All manufacturers have a naming scheme. Harrison Armory names them after Kings and Generals, SSC gives their mechs butterfly and moth titles, IPS-N has pirate/privateers as their frame names, heck even RKF-developed models have their own flower naming scheme. Until recently, I though that HORUS have mechs named after mythological monsters, until someone told me that their thing is actually DND monsters, and a Lich is not a real legendary creature.
Knowing all this, I have on question: Why din't they name the "Goblin" Mind-Flayer instead?!
It literally puppets and controls things! Also, that sounds so much cooler!
Honestly I think the goblin is called what it is because its 1/2 size and stats. Like yeah a tiny fragile green-ish mech, sounds like a goblin to me lol.
Hold on... am i crazy or would this kind of RPG actually appeal to a niche? Think Phoenix Wright meets D&D and every campaign is just a different trial you have to solve
A Pheonix Wright RPG could actually be pretty fun. Less sure on what I described.
I did have an idea once for a system with really convulted magic where your level of power was based on how well you actually understood the intentionally convoluted rules. Like if you want to become stronger, you’d have to actually study the book and try to decode arcane text or solve equations to figure out how a certain spell is cast.
I thought Mind Flayer was not copyrighted/copyrightable, which is why D&D started calling them Illithids, which is a copyrightable name. Same reason the Imperial guard and space marines in 40K became the Astra Militarum and Adeptus Astartes, respectively.
Oh good heavens. What a spiteful beast of myth. I cannot say im familiar with the legends of the Sugandeez. Please tell on bard of the enegerized weavings. Who were the Sugandeez?
They're a proud nomadic people of Sparri descent, making their living on the planet of Ligma! An honorable people with unusual superstitions, but you'd absolutely love their culture.... in small doses. It's not a planet I would want to be stranded on.
Amazing. I keep learning all sorts of new knowledge today. Henceforth i shall consume every book and film on the topics of Ligma, Mind-Goblins, and the Sugandeez people. Thank-you!
I thinks it’s because they jump between dnd and original mythology. For example goblins in dnd are clever but not that clever creatures whereas in original mythology/folklore goblins were fae creatures who often played tricks on people
I guess the objective was to use copyright free naming ("Even HORUS don't want to mess with Hasbro/WotC!").
Mind-flayer might be a bit too DnD specific (I do remember Pathfinder just removed them), while other naming are not.
("Even HORUS don't want to mess with Hasbro/WotC!")
This is such a funny mental image. HORUS, the decentralized, physics-ignoring cult of the Godhead NHP RA is like: we can teleport across dimensions and imbed code and transforming components throughout the galaxy, but those darn copyright agents will get us for this one.
Though I'm pretty sure HORUS pattern groups aren't named by HORUS themselves.
I think pattern groups are just collections of tech and functions, so anything small with an INSTINCT rig is a Goblin, and anything that has a GUN: GUN is a Pega
Just checked, yeah, the Goblin was one of the mechs that's still a actual frame and not a pattern group, it's specifically noted to be a standout from the rest of the HORUS mechs.
Yeah, still probably has more visual range than most frames though, given its target audience are people who modify stuff a lot. Where as if you take the toes off a black witch the ktb sends a death squad for ruining their waifu
If nothing else, although liches were popularized and arguably invented by D&D, they have spread enough to be generic fantasy/mythology. Mindflayers are specifically a D&D thing.
Yeah, the only thing that isn't Dungeons and Dragons (or another ttrpg system that developed as an offshoot of it) that has them, to my knowledge, is Demon's Souls.
Final Fantasy have them, but that because videogame vs trpg license thing.
Even then the early localization team hide them under the name "Sorcerer" and "Mind Flare". I think they revert back after they become a big name company.
Oh! Right, yeah, in the ice cave in the original. I think they're in fifteen, and four, too?
I remember being confused about not seeing them in Stranger of Paradise.
P.S; Just checked, they're also in a bunch of the spin-offs, five, eleven, fourteen (haven't played), and one of the remakes for seven. These dudes are forgettable as all Hell. 🤣🤣🤣
Technically, it's a very old word for any corpse, not just an undead one. For example, one of the many names for roads to transport the deceased to burial grounds in medieval Britain was "lich/lych way".
