Lords of Madness: I love this terrible fucking book!

[Ancient History]

I can see your point, but I'd actually argue against the need for a fiendish and half-fiend template. Fiends don't have anything like a standard biology to begin with, so compatible anatomy is right out the fucking window, but it's a lot like how you have "Half-Elf" as a thing but not an "Elven" template. I get that you want a shorthand for demonic-<insert_critter_here>, but I don't think you need to distinguish between "great-grandpa was a demon" and "cambion."

[Wiseman]

I don't really see the point in having Elder Brains, when Mind Flayers already have a god (ilsensine or something). If I was going to do it, I'd make the Mind Flayers be ruled by some sort of collective psychic intelligence, kind of like Many-As-One from Torment. It's never fought directly, and coordinates groups of mind flayers and their servants in their plot to take over the world/extinguish the sun/prevent a future catastrophe/whatever.

[Koumei]

Mind Flayers don't worship Ilsensine, they just have an intellectual understanding with one another. They basically made a business deal.

[Ancient History]

The whole interaction with aberrations and religion is generally edging towards openly atheist. I really don't understand why they don't ditch clerics altogether and just have them as an independent race that propitiates Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and whatnot.

[tussock]

3e has templates at all because AD&D kept inventing monsters that were a common theme on a bunch of other monsters. The Half-troll template is a lot less book space than the old giant trolls and giant two-headed trolls and spirit trolls and frost trolls and stone trolls and ... you get the point.

Same with different Zombies (only templated in 3.5), demonic stuff (sometimes made into full monsters again for 3.5, nothing like being consistent), tentacled not-quite-an-illithid monsters (which got the full stats and the template).

But then they didn't do it for dire animals ever, because ... I don't even know, I guess Druids needed them pre-defined back when 3.0 was in the works, maybe they didn't want a Dire Tyrannosaurus, even though T-Rex is just a Dire Allosaurus in the first place. Ah well, all ancient history now.

[Zaranthan]

But then they didn't do it for dire animals ever, because ... I don't even know, I guess Druids needed them pre-defined back when 3.0 was in the works, maybe they didn't want a Dire Tyrannosaurus, even though T-Rex is just a Dire Allosaurus in the first place. Ah well, all ancient history now.

They didn't do it because there isn't any consistency to the Dire animals at all. Compared to their mundane counterparts:

- The dire tiger gains 10 hit dice (6 to 16), 4 strength, and 3 natural armor.
- The dire bat gains 5 hit dice (1/4 to 4), 15 strength, 7 dex, 5 natural armor, a bite attack (the mundane bat has no attack), and grows from diminutive to large.
- The dire ape gains 1 hit die, 1 strength, 1 natural armor, and a Rend attack.

Now, that's not to say it can't be done. You can get plenty of mileage from just saying "add a bunch of strength and natural armor, and increase size to large" and just doing custom writeups for edge cases like the bat being a dex monkey. I assume they just were lazy and found it easier to eyeball the bonuses and CRs rather than do work and make a formula.

[Username17]

Dire Animal can't be a template because a lot of the animals don't have meaningful combat stats as non-dire variants. The Dire Toad like swallows people whole and shit. Regular toad familiars don't do that.



What Dire Animal really should be, is a character class. You make an 8th level beast and then it has appropriate attack bonuses and hit points and shit and grabs some beast abilities off a table. But while 3e showed us that was how such monsters should be made, they weren't there yet when the edition actually hit the printers.

I have no idea why someone thought it was a good idea to go to 3.5 and then Pathfinder without fixing this shit though.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Chapter Nine: The Aberration Hunter

So, this is the rest of the book. I've been trying to think about what this book actually is, and there's not a good fit for it's type. It's a monster book, sure, but it's supposed to be looking at a (more or less arbitrary) subset of monsters, and doesn't do that terribly well. I'm tempted to compare it to something like Shadowrun's Threats, but in that book each "threat" was given a chapter front-loaded with fiction and setting material fluff, then in the back you'd have some stats and mechanics. It was definitely a strict dividing line between what was in character information, and what was out of character information - and heck, for that part which bits were for players and gamemasters. This obviously isn't that; I don't think there's two pages stuck together without some stats on them. It isn't Draconomicon either, though that comes closest in terms of scope and content. No, this is...well, this is a hodge-podge of stuff, much of it skimmed from older sources and regurgitated in the latest ruleset. There's not a lot new in this book, and it's pretty much all in this chapter.

It starts out with "The Great Foes," which is frankly a half-assed effort to get gamemasters to care about killing Aboleths, Illithids, and Beholders as proper PC-killing threats. The authors can't even work up the gumption to care about Grell, Neogi, and Tsochari. Then they skip straight to "Minions and Cultists."


Wait, did you get some Call of Cthulhu on my D&D campaign? No? False alarm.

