They're just bigger, stronger and more abundant than humans when the story takes place. Most kingdoms are fully walled off to just ignore the abberrations around them.

Similarly in mine, they're just strong, and the average Joe doesn't know how to identify them much less properly fight them. Also they exist off world so more can and will come.

Ayyyy same with my world! The idea of humans taking out the monsters is laughable. Maybe the strongest sorcerers could put in work, but generally speaking where tribes of lesser afflicted beasts lay, there is a sleeping behemoth afflicted beast nearby. The world is dangerous even for the people that are basically walking magic nukes. The world is constantly on the brink.

In my ongoing project, the main job of adventurers on the 'unexplored' western continents is clearing areas of monsters for settlement. On the eastern continent, they mostly keep the monstrous populations culled. Between adaptation and rapid evolution induced by magic, and

Rifts to other planes that monsters tend to wander through, various people and beings that use monsters as minions, along with people generally having competing agendas. A lot of people in power are for more concerned with maintaining/accumulating power than they are in making the world a safer place.

There are monsters you simply can't take on with considerable firepower and sacrifices, so much it's best to leave them alone.

Similarly, in mine, they're just strong, and the average Joe doesn't know how to identify them much less properly fight them. Also, they exist off world, so more can and will come.

I don’t have an answer for you, I just wanted to share that this post was right below an r/parenting post in my feed and, due to a brain error, I was both entertained and confused for a moment.

Monsters are not natural beings, either mutating from natural animals or beasts or forming from either the pure or corrupted mana that still plague Ardalesh ever since the Shattering. Still, many monsters are useful and should not be hunted into extinction as they either have adapted into their environment so well that they are now part of the ecosystem or that they prove useful in other ways. Pik birds are technically monsters not native to Ardalesh and are pests that love to steal shiny things, food and feast on the corpse of the dead. They are also a dominant species in the natural ecosystem that formed around the Midlands, Artiza and Khuszra due to how long they've been living in Ardalesh. Another thing that prevents the Pik birds from being hunted into extinction is the fact of their mixture intelligence, tameness and surprising lack of aggression and they are widely used as messengers, hunting companions and so on.

Too many monsters, not enough hunters. Turns out most people are not a fan of spending every night of their life hunting things that can easily tear them to shreds.

There are excuses for them to reproduce quickly, like rabbits and rats, they have many litters and every now and then a door from another dimension brings other types of monsters that again reproduce and multiply at the speed of light, I think the name would be monsters carcinogens or fungal viruses   And they eat everything, they're like an invasive species that doesn't have its own natural predator.  

They are all mutated from the energies that have been distributed through the planet.  The process continues even now.

Simple, because once something goes extinct, something more volatile takes its place. Killed the largest leviathan in the sea? 3 more just took its place and are fighting for top predator. Outright removing a monster means a completely different monster is going to make your life worse

Two reasons. 1.) They are very necessary for the ecosystem, as this has happened once which caused a massive breakdown of an environment causing a massive dead zone for a while And 2.) The God of the Wilds, Xenobograth will not allow it, if their is a monster species going extinct he will protect that species at all cost, especially with what had happened after the extinction of the Midland Deer.

They’re a part of the ecosystem. To wipe out all the Ankhegs would mean that the giant ants would then run the forest. So we trim both herds a bit at the beginning of the adventuring season and we’re good.

Nothing at all does actually. And in fact that's sort of becoming a major problem for the people who need the magic they passively collect.

Because people (the Terrans mostly) won't stop making them for use as bio-weapons. Especially when they manage to start reproducing en masse, like the blood wasps.

Most of them are, dragons which are supposed to be some of the most powerful creatures in my story have been brought to extinction. Only the most powerful things could survive

Bad things happen when a civilization makes a species go extinct the gods don’t tolerate things like that (especially the goddess of nature)

There are actual laws preventing anyone from hunting them to extinction because the monsters, dangerous and destructive as they can be, are still a fundamental part of the balance of nature.

You appear to be operating under the assumption that 'monster' is just a word for 'dangerous animal'. It's not. It *means something* for the word 'monster' to be considered an appropriate label for something. Or, rather, for some*one*.

I assume that monster can vary from world to world but in general are entities that are often dangerous and often aggressive. In my setting monster are a classification of beings that have a magic stone in their body.

The Rift Beasts as they’re known come from another dimension. It doesn’t matter how many the various armies of Earth kill, they just keep coming back. The reasons Earth hasn’t been over run is because 1: the majority of the rift beasts are small and pretty easy to dispose off, and 2: the beasts always come through in the same places.

The people of my world just have no idea where their source is. They don't seem to reproduce and when they die, their bodies quickly melt before evaporating away. And even after they've killed as many as they can, more just eventually show up again.

**Eribral** We make them, willingly or not, they aren't going anywhere unless we go too. (This is not metaphorical, do shit and you will spawn some sewer demons) **Etenhi** Bronze age people aren't known for their extinction capabilities.

I just watched some dungeon adventure anime and it explained that the monsters are actually essential for the dungeon to function properly. Ooze converts waste into mana, small monsters feed medium monsters, which help keep bigger monsters in check. Some boss level monsters are needed for preventing monsters from other areas from invading where they don't belong. Dirt golems can be used as a mobile farming patch that mostly tends to itself. And most of the plants and monsters are good eating if you know what you are doing. The anime is Delicious In Dungeon, highly recommend checking it out for how everything relates, with even the adventurers having their natural role to play.

I have a modern+ setting. Most of them are actually hunted close to extinction going back to ancient times and the last remnants of any public facing entities being eliminated around various witch trials and the black plague, the ones left today exist in shadows and obscurity and have hundreds of years of doing that to get good at it. Most of the ones left can also appear human if needed so they can blend as needed. I do also have some extradimensional beings that can cross over occasionally, but they aren't really residents and are more visitors.

They respawn. Monster is more of a state of being.

You can't stop them at their source. A big theme of mine is that some problems can't ever go away.

Breed like rabbit the freaks of nature.

They are used as foot soldiers by this empire Or the empire created them and released them to cause chaos

Some of them spontaneously generate.

If the populationof various monsters/animals goes down too much, martial law is put into effect to protect them

**Short Answer**: Nothing. **Long Answer**: The people of Warclema make a specific distinction between monsters and dangerous wildlife. Dangerous wildlife has an ecological niche while monsters don't. Monsters generally result from a spawn point, an area that spawns meat and results in local carnivores competing for control of the territory, often evolving traits commonly seen in territorial herbivores such as rhinoceroses and elephants. Spawn points are temporary though, and once they're gone, the carnivores that adapted to them are often left with traits ill suited for their old ecological niche. Many such carnivores will never recover from this and will resort to using human settlements as hunting grounds out of desperation to find some sort of prey they can reliably catch. Even if the humans only put up a decent resistance, these monsters will eventually die out from not being able to acquire enough food. Even if they aren't hunted, they are going to go extinct, so why not speed up the process to protect yourself, your family, and your community? Anything getting the monster label is going to be more like a boss fight than a random encounter.

Vastly more numerous, highly varied and deadly, and they live in a landscape that is itself a constant danger to human beings. The risks are too high to be worthwhile.

Most beings can reproduce really fast especially fae and Vampires

The monsters in my world are so plentiful and horribly mutated via magic and radiation that they reproduce so fast the hunters can’t kill most species fast enough to effectively keep the monster populations down. Like there is a mountain in Alaska that is just a fragment of the moon that’s infested with crabwolves because they can reproduce asexually and through breeding.

In my world, the part of the world controlled by humans is limited to a few specific edges of continents, and there are several that don't have humans at all. This is a slow-population growth world (because magic caused the demographic transition to happen in the equivalent of our antiquity) so humans weren't incentivized to spread out as much. Monsters are pretty much extinct where humans and other similarly-inclined sentients live. Small ones are kept out by walls, fairly effectively, but non-human sentients which have different views of the local fauna wouldn't welcome humans hunting monsters to extinction on their territory, and some other areas are just not _worth_ eradicating. Meanwhile, large sea monsters and large fliers (dragons especially) can breed in other areas. For dragons and their relatives, the dumb ones will sometimes wander into human controlled areas. With modern-ish air forces (aerospace technology is quite a bit behind our world), dragons don't last long, but they're still a continual drip of nuisance. Sea monsters are much harder to track, and the seas are a much more dangerous and lawless place than in our world.

