I started off thinking about my own version of
Brendan's differentiating weapon with properties other than how much damage they do and then I started thinking about pikes and how cool it would be if PCs hired a bunch of pikemen to travel around with them but then I thought pikes are a lousy weapon in a dungeon, you're better off with a shortsword in those tight spaces then I was wondering about what kinds of foes or situations would it make sense for the PCs to hire a bunch of pikemen if not dungeon crawling and the answer to that is wide open spaces and enemies that are something like cavalry since historically that's what pikes were good against so that means beasts, animals, humanoids I suppose too but I like the idea of big scary beasts being fended off by a handful of guys getting paid like 5 gold a day and they're all scared shitless but their wizard boss is like "it'll be fine boys, just jab him if he gets any closer."
Dragons are a big beast but their fire breathing would render pikes useless, so it's gotta be a big beast with no ranged attack, how about wyverns? Then I remembered how I want to link Lycanthropes with Medusas via Gargoyles like this: Medusa/Gorgon type creatures are really intelligent and really old and for whatever reason their turn to stone effect doesn't work against Lycanthropes the same way it does against every other kind of creature, instead of turning to stone they turn to stone but are able to move and think and they are forced to serve the Medusas who make them. Maybe the ancient Medusa language
Gorgole has a magic effect on them. Then I think maybe some were creatures turn into something other than Gargoyles maybe their mutants, maybe they look away at the last minute maybe they drank an anti turn-to-stone potion made by a werewolf alchemist I don't know. The whole Medusa/Gargoyle/Lycanthrope relationship will have to be explored another time, here's the sketch that resulted from the above silliness:
