The Gaming Den

The Gorbal is pretty obviously a Dark Star expy.

OSSR: Fiend Folio
Monsters A-Z: Mantari to Slaad


Giant Frog!


This is a Mantari.

It's a mantaray, but it flies. It's pronounced “Mantaree,” which makes it almost as innovative as a Pokemon name. That tail is supposed to only be 4 feet long, so I think there's some seriously weird perspective in that picture. We are told that the stinger is “not poisonous” but “acts on the victim's nervous system,” which leads me to believe that the author did not know what poison was. This thing has an incredibly weird system for handling its... non-poisonous but potentially fatal nerve agent that involves subtracting the victim's constitution from 19 and possibly multiplying by four. If it hits you two rounds in a row, you're probably dead, but this is not likely to happen because it only has 6 hit points itself. No word on how this fucking thing works if it attacks a creature that isn't a player character and thus doesn't have a Constitution score because AD&D was fucked like that. It flies pretty fast and can kill Steve Irwin or pretty much anything else that it gets the drop on, which is why it likes to hang out in areas with low ceilings full of ninjas with spears.


Everything about this picture is a fucking lie.

The Meazel is, despite the appearance in the picture, a man-sized solitary monster. Yeah. The picture promises us evil muppet Thuggee with the hair stylists and possibly sword smiths of the Githyanki. That sounds awesome. Unfortunately, the actual text describes a creature that is nothing like that. Thus, the Meazel has languished in obscurity, because when a DM's eye is caught by the art, they are looking for a monster that is in no way similar to the one actually described in the text and mechanics.

Actual Meazels are like tougher Hobgoblins that almost never leave the house and when they do, use stealth to pick off individual Orcs and Kobolds on solo raids. It's... not what is promised on the tin, that's for damn sure.


This is a Meenlock. It's not so much a monster as a story.

The Meenlock entry is a quite elaborate walkthrough of a horror story, where various scary events happen and the monsters harrass an individual person for days, causing them nightmares and killing the people around them, and baiting them into walking down spooky hallways and finally causing the bad end where the protagonist becomes a monster themselves. It's... not actually D&D. It's like a bizarre parody of a railroad adventure, or perhaps someone trying to write mechanics for a series of events that happen in a campfire story. It's all made sort of surreal by the fact that Meenlocks are seriously 2 feet tall, which I suspect might be a typographical error but in any case makes all of the monster horror and the eventual transformation into one take a weird comical feeling that I don't think was at all intentional.


The original mephits came in Fire, Lava, Smoke, and Steam flavors. They were sort of like imps, in that they were minor evil critters that fawned and served any devil or demon more powerful than they were, which was pretty much all of them. They were mostly forgotten until Planescape re-envisioned them as coming from the paraelemental planes.

Mephits are connoisseurs of the vulgar and tasteless; they share an extraordinarily twisted sense of humour (to a mephit, the sight of a creature writhing in agony is excruciatingly funny). They delight particularly in tormenting the helpless. If they can obtain them (and it is usual that they do) they will wear clothes of the most garish design and colour possible. They are often seen puffing upon smoking rolls of exceedingly foul-smelling dried vegetation. They adopt a strutting gait and have shrill voices (they all speak a common mephit tongue and their alignment language).

They're basically yobbos. Surprisingly, they're also 5' tall. I always thought they were shorter. Artwise, they look closer to faeries.



I've never been quite clear on the purpose of creatures like mephits. I mean obviously, you want a demon or devil that is within smacking range of every level of player character, and in later games you sort of want PCs to be able to cow or summon minor devils to take out the trash or kidnap the princess or breed some cambions or whatever the fuck wizards do, but mephits don't really have any sort of mythological precedence or place in the ecology of the underworld. The demons and devils don't raise vast armies of them, they don't pokevolve into more powerful forms, they don't do shit. They just are. Assholes. They don't even torture the damned or anything like that.

I would feel better about Mephits if I didn't know they were connected to Quasi-Elemental and Para-Elemental planes of existence. Back when I was a child and didn't know that, I liked Mephits more.


The Mezzodaemon

Originally coming from Vault of the Drow, the Mezzodaemon is one of the original Yugoloths. The word “Yugoloth” is just a nonsense word that was made up during 2nd edition's attempt to scrub itself of satanic imagery to protect itself from angry Christian mothers. However, unlike Baatezu and Tanar'ri, people still use the word Yugoloth unironically. And this is because the original term for the Neutral Evil variants of Demons and Devils that Gygax came up with was “Daemon.” Which is literally just the word “Demon” with a slightly different orthography, so fuck that.


This is a Mite. Unlike the Meenlock, I'm pretty sure the fact that this guy is 2 feet tall is not a typo.

Mites are small creatures who are dicks. They can't talk and despite the picture do not actually appear to work metal. They capture people, take their shinies, and dump them naked into dungeons full of monsters because, as previously noted, they are dicks. Not a terrible nuisance monster, the book notes that they are related to Jermlaine and Snyads, implying that there is a whole category of vile little fairies. This would later be called “Gremlins,” but since the category was defined in 2nd edition it came with a lot of stupid.


I have a soft spot for the Necrophidius. It's not just a necromancer golem-crafter working with what they have, it's being creative about it! Basically, these are skeletal snakes with a human skull at the end. Suitably creepy. Their special ability is the Dance of Death, where they go into a swaying dance and hypnotise onlookers, allowing them to get closer and kill them.

There are three ways of creating a necrophidius. The first is by means of a special magical tome, similar to a Manual of Golems. The second method is for a high-level magic-user to employ a limited wish, a geas and a charm person. The third method is for a high-level cleric to employ quest, neutralise poison, prayer, silence and snake charm. The materials include the complete articulated skeleton of a giant snake (poisonous or constrictor) and the skull of a cold-blooded murderer killed within the previous 24 hours. The cost is 500 gold pieces per hit point of the creature and it requires 10 days construction time.

My favorite use of a necrophidius was to team it with an iron cobra; the cobra would get close and then unhinge its iron jaw, letting the necrophidius vomit forth. Most of the PCs were so unnerved by this they forgot to attack it immediately. Good times.

Continuing on with the looks-like-undead-but-isn't theme is the Needleman.



Which is actually a sort of ambulatory cactus-plant, so I have no idea why it's wearing a codpiece. They hate elves and are very vulnerable to magic. 2nd edition tried to make some sense out of these critters and failed.

I suppose I should take a moment to mention that many of these critters are ambush predators; most of them are given some special ability that allows them a better-than-average chance of hitting the PCs from ambush. Now, you might well argue that this is just because Mister Cavern is a dick or so that the critter gets at least one hit in, but objectively I think ambush tactics are good for monsters that really won't win in a straight fight. It's an established and successful evolutionary niche. That said, I was glad in 3e when monsters got the Hide skill and we didn't have to waste an eighth of each entry on how fucking hard the critter was to see.

Moving on, we have the infamous Nilbog!



This entry is so insane, I'm just going to copy it in its entirety:

This creature looks exactly like a normal goblin and has all the characteristics of that race (see ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
MONSTER MANUAL - Goblin) with one important exception - it suffers from a curious spatio-temporal reversal. It remains a mystery why only goblins are susceptible to this strange disorder. Nilbogism (the name given to the disorder) appears to occur when overly heavy use of magic strains the fabric of the space-time continuum, and leads to some very strange localised events. The coincidence of conditions which lead to nilbogism is extremely rare and is only imperfectly understood. Although the creature itself does not in any sense transmit the disorder to those around it, some of the effects are transmitted.