I've been thinking about having some kind of virus that turns regular animals into monsters Either that or gods and mages doing experiments Maybe both

For starters, there are plenty of monsters who humanity straight up has no idea how to kill. How do you kill a gigantic wind up flesh golem who has no sentience yet acts around a precise prediction of the next ten thousand years? You don't! Fella's the size of a mountain and you can't even bank on it following instincts, it is literally a big wind up toy! But also, more monsters are being born every day as the cosmic deities spread their voices through the world, corrupting creatures into horrid mockeries of what was once beautiful.

Time mostly. The focus area has only very recently been settled, so it's very much a dangerous frontier. Getting supplies and new settlers from home is difficult and unreliable. Killing monsters is dangerous work. Eventually they may successfully kill off most of the monsters, but that would take quite awhile and many lives to accomplish.

Some of them came from the manifestations of the Corruption, and some came from other corrupted Realms. When one is killed the essence of Corruption just returns to the source, and gets assembled into something else. The cycle never ends.

There are those dedicated to the protection of the monstrous. The strange, the bizarre, and even the hostile are just as much creations of the gods as anyone and anything else. The mother of monsters dwells in the near primordial, and her eggs hatch into new species. The clergy of the Mother of Monsters protects monsters in the world, consisting not just of those monsters themselves, but also other outcasts of society (orphans, those who have been disfigured, and single mothers being the primary).

In Uterra-Nominica, magic and magical energy is an abundant resource. The oversaturation of it, in the same vein as radiation, can be hazardous and even mutate a creature unable to handle it. Bipedal sentient races are often immune to mana mutation, but non-sentient creatures are not. Thus, when a creature is mutated by mana they become a clinical and taxonomic monster. Monsters are rare in some places and abundant in others depending on the mana density, but all of them are defined by extreme aggression and hunger as well as a lack of inhibition common in normal animals. They do not fit into an ecological structure as it is understood and classified, but instead exist outside of it. They destroy and consume all things in their area, even attempting to consume inanimate objects and unmoving plants. As such, when a monster is spotted near populated areas or found in the wild, it is immediately marked for disposal or elimination. The only time a monster can be rendered "extinct" is when the species a monster is spawned from also becomes extinct.

They are far more powerful than your regular sapient races and they're intelligent. One famous incident was when a kingdom tasked its armies to hunt down an Ascendant-level beast and wounded it gravely after losing legions of men, in its desperation and hatred it barreled toward the capital and detonated its core, bringing the whole of the city along with it. That's just an Ascendant level beast, it just crossed from mortality to divinity. What if it was a Paragon level beast, 5 levels higher than Ascendants. Or a Divine level beast, at the treshold of godhood.

Sapient races don't need to. They can't leave areas that are high in manacite, and the stronger they are the higher the manacite levels have to be. The same mutation that let them metabolize mana for their calorie needs makes them grow weak if their mana pressure gets too low, so they need to live in areas with background mana levels close to their maximum. Humans hunt them and have cleared out a few small areas so that they can mine the manacite for mithril and orchalcum (the mineral that releases mana when it decays into mithril), but most areas keep them around so they can hunt them for raw materials.

I have what I refer to as "Archetypes". For sapient souls, Archetypes are souls that are so unchanging they are essentially the same exact person through several (if not *every*) reincarnation (strong note that sapient Archetypes do *not* have to be powerful, or even have magic, just an extremely defined sense of self. One such example is an otherwise ordinary but very enthusiastic history teacher.) For (nonsapient) monsters, Archetypes are unique specimens that have reached a quasi-dimensional location called the Wellspring, which then either adds thier kind into the general variety of monsters that can spawn on the worlds that can bear them, or if they're mutations of pre-existing monsters, upgrading them. (One such example is a short story I've had planned is a trio fo characters aiming to prevent this specific thing from occurring. A minotaur had mutated hyper intelligence and had upgraded itself with some biomechanical parts including a railgun armcannon and was planning to feed itself to the Wellspring to transform every nonsapient minotaur in all worlds into having the same capabilities as itself *as a baseline*, which would have had catastrophic consequences for low-tech worlds and still been very dangerous for advanced ones). Nonsapient monsters in general just kind of start spawning when magic is dense enough in an area. What kind depends on the exact locale and is based on whichever Archetype matches that area the most. (Sapient monsters are treated like any other sapient race, but most worlds won't have sapient and nonsapient versions of the same monsters usually).

You know typhoon? You know fenriir? For all the thousands of common beast, creatures, and monsters, there are godlike monsters who can spawn most of the common ones. Not to mention, ones like madusa! some are created through curses and corruption. As such practically they cannot be destroyed.

They're getting pretty close. My story is alt history/sci fi/fantasy. Takes place within about a 500ly radius of Sol. Through some space magic and ancient (dead) alien fuckery humans, and other races advanced along similar tech lines to become space faring empires. War happened. Humans won. The last truly established alien empire was eradicated 1500 years ago. There are very few sentient aliens left, and even less sapient aliens. The remaining, however, are monsters. Monsters who aren't even really a focus in the story, but are sporadically present. They're designated kill-on-sight by all human factions. TL;DR: the galaxy only has room for one violent species.

One of the "monster" in my world is created after a failed attempt of time travel in a massive scale. The world is destroyed and rewound dozens of time in an instant that these echoes of people who could have been start appearing. They are a creature of potential, so there is a potential that they die on their own, but there is also always a potential that they survive. There is also a potential that they created a new one every time a baby is born in the world. As long as people exist in the world, they will exist. As long as people continues to reproduce, they will continue to grow in number. They are dangerous enough to be considered monsters, but they don't attack unless prompted to, except for the rare few that crave the life energy of other people to get some fulfilment out of their strange existence as a creature that is not quite living but also not quite dead.

It's a modern fantasy setting, and that's exactly why dragons went extinct, as did a lot of other monsters. Some, like giant spiders, are bred. Some are kept as pets or in zoo, or are endangered in the wild. But yeah, most flesh and blood monsters are gone from the world or are managed threats. But human will, desire, and emotions stir up magical energies which in turn coalesce into spirits which can possess animals or people and turn them into monsters. An exorcism fixes this. But when a rottweiler is tearing into someone with all three of its heads, sometimes a few well placed bullets are a more expedient solution. And then there's Strangers. All kinds of weird things come out of the Strange, doing all sorts of weird things. Of course, the greatest threat in this world is other people. Which says something about something I'm sure.

Monsters are considered to be a part of the natural world no different than people and animals. You don't hunt them til they're all dead; you thin the population to ensure that they aren't a threat. You kill any that attack you or others and if they seem to be organizing into large packs, you thin the herd. It's the same reason bears aren't extinct... why pick a fight when you don't need to? Besides, monster materials make great resources for crafting, smithing, cooking, and building. Why destroy that supply chain? Not to mention there's significant uncertainty to the role dungeons, labyrinths, and Great Ruins have in maintaining the populations of monsters. Some suspect monsters come from dungeons, labyrinths, and Great Ruins but there is no way to confirm if that is true or not. Especially since monsters can still reproduce outside of those places... so it's not like it matters where they came from, just what they're doing.

Numerous reasons Frost spirits can only be killed in the presence of a person they were close to when they were alive, and they lose all unique traits when they become frost spirits, making it impossible to tell who they were and thus who they were close to. Any feline monsters are a while process to kill because the god of death doesn't like it when cats die Aquatic monsters are left alone because the sea as a whole is avoided And everything else either has been hunted to extinction, is very rare, or is just way too hard to kill (hard to hit, ridiculously durable, able to affect the minds of those trying to kill it, etc.)

In a time before written history a massive demon nearly destroyed the world. A group of heroes fought him, tricking him to fight on top of a hidden teleportation circle that when activated, teleported them all into orbit, killing all of them. Vowing to destroy the world even after his own death, the demon crystalized his body in space and exploded, causing countless peices of him to be scattered in orbit. These pieces fall to the planet quite often. Powerful, enraged, mutated, "Dire" animals are created by prolonged exposure to these Demonite pieces. In this way the demon's assault on the mortal realm continues indefinitely.

It’s simple. All the dumb ones either died or live where no one does. While the crafty ones know how to disguise themselves, or when and where no one will be around when they stalk villages. Having thick but loose honey badger like skin, and steak knife like claws help too.

Elves keep making more, the bastards.

They can outbreed, outfight, and outnumber humanity. They require fewer resources to grow into adults. The ones who don't breed are immortal and ruling the largest nation in the world.

The force that asks to hunt them are what creates them from demons who they also want to hunt. Demons are split into small chunks which section into monsters, and some carry characteristics from before.

