Lords of Madness: I love this terrible fucking book!

[Wiseman]

Really, if you go back to most things, you find that they actually suck somewhat and feel bad for ever liking them.

[Night Goat]

Yeah, nothing's ever as good as you remember it. I really liked this one back in the day. Some of the fluff is cool, at least.

[Koumei]

I do like how mental the beholders are. First they will genocide non-beholders. Next will be "all beholders that have a different monster write-up". Then they kill all beholders of the same type but of a different colour or a different arrangement of eyestalks. Then the remainder will form arbitrary groups to kill one another. Then that group turns on itself like a wrestling faction.

The last survivor then dies of an autoimmune condition as the cells of the body attack one another.

Also, there is totally a use for the Beholder's Disjunction feat: tenth-level Rogues :3c

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: The Mind Flayers
If you go back to the credits part of the book, you'll note under "resources" that the first thing mentioned is The Illithiad. That's not really a coincidence; the Mind Flayers are part of the established product identity for D&D, and have been for decades. They're arguably the most developed of the "aberration" races before this book ever came out because they already had their own fucking book.


In Germany, would this be the Illithias?

Which brings us to the basic problem with Lords of Madness: not enough book. I know that might sound insane given the shovelware nature of the first couple of chapters, but it's true. A lot of words have already been put into print about beholders, illithids, aboleths, et al. So many that large chunks of this book consist of little more than combing through the crap already written, distilling it, and throwing some 3E mechanics on them (if, y'know, they didn't have those already). But here instead of entire books, they get entire chapters - and they still try to cram in their own new craziness. The result is that for a lot of these critters, the results are unsatisfying to old fans and weirdly batshit crazy/boring to new fans - and hey, I can relate. Same thing happened when we were trying to squeeze Seattle into a chapter for Runner Havens.

Anyway, you'll note the "Monstrous Arcana" bit on the Illithiad cover, and that's because this was a series of things that AD&D 2nd edition was trying to do - and they got about that far and said fuck it. Yes, they did release three adventures for Beholders, but the Illithiad was the last single-monster-race-specific book for years, at least from TSR/WotC proper.

These don't count. They will never count.

Anyway, enough of that. The Mind Flayer chapter begins by trying to squeeze the anatomy and life-cycle chapter of the Illithiad into as few pages as possible.

From birth to death, the physiology of the illithid life cycle is
unique, and unspeakably horrible.

It is unspeakably horrible, because they're still calling illithid spawn tadpoles, although the numbers are slightly less insane: the flayers spawn 2-3 times in their life with about a 1000 eggs at a time, and a "few in a thousand" manage to survive being eaten by the Elder Brain.


Wait, how many of these things do I have to push through my cloaca?

Mind Flayers then pick up one of the bigger, healthier surviving tadpoles viligers and introduce it to the "ear, nostril, or eye of a helpless humanoid captive" which the tadpole then burrows into the brain of and replaces their body, becoming a new Mind Flayer. I don't know about you guys, but whenever they talk ceremorphosis I kinda see them putting the little wriggling bastard at the hole in the base of the skull - the foramen magnum - and letting it dig in from there. Trying to cram that thing through the nostril just seems like a dick move.


Seriously, straight shot to the brain and spinal cord.

They did choose to expand on the ceremorphosis bit:

Victims have been rescued from this horrid fate, but only if help arrives quickly. A victim is permanently drained of 1 point of Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, and Dexterity every hour after tadpole insertion. When any one ability is reduced to 0, the victim’s psychic essence is destroyed and replaced by the tadpole’s awakening mind. Before that point is reached, restoration can reinstate lost ability points but won’t kill the tadpole, so damage keeps accruing. The only sure way to save the victim is to kill the tadpole. The tadpole itself is very easy to kill (automatic kill with a coup de grace), but its location inside the victim’s head is a serious complicating factor. Spells such as cure disease and remove curse have no effect; only a heal spell can save a victim undergoing ceremorphosis.

In most cases, the only way to guarantee the tadpole is slain is to crush or incinerate the victim’s head. At that point, resurrection, true resurrection, or raise dead come into play. Raise dead alone is of no avail if the victim’s head was destroyed in the process of killing the tadpole. The process of ceremorphosis takes a week to complete but it cannot be reversed after any of the victim’s ability scores are reduced to 0.

From that point, no means can bring the victim back short of a miracle.

I'm going to hell for this.

This is all a pretty complicated and bizarre to think about. Seriously, it's a parasite eating your fucking brain, and you have magic that can bring people back from a pile of ashes. Why the fuck does it matter how much of your brain it's eaten? That shit grows back! If my character dies because a drow matron gives me a lobotomy by humping my skull with a spiked strap-on as a sacrifice to Lolth, I don't lose any fucking Int points. What the fuck?

Large portions of this section fill me with rage, because they manage to not only repeat stupid shit from the Illithiad but try to out-do it in terms of retardedness. Frank and I already mentioned the whole "acceptable ceremorphosis candidate" thing is bullshit, but this book was published after the Fiend Folio introduced the Half-Illithid Template.


No, that's a half-Illithid lizardman. Dammit Quarrl'bob, I told you not to use the lizardman!

"Illithid Variants" gets it's own section, including Ulitharids (good) and Illithid Sorcerers - wait, what? "Certainly, mind flayers have no dragon blood." Well, yes, but who gives a rat's ass? I understand that you hinted at the whole draconic heritage for sorcerers, but I'm pretty sure a) that had already been dropped by this point in 3rd edition, and b) it's just a fucking character class. This is the kind of shit that Frank and I were harping on in the fucking Earthdawn review, the people writing this are intelligent enough to realize there's a disconnect between the system and setting material (weak as it is), but not creative enough to work around it. Ugh.

Elder Brains are given most of a page, although I'm not sure how that classifies as a "variant." I love this sidebar, btw:

Psionic Substitution
In Chapter 8, the elder brain is described as a 20th-level sorcerer. This spellcasting merely serves to emulate its psionic abilities for DMs who choose not to use psionics in their game. Elder brains are never true sorcerers.

What, never? You just had a couple paragraphs on mind flayer sorcerers. Also really, we're still getting this chronic decision-making disorder on whether mind flayers use magic or psionics? Come the fuck on. This shit was tired last edition.

Brain golems, Alhoon, mind flayer vampires, neothelids, and urophions all get their sections. I don't know why none of the new illithidae described in the back of the book don't get a mention, or half-illithids - well, I know that it's because there were multiple writers working on this and none of them talked to each other and everyone was either too busy fapping to Bruce Cordell or too lazy to remember about the Fiend Folio, but it's still a noisome omission. Really, at the point where you're retreading crap from Ravenloft which isn't even an official setting at this point (yes, yes, White Wolf published that bit, no one cares), why the fuck are we still talking about Illithid Vampires? Seriously. It's not like we've got people crying for Ravenloft elementals. Let it the fuck go. Do something original.

The seciton on Illithid Magic showcases another downside to the whole "cram an entire species with multiple variants into a single chapter" - they end up having less racially-distinct magic than any given human culture. Here, we have a bunch of magic items, mostly 3e rehashes of stuff from the Illithiad. For some reason Nautiloids, Resonance Stones, and Psionic Seals all separate entries, even though they're not really any different from the rest of this stuff and the Nautiloid isn't even given stats. Or a picture.

To spelljam, or not to spelljam. That is the question. Make up your minds, you boring, uncreative fucks.

Psionic Seals are a new type of magic item, made using the Craft Psionic Seal feat included here, and are the 3e take on Cordell's psionic circuitry from the Illithiad. It's actually a decent feat for any psionic manifester, by which I presume this was entirely by accident. Let's look!

Craft Psionic Seal
A creature with this feat can create psionic glyphs or symbols that hold spells or psionic powers until triggered.

Prerequisite
INT 15, psionic ability (spell-like abilities described as psionics, psi-like abilities, or psionic powers), caster level or manifester level 7th.

Benefit
A creature can cast or manifest any arcane spell or psionic power it has access to as a psionic seal. If it is creating a psionic seal of an arcane spell, it must have prepared the spell to be scribed and must provide any material components or focuses the spell requires. If casting the spell or manifesting the power would reduce the creature's XP total, it pays that cost upon beginning the seal in addition to the XP cost for making the seal itself. Likewise, material components are consumed when the creature begins scribing the seal, but focuses are not. A single object of Medium size or smaller can hold only one psionic seal. A larger object can hold one seal per 100 square feet of surface area. A creature can also scribe a psionic seal on a willing creature, but a creature can hold only one psionic seal at a time; any additional seals inscribed on that creature automatically fail. A psionic seal has a price equal to its spell or power level — caster or manifester level — 50 gp. (A 0-level spell or power counts as 1/2 level.) The creature crafting the seal must spend 1/25 of the price in XP and use up raw materials costing one half the price to inscribe the seal.

As for what it is...it's a spell/power-activation thing, like a scroll or a potion. You can put a 3rd-level or less power (or spell described as psionics) on anything, and activate it with a touch and a thought. So it's fairly simple and versatile, and works equally well for spells, spell-like abilities, psionic powers, psi-like abilities, etc. You can put it on yourself, your boots, your sword, a rock, anything. It's not a high-level thing, and you can make the argument that it's not really an improvement over the power stone, but considering how slipshop psionics were applied in 3e it's amazingly close to useful.


Mindflayer porn is its own distinct subgenre of Rule 34, and I'm not going to post any of it here, but I thought the tits might help distract you from the next part of the chapter: "The Whispering Shadow."

It's basically a mishmash of all the best and worst parts of Illithid lore - trying to put out the sun, spelljamming, the Cthulhu Mythos-esque hints, their world-spanning empire and the Gith revolt - aaaand then they fuck it all up by revealing that the Illithids of today aren't an ancient species from the dawn of prehistory - they are actually time travelers from the future who fled backwards in time from some terrible catastrophe, arriving thousands of years ago.


So yeah, there's that.

So, yadda yadda. Sections on language and religion (they still worship the big brain), relations with other races (hah), thralls, mind flayer goals...which is still focused on putting-out-the-sun ...I swear, they've actually worse than in the Illithiad...except in one particular! They actually did some math on how many brains Illithids eat, and realize that each individual Illithid needs a vast number of thralls to sustain themselves, because the workforce doubles as the larder. Breeding brains isn't particularly doable - it notes that to eat a brain a week (the mind flayer ideal), they'd need 250 human slaves per mind flayer - so they're down to hunting and "brain raids" to shore up the number of thralls, and Illithid communities tend to be small affairs in the double-digits for mind flayer populations. It's probably the best bit in the chapter, to be honest.


I just like this image.