Many and varied accounts have been received about the nature of the space-time disturbances which take place in the presence of nilbogs. Only one factor appears to be common - the adventurers will have no control over their own actions and will generally pursue courses of action contrary to their normal intent; for example they may feel an overwhelming compulsion to load all their treasure into an empty treasure chest in the nilbog lair and leave empty-handed. There are no saving throws against these effects, nor is there any known defence (though a powerful spell such as a wish, will, if used properly, have a good chance of rendering local immunity against the effects).

Another curious feature of nilbog power is that the creature gains hit points when it is struck, the addition being equal to the intended damage rolled. It can only lose hit points by such means as casting cure wounds spells on it, forcibly feeding it healing potions and so on. For obvious reasons, encounters with these strange creatures are dreaded and, as a result, normal goblins tend to be treated with extreme caution lest they turn out to be nilbogs. There appears to be no way of distinguishing between the two apart from the use of such spells as commune or by trial and error.

So far as is known, no other creature has been afflicted with nilbogism.

These are some of the original joke monsters, although the joke is likely to be on the PCs. They don't make much of any sense in any context. Their single greatest contribution to AD&D were healing arrows.

The Nonafel is a big black panther that splits into nine much smaller black panthers and then reassembles into a big black panther again and regenerates and shit. It's actually a decent boss monster. You can cut it up good and then it swarms you and then you beat that off and then you fight it again and win. This one seems like it should be related to the Displacer Beast, but it spends so much time fucking around with its overly complicated hit point mechanics that it doesn't really get around describing why this thing is a thing. I mean, other than that it makes a pretty decent set piece battle.



Norkers are supposed to be a “far distant relative” of Hobgoblin. That makes my brain hurt. Goblins and Bugbears, for example, are close relatives of Hobgoblins. So if something is a far distant relative, why are they specifying Hobgoblins? It was before the whole Goblinoid thing really got ironed out, but this writeup was puzzling even when it was written. It gets more surreal, what with it insisting that they look like Hobgoblins and then mentioning that they have a fucking exoskeleton, which Hobgoblins very obviously don't have.

For all the bullshit, the Norkers are basically low tech Hobgoblins. Their in-game purpose is to be about as tough as Hobgoblins as opponents while only dropping shitty stone-age equipment. So they make up for their low tech by being strong and tough. So really, this is basically just the same idea as the Drow's underground radiation or the Disenchanter's swag destruction nose: it's a way for Mr. Cavern to reduce the amount of toys the Player Characters go home with. And while I think that's actually a kind of stupid goal most of the time, the Norker explanation for why your cash take from the adventure is less than you might have thought is much less stupid and insulting than the others.

Generally speaking, Humanoid encounters are very well paid because combat equipment is very valuable (some of that is medieval realism, where a set of chainmail cost as much as a house, and some of that is the authors knowing that you mostly care about buying things that affect the biggest mini-game in the game). So your expected takehome from beating up a lot of humanoids is actually potentially destabilizing to the campaign
– all the more so because AD&D didn't have encounter or wealth guidelines. The Norker exists to be an encounter that is like fighting a bunch of Hobgoblins, but without giving the party a wagon load of armor and weapons when they fall.


The Nycadaemon is a yugoloth from the Middle Lower Planes, who grew up in a modest but loving household in the suburbs and could never pretend he was "street" like the Baatezu, and the rest of the evil kids avoid them. That said, they're pretty bad ass as Neutral Evil outerplanar entities go. They're as strong as stone giants, use magic items, have a shitload of personal spell-like powers, regenerate, have various weapon immunites, AC -4, a "graduated magic immunity" (i.e. 100% immune to 1st level spells, 95% immune to 2nd level spells, etc.; theoretically they'd have a 55% immunity to 10th level spells, if 10th level spells were a thing back then), and just to give Mister Caverna headache:

The entire spectrum of radiation can be seen by nycadaemons (i.e.
infrared, ultra-violet, X-rays, gamma rays etc.) The telepathic ability of these creatures allows them to communicate on the telepathic level
with creatures of intelligence low or better.

The 'N' chapter ends with a half-page drawing of a scrawny evil humanoid with pointed ears and fangs, dressed only in a loincloth and rags on its feet, holding a cleaver bigger than it's entire body. No idea what it is.

The 'O' chapter is one page, with two monster. The first is the Ogrillon, an orc-ogre crossbreed. Later on in 2nd edition, digging deep into the lore of orc mating practices, it was decided that the ogrillon was the product of a female orc and a male ogre, while an orog was the product of a male orc and a female ogre. I think this was supposed to be a bit like ligers and tigons, but orogs and ogrillons really aren't that distinct enough for anyone to give a fuck. Although I suddenly have a terrible visage in my head of an hermaphrodite orc demigoddess that is the mythical progenitor of all orogs and ogrillons by seducing different members of the Ogre pantheon.

Anyway, the other critter is the humble osquip.



It's a giant rodent that can have 6 (70%), 8 (25%), or 10 (5%) legs. It burrows through soil and rock and eats smaller rodents and jermaine. Honestly, I'd rather have these things than cats in a fantasy setting. I will also love them always as being the subject of one of the most entertaining Monster Hunter Association "Monster Ecology" articles in Dragon Magazine, where a one of said monster hunters adopts an osquip named Ozzie and makes him his familiar.


Also, always a great excuse to use this joke.

Lots of monsters are taken from science fiction and fantasy books. Others are made up from whole cloth by authors that may or may not be on drugs. And finally, some come from old folklore. And when a monster gets really weird, you know it's probably traditional. There's just a limit to how crazy these things can get after only a round or two of telephone.


Seems Legit.

The Penanggalan is kind of like a vampire, but its head pops off its shoulders, pulling a trail of visceral organs out behind it so it can fly around looking for victims. It might not surprise you to learn that this monster is 100% folkloric. Drawn from the myths of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, there are more people who believe in these things today than ever believed in wyverns in the entire history of the world.

The writeup here goes on for a page and a half, throwing in weird facts (like if it doesn't reunite its intestines and body by cock-crow, it risks being paralyzed all day when the sunlight hits its floating head), and strange rulings (like how it explains that all undead are immune to spells that control the mind or body, which in this edition is very much not true). Basically, it reads like someone found out about these things and then flipped the fuck out and felt compelled to just write everything they could think of to translate all the strange facets of this majestic beast into AD&D terms. Like you do.


There is an entire genre of Malaysian Penanggalan movies. One day they are going to get a special effects budget and that will be awesome.


Who Are You?

The artist clearly was thinking of The Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland when he drew this guy. This is actually not the picture of the Pernicon that appears in the book, but the original piece drawn by Russ Nicholson. He was asked to redraw it and to make sure that it had a visible pincer on its tail. So the one in the book looks pretty much exactly like that except that it has a pincer on its tail. According to the description, these things latch on with their pincers and drain blood and water from their victims. Making this the only monster I am aware of with a blood draining ass. Other than that, they hum when sources of water are nearby, so you can potentially use them as divining rods.