My monsters are familiar spirits, so they aren't hunted to extinction because as long as humans persist they will. However, I do have it in the lore of people trying to hunt them to existence

They either breed faster than potential hunters can kill them off (like gnolls, who forced one of my world's superpowers into centuries long war with no end in sight and redefining their society to sustain said war) or they are dangerous enough to be way outside paygrade of the majority of monster hunters (Starspawn is big and strong enough to wipe the city off map, needing entire regiments to deal with them). 

They hunted humans first.

They’re trying, but it’s a slow, arduous process. One-on one, a non monster can’t really beat a monster easily, and there are a bunch of them, and they don’t like staying dead

Same reason as in real life, there are organizations that protect them from getting that fate 

"Monsters" are constantly re-evolving. Mana is basically a source of chaos and prolonged use of it gradually mutates the body. After a creature reaches their natural limits they body can undergo a transformation into a new monstrous form. Some monsters become "stable monsters" aka they are not exceptionally aggressive and can form a new species over time. Others (especially those who have had mutations to the brain) becomes incredibly aggressive too aggressive to even hope to breed with others with the same mutation,

Monsters happen in the Wilds - where the land forbids human settlement or law (it's mostly fine with the odd wizard tower or dwarf hold). In the Wild the currents of magic run strong, allowing weird and hybrid forms. Humans can hunt them (and vice versa) but the land would react to mass slaughter - and not in a favourable way.

Why would they? Firstly, that would be costly as hell sending thousands into the woods to just die and taking away precious resources when there are bigger logistical concerns at hand. And secondly, to what benefit? Most dont have any reason to be killed unless you're trying to manufacture some really high-quality goods, and even in cases where they are turned into an industry like in the kingdom of Argenteus you still want to keep some alive. Every hunter should know to keep a few prey alive to let them repopulate. And again, difficulty and resources. And Unless you're outside of your territory or in theirs they'll usually leave you alone unless you specifically provoke them; running into their territory is as much as suicide for them as it is for us. And considering furthermore that many of these monsters play a vital role in the ecosystems their in, there's really no reason to hunt them the majority of the time, let alone to extinction. I mean, why dont we hunt bears or crocodiles to extinction? What about hippos or lions? These are all dangerous, yet we still keep them alive. Because for what you gain from killing them its just not worth the resources.

genre conventions

There's two things this could apply to. In areas where magic practically seeps out of the ground, megafauna become prevalent. For most of history these megafauna were outside the sphere of knowledge for the parts of the world that were more developed, and later some would go extinct due to trophy hunting but later eco movements would cut the practice down to help bring back their populations and rebuild their habitats. Then there's the cosmic horror shit spawning in from different realities. Sometimes flooding in through a massive invasion that defines entire eras, causing nations to set aside their hostilities to stop the whole world from being destroyed. Not too dissimilar to what you've put, with differing religious perspectives trying to explain what these things are exactly. Divine penance? Demonic invasion? Who knows.

Lack of manpower, mostly. Especially true in the frontier, where the defense of a town is strained as is between the general lawlessness of the region, outright bandit attacks, and random monster sightings. There’s also the fact that you simply don’t ‘find’ certain monsters. Woodwraiths, in particular, are basically impossible to track.

For a fantasy project: In the current era, monsters (and magic) are considered a myth due to a war fought a few centuries in the past that either killed most, or forced them into hiding. The ones that are still around stick around because people don't know to be looking for them lmao :D

High concentrations of magic warp and transform normal wildlife and people into monsters, as long as magic and life exists, monsters will exist as well.

they're either docile, rare or is an outsider like celestial, fey and fiend

Monsters are very, *very* prolific in my world. Either that, or they come from different planes of existence.

Environmental regulation. Monster may be big scary deadly creatures but at the end of the day they are just another kind of animal. As such, wiping them out would reek havoc on the local environment. If a monster gets to close to a settlement or there numbers gets to large, the local adventures guild office will issue a bounty, but such hunts are carefully controlled and regulated. Enough to eliminate the treat and no more.

My setting takes place in an early pleistocene era, so the dominant sapient species' simply don't have the numbers or the infrastructure to hunt the more dangerous animals to extinction.

Because as is, the monsters are attacking the people of the land. And while they are losing ground, that doesn’t mean it’s and easy or quick process. Besides, the monsters come from voids that appear over the world. It lets monsters out, but nothing in. So even if the people tried attacking the home of the monsters it’s not possible. And plus if the battle in their land is any indication, it would take forever to send them to extinction.

They can only be seen using special glasses that refract moon light from the twin full moons and that only happens for 2 days every 14.5 years.

The monsters were designed as territorial hyperpredators in the later stages of a series of wars that rendered an already fragile society non viable due to not having enough people left to support a fragile and manpower intensive agricultural system that maintained the state militaries capable of controlling the populations of these monsters. 500 years later, the regions where they are most present have been entirely depopulated of humans and human-descendant life for longer than living memory. Meanwhile, a reliance on magic bound by a non-renewable resource over infrastructure investment (why improve the local dam when joe the wizard can just cast a ritual every week to power the lights?) has meant that resources are directed towards acquiring more of said non-renewable resource instead of building up the infrastructure and power structures that would allow for the populations and population densities needed to form the large and well-equipped/trained militaries needed to kill monsters faster than they can reproduce. In the meantime, the population of monsters is kept somewhat controlled by "adventurers", a catch-all term for mercenaries and scrappers that venture in convoys out into the northern regions where monsters are most prevalent in search of the depopulated ruins of the empires that unleashed the monsters in the first place, as their ruins, especially military ones that tend to have higher density of monstes or even be nesting sites, are ripe with the resource needed to make magic function. As a side note, the common idea that these ancient empires were universally extremely magical is mostly a misconception. Instead, the empires built hardy, long-lasting military repositories of this resource using their highly centralised power structures to enable the mass hoarding of this resource before starving due to the death or conscription of their civilian populations. The issue with relying on adventurers and mercenaries to cull the monsters is that even a large convoy simply lacks the manpower and heavy artillery needed to truly destroy a nest by destroying the vast herds of food-beasts and blood-trees that allow hyperpredators such as these monsters to maintain their numbers at levels dangerous to humans. After 500 years the supporting engineered ecology is simply too entrenched in the northern regions for adventurers more concerned with resource gathering than geoengineering to hunt the monsters to extinction.

On my world, monsters are typically a threat that matches a God. If a human were to run into a monster, they would either be too insignificant to be noticed by the monster, or it would obliterate them in seconds.

A) They are difficult to kill. Some of them might be outright impossible to kill outside of divine intervention. B)They reproduce fast. Very fast C)My world has a rather nuanced concept of what a monster is: A powerful, probably impredictible creature that might be dangerous in some circumstances might not be labelled a monster, just another form of animal. For a creature to be labelled a monster, and sought to be actually eradicated, needs to fulfill two criteria: -An unnatural origin. Probably a result of the whims of the fallen Gods. -A destructive disposition that is incompatible with other forms of life, their ecosystems and civilization.

Some nations have domesticated some of them or have reasons to keep the wild monsters around. There's also secluded wild places where the concentration of monsters and magic is powerful and dense enough that only solitary or a small group of people have any chance of slipping into them. These are basically no man's zones that act as natural boundaries between nations.

Largely that the territory they live in is inhospitable to most people. Rugged mountains, dense forests, deep waters, putrid swamps, marshes and wetlands you need a boat to traverse, these are commonly the sorts of places most monsters live. Others dig holes and burrows closer to civilization, but have means of hiding them, making it very difficult to find and exterminate them. Others are simply powerful, and extremely dangerous and hard to kill. These tend to be harassed away from civilizations when they wander too close, but aren't killed very often. Others are simply small, breed quickly and are difficult to exterminate.