Next we get a look at Lagurno, an Illithid "sept" or village. Which is pretty close to the one from the Illithiad, except with duergar instead of grimlocks. The basic idea is that most visitors just see the duergar village, and don't realize deeper tunnels lead to the small Illithid settlement. It's pretty obvious that whoever wrote this didn't read the preceding bit on the brain-to-mind flayer ratio, because there's no fucking way the duergar village of 600-900 dark dwarfs is sufficient to sustain the "few hundred illithids" down below. Also, the Temple of Ilsenine has no clerics, just a couple sorcerers and a few regular mind flayers with ranks in Knowledge (Religion). It must suck to be the god to a race of agnostics.

Then we get the lair of a rogue Illithid sorcerer, Sarkt. This is a pretty big lair. It's nicer than my house. There's a rotunda and everything. It turns out that it used to be a shrine to Blibdoolpoolp and the Kua-Toa want it back, but that's sort of a small matter in the grand scale of things. I'm much more curious as to why the gold-inlaid drow skull is worth 2k gp while the golden idol of Blib with platinum claws and aquamarine eyes is only worth 1.7k gp.

It's not a good chapter. There's not a lot of good information here, and it contradicts itself a lot. There are a lot of references to settings that died a natural death years before this book was ever produced, and I'm pretty sure it was written by committee, all of them fapping hard to the Illithiad like it was rule 34. That said, I actually kind of like Sark's lair. You can drop that shit into a game. He has more magic items than most PCs should see, but that's far from the stupidest thing I've ever seen, and the Craft Psionic Seal feat approaches useful, particularly if you ever get a character monster with Psionics (Sp).

[fectin]

On the plus side, Neogi and tsochari are still to come.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 5: The Slave Takers

Our advanced species has mastered pockets! Also, we would like to discuss your knitted hats. Yessss.

When you talk about aberrations, the easy ones are Aboleths, Beholders, and Illithids. After that you have stuff like Umber Hulks and Otuygh. I mean, what is an aberration, really? Just something totally alien that doesn't fit into the already-established categories, right? Tentacles a plus? How many bizarre alien races do you need in a fantasy world? My point being that we've already run through the really good aberration races, and the next three are the Neogi, the Grell, and the fucking Tsochar. Don't get your hopes up.

Anyway, the Neogi are from Spelljammer originally, and they're basically evil spiderlike Ferengi or the Men of Leng - they come in, riding their umber hulks like pimps, and want to trade for slaves and stuff. If they think they have the numbers and power to just straight up enslave your village, they'll do that instead. So it's sort of race where gunboat diplomacy doesn't just work, it's kinda mandatory. They fill a niche in being the go-to evil space merchants, and that's about it. They might not even qualify as aberrations except for their lifecycle. Amazingly, probably because they're really a Spelljammer race, this chapter starts off with the monster block right-ups for Neogi. Not back with the rest of the monsters, nothing on the anatomy or culture, just...Neogi! CR 3.

The hallmark of the Neogi is that they're small spider-like aliens that can Enslave (Su) creatures 3/day. It's not a great ability. The Neogi are never going to go toe-to-toe with a mindflayer (well, maybe; the Neogi are immune to mind-affecting spells and abilities), but it really helps sell the evil "slaver" motif.

So you have a write up for the adult Neogi (CR 3, small), the Neogi Spawn (CR 1/3, tiny), and the Great Old Master (CR 6, Huge). Normally with a size about thirty times bigger than the average Neogi and a name like "Great Old Master," you'd figure that these would be the Elder Brains of the Neogi community. You would be wrong. These things are incubators. Each one of the swollen, dying things is pregnant, being eaten from the inside out by Neogi Spawn, which the senile can spit at people and which burst out whenever you cut the damn thing. Illithids at least have the polite fiction that when they die and join the Elder Brain maybe their personality will survive, but Neogi live their greedy little lives knowing that when they get too old the rest of their fellows are going to inject them with a special venom to make them bloat out, then gangbang them and inject their eggs into them until they can't fucking move.


Well, there's the horror taken care of for this adventure.

After those three monster write-ups, there's three paragraphs on Neogi society (read:Ferengis + slavery), stats for Neogi characters (level adjustment +3? Fuck you.), about a page on Neogi anatomy and reproduction (just in case the above horror hasn't sunk in yet), and then a half-page on Dwarf Neogi.



Dwarf Neogi are, you guessed it, smaller-than-average Neogi. They're fairly rare (1 in 100), and they're CR4 because they get some extra spell-like abilities. Which is probably a little bit unfair, because these are tiny aberrations that your half-giant could probably step on, and they cast charm monster 1/day at Caster Level 12, among other things.

Really, the Neogi are the poor man's mindflayers. They don't actually flay minds, but they're alien critters that enslave others with their special powers and have squick-inducing reproduction. The only major difference from a mechanical standpoint is that they're a lot easier to kill, making them viable enemies for much lower-level adventures.


I wanted to use this image.

On page 94 is a little sidebar with the Spit Poison feat. This is a feat where if you have poison in your bite attack, and Ability Focus (Poison), and some other crap you can take this feat and then spit your poison up to 30 feet. That doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but I'm sure somebody would enjoy taking it. This goes with the other Neogi variant on the next page, the Neogi Defiler, which is like a regular Neogi but with a level in Rogue. Seriously, that's it. They should have at least given it a level in Ninja, that would have been something.


Am I not a thing of mist and shadows? Also, yes, Neogi have crossbows.

