- Yeah, I'd tap that.
FrankT:
I want to get this out of the way: Tomb Tappers were Always Stupid. They are a race of creatures from the completely gonzo “Netheril: Empire of Magic” box set whose sole purpose in life is to make tunnels, attack adventurers, and store magic items in glowing vaults. They are probably the laziest, stupidest reason for a dungeon full of monsters and magical treasure to exist. Also, their entire list of immunities is a bunch of bullshit that was obviously made up to inconvenience adventurers. Hell, in their original conception they did a lot more damage in melee by putting their hammers down. Like the writer couldn't even fucking do math.
But the 3rd edition conversion is possibly even stupider. Tomb Tappers are a synthetic race, so the author here decided to make them a “Construct” despite the fact that that is not what the fucking Construct type means. The old 9 hit die Tomb Tapper for no earthly reason got converted as a CR 14 monster, but none of its abilities are remotely up to snuff there. A 14th level party will barely look at these assholes as a speed bump.
The Black Unicorn is just like the White Unicorn except that it's bad. Being bad yet otherwise exactly the same as the White Unicorn means that it is ridden around by sexy Human and Elf ladies who are also bad. This being the Forgotten Realms, most sexy Elf ladies are Drow. Frankly, I do not understand why this needed to be a full writeup at all. Really seems like you could have had a note in Unicorns “some Unicorns are bad instead of good, and they are black instead of white because this setting operates on the moral level of a Saturday morning cartoon.”
AncientH:
Considering the number of humanoids with vaguely animal features in 80s and 90s television, comics, and RPGs, the sudden appearance of furries and furry culture should surprise no one. Even by furry standards wemics are a bit weird though - they have the whole centaur build, but they're explicitly lion-based. So you have the head of a lion-man, the upper torso of a man (with fur and probably claws), and then the lower torso of a big cat. I don't know how many bras the average wemic female feels she needs, but my guess is "a lot."
Not porn.
Arguably, the best use of wemics of all time was in Steven Brust's novel Taltos, where they aren't called wemics and are easily hooked on gambling. In the Realms entry, the best they could manage was to include notes for a variant race of "mountain wemics" based on mountain lions. This makes me glad there was never a Monsters of Faerun II, because we would undoubtedly have gotten entries on panther wemics, tiger wemics (including white tiger wemics), and probably something comparable to a liger that happens when you cross a wemic with a dragonne.
Templates
That may look like a regular cat spewing green flame, but it's... OK it's basically a regular cat spewing green flame. It's about as threatening as that sounds.
FrankT:
Templates were an astonishingly bad idea that was in equal parts astonishingly popular. The idea was that you get to make your own monsters by adjusting monsters that already existed. And considering that 2nd edition tried to give you a whole new monster listing for the freshwater version of the aquatic troll and had no less than 15 creatures that were a “ghost” (including the “animal ghost” and “ghost dragon,” but not including the “Windghost” which isn't a ghost at all and is actually a flying windsock of death, also not including the stuff that was just like a Ghost but not called that like the Doom Sphere), it's easy to see the appeal of putting the power back in the hands of the people at individual tables by letting them combine common adjectives with available monsters. I mean, why do we need Ice Crabs and Ice Toads to get their own writeups when we could just have a simple “Is Ice Now” modifier we could apply to giant fucking crabs and toads on our own?
The idea had immediate traction, and people rushed off to make their own templated monsters. Unfortunately, the problems were many. The first problem was that the templates were way more complicated than they needed to be. Most templates had an entry for every single line on the monster writeup. And even if many of them said “As base creature” it was way too much fucking work to use these things. The second problem was that balance wasn't particularly good. Many templates increased the power of the creature it was applied to, but the synergy or lack thereof of the new abilities and the original monster made the real power increase run the gamut from meaningless to extreme. Abilities that were meaningless at high level were unbalanced at low level, and the CR change could never hope to be right on the money. Half Dragon Kobolds would kill the whole party with their fire breath at 2nd level, and the half dragon bonuses were so small as to account for free experience when layered on top of a Mind Flayer for the 10th level party it was scheduled to face.
But beyond that, templates were never really used for the kinds of things they should have been. I mean, for fuck's sake there is still a fucking “Unicorn, Black” in this book. Considering that you could get the entire “Wickedify Monster” template written into less space than picture of the Black Unicorn took up in this book, this was a huge missed opportunity.