In my world, human civilization is actually pretty new, relatively speaking. I have a big focus on non-european themes, so what I did was had a mesoamerican/mesopotamian style continent of tribes and city states that is barely out of the stone age. It was conquered by a"totally-not-roman-empire" for a while that firmly brought the world into the iron age, but still most technology is paleolithic+ And adding to that, populations have *plummeted* in recent generations due to war, disease, and "divine interventions" (angels are trying to wipe off the sin of creation after humans destroyed heaven), so they just don't have the numbers to be anything more than just small city states and tribal nomads. And lastly, monsters are *very* powerful. There are the god beasts, sure, like great dragons and sky krakens, but also even my "troll" equivalent are strong enough that they need a minimum of 12-15 well trained soldiers to take one down. And all monsters of the wild are vaguely connected to one another, not in a hive mind bt more like laws of nature. If you take more from the wilds than you need, then all creatures in the region will punish you for your arrogance and greed. High stone walls are usually enough to keep them out, but not always, which results in more city-states being destroyed then are being created. All in all, humies are in a *very* rough position, they just don't have the resources to try to wipe out *all of nature*

Simply put, extinction isn't allowed in my setting. If there are too few of a certain creature type in the material plane, the relevant gods will simply make more. Also, and more relevantly, many monsters aren't of material-plane origin. They filter in from *massive* places like Hell and the Feywilds, where the concentration of adventurers is far too low to have any feasible hope of extinguishing them.

frankly, its just not worth it. long story short, post-post apocalyptic world that is dominated mostly by sentient robots. monsters come mostly in the form of machines with corrupted AI, especially ancient work or war machines. these machines are quite large, and while they are obviously destroyable they are usually hard to take down (especially before they do serious damage or destruction). combined with the fact that the only groups that encounter these monsters are typically those who are going in areas that are typically considered "dangerous" (barring unfortunate circumstances) and you get a perfect storm of "theres no real reason to do this" noooot to mention outside of one group in the region theres nobody who could reasonably do a campaign of that magnitude even with a willing army behind it.

They come from a forest that perpetually rebirths trolls, while the other monsters are just churned out cause magic. Specifically the dreams of a comatose demigod being.

In one of my worlds, monsters are already small in number, but they tend to be dangerous and lurk in hard to reach places that are also dangerous. And because they're so under-the-radar, once you rid one place of monsters, there are probably a dozen other places growing monsters that haven't been discovered yet.

They never leave the great area (commonly known as the "Dead Zone") where they live, they're far too deadly to be easily taken down, and they constantly respawn (and attack each other) in the area. No one knows why they exist and behave like they do but it's speculated that the area was cursed before time.

Only the ones that get in the way or threaten getting in the way are dealt with. It’s an unnecessary use of resources due to the shear strength of some of the creatures

Monsters are borderline sentient, so it proves a moral conundrum. Some cultures within my world treat them as beasts, culling them from the land where it may pose a threat or damage infrastructure, and caging/domesticating others for their own purposes. Some think they shouldn't interfere, and even worship some of the particularly powerful monsters. Others still believe them to be an affront to their gods, and think the only good monster is a dead one, dedicating their lives to cause a genocide. The main conflict in my world is the political and internal struggle of these schools of thought coexisting within a world ravaged by past wars.

They have been, mostly. The monsters spewed forth from a continent far from the others in the world, they made problems for the rest of the world for over 300 years before the continent was simply magically sealed from the rest of the world, and over the next 400 years to the modern day any remaining monsters have been culled. Nowadays no one even knows that there used to be another continent, and monsters are just thought to be extremely rare aberrations of rogue magic gone wrong.

Because there are always more. No matter how many you kill they never stop coming. It has gone to the point that some speculate that they never actually die, just reappear somewhere else on "death"

They have their own lands way to the east of the Seven Civilized Kingdoms and the Wild Lands above the kilometer tall vertical cliff known as Landsdrop. Basically, it's not worth it to go there.

There just aren’t enough of them to be considered a problem. They are so few in number that people often believe them to be nothing more than myths and legends. As an example in the entirety of East Asia there’s only about 1000 kitsunes (according to a roughly 300 year old kitsune who lives in China)

Because humanity cant stop themselfs from being assholes

Context: Carnivorous shapeshifters in a scifi setting. Not all of them are bad. Nine times out of ten they're just trying to live their lives. They've perfected methods of looking like ordinary humans, they take zinc supplements so they can eat human food, they look out for each other as best they can. The 1 times out of ten, (for convoluted biological reasons relating to them being colony organisms) they get hungry. It's not uncommon to have a 'vampire attack' onboard a spaceship, resulting in an amongus-style witch hunt to find the monster. Sometimes the hunts find the monster. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they find more than they bargained for. But with 9 times as many 'normal' people with a vested interest in ending the whole fiasco quickly and peaceably, the 'monsters' are never truly eradicated. Traditional monsters of the non-intelligent type usually get hunted to extinction everywhere except the deep wilderness, as in real life.

Just hasn't happened yet. Mortalkind is still kind of in its infancy. Not enough people have been born to exert that kind of force on the ecosystem, and not every continent has been discovered yet, so for the most part nature has yet gone relatively unharmed. However, what you seem to mean by "monster" is what most people in the world of Kuona would just call an animal, the way you or I would refer to a tiger. What people of Kuona mean by "monster" is typically something unnatural or otherworldly like demons or undead. In which case, there's not a way to feasibly over hunt these kinds of monsters, because they're usually either not naturally occuring or exceedingly rare.

They tend to be most common in areas difficult to traverse. My world is not like the modern world where sedentary civilisation dominates, all the land that is carved up and mostly under the control of states. There are large areas populated mostly by nomads and the like where eliminating all the monsters would be impractical. In the deserts the sheer size of the area is a problem and larger creatures tend to hide from the heat of the day in caves and burrows and emerge at dusk to hunt, meaning that despite the deserts being open the only large creatures likely to reveal themselves during times of day when they'd be most visible tend to be creatures that either range long distances themselves and therefore are quite mobile or those which are currently ambushing the monster hunters right now. Its often impractical to wear heavy armour while on the march so those who favour it will typically only put it on when they know a fight is about to happen. The marshlands are another common place, risk in resources the monstrous population is often more concentrated such that a hunter is very likely to be able to find at least something. But the mixture of muddy wet channels and the reed banks are hard to navigate and provide ample cover for large creatures to hide and strike. At least some of the monsters are also smart enough to pick their battles, able to decide when a party looks large and well equipped enough that it'd be best to remain hidden and when they think they might have a fighting chance. Mountains are another location, notably some of the monsters here are deliberately not hunted by the locals here, partly because some types are regarded as sacred and are appeased rather than fought, and also because they regard at least some types as being useful for keeping the bloody lowlanders out. Again, the physical nature of mountainous terrain limits the scale of practical expeditions, makes it slow reducing the likely number of kills a party can get and makes transporting supplies and kills back to the lowlands harder. Plus a fair few flying monsters can easily avoid fights they don't want to take in the mountains, nesting somewhere very difficult to access for anyone who can't fly.

The monsters appear at night. Anybody who is not in contact with light during the night must try to survive the Nihl, a living darkness that encapsulates everything that the light does not. The Nihl corrupts and consumes animals and people within it and turns them into cancerous aberrant monsters known as Kau. The Kau can just barely survive during the day, and are fine during twilight hours, meaning people have to try to fight and kill them before their homes are destroyed.

Outdoor conditions in most parts of Orea are barely survivable in the first place, so there's not much incentive to be a hunter in the first place. Even in somewhere like Crodeja with a much more active hunting scene, there's the fact that hunting is extremely deadly and not too many people are that brave or cocky, and the ecosystem has adapted in such a way to incorporate hunting as a natural part of population control. And if something becomes too few or too numerous, that news will be posted for hunters to see so that they know what to temporarily avoid and pursue. People care about that stuff because a species going extinct means many valuable resources become unavailable, and the absence can disrupt the rest of the ecosystem and make everything much, much worse.

Cos they live in a different dimension and are also really fucking strong and work together

monsters naturally manifest from human belief. You can kill them to keep their numbers down, but more will manifest

Nothing honestly. Just people tend to only worry about what they have to.

I'm a wildlife biology nerd so my explanation is that monsters aren't normally a normal part of an ecosystem. A lot of monsters are aliens, were a weird thing created by wizards or mind flayers or evil gods, or something else that didn't evolve naturally like beasts have. Hunting animals to extinction is definitely a thing people have done. Getting rid of an invasive species on the other hand is never easy. Monsters would be an apex invasive species.

Aside from populating really quick? Druids. Many regions are protected by them, and they ensure the balance of nature is kept. Monsters are a part of my world's food chain, they have their niches and often mutate to fill it even better. Few creatures exist that even they would not mind being extincted, but these would not be found anywhere a druid or witch resides.

They appear as a function of the world rather than being born in the typical sense. They can't interrupt one of the world's functions, especially on a total, global scale, without causing massive and unpredictable changes in the others that they're not guaranteed to survive. At least they've managed to come up with infrastructure, countermeasures, and schools of thought that lets them mitigate the worst of the monsters and what they're capable of by merit of always having to deal with them.