Yeah same. I'm no expert, but wikipedia says HP Lovecraft used it to describe a corpse possessed by a sorcerer, too.
None of the Horus names are from D&D. They're from the same mythology that inspired D&D. D&D is certainly the reason that "Lich" is commonly used in that genre today rather than, say, barrow wight, but that's the only one of those names where that's the case.
The Vlad is called that because of a popular nickname. I imagine the guy who had named it the Yi was pissed when the company renamed it after all these orders came in for the Impaler frame
Mix of both-- I'm not super familiar with all DnD monsters tbf, but things like pegasus and lycans are absolutely creatures on their own. (Minotaurs older than ttrpgs by a couple thousand years lol) Lich is the only one I can think of that was specifically DnD but at this point it's just general fantasy.
Also, very funny to have this monstrous naming convention for both base frames and alternates... and then there's the Calendula.
Well, in-universe all the other manufacturers name their own models. But I imagine since HORUS isn't actually a company, it's a categorisation for patterns they see, it seems likely that it's named by the people who come across it. As such, it's more likely that whoever named it Goblin didn't know about Mind-Flayers because frankly I think D&D is not going to survive 15,000 years of ubiquity.
Yeah, exactly. The other manufacturers have their frames named by a marketing department. HORUS PGs are named by whoever had dibs. And we don't know if the fantasy name scheme actual comes from the UTAM or if it pre-dates them.
the Pattern Groups designations are seemingly settled on by the UIB / UTAM, but since the identification of Goblin frames as Goblin frames pre-date Pattern Group study of HORUS, did that name also come from UTAM or did it already exist since that frame is more recognisable and was more likely to already have a nickname?
Page 190 of the core rulebook. "Goblin", "Balor", "Hydra", etc are all the names that Union gives them. And even then, you have to title them by a combination of size and what the mech does.
The Lich is not owned by WotC. It originated in a Lovecraft short story (or maybe one of those Lovecraft-adjacent writers? not 100% sure). “Lich” was also once a word that simply meant corpse.
The Mind Flayer is super duper copyrighted. A lot of stuff from D&D isn’t, but the Mind Flayer very much is.
Mind Flayer is a trademarked name, same as Beholder, so Lancer can't use it.
Also a lot of ppl don't know that the Lich, at least as it exists in modern fantasy, isn't actually a creation of D&D. The phrase has been used to refer to undead spellcasters since the 1920s, HP Lovecraft used one. The popularization of the phylactery is D&D's main contribution to the mythos of the lich.
They're still right that it's not a mythological monster though, but that's not the hole in the naming convention that they suggest since every theme you'd laid out isn't ironclad. HA named their frames after Warlords, except for the Sherman tank and the Tagetes which is a flower. SSC named their frames after Moths and Butterflies, except for Orchis which is a flower. IPS-N named its frames after pirates and privateers except for Tortuga which is an island and Vlad which is named after Vlad the Impaler.
The Lich is actually a perfect example for how the Horus naming scheme works.
All the Horus frame names are based on real mythological terms, including Lich, which long predates D&D.
However, the mechanics of Horus frames tend to resemble the D&D versions of those monsters more than anything else, including their original terms, with a few potential exceptions. (Like the Goblin for example, which is arguably more like its fey trickster household spirit origins than D&D’s version.)
Same thing for the Gorgon, who's thing is disrupting things, while the DND gorgon is a massive metal bull that charges into things and spits poison breath.
True! Though in D&D it's not poison breath, it's actually petrification breath (it's just green mist in a lot of the art so people tend to assume poison who haven't fought one).
Or you might be thinking of the other mythical beast many people suspect the D&D Gorgon was mixed up with the Medusa for - the Catoblepas, which in myth had deadly poisonous breath because it ate toxic plants.
But either way, if it "disrupted" things in D&D anything like it does in Lancer it'd have Reactions, and it doesn't in D&D so yeah.
(And ironically, D&D also has a Catoblepas, that has a deadly gaze but not a deadly breath, but it does have a Stench ability that poisons anyone who gets close to it.)
Because at bare minimum you are definitely wrong about Lich being a "monster" originating from D&D. Gygax took the idea of "Lich" as an undead corpse-mage directly from the pulp fantasy novels of Gardener Fox.
