The Manticore - Man Eating Beast from Persia


Dungeon and Dragons, the first and most popular RPG game designed, isn’t lacking in the departments of monsters to throw at the players. Among them, the Manticore stands as one of its most utilized and popular one, serving as early challenges for low-level parties. But just like the vast majorities of dnd monsters, the Manticore take roots in real life mythology of the lands of the Achaemenid Empire, better known as Persia.

Just like most ancient mythological monsters, the Manticore’s appearances varied from time to time but kept some core features. These being a man-faced lion with a scorpion tale delivering paralyzing poisons, while wings and throwing quills being added every known and then. Behavior-
wise, the Manticore was purely a feral predator, killing to eat rather than inflicting torment and its appetite was ravenous. Its three rows of teeth allowed them to chew anything between flesh and bone to metal and stone, leaving nothing of its victims behind. The creature was said to live in faraway lands, most notably India as to the people of Persia they were full of mysteries and dangers.

Like many other creatures of legends, other cultures adopted look alike in parallel to the Persian Manticore. The two most popular in Europe being the Egyptian Sphynx and the Greek Chimera. Both shares the lion-like body, the Sphynx keeps the human face while the Chimera instead has a second head belonging to a goat. Behavior-wise, the Chimera shares the more feral and predatory nature of the Manticore. Meanwhile, the Sphynx takes on a more malevolent intelligence and torments its victims with riddles. A bit further away, coming from the lands of Japan lived the Nue, a Yokai with the body of a tiger, the head of a monkey and a serpent tail.

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