Sometimes, I hate store-bought, folklore-based, history-accurate monsters. This has become a bigger problem for me now that I’ve been running a medieval East Asian inspired campaign where my players dwarf my knowledge of the creatures that pop up in these cultures. Don’t get me wrong, I love folklore, and the creatures we can find there are the basis of everything I expect to see in an RPG campaign, but therein lies the real problem: expectation.
If I namedrop a creature my players are familiar with, they would expect that it would act and behave just like in legend – the first time they find dish headed a turtle-like humanoid at the shore of a river they will instantly expect a kappa, taking away any mystery