Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa
In a mostly positive step, brand name D&D is doing away with gendered monsters. Or, more accurately, they’re letting those monsters be depicted as both gender binaries, so medusae, for instance, can be dames or blokes! We will have to wait for 2034’s incarnation of D&D for non-binary medusae.
This is a good change not merely for representational reasons (we can finally tell our sons that you too can be a medusa! No more will they have to become a Minotaur to live out their dreams of being a monster of Greek mythology), but also because when monsters are so thoroughly and exclusively female-coded, it seems to encourage weird usages of those monsters. I don’t just mean at individual tables where I’m sure Reddit can supply creepy DM horror stories involving literally every monster in the manual. I am talking about published adventures too.
TSR’s Honeytrap Encounter Design
It is only appropriate to start with the medusa herself. How has she been deployed in what is reportedly still the most widely owned D&D adventure of all time, the starter adventure that started it all: The Keep on the Borderlands. A medusa is the monster encountered in the final numbered room of the Caves of Chaos, the last thing you see in E.G. Gygax’s famous module before the credits begin to roll. I’d like to treat this as a case study, so allow me to quote it first so we can then discuss it:
“This is the place where prisoners are kept until tortured to death or sacrificed in the area above. There are several skeletons still chained to the wall, and one scantily clad female – a fair maiden obviously in need of rescuing! As she is partly around a corner, at first only her shapely legs and body up to the shoulders can be seen. Those who enter and approach closer are in for a rude shock! This is actually a medusa recently taken by the evil priest’s zombie guards”
-B2: The Keep on the Borderlands (1979)
Notice, of course, the shapely legs.
Frankly, a compelling thesis could probably be written around this scenario, and I am not the person to do it justice. But you don’t exactly need to be a rocket scientist in the field of women’s studies to pick up on some fucked up vibes. The medusa is, unless I missed something key, the only monster in the module that has their legs described before their combat statistics, or at all. Gary should tell us whether or not the kobolds have sexy gams too! So not only is she written explicitly with a sexual male gaze in mind, she is objectified in the narrative of the module as well–at first as a potential maiden in need of rescue and then even after the reveal that she is a monster she has less agency than other monsters in the module, not being there of her own will but captive and (in the paragraph after the one I quoted) looking to the player characters to free her in exchange for a potion of stone to flesh, which they will likely need after male-gazing at her petrifying visage. Although she’s still a monster, the module lets us know that she’ll double-cross the player characters if they do.
What makes this encounter work is basically the assumed attraction of the player characters to the medusa’s shapely legs. You can really feel the basement nerd archetype as the assumed end-user when reading this encounter. Let me break this down using my Encounter Checklist (I encourage you to read that post if you haven’t already; it is some of the best advice I’ve ever written):
Is the encounter something that happens to the player characters? Yes, the medusa tries to petrify at least one player character so she can use her antidote as a bargaining chip to get what she wants.
Can the player-characters “play” with the encounter (i.e., is the encounter “toyetic”)? No, this encounter isn’t overly toyetic. It is a single monster quasi-social encounter but basically in a featureless room.
Are there multiple possible solutions or no solution at all? Yes. The adventure text definitely seems to offer freeing the medusa for the potion as the perhaps path of least resistance, but what is to stop the players from simply taking it? She is chained up. Or making some deal with the evil cleric that already wants to ritually sacrifice the medusa. Or even ritually sacrificing her themselves.
Do the player-characters want something from the encounter? So this is the most important factor for our purposes. The answer is yes, but I will get into it below.
Does the encounter have a motive? Yes, the medusa is in chains and desires freedom. But also is evil and wants to petrify the player characters even if they do help her. Fuck them kids.
Does the encounter have a means to accomplish its motive? Yes, she doesn’t need to not be chained up to petrify incoming adventurers.
Is there a consequence to ignoring the encounter? The adventure says the cleric has plans to sacrifice the medusa to summon the demon, but there isn’t really an indication when that might happen or that it will happen if the player characters don’t either free the medusa or kill the evil cleric. So technically yes, but I'm gonna put this one in the no column.