Phantom Stranger Stalker

The Phantom Stalker is much like an Invisible Stalker, except that rather than being invisible, it's intangible because it's chillin like a villain on the Ethereal Plane. Yes, that makes the second monster in this book that is “like an Invisible Stalker but...” I don't know. Back in the late seventies, I think Invisible Stalkers made a much bigger impression on people than they do now.

The last two entries in "P" don't merit an illustration. This is because they consist of the Poltergeist, which is just a ghost that throws shit and has no physical form, and the Protein Polymorph, which is just a fucking bargain-bin mimic.


Later editions also failed to capture the majesty of a shape-shifting colony organism.

The 'Q's get a page-and-a-quarter because they include three entries. One of these is the quipper, which is just a fucking piranha, and another is the Qullan, which are chaotic evil humanoids that radiate confusion and attack with impossibly sharp swords for no particular reason. No one cares about either of those. No, the star of this section is the Quaggoth, which is an exemplar of adaptation advancement.


This is the original quaggoth. It's not much to look at. It is, in fact, a shaggy stone-age humanoid that hates surface elves. It hates surface elves so much, it sometimes enslaves itself to the drow so it can fight surface elves.


This is the quaggoth Mark II. It's now a sort of ursine humanoid. It organizes itself like vikings, and gets enslaved by mindflayers, and has a small chance of psychic powers. Dragon would later add Quaggoth mutants.


And this is the quaggoth Mk. III, which we noted in Monsters of Faerun, and later Drow of the Underdark would add the Greater Quaggoth.

It's hard to see why quaggoth literary evolution has followed this particular path. There's no one guy that's "the quaggoth guy" and writes them into anything they can, subtly expanding on the culture and write-up. What these are is an example of a critter just interesting enough to revisit, and then somebody rewrote them to be more interesting and that got more people interested in them. Lots of monsters in Fiend Folio have been re-specced in later editions, but few have seen the sort of evolution you see with minor monsters like the quaggoth, and its sort of the kind of thing you want to see in games - not just the same old shit rehashed and updated to the latest ruleset, but reimagined and expanded a bit.


Demogorgon apparently designed these guys to inspire maximum terror.

The Retrievers are living constructs made by Demogorgon whose nominal purpose is to go retrieve things but whose actual talents lie in ripping things to shreds and shooting destruction rays out of their eyes. Unless Demogorgon likes his morning paper delivered chopped in half, set on fire and then turned into lead – I can only imagine that the title “Retriever” was bestowed ironically. Or perhaps was titled that by one head so the other head wouldn't figure out what was being made. In any case, this is one of the most seriously dangerous monsters in first edition, and the 3e conversion was both bogus and sad.


This is the dreaded Hobo Revenant.

Revenants are neutral undead who single mindedly attempt to avenge their own murders. Basically like The Crow, but 13 years earlier than that. They regenerate, because this was a simpler time in which Undead regenerating wasn't a problem. Apparently, becoming a Revenant teaches you the Neutral Alignment Tongue, which I personally find insulting, but other than that it's pretty much what you expect.


If those look like cave bison to you, that is because they are cave bison.

The Rothé are a herd animal that lives in caves. They are like yaks or bison or something, but they live in caves. Really. I actually fully support these things. They aren't very useful as a monster, but the fact that they exist is really helpful for designing Underdark cultures. Dwarves can put Rothé milk butter on their food and Kuo-Toa can pull wild Rothé into the pond in order to have feasts. It's just a single brick, but it's a brick that's genuinely useful for world building.

Rothé were embraced by Ed Greenwood for the Forgotten Realms specifically for that purpose.


Sandman

Sandman

Sandman

SO. Sandman (D&D) is a humanoid made out of sand that makes you sleepy. There's no reference to their culture, habits, what they eat, or anything else about them. Also no account of what happens when they run into elves, which are immune to sleep.


Frank was not the only one to use the Fiend Folio as a coloring book. THis is the scarecrow. They're evil animate scarecrows. 'nuff said.

Also, I just ran across this great mashup.

The Screaming Devilkin looks like a mephit. Which is to say, your traditional small red devil, little horns, barbed tail, wings, etc. It flies around screaming, preventing magicians from using spells with verbal components. Rather weaksauce.


The Shadow Demon is a combination of the Shadow, which in pretty much every incarnation is ridiculously broken, and a demon. This is actually to the detriment of the critter, since it lacks the ability to drain levels and make no shadow demons, and is vulnerable to various light sources. Even the author has no idea how this fits into demons, which have a fairly strict pokevolution structure going on.

The Sheet Ghoul and Sheet Phantom are presented together, although this is sort of by accident since the whole thing is nominally alphabetical so the sheet ghoul comes first. Basically, the Sheet Phantom is a wraith in the form of a sheet.


Hooah, got it, next.

The sheet envelopes a target (which takes any damage if you attack the sheet), and when the target eventually suffocates they become a sheet ghoul. I probably would have save an entry and just had the victim become a regular ghoul, but then I'm a forward-thinking designer looking to save conceptual space.

The part I like about sheet phantoms is the speculation that they're undead lurkers, even though that doesn't make much sense.



Oh wait, that's not it...


There we go.

Shockers are electrical villains that essentially specialize in shocking grasp from back when that was pretty decent. They make touch attacks from before that was a thing and are immune to non-magical weaponry. The only real surprising thing about these assholes is that rather than being a boss monster like you might think, they have one hit die each and show up in groups of fifteen. So... bring a fireball I guess. The book explicitly says that little is known about their purpose, but I think their purpose is reasonably clear. It's to make Fighters feel small in the pants.



The Skeleton Warrior.

D&D has used animate Skeletons as mook monsters from the beginning. From before the beginning actually, because you could field them in Chainmail before it became D&D. The Skeleton Warrior is just an animated badass Fighter who continues being a badass Fighter in death. It's like a Death Knight, but less interesting. So while this monster became generally accepted, it never achieved the iconic status of the Death Knight.


Spot the Skulk!

Skulks are a sister species of Human that got camouflage powers because they were cowardly. They are wicked and sneaky, and badly in need of a coherent spotting mechanic to reference.

Frank offered to let me start in on the Slaad, but he's been doing well with the chaos frogs so far, so I think I'll let him take first whack at 'em next post.

Ancient History wrote:Frost Men are exactly like normal fucking humans, except that they radiate cold and can spit forth a cold of cone three times a day. Other humans thought that shit was freaky and called them "ice demons."

OSSR: Fiend Folio
Monsters A-Z: Slaad to Xvart


Earlier, we promised you Giant Frog. Then we didn't give it to you because Giant Frog. Giant Frog Giant Frog.


Slaad!

The Slaad are giant frogs. They were written by Charles Stross, the same guy who brought the Death Knight and the Githyanki. Considering that unlike the Rilmani or the Demodands, you actually know what Slaads are, that shows that the young Mr. Stross had a really high hit rate with his teenaged creations. He was 17 years old when this book came out, and probably a strict majority of the monsters in this book that you give a damn about and weren't written by Gary Gygax himself are written by Charles Stross. He of course went on to have a successful career as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but it really drives home the difference between a halfway decent author and a random fan.

