Legamon "Illustrated" (OSR)

 One of the delightfully-creative things to have come out of the OSR wing of RPGs is legamon, or "legallydistinctémon." Created for the GLOG RPG (Goblin's Laws of Gaming, a minimally-structured ruleset that retains much of the essence of D&D while dropping most of the trappings), legamon are monsters much like the ones from an unnamed popular franchise, yet legally distinct—hence the name.

It started on the Numbers Aren't Real blog with tables to create your own legamon, which was automated in a post on Whose Measure God Could Not Take, and has spun out of control ever since. Good blog posts to see for more can be found here, here, and here, and many more places on the Internet and on Discord than I could link to. It's a fun setting with interesting permutations and repercussions that have a lot of gamability.

The one downside was that, of course, the original franchise is very well known for some iconic art pieces depicting their most popular monsters, and a lot of very creative people generating these gamable monsters don't have the same level of skill, talent, or free time to do the 'mons justice. Some bloggers have been kind enough to release potential legamon art under a CC license for others to use (like this guy) and there are people's own fan-art 'mon-like creations on DeviantArt and Artstation, but for the most part gamers are left to their own devices.

Until now.

BuzzFeed data scientist Max Woolf forced a bot to look at all Pokémon ever made and then generate its own. He's been posting the results on Twitter, and they're... interesting. I'm not sure they're Creative Commons or under copyright, but he Open Sourced the image preprocessing code used, so it's feasible to generate your own if you're a little tech savvy—which is, in my experience, more common among the gamer crowd than artistic talent.

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