While exploring the Undead Burg less than a week after Dark Souls’ launch, Patrick Todd found something weird - a docile creature that resembled a semi-hatched egg with insect legs. It stood there as if waiting to be slain, white tendrils atop its head lilting like seagrass. Though Todd had passed that exact location many times, he’d never spotted a creature there before.
“I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?’” he recalls of that first Vagrant encounter. “It was just such a weird, baffling moment. I didn’t fully appreciate Vagrants until later on. It just stood out as a rare event. Their design is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, you might call it ‘cute Lovecraft-ian’. The Good variety looks like an egg with legs. There’s a really rare event in Final Fantasy II that involves seeing a rare monster in a certain cave. So it initially just stood out as, oh, this is Dark Souls’ version of a rare-creature type thing.”