It checks nearly all the boxes for a fun encounter! #7 is a real miss, but overall, it isn’t a bad encounter structurally. The issue is more the way it satisfies #4. When the medusa is first described, shapely legs first (atypical monster description method aside from centaurs and the like), the module seems to think it is already dangling a tasty worm at the players, trying to get them to bite. And it does this by activating both sides of the medusa-whore complex: she isn’t just a “fair maiden obviously in need of rescuing” but she is also “one scantily clad female”. In either respect (both are offered so as to appeal to both the chivalrous and the chauvinist alike), the function of either her desirability of object to rescue or object of let’s-call-it-romance functions the same as giving the shoe-goblins some treasure in my example from the Encounter Checklist. That the medusa herself is (at first) what the player characters are seemingly intended to desire is not disconnected with her objectification as a woman-monster. Citing from my colleague Marcia of Traverse Fantasy:
“[D&D] is designed to last infinitely by shifting goalposts of character experience in terms of increasing amounts of gold pieces acquired; this resembles the modus operandi of phallic desire which seeks out object after object (most typically, women) in order to quench a lack which always reasserts itself.”
I recommend reading that post in full as a much deeper companion to this one. Marcia digs much deeper into Gygax’s comments on biological essentialism (seen not just in this encounter but in his direct quotes on the subject and “a difference in brain function”) and also on the phallic drive to seek more objects to sate an insatiable desire.
Once it is revealed that the medusa is a monster, likely by turning one or more of the player characters into a quite lifelike statue, the desire shifts to an actual object, the potion of stone to flesh, but the initial object of the medusa-as-maiden herself serves the encounter as a honeypot to draw the players in (making the encounter stickier, as it were) so that the medusa can trick them and petrify them.
My colleague, Lino of the Pink Space blog, also pointed out that “The medusa in the keep naturalizes a male perspective, yes, but also is just one instance of a larger gendered worldview that Gygax presented of women as inherently and supernaturally manipulative. That is just how women are, so for medusa to be a monster weaponizing that is to provide the PCs with an opportunity to both succumb but also resist it. The violence against her is just for she is monstrous.” What they are referring to, for those unaware of this dubious aspect of early D&D history, is that Dragon #3 introduced rules by Len Lakofka for women player characters where “Seduction” was a magical spell that women innately had access to, so long as their Beauty attribute score (which they had instead of Charisma) was a high enough threshold based on a racial matrix. Weird stuff.
This honeypot encounter design was not at all uncommon in the early hobby, and once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere. The distinct impression is that “dumb, horny straight male adventurer” must be such a common aspect of the implied setting of D&D that whole swaths of monsters evolve to exploit this bottomfeeder of the dungeon ecology. Take, for instance, the Kelpie, a topless sea-monster introduced to D&D in the other classic of the era, White Plume Mountain. Allow me to quote from the entry for the Kelpie that is included in the back of the module:
“They are able to shape their bodies into any form they choose, and they will often assume the aspect of a beautiful human woman in order to lure men into deep water. However, though the form may be changed, the substance still resembles green seaweed, and the effect is somewhat grotesque. To counter this, the kelpie can throw one powerful charm spell per day. If the target does not save vs spells (at -2), he will perceive the kelpie as the most wonderful, perfect and desirable woman, and will willingly leap into the water to join her. … For some reason, females are immune to the spell of the kelpie. Legend has it that this is so because kelpies were created by the sea-god as punishment for those men rash enough to sail the oceans without paying their lord his proper respect. Women were not involved in these transgressions, and thus did not incur the sea-lord’s ill will.”
-S2: White Plume Mountain (1979)
This one is funny because it wasn’t enough that the designer had the horndog male adventurer in mind when writing the encounter, they had to go back and justify why the kelpie, who can shape their bodies into any form they choose, only targets men. And the legend doesn’t really hold up. Did all men spurn the sea-god? Also, am I to believe that all of the men involved were solely straight? The famously exclusively straight profession of being a sailor? If I heard this justification for why a monster was created to drown me, I’d be like homie I wasn’t involved in those transgressions either, seems like your beef is with some very specific sailors. Though the idea of a sea-god who just has a mostly irrational hatred of all men like certain dogs that weren’t socialized to interact with men is funny, so I guess I’ll give it a pass. But if 5.5e comes out with a kelpie, they better include the himbo variant!
