The Gaming Den

Monster Compendium:
Monsters of Faerun



We're setting the wayback machine to 2001, when the first Monster Compendium came out for 3rd edition. It is also when the last Monster Compendium came out for 3rd edition, or indeed for any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Back in 2nd edition, the basic set up for monster books was that they came in various regional and conceptual packets which all went into the vague “Monstrous Compendium” heading, and they got compiled and put into binders and shit. It was all very cumbersome, and didn't even seem like a great idea at the time.

So into the era of 3rd edition but only barely so, WotC decided to give it another go. It's pretty much the same idea as for 2nd edition, but they call it a “Monster Compendium” instead of a “Monstrous Compendium” so that it will come earlier alphabetically than all the dozens of Monstrous Compendium shovelware installments they had lying around from the last 11 years. That is literally the actual reason for the name change. Put in charge of this project are James Wyatt and Rob Heinsoo, two names spoken with spit takes today because they were also in charge of the project of 4th edition D&D. It is totally mysterious why that happened, just as it was mysterious why it was happening at the time, and it was mysterious why it was going to happen when it was announced that it would.

Simply put: this project, the Monster Compendium book line, did not do very well. It did so not very well that the entire book line has a single book in it: Monsters of Faerun.

Now, there's a lot to be said for the AD&D Monstrous Manual and its contingent Compendiums. Mostly you would say "they invented the fucking format" and that would be the end of it. Believe it or not, there are relatively few ways to do what we think of as a proper bestiary or monster book, and D&D locked their format in as the default rather early - one page entry (maybe spilling on if absolutely necessary), with all the stats you need right there and a few words on its place in the world, with a picture. That is now the Generic Monsterbook Template. So when D&D 3.0 decided to go "fuck that" and opt for a more condensed "rolling double column" format, that was actually a big change - and, it becomes readily apparent, one that the other writers and game designers at WotC were not quite used to yet.

Before:


After:



Monsters of Faerun is interesting as a transitional fossil – a book not quite 2nd edition and not quite 3rd edition. What's especially interesting about that fact is that the book actually was published in February of 2001, several months after 3rd edition happened. Which basically means that the B-team (that is to say: Rob Heinsoo and James Wyatt) were still working in an AD&D framework in a lot of ways. The rules are mostly 3rd edition compatible, but I can't help wondering how much of it was cleaned up and 3rd edition justified by editors at the last moment.

Or possibly we're looking at a piece of market research. The people at WotC wanted to know if they had gone “too far” with 3rd edition and the public might want things scaled back a bit towards AD&D presentation. If that was the question being asked, WotC certainly got their answer. And that answer was No.

I honestly think that chunks of WotC were writing more or less independently of each other for years at a time, and what we have here is essentially a third party product put out by the main game company - something like when Kenzer Co. did their Kingdoms of Kalamar supplement advertised as the "IVth" essential book after the PHB, DMG, and MM.



So in a lot of ways, it's the Forgotten Realms guys trying to jump on the D&D3 bandwagon and stay relevant. However, I also think it was an effort by the main D&D guys to see how much they could get away with - that is, could they spit out mini-Monster Manuals and have the readers buy them? Because for a lot of gamers, monster manuals are only really of any use to Mister Cavern, as they generally have fuck-all useful information for players, unless you're a specialized summoner or necromancer or something. So in presentation and layout, these guys were hewing very closely to the established D&D artistic choices - faux-cool book cover, weird water damaged paper inside sheets, pencil-scratch lined pages, the works.

Introduction

MC:MoF wrote:This book contains descriptions for more than eighty creatures for use in DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® adventures.

The first page has an “Introduction,” a “Presentation,” and a “Reading the Entries” section. Those don't quite sit right with me, because they all mean the same thing. But also because they are all headings on the same page and aren't the same part of speech. It's kind of clunky language use in a way that's hard to describe, like when people use the singular and plural interchangeably in the same sentence. But mostly, it's the actual contents that are unenlightening.

The fact is that there is basically no chance of anyone wanting to buy this book if they don't already have the Monster Manual. So having a section that tells you how to read a monster entry when it is formatted the same way as the Monster Manual was just wasted space. And this wasted space drags on for seven more pages where they tell you what the size categories are and what is meant by “special qualities.” It's all very puzzling, because this book is not a complete product. It's a Monster Manual addendum, and there is absolutely no way you would read this book if you didn't know what the size categories were in D&D. For fuck's sake, in 3rd edition that information was in the PHB, the DMG, and the Monster Manual. It doesn't need to be in this book too.

Again, this is a bit of a throwback to AD&D, because the Monstrous Compendiums would actually have basic introductory "how to read monster entries" page eaters in there back then too. And, honestly, it's as dead a giveaway as any that this book was written with the principles not quite sure what they were doing. They obviously felt the need to sell or justify the book, but really couldn't.

The come from the depths of the earth, the endless expanse of the lightless Underdark.

They come from the stinking pits of the Abyss, from the infinite maze of the Spider-Queen's web, from the Bastion of Hate where the Godson of Bane resides.

They are born of ancient curses and bred in magical laboratories, birthed in obscene rites and formed in magical catastrophes.

They are the minions of divine will and the wrecked remnants of divine fury, rampaging forces of destruction and subtle agents of corruption.

Okay, I can't take anymore. Someone pry the thesaurus out of Wyatt's hands before he does any more damage.

Eighty monsters is frankly not very many. It's not something to brag about. It's a fairly small number all around. Real Monster Manuals have hundreds of monsters in them, so having a book that had less than a hundred was sort of throwing in the towel. It might be something if they had gone through a list of several hundred monsters and winnowed it down to four score and seven that were really cool, but it's pretty obvious that's not what happened.


This is a real monster in here. We'll get there, I promise.

Just so you know, this is not a long book. 96 pages, softcover. The first 10 pages are introduction and rules that are in at least three other books and the SRD at this point. The last half-page is actually a table of monsters in the book ranked by CR, with one quarter devoted to dragons by age. So 80 monsters are squeeze into 85.5 pages...that's actually worse than if they were doing the old AD&D monster-a-page format. How the fuck did they manage that?

Well, I'm counting the templates, and we'll get to those. But probably the most egregious reason this book is so long and yet has such a low information density is that each fucking entry includes a tacked on "In the Realms" sidebar, telling you how this monster gets the fuck on in Faerun. Why? WHY? THIS WHOLE FUCKING BOOKS ENTIRE FUCKING PURPOSE FOR FUCKING BEING is to show monsters IN THE REALMS. Why fucking pretend that these are generic-ass fucking critters that you're going to drop into your laughably unsupported Greyhawk game without modification? I don't have a good answer for that, but I know that somebody didn't learn their lesson and this shit crops up again in later 3e products.