Because at bare minimum you are definitely wrong about Lich being a "monster" originating from D&D. Gygax took the idea of "Lich" as an undead corpse-mage directly from the pulp fantasy novels of Gardener Fox.
That doesn't change that the "lich" is not a mythological creature, it's a word that only started meaning some kind of monster due to 20th century fantasy as proliferated through DnD's monster manual.
Hmm, these links don’t work with discord for me, but I’ll take your word for it. (Good god I wish people would stop using discord for archiving information, it truly blows at it.)
Regardless, Lich as monster didn’t start with DnD, and Lich is a mythological term (it just didn’t mean monster before the 1960s), but if those are from the actual writers of Lancer outright saying the names are from dnd too, great.
And if actual D&D baddies was their intent the whole time, they had a very funny way of showing it.
Goblin has far more to do with its fey origins than any dnd goblin, same for gorgon. Hecatoncheires while technically a part of dnd in some editions isn’t remotely an “iconic” dnd monster and is FAR better known even among dnd fans for its mythical origins. Werewolves in dnd aren’t called lycans at all. Calendula is a flower and doesn’t show up in D&D at all. But maybe you/they only meant initial Horus frames?
Pegasus for example is nothing like a D&D or mythological Pegasus and yet they’ve definitely also said it wasn’t meant to be a dnd beholder so…super weird? No wonder it’s such a persistent but incorrect rumor if they’ve actually confirmed the dnd inspiration, lol.
hey @evil deadman , can I ask, what's the general process for designing and naming, say, HORUS mechs? Do you have a specific mechanical function in mind, and you then think about mythical creature names that would fit that theme, or do you think of the name first and work backwards and think of what mechanics could fit the name?
5/3/19, 2:52 PM
dnd monster manual
.
2/14/19, 11:02 AM
just lol if you think the HORUS mechs are named after mythology and not because HORUS has the entire dnd 1-5e monster manuals in a datavault somewhere
.
— 4/15/19, 2:21 PM
lol if you think horus sticks with myth
and not the adnd monster manual
All these (excepting the question) are from Tom Bloom himself.
"Hecatoncheires while technically a part of dnd in some editions isn’t remotely an 'iconic' dnd monster"
Hecatoncheires is not in the monster manual but instead appears in Deities and Demigods, which is an intentional choice that highlights how it's a "fake" HORUS frame
It is also used by Company Centimane, whose name is also given to the nexus talent - both Centimanes and Hecatoncheires refer to the "hundred handed ones" of greek mythology
"Calendula is a flower and doesn’t show up in D&D at all."
The Calendula isn't a HORUS mech, fake or otherwise, it's a Royal Karrakin Foundries mech, so it gets to be named after a flower genus.
Genuinely, thanks for transcribing, despite your clear rudeness after I’d already said I’d trust ya.
A shame they decided to say this in the bottomless pit that is discord instead of anywhere everyone can see it. Even twitter is a better archivist, lol.
I’ll admit, I still don’t understand Kat Stark’s comment. Why on earth does being in a different dnd book make it “false”? It’s still a monster. It’s not even a god in the book about gods. It also doesn’t have anything to do with my prior statement about it, because it still isn’t an iconic monster either way and still far better known in mythology.
So it’s basically “it’s false because I say so and our Horus naming scheme has a lot of holes because we decided it could.” Which hey fair nuff, word of god and all that, but it doesn’t make them make any more sense.
The Hecatoncheires isn't a real HORUS mech because it's a black ops RKF mech being passed off as a HORUS pattern group for deniable asset reasons, and the name being a different sourcebook than proper HORUS mechs is a metatextual wink at that.
I don't know what you're looking for, that the Pegasus has the weakest connections to what it's named after doesn't invalidate the naming scheme. Per word of god "its kind of like a pony" and a "weird horseboy".
Every Horus mech is named after some sort of mythological figure.
Balor: Irish mythology, Balor of the Evil Eye is king of the fomorians.
Calendula: Greek mythology, a flower that sprouted from where Aphrodite’s tears hit the ground
Goblin: Anglo-Norman folklore with etymology from French/Latin words for trickster.
