchemical reagents, one might gather and consume the tears of another to gain insight into their lives and loves.

Lactolestes ("milk robber")

Its truest form is a sort of fat lamprey with a dozen stumpy legs. It may lull its prey into believing it to be their infant, thus nursing on stolen goods while the true offspring goes hungry.

Magniporphyrhino ("great purple nose")

An ape with a shaggy grey mane. Its face is flushed red, and the bulbous protruding nose a brilliant violent. Males will inflate this mighty shnozz to attract females during the mating season, an act terrible to behold.

Nocinax ("pain king")

PAIN. KING.

Octodon ("eight-tooth")

The teeth like shovel blades, each on its own mandible and arranged in a circle, fit for burrowing through soil and stone. It is blind and ill-suited to the light and nosie of the surface, but its skin contains many valued anticancerous unguents.

Osteopsy ("inspection of bones")

A divinitory practice, now banned by the new government. In it, one who wishes to have their future read will offer up a bone or bones, from the tip of a finger to an entire leg, to their shaman. The offering will be presented to sacred flesh-stripping beetles, and the cleaned bone will be placed in the fire until it cracks and can be read. If the proper ceremony is made, this prediction will always be accurate. The larger the bone, the more detail can be gleaned.

Spondylscolio ("twisted spine")

Thin and lizardly, coiled up like a spring. Can stick to walls using the gripping pads of its feet and launch itself great distances. Beloved for their cheerful chirps and eating of pest insects.

Striatocetus ("striped whale")

A cachalot named so for its bands of pale grey and deep blue. Known to launch itself out of the water to do battle with its favored prey, the pelagic sky-squids.

Tachystomy ("swift creation of a circular opening")

A finishing move in martial arts: punching a clean hole out of a target with a single blow.

Tritympani ("three eardrums")

Like a three-armed starfish, with a taut membrane between each arms. Arboreal, use vibrations of their membranes for simple humming and buzzing calls, and to attract insect prey.

Umbilicodendron ("umbilical tree")

A tree that is too much like a spine, with leaves too much like teeth. Meat-rope branches dangling down to raw red fetal-curled forms by the yellow-grey roots. They stir. Ride faster.

Xenula ("small foreign thing")

No bigger than a marble, but clearly alien in substance. Flit away from contact. Scrawl signs in the dirt. They may very well think.

Xiphzymy ("fermentation of swords")

Ritual preparation of dueling swords, where the chosen blades are steeped in a mixture of goat's milk, wild honey, and alcohol.

Monsters of Linnaeus

Matt Celeskey

This little fellow is named "bulbous lizard leaf-razor", a name which proves both that palaeontologists love taking the piss, and that scientific names are great. Especially for games. It's already the default bestiary terminology in the real world, Greek and Latin are already wizarding languages, you get a handy literal descriptor for the monster, and you can just fit descriptors together like puzzle pieces. Roll on the table, get a monster.

(This is all thanks to Luka Rejec pointing out this handy list of taxonomic affixes (don't forget the medical ones too!) to go along with the magical prehistory bandwagon)

Coelcyon ("hollow dog")

Its bones are needles and the rest is skin and fur hanging over empty space. They make a high-pitched whistling near-indistinguishable from tinnitus.

Rhodosuchus ("red crocodile")

It is very much what the name entails, though its snout is long and thin, more like a gharial. They mate during monsoon season, building house-sized nests of mangrove roots and dead fish, designed to topple over just so in the storms.

Chloracanth ("green spine")

The bony ridge that runs down the slow and daftsome creature's back is hollow and honeycombed. Symbiotic mosses grow there, which may be harvested for medicinal purposes. Otherwise unremarkable, though the meat is good.

Brontodromeus ("thunder runner")

Their slate-blue hides coruscate with bright white chromatophore signals. Thick tails provide balance when running, while folding arms and bullet-shaped heads cut down on wind resistance.They run with the rains, and slip away just as easily.

Plesiofelis ("almost cat")

Looks like a sleeping cat at first or second glance, but reveals itself under touch and closer inspection as a gelatinous non-Newtonian fluid covered in fine calico cilia. The tail, curled underneath the central mass, is far longer than it should, and trails off out of sight. The nature of the angler is unknown.

Scoliospondylus ("twisted vertebrae")

Eight-limbed hominids whose spine might only be the result of a cruel and hateful god. Each limb ends in a six-fingered hand with two opposable digits, and their catastrophic backs show clear signs of divine malice. Their black skin is hairless, and decorated with splashes of brilliant orange and blue; this does not do anything to lessen the pain and sadness in their six eyes.

Xanthopepsian ("yellow digesting")

A sort of sponge, about the size of a large melon. It may live upon land, and in desperate circumstances move under its own power. It consumes the color yellow, a diet that leads to it being a most brilliant shade of that color; anything else in its feeding radius will be bleached white

Cacopithicus ("bad ape")

Ratty red-brown fur smeared in shit. Fingernails curved like snail shells. Teeth set in gums like maggots in a side of beef. Crusty black eyes, dribbling snot and spit. Its behavior is self-evident, and all are thankful that they cannot work in unison for more than a few hours before the backstabbing begins.

Platypharyngovenator ("flat throat hunter")

Its wedge-shaped head is attached to a flexible neck nearly ten feet long and an inch thick. It is an ambush predator, burying its cumbersome soft-shelled body in loam or mud and lying in wait.

Squamotherium ("scaly beast")

Its body is like a pillar or a trunk atop ten squat legs surrounding a mouth. The scales decrease from the size of a hand to hardly more than a pinprick as one ascends towards the upper ring of eyes. They are usually a green-brown in coloration, to best imitate trees and avoid predators. It was not called dendromimus due to a certain unnatural philosopher having a love affair with the word "squamous".