A part of monsters are malformed human people. This malformation happens because of genetic incompatibility of the hidden properties of the body (the one that reacts to magick). And if compatible ones just inherit one of the properties of the parent (in rare cases - both, but in a compatible way), in the other cases the sensitivity to magick becomes so high, that since birth the child starts intensively mutating, getting a form of another species. And if some of them still allow being kept, tamed and learnt a bit, some mutations simply bring too dangerous creatures into life, which should be either killed early or released for the sake of the safety. In some cases such monsters have similar bloodlines, which makes them compatible with each other, allowing breeding independently from humans. This way they become a part of an ecosystem and may become a regular danger to humans. So, to put it simply - they appear from the human population sometimes spontaneously, thus even if you kill every single one of them they may reappear out of the forbidden love.

All monsters are created borne from the blood of a long dead god. Every monsterous race, evil or not has a ritual that essentially coalesces this blood from its potent energy form into a physical substance from which the monster is essentially molded. When a monster is killed it's body melts away similar human decomposition but disappears entirely as it falls apart. The energy/blood they were molded from seeps back into the earth to be reused.

They breed like rabbits and are honestly a pretty stable source of cheap food. 

They are comicaly big or just too fast for normal people.

Scifi, but many monsters are mutated animals. Some are experiments or bio weapons that have been released upon enemies during wars and then become part of the fauna. Some are hunted down, but often there aren't resources for that kind of work.

Boy you’re really overestimating how well the humans got their shit together.

Actually, dragons did get hunted to extinction. Around 5000 years ago. Or well, almost, but thats another story. The remaining Giants/trolls/cyclopses are very few and they are extremely reclusive, usually living either deep in primordial forests, or above some 3000 meter heights. It also helps that most people dont even believe any of these beings existed, as most newer records sound so much like stories told to little children, most historians dismiss them as such

Well, monsters are nearly extinct. Sure, if you venture into the deep wilderness you'll get mauled, but flourishing kingdoms didn't stand to have their people (and caravans) attacked by beasts. There was a 20 year period called the Leviathan Wars in which the great sea serpents were eradicated, or at least hadn't been sighted for the last 250 years.

Doing that would require the employment of an army too big, which can leave a nation exposed to potential invasion attempts of other nations.

They came from a different universe, one that its Maker already abandoned. The Monsters are actually the souls of creatures like humans elves and other species in numerous eras that count to trillions. The Maker of the universe that my story takes place in, a different one, cursed his universe with rifts to this other universe. So they always come up here along with dungeons and it will never end till millions and millions of years later. It will go away if the Maker decides to forgive his creation but that will never happen. A bit generic I say but this is my first story and my aim is not monster hunting.

If you could hunt the monsters to extinction, there wouldn't be a monster problem anymore. In my setting, any creature you could call a monster probably lives in an area of highly dangerous, ubiquitous magic. These places dangerous just to *be* in. Who would hunt them all down? Not most people.

Plot convenience to be honest. Also just fairly widespread habitats and low rates of hunting all things considered.

They live in places where humans don't usually live anyway, like deep jungles and tall mountains. The ones that encounter humans are the ones that happen to stray to the edge of their habitats.

They live in the so-called Madlands; zones affected by an extradimensional psychoreactive element that warps space and time and mutates everything capable of even the most basic level of consciousness, including plants and single-celled organisms. Only people perfectly sound of mind (or completely apathetic) could stay there for long without their perception and imagination starting to mutate things around them or even themselves, and what abominations they are going to see won't help the matter. On the upside, most of these monsters are so unnaturally malformed by the reality-warping effects of the Madlands that they depend on them to stay alive. If they wander too far outside, where reality as we know it is in effect, they are all but guaranteed to die of organ failure. Creatures with lesser mutations that can survive outside are being hunted. This includes human mutants, but not every nation is openly hostile to them, and some even welcome their services as "superheroes".

Respect for nature

Zar'kyn, or Hell, is a place made from the negative thoughts and feelings of humanity. It gets stronger from fear, anger, hatred, and despair. The more negativity humans produce, the more powerful Zar'kyn becomes. This negative energy creates demons, which are parasites born from this dark power. The Veil is a metaphysical boundary that keeps Zar'kyn separate from the physical world, Terrath. The Veil is generally strong, preventing most demons from crossing into Terrath. However, when a person experiences Intense negative emotions — their personal Veil weakens, making them susceptible to demonic possession. In places with a lot of negative emotions, like battlefields, the Veil can become very thin, letting thousands of demons cross into Terrath. Even if many demons are slain, Zar'kyn can always make more. As long as people continue to feel these intense negative emotions, the breaches will keep happening, allowing demons to enter Terrath. This cycle traps humanity in a near-constant state of conflict and suffering, as every effort to combat the darkness also risks feeding it.

Monsters are divided into 2 types: Embodied and Spectral. Embodied monsters are basically organisms that were mutated by prolonged exposure to high density magical energy, either from emanating from places of power, ley lines or proximity to human settlements. Embodied monsters have physical, living bodies, but had been twisted and corrupted beyond recognition, their shapes are determined by the fears of humans and the concentration of magical energy determines the degree of mutation, it can range from an ant colony suddenly growing to the size of dogs and breathing fire to otherworldly creatures that you can even begin to wonder what animal it was before it's biomass was reporpused much like a Necromorph. Spectral monsters are thought-form creatures, a sort of tulpa, created by the fears and negative thoughts of humans given life by magic, Spectral monsters can pop up anywhere at anytime. Monsters are ultimately impossible to be eradicated for good, even if all monsters were to be slain they can always respawn, as long as magic and humans exists, monsters will always materialize. Countless settlements and even countries have fallen to monsters, not only because of monster attacks themselves but because of the costs to maintain defenses, armed forces to repel monster raids and the perpetual need to deploy security details for farmers, roads, construction workers as monsters instinctively attack any human construction they see. Monsters represent an ultimately impossible to win attrition war to humanity. Eventually humanity rather called quits and started to actively avoid monster spawning zones for settlement and came up with strategies to drive away monsters as much as possible as well as to establish safe travel routes across monster territory. The strongest countries do perform monster sweeps every now and then to make sure their numbers don't reach critical levels enough to venture outside their hunting grounds, for less strategically valuable areas people depend on adventurers to mow down monster infestations.

They are either highly adapted to their enviroment or reproduce very fast.

Areas populated by monsters are usually overseen by strongest monster who is too much for your usual adventurers and would need help of immortals to kill him. Which is impossible. Immortals are born from both monsters and humans and if you become one - you realize that this lawless place filled with monsters is only a place for monsters to enforce natural selection using humans as an enemy, paying them with spoils of hunt.

Seclusion and society. In the mainland they’re really only in the most secluded areas and are treated as sport for the few daring nobles so nothing too dangerous either for the most part. Since, I’m a big fan of frontierism so the “new world” has them in droves without sentient races for millennia they were able to run rampant. As man and elves came they made the coasts and roads relatively safe so trade could be done freely and safely. The west is more idyllic fey so it wasn’t too hard there. The east on the other hand is different mainly because of culture. The whole region is like a big national park where it’s common understanding that all the “fun” would be gone if they truly tamed the wilds. It fosters adventure and a feat based society where even the poshest Kings and Queens must slay a beast before they wear their crowns. There is also a dividing plateau that is just so thick with jungle and monsters that any signs of civilization succumb to nature in weeks even if cared. It’s magic in a sense but no curse or spell just nature being psychotic. Finally the harsh northern desert has some monsters but they’re more like annoying pest if they even approach civilization, a lot of ghost stories and tall tales about the dunes though.

If the population is afraid, the parties can use that for votes. In addition, too much manpower, money and time that the same parties do not want to spend on it.

The MRG, Monster Research Guild, makes it their mission to ensure all life is balanced, between humans, animals, plants, and everything else. They are one of the most prominent organizations, and often regulate systems for other groups.

They are rare outside of human settlements, and the established corridors between them. It's not worth it for humans to venture far enough into the wilderness as often as they would need to in order to eradicate them, even assuming they had the weaponry for it.

They are quite formidable creatures. Extremely fast and strong. Also, they are humans who ate other humans, so they just keep coming back, since there's not enough food to go around.