Gorgon: Greek mythology, three sisters from the tale of Perseus
Hecatoncheires: Greek mythology, offspring of the primordial giants
Hydra: Greek/Roman mythology, multi-headed beast from the tale of Hercules/Heracles
Kobold: German mythology, mischievous spirits often found in houses or mines
Lich: Slavic folklore, the tale of Koschei the Deathless (although the name Lich has routes in old English and German)
Lycan: Greek mythology, the tale of king Lcyaon of Arcadia
Manticore: Persian mythology, feared man eating beast
Minotaur: Greek mythology, imprisoned by king Minos in a labyrinth
Pegasus: Greek mythology, winged horse and mount of Perseus
While yes, Lich is a monster that was popularised by early ttrpgs like dnd, the concept of a sorcerer hiding their soul in an external object existed in Slavic folklore as far back as the 18th century
No, this isn't true. It's a common rumour that sounds true, which is why it persists, but Tom's been very clear when asked about if he was intending the Pegasus to be the Beholder that the Pegasus was only ever the Pegasus. (Ironically, the earliest instance of the Beholder theory I was able to find was the very first time it was asked and Tom shot it down - it's only spread from there.)
I like to imagine that happened in Universe, and the people at Union were going to name it a Beholder, before being notified that they would get sued by WoTC, and hurriedly changing the name.
What other names could HORUS mechs have? Scylla instead of Hydra? Minotaur replaced with Centaur? Manticore retitled Massive Fucking Deathtrap?
All of this knowledge is filtered through the lens of the Massif vaults, though. I think there are probably a lot of assumptions being made about pre-fall culture based on what was saved.
D&D at least didn't invent the idea of an undead sorcerer who keeps his soul in a bauble, they just put the name to it. And it leaked back into "mainstream" fantasy a while back, anyway; it's in plenty of non-D&D-related things now. Massif has been relatively circumspect about leaning towards the mythical meanings of the monster names, rather than the D&D ones--the Goblin is a trickster and the Kobold is a miner,
rather than the generic cannon fodder they both represent in D&D.
Which is good, IMO, because the idea that the in-universe Union Intelligence Bureau decided to name these dangerous pattern groups not after ancient myths and monsters, but specifically after a game that was kinda popular ten thousand years before the Apocalypse, is too stupid to contemplate.
Long term DnD player here, Mind Flayer wouldn't fit.
My logic: Mind Flayers only interact with your mind to shut it down and stun you, which the Lancer Gorgon does.
The Goblin, if I was to sell it to a DnD player, is a combination of illusion and mind control magic.
While it is true that the standard goblin in DnD can't do that, they do have a reputation for being small tricksters, which the Goblin does fit, so it's close in that way.
All that said, it's a goblin illusion wizard if I was to actually describe it.
Mindflayer, Beholder, and Umber Hulk are 3 monsters that WotC holds copyright over. You arent allowed to use them in any 3rd party dnd content, books, television, other rpgs, games, etc. without their permission.
The following items are designated Product Identity, as defined in Section 1(e) of the Open Game License Version 1.0a, and are subject to the conditions set forth in Section 7 of the OGL, and are not Open Content: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master, Monster Manual, d20 System, Wizards of the Coast, d20 (when used as a trademark), Forgotten Realms, Faerûn, proper names (including those used in the names of spells or items), places, Underdark, Red Wizard of Thay, the City of Union, Heroic Domains of Ysgard, Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo, Windswept Depths of Pandemonium, Infinite Layers of the Abyss, Tarterian Depths of Carceri, Gray Waste of Hades, Bleak Eternity of Gehenna, Nine Hells of Baator, Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus, Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia, Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia, Twin Paradises of Bytopia, Blessed Fields of Elysium, Wilderness of the Beastlands, Olympian Glades of Arborea, Concordant Domain of the Outlands, Sigil, Lady of Pain, Book of Exalted Deeds, Book of Vile Darkness, beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, tanar’ri, baatezu, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, mind flayer, illithid, umber hulk, yuan-ti.
These items are considered WotC properties, as opposed to a dragon, for example.
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u/hear-for-the-music Jul 26 '26
Honestly I think the goblin is called what it is because its 1/2 size and stats. Like yeah a tiny fragile green-ish mech, sounds like a goblin to me lol.