Anyway, the book follows all the conventions of Demons and Devils in AD&D, which as we have alluded to earlier are confusing and terrible. But it is at least consistently terrible. So they have gems in their foreheads that work like the amulets and talismans and shit that other flavors of outsider had. And it told you what kind of Slaad you could get with the various kinds of demon summoning spells. Just the fact that I have been reminded that Summon Cacodemon was a spell that existed makes me sad, but it would have made me even sadder if they didn't plug into the rules that existed.

Another important thing about Slaad is that they have followable conventions. They are Giant Frogs, and they come in different colors. That's kind of stupid, but it's something you can explain in a single simple sentence. The Slaad are, quite simply, a brand. And you can build on that. And people have.



Other attempts to create outsider factions were less successful with their branding.

So the biggest problem that the Slaad brand has, is that they represent “Chaotic Neutral (with evil tendencies).” D&D Chaos is terrible. It makes no fucking sense. It's all contradictory horse shit all the way down. I mean, for fuck's sake, here was the actual description of the alignment that these assholes were supposed to be upholding:

AD&D PHB wrote:Chaotic Neutral: Above respect for life and good, or disregard for life and promotion of evil, the chaotic neutral places randomness and disorder. Good and evil are complimentary balance arms. Neither are preferred, nor must either prevail, for ultimate chaos would then suffer.

That is incoherent gibberish. The cosmic balance of random bullshit is apparently a higher goal than life. That makes me want to kill myself. Or possibly Gary Gygax. I understand that he's dead, but apparently disorder and its promulgation is more important than such details. This book pretty much ignores all that and just assumes that Slaads work together, keep slaves, and run around murdering folk just like all the other Outsider factions. Team Chaos is, according to a young Charlie Stross, basically a political party or maybe even just a street gang.

Anyway, Slaad got embellished a lot later on. Much of that embellishment is actually really dumb. The original Red Slaad implants poison pellets that kill people, and later editions turned those into egg pellets that cause
new Slaads to explode out of peoples' hearts. Because D&D didn't already have enough monsters that did that. None of that garbage is evident in this writeup, which instead focuses in rather cleanly on the fact that they are brutal giant frogs. Probably the dumbest thing in this whole list is the fact that Blue Slaad get a separate attack for each spike on each hand.

Guy on the left: somehow he gets a separate attack with the two spines on the back of each hand. WTF?!

The five basic colors of Slaad are of course Red, Blue, Green, Grey, and Death.



The Slaad also come ready made with their own Demon Lords Arch Devils Leaders.




This probably brought it all home. I mean, those are completely fucking batshit, and have nothing at all to do with the differently colored Giant Frogs. But the fact is that Demogorgon doesn't look a fucking like a Vrock and Dispater doesn't vaguely resemble an Ice Devil. These absolutely left field Slaad Lords made the Slaad feel even more like an Outsider faction.

Frankly, when all is said and done, the Slaad feel more like a faction of outsiders than the official factions of Outsiders that existed at the time did. And when Gygax tried to introduce some more in the Monster Manual 2, they had a lot less traction.


A lot less traction.

Again, Slaad are just a monster which captured enough of the imagination to build on. I think the whole color-scheme that half of them follow is at least partially responsible. As Frank mentioned the Chaos bit in AD&D is bizarre - it was obviously supposed to be based on Michael Moorcock's Law & Chaos, but they never committed to anything like a cohesive ethos (or even pantheon) for the fucking thing. So it goes.


This Snyad is largely indistinguishable from the Mite pictured earlier.

Mischievous fey #I've lost count. Moving on.



These are undead crawling with worms. In later days, Kyuss became a deity and these critters inspired the Age of Worms adventure path in Dungeon Magazine, but their rather humble origin is here...and I think one of the reason it works is that it's not a generic undead. This thing has backstory, even if not much of it. Specificity has its advantages.



Stun Jelly is supposed to be wall colored, but young me decided that it obviously was meant to be a bunch of rainbow colored patches.


Sussurus

The Sussurus is like a creature from Jaberwocky. The word Sussurus is a real word which means “a rustling or whispered sound” but it sounds like the name of a fucking dinosaur or something. So these are giant ape shaped headless monsters that actually communicate and perceive with their environment by having air whistle softly through holes in them. They are majestic and beautiful and weird. Not a lot of point to this monster, but it does present an interesting world and makes things just generally feel magical that shit like this is around.


Also one of the few creatures where the 1st edition art for it is just simply better than the art for it in 3.5.



Svirfneblin

The Svirfneblin are originally from Shrine of the Kuo-Toa by Gygax. They are like Gnomes, but with both more evil and more power. I think the most interesting thing about the Svirfneblin is that their name looks and sounds like a word written backwards whether it's written forwards or backwards. Seriously: Nilbenfrivs.

I always thought Svirfneblin was Gygax misremembering stories that his German grandmother told him, because it sounds like Nibelunglied.

The Symbiotic Jelly - there were oozes at this point, but this was before the major push to collate critters by type - is basically designed to explain why monsters in dungeons stay in specific spots and wait for adventurers to come along and eat them. Because <bullshit> the jelly "eats" by energy draining a monster while it's eating meat. So it uses its powers to charm monster a carnivore to hang around and attack anything meat-like that comes within range.

This is an early effort to try and explain some of the tropes of D&D, and it was shit. But at least it tried.


This looks like a lemur, but it's actually supposed to be a cat-person. (If you want cat-person tits, go to the Deities & Demigods and look up Bast).



Anyway, Tabaxi are your generic stone-age cat-people living in a jungle. Later editions made little of them.



The tentamort is a no-fuss tentacle monster. It has two long tentacles, one of which squeezes you to death, and the other of which has a spine that injects saliva which kills you and starts the digestive process. It's not a great monster, tell truth. It's patently designed as a corridor monster, where it can engage two different PCs at once.


The Terithran and the Thoqqua are creatures of the elemental plane of Earth.

Page 87, for whatever reason, ends up covered with creatures from the Elemental Plane of Earth. The Terithran is a midget alien that comes out of the stonework to harass Magic Users, and the Thoqqua is a big burning worm. There was a concerted effort to create fauna for the planes. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it did not. Honestly, the Fauna of the Elemental Plane of Earth is best when it's tricordate. The Xorn and the Kharga (mentioned earlier in this book) really look like they come from the same world. The Terithran is just dumb and no one cares. The Thoqqua, interestingly, eventually became a fairly iconic monster from that world – but only after an artistic redesign which made it look like something that came from the world the Xorn lived in. In the Fiend Folio, this is just an earthworm made of lava. Once it started looking genuinely alien in later editions, I was on board with it.


This looks like something that could have evolved on the world that brought us Khargas and Xorn.



Thorks are like Stymphalian birds in that they are birds made of metal. Copper in this case. Also in this case they are filled with boiling water which that can spray at people. It's not terrible. As simple fauna for a magical world, I guess it's fine. But unless you want to capture one to fill out your pokedex, it's hard to imagine caring.


Throat Leech!

Yes. Throat Leech. Don't drink the water in D&D land unless you filter and boil it first. Because there are parasites in D&D land that are disgusting and quite abruptly fatal.