I actually like monster cults. Monsters are fun, but too many in quick succession and the shock wears off. Cultists hint at the rarity and power of monsters, and give you a fair number of mooks to work your way through - which, being human, you might feel slightly worse about killing indiscriminately, maybe. Even monster cults where the monsters worship strange, alien deities from outside any known pantheon are kinda cool, they give the monsters more purpose than just randomly kidnapping village children because they have tentacles and must violate something to keep from getting bored.

Rinse all alien artifacts before touching them with your bare hands.

This section doesn't give any really good suggestions or run-down of sample cults, but it does have a page with brief entries on popular "unhuman" gods like Ghaunadaur, The Great Mother, Ilsensine, Mak Thuum Ngatha, The Patient One, and everyone's favorite Tharizdun. I have no idea why they didn't include Cthulhu or Azathoth or some of the gods from the Book of Vile Darkness or any of the other established monster gods or maybe some choice Demon Princes from the Abyss, but there you go.

The lack of human cults of these gods here kind of annoys me. Humans will fuck, kill, eat, or worship anything, often more than one at once, often given only very limited information and opportunity. Hell, Dragon magazine realized this and gave entire cults over to the Beholders and Illithids and whatnot. So this feels like a very short-shift section.

From there, we go straight to "Feats for the Aberration Hunter." Which is a lie. There are feats like "Aberration Banemagic" which sound cool, but then there's stuff like "Aquatic Spellcasting" and "Ocular Spell" and you know that this is also all the PC options based on said critters as well - and that's not including the Aberrant Feats. Yes, yet another feat type! This one means you've got some aberration in your ancestry and as you take them you grow tentacles and gills and shit. Which isn't bad; there's an option in one of the Eberron books where you can treat your Aberrant Dragonmark feats as Aberrant feats...or maybe that was vice versa?...which almost makes either worth taking. Almost.

Mainly, I think the best feat in this vein is Aberration Wild Shape, which lets you use your Wild Shape ability to take the form of an aberration of the appropriate size. This is actually rather workable, I think, since there are aberrations with some interesting extraordinary abilities, but is it worth two feats to take it? Eh.

Most of the other feats are rather too-specialized or blah to bother about. Which actually means, shock upon shock, that they're probably appropriate for the book, even if you'd never take them. The two glaring exceptions are Ocular Spell (which allows you to cast some spells as rays from your eyes - up to two at a time - which is handy, but really just a one-shot) and Wild Talent, which is verbatim from the psionics rulebooks and the only acknowledgement in this section that psionics is a thing associated with aberrations.


This, basically.

Then we get into the prestige classes. Abolishers are a re-working of the Illithid Slayer class except for non-psionic rangers and aimed against aberrations in general. It's not actually better than taking the same number of levels of ranger.

I suppose you could double-dip as a Ranger/Abolisher/Illithid Slayer, although for the life of me I can't imagine why. As with other prestige classes at this stage in the shovelware life-cycle, in addition to the basics of the class we're subject to extended crappola about playing Abolishers and Abolishers in the World and Abolishers Lore and no one gives a fuck.

Darkrunners are something like a reject from the Dungeonomicon or Complete Adventurer, it's a class themed for running, climbing, crawling, fighting, and teleporting around the underdark. It's not really worth even level-dipping into.

The class everybody remembers this book for is the Fleshwarper.



...which is basically an item creation specialist that focuses on grafts; the whole Craft/Graft Reserve mechanic would be recycled for another couple of classes in Eberron. The basic idea is that as you advance through the class you upgrade your body with monster parts and gain various bonuses. THis isn't the first class of its kind - Oriental Adventures had something similar with the Tattooed Monk, and of course the Loremaster had their shitty secrets - but for an arcane spellcaster class that has 9/10 spellcasting, it's not the worst thing they've ever done. That said, no-one becomes a Fleshwarper to unlock the hidden power that is Climb Speed, so this is really an NPC prestige class for when you want to add grafts to your game.

Keeper of the Cerulean Sign is a mouthful, and sounds like it should have been an Incarnum class...but it's actually a 10-for-10 spellcasting class focused on killing aberrations with magic. If you were planning to focus in that anyway, it's a good class to move into and the opportunity cost is small; if you aren't, then you can safely ignore it. The big stickler here is that you have to create your own Cerulean Sign a non-insignificant magic item which can cost 160 XP at the low end to 4000 XP at the high end, Mister Cavern permitting. It gives you a luck bonus on AC, saves, and things against aberrations.

Sanctified Mind is the nominal psionic prestige class for the supplement, and is weird on several levels. It's 6 levels long, which is odd, and 5 of those are either/or on divine spellcasting or manifester levels, which means this was either intended for Paladins of a psionic race or the Divine Mind class which didn't exist yet. Either way you look at it, the Sanctified Mind sucks aboleth eyeballs.