Diploteratomaia ("double monster mother")

Unique among the echidnamorphs for possessing two wombs and regular simultaneous pregnancies, this creature's distinct black and white coloration is very much on point. The eyes diverge from this, being blue and ringed in black. Offspring will be of one color or the other, or bear similar separation of color. The back-quills of this variant are shorter than those of more common species. 

Gnathomimus ("jaw mimic")

Descendants of agnathic fish-turned-amphibians, the species' impressive underbite is in fact an outgrowth of the head's armor plating. While useless as a manidle, they are used as weapons during territorial disputes and mating displays.

Polycetus ("many whales")

A horrifying leviathan created when a pod of whales melds into an island-sized fleshbeast of blubber and barnacles and oil and curtains of baleen and banks of paddles, singing apocalyptic songs of the abyss. Mass beachings are in truth mass suicides: the whales know that the melding is near, and their good nature drives them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the rest of the world.

Cephalospadias ("head fissure")

A gangly, chalky-white hominid. The head contains no eyes, nose, or ears, and is disproportionately large compared to the body. Each specimen has one or more deep clefts in their heads, the insides of which are the color of a blood orange and peppercorn seeds. Each individual has a unique pattern of fissure.

Ordinary Magical Animals

The Aberdeen Bestiary

(This is all inspired by Arnold's secrets of mundane animals, and fueled by wanting to replace my empty complaints on how boring the MM appendix is with actual content. Also Wikipedia's unusual articles index.)


Ape - Capable of creating simple gods of their own. Tend to imitate human behavior, but the amount of understanding of these things varies dramatically. They've got politics down pat, though.

Awakened Tree - Lovers of gossip, the trees are constantly after news from abroad. Being immobile (and tree-to-tree communication being incredibly slow), they will recruit birds, beasts, bees and men to pass on messages, usually offering magical flowers or fruit in exchange

Barnacle Goose -  Grey, flightless, armored, foul-tempered, and stinking of sea salt - this is the barnacle goose. They make for excellent guard animals, if one can train them.

Bishop Fish -  A rare piscene genus, of which all members are ordained priests. Occasional specimens may be found in a cathedral-aquarium, or delivering sermons to beachgoers.

Boar - Pigs that eat the flesh of man will become more man-like, inheriting everything foul in human nature and nothing of the good.

Bobbit Worm - Popular familiar with wizards who like outward displays of hostility. There are rumors of a tapeworm variant.

Bonnacon - A species of cow with a horse's mane and ram's horns, capable of launching high-velocity burning feces across an acre or two.

Borometz - Vegetable lambs, connected to their parent trees by a rootlike umbilical. Used and sold by wizards for lawn care.

Camel -  Occasionally carry water nymphs in their humps. Intense study has revealed that camels give the fewest fucks of all animals.

Cat - Can see ghosts, walk through shadows, and can walk among even the most monstrous of Folk as equals.

Crocodile - Engage in ritualistic wrestling for territory and hunting grounds, complete with individualized techniques.

Death-Watch -  A sort of pocket-watch on insect legs. It buries into the walls of a house and makes a faint ticking noise there

Dog - Actually a god.

Dolphin - Apocalyptic sex cults.
 
Elephant - Will bless or curse a human according to their actions, lasting long past the death of both parties.

Frog- As a means of preserving an emergency heir, royal bastards may sometimes find themselves polymorphed into frogs and hidden away until needed.

Giant Spider - The canniest of arachnids have embraced the silk-weaving industry with all eight limbs, trading fine goods for blood sacrifice. A pig or cow is fine, but they are quite fond of human meat. If you're offering.

Globster - Primordial oozes from the deep ocean that occasionally wash ashore. Their corpses are filled with all manner of benthic treasures and are greatly valued by fleshcrafters.

Goat - The natural enemy of trolls. Absolutely know more than they're letting on.

Hippopotamus - A great and terrible demon, feared even in Hell.

Hydra - The kind that look like trees with no leaves, made of jelly. In good, clean water, they can grow ten to twenty feet in height and will not die on their own.

Lion - Befitting their station as the first estate of Kingdom Animalia, they require a writ of causus belli before going to war.

Manta - Capable of launching itself out of the water at such speeds that it takes to flight like a great bird.

Moon Tree - Grown from seeds taken to the moon and back. Silver-white trunks and fleshy leaves of pink and ulfire.

Octopus - Comes in 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 100 tentacle variants. Often domesticated by wizards as familiars and assistants.

Owl - Omens and spells can be read from their pellets. Canopic breeds have corkscrew heads that can be safely removed, and spell components stored inside.

Phoenix - A small, sunset-orange bird similar to a pigeon or dove, with the unfortunate habit of spontaneously combusting. Their feathers are, among other properties, fireproof.

Pelican - Pelican blood is a valuable alchemical reagent, known to provide energy and sustenance to those who drink of it.

Rhinoceros - When ground up, the horn creates a gritty powder that tastes of fingernails and provides absolutely no benefit to anyone.

Seahorse - Believed by many to detect poisons on contact, grant potency if dried and eaten, stave off seasickness if worn around the neck, and determine the direction of incoming storms. All entirely true, but they cannot breathe underwater. No one is sure how they survive.

Tiger - Becomes a manticore if it eats 100 men. A man that eats 100 tigers becomes something far more horrible.

Warhorse - Carries a sword in its mouth and canters in marching time.

Wasp - Requires an exorcism to truly kill: poisons and fire will only do half the job.

Whale, Exploding - They throw themselves up onto the shore and explode with mighty force