D&D has tried to make insect people a thing many many times. It's an obvious concept and a popular one. The problem is that most of the good ones are under copyright. You can't call your bug people Klackons or Bugrom. The Tiger Fly was but one of a long list of attempts to make wasp people be a thing. Sufficiently uninteresting that later editions just started over with new names – but it's pretty similar to the Abeil in concept.


What the fuck is that.

Most critters on earth above the single-cell have bilateral symmetry. Efforts at critters with trilateral symmetry have been attempted in RPGs many times, with little success. So the Tirapheg looks like a terrible accident at the inflatable sex doll factory. It's a 7-foot tall hermaphrodite (I don't know why they felt the need to tell us that, except to explain their inevitable tirapheg rapefic), and if you attack it, it'll create two illusions of itself and all three will gang up on you. This thing looks like the great granddaddy of Slenderman, and I'm glad it didn't gain traction.


The trilloch is "an energy being from the Negative Material Plane." Since random blobs of color stopped being scary back in the days of Star Trek, later editions gave this more of a glowing-unnatural-insect appearance. It's basically an animal and feeds off dying creatures, so the invisible monster hovers around, making combat bloodier and making people die faster; it can be driven off by dispel magic and that's it - good luck with wish!


It Breeds True!

The Fiend Folio is pretty much why 3rd edition eventually just made a half-troll template. There are four different Troll varietals, which are submitted by four different authors. The editor compiled all four into a Troll entry, and declared that they all existed because Trolls will fuck basically anything. We'd all be happier and more productive people if we pretended this shit never happened.

The varieties here are Giant Troll, Two-Headed Troll, Ice Troll, and "Spirit Trolls," which is what you get when trolls somehow fuck invisible stalkers. (Wait, what? How the fuck does that work?)

Aside from being insane, the multiple-troll-types are sort of important because the concept had enough legs to jump games, which is why Warhammer Fantasy has Stone Trolls, River Trolls, etc. If anybody else is staring into blank nothingness considering the universe where game designers in the UK are actively stealing bad ideas off each other (or where the pool of game designers is just so incestuous that the same guy can successfully pitch the same idea to two completely different companies), take a drink.




This is a Tween. If you just enter "tween" into Google Image search, you just get a lot of jailbait. If you scroll down, I'm pretty sure the FBI comes and arrests you. Anyway, the Tween is an ethereal creature that forms a bond with a host on the Prime Material Plane, improving their luck at the expense of everyone nearby. This is basically an excuse for parties to self destruct because one guy gets a Tween and the rest of them start dying from poison and shit because they fail their rolls, so they gang up and kill the guy dating a tweenager...or whatever.

The big takeaway from this (aside from Tween being a terrible fucking idea and a bad name), is that early D&D recognized the idea of other spaces coexisting with our own - the Astral Plane, in Shadowrun and Mage parlance - but they never quite got it right, because they split it into the Ethereal Plane and the Astral Plane (and, later on, the Plane of Shadow), and the rules for interacting between the planes was always bugshit insane and made up of more exceptions than hard-and-fast rules. It's one of the things they should have addressed in...well...any fucking edition. But they never really did, although I guess D&D4's Feywild/Shadowfell simplification is as close as they've ever done it. The thing is, when you have workable mechanics like "Okay, this is the magical/spiritual/timeless plane that overlaps and surrounds the prime material plane, and it's just this one." it really simplifies a lot of interactions and plane-hopping abilities become much more standardized and interesting. Elsewise, you get crap like the Tween.


The umpleby is a derange, retarded, backwoods variant of the wookiee. It's stupid, can't really speak, won't help, and likes to tag along with adventurers. It can detect precious metal and gems, and likes to steal shit. It weaves nets out of its own hair, which is keeps wrapped around its waist. And it's so shaggy, it stores up static electricity and releases it throughout the day. These things should be shot on sight or used by philosophers to power things by pole-dancing on amber pillars.


The eventual update did not help matters much.

The Urchin has been mentioned before in the context of 2nd edition. All the weird and totally inaccurate stuff is right here.

Fiend Folio wrote:The urchins constitute a family of marine creatures resembling 3' diameter balls of various colours with thousands of radiating spines 3” long. The more hit dice the urchin, the more spines the creature can fire in a round.

The Urchin was written by Nick Louth, who I suspect of being the same British Nick Louth who went on to being a contributor to Reuters and the Financial Times. Because he was known far and wide for his incredible commitment to factual accuracy in the printed word. Also, go fuck yourself.

---

The Vision, like the Urchin, has no picture. It has a fuck tonne of hit points and is hard to hurt. But it's insubstantial and only does illusionary damage to your age stat. If your intelligence is high enough, you figure out it isn't real before you die of old age and then revert to normal. Otherwise you die of old age. Supposedly, these were created by an Illusionist who didn't have a high enough intelligence to not die from this bullshit. That doesn't even.


Vodyanoi

The Vodyanoi is a Slavic water monster. In the Fiend Folio, it's an aquatic Umber Hulk. It's... OK. I mean, having aquatic versions of basic monsters is fine I guess, and the name isn't super important to be used for something else. So sure, why not?

For no reason they can also call for aid from electric eels. I'm not making that up.

The image and description of the Volt in the Fiend Folio at it's entry don't do much to actually tell you what it looks like, so I'll just throw up a later picture:



It's a shaggy, bug-eyed levitating worm thing that bites you, drains your blood, and the deal delivers a light electrical attack. Which presumably explains the name. Except not really - is is called a Volt because it's got an electrical attack and some D&D philosopher understands the concept of voltage, which was derived from a guy named Volt, or is the term volt current in D&D Common because of the critter named a Volt which has an electricity attack?

The vortex appears as a whirlwind - 4" high, 1" base diameter and 3" diameter top (though larger ones are believed to exist on the Elemental Plane of Air). It appears to be free willed and cannot be summoned. The physical form of the vortex is a small sphere about the size of a grapefruit which bobs and dodges about in the centre of the whirlwind. Its small size and its speed of movement make it difficult to hit; thus its high AC value

This is a fuck-you monster. It picks up one PC at a time, and there is a 5% cumulative chance per round you're spun to death on top of the damage it deals every round. Rescuing the PC requires hitting the sphere at the center hard enough to kill it, which because AC 0 is not fucking likely without magic missile. Shit like this is why D&D wizards build towers and never venture outdoors if they can help it.

The whipweed (no picture given) is an ambulatory plant which confuses people because they can't believe "No, really, it's a plant. Druid spells affect it and everything." When you spend half your entry about how people scratch their heads about your monster, that's a fail. If this thing made it in, what didn't?


I couldn't find a pic of the witherstench, but basically it looks a lot like this.

The Witherstench is a nearly hairless large skunk. The author apparently doesn't know how skunks work, and you stop being nauseated by the stench when it leaves. So, more Pepe le Pew than actual skunk.

The Witherweed is obviously alphabetized to the same page. It's a patch of poisonous vines that flail around and try to kill you for no reason. You can burn it to death easily, but it creates lethally poisonous smoke when it goes up in flames. Because fuck you for trying to bypass an immobile monster made of dry leaves.

The X's get one page and two critters, both with surprising staying power - presumably because even in the grim darkness of the far future (late 80s/early 90s), people still wanted monsters that began with X.