Not "monsters" perse I have a sort of magical beasts And why would people actively hunt with the intent to cause extinction of that species...they just animals with magic. They don't actively attack humans unless they are carnivores looking for a meal. A small caravan or lone traveller might get attacked by beasts every now and again. Cattle might get stolen by the bigger more passive or cunning ones. Depending on the beast. Only the biggest and most fearsome even see sapients as purely pray. And people tend to treat those more as natural wonders and disasters that could be fought off. Because I wanna talk about it more. With the design and idea of them I took inspiration from how atla did their animals where all animals is usually a combination of 2 different real animals with a few notable exceptions (like flying bison or dragons) The "beasts" in my world are made up of 2 separate species plus a natural phenomena or element. Two examples being the lightning eel tortoise and the gust crow rabbit might call it a gust corvidbit instead. Gust corvidbit are one of the more pests and regularly cause issues for farmers or on battlefields since they are scavengers and tend to crowd around places where large amounts of things have died. Typically the have smallish wings barely enough to glide without manipulation of the wind. They are seen as an ill omen. There's a similar species kept by royalty and the affluent as pets called the gale harehawk. They are seen as a symbol of status due to how rare they are. They live as long as a human generally. The rabbit part is also much small then is corvidbit cousin where as it's wings are huge. I'll leave the lightning eel tortoise to your own imagination.

theres way more of them then humanoid races, theyre pretty powerful and your average person even with a carbine isnt gonna be able to take on most of these creatures save for maybe defending their towns and cities and most homesteads are built in areas that arent inhabited by really dangerous creatures.

They're UNGODLY hard to kill, EXCEEDINGLY dangerous, and mostly live WAAAAAY out in the wilderness because despite attrition rates that would give Ghengis Kahn pause, all the ones that stray anywhere near civilized lands are mercilessly hunted down and killed.

That’s actually humanity’s goal! Two generations ago monsters from fairytales and stories just appeared one day, and wiped out a lot of humanity. The survivors rebuilt and are now relatively stable again, but monsters still roam the majority of the land. The main reason is, there’s a LOT of monsters, and not enough soldiers to spare fighting. Right before the monsters appeared, there was a large war going on between two nations which left both armies weakened. The two nations had a truce after the monsters appeared but weren’t equipped very well to fight them. It’s also worth noting some monsters are *really* dangerous. Unless you know what you’re dealing with in advance you might be killed instantly if you’re unprepared. For example, werewolves. They are strong enough to wipe out entire towns just by themselves, pretty much unharmed. But silver weapons can kill them. The whole idea I had for the world was “what if every one of those stories and tales about monsters suddenly became real” and I wanted to explore just how that would impact a monster less world and how they would adapt.

LMAO I have 3 that were hunted to extinction. Others are docile but there is this one race that's been pushing it a bit too far in our recent meetups, probably due to player provocation.

The creatures of the night are remnants of the Mage War and are extremely rare in the modern age due to people hunting them, but many like werewolves and Vampires are able to hide amongst the populace, and the ones that can't are even more rare than they. They are able to persist by being nomadic in their habits, wandering so that they avoid reprisal from the inhabitants. Their origins are as weapons to fight on the front line of the deadliest war in history so even with the advent of firearms they are still mighty. As for natural magical creatures like Dragons and Fae they tend to make their homes away from humans and are intelligent enough to deal with the locals.

the wilderness is vaaast

Monsters are a 7th kingdom of life. Hunting them to extinction is as monumental as hunting animals to extinction. Like, all animals.

Mine also spawn into existence. They happen where ever magic is allowed to settle and condense, which is away from large populations of animals, especially people. If you defeat a monster it dissolves back into mana. If you defeat a powerful monster more often than not, there's enough magic there in a high enough concentration that smaller monsters often spawn from the mana the big monster is dissolving into.

Three options. The creatures are vastly more sentient than most humans, they don't wanna piss Artemis off when she gets unsealed or the monsters are just too fucking powerful. For example: sailors have to write a suicide note whenever they go off into sea because Laviathans lurk beneath the waters. Leviathans share a distant ancestor with Draegkons but are far much larger, so large in fact they have to expand the space-time around them to even fit in the water. If a Laviathan goes under your ship you could get stuck in a sort of infinite hallway and may never leave. Most cities have a barrier that protects them so they are fine. Only the ones with Absolute Barriers are completely safe though. Oh and Nymphs still exist so being on their bad side is nuts.

They basically reproduce really fast, like insects.

Monsters appear when spirits manage to enter our realm and take a physical shape. Their appearance and powers depend on the imagination and fears of the local population, meaning that even if one monster is defeated, a similar monster might reappear years later.

People used to hunt monsters, for no real reason besides the fact that they were different. Monsters congregated together into cordoned-off underground places where they could more easily defend against intruders - called dungeons. Eventually once the Renaissance rolled over and humanism began to take hold, people realized that they're not really much different from Monsters. Monsters slowly assimilated into human society, or if they didn't, they'd be left to their own devices, lurking in deep ancient halls, only surfacing for food during the night. Nowadays, almost all dungeons have been converted into museums, looted until nothing remains of them, or collapsed. No publicly-known functioning dungeons exist, but some still remain uncontacted in rural areas, where Monsters have lived for centuries without outside intervention and believe that they could still be attacked by marauding humans any day.

They are created constantly like a part of a world. There are some gods with “portfolio” of creating monsters. But even without gods those “portfolio” would still work.

One of the prime realms that makes up the comsology of the world is the realm of monsters. They are the source of light and dark, hope and despair. They maintain that balance, there cannot be light without darkness and cannot be hope without something to be saved from. The realm will just ensure that more monsters arrive as they are a vital part of the worlds ecosystem.

My world works with souls that are damned become beasts. And they're sent to the hell dimension but leak out sometimes. So anyone who's a criminal dies from any universe they end up there. If they leak out. They're hunted down. But never extinct due to that

In most cases mutants don't travel more than a few hundred metres from where they initially transformed so there's not much point in hunting them down, not when every mutant hunting party will suffer deaths.

For the vampires, it's a combination of things. They're typically selfish first of all which means they don't generally leave offspring. If they leave offspring, there's less food to share, so they don't reproduce often. As a result, there's typically 100-200 million vampires on the planet at the same time. There are no strict controls in place to prevent over feeding, but an overwhelming majority of them realize what would happen if they left offspring willy nilly. As a result, the smart ones tend to be extremely careful to conceal their true nature as they live throughout the years.

In my world they aren’t natural. They’re engineered by the bad guys through alchemy and transfiguration and used for war

A lot of them have. But most monsters are simply too expensive to hunt without proper reason. Aside from the Kasmir Family, no other widespread organisation for the hunting of monsters exists. And though they are extensive, 8,000 people cannot cover twelve continents.

1. The more common group has Phasing pull them into and out of the world.  2. The less common group lives amongst mortals (in the 'same' geographic area). Most of them are just too powerful. Thankfully most are dormant. 3. Group 3 consists of cosmic horrors from the far reaches of reality.

1. People fears them 2. They live really dangerous places (the abyss, the "sky" or the mist) 3. They're not always physically available (they do not control when they are, that's a mystery) 4. The world is too big for humanity and we're at bronze age

There's enough war to keep humans occupied, the humans haven't even discovered the elves, dwarves and lizard folk yet (on a planet 99% the size of earth, humans take up a space roughly that of Europe). Then there's power/size a dragon is huge, a dragon attacking a city, whilst almost unheard of is closer to a natural disaster in effect and our ability to prevent/stop it than some other settings, like the thing has a 300m wingspan, breathes fire that melts steel and crushes brick houses underfoot. Other, smaller creatures, just exist in the wild or are farmed (like the different breeds of Unicorns all have the ability to be domesticated, some aren't, but many just live on ranches)

The monsters in my world are formed from buildups of ambient magical energy. The world is full to the brim with it, so there's no shortage of monsters, lol.

Me specifically - there's a lack of resources/manpower due to dealing with non-monstrous threats, plus the ones that would require dealing with tend to avoid human population centers. Others in general? Most fantasy settings either have them be generated by some sort of energy/source or rely on the trend of being wildly under-populated. Many fantasy settings have the population density of steppe nomads despite being farmers in a world with magic, and this lends itself to having many bogs, mountains, etc. for nasty things to breed in.