Neogi variant #3 is the Slavemaster, which gets +1 CR and a slightly better Enslave (Su) ability. Points for being straightforward, if uncreative. Neogi variant #3 is the Neogi Sorcerer, which is...a Neogi with sorcerer levels. WTF? "Weasels are the most common familiars of neogi sorcerers, with snakes a close second." The sample Neogi sorcerer has a rat familiar (I shall name him H. P. Fuzzcraft), which sort of fucks with that. I suppose they stay away from spider familiars so they don't get accused of child abuse.

There's a section on "Neogi Life," which is really about your benefits and status as a slave of the Neogi, divided into four tiers based on status. If your campaign is ever at the point where you need to know your value as a mindslave, that's not a good place to be.

In other aspects of Neogi society, apparently they've forgotten their own racial tongue in favor of trade languages like Common and Undercommon, and they don't have any particular racial gods to write home about so they pay lip service to entire pantheons, and sometimes get mixed up in joining cults. The prospect of Neogi Scientologists is at once appalling and yet I sort of want to work it into a game. Neogi aren't given any magic items, which seems odd because they have flying spider-ships and you think that would qualify.

Their main goals are to sell you stuff, or steal your stuff and enslave you, not necessarily in that order. Like I said, evil slaver Ferengi. Just add plasma whips. Why do they not have plasma whips?

For anybody curious, they include the formula for the rough gp value of slaves:

Cost = (CR, minimum 1)^2 x 100 gp

Wait, holy shit, I can get 100 gp for an unskilled peasant? Fuck, I'm in the wrong business. Now I know why all the evil adventurers just enslave the village and sell them to the local Dark Lord.

The set-piece encounter for this chapter is "Wreck of the Mind-Spider" - a Neogi flying ship has crashed, and the Neogi are stranded. Presumably you come along and they try to enslave you/ask you if you'd like to trade, depending on how much of a badass they think you are.

I neither hate or dislike the Neogi. They are what they are, and they transfer over from Spelljammer to a normal D&D milieu slightly better than some other species. I could argue "how many evil merchant/slaver races do you need?" but that's a personal gripe. I do have the sneaking suspicion that the whole thing about calling a Neogi with a character class a "variant" is a presage of D&D4, though. Also, the chapter layout is a complete fucking mess.

[hyzmarca]

I think the Neogi could be a bit more interesting if they were more egalitarian in their complex system of universal enslavement and allowed slaves of other races to own slaves. Also, if the Wheel of Ownership wasn't discoruaged.

Because "my umber hulk won my master in a poker game" seems like the type of situation that would make a game more interesting.

[Night Goat]

I think the Neogi are the lamest of the featured aberrations in this book, and a big part of that is because of their appearance. Take a look at the Neogi from the Monstrorious Manual:

This guy's cool. He's an eel crossed with a spider, two great things that go great together. Then 3e turned the Neogi into an angry pom-pom.

[fectin]

You're both wrong. The neogi are awsome, and they're cooler with hair.

It's too bad that they're completly unplayable, but that's a 3E theme.

[Username17]

Neogi are one of the most playable LA races in the game. The thing to remember is that you come with a fucking Umber Hulk and that for most challenges the Umber Hulk is your character. You're an 8th level character who is an Umber Hulk with a shoulder muppet who attempts to enslave brute monsters to upgrade or accentuate the Umber Hulk. All the belts of strength and shit you get go to the Umber Hulk, the shoulder muppet just needs to stay alive and enslave a Stone Giant at the first opportunity.




-Username17

[tussock]

The Neogi in 4e terms are mid-level Minions. As a paragon party you fight a bunch of Umber Hulks, only these ones have Neogi masters. Not that 4e wrote them that way, because the design team never understood their own mechanics, but that's what they are.



Heh, Beaker, now there's a character.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 6: The Eaters
When you do a google image search for "Grell," this is what comes up:

Which is the short way to say, Grell are not iconic D&D monsters. The most interesting use anyone ever had for them was when Mystra used to turn spellcasters she was pissed at into them or wingless wonders. They're in canon somewhere as distant relatives to flumphs. My point is, this is not a particularly good critter. They look like they were put together from spare parts from other, better aberrations like Illithids, Beholders and Aboleths.


Bawk, bawk, brains?

But they do the best they can with what they've got.

So, like the Neogi chapter, this one starts off with the actual monster entry for Grell - because these critters are so un-iconic they couldn't be arsed to present them in any of the preceding monster manuals for 3rd edition. The math on these guys seems off; they're CR 3 but the level adjustment is +6. By comparison, the Neogi were CR 3 and had LA +3. Does not compute. Maybe they were supposed to have a higher CR and then somebody came along and nerfed their hit dice. I dunno.

A Grell Philosopher is included in the same entry, which is just a Grell with 4 levels of Wizard. I don't mind that the Grell can be a wizard (although the whole verbal/somatic/material thing comes to mind again), but I question the need for calling it something distinct just because it has a couple class levels. Would "Grell Wizard" really be too hard? Also, the 4th-level Grell Wizard Philosopher has a listed CR of 5 with a level adjustment of +6. Someone has been sniffing the binding glue a little too hard.

Anyway, the key hallmarks of Grell are that they're blind, floating things that grapple you with their paralytic tentacles and are immune to electricity. Classic closet troll, but because they're floating and immune to gaze attacks and whatnot they're a bit more interesting to place than the average such beastie, and less deadly overall than a beholder. Decent lower-middle-class monsters, really. Also, it occurs I still have no idea how spellcasting works with Blindsight.