The Xill started off as 4-armed, ethereal breeding machines, and apparently inspired (like so many others) by an A. E. van Vogt novel: The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Like some of the other monsters, they accomplish their aim by attacking people and laying eggs in their stomach. This sort of parasitic activity is not cool, and I've had quite enough alien wing-wong in this book as it is. Still, I could see a game where a more advanced race of Xill pay humanoids to act as surrogates to gestate their young, then surgically remove them before the little critters hatch and eat their way out.


Or, y'know, not.

The Xvart is the missing link between goblins and kobolds. This was back when kobolds were less reptilian and more...uh...y'know fuck, I dunno. They were really just pulling names out of folklore and calling them fantasy races. I suppose they fill an evolutionary niche so that when PCs move on from killing kobolds to xvarts, they know they're moving up in the world and in a level or two they might look forward to goblins! ...or something. For some reason, Xvarts get along with wererats.


Old Xvart.


Newer Xvart.

Next up: the end of the alphabet and a bunch of tables.

You can blame Tolkien for some of the multiplicity of trollish types, though you have to really be obsessed to find them*. The two headed troll comes from a passing comment from the narrator in the Hobbit, and there is a vague reference to 'snow trolls' in one of the obscure side stories (published by his kid, I think).

*which, considering this book is largely from british gamers in the early 80s, yeah, I think we can assume some of them were.

Yay, Giant Frog next post! Ninja'd by the actual post

Also, if you ignore the existence of the Para/Quasi-Elemental Planes, mephitis are awesome. And everyone should ignore said Planes. Just assume that Mephits are pokemon, potentially changing Forme like Arceus does, and it's all good. You now have offensively weak, annoying, dickish monsters that can be kind of resilient in their natural environment and like pissing people off. And aesthetically they can appear as imp/goblinoid things, or malicious faeries, or according to the 3E book, attractive ladies scaled down to Small size without looking childlike: there's something for everyone.

And then you set fifty of them loose and tell the PCs they need to catch them and stuff them in a massive jar. For science or something.

(I also think Imps and Quasits are awesome, and feel there really should be more variants on that creature type.)

Koumei wrote:And then you set fifty of them loose and tell the PCs they need to catch them and stuff them in a massive jar. For science or something.

The Kobold has bounced around a lot. Early on, they were described as being part of the Goblin family, and remained there in some descriptions until 3rd edition. In AD&D, they were the smallest of the "Giant Class" along with Goblins, Orcs, Ogres, and Cloud Giants.

In AD&D they also started talking about reptilian traits for Kobolds, but they continued to have mammalian traits as well. Depending on which piece you read, they were described as a mix of lizard and dog or a rat with patches of scales.


AD&D Kobold was a repitlian dog-man with a rat tail that laid eggs.


2nd edition Kobold was a rat-man whose "scales" were described in such a manner that they might have been just describing actual rats.


Like this, perhaps.


The Planescape angle on Kobolds was that they were straight up rats.

So the Xvart angle where Kobolds are rat-aligned has always been there. But by the time 3rd edition came out, all the mammal traits of the Kobold had been jettisoned completely and we were lizards only, final destination. In the process, of course, Kobolds stopped being in any way related to Goblins or Fire Giants.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:But by the time 3rd edition came out, all the mammal traits of the Kobold had been jettisoned completely and we were lizards only, final destination.

You heard it here first: Frank admitted to being a kobold.

The image location of the vortex is a bit weird.

http://tgdmb.com/The%20vortex%20appears ... AC%20value

Fixed.

OSSR: Fiend Folio
Monsters A-Z: Yellow Musk Creeper to Zombie, Yellow Musk


The zombie apocalypse has begun. Well, not zombies per se, but they look similar enough to make you blow a turning attempt.

Y and Z are on the same page, which is a bit of a cheat because it's basically the same creature. Y is Yellow Musk Creeper, and Z is Zombie, Yellow Musk. The creeper is a climbing plant...


We're gonna need a bigger lawnmower.

...with a hypnotic pollen. If you're entranced by the pollen, you walk into the middle of the plant where it grows roots into your skull and eats your brain (-1d4 Int/round)...


Who bred these things, mindflayers?

...and the victim either dies (Int =< 0) or becomes a Yellow Musk Zombie (Int == 1 || 2), and serve the master plant. Which isn't intelligent, so I don't get your hopes up.

Amazingly, apparently you can grow your brain back after the plant eating most of it, at least with the liberal application of heal spells. Though you're likely to have some very ambiguous feelings about flowers after that. The Yellow Musk Zombie tries to push the "all undead are immune to mind-effecting blah blah blah" bit, which makes me think this is a personal houserule of Albie Fiore (who wrote these two entries) and it was somehow adopted later on.

Rule 34 really is inviolate. I ran into Yellow Musk Creeper pornographic fanfic one time. There was a sorceress and she started getting it on with a Yellow Musk Zombie and there is not enough brain bleach in the world to make that image go away. I assume that eventually she gets eaten by the Yellow Musk Creeper or something, vore definitely isn't my thing and it makes me sad that I even know what the short term for that fetish even is. There is literally nothing that you can imagine that doesn't have porn of it on the internet.

As luck would have it, Ancient History ended up with the Adherer, the Shadow Demon, the Needleman, and the Necrophidius, which really didn't give me a great chance to make this point, but holy shit are there are a lot of monsters in this book that look like undead but are actually something else. The Adherer is a humanoid, the Shadow Demon is an outsider, the Necrophidius is a construct, and the Needleman and Yellow Musk Zombie are both plants – but all of them are supposed to be physically described in such a manner as to make the players whip out their anti-undead techniques.

Part of this is that in AD&D there just weren't that many character classes and no one had a skill set. For fuck's sake, if you wanted a creature to have a disguise that players could potentially see through you needed a kludge rule (like the Lamia Noble), and there wasn't a consistent rule to be found for handling even such basic bullshit as being sneaky. A laudable number of monsters in this book sneak like 4th level Thieves, but that was a pointer to a rule which (while fairly fundamental) wasn't actually explained. I mean, what does a 35% chance of moving silently even mean? AD&D never explained that shit. So with so few character abilities available, it's perhaps not surprising that so many hack authors decided that the thing to do was to create a scenario where it looked like you could use one of them but actually couldn't. It's still fucked though.

All fled, all done. That's it for the monsters. It's a bit of a hodge podge, and today if you were to have a proper ruleset and templates and things you could squeeze twice as much actual information into half the space, no problem. I wouldn't say any of these were gold. Some of them are competent, which is impressive; the Slaad et al. show promise which was later developed. Most continued on in the next editions in some form or another, even the ones that are explicitly MC fuck-you monsters.

And yet...and yet. They set imaginations afire. There may not be much here, but there's a couple ideas that any good MC worth their salt could build on...and they did. I wouldn't say there's a lot of good design in this book. The mechanics, as Frank noted, are shit. Fanboys trying to work around a ruleset with so many holes in it, you don't know where the patches end and the original cloth begins. It's the kind of game where the rules live on in the mind more than the paper; you hit a hurdle you ignore or pull a Justin Bieber and make a ruling on the fly and move on. But look at what came from this! This is a book where the critters are getting a new paint job even after thirty years. That's better than most of us can say for anything we do.

Treasure Types


This is actually from the Monster Manual, but good enough.

