Hello! I am working on a spooky tabletop rpg set in 1900 ish UK and I'm looking for creatures to include in the bestiary. Do you have any recommendations for iconic Welsh folklore to include? Interested in either ones that are too iconic to be left out, or little known ones that never show up anywhere.
I'm from Scotland so I've got quite a lot from here but don't want to leave the others under-represented!
The big obvious ones are likely to be things you already have a Scottish or Irish equivalent of; faeries and banshees and that. The Welsh versions are a bit different, but probably too similar for satisfactory game design
Okay, so, a lil selection:
Llamhigyn y Dŵr (plural: llamhigau). Little flocking critters with the head/body of a frog, the wings of a bat, and the tail of a scorpion. They live around ponds and streams, and come out to fly over the water with a sort of swooping, leaping, hopping kind of flight path at dusk. They'll eat sheep who get too close. Maybe a small child that falls in.
But their main offences are snapping fishing nets/lines, and tangling the manes of horses that drink the water. Absolute scamps.
(They are clearly mythologised Daubenton's bats, given the faerie treatment)
Afanc/Addanc. Modern Welsh uses 'afanc' to mean beaver, but either spelling is appropriate here. The afanc is a weird lake monster, with super varied descriptions; things it looks a bit like have included crocodiles, beavers, dwarfs, demons, etc. So you can take your pick. I favour the giant river otter idea myself - croc-like in the water, beaver tail, etc.
Like all good lake monsters, it eats you if you enter its lake. Much like Nessie, there's one in Llyn Tegid called Teggie
Twrch Trwyth. Fuck off massive boar with a comb and scissors growing between its ears, which were the only things capable of giving giants a haircut
There's a bunch of things mentioned in the Arthurian fragments - the Cinbin are cynocephali, or possibly werewolf-like creatures, and Cath Palug is a monstrous black cat with aquatic traits born of a pig. We don't know a tonne about either, so they're nicely open to interpretation.
A wildcard choice is vampire furniture. You get in the bed, it drains your life force. Doesn't really have a name, mind, it just turns up in myths sometimes
Oh! Wait, Cŵn Annwn! Singular: Ci Annwn. Hounds of the Wild Hunt. If you hear their growling, they're after you; if they sound loud, they're far away, but the quieter they get, the closer they are. Relatedly, the gwyllgi is the Welsh version of the Black Dog
I can keep going if you need, but that's probably a good number to be starting with!
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