I’d love to see monsters that are, instead of threats, irritants.
Bear with me, I know that sounds moronic.
Ethereal Flincher: A tiny creature, cloaked in shadow. It will stay still for hours at a time, unless it’s dark or shadowed. When it moves, the player gets a perception check to spot it, and searching manually can help you find it as well, if you suspect one is there. The Flincher won’t attack you, unless seriously pressed into a corner, and even then, it does minimal damage, even in swarms. Instead, it waits until you’re sleeping or out of sight, slips in, grabs a single item that you’ve handled recently, and slips out, never to be seen again. (Targeting items of perceived “value”). If the capacity is there, perhaps there could be ‘nests’ on the map (not showing up as anything other than forest tiles, so tracking and searching is important), where all your stolen loot is stashed.
The Street Sweeper: When night falls, the robots come out… to CLEAN. Making a fair amount of noise, and trailing zombie hoards behind it, the Sweeper is a bulky robot that prowls around sidewalks and streets, mopping up blood, putting out fires, and refining lost goods for disposal at the recycling bin of the local public works facility. They’re armored, but stupid, and if you can get them following a trail of spray paint, you can lead them through a series of traps designed to crack them open for their sweet cargo of batteries, ready-to-go rags, and zombie meat.
The Gardner: The trees be attackin! Or, well, defending. The trees are actually mostly just trees. But sometimes, a single goo-infested tree will gain just enough mobility to have the presence of mind to try to preserve its leafy brothers. Gardners will harvest fruit in a mimicry of human farmers, plant trees and flowers, and set a series of mostly-non-lethal but irritating natural traps to deter any interlopers from their small patch of Eden. Finding one can net you some valuable chemical compounds if you can butcher it, but first you’ll have to spot the forest for the trees, and get through the random string of shallow pits, snares, acorn catapults, and resin globs.