There's just a full page of art and a full page of table for the Treasure Types appendix, but it's integral enough to the way things worked that I think we should talk about it. You may have noticed that every time we post a monster where the stat line is hanging in there that one of the lines is “treasure type” and is followed by a bunch of capital letters and no explanation (except for the Dark Ones, where they don't really bother and walk you through all their non-standard treasure percentages anyway for no reason). What this corresponds to is 26 completely arbitrary treasure classes that add treasure (or chances of treasure) to the haul, and you add all the stuff together for each of the letters and that's what you get.

It's important to note that magic treasure (the shit you cared about) was full lottery. So if a monster has treasure type “I” it has a 15% chance of having a magic item. But that can literally be any magic item. The chart is more likely to give you a healing potion or a +1 dagger than it is to give you The Wand of Orcus or a Brazier of Summoning Fire Elementals, but all of those things are on the big chart. So every time a creature has a treasure type of I, there is a very small chance of you getting a world changing artifact at the end of the day – and an 85% chance of you getting nothing at all. It's a totally different way of handling magic items and treasure than later editions went with, and while ultimately I think you could make a wealth by level system work, neither 3e nor 4e did a terribly great job of it – and AD&D actually did mostly have a functional lottery system. Making it quite possibly the best treasure system Dungeons & Dragons has ever had.

Not to say that you couldn't improve this shit, because you totally could. There are things on that magic item chart that don't make sense (although that's a different OSSR I think). Closer to this book, the treasure types themselves are lol random. J through N are progressively more valuable piles of coins in the pocket of each monster, while O is a small chance of there being a few thousand copper or silver pieces (or both) in the lair (or wherever the creature keeps piles of a few hundred pounds of precious metals). Clearly this shit could be streamlined all to hell and gone. Yes, when you'd played the game a lot you eventually realized that the real source of portable money was treasure type Q (a 50% chance of 1-4 gems, which were themselves generated on a chart and sometimes worth mad stacks of cash and always extremely portable), and that the big payday was Treasure Type U (70% chance at getting one of each type of non-expendable magic item). But that's stupid. Treasure types could have been arranged in a manner consistent with, well anything. There could have been progressions where you could tell at a glance whether something was bigger or smaller without having to memorize that treasure type S gave you a less than even chance of getting 2d4 potions.

The end result of this is that MC-prep for a session was a lot like sitting a maths exam - if they decided to roll up all the treasure in advance, so maybe the Goblins could use the +1 sword. More often then not you hit a random encounter, and after you were done then you went out for a smoke break or raid the fridge while the poor bastard MC flipped through two or three books to figure out what they were carrying.

It also meant that tables - especially consolidated tables - became valuable. You think about it, imagine if somebody comes up with a table where you roll randomly to see what spells are in a given spellbook - and then you get a book out next month that adds three new spells? Well, those aren't on the table, so if you stick with the table you're never going to see them. One of the major attractions of the Encyclopedia Magica is that it had a single consolidated set of tables that covered every one of the thousands of magical items in those books...and in the next month an issue of Dragon magazine came out with a Bazaar of the Bizarre and there was stuff that wasn't covered once again.

Probably the crazy thing about AD&D 1st edition is that with the internet-based tools we have now, we could actually do all this stuff so much less painfully. Imagine if you had a virtual table top, and when you bought a new rulebook it downloaded a patch which updated all your tools. New magic items? Popped right into the magic item table. You want 1d6 orcs for a random encounter? Put it in, press the button, and it'll spit out full stats and the treasure they're carrying. Easy as pie to do now...but, y'know, no one wants to go through the hassle. Because for the amount of programming you'd have to do to make an OSRIC digital tabletop, you could probably make Corruption of Champions II: Revenge of the Omnitrix and make a shitload more money.

Monster Tables


Not entirely fair. But not entirely unfair either.

The Fiend Folio has twenty pages of random monster tables. They assume you have the Monster Manual, because a lot of Monster Manual monsters are represented on the charts. They do not assume you had a Monster Manual 2, because it wasn't completed yet.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of encounters: Dungeon Encounters, and Wilderness Encounters. In a Dungeon Encounter, the charts are level based. That doesn't correspond to character levels or even literal floors of the physical structure you are exploring, but an entirely different concept called “Dungeon Level” which is a rough gradation of threat. There are ten levels of Dungeon Monster charts, and the tenth is fucking ridiculous and has a 5% chance of your random encounter being an Arch Devil or some similar level of complete fuckery like a a Slaad Lord or Demon Prince. Type X dungeons are, obviously, extremely rare. Even for the kinds of full adventure path that gets published today, that chart would at best be “roll for the form of the end boss,” but theoretically AD&D extended to levels where the boss of a modern adventure path would be a random monster in a hallway. Even at the time, people were dubious of that level of play actually functioning (not that people didn't give it a try).

Wilderness Encounters were a bit different. Those weren't segregated by power level, but by climate. So if you were in the arctic, you could encounter wolves or white dragons, and that was that. Gygax said this was all working as intended, and straight up told people that dungeon exploration was safer for new parties, because a level 1 or 2 dungeon didn't have anything too crazy in it, but wilderness encounters always left open the chance of running into high end crazy shit.



Dungeon levels are basically the inspiration for Rogue, Moria, Angband, and Dwarf Fortress. It's procedurally-generated content, right down to the architecture, random encounters, and treasure drops. There were tables for pretty much all that stuff in the DMG and Monster Manual, and some bright coder at the beginning of the PC revolution just made it automatic. And it was good. It is still, at a very fundamental level, the basis of all modern MMOs, and the reason you have level grinding and spawncamping and whatnot.



Of course, the general failing point for roguelikes is the same as for AD&D 1e: the lack of a cohesive and coherent setting and storyline. You can delve the deepest dungeon, but why? Who built it? What the fuck is the adult albino wyrm doing crammed into a 10'x10' room, and why did it have a collection of magic spoons?

The randomness of the adventures created by these charts make for pretty entertaining stories sometimes. I know, because once I had learned to actually read this book (which came shockingly close to learning to read at all), I would spark flights of imagination by randomly generating encounters and then having make believe characters deal with them in my head. This book can be a wonderful resource for a small child is what I'm saying.

...and then there's that, the meat of the matter. These are rules for you to go build your own worlds; there's really only the tiniest and scattered hints that these are parts of a larger, more fleshed-out setting - which would eventually spawn into the sprawling and lucrative settings like Forgotten Realms, once game writers figured out that players and MeisterCaverns were as happy to play in somebody else's world as they would their own, particularly if the world was fun, exciting, and made more sense.

The ecologies implied by these wilderness encounter charts are kind of insane. OK, they are very insane. Any forest that contains Dryads, Gnomes, Carnivorous Apes, and Manticores (as does the Temperate Conditions: Faerie and Sylvan Settings: Forest does) is a seriously weird forest. But for all that weirdness, I don't think getting rid of this stuff (as 3rd and 4th edition did) was a step in the right direction.

Explaining what kinds of creatures you can expect to encounter in various kinds of terrain in the world is invaluable for creating a world. AD&D's lands (and seas) were apparently gonzo and full of madness, but that's something. Replacing it with nothing meant that there weren't really worlds at all – just empty canvasses.