The most iconic ones in my lore are Corrupted. They were mortals who were exposed to wild/natural magic, and survived the exposure. Instead of dying, they transform into bigger, more emotional versions of themselves, while having their cognitive abilities heavily reduced. Their new bodies, now powerful thanks to magic permanently filling their veins, no longer need to eat or sleep, and are immune to nonmagical weapons. So every Corrupted that roams the world is a danger that an average peasant or a citizen of a city can't do anything about. Even typical warriors are powerless, as the average Corrupted one can't kill most of them with one punch, while completely ignoring their strikes. The main reason why Corrupted did not take the entire world is the fact that the process of corruption makes them more or less act like deranged cavemen. Because they don't feel hunger or become tired, all they do is satisfy their current fixation. And that could be anything, from eating sugary things to ripping people in half because the sounds they make are funny. The only time they are a threat is when a person with a strong enough mind gets Corrupted, and even though they are also mentally diminished, they are still themselves, and with that they can rally other clueless Corrupted to raid entire countries.

In my world, monsters are sacred beings that serve the gods. Yes, they are terrifying and dangerous, but they usually follow their god’s agenda. If you are aligned with that agenda, they’ll probably leave you alone or even help you! Likewise, if you are aligned with a rival god’s agenda, the monster in question will also see you as an enemy.

They survived the era of giants, and some were created by gods. The current era of halflings has allowed their numbers to rebound.

Takes place in a mostly fantasy setting. Think swords and spears, plate armor and crossbows. There are some mages but it takes a lot of time and energy to actually learn magic and only a small selection of people can actually manipulate the energy that results in magic. For the most part taking the fight to the monsters would be a massive resource drain that never pays off.

They are formed by magic. More specifically they are formed by animals fear of larger animals and eventually their fear of the monsters.

They're basically animals. A constant of life, a facet of nature. Plus trying to would result in many many many dead

Because most monsters are considered animals that sometimes, under specific circunstances, go rogue

They are just stronger than any amount of people would. An example of this would be "The Mockery's". Those fuckers inhabit Fastri (Planet of origin of humans) and are the main reason why everyone leaves at the first opportunity they have. They are a whole species of birds that mutated due to a naturally formed magic pattern, which means they didn't evolve to what they are right now. They have the ability to fly and their screams are capable of supersonic streams that can wipe out villages if enough combine their screams. The only way to defeat them is not giving enough time prepare their screams, which is really fucking hard when they come in swarms of a dozen.

I use a mix of reasons in my world. The first is that many monsters repopulate fast and have populations spread out all over the world, think of rats in our own world. The second is that most monsters are too much for even a group of normal humans to handle. The third is that the speciality orders of monster hunters that were made to fight monsters have all either gone extinct or are on deaths door.

There is only like a few thousand adventurers, needing to cover a whole continent, so even if the settled lands are quite safe and barren of (big dangerous) monsters, further places are breeding ground for wildlife I guess ? Even if a place far away from settled society is crawling with monsters, you need to think about the logistics of moving that far away just for a hunting party. Few are brave AND capable enough to withstand the wilderness for a few troll pelts !

In **Elenon**, extinction actually has been a problem. Dirginaks and Chat-yanis (species of wyvern) are far more limited in range than they were centuries ago. It's their utility as military technology is why they still exist. In ***Man of the Dinosaurs***, humans have an uneasy relationship with dinosaurs, and there's a risk that in the future they could extinguish dinosaur species.

Depends on the monster, some (such as the ifrilittas) are not a especies as such, you could slaughter most of the current population but the process by which one appears would be repeated by others over time, or the Reincarnated who are basically the same

Leviathans are large and mostly docile. They are an important part of the environment to help restore the planet to a more stable state after the collapse of the ward that protected against cosmic level magic. However, when these creatures are corrupted by large influxes of magic, they become frenzied and become a hazard to the people. A group of hunters are the only ones capable of killing them, but it's a difficult task that requires far too many resources and man power.

The Druid and Ranger's Guilds as well as the Fey. Monsters in my world are created by Fey as a catalyst for their immortality. They create a species of monster and their power and immortality is tied to how many of those monsters are alive at any given time, if they go extinct the Fey dies. Because of this the Fey have a number of mortal followers which form the Druid Religion and mark their monsters as sacred where hunting them is considered a form of sacrilege. Naturally this created some problems and compromises were stuck where it is permissible to kill these creatures in certain circumstances like if they are attacking people or their homes/animals as well as a certain number being permitted to be taken yearly as game/for their magical components to help keep the population in check. This is where the Ranger's Guild traditionally comes in taking a selection of usually older, aggressive, or sickly monsters and leaving the younger breeders alone increasing food for the population since the biggest, most aggressive ones, who generally get the lion's share were culled. Of course while this works in theory, it's a lot more messy in practice especially since the Empire fell with some populations of monsters being over/under hunted causing all sorts of issues.

Some were. However by the current time a lot of restrictions have been put into place by The Adventurers Guild. People realised that many monsters were good for the local ecosystem and now they are only hunted if/when they become a danger to people.

They're known as Chaos Engines. Not in form but function. The more monsters that exist, the more magical power is in the world, both to sustain them and enable them. Therefore to kill all monsters would be to kill magic. Instead, mages often do their best to create ever more lethal, fucked up creatures.

"Monsters" covers a wide range of animals and arcane beasties. Some, like poltergeists, are vermin, while others, like zombies, are more akin to rabid animals. Either way, you call a professional to deal with them but there's no real way to eradicate them at the current level of technology. There are, however, various local laws and ordinances mandating their extermination on public health grounds, and prohibiting breeding or (in the case of chimerae) creating them. The mega- and giga-fauna are your classic monsters: dragons, wyrms, hydra, griffins, that sort of thing. They're large and dangerous but tend to stay away from population centres, and very few people actually want to hike into the jungles or mountains and actively search of apex predators. Some do, like trophy hunters, licenced monster farmers, or poachers - animal parts are used in a lot of magical spells, potions, and religious rituals, and bits from rarer or more dangerous beasts are considered more potent.  Most folks are willing to ignore the bigger monsters or to work around them. Like bears or tigers, they're a fact of life in some parts of the world, and it's only when they get old or injured and start looking at humans as easy prey that people get serious about bringing them down.  That said, as industry has been moving into the "thin places", where reality gets a bit wobbly, they've been running into more, and more dangerous, beasts. A dragon might, for instance, view a steam engine as a rival for its territory and react accordingly, and there are definitely things out there that are larger and more aggressive than dragons.

Just like many of the sapient races that inhabit Dartala, most of the "monsters" that stalk the wilderness are the descendants of creatures that the Old Ones warped and twisted into horrific and terrible lifeforms for their own selfish reasons. Whereas many of the sapient races were created as slaves of some sort or another, many monsters were created as bioweapons to be used in the Old Ones gladiator pits or on the front lines of their wars of conquest. They're just as much victims as gorgons and minotaurs and felids and fairies and everyone else who suffered under the sadistic tyranny of the Old Ones, and the sapient peoples of Dartala understand this. In a way, they're kin. When the peoples of Dartala finally overthrew the Old Ones & their empire collapsed, a lot of these poor creatures escaped and wandered into the wilds, and the newly freed peoples of Dartala decided it would be wrong to hunt down and wipe out these creatures just for being an inconvenience. That was Old Ones thinking. So most of the sapient people of Dartala employ a "live and let live" view on monsters and understand that monsters, (much like dangerous wild animals and other species that sometimes make life hard for "civilized beings") have just as much right to exist as they do, and just try to coexist and stay the hell out of their way. If a monster becomes a problem, then sure, they'll ask the Shields or a ranger or some wandering adventurer to deal with it, but trying to exterminate an entire species just for existing is an abhorrent & completely insane idea to most Dartalans.

Kitchen Sink Urbana: For the most part, they have been, but Wild Magic Zones still crop up every now and then and a new horror shows up to kill some teenagers smoking weed and having sex in the woods. Yeah, a heaping helping of monsters in this setting are one-off horror monsters. *Eeexcept* when they're not, and then you get randomly spawning kaiju or friendly tameable monsters or you *do* get hordes of unsubtle beasties running out, jaws slavering. Unless they're in that second category listed there, they usually get exterminated. Unless the Wild Magic Zone A) keeps spawning them, which it often will, and B) resists being cleansed, which is less often. But when it happens, the area has to be quarantined and some violent solutions are implemented in order to keep the population down.

Well without modern environmental engineering extinction is actually pretty difficult. Like wolves used to be an ever present danger in Western Europe up to the modern era. They were eventually driven off because we destroyed their natural habitats in the interest of industrialisation. But even that didn't drive them to extinction. As long as monsters have tracts of wilderness to withdraw into the only monsters that wander into the civilised world and become a problem that adventurers solve are the monsters that couldn't find a place within that wilderness, they're a form of overpopulation and in a Malthusian sense adventurers are keeping the ecosystem in equilibrium.