Next up is a quick review of Grell anatomy. In the AD&D days this is where you'd get an "every part of the buffalo" approach to adventuring, which Hackmaster ruthlessly/awesomely mocked/exploited in its "Yield" category for monsters. This one, not so much. They start out genderless and when they hit adulthood they can choose to become male, like that kid in the Netherlands or whatever with the hippie parents, and the other grell become female when they want to mate. Actually, from the sound of things they can switch back and forth by rearranging their bits however they want, so you have to think that a great way to do gender-swapping would be to shapeshift into a grell, switch your gender, then change back.


Powerful electrical discharges can temporarily overwhelm their blind sense. Or, whatever.

There's stats for Grell hatchlings and juveniles, just in case you run into a nest and decide to cleanse the world.

Grell variants is a simple paragraph explaining there are no grell variants. Which is both refreshingly straightforward and seems to defeat the point.

Most grell are Feral (i.e. wandering monsters); the minority gather together in nests led by wizards Philosophers. Calling this "civilization" is a bit of stretch. They build nothing, don't appear to have any experts or specialists outside of alchemy and wizardry, and "do not engage in commerce, trade, manufacture, or leisure, nor do they have much interest in trafficking with neighboring cultures."

So, they herd livestock (sometimes) and practice alchemy. I'm not sure how that works. If they were humans, I could sort of see a hunter-gatherer thing where they follow the herds and brew beer and stranger drugs, but in a stationary nest it sounds like they're strip the environment bare and then move on. Also, no idea how they handle the alchemy thing without any potters or glassmakers. Hell, I'm not even sure how grell wizards philosophers memorize spells, unless they have some sort of braille version of grellspeak. It's a mystery.

On the Grell language: most of it is based on manipulations of their electrical aura, with the rest consisting of clucks, clicks, buzzing, and rasps. In other words, g'luck trying to learn that one.


Unless you have three tongues, a beak, and a greater mastery of electricity than "rub this amber rod with a bit of rabbit fur."

Like Illithids et al., Grell don't have much use for religion. At this point we know more about what they don't do and can't do than what they can and will do.

Grell Leaders are called Patriarchs, because they prefer to be male. Really, that's pretty weird gender bias, but whatever floats your giant brain. They're usually higher-level wizards. The example given actually has the correct CR (10) for a 7th-level Grell Wizard, which leads me to suspect that somebody else did the stats for it than earlier in the chapter.

Relations with other races are...straightforward. You're food, inedible, or something that eats grells. There's no real overlap there, and sitting back you have to wonder why anybody thought not giving these guys more backstory and personality was a good idea. Aboleths and Illithids both have ancient civilizations going back into the hoary mists of time, Neogi are alien but willing to deal with you, beholders are basically insane but so powerful no-one cares...but what the hell is the deal with the grell? They're aliens, sure, but they're not developed or interesting aliens, there's not a lot of there there. The basic assumption is that you either tackle one in the wild, or you get captured by a nest and dropped in next to the cows and orcs until they decide to eat you. That's not fun.

"Grell Magic" consists of the feat Grell Alchemy, which allows you to make grellcraft items and gives some small bonuses to spell penetration and the like. Grellcraft is basically just alchemy, and directly contradicts the bit earlier where Grell don't build shit, because Grell crystal is used to build Grell lairs and Grell build lightning lances and shit. Which mostly only work for grell, which is crap.


Who's a badass now, rrrawrk?

The "encounter" for this chapter is Sangkon Bhet, a grell outpost under an abandoned human temple. The highlight is a Grell necromancer Necrophilosopher. It has scrolls, but I have no idea how it reads them.

And those are the mighty Grell. Not...terribly exciting, I must say. I'm pretty sure I could have written a better chapter on flumphs. I've certainly read better articles on flumphs.


This is Zak Smith's version of the flumph. Be afraid.

Next up: The Wearers of Flesh!

[TiaC]

Actually, the CR of the first Grell Philosopher is correct and the second one is wrong due to the rules for non-associated class levels.

[Ancient History]

I hate that rule. Also, I deeply regret not making a "Holy Grell" joke.

[Prak]

Grell and Neogi both first appeared in 3rd edition in MM2. So, while you're right that they are far from iconic D&D monsters, they had been printed for 3rd prior to LoM.

[Ancient History]

Then why the fhtagn did they reprint the stats? Wait, LoM was a 3.5 product, wasn't it? I suppose that would do it.

[Username17]

Then why the fhtagn did they reprint the stats? Wait, LoM was a 3.5 product, wasn't it? I suppose that would do it.

Yeah, Monster Manual 2 was 3e. The monsters in it didn't exactly get official 3.5 workovers, so the Monster Manual 2 monsters in Lords of Madness get their stat lines revised slightly.

-Username17

[Prak]

Yeah, and probably to remind people what the things were, since they had next to nothing done with them since MM2 was printed. In fact mooncalves had more done with them in 3.X than Grell.

Which... really needed commentary in LoM, given that Mooncalves are beaked flying cephalopds with blindsight and call lightning as a spell-like ability. Ie, nearly indistinguishable from grell from a functional standpoint. I mean, they're magical beasts, but they're superintelligent (Int 21) 15 HD magical beasts. Mooncalves are practically gods to grell.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 7: The Wearers of Flesh

No one gives a shit about the Tsochar. I'll fight anyone that says anywise. It's not just that they're obscure or fall into the general trap of "they're anatomically alien species from a distant world, and why is there now sci fi all over my medieval fantasy game?", the thing is that D&D already has any number of other, more interesting species that fills the same slot.