AncientH:
The advantage of the template is that, as we have seen in Hackmaster and D&D4, not having it means that you need to create an entirely new fucking entry for each variant monster you have, which is a pain in the ass. Worse, the templates were applied very unevenly, so that before we even get to the template section we get an entry for "Zombie, Tyrantfog" which really should be just another fucking template.
And there were a lot of fucking undead templates. More than you would think absolutely necessary. I mean, of the famous undead you can name, you've got Ghost, Mummy, Skeleton, Vampire, and Zombie. That pretty much covers the basics, and it's actually really hard to come up with something new, which is why you can't really tell a Crypt Thing from a Banedead from a Lich, because they're all undead vaguely skeletal dudes.
Then there are the Curst, who as the name suggests are cursed with awesome. They're basically immortal regenerating characters with most of the strengths (immune to fire, cold, mind-effecting effects, level draining, critical hits, poison, sleep, stunning, disease, etc.) but few of the weaknesses of the undead (i.e. heal spells heal them and they cannot be commanded/rebuked as undead), and they fucking regenerate from anything up to and including having their heads cut off, because simply running out of hit points will not kill them. They're limited to whatever extraordinary abilities they had in life, but that basically means these are the natural upgrade for barbarians, fighters, and rogues. I have no idea how these things would work with Libris Mortis, because the Curst were updated in 3.5 in Lost Empires of Faerun and I'm too lazy to look at it, but it seems like a pretty sweet gig aside from the 1 in 20 chance of going temporarily insane every 10 minutes.
Actually, now that I think about it Curst are immune to paralysis but when they run out of hp they're paralyzed. I'm not sure how that was supposed to work.
FrankT:
The Ghost Template rears its ugly head in this book as well. The Ghost Template was an attempt to get all that ghost crap out of the way and let DMs mix and match the various ghostly powers. A fine idea, but the power list was too short to accommodate all the crazy bullshit that canonical D&D ghosts got up to. So in Monsters of Faerun, they brought the Ghost Template back for a second look to drop in a bunch of extra stupid powers. Honestly, most of these are such trivial variations that you wouldn't care. Does it actually matter to you if the ghost's drain attack does a little bit of strength damage and a little bit of con damage versus doing slightly more strength damage but only being used up to twelve times a day? Of course not, that is trivial bullshit that it would have been better to either standardize completely (ex.: all drain attacks do X) or make completely open (ex.: “ghosts can pick a form of ability damage”). Spewing out minor variations at the rate of several lines of text each was an atrocious use of space.
This also wasn't the last time the Ghost template had to be revisited for being overly restrictive. By the time Savage Species had rolled around, people had noticed that due to quirks in the template's small text, you couldn't actually make a legal ghost hound with it, necessitating the creation of a whole new template: the “Ghost Brute” to handle all the shit that fell through the cracks. It's almost like they made templates too complicated and it ended up making them less useful than they would have been had they been shorter and more user friendly.
AncientH:
Liches have always been a bit of an odd duck. Old school D&D liches were straight out evil, since undead were pretty explicitly evil and unnatural violations of the natural order of things created by evil wizards committing spectacularly elaborate suicides. But this is the Realms, so there are lots of other liches.
Alhoons or illithiliches are undead mindflayers; back in the day these were nothing special because undead critters were not immune to mind-effecting effects. In D&D3 though, they get the best of both worlds (well, until the Psionic Handbook came out and tied Psychometabolism to their nonexistent Constitution score), and can basically run roughshod over fucking everything. This alone should have been a fucking sign that there was a problem somewhere, but apparently these guys didn't get the memo.
Baneliches are evil undead clerics. Which would normally become mummies, but apparently it was felt the need to do something more with them. Next!
Lich, Good is an actual fucking separate fucking template from the first gods-be-damned Lich template, which is fucking annoying. They get most of the same powers as normal liches, which further underscores the "why the fuck is this a separate template?" question.
Archeliches are your generic good lich. In addition to not dying of old age, they can rise from their tombs and walk on water. I'm sure Wade thought that was appropriate/hilarious.
Baelnorn are elven Master Race good liches, because this is the Realms. This was sort of a retirement plan for older elves, wherein they were guaranteed a place to rest their bones and guard against thieves and shit, which is good because they don't have phylacteries. I don't understand this, really, because you'd think if you were a powerful good caster you'd want to do more with eternity than keep the family tree updated and tutor the latest generation in their cantrips.