Okay, That Was Way Back in the 1900s! Are We Better Now?
No! Numenera is a science fantasy TTRPG published by Monte Cook Games in 2013. I am not breaking new ground here, but the “Nibovian Wife” in Numenera’s monster manual equivalent is…not great. This was immediately realized at the time of publication and a thread on the rpg.net forum reached the status of “‘Is Wario A Libertarian’ - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,”. As if forum posts weren’t bad enough, Reddit unfortunately has a good summary of what went on in that online battlefield. I don’t want to rehash it all, just point out the continuity with the encounter design implied by the Nibovian Wife and the TSR honeypot monsters of the 1970s. Quoting from the monster manual entry:
“These biological constructs appear to be beautiful female humans. Their only function, however, is to seduce male humans so they can get pregnant. Pregnancy in a Nibovian wife opens a transdimensional rift inside its womb, giving an ultraterrestrial [parenthetical omitted] access to this level of existence. … When the ultraterrestrial creature is ‘born,’ the Nibovian wife nurtures it as if it were a child, even though it clearly is not. During this time, the construct defends the ‘child’ fiercely, using incredible strength and resilience. The young creature develops quickly, and its first and only compulsion is to hunt down and kill its ‘father.’ …
Motive: Seduction for reproduction, defense of its ‘offspring’
Environment: Anywhere
…
Interaction: As long as you give Nibovian wives what they want, they are kind and eager to please. They can never be convinced to abandon their imperative (reproducing and nurturing their terrible child), but on other issues, they can be perfectly reasonable.”
-Numenera (2013)
This monster absolutely sounds like it could have only been dreamed up by an angry but confused sea god. A small pro-tip for monster design, conspicuously omitted from Goblin Punch’s recent checklist on the subject, is that if the first sentence includes some variation of “beautiful female humans”, start over completely.
I assume you already see both the parallels with our earlier case studies and also see why this sucks. Like the kelpies, this is an encounter that assumes a male audience (or at least playing as straight male characters, but I think on the whole most people play as characters that match their own gender more often than not), in a more biologically essentialist way than the kelpie. Like what are you supposed to do with this monster if your player characters are all women or non-men? But unlike the medusa where it only appears at first glance (at the legs, naturally) to be an ordinary, non-monstrous woman, the Nibovian wife is such a honeypot encounter that the players knowing that this type of creature exists will color all interactions with any women NPCs in the setting. Is this NPC just being friendly or are they an otherdimensional being that is only acting “kind and eager to please” to birth a ultraterrestrial creature?! Is this fun? I know that when I ran some adventures in a Numenera-esque (i.e., stealing stuff liberally) setting, I was never tempted to throw one of these at my players.
Mammas, Do Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Medusae
What underlies these usages? It’s ultimately an assumption that the players and their characters are straight men and also that all straight men view women as objects for their players to obtain just like piles of gold or magic swords. It plays on presumed predilections and anxieties of a nearly all-male audience. Do these encounters function as intended if the entire party is a troupe of gay dwarves? With the hobby becoming less niche (a good thing), it is also becoming less dominated by straight men (also good, not because of the inherent evilness of straight men but because a more diverse hobby is a larger hobby with more diverse ideas and experiences and because the medium of TTRPGs is a rich and mostly untapped avenue of expression that belongs to the full range of humanity). It was only a matter of time before medusae and the like caught up. With medusae and other formerly gendered monsters no longer defined by their gender characteristic, they can really thrive as we focus on the more interesting aspects of these monsters.
What is interesting about the medusa has never been that she’s a woman. Unless you’re Gary Gygax, the most interesting part is that the medusa has little snakes for hair and can turn you into stone. That’s pretty compelling! Let the medusae be of any gender. They’re monsters, but they’re people too.