See, nominally the Tsochari are invasion-of-the-body-snatcher types, who burrow into the body of a victim and puppet them around - all while the victim is conscious but helpless. That sounds cool, but remember this is a game that already has 3+ types of doppelganger already, and any number of possessing entities.


"Let colonization begin."

(I'd link the Oglaf comic, but let's keep this thread clean.)

Anyway. Like the Grell and Neogi, they start out by reminding us of the needlessly complex Tsochar stats with no level adjustment listed because fuck you for wanting to play one. We then proceed directly to Tsochar anatomy, where they remind us for the third or fourth time in two pages that the Tsochari are from an alien world only accessible by gate.


Or maybe spelljammer, if you're using that D&D version of the setting.

Technically, each individual tsochar is a colony organism made up of strands from up to a dozen different parents. By which you can be assured the reader was familiar with the Jotoki of the Man-Kzin Wars.


'sup, softskin?

The only variant of the Tsochar is the Noble, which doesn't get an individual write-up - it just has 8 racial HD and 4-8 levels in Sorcerer. Have fun calculating the CR on that. Also in this section is one of the laziest feats in the book (and that's saying something): Mindsight.

You might be forgiven for forgetting that Telepathy was a specific named special ability, separate from any telepathic spell or psionic ability, I know I had a whole rant worked up for it before I bothered to check the SRD. Still, it leaves out a bunch of critters that you'd think would have it, as well as most player characters - although why they didn't just make mindsight a constant version of detect thoughts like the doppelganger has, I'll never quite know. As it is, it's basically "unblockable blindsense."

Like Illithids, Tsochar society is organized into castes. I don't know why this is, because they're self-reproducing parasites with no clear racial goals or drives, apparently they get bored and scheme out of habit. Most of them are fascinated by arcane magic, and the priest-caste are fanatics that want to sacrifice victims to their dark gods to spread their candles, the rest nobody really cares about, because seriously they could be anyone or anywhere and you never even know you're dealing with a tsochar until you bash somebody's skull in and see a couple tentacles wriggling around in what's left of their grey matter.


We're supposed to give a damn about this sample character, but I'm still not sure why the tsochar is depicted with it's tentacles outside its victim. Maybe it just likes to show off.

Indeed, you could totally be in an adventure and facing a tsochar or group of tsochari and never fucking know it. These guys are indistinguishable from Mister Cavern being a dick. You stumble onto a plot, maybe you get hints that it's not a human plot but people disguised as humans...that doesn't narrow it down much...is it doppelgangers? Maybe a druuth? Shapechanged dragons? Could be anything, really. You can't trust anybody! Really, up until you start lopping off limbs, the MC doesn't even have to choose which race is taking over your guild/town/city/kingdom/world/favorite tavern or brothel. Even then, in some cases; the tsochari use most of the host's native abilities, so they're pretty much indistinguishable from fighting a regular NPC plus added MC-dick powers.

One big thing about the tsochari is that they're religion, particularly the cultists of Mak Thuum Ngatha, the Nine-Tongued Worm. Which sounds cool, and might have been interesting if introduced early in the setting...ha, I kid. D&D has no setting material. This whole book pretends that every world is actually a planet, and not a Greyspace or Krynnspace or discworld on four elephants on a giant turtle.


Give usss a kisss!

This brings me to the next section, and my next gripe: in the Cthulhu Mythos, which these dark, ancient, and alien deities are calling back to - although why I don't fucking know, since there's really no problem with just worshiping Cthulhu and Tsathoggua from a copyright standpoint - is that they don't have a lot to offer. It's implied they're ancient and full of terrible lore and secrets and their worship involves strange and horrific acts, but when you've already got stock evil deities that are cool with human sacrifice and a bit of cannibalism, and pretty much everybody casts off the same spell lists, and objectively one prestige class isn't supposed to be more overpowered than any other...well, it basically means these nominally ancient and alien deities don't have a whole lot to offer even to their clerics, never mind any non-cleric PC.

The tsochar do get a couple spells - and this is bizarre because it includes whispercast which is a callback to the ancient metamagic spells of AD&D. Seriously, it's a 2nd-level Sorcerer/Wizard spell that lets the next spell you cast of 5th-level or below be cast by purely mental action - no verbal, material, or somatic components needed. It's Eschew Materials, Still Spell, and Silent Spell all in one but a damn sight cheaper; it's meant for tsochar to cast spells while inhabiting, but seriously, what the fuck?

Also, why do the aberration write-ups never really combine their material with any of the other already-existing material? Why don't a couple of the Noble Tsochari level up in the Alienist prestige class, for example? Seems right up their tentacle-goo-covered alley.



The Ring of Reduction changes your size, allowing tsochar to squeeze into smaller meat-suits. Which could be really freaky, but again, nothing that a doppelganger can't really do.

The encounter for this chapter is the tower of Derros Frist, a wizard possessed by a tsochar which, according to the artwork, worships the statue of an aboleth - because fuck consistency inside a single chapter, yeah!

Look, you can sort of see the writers struggling in this chapter. You could totally play up the tsochari for a horror-based game but...why? There's not a lot here that isn't done elsewhere, and often better. They're not bad monsters, just latecomers and boring. Why not mimics? Or otyugh? Or if you wanted to go beyond the MM, the thoughteater?