I would have really liked someone to go through these and part them out a bit and maybe differentiate between the kind of marsh where you might encounter a Wyvern (and thus your 2nd level party should probably not go) and the kind of marsh where you won't. A bit more Dwarf Fortress and a lot more regional segregation and I think you'd have a resource that would absolutely fit into a modern core book. For fuck's sake, the 3.5 MM and DMG are 320 fucking pages, they can spare 30 pages to tell me what the relative frequency of Wyverns and Will-o-Wisps is in the Bane Mires.

The amount of crazy in this book is most apparent if you look at the critters that survived and thrived in later editions - mostly by taking the basic concept of a critter from here, shaving away all the parts that nobody liked, and then reimagining them in greater depth and scale. Githyanki, Slaad, Drow, Bullywugs...there are some interesting and iconic monster in potentia here, but that's all they are - rough ideas, needing to be sketched out.

Index of Major Listings

You have to remember that while nominally alphabetical, this book was full of crazy. That continues right on into the end, which somebody thought should look like a proper index, even though they'd obviously never done an index before. So there's a lot of goto statements, some weird categorization (Drow: See Elf: Drow; there's only one type of Elf in this book, and it's Drow). This would have made more sense in the AD&D 2 era where the monster manuals came as looseleaf sheets, but here it's just...well, idiosyncratic.

Looking through these credits, I think I am sometimes unfair to Gary Gygax. Yes, he was a liar and a thief, and yes he was an amazing asshole when he put his mind to it, and yes he produced a lot of absolutely worthless garbage like the Disease table and the Alignments and the Modrons that I've harped on over the course of this review. But he did create actual monsters that caught fire in peoples' imaginations. A lot of the monsters from this book that you care about are actually reprints of Gary Gygax ideas from adventures. He doesn't score critical hits all the time, or even most of the time, but he scores critical hits ever. And that's better by far than what most of the contributors to this book could manage. His hit rate wasn't nearly as good as Charles Stross, who even at the time was an obviously talented writer, but it was the second highest of any of the major contributors to this book. For all his bad ideas (and they were many), Gary Gygax did have a lot of good ideas as well. He was doing much better than Sturgeon's law would predict. And pretty much by definition: most people don't. If I was putting together a monster book today, and I had pitches to read and one of them was by Gygax, I'd definitely read his before I read one by a no-name author. And that's not something I can say about, say, SKR.

And that, as they say, is the book. It ends with a promise, or possibly a threat:

I look back with some chagrin on the gestation period of this volume which has been much longer than anyone could have anticipated. Publication date is likely to be nearly two years after I wrote the introduction, and during that time many things have happened. For one thing, I am now responsible for TSR Hobbies (UK) Limited and have been so for nearly a year - yet at the time of writing the introduction even my wildest dreams could not have predicted that this would have been so. But delay and serendipity are often bedfellows, and I am now able to greet this publication with even more pride because of my new association with the
Company.

It may be appropriate here to say that, though this is the first British contribution to the advancement of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS@ and ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS'"games, it will certainly be far from the last. TSR Hobbies (UK) Limited has plans! We do intend to play our part and do at least our fair share in adding to the D&D@ and AD&D'" repertoire - there is no reason why the hobby in the UK should be led to assume that our American brethren, though admittedly the first creators and the ones who established the very high quality we have come to accept, are the only ones who can produce original work of exceptional merit.

So a statement of policy might be in order here - we at TSR (UK) will do everything we can to promote the cause of these fine games because our belief - and my personal experience - is that the gaming hobby gives immense pleasure and satisfaction.

You will be hearing from us again.

I honestly can't think of another Brit-supplement to AD&D...wait, no, I take it back. Top Ballista.


And if you thought this book was insane...hah.

Slaad kick so much ass it's almost scary. There should be an entire sourcebook about slaad. And more D&D-related novels should involve the slaad. Like in the next Drizzt book a hardcore slaad should kill Drizzt. I mean, they are so fucking cool and there are different varieties which is also cool, so everyone can pick a favorite. Anyone who doesn't like the slaad is a loser.

Rule 34 really is inviolate. I ran into Yellow Musk Creeper pornographic fanfic one time. There was a sorceress and she started getting it on with a Yellow Musk Zombie and there is not enough brain bleach in the world to make that image go away. I assume that eventually she gets eaten by the Yellow Musk Creeper or something, vore definitely isn't my thing and it makes me sad that I even know what the short term for that fetish even is. There is literally nothing that you can imagine that doesn't have porn of it on the internet.

...I think I ran across this one too (unless there are more fics involving Yellow Musk Creepers and sorceresses). It was in the top 10 of a mind control porn site. It ends with the sorceress having breathed enough second-hand pollen to accept the creeper as her master despite not suffering Int damage. My curiosity kind of died after that one.

treasure type Q

Holy shit.

Count me as another person who finds a lot of this art more satisfying than modern D&D. Wayne Reynolds might be the person you want for covers and full page splashes, but he's kind of heavy for individual portraits.

But this, for example, is probably the best picture of Orcus I have ever seen. [NSFW if you squint]

Crabmen are an awesome idea







I doodled a crabman before that had a gladiator helmet shell covering his face and a ball n' chain instead of a claw, spinning it around. ought to redraw it

I just wanted to say +1 for the Charles Stross love.

Dude is awesome.

Carry on.

schpeelah wrote:

Rule 34 really is inviolate. I ran into Yellow Musk Creeper pornographic fanfic one time. There was a sorceress and she started getting it on with a Yellow Musk Zombie and there is not enough brain bleach in the world to make that image go away. I assume that eventually she gets eaten by the Yellow Musk Creeper or something, vore definitely isn't my thing and it makes me sad that I even know what the short term for that fetish even is. There is literally nothing that you can imagine that doesn't have porn of it on the internet.

...I think I ran across this one too (unless there are more fics involving Yellow Musk Creepers and sorceresses). It was in the top 10 of a mind control porn site. It ends with the sorceress having breathed enough second-hand pollen to accept the creeper as her master despite not suffering Int damage. My curiosity kind of died after that one.

Is that where it was going? I just sort of assumed that they were going to do brain eating during sex, on account of that being what Yellow Musk Creepers do. Which is one of the most disgusting things I can imagine. Of course, I punched out way before it got to that point, since I think sex with a Yellow Musk Zombie is pretty similar to raping a retarded person.

-Username17

The story is titled Yellow. It's easy to find on EMCSA, and by one of their regular contributors known for doing high squick factor pieces. You have been warned.

On a less... triggering note. Man, I forgot about that awesome DiTerlizzi kobold pic. I kinda really want to have a kobold menacing someone with a scorpion on a stick now.

That the dragon fish is way lamer than stonefish is just another reason why Australia is way more hardcore than Greyhawk.

So, when did the Githzerai make the transition from "Mind Flayer sympathizer" to "badass monks that live with Giant Frogs", exactly?

Whipstitch wrote:That the dragon fish is way lamer than stonefish is just another reason why Australia is way more hardcore than Greyhawk.

To be fair, that's not because it's the size of a mountain or unleashes lightning or anything, it's simply a matter of the venom being so horrifyingly painful with long-lasting effects. Our dragons don't hold a candle to Greyhawk dragons.

Though our mind flayers are aquatic and dual-wield man-o-war tendrils as flails, so that's something.