Last week I kept seeing posts and comments about Final Fantasy X and decided to lean into it this weekend and reinstalled my copy of the X/X-2 Remasters and started up a new file and something struck me as I was playing through it. If you haven’t played this game and care about that kind of stuff, spoilers are incoming for a 20-year-old game.
Right away we are introduced to the big bad of the game – a creature known as Sin. This creature is a titanic force of destruction that ravages the world of Spira, destroying cities that get too big. Believing Sin to be a punishment for straying from the path of their god and relying on machines to do the work that was meant for mankind, they have lived with Sin for 1,000 years. It cannot be defeated by conventional means – instead the world relies on powerful spellcasters known as Summoners. They undertake a dangerous pilgrimage visiting each of the Temples in Spira to learn how to perform “the Final Summoning” and temporarily defeat Sin. This process claims the Summoner’s life, but provides a period of relief to Spira known as “the Calm.” However, Sin always returns and the cycle of the pilgrimage continues as the next Summoner gives their life to defeat Sin again.
The futility of fighting Sin conventionally is shown at a particular point in the game where the military arm of the church attempts to draw in Sin to destroy it using forbidden weapons. The plan fails spectacularly and Sin escapes without a scratch on him. And it was while watching this scene that I realized something.
Sin is what the Tarrasque wants to be, and this concept is a great way to frame the titanic beast that destroys nations and ends Empires before going back to sleep for years. Kingdoms and armies through the ages have sought for ways to stave off their impending doom at the hands of the raging monster that comes from deep in the earth but so far no one has ever accomplished anything but hastening their own demise.
Over the last several centuries, a powerful ritual has been used to keep the titanic beast at bay, requiring rare and powerful reagents that take years to regrow after they are harvested. After gathering these components from the most dangerous places in the world they must then complete the ritual. Not only are these individuals often targeted by doomsday cults and other nihilistic organizations that worship the Tarrasque as a god and want to see it unmake the entire world, but they are faced with the prospect that they will have to sacrifice one (or more) of their own to the sheer power of the magic that is required to subdue the Tarrasque and send it back to sleep. But maybe the PCs can find a way to break the cycle and uncover a way to put the monster to rest for eternity instead of a mere decade.
This solves a lot of problems with creatures like the Tarrasque as they are written – they are meant to be these creatures of unfathomable power that in some settings are spawn or avatars of the gods themselves. But then you put stats to it, and as the old trope goes – if it has stats, it can be killed. And then you get armchair treatises written by gamers that decide to look at things in a vacuum and make claims that the Tarrasque can be killed by a level one character with a fly speed and a magical bow, never mind that you won’t be facing said creature in the vacuum their flawed thought exercise took place in in the first place.
Using them as a framing device that can’t be fought, but only evaded or overcome casts the game in a different light and lets you as the DM say “there are some things in this setting that you cannot fight” and helps the characters reframe their own expectations about the game and what they may be facing elsewhere.
What are your thoughts? What are some of your favorite ways to reframe these kinds of monsters and prevent them from being just another stat block?
Ben Erickson
