Friday, May 20, 2011

The Perils of Sleeping In A Dungeon

Some theorists hold that the monsters in dungeons are all adventurers who went to sleep and, when they woke up, found themselves transformed.

This is said to explain why more powerful monsters tend to live on the deeper dungeon levels, when one would expect them to seek the sunlight. Greater heroes, the theory says, will tend to explore deeper, and become more dangerous monsters.

(Author's Note: I have misplaced my notes, and cannot recall where I saw the initial research that inspired this post. Can anyone help?)

2 comments:

  1. Doesn't one of the youths in a Narnia tales turn into a dragon? I believe that was based on Germanic myth where Fafnir was turned into a dragon because of his great greed.

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  2. Yeah, it's the obnoxious, spoiled brat, a cousin of the other kids, that gets transformed.
    And Fafnir used to be a dwarf. This makes Sigfried or Sigurd a "dwarfslayer"...
    You could even make this into a story: "And the treasure was guarded by a giant, wild, angry dragon with fiery breath, and I slayed it." "I heard it was guarded by a dwarf...an old, crippled dwarf." "Yeah, uh, but... he transformed into a dragon with all that greed, really! And it spit fire as hot as a smith's hearth!" "Uhuh... yeah, whatever...you pay, dwarfslayer."

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