Wikipedia is the DM’s friend. Even just hitting the random article button a few times – or spinning a virtual globe and looking up a real-world place – can produce ample gameable content. So let’s see how many ideas we can spin out of a real-world monster: The helmeted hornbill.
The casque (helmetlike structure on the head) accounts for some 11% of its 3 kg weight.
We don’t usually need to think much about the weight distribution of our monsters, but it can be an interesting way to flavor them. How is a giant flying creature's body built to accommodate that activity? Many of the prompts in my flavorful dragon post concerned that question.
Here I’m picturing a huge flightless bird with a heavy casque on its bill. It basks in the sun on ridges and mountain crests until it sees interlopers on its territory. It then curls into a ball and tips forward to roll down inclines to smash into its prey.
Unlike any other hornbill, the casque is almost solid, and is used in head-to-head combat among males.
This kind of behavior is pretty common in the real-life animal kingdom, but it rarely comes up in monster ecologies. This is a great way to present dangerous monsters that don’t care about the PCs; monsters fighting in this way are more like a hazard than a combat encounter.
It is a belief among the Punan Bah that a large helmeted hornbill guards the river between life and death.
There’s nothing wrong with Cerberus, but mixing in mythology from other parts of the world is refreshing.
[The casque] and the bill are yellow; the red secretion of the preen gland covers the sides and top of the casque and the base of the bill, but often leaves the front end of the casque and the distal half of the bill yellow.
OK you don’t need to worry about preen glands for most of your monsters, but the secretions imply things about the monster. Does it protect them from some form of moisture endemic in the dungeon? Is it a unique and valuable resource that adventurers would want to harvest?
Their call is two parts, the first consisting of a series of loud, intermittent barbet-like hoots, sometimes double-toned and over two dozen in number, which sound like the "toop" or "took" noise of an axe. These hoots gradually accelerates to climax in a cackle reminiscent of laughter; this is thought to advertise information about the caller, such as age, size, and fitness, to listening conspecifics.
Conveying the idea of sounds to players is challenging. How many distinct ways can you describe bird calls? Unless you are a birdwatcher yourself, probably not too many. Copying a description like this can add a lot of flavor over a generic “you hear birds.” All the better if a player hears the hoots and uses magic that allows them to understand animals… and gets the hornbill’s dating profile for their trouble.
Because of this call, the Helmeted Hornbill is also known in Malay as the "Kill your mother in law" bird (Tebang Mentua). It is said that there once was a man who disliked his mother in law so much that he chopped down the stilts that supported her house while she was still inside of it to get rid of her. As punishment, the gods transformed him into the Helmeted Hornbill and so he was condemned to relive his crime forever by mimicking the sound of an axe striking foundation posts, followed with cackling glee at the house crashing down.
This could work with little or no change in a folkloric campaign. More generally, this is a much more compelling and specific idea for a monster than a lot of the standard book creatures. Many of modern D&D’s monsters have cursed origins, but they tend to be abstracted or attributed to broad cosmological forces. The genius loci flavor here is much stronger and more actionable.
Helmeted hornbills mostly eat the fruit of strangler figs.
One easy way to populate a wilderness hex or fill out a random encounter table is just to take real-world terms literally. Strangler figs become literal constricting plants that kill unwary adventurers. Studying the hornbill’s behavior (and how it feeds without being caught) is a useful survival strategy for an adventurer.
I’ll leave it there, but there’s more we could harvest just from Wikipedia’s high-level view. But one last note. The real-world helmeted hornbill is critically endangered. I just donated to a group that supports conservation efforts for helmeted hornbills and other animals in Borneo. Go ahead and throw them a few bills, and enjoy the look on your players faces when you tell them how much damage they’re taking on a critical hit from a giant bird’s casque.
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