Dungeon fantasy's archetypal monsters

 This is a sequel to my post on archetypal spells; in much the same style, I’ve gone through a fat stack of monster manuals to find out what themes unite the core coterie of monsters therein, and what niches they fill.

—

This is the minimum viable bestiary: what’s the least a DM needs to make informed choices while making and running their own monsters? (If you’ll recall my GLoG reviews, my primary critique of most hacks were their lacks of bestiaries, so pay attention.)

• A normal dude with a shitty spear, the soil upon which cathedrals are built.
• A wizard, the scapegoat for bullshit.
• Two mundane animals, something dangerous and something not.
• Some faceless minions, so one may enjoy butchery.
• A sack of hit points and malice, to fuel a starting dungeon.
• A monster with some extraordinary power, to show what a broken rule looks like.
• A campaign-level superthreat, usually a dragon, to show where the road ends.

—

This is the full archetypal bestiary: if you wanted to use your bestiary to repopulate any standard module without headache, what would you need in it, given that your monster stats can acommodate on-the-fly level tuning? (Bloated bestiaries are often primarily composed of bestial and intelligent variants of what the latter list considers the same monster, same for good and evil variants.)

ANIMAL/INSECT

• Mundane animal (typically dangerous)
• Magical variant animal (typically giant)
• Hybrid
• Swarm
• Prehistoric animal
• Fantastical nonmagical animal

HUMAN

• Unskilled combatant
• Wizard
• Priest (typically evil)
• Skilled combatant (typically evil)
• Tradesperson
• Class-analogue (if not covered already)

HUMAN-ADJACENT

• Big guy (particularly orc)
• Little guy (particularly goblin/kobold)
• Hybrid (typically plant/animal)
• From elsewhere (typically underground/another plane)
• Giant
• The French

UNDEAD

• Zombie
• Skeleton
• Incorporeal
• Vampire
• Mummy
• Class-analogue (if not covered already)

OCCULT

• Dragon
• Fiend (particularly demon/devil)
• Lovecraftian horror
• Angel
• Brain-eater
• Task-bound

ENVIRONMENT

• Underwater
• Burrowing  
• Filth-dweller
• Ice-dweller
• Flying
• Nature spirit

CAPABILITY

• Petrification
• Corrosion
• Teleportation
• Regeneration
• Infection (particularly lycanthropy)
• Immunity (typically invulnerability)

BODY

• Elemental (particularly genie)
• Ooze (particularly cube)
• Ophidian
• Mouth with legs
• Invisible
• Disembodied head

FORMS

• Construct (particularly golem/automaton)
• Animate object (particularly gargoyle)
• Murderous plant
• Disguised predator
• Shapeshifter (particularly doppelgänger/mimic)
• Collector

Please do comment if you think I've forgotten or misapprehended anything, in service of making this as valuable a resource as possible. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.