Gremlin

Watch out for this little monster.

Gremlins are a kind of monster originating from Britain "neo-mythology", having been concocted by members of the British Royal Air Force within the 1920s as a goblin-like creature that loves mechanical devices and tinkering - or, more accurately, breaking things, especially to get people hurt.

Up to 1983 the most famous gremlin in popular culture was the one Richard Matheson sicced on William Shatner in the 1961 anthology Alone by Night, very soon a Twilight Zone episode. And there was a car. Loosely defined.

Dungeons & Dragons overlooked this breed until Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, when in GenCon XI that post-Monster Manual Jermlaine filled that niche - perhaps from the French.

Gremlins by that name became famous again in the 1980s, that cultural wasteland, because of the Twilight Zone movie and then a disgustingly bad Stephen Spielberg outing. So of course various roleplaying games had to catch up and include them somewhere. For Dungeons & Dragons they got into the Companion rules where, as usual, they appear out of alphabetic order. They wouldn't have it any other way, we suppose.

Gremlins most commonly appear in dieselpunk or urban fantasy settings, where their status as magical creatures that love to meddle with machines makes most sense. Settings aiming more to fantasy, like D&D noted above, will portray them as a particularly nasty goblin or faerie creature with a particular knack for traps.

D&D

In Dungeons & Dragons, at least in AD&D, gremlins are described as a member of the goblinoid family that resemble imps. Fiend Folio didn't define them but did describe several monsters either as gremlins (galltrit) or as jermlaine-related (mite aka pestie, then snyad).

By 1993 the Monstrous Manual had for the Gremlin category five different kinds: the standard gremlin, the Fremlin (Friendly gremlin), and the aforementioned Galltrit, Mite, and Snyad. For whatever reason the Jermlaine were NOT so annexed; they're listed on their own as "Gremlin, Jermlaine". Also this Manual claimed the big five have wings and small tails, untrue of mites and snyads (especially since these live in tiny underground passageways).

Ravenloft is home to its own divergent member of the species, the wingless gremishka.

Because WotC was too slow to bring back the Mite for Third Edition, Frog God Games's Tome of Horrors includes the Mite again. This has them as goblinoid (perhaps to avoid the 2e classifications) and disassociates the pestie into a subtype. The third Tome volume has a separate entry on gremlins. Obviously none of this is D&D canon.

Pathfinder

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Various gremlinkind debuted in the Pathfinder adventure path Legacy of Fire, at least for its opening act Howl of the Carrion King - and indeed, in the desert you do not want to meet up with them. They also infest the Darklands. They've shown up in various Bestiaries.

Gallery

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  2e Monstrous Manual

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