You have chosen...poorly.

Last and arguably least is the Topaz Guardian, which is...ah...I guess aimed at Paladins that don't like aberrations? Five levels, three of them any brand of spellcasting, requires a feat unique to this book and approval of a new organization no one's ever heard of. You do get a free magic item, the topaz diadem, which is like a personal protection from evil that doesn't work against summoned monsters (wait, what?) No one is going to take the Topaz Guardian class.

"Magic" is, really, spells. Starting off with a bunch of new domains no one cares about. I never liked the domains because none of the books talk to each other and there's a tremendous amount of overlap. There's seriously separate domains for Mind and Mentalism, Necromancy and Undeath. What the actual fuck? They also re-write the Vile Darkness domain from Book of Vile Darkness, which had to be somebody's pet project.

Spells are boring. You've got detect aberration, some other aberration-targeting specific spells, the great bolt of bedevilment lifted straight from a Ditko-era Dr. Strange comic...



...brain spider and probe thoughts which ought to be psionic powers; morality undone which turns the subject evil for 10 min/level (and wouldn't it be nice to have the cleric control undead instead of turn them for once?, or make the Paladin take a sudden deep dive into Blackguard?); etc. The only really fun spell here is the 9th-level Invoke Magic, which exists primarily to give NPCs a way out of antimagic zones.


All I have for this.

Magic items...meh. Magic item bloat is magic item bloat. I like magic items, but there's only like a page of these things and they're not tremendous. You've got a seven-charge amulet that you can blow a charge to prevent yourself from being turned into a skum or a polymorphed or something; there's a mask that gives you face tentacles like a chuul...


Do these tentacles make my face look fat? You'd tell me, right?
Don't worry, vertical tentacles are slimming.

...the Codex Anathemata which gives an Int boost, Wisdom drop, and a bunch of skill ranks, and three other random items I can't care enough about to mention. Bah, humfuck.

Most of this section is really taken up by grafts (following on from the Fiend Folio), which covers many pages and includes several fun and exciting alien organs you can add into your body. The likelihood of you ever using an Inksac or Mucus Projector are slim if you're older than twelve, but at least these were the pre-Eberron graft rules before they really fucked things up. They're better than most magic items 'cause they don't take up a real slot and can't be removed without surgery, and hey, most of them are things you might want, like the Healing Blood or Darksight Eyes, or something that the grafters might want, like the really fun Mind Blast Relay. The big downside, of course, is that each type of graft arbitrarily requires it's own feat, and the gp costs tend to be exorbitant (probably to prevent abuse, but c'mon - 2 points of Dex is worth 110,000 gp!?). Also sadly, beholder grafts are back in Fiend Folio. Also weirdly, I'm pretty sure they didn't make much mention of aboleths, illithids, or silthilar using grafts much back in their respective chapters, which seems a shame.

"Defenders of Humanity" are a group of investigator organizations monster hunters organizations associated with the prestige classes you aren't going to take, plus associated sample characters. I'm not going into these, each sample character entry is longer than the write-up for each individual order or guild, and they're never referenced anywhere ever again.

...and that's the book.

I don't like this fucking book. It's designed to be one of those interchangeable, take-it-or-leave it books like GURPS, but it doesn't stand on its own and it doesn't stand with anything, so why the fuck would you buy it unless you just had to have the latest stats for a bunch of obscure monsters that haven't seen the light of day for ten or twenty years. There's not a lot of new material, the old material isn't updated well, and while I could forgive them for resurrecting some of this crap if they bothered to tie it in anywhere or at least consolidated everything...well, they didn't. So this is a remarkably unremarkable book, without a lot in it for players or gamemasters. Which is sad, because I remember looking forward to this book. I like illithids, even when they're insane. I like fantasy lifecycles and civilizations and figuring out how they work in the campaign. But there's no real setting in D&D, and that really hurts them here - there's nothing for these guys to tie in to, except the generic idea of a unified quasi-medieval D&D world. It's no wonder Eberron basically abandoned all the fluff for these guys the second they had a fucking shot at it.



And the thing is, aberrations are cool. They're cool because they are different, because they're not some obviously-a-wizard-fucking-did-it mishmash beastie like an owlbear or a chimera. They're alien, with implications of a completely different chain of evolution and ecology and profoundly different way of living, weird magic and powers and strange gods and actual technology in shit. Sure it's a bit more science fantasy than your average D&D game but that's not a bad thing. It hearkens back to the classic literature that D&D was based on, like John Carter of Mars fighting malevolent molluscs and shit. It's H. G. Wells meets a Frazetta cover painting...and Lords of Madness just doesn't live up to it.

[Mistborn]

Ocular Spell (which allows you to cast some spells as rays from your eyes - up to two at a time - which is handy, but really just a one-shot)

Ocular Spell is actually one of the more abusive metamagic feats, it's a big factor in the metamagic blasters ability to evaporate people.