I suppose special mention should go to "good liches" and baelnorn in particular for inspiring the Undying Court in Eberron, but honestly I felt that those "we're not undead, we're just corpses animated by positive energy!" were really fucking annoying.
So, some small variant powers and behavior aside, we've established that there are two different lich templates for no reason. No word on dracoliches, demiliches, or any of the other assorted liches in MoF, though be sure that they show up again in other books.
FrankT:
Lycanthropes also get a mention in this book. It's just to bring out more were animals. Honestly, if you're going to go the template route and the kitchen sink fantasy route at the same time, lycanthrope types should have been procedurally generated. However, they were not. This book takes up some space by bringing back the Werebat, the Werecrocodile, and the Wereshark. Those aren't the most retarded lycanthropes that D&D has produced (that would be the Wereswine and Wereray if you were wondering), but it's clearly scraping the barrel.
Honestly, werebats embarrass me. Just play a fucking vampire and be done with it.
AncientH:
Frank forgot to mention the Lytheri, which is a Master Race werewolf:
Jesus fucknutting Christ, I DID NOT COME HERE TO READ THE OPENING PREMISE TO YOUR EROTIC FANFIC.These elf-were-wolves share all the common abilities of werewolves, except that they do not have a hybrid form. Their alignment is always chaotic good, and they are often higher-level elf characters in elf form.
In wolf form, lythari are beautiful, with pale grey or silver fur and intelligent blue or brown eyes. In wood elf form, they are beautiful and otherworldly, even for elves. Tall and pale-skinned, they have light blue or green eyes and silver hair.
Lythari can only pass on their lycanthropy to other elves, and only in a special ritual performed with the consent of both parties.
FrankT:
The Yuan-Ti have been D&D's all purpose Cobra-style adversary since their debut in Dwellers of the Forbidden City back in 1981. They are snake people who breed with humans and stuff and some of them can pass for human and some of them are giant snake monsters. It's cooler than that sounds, and you get to pull them in as conspiracy enemies and cultist enemies who have an excuse to pull a boss monster out in the middle of their evil snake temple. It's just good times all around. I mean, yes the whole Lovecraftian idea that racial miscegenation is inherently evil is actually kind of vile, but if you don't think too hard about the racialist undertones there are a lot of cool stories you can tell.
The Yuan-Ti were however written up in the 3e Monster Manual. This book adds two more Yuan-Ti templates for humans who have gotten the bad touch from the Yuan-Ti higher ups in slightly different ways: the Brood Guard and the Tainted One. Frankly, I don't even see what these are for. If you wanted humans with snake powers or ugly scaled dudes in the Yuan-Ti encounter, you already had the tools to do that. And by having these be templates rather than ready-to-eat monsters, it doesn't even save you any time.
AncientH:
Broodguards are pointless, but the Tainted Ones were supposed to be an acquired template so that you could go all post-Cobra-La Cobra Commander on your player characters.
That's the book, folks. By critter weight, the median monster in this book (barring dragons) has a CR of 4, with a range of CR 1/3 (crawling claw, gibbering mouther) to CR 14 (tomb trapper) or 24 (Great Wyrm Brown, Deep, and Song dragons).
It's hard to place the lessons learned with MoF. It came out at roughly the same time as Creatures of Rokugan, the L5R monster book back when they were pretending that was the Oriental Adventures setting, and shared a lot of similarities with that book - though maybe this is rose-tinted nostalgia talking, but I remember Critters of Rokugan as a superior production, if maybe too specialized for your average D&D game. The next big monster book was Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II, released in 2003 and already dead products walking because the fix was in for 3.5.
I tried to dig up any sales data on MoF, but aside from the fact that it seemed somewhat well-received at the time there's not much to go on. As Frank pointed out in the first post, the most damning evidence of the failure of Monsters of Faerun is that it did not spawn any sequels in the Monstrous Compendium line. The mix of old second-run critters from the Realms and AD&D Fiend Folio with the amateurish execution and the high price tag probably meant that this book didn't exactly fly off the shelves, and highlighted issues that needed to be dealt with - which is why the 3.0 Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II included something like 50% original monsters instead of updating old standbys. Still, MoF marks an interesting transition between the AD&D and 3e mindsets, one which hadn't quite gelled on the fundamental changes made to the game just yet.