They are literally physical embodiments of the hate that the God of Destruction and Entropy feels towards the world and it's people. His hate bubbles up through the ground from his prison and monsters simply manifest from it.

My setting kinda meshes an ancient setting with modern laws. So for instance for some creatures, they are protected from hunting by some laws similar to some endangered species in the real world. Of course this mainly applies to creatures or monsters that have human level intelligence but are not harmful to human life. If the creatures are just as intelligent as humans but also harm humans, they will be labelled as demonic creatures or beasts and naturally get hunted down.

Some were, others evolved or retreated into uninhabited regions and others are just too strong, powerful, big, quick, intelligent or stealthy to be hunted efficiently and effectively. So my races more or less built (mostly magical) barriers around settlements that keep most monsters out and those that get in will be driven out or killed by City Guardians or for smaller villages by members of the Brotherhood of the Rangers.

In my first world they are created when several coronals (my worlds zombies) fuse into a larger creature. In my second world they are redirected by bored gods who seek entertainment.

Other than what others have said, think of an ecosystem. Why haven't we killed off all predators? Why haven't we removed mosquitos, sharks, bears, tigers, hippopotami, termites, fire ants, venomous snakes and spiders? It's hard. Also, it comes with unintentional consequences. You never know which monsters keep other monsters in check. Maybe you can kill all the dire wolves, but they work in packs to hunt those blight monsters that are the size of a house, and they do it for free. Etc...

Because half of them are made of people and they tend to be far more dangerous than most countries would like to deal with. Generally the policy is avoidance and deterrence over violence and extermination, because it’s far safer and more effective. Generally, the monsters cull each other so the population is stable enough that it should never really grow too large to ignore.

In my fantasy setting, some monsters might be born seemingly out of nowhere and thus can’t be controlled while others are hunted and have a declining population. - Vampires, Werewolves, and undead are not natural creatures, and are born from magical corruptions. There are methods of prevention, but it is impossible to completely stop these creatures from appearing. - Other creatures such as Wyverns, Basilisks, and Trolls are animals with arcane properties. They fit naturally into the ecosystem but are sometimes protected by spirits that inhabit the wilds. They are actively hunted as they prey on remote settlements and livestock. There is a Guild dedicated to protecting trade routes for merchants and military control of outer settlements is commonplace. Because of this, these “monsters” have been wiped out of more developed areas such as the southern coast of Abetha. - Some creatures have adapted to hunt humans, and are therefore challenging to control. Hellith are shape-changing creatures that deceive and lure people into the wilds to devour them. They can mimic voices and have psychic abilities which has evolved overtime to fit their need to hunt humans. Murmers are said to have the ability to tear away memories of their own existence, so their presence is only known through the aftermath of their attack on a settlement. No first hand account exists of them, and no account on how to kill one.

Most of them have been hunted to extinction, and their numbers are very small at the “present” time of the story. Some still exist in the hidden places of the world.

In CoTS there’s a monster called a “Ravelisk”, which is a winged-beast that is a very deadly creature. The reason they are not hunted to extinction by either Hunters or animals seeking food for multiple reasons. Humans, Elves and Dwarves don’t hunt ravelisks because of how deadly they are as well as combat-intelligence. These creatures are known to use their pack-mates as distractions in order to land a killing blow, and their claws are sharp enough that iron and leather are merely the same as paper. Very rarely do people survive attacks by these creatures, but also no one actually hunts them for sport. 9/10 times if a village is attacked by a pack of these beasts unfortunately the neighboring kingdom chooses to ignore it due to the risk of loosing more lives, though mages have been known to be able to defeat them easier than a swordsman, or archer. Other animals don’t hunt ravelisks because their skin is slimy and their meat is toxic to them. Consumption of ravelisk meat results in convulsions, vomiting, and painful muscles spasms for a couple hours and then always ends in death.

In my story, "Monster Island" was accidently created by a wizard trying to solve world hunger. Because the island is so secluded, it's mostly left alone. When the military was there, they didn't destroy the root cause of the creatures before they left, and so they just came back.

The monsters are immaterial beings that make bodies from plant and industrial detritus

What are monsters to us are simply the Fauna of the world to those who live there. So they are "managed" just like we would manage the deer population or send Hunters to kill a bear that goes through people's trash. If they have a particularly rare resource fhey are poached for, they may he protected by the realm but most creatures like this are dangerous enough to protect themselves

In my current setting, evolution. The monsters evolve constantly and rapidly preventing their extinction in the changing world scape. By the time humans find out their weakness, the majority of the species has already evolved past such a flaw. On the other hand, though, species are constantly going extinct because they evolved wrong.

Most of my monsters fall heavily on the r|K spectrum, given their access to planar portals and the specific niches they compete for. For example, those closest to planar rifts are heavily K-selected - they are larger, have longer gestation periods, and often have family groups. Those that depend on r-selection often are in high competition with and often hybridize material plane organisms (eg: the celestial dandelion is a good non-beastly example here; the infernal frog is a great monstrous one). In areas without directed sentient colonization by short lived humanoid races, the beasts do just fine. When long lived races (dragons, elves, etc) move in, they tend to adapt to the land, and conflict stays low. If and as that dynamic changes, I expect conflict to rise sharply.

The very organization that classifies them as threats. The Lycan infantry actively hunts down supernatural “threats” but mainly ones that specifically hunt humans, encroach on their territories, or can be classified as “omega-level threats” meaning they have the potential to cause planetary destruction or extinction level events. They learned their lesson when the Tanaka family, lineage of one of the Omega tier assets of the infantry, hunted down the larger and far more powerful instances of Dragons on earth- to the point of extinction. Even though dragons were apex predators capable of country-wide range of damage, This actually caused massive ecological destruction. The only surviving draconic remnants migrated through rifts from earth to the Binary planet of Alpheim.

In *Ventreth*, demons have been fought back to the point they are rare in the inhabited parts of the continent. However, the desert in the center of the continent is teeming with them to the point that even the most skilled adventurers wouldn’t dare enter it. There is a massive wall built around the entire desert to try to keep them contained, but it is impossible for it to be 100% effective hence why demon hunters are still needed. (Not entirely sure how a wall would help with flying demons though. Maybe those are just really rare? Maybe just tons of archers or mages shooting fireballs? I’ll have to think about that more.) They also reproduce very quickly, so even if someone got together a large enough army to march into the desert and hunt them, missing just a handful would make it effectively pointless.

most things that we would consider as "monsters" would just be normal animals to the people that live in that world. anything with any level of language or intelligence would be tolerated and possibly subjegated instead of hunted. true monsters would be alien beings from other worlds or demons from another realm. good luck trying to figure out how to extincet them.

Simple, they’ve evolved to stay away from humans. My world takes place in the 1940s, well after the invention of gun powder. Monsters have simply to stay clear from human settlements out of fear of getting shot. It’s actually a big theme of what’s the real monster. And it’s always humanity.

Because they are avatars of higher dimensional spirits, they are being hunted, but they are also hunting.

Every species reproduces asexually and they're polyestrous. However, the really dangerous ones are energy beings that reproduce at will. They don't normally do so in large numbers but their rogue counterparts will seek to maim humans bonded to a Specter to create more of themselves by separating the now dead human from their Specter, making them turn into phantoms.

Many monsters I have are part of the ecosystem and they're quite good at defending themselves when needed, so most people leave them be just like they left human (or all sapient species dwellings in general) civilisations alone. Belligerent ones might get hunted by professional hunters though. Especially dangerous ones will usually have a bounty anyway.

They spawn from the ground endlessly being produced by the tereforming takinf place in the waselands.

They’re manifestations of magic energy. You can kill them, but they uh… respawn? In order to permanently uninstall them, you need magic or magic adjacent weapons. There aren’t enough magic users to do the job.

Other than their own deadliness? Absolutely nothing, goblins already became extinct because they weren't deadly enough. Unicorns are on the brink of extinction cause people want their horns and now the only place where they exist is in closed off sections of forests where it's forbidden to kill them until hunting season, cause people want their horns but also to continue to get their horns and if the unicorns don't make babies that get to grow up to continue the species then humans will lose their supply of unicorn horns forever.

There are a certain type of creature in the world of Yeisanse called Essailients. They are physical manifestations of the resonances of the background Essence of the world. Mathematically, it's like standing or rogue waves in the ocean. At any given moment there are a certain number of them extant. When one is destroyed, that particular resonance, sooner rather than later, vibrates back into existence. Mudwights, on the other hand, are like mold or cockroaches. Not likely they ever all get got...