[Ancient History]

Is it? The requirements always struck me as more trouble than it's worth, at least compared to some of the crap that came out of the Forgotten Realms books.

[Mistborn]

Is it? The requirements always struck me as more trouble than it's worth, at least compared to some of the crap that came out of the Forgotten Realms books.

If your serious about abusing metamagic it's a good deal, for starters it lets get off two spells in the same round for +2 metamagic as compared to quicken spell or twin spell (and it makes hideous babies with the other low cost spell doubler split ray) . Now if your playing a normal wizard casing 2 3rd level spells in one round at the cost of two 5th level slots, but if you're a meta-mage you're already playing a bazar form of D&D that god never intended where you layer as many metamagic feats as possible on a low level damage spell with good scaling and ocular spell is one of the more efficient ways to double your damage.

[Ancient History]

Yeah - but it's a one-shot, and it only works if you can actually hit something with it (i.e., where is your Weapon Specialization(Ray) when you need it?) I don't deny it could be useful, I just thought there were better options.

[Mistborn]

Yeah - but it's a one-shot, and it only works if you can actually hit something with it (i.e., where is your Weapon Specialization(Ray) when you need it?) I don't deny it could be useful, I just thought there were better options.

Well you can prepare as many ocular spells as you want you just cant have more than two ready at once, and touch armor tends to be easy to hit with even end game monsters like balors only having touch ac 20

[Koumei]

Ocular spell is a weird one: I've seen people mistakenly think "Ah, RTA, they don't get a Ref Save for half damage!" and use it to unleash a pair of (or via Split Ray, four) "Always hits" Wings of Flurry for (level)d6 Force damage each. No, it still gets Ref HalfNegates because Evasion.

Also, people generally take it because a 60' ray is obviously a "fixed" spell range, meaning you can Persist it, theoretically. I have never seen someone simply use it to give reach to a Touch spell or to single-target their fireball or whatever.

As for the fleshwarper, there's a terrible problem: it requires 4 ranks in Heal and 8 ranks in Know (Arcana). So you enter it after level 5, right?

Wrong. You also need one Graft feat. Which has the requirement of Heal 10 ranks. So let's say a Wizard swindles Heal as a class skill, that means they qualify for that at level 7, and get a feat at level nine, and it's level ten when they get their first level of Fleshwarper. One level later, the DM probably brings the game to a finish. If you don't get it as a class skill, then you can get 10 ranks at level 17 and take the feat at level 18, and then enter the class at level 19.

This is why you don't design games while doing meth.

[Hicks]

No one gives a shit about the Tsochar. I'll fight anyone that says anywise.

I like the Tsochar. They and the Mindsight feat are my most favorite things in the Lord's of Madness book. If you ever find yourself in Memphis Tennessee, I will fight you back, then probably buy you a beer.

It will be a shitty beer though; I refuse to waste good beer on somebody who dislikes the Tsochar.

[LeadPal]

No one gives a shit about the Tsochar. I'll fight anyone that says anywise.

I like the Tsochar. They and the Mindsight feat are my most favorite things in the Lord's of Madness book. If you ever find yourself in Memphis Tennessee, I will fight you back, then probably buy you a beer.

It will be a shitty beer though; I refuse to waste good beer on somebody who dislikes the Tsochar.

Its background fluff sucks, but the Tsochar itself deserves more credit: none of D&D's other body snatchers really aim for body horror. Being controlled by a ghost is creepy in a different way from being controlled by parasitic worms.

[Ancient History]

It will be a shitty beer though; I refuse to waste good beer on somebody who dislikes the Tsochar.

It's okay, I'm a teetotal.

The Tsochar just lack...everything. No-one uses their society, they don't build anything, they don't have much in the way of magic, no grafts, no real motivation...they're one-episode Star Trek villains, and not even one of the good episodes. They're the kind of threat that Reed Richards would solve by tricking them into invading some cows. What they really remind me of in a lot of ways are the Insects from Shaggai: they come from nowhere, are inexplicably religious, and invade your body but that's it. As a drop-in monster they're probably fine, but they just don't have the visceral appeal of the mindflayer.

[Voss]

Eh. The tsochar are interesting because there are various plots and themes you can hit up with them. Mind flayers on the other hand, have too much history as fuck-you penis extension monsters. Oops, you rolled poorly, you're either stunned for so long it might as well be the entire combat, or 'Ate your brain. Dead.' Any mind flayer encounter is less interesting (and this is true for the beholder as well) because at any point it can devolve into RNG TPK madness on a level that is just infuriating.

Whatever scenario or RP plot point or in-game horror might be evoked is horribly overshadowed by the players (and probably the DM) being terrified of the fucking dice.