I don't want to say they half-assed it (although they totally did), but aberrations are critters that pretty much should be psionic monsters by default. Think about it: pretty much every critter in this chapter is an alien lifeform with weird mental powers or extraordinary senses, a completely non-humanoid mindset on reproduction and life-cycle, and most of them have some interest in arcane magic. Why not have them all have inherent psionic powers because that's the standard where they're from and they're all interested in arcane magic because they've never seen it before. Then all their weird magic could come from them applying their very different theories of physics and metaphysics to an entirely new system of manipulating the universe. It encourages their interest and interaction with the other humanoid races and it ties in with your other products.

But, of course, that would require other things. You'd have to shelve a lot of pre-D&D3 fluff on the critters - not that that's a big loss, since Forgotten Realms and Eberron and shit just kept on trucking and ignored as much of the backstory of these monsters as they wanted - and you'd have to keep some editorial oversight to ensure consistency (ha), and probably the biggest stickler of all, you'd have to actually incorporate the setting and system. That's...never going to happen in D&D. Not for general sourcebooks like this, not in most of the setting-specific books. Such is life.

Next up: Chapter 8 - New Monsters.

[Lokathor]

I read this book once, and since then I'd forgotten entirely that there were chapters on anything except Mind Flayer, Beholder, Aboleth, and Neogi.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Some of the monsters in Chapter 8 were way more interesting than the tsochar. And there really should have been more done with the Ethergaunts, I liked the bastards.

[Stinktopus]

I have to object to the idea that the tsochar are redundant with dopplegangers. Once you know that the doppleganger is a doppleganger, you are free to kill it. Also, the majority of "possessing entities" in D&D exert complete control if they succeed at possession.

Tsochar can command obedience with the old "do what I want or I start chewing on your insides" technique. So, if a friend of the party gets tsochared, they are still themselves, so you can't use phrase/counter-phrase or hair cutting or whatever the party anti-doppleganger standard op is. Once you find out that the person is tsochared, and if you don't have (insert magic solution here), you now have this worm thing saying, "Okay, now YOU people do what I want or I chew up your friend's insides."

I think they have a lot of potential. Now, they weren't given enough of a background to be interesting by themselves, but they could still be neat as the tools of someone... someone named...

KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Blicero]

Yeah, I also think that, conceptually, the tsochari are sufficiently distinct from doppelgangers and the like to warrant inclusion in the game. Certainly, their implementation needed some work, but the concept grabbed my attention when I first read this book. I remember trying to get excited about neogi and grell, but I never could.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 8: New Monsters

Spoilered for awesome.

This is what you think of when someone says aberration.


This is what you get.

Anyway. There's two immediate rantworthy things here. First off, these aren't really new monsters, these are new to you monsters. Some of these monsters were well old enough to drink by the time Lords of Madness saw print, and the remainder are crap like the Half-Farspawn template. So really, this is just Fiend Folio 1.5, updating a bunch of monsters that they hadn't updated yet...and that's not to say this is all the aberrations that there are in D&D, just the twenty or so that they cherry-picked from The Illithiad and Spelljammer and Ravenloft and crap. It doesn't even touch anything in the Forgotten Realms.

Second, you have to ask why they have this section at all. If you look at the organization for this book, it's rather crap. Chapters 2-7 of this book are standalone looks at six major aberration species/cultures in setting-generic detail, freely mixing in-and-out-of-character knowledge in that way that they used to do in old AD&D products, including monster statblocks stuck just about anywhere...and then you have this section of "new" monsters, at least half of which really belong in one of the preceding chapters. Seriously, if you want to know all about Illithids, surely you'd just go to the Illithid chapter and read up on the Illithidae and Elder Brains there, and not have to flip back and forth through the book. Surely you'd want all the Beholderkin entries in the Beholder chapter. Indeed, this is the one book where it's okay to reprint entries from the Monster Manual or Monsters of Faerun under the justification of just cramming them all in the same place. It's not like the old days of AD&D 1st editon, where you had separate monster pages because those pages were literally meant to be punched and put in a three-ring binder like the Book of Mormon. If you're going to go ahead and divvy up aberrations by general type anyway, you might as well lump everything together.

That being said, this might be my favorite chapter in the book, because many old AD&D monsters were insane and I loved them. I love monster manuals and bestiaries as a I love few other things. They speak to my deep-seated need to organize things and balls-out, pants-on-head crazy.

It's also one of the great strengths of D&D, and aberrations in general, though one not often enough taken advantage of: the idea that there is an entire fantasy ecosystem at work here, that the creatures aren't stand-alone random beasties but actually interact with each other and have histories of conflict and trade and strange loves that dare not speak their name - which is why you have shit like pegataurs. So aberrations don't just have a single entry (except for shit like the tsochar), they have variants and off-shoots and templates and special golems and related monsters and shit.


"You see an eight-foot wiggling mass of furrowed pink folds. It shudders with agitation, seething anger at you as it waves its stubby but deadly lobes in your direction..."

Which is cool. It adds to the world. They are tools in Mister Cavern's toolbox, and while many of them (I'm looking at you, brain golem) might be insane or crap, but over time you build up a lot of that stuff, and you can find some cool stuff in there.


Case in point, that floating thing is a Gas Spore. It's a floating fungus filled with gas and spores. It's basically there to fuck with players by making them think it's a beholder, and then to fuck with them again when it explodes after they attack. Now, the idea is that this is all an oddly specific evolutionary trick/a wizard did it, and beneath that it's an absurd critter made entirely to fuck with players - and it works. I love it. It's a classic D&D trap-monster. My players hate me when I use it (it famously almost led to a TPK in the Crypts of Chaos), but it's fun.

Okay, so maybe not the best example. On to the other monsters.

The front-page art for this chapter features a destrachan, a chuul, and an umberhulk. None of these critters are actually in this chapter, they're just random aberrations, two of which aren't in this book.

The entries proper begin with the Beholderkin, which are all the many and strange variants on the beholder, most powered-down so that they're less instant-party-kill than the standard variety - sorry Eye of the Deep, but the claws really don't cut it next to a disintegration ray - as well as the various Spelljammer varieties that allow you to have a Beholder pseudo-society like the Hive Mother and Director.


Just wants a hug. Also, to kill every beholder that doesn't look exactly like it. I like to pretend they come in different colors, like lobsters, and mutants are hated more than others.

The Cloakers get the Shadowcloak Elder in this book, and a little blurb about how the bat-like critters build citylike nests deep in the Underdark. Now, your bog-standard Cloaker is a generic trap monster like the Mimic - a large part of its basic predatory strategy is to try and get PCs to put it on.


Dude, capes are in this season. I'm gonna look pimp and get all the honeys when we get back to Waterdeep. Panties gonna drop, son.

So the fact that they have a civilization more interesting and progressive than the Grell or the Tsochar is...well, strange. I'm not saying I'd have wanted a chapter on cloakers, because frankly I've had enough bizarre monster sex for a while, but if they had swapped out grell for cloakers to talk about dark cloaker-colonies carved out of the living stone in caverns of eternal night, I would understand.


"I could stand to hear a little more..."
"I'll be in my bunk."
Okay, I think I have it out of my system now.

The Supreme Intelligence Elder Brains probably shouldn't have stats. Really, it's always disappointing. It's like statting out a god, they're individual characters that are not going to die because you poke it with a bit of sharpened metal (or, in one memorable case, players created a decanter of endless bleach and redirected a stream of it into the Elder Brain's pool). Even if you call them CR 25, you're basically never going to actually use them in a game. They're a plot device, not a dragon you go fight. That said, they give both Arcane and Psionic stats here, with the Psionic stats in a bottom-bar. The most remarkable addition in this edition is the extraordinary ability to bud off and shape a Brain Golem once a day. That sounds like a mistake, because...well...I doubt a PC would ever shapechange/wild shape into an Elder Brain just to bud off a brain golem, but I guess it's a possibility.


In the Elder Brain entry (145), they tell you to read up on Brain Golems (65), which then directs you to the Fiend Folio. That's a double redirect fail.

Elder Eidolons are lazy golems. It's a template you add to almost any creature to make a golem shaped like said critter. Instead of supernatural and spell-like powers, it gets an insanity aura and various construct traits. They're lawn ornaments from R'lyeh, basically.

Which reminds me: the fine print at the front of the book says they're borrowing material from Call of Cthulhu d20. I haven't seen evidence that they've actually done that yet, but maybe I've missed something.

Half-Farspawn is one of those templates that seems unnecessary. We already have the Pseudonatural template, and doesn't that say it all?


Two tentacles way up!

The only difference between pseudonatural and half-farspawn is that it adds a couple spell-like abilities by HD. At 18 HD, you can cast summon monster IX 1/day, but can only summon animals with the pseudonatural template in place of fiendish or celestial critters. I generally approve of the idea of limited, themed character lists, but I still think half-farspawn are unnecessary.

Illithidae are critters from the same alien world (or, I guess, alien future) as mindflayers, but aren't illithids themselves. The aberration equivalent of elven dogs and elven cats, if you like. Like with the rest of the illithids, they have two stat blocks: arcane (spell-like abilities) and psionic (psi-like abilities).



Then we get the illithilich, illithid vampire, ulitharid, all of which would have been better placed a couple chapters back. There's nothing special here except holy shit, ulitharids have an LA of +9. I guess that's not as bad as the Paragon critter (+15), but dizamn.

Also, why did they not update the half-illithid template from the Fiend Folio? I know it was stupid, but that never stopped them before.


Psurlons are another contender for "Wait, why didn't these guys get a chapter?" They're blind, worm-like, telepathic critters that live in deserts and form communities about on the scale of Grell. They'd probably get on like a house on fire with the Neogi.

Shaboaths are giant tentacled constructs created by aboleths that aren't Elder Eidolons. They're made from a near-invisible gel that lets them engulf like a water elemental and create walls of ice.


No'quite.

The Shadow Creature template is here. I don't know why. I mean sure, the sample critter is a Shadow Cloaker, but honestly it doesn't turn a non-aberration into an aberration. Maybe they just wanted to update the template from Manual of the Planes and crammed it in here.

I think the Sithilar (flesh-warping colony organism) and Zeugalak (electrical predator) are original to this book, but I'm not certain of it. I'd actually have liked to have seen more of these. I'm not sure why they didn't just go ahead and update all the aberrations while they were at it, but I'm sure page count was an issue.

Next up, the chapter you've been waiting for: Chapter Nine PC Options The Aberration Hunter!

[Blicero]

@AH: I think that, given the existence of both the fiendish and half-fiend templates, the existence of both of the pseudonatural and half-farspawn templates is not unreasonable. Do you dispute that claim, or are you saying that it's okay to have fiendish and half-fiend, but it's unnecessary to have pseudonatural and half-farspawn?