Self-designation Terms for Different Monster Hunter Teams in the World

[tbone]

Originally Posted by Icelander

What kind of group do you imagine calls themselves that?

Any team that considers monsters to be vermin!

But probably a better name for specialists who deal in swarms and other creepy-crawly monsters.

[Donny Brook]

Here's some ideas for autonomous and self-organized teams around the world. Please note that non-English names might lack in idiomatic finesse, but hopefully the idea will be clear enough to work with.

Doom Squad (This is actually the name of my gang of PCs in a campaign set in the U.S. The name is a riff on the video game 'Doom'.)

Jah Bones (A self-consciously tongue-in-cheek name for a Rastafarian team.)

Los Angeles Luchadores ('The Fighting Angels', pro-wrestlers turned monster hunters in Southern California.)

The Camelots (A British team centered around a retired rock band of the same name.)

Achtsamkraft (A portmanteau name meaning 'Watch Force', for a German-language team.)

Bonicats (An abbreviation from Latin 'bonis catulastri' meaning roughly 'good guys', for teams formed by local Knights of Columbus clubs.)

Kàn dàole, zuò dàole (This is translilterated Mandarin meaning roughly 'See Right, Do Right'. It is a riff on a quote from Confusius: "To see the right and not do it is cowardice." It's the name of a team of monster hunters in China or Hong Kong. They sometimes shorten it further to simply Kan Zuo ('See, Do').

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tbone

Any team that considers monsters to be vermin!

But probably a better name for specialists who deal in swarms and other creepy-crawly monsters.

I expect there are any number of people aware of the supernatural who consider monsters to be vermin. Outside of (mostly) small and rare confluences of higher mana, few blatantly supernatural phenomena tend to be visible. Various spirits, invisible and undetectable to anyone who does not have special gifts, are much more common than anything physical. Their influence can cause instability, violence and aberrant behavior in animals and humans, which at night, in the right conditions, might in some cases manifest briefly as physical changes.

While there are intelligent spirits, even ones that seem more knowledgeable than any human, the vast majority of spirits are animalistic, barely sentient. Some are nothing but vague spiritual shapes, husks or shells of something, existing only as hunger or negative influences. Occultists have various terms for such entities, but the Kabbalah term 'qlippoth' captures them perfectly. And from most points of view, qlippoth are vermin.

[Ashtagon]

Has Scoobies been listed yet?

Riffing on that theme, you could probably use any cartoon "gang name" as the basis. *****cats, Planeteers (especially if the monsters are "polluting" the natural order), [Rescue] Rangers,

ETA: okay... not sure why the censors thought a word that pairs with lightning needed to go!

[Maz]

Troldejægerene (danish for The Troll Hunters). The danish military special operations force (similar in many ways to the US rangers) is called Jægerkorpset (the hunter corps). And it would make sense that a group of Monster-hunters would draw inspiration from them, or maybe be directly organised under them if part of the military.

It could also make some modern mythology sense to classify most monsters as "trolls".

..although they might NOT pick it to not be mixed up with popular children show of the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trollh...les_of_Arcadia ;)

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm looking for what terms 'Monster Hunters' who belong to various secret groups or organzations in my setting call themselves.

I've already established the fact that the British commandos of the Shadow Court call themselves Rangers (which is short for the tongue-in-cheek Queen's Paranormal Rangers, and yes, is not unrelated to Tolkien).

Oh, I just stumbled across this sentence of yours and the first thing that came to mind when I saw what the abbreviation of the name of this monster hunter team is was a certain football club*

*Proper football, of course.

[weby]

So additional things:
(Night) hunters
The stand (for humanity)
Protectors (of humanity)
Investigators (of the paranormal)

The things in parenthesis being optional additions. And of course any of the given names here or in the above posts in any other language..

[Michele]

In a MH campaign set in Italy in the late 1930s, the Patron organization was the Fraternitas Sancti Leonis (of GURPS Cabal fame), and this parent organization called each monster hunter a "defensor" (plural "defensores", in Latin, defender/s). But the PCs, while aware of this designation, made a conscious choice to use opaque terms. They referred to themselves as "we" or "the group" (later, group 1 and group 2), and to the Fraternitas as "the palace". They thought that overhearing, or, worse, intercepting and reading, a sentence like "the defensores will be there in two days to solve the problem" was exactly the kind of thing which would make people raise their eyebrows, and eventually cause dangerous leaks.

Their handler (GM's mouthpiece) accepted that, but the name was still in use in the upper levels of the Fraternitas.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

Has Scoobies been listed yet?

Riffing on that theme, you could probably use any cartoon "gang name" as the basis. *****cats, Planeteers (especially if the monsters are "polluting" the natural order), [Rescue] Rangers,

ETA: okay... not sure why the censors thought a word that pairs with lightning needed to go!

OK, that is pretty odd. On the other hand, 'thunder' has more than five letters, so maybe you made a weird typo that the software thought was rude?

Testing: Thundercats. Apparently that works, so I'm guessing typo, I'm just not sure what typo.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Oh, I just stumbled across this sentence of yours and the first thing that came to mind when I saw what the abbreviation of the name of this monster hunter team is was a certain football club*

*Proper football, of course.

Originally Posted by Michele

In a MH campaign set in Italy in the late 1930s, the Patron organization was the Fraternitas Sancti Leonis (of GURPS Cabal fame), and this parent organization called each monster hunter a "defensor" (plural "defensores", in Latin, defender/s). But the PCs, while aware of this designation, made a conscious choice to use opaque terms. They referred to themselves as "we" or "the group" (later, group 1 and group 2), and to the Fraternitas as "the palace". They thought that overhearing, or, worse, intercepting and reading, a sentence like "the defensores will be there in two days to solve the problem" was exactly the kind of thing which would make people raise their eyebrows, and eventually cause dangerous leaks.

Their handler (GM's mouthpiece) accepted that, but the name was still in use in the upper levels of the Fraternitas.

Indeed, it is good tradecraft to use terms that ordinary people, unaware of any big Secrets, can interpret as something innocuous, such as a football club.

Most groups of Monster Hunters are likely to have planning sessions, briefings, after-action reports and/or memorials, if not social gatherings, where everyone present is aware of the Secret, and, in any case, far more incriminating things are said than the use of a self-designation for them as a group.

Even if a group of counter-supernatural operatives all belong to a real tactical unit, like BOPE in Rio or the Pakistani 'Black Storks' / SSG and their missions are covered as mundane training, anti-drug raids or counterterrorism, I imagine that those who fight paranormal threats want to distinguish themselves from other commandos who are not aware of the occult. Whether formally or informally, those who take up arms against the extra-mundane are set apart and probably think of themseves as belonging to an exclusive group.