Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In the anime Netflix movie The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, it's said that monsters were created by witches using alchemy.
Is this true for all monsters (creatures) or are ghosts and cursed considered to be different than monsters (creatures)? Are there any canon references of which monsters were created by alchemists?
In the Witcher Universe "monsters" come from a variety of sources.
Some - as you found in The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, are the result of deliberate or accidental magical creation. Many others, such as vampires, Griffins, and others were brought from other worlds during the Conjunction of Spheres (an event that occurred some thousand years previously that temporarily joined many disparate worlds).
However, the origins of many creatures are left somewhat vague, with it being unclear whether they are "natural" to the world that of the characters we see live in, or were brought in from one of the other sources I mentioned.
I can't recall, nor find any references in sources to any "monsters" which are explicitly stated by a reliable source to have existed in this world before the Conjunction - though there are some where it seems implied, such as with Sylvans, Spriggans, and Fiends
Most monsters came into the world during the Conjunction of the Spheres, an event that took place around 1500 years before the books/games - humans arrived to the world at the same time, it was originally inhabited by elves, dwarves and gnomes.
When humans settled in the northern part of the Continent - what was to become the Northern Kingdoms, the first witchers were created in the castle Rissberg by mages. While The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf itself isn't canon, it follows it well and seems inspired by Season of Storms/Sapkowski, where a mage from Rissberg is creating monsters - the same castle where witchers were originally created. However, there is no mentioning in the books of witchers creating monsters.
The event in the movie where an an assault on Kaer Morhen by peasants lead by mages follows canon. In this battle most witchers and all the mages who knew the mutation process to create new witchers (the Trial of the Grasses) were killed.