The authors of the book seemed to have no real idea of what kind of information should be handled as function calls and what kind of information should be handled in individual entries. Obviously, 3e was young and still finding its way, but it's also clear that neither Rob Heinsoo nor James Wyatt ever got the hang of this sort of thing. These days they are universally reviled for deciding that absolutely all information should be special snow flake information standing on its own in each monster entry, but in 2001, they were guilty of making the following high function call:

Monsters of Faerun, Reading the Entries, Special Attacks, page 7 wrote:Sonic Attacks (Su): Unless noted otherwise, a sonic attack follows the rules for spreads (see Aiming a Spell in Chapter 10 of the Player's Handbook); the range of the spread is measured from the creature using the sonic attack. Once a sonic attack has taken effect, deafening the subject or stopping its ears does not break the effect. Stopping one's ears ahead of time allows opponents to avoid having to make saving throws against mind-affecting sonic attacks, but not other kinds of sonic attacks (such as those that inflict damage). Stopping one's ears is a full round action and requires wax or other soundproof material to stuff into the ears.

Everything about that is fucked. First of all, under no circumstances am I going to look at page 7 of the Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerun middle of the god damned “Reading the Entries” section of a fucking bonus monster pamphlet to find out what kind of action it is to stuff wax into my ears. That is one of the last places I look for that information, coming only slightly before volume 2 of Mein Kampf and the ingredients list to a box of Cheerios. Secondly, siren songs and explosive noise blasts are so obviously completely different things that it doesn't make any sense to try to jury rig them into the same entry. Thirdly, their inability to use pronouns correctly is driving me to run out of Metaxa. For fuck's sake, putting wax into one's ears protects the opponent? But finally, even the ruling here is obviously fucked. Of course wrestling your friend to the ground and shoving wax in their ears breaks the effect of the siren's song! That's why you fucking do it!

When it comes down to it, there is really only one actual “rule” in that whole mess of gobbledegook. and that's the rule that ceasing to hear the siren's song doesn't mean you get to stop walking into the siren's trap. And that is seriously bullshit.

Yeah, fucking Odysseus had that one nailed.

In hindsight, it's amazing that Wizards of the Coast didn't make more of the System Reference Document. I mean, if you're going to put the guts of your system out there, why not make use of it? Okay, maybe 2000 was a little early for the "laptop at every table" style of gaming, but you'd have to know that it would be better to just have everything point to a text-searchable website than have a shelf-breaking pile of books, right?

This image has nothing to do with anything, but when I went to google "D&D shelf breaking point" this popped up.

The last part of the introduction is some copypasta feats from the Monster Manual and then the 3rd edition Creature Advancement by Type chart. This was before that got simplied and rectified with player character advancement, so it's weird as fuck. Monsters get a feat every 4 hit dice, the Beast and Magical Beast types are different, and all that. Not really this book's fault, but it didn't make any attempt at all to make any of this shit more transparent. Indeed, this book is rather best understood as an experiment in seeing if people would like some of the standardization and formatting of 3rd edition rolled back. As it happened: they would not.

I still don't understand why there are so few monsters in this book. Though sadly, this book languishing in obscurity pretty much removed many of these monsters from common knowledge for a generation of gamers. The monsters in Monsters of Faerun were mostly not reprinted during 3rd edition or 3.5's lifetime. That's 8 years straight when the only way you'd find out about Fire Newts or Bullywugs was to dig up this obscure and universally reviled monster pamphlet. For people who didn't game in the nineties or before: Bullywugs are frog people and they used to be a fairly iconic D&D adversary race. The fact that the kids reading this may not have ever heard of them shows how easily things can be memory holed by a bad book. Consider that the next time someone tells you that 4th edition or D&DN being shitty doesn't affect you as long as you still have a game you like to play.

Something Frank pointed out moments before this post, the original 3e Monster Manual was $20. This spindly paperback was originally priced at $21.95.



I guess the extra money went into research. Or up someone's nose.

Next up: the Monsters!

My favourite thing in that book was the Cloaker Lord that Cloakers can evolve into if they level up at night while at maximum happiness. They lose points for not calling them Capers.

I regret that they added new flavours of dragon, but IIRC that one had the mercurial dragon or song dragon or something? That was kind of interesting and less stupid than the colour-coded alignments.

The first page has an “Introduction,” a “Presentation,” and a “Reading the Entries” section. Those don't quite sit right with me, because they all mean the same thing

Actually, they don't. 'Presentation' is admittedly odd, but for reference materials in 19th and early-to-mid 20th century 'Reading the Entries' is always separate from the Introduction, though it usually follows it closely. Introduction is prose text about the book, the author and the research that went into it, as well as other authorities on the topic. Reading the Entries is solely concerned with the technical aspects of getting the reader familiar with the specific format, which is why it should be separate from the Intro, and have a separate entry in the ToC. These days no one much bothers, because inherently cryptic formats are avoided, for both accessibility and to deal with the inherent stupidity of the audience.

What they are probably intentionally aping is Stith Thomson's Motif-index of folk-literature, but falling short, because there is a major difference between a 20 year academic work, and shitty little monster book.



As for the wacky picture, ugh, Sharn. First introduced in Undermountain, and with an excessively convoluted backstory, as one of two (the phaer-something or other is the opponent) races of ridiculous looking but absurdly powerful critters fighting a secret war for Faerun in the Underdark that no one else actually cares about, unless they spontaneously make deserts, which sometimes happens.

Voss wrote:As for the wacky picture, ugh, Sharn. First introduced in Undermountain, and with an excessively convoluted backstory, as one of two (the phaer-something or other is the opponent) races of ridiculous looking but absurdly powerful critters fighting a secret war for Faerun in the Underdark that no one else actually cares about, unless they spontaneously make deserts, which sometimes happens.

I don't know anything about the flavor, but Sharn and Phaerim are two of the only races worth their LA in the 3.5 update. Hatchling Phaerim are 1HD/2LA and cast as a sorceror of their hitdice, including class levels. Sharn have 3.0 Haste grandfathered onto them while having componant-free theurgic casting, regen, and good melee stats.

The monsters in this book have so many bullshit "screw you" effects. You don't even have to look, the second monster in the book can make itself immune to everything but a few spells that are never prepared with a badly written ability.

Edit: Forgot the Malaugrym, CR4 with at will CL20 Shapechange. I mean really, who thought that was accurate?

TiaC wrote:I don't know anything about the flavor, but Sharn and Phaerim are two of the only races worth their LA in the 3.5 update. Hatchling Phaerim are 1HD/2LA and cast as a sorceror of their hitdice, including class levels. Sharn have 3.0 Haste grandfathered onto them while having componant-free theurgic casting, regen, and good melee stats.

They might be mechanically worth it, but damn if it doesn't suck to be an amorphous blob of oil or a half-cactus-half-sea-cucumber.

NineInchNall wrote:They might be mechanically worth it, but damn if it doesn't suck to be an amorphous blob of oil or a half-cactus-half-sea-cucumber.

Yes, they are the sort of races played by the worst kind of non-roleplaying munchkin for the most part. (Sharn aren't actually amorphous. Hell, they're immune to anything that would change their shape.)

A pseudo-Shoggoth actually sounds like it might potentially be interesting to play, really. Then again, since I've never even heard of them before, I imagine the implementation was somehow fucked up.

The fact is that there is basically no chance of anyone wanting to buy this book if they don't already have the Monster Manual.

I actually know somebody who bought this book and at the time did not own a Monster Manual. Seriously. I'm not sure why.

Monsters A-Z



A thing to remember while reading Monsters of Faerun is that this book is an amazingly bad value for the money. It was not “priced to sell” by any means. While going through the monsters, think of it as a slot machine. You put in a quarter, you pull the crank, and a monster comes out. We don't really get any jackpots of course, but it makes the true duds all the more galling when you realize that every single monster in this book costs you a quarter.

• The original and the MoF version

The first monster we'll talk about is the Aarakocra. It comes first because it comes first in the alphabet. It was a monster that was basically designed to come first alphabetically. They are a race of bird people that was first introduced to AD&D in the 1981 Fiend Folio. And they were created to fill many other underutilized spaces in D&D besides simple space at the front of a monster book. They are one of the few Good humanoid races. They were the first playable race that could fly. They look extremely ridiculous. All good things.

What they are not of course, is particularly something that comes to mind when you mention “Monsters of Faerun.” They were introduced to D&D in a generic product in 1st edition and have a bigger presence in Greyhawk than they do in the Realms. Even this book can't dredge up enough Forgotten Realms Lore on these fuckers to justify their inclusion in this book. Instead it lamely shuffles its feet and admits that they were mentioned a few times in mother fucking Maztica.

On a mechanics level, the book really fails hard here as well. The Aarakocra, such as they have any point, are there to make playable flying characters. But the entirety of the “Aarakocra Characters” section is as follows:

Aarakocra leaders are usually fighters, and fighter is their favored class. Aarakocra clerics have access to the Air, Healing, and Sun domains.

Seriously, that is the whole thing. It doesn't even tell you what the stat modifiers are. The writeup has bizarre AD&D style crap like giving groups of six the ability to dance around and have an air elemental show up for... an unlisted amount of time. No idea what the caster level on that summons is or how often the power can be activated. It's extremely telegraphic. It seems that none of the authors understood what was supposed to go into a 3rd edition monster entry, and the editors didn't care to fill in the blanks.

To add insult to injury, when WotC did introduce a bird-based Main Player Race Guys, it ended up being the fucking Raptorans in Magic of Incarnum.

Of course, the aarakocra aren't the only Fiend Folio-bait in this book, since it is immediately followed up by the Aballin, a watery ooze-critter. You really do have to wonder if this was an effort to fluff out the number of Realms-specific critters or an excuse to include a bunch of monsters that didn't make the cut for the Monster Manual...I could go either way, but if these were mostly cuts from an early draft of MM, that might explain a bit about why they felt all of them needed the "In the Realms" add-on.

The third monster is also an old, non-FR-specific monster recast for the Realms: the Abishai, a group of color-coded demons designed to serve Tiamat. Balance-wise they're a mess, with a slew of weaknesses and special abilities that don't seem to amount to much but basically equate to being much more of a challenge to lower-level PCs than their CR would indicate. More confusingly they're...well, they're supposed to be these demonic dragonoid things, but they were so ill-conceived or translated over that everybody forgot/ignored these guys in favor of things like the Tiamat Dragonspawn and the Dragonlance Draconians. So you can have three or four different types of dragon-themed evil not-dragon critters in your D&D game, with plenty of overlap. It's confusing.


Abishai - not dragons


Draconians - kinda sorta not dragons


Got lost looking for spawn of Tiamat, but have this great illustration of Godzilla vs. Tiamat. In my fanverse, she ported in after the Big G laid a smackdown on her son King Ghidorah (his father is Bahamut, explaining both his coloration and insanity).


The Asabi I will note only in the fact that they are not the only reptilian humanoid race in this book. And I'm not just counting the fact that there are two entries for medium-size and large-size “Stingtail” Asabi. There are also Firenewts, Pterafolk, and Dragonkin. Considering that there are only eighty something monsters in this book, it's actually amazing how many of them are reptilian humanoids who live in deserts and hot jungles.

But really, I want to talk about the Baneguard. Because I used the name for a 4th edition D&D class that is currently the number one Google search for “Baneguard.” Beating out, for example, this actual monster from whom the name was taken. Because people care that little about this monster. The original concept is that Clerics of Bane would have guardian undead who ran around in black armor and using dark magic. Like a Death Knight, but to be fought by lower level characters. Then, this being AD&D they had to have an entirely different monster writeup filled with special snowflake bullshit.

And this being a bizarrely transitional product, we are presented with what is in essence an AD&D writeup. Sure, it mentions that the upgraded versions get specifically deflection bonuses for evolving into Direguard, but no care is made to tell us what the fuck is going on. Seriously, they wear black, semi-translucent armor. But it's not in the base stat line, it's an available upgrade. No indication is made as to how they get this armor, what the benefits of that armor are in terms of armor bonus and such, whether other people can wear the armor after taking it, or any of that shit. It's basically an AD&D writeup and I have no fucking idea how any of this shit is supposed to work.

And that is why the Baneguard class is the 1st hit on Google and this fucking monster is not. Because it's an unusable writeup that no one uses because it can't be fucking used. That's actually why I used the name – because it was a cool name that might be vaguely familiar sounding but I didn't consider it “taken” because the MoF version was such an editing clusterfail.

I want to stop and focus on the undead for a minute, because this really is an AD&D approach to these guys. Let's look at the "Creating Banedead" entry:

An evil cleric who is 12th level or higher can create banedead in a special ritual that requires at least twelve willing worshipers (to be transformed into banedead) and an additional twenty-four living worshipers. The ritual must be held in a place that is consecrated to the cleric's evil deity. The newly created banedead are under the control of the presiding cleric. The control can only be broken if another cleric successfully turns the banedead. The original master must then make a successful turning check to regain his lost control.

There's a lot wrong with that sentence, so it's hard to know where to begin. Ok, first off this is patently not a spell as given in the PHB, so any of your feats are worthless - or indeed, basic spellcasting ability; you could be the sort of cleric that prefers to recruit worshipers with their mace just to get raw materials for this ritual. Likewise, there are no limits stated on how many HD of undead you can create and control. It's really exactly the kind of weird undead-creating write-up you'd absolutely expect for the AD&D Monstrous Manual, right next to how you could make potions of undead control from their thighbones or something, but it's also explicitly the sort of thing D&D3 was shying away from.


Beholder Mages Bitches!

If anything from this book has gained traction simply for being such an amazingly terrible idea, this is it. The Beholder Mage. It's the first “catch up casting class” that would go on to break the game a hundred ways with The Wish and The Word. All the bullshit with Ur Priests and shit starts here: with the Beholder Mage. 9th level spells in 9 actual levels. No level requirements, only racial requirements. All the broken, all the time. The funny thing of course, is that in its first incarnation, it's actually less broken than the later versions. It didn't get the crazy bullshit of learning like a Wizard and casting like a Sorcerer until later.

But this remains one of the most epically terrible ideas of all time. It's never level appropriate. Converting even the shitty eyes into 1st level spellcasting is bullshit. But when you start dumping multiple high level spells every turn, insanity crawls over the world. It's a fractally terrible idea. Every part of it is as bad an idea as the whole.

Aside from the Mage, Beholders get some love in this book, mainly because they couldn't cram all of the beholderkin into the MM (though most of the Spelljammer-specific beholderkin are still SOL, I think). These include the formerly-generic Deathkiss and Gouger, which nobody cares about because they lack the all-important eyebeams. But then we come to the single most beloved beholderkin of all time: the eyeball.


Lookit that guy! He's ditty! He's also the only beholder you can have as a familiar, and as familiars go I'd trade out my fucking frog for a floating spellray-shooting eyeball in a heartbeat, even if I did need the Improved Familiar feat. Hell, I know PCs that would rather adventure as eyeball beholderkin sorcerers rather than play as humans or elves.

Actually, let's take a moment to talk about that: the Improved Familiar feat was bullshit, and the eyeball beholderkin is one of the reasons why, because this is a familiar that rocks at levels 1-3. Most of the familiars you had as an option were pretty bad, but the fact that specific familiars gave you specific bonuses meant that you were picking the familiars for the bonus, not because they fit your character. So while drow wizards should have big-ass spiders as SOP, they probably had a fucking raven deepcrow hatchling because it was the best mechanical fit. Improved familiars were even worse, because by the time you had the level to get a cool familiar, it was completely underpowered and you didn't really need a familiar. If you're going to have a familiar in D&D, you want that thing from level zero and it needs to poketrain its ass up and evolve to stay a relevant class feature; you couldn't really do that in D&D3 unless you devoted considerable resources to doing just that - or cheated, which there were plenty of ways to do. Undead and homunculus familiars were easy buffs without even trying; but one good polymorph and your rat familiar could be a lowland gorilla or something, easy.

I strongly implied that I'd talk more about the Bullywug, so I think I should do that. Like the Aarakocra, they first appeared in the Fiend Folio for AD&D back in 1981. They were also the antagonists of Dweller of the Forbidden City and even one of the iconic enemies in the Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon!


They were a pretty big deal, at least the level of Gnolls. If you asked someone to name three beast races, the evil frogmen would probably be on that list. And now... they are not.

In 2nd edition, the Bullywug was given a fascist society (yes, it really uses the fascism term). Here, they are presented not as a brutal xenophobic dictatorship, but as comic relief villains who suck at everything and lose control of their summoned monsters. It's pointless.

It gets worse than that: not only are bullywugs not the only batrachian race in D&D, but according to Forgotten Realms lore these dudes are supposed to be the remnants of one of the five creator races that made the Nether Scrolls. These are the guys whose ancestors went on to become the friggin' Slaadi, which is why their "special" ability here is a slightly chaotic boost to summon monster spells cast by Bullywug clerics. Who are never given stats, because you're supposed to sort that out yourself.

Also, point of order: the bullywug is armed with a halfspear. That's just mean. At least call it a pilum or something. Something other than "three and a half feet long with a pointy bit at the end." Really, these guys should get dirty great choppers.

Need a half-bullywug template for my next character.

Ancient History wrote: I honestly think that chunks of WotC were writing more or less independently of each other for years at a time, and what we have here is essentially a third party product put out by the main game company - something like when Kenzer Co. did their Kingdoms of Kalamar supplement advertised as the "IVth" essential book after the PHB, DMG, and MM.

I think you might not realize just how close to the truth you are on this one.
I was reading an article by some WotC author or another (I can't remember who, nor can I find the article), who literally characterized the R&D process just as you have. It's explicitly why Epic Handbook and Deities an Demigods were 2 separate books (for example). It's also why there are so many redundant feats and spells. They intentionally went out of their way to keep individual design teams in their own bubbles .... the rationale had to do with cross-contamination or some bullshit, but I legitimately think that it was so that they didn't accidentally lose sellable page-count.

FrankTrollman wrote:Seriously, that is the whole thing. It doesn't even tell you what the stat modifiers are.

Bullshit. What a load of fucking bullshit. How did they fuck that up so bad?

Goddamnit, Wyatt.

Ancient History wrote:To add insult to injury, when WotC did introduce a bird-based Main Player Race Guys, it ended up being the fucking Raptorans in Magic of Incarnum.

Those fuckers were also in Races of the Wild, a book only noteworthy for a prestige class that let clerics plunder druid spells and vice-versa and another prestige class that -- with Mystic Theurge -- gave you 9/9 spellcasting by level 20. And guess fucking what? They couldn't even fucking fly out of the gate.

Actually, I think that book represents a good demarcation of when D&D authors started to quake in their boots at the thought of low-level flight. Which I guess to was an extent necessary due to the preponderance of DMFs and closet trolls, but it managed to infect 4E D&D as well even when it started with a clean slate.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Seriously, that is the whole thing. It doesn't even tell you what the stat modifiers are.

Bullshit. What a load of fucking bullshit. How did they fuck that up so bad?

Goddamnit, Wyatt.

That is par for the course for this book, a good quarter of it is roughly humanoid races lacking any interesting abilities. None of them tell you how to play them as a character.

Much of what is left is special snowflake undead, none of which really justify being unique.

Almost all the actually interesting monsters were unusable to most groups when the book was published due to horrible CR. When everyone was still getting used to 3.0, they relied on CR much more. To illustrate this, look at the Banelar. (Way too many monsters named after gods in this book) It's a naga-like creature that at CR 5 has 6th level casting off of both wizard and cleric lists. It gets to auto-quicken a spell when it attacks, and ignore XP and Material components. It's called out as using treasure intelligently, has fast healing, and is effective in melee. This could be a cool monster, but it should be a TPK for any early 3.0 5th level party.

Ancient History wrote:To add insult to injury, when WotC did introduce a bird-based Main Player Race Guys, it ended up being the fucking Raptorans in Magic of Incarnum.

Magic of Incarnum didn't have any flying races, that was Races of the Wild.

Playing monsters as a character doesn't happen until, what, Savage Species for the format used in 3.5. For MM2 and FF they're still using the old "level adjustment" that includes hit dice. So it's just a 3.0 thing.


In the original Monster Manual there's no level adjustment at all, that came out in the FRCS, which is after this book IIRC. You just get a list of how Monster Hit Dice count as levels and you might have to start a level or three below everyone else anyway for "balance". Which works well enough until they changed the XP system in the FRCS and let you catch up, because people were complaining about XP costs being an actual cost.

Hell, making monsters start lower and then catch up levels in play was probably a better system than what we ended up with.

tussock wrote:Playing monsters as a character doesn't happen until, what, Savage Species for the format used in 3.5. For MM2 and FF they're still using the old "level adjustment" that includes hit dice. So it's just a 3.0 thing.

Didn't the 3.0 DMG have a page on level adjustments? Or was that the 3.5 one? Savage Species was written on the 3.0-3.5 cusp (same as FF).

Which works well enough until they changed the XP system in the FRCS and let you catch up, because people were complaining about XP costs being an actual cost.

Does a day go by where you manage to not spout total crap? It didn't remotely work at all. Doing the catch-up system slightly alleviated it but still made it unworkable: either you played a character that was just about even with the other PCs (except really easily killed) and then you still end up falling behind as your racial abilities become more and more useless but you're still paying the price, or alternatively you grabbed a very cheap template that gives benefits that stay relevant, and when you catch up XP-wise, you're ahead of the curve. I can list every single one of those, using one hand.

Hell, making monsters start lower and then catch up levels in play was probably a better system than what we ended up with.

That's basically what we did get. Unless you want to pretend the Racial Progression (where you start as a Mummy with one hit die and don't even have 1/day disease) wasn't a joke. You can do that, but that just makes you part of the joke.

What we ended up with, what the later books all used, was "It's a CR 3 creature with 5 hit dice and LA +2. So you can play as this CR 3 creature at level seven, and not before then, and a fair challenge for just you alone would be to fight four of yourself." They didn't print racial progressions - and remember, that's guaranteed page filler and wordcount! So they abandoned the idea for a good reason. Yes I know Libris Mortis tried digging it up again, but only because that book is all about digging up shit that should be left to rest and to rot.

And technically, the option to catch up only appeared in "Monte Cook Releases a Bunch of Optional Rules After a Coke Party". The regular rules assume you should carry the burden of your 1/day breath weapon (DC 10 + Con, hit dice do not have a say in this. Damage: not enough for you to care) all the way to the highest levels, paying for it every time you roll that d20, knowing the bonus added to the roll would be 1 higher if not for that fucking breath weapon.

TiaC wrote:

NineInchNall wrote:They might be mechanically worth it, but damn if it doesn't suck to be an amorphous blob of oil or a half-cactus-half-sea-cucumber.

Yes, they are the sort of races played by the worst kind of non-roleplaying munchkin for the most part. (Sharn aren't actually amorphous. Hell, they're immune to anything that would change their shape.)

1. To change shape requires that a thing go from shape A to shape B.
2. 'Amorphous' means 'without form or shape'.
3. Something that is amorphous can't change its shape (because it doesn't have a shape to change.)



Of course, the sharn are even more hardcore amorphous than that - they can't even gain a shape.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Seriously, that is the whole thing. It doesn't even tell you what the stat modifiers are.

Bullshit. What a load of fucking bullshit. How did they fuck that up so bad?

Goddamnit, Wyatt.

Back in 3.0, they didn't publish player stat adjustments for monster races. The DMG had info on how to convert it yourself. This was before the days of applying the elite array or the warrior array (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) to monsters, and all monsters were assumed to have a base stat of either a 10 or an 11. So, you had to take all of the stats, round down to the nearest even number, and subtract 10. That would be your racial stat mod. I think they gave a few examples in the DMG of how to do this, but they didn't publish any of this info on an individual basis in the MM. I think all you would get was a favored class and a domain list.

The term Level Adjustment also didn't exist. Instead, the DMG had a table of "appropriate" levels for base monsters. So, minotaur clocked in at level 8. In 3.5, this would later be translated to 6 RHD + 2 LA. On a side note, I remember reading a 3.5 MM someone had while I still played 3.5, and I was floored that they would drop the level requirement of the minotaur by six levels! So, or course, I rolled up a 1st level minotaur barbarian as a 3rd level PC.

Of course, another thing that was plainly missing was the formula to figure out DCs of abilities, both of the base monster, and how to advance it. They didn't start listing things like "the DC is Con-based" until 3.5.

Monsters A-Z



There are really a lot of pieces of bullshit in the Bs, like the ricockulously overpowered Banelar pictured above. But we have to move on if we ever intend to finish this shit. So we're going to start in the Cs, or CHs if you're coming from a language like Czech that considered CH to be a different letter than C for alphabetical purposes.

The Chitine and the Choldrith look really very similar and are back to back on pages 26 and 27. They are both Elves who have been turned into spider hybrids by Drow magic. Now, I know you're probably thinking “don't we already have a fucking Elf who got turned into a Spider Hybrid by Drow magic? I mean, that sounds exactly like a Drider” and you're totally right. One of these two fuckers even gives the game away by noting:

Monsters of Faerun wrote:Their similarities to driders has not gone unnoticed by scholars

Thank you for that. Oh, and the Choldrith are just the priest caste of the Chitine, who have a couple extra hit dice and some arbitrary magic powers for being the evolved form. So even granting that both monsters have no reason to exist because there are already fucking driders in the monster manual, there's no reason for both of these monsters to get their own writeup – this is just one entry divided into two to take up more pagecount. It's not two monsters that shouldn't exist because it's a reused and kind of stupid concept, it's literally just one monster. For a book that is charging you a quarter a monster, rubbing it in your nose like that is fucked up.

This is the Chosen One, as it was originally presented:


This is the Chosen One, as it is in Monsters of Faerun:


There is actually an intermediate step between "teenage pencil sketch" and "wizard needs photoshop badly," because the second image is actually directly ripping off an older painted image which I spent half an hour trying to find before giving up. Anyway, this is a good excuse to point out that while you do get some fantastic art in D&D3, reimagining some of the old classic monsters in new and more fantastic/realistic fashion, you also get a lot of crap where the artists are trying to follow the old art from previous editions even though it wasn't very good to begin with.

Unlike the undead mentioned earlier, the Chosen Ones are also given a specific spell to craft them with. This tells me that different people were writing different monsters in this book, and not checking each other's work, and one of them had a firmer grasp of the 3e ruleset than the other, because this at least is something workable to create them. Not ideal - I seriously think an added option in create undead would have worked better - but you work with what you have.

• Caper Advanced Cloaker Cloaker Lord!

Cloakers are... actually really dumb. The idea is that they lie around and pretend to be an article of clothing because they look like discarded clothing complete with buttons and an attached mace. Because apparently there are enough people who, when wandering in dangerous caverns and see dirty laundry, decide to stick their head in it that it is a successful ambush predator. This strains believability even compared to the Trapper and Lurker Above.

Anyway, there is a superior subrace of Cloakers who are called “Cloaker Lords.” They are bigger and stronger than other Cloakers, and were first depicted in the Menzoberranzan boxed set with a totally surreal plot where the Cloaker Lords are uniting the Cloakers (who I should remind you are solitary ambush hunters disguised as dirty laundry) into a hierarchical society and going out on raids and taking other creatures as slaves. I don't really know what it means to be a slave of something that is essentially a goldenrod crab spider, but whatever. Maybe you shake meat on the end of a stick for your dark masters so they can feel the thrill of grabbing “unsuspecting” prey.

Cloaker Lords actually have a hunting style that is every bit as fucking retarded as normal Cloakers. Only
maybe moreso, because they are much larger and apparently hang on walls looking for all the world like a cloak that an Ogre or Giant might wear. There are no words for how unlikely that is to be in any way helpful in stalking mansized prey. For fuck's sake, if I saw a giant's battle laundry hanging on the wall, I wouldn't suddenly decide to let my guard down. It's like a crocodile attempting to lure it's prey into a false sense of security by masquerading as a pride of lions.

But this was all stupid shit that happened nine years before Monsters of Faerun was printed. It's a thing that happened in the Forgotten Realms, and a book about Monsters of the Forgotten Realms is well within its right to include them. Apparently Cloaker Lords put together a city ten thousand years ago, and it's exactly the same now because Cloakers exist outside the flow of fucking time! Or the authors got super lazy and simply don't want to update the information on the Cloaker city right now ever.

The actual mechanics are lackluster. The fact that they are the unquestioned rulers of Cloaker “society” is mysteriously an (Ex) ability despite not having any game mechanics and being normally the sort of thing that you'd just note in flavor text. They are all 9th level Wizards who are specialized in the subschool of Shadow, which I think is very forward thinking considering that subschool specialization didn't fucking exist in 3rd edition when this book came out. They have some shadow manipulation powers and sound manipulation powers, and true to form this book does not bother to tell you what kind of action it is to use these abilities nor how often they can be used. Because giving out complete ability descriptions would take the mystery out of life or something.

Having said that, it's quite obvious that even McSpellcrafter hadn't quite grasped the basics, which is why Crawling Claws are listed as constructs instead of undead and crafted with a 3rd-level spell with the [Evil] tag. Seriously, it is a goddamned severed hand, which you have animated and brought back to life. You don't need or want Transmutation for that, because you have Necromancy! That is literally what Necromancy was created for your fucking fuck!



Anyway, the spell is so poorly-worded that there is no requirement that the hands/claws/etc. in question have to be unattached from their owners when you cast the spell, and there's no saving throw. So yes, if you sneak into range while the party is sleeping and spend the hour casting the spell without waking them up, you control their left hands forever. I'm sure there's some Realms slashfic about that somewhere.

Doppelgangers have a weird and storied history in D&D. Basically, the concept is that it's a dude who takes the form of other dudes and impersonates them. And that is a concept that doesn't have any level limits on it at all. You can tell that story at first level with the local Baron getting replaced by a shifter, and you can tell that story at 20th level with a demigod having to fight his dark twin. So it isn't super surprising that D&D keeps coming out with greater and lesser versions of the Doppelganger to bring out at different levels.

This book contains the Greater Doppelganger. Which is not to be confused with the Ethereal Doppelganger that came out the year after in the Monster Manual 2. Nor is it to be confused with the Dread Doppelganger that happened for Ravenloft. Nor even the Changeling (or “lesser doppelganger”) that happened for Eberron.

Anyway, the Greater Doppelganger is a Doppelganger who eats brains and gets to mimic the abilities of the person he is then able to copy. This may sound similar to the Ethereal Doppelganger, that has a mind meld where it can assume someone else's identity but um... shut up. Anyway, like all systems of taking portions of one creature and line item adding them to another creature, this is confusing and fucked up. Frankly, this would all be less confusing and stupid if we were talking about the Marvel character and that is saying something. Greater Doppelgangers are actually a Forgotten Realms plotline from the 90s that nobody cared about, so their inclusion in this book is perhaps understandable. But it's still just really fucking stupid all around.

The Doppelgangers also have a weird connection with mindflayers in some parts of D&D, where a gang of doppelgangers led by an illithid will be called a druuth. Presumably the doppelgangers either bought in to the illithid brain-sharing plan or they're just useful proxies because illithids are allergic to fake mustaches.

Disguise skill: I roll 20s.

Darktrees are bloodsucking would-be treants. I think they're supposed to be immobile, but that's not actually mentioned anywhere in the entry. I'd make a job about redneck trees, but aside from the fact that darktrees get confusion instead of dirty talk, they're almost identical.

Up next is a classical Realms monster, the deepspawn. By "classical" I mean of course "retarded" and "deeply problematical in the game." See, the deepspawn eats critters...and then spawns copies of those critters that look just like them and have their abilities 1d4 days later. You can make your jokes about spawncamping and making money off monster breeding, I can guarantee you they've all been done before and in character fiction. Seriously, these are monsters whose economic/exploitation potential is so hard to miss that even fucking Ed Greenwood couldn't miss it.

A word about demons: the demons here have spell-like abilities, and then they have Psionics (sp). This is because there was no psionics handbook at the time, or presumably in anything but the early planning stages, and yet they felt the need to include "psionic" abilities as separate from spell-like abilities even though they are functionally identical at this point. I'd like to blame that as another bit of last-edition-carryover thinking, but even on the barest reflection it doesn't hold up, and as far as I know was never corrected because the Psionics Handbook was a pile of warm monkey poo.

For whatever reason, I find the Brown and Fang Dragons really hard to take. For the Brown Dragon, it might have something to do with the fact that Blue Dragons are already brown on the back and already have an Earth subtype. It might be because “living in caves” is not a fucking distinguishing feature for a D&D Dragon. I'm not really sure. For the Fang Dragon, it's because all the Dragons have fucking fangs, so you might as well have named it the “Dragon Dragon.” Just from the name alone it's obvious that the authors had run out of ideas.

That's been true of dragons for a long time, though. After getting the primary colors and most noble metals out of the way, D&D couldn't leave well enough alone and kept coming up with dozens of additional variations on the theme (adamantine dragon, steel dragon, yellow dragon, purple dragon, etc.) not to mention gem dragons...which they couldn't even manage to keep fucking consistent within editions...but my favorite is when they try Completely New Concepts(TM) that fail spectacularly. Case in point, this book contains both the Deep Dragon and the Shadow Dragon, which are conceptually identical.

Notice that nowhere in here are stats for half-dragon offspring of these new dragon breeds. That would be thinking too far ahead.



The book is very schizophrenic about what it decides should be a template and what it decides should be a unique monster writeup. This is important, because all the template monsters go to the back of the book and aren't in the regular alphabetical order. This is why the Beast of Malar is on page 20 but the Beast of Xvim is on page 85. But nowhere in the book is this fundamental failure to understand when templates should and should not be used more apparent than the Dread Warrior.

The Dread Warrior is a thing that happens when the Necromancer faction in the Red Wizards of Thay find that one of their warriors died and they'd prefer that hadn't happened. So they reanimate them with some of their abilities intact. This is actually a perfect place in the rules for a template, but instead we get an arbitrary one-off monster writeup that happens to be a 4th level fighter – leaving you to figure out what the fuck happens to make a 5th level fighter or a 7th level Orcish Barbarian on your own. It's pretty fucking useless.

In fact, this writeup is so unhelpful, that when the Dread Warriors were revisited two years later in Unapproachable East they just fucking rewrote it from scratch. As a template.

Of course, there are also Dragonkin, which are explicitly not half-dragons but a sort of winged lizardman that can detect magic at will. No relation to the dracotaur, although you'd think there'd be some crossover there.

The original Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting went kinda nuts on the player character race subtypes - humans got sorted by nation, demihumans by subspecies so that you had fucking Moon Elves and Sun Elves and Gold Dwarfs and Urdunnir and Wild Dwarfs and shit. This is nominally supposed to be going back to Tolkien who had a really big hard-on for the actual lineage and nations of different races and the languages they spoke and yadda yadda fucking yadda but I think giving them stats is too far. Thankfully, they chose to leave out the Azer/Urdunnir crossbreeds and dwelfs from this book. Small blessings and all.

I genuinely don't know why we would need so many Dwarves. The Forgotten Realms is pretty fucking crazy on subtypes, but a new edition seems like it would have been a great time to say “Shield Dwarves and Arctic Dwarves are the same fucking thing, but live in different places, the end.”

The Firenewt falls into many categories that fill this book. First of all, as previously noted there are five fucking reptilian humanoids who live in hot wilderness areas in this book. Secondly, a very large percentage of the monsters in this book are not taken from the various stupid Forgotten Realms supplemental materials but are just repeats from the original Fiend Folio. The “in-the-realms” segments for these monsters tend to be very lame, and for Fire Newts it is no exception. There is no mention of any cities or plotlines or people, just a list of hot places you might be able to encounter one. I'm mostly talking about them because I want to include the Firenewt picture because it is adorable.




Giants are like dragons in that there are a lot of them, they are often very silly, and poorly organized. Case in point: the goddamned Fog Giant, whose signature ability is to hide in fog. Note that giants get a penalty for hiding in fog because they're fucking giants, and creatures beyond 5 feet away have automatic concealment in fog anyway and have a reach of 15 feet. So what a basic fog giant attack should look like is a fog rolls in, PCs start to panic, and then a fucking tree trunk comes out of nowhere to bash them and then disappears back in the fog and they never see what the fuck is attack them. This would be especially good if the giant had, say, some innate magical ability to create fog, such as fog cloud or obscuring mist, especially if paired with any ability that let them see through fog like blindsense.

But they don't have that. So instead you have 24-foot tall albino giants trying to tip toe through the fog until they can see you and have some hope of smashing you with their gigantic fucking clubs, because if they just take a swing at you from more than 5 feet away they have like a 25% miss chance. These are creatures whose inherent abilities are useless as written because they can't fucking operate in the environment they're supposed to be evolved to operate in. "Oh yes, I'll use my fucking Rock Throw ability while I hide in the fog, except oh fuck they can't see me so why am I hiding, and I can't see them to hit them with my fucking rocks. I'm going to starve to death."

Thank you for that. Oh, and the Choldrith are just the priest caste of the Chitine, who have a couple extra hit dice and some arbitrary magic powers for being the evolved form.

So if you're playing pokemon as an Outsider that can capture Humanoids, your Drow can evolve into a Chitine at X hit dice, then into a Choldritch at Y hit dice if it's night time? As opposed to trading a Drow that's holding Sticky Web, then it evolves into a Drider.

Cloakers are... actually really dumb. The idea is that they lie around and pretend to be an article of clothing because they look like discarded clothing complete with buttons and an attached mace.

I always assumed they looked like a fairly nice, if menacing, black cloak. So admittedly, only villains, vampires and Batman would wear it. Oh, and stage magicians.

Alternatively, you keep one in your dungeon on a coatrack, next to a magical trap that activates a Disrobe effect, and then the chivalrous paladin throws the monster on top of the naked rogue and lulz ensue.

Alternatively, if you have a particularly smart Cloaker (or perhaps a Caper), it owns the castle, the minions will swear that the boss is an ogre or something, and then you find that he isn't in his throne room - his desk is there, with his magical cape hanging on his chair, there is an open book on the desk...

(And then if they just beat it into submission, it becomes a seriously awesome magic item to wear)

specialized in the subschool of Shadow, which I think is very forward thinking considering that subschool specialization didn't fucking exist in 3rd edition when this book came out.

That's a pretty good idea for subschools that have enough spells to their name (and by the end of 3.5, that's nearly all of them), did 3.X ever actually introduce that option?

So yes, if you sneak into range while the party is sleeping and spend the hour casting the spell without waking them up, you control their left hands forever. I'm sure there's some Realms slashfic about that somewhere.

"Wait, there's a medical condition where it's like your hand isn't your own? How can I get this disease?"

So it isn't super surprising that D&D keeps coming out with greater and lesser versions of the Doppelganger to bring out at different levels.

What's the pokemon progression on them?

And I really hope the picture A_H linked is Lord Brian Consumptington, the Elder Braingentleman. I look forward to getting home from work so I can see the images.

Psionics

Presumably they wanted to leave it there in case a future Psionics book decided that monsters with "Psionics" work in some special way. It's handy for letting us know which demons are Psychic|Dark Pokemon.

Koumei wrote:Didn't the 3.0 DMG have a page on level adjustments?

Yeh, sorry. Here's a quick clarification.

In 3.0, to play an Ogre you had to start in a level 5 party (at least). That puts you 4,000 XP behind everyone on just 4 "monster level" HD, but XP is the same for the whole party regardless of level so by 10th you're still only 4,000 XP behind and often the same level as the party (at least if you think an Ogre is worth 4 levels of anything).

A Tiefling starts in a level 2 party and is only ever 1,000 XP behind, not a terrible deal. I customised that as a fixed XP cost to play a monster. Which made sense to me at least if you wanted to start at higher levels.

With the FRCS, because they let lower level PCs earn more XP for the same fight all of a sudden, they lock in the LA to prevent that for better races (calling the Ogre +5, including the HD). So at any level you're always one HD less than the other PCs as an Ogre or Tiefling. But not a Wizard or Cleric churning out items and the best spells, so they're happy at least.

With Savage Species and 3.5, your Ogre LA is +2, plus the HD, so you're always two HD behind and no one ever plays proper monsters again. The monster-playing book that stops people ever playing monsters.

With some later splat you start catching up again. UA? Can't recall. The Ogre takes 9 levels to catch up and the Tiefling 3 levels. That works for smaller LAs but not, for instance, anything with +3 or more like Svirfneblin, and many DMs don't allow it anyway.

While the thing never worked right for Hill Giants, you could at least play one at 12th level in 3.0 when it's not impossible to live a round.

Yeah, it was UA, and the Tiefling sort-of catches up at level 3 (they drop their LA by 1, losing the necessary XP, so that they can actually catch up the same way you would if you spent 1 level worth of XP). So you can basically carry on with life as a Rogue or Beguiler and be perfectly happy with your life choice. If you did that has an Ass-mart, you probably decided to be a Cleric or Druid, hated those first few levels where you were a bit squishier and, at levels 2 and (most of) 4, a spell level behind, and then it kind of evens out and you're ahead of the curve by being almost always the same level but getting +2 to your caster stat. If you were a Genasi, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The Ogre loses 1 LA at 6 (party is level 8), and then another at 9 (party is 10), and eventually is "even" (except for their awful racial hit dice).

The Half Dragon loses 1 LA at level 9 (when everyone else is level 12), and hits level 10 before everyone else hits 13. They then lose their next LA at 15 (roughly at the same time everyone else is at 17), and they lose their final LA at level 18 (everyone else is at 19). And they quite possibly hit level 20 before everyone else hits 21, but nobody cares any more, and although they love their +8 Str +2 Con +2 Int +2 Cha +4 Natural Armour and Fire Immunity, the fact is the LA stopped them from playing a caster, so as a level 20 Fighter or Barbarian, you could get that shit for free and you're still not playing with the grown-ups.

Firefox for Android properly displays base encoded images btw.

Monsters A-Z: G



We start with the Ghaunadan, which is almost wholly copypasta from 2nd edition. It's a shape shifter monster that I think was based on Deep Space Nine's Odo, but could easily have been based on Terminator 2 instead. Its natural form is an ooze, and it can form itself into humanoid shapes. It also has completely random magic powers. Like everything in this fucking book, it's a magic thingy made by the Drow. D&D always falls a bit into the “A wizard did it” trap of narrative, but this book goes a bit farther with “A Drow wizard did it.” It's the Monsters of Faerun equivalent of AD&D's Mad Wizard's Guild.

Anyway, here was the Ghaunadan in 2nd edition, where you can see its Star Trek/Terminator roots more clearly:


The text, as I mentioned earlier, is copypasta. Here is the 2nd edition Monstrous Compendium description:

2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Compendium wrote:These vile, intelligent beasts are the loyal servants of Ghaunadaur, the god of oozes, slimes, and jellies.

And the MoF version:

Monsters of Faerun wrote:These vile, intelligent beasts are the loyal servants of Ghaunadaur, the god of oozes, slimes, and jellies.

The big difference is that in 2nd edition, they were intelligent oozes. In Monsters of Faerun they update it to “similar to oozes, but they are quite intelligent” but other than that it's pretty much unchanged. But of course, since literally no one gives a second fuck about Ghaunadar, the Drow god of jelly, it's not liable to come up.

To be fair, "a Drow wizard did it" is a bit of an elaboration on Greenwood's earlier thesis that "an elf wizard did it," and his go-to alternative is "a Netherese wizard did it." Then of course, there are the Giant Striders.



...which seriously, looks like a monster as designed by Col. Sanders, Necromancer. I can't look at that thing without my stomach rumbling, since it appears half-cooked already. To make it even better, they're used as mounts by Firenewts (how? why? fuck it). And they don't cook:

Fireball (Su): Twice per hour, a giant strider can emit a small fireball from ducts near its eyes. [...]

Fire Subtype (Ex): [...]

Healing From Fire (Ex): Not only do giant striders take no damage from fire, they are healed from it. [...]

Resistant to Magic (Ex): Giant striders gain a +2 bonus on all saving throws against magical effects.

Yes, they added Fire Subtype under special abilities. No, I don't know why, except perhaps that they didn't know any better. Also, that "twice an hour stuff" is really the kinda of bizarre limitation that Flame Yoshi should have been going away from. It's just pointless bookkeeping by Mister Cavern.

• Seriously, WTF?

This book doesn't actually make many pieces of new material. Mostly it's monsters dug up from the old Fiend Folio or from the margins of old Forgotten Realms materials that no one cared about. But from time to time it surprises us by actually writing up something brand spanking new. And the Dekanter Goblins are one of those new things. They are big, stocky Goblins with rhino horns on their face. They were made by an Evil Drow Wizard. Yes, this time it's not even “A Drow Wizard Did It,” but it is “A Mind Flayer Wizard Did It” which in this book is almost as cliché.

I actually have no idea why they are classified as Goblins in the first place. They specifically bear “little resemblance” to Goblins, so the whole thing gets a giant WTF. They are so bizarrely specific to a single adventure that you'd think they were copypasta from a 2nd edition adventure. But if that's true, neither I nor the internet knows what that adventure is. Perhaps James Wyatt had a manuscript that never got published and just
decided to spruce it up for 3e? I don't know. Nobody knows.

It's so fucking bizarre that people (myself included) sometimes use the rhino goblins as examples of bullshit obscure monsters. I mean for fuck's sake: this is a monster that is the specially created guards of one Lich who happens to live in one dungeon complex in a published adventure that seems to have not actually ever been published. That is some serious obscurica right there!

I'm too lazy to even look up to see if Dekanter was mentioned in any of the Netherese or Anauroch books before this. Anyway, speaking of a wizard did it, nothing screams that quite so much as golems! And we have some golems for you here today: gemstone golems! Now, normally this brings to mind serious adventure scenes like this:



However, you have to remember that these are based on Ed Greenwood and his repeated efforts to stuff something called "gem magic" into a D&D context:

Each type of gemstone golem embodies one of the powers of gem magic, an ancient form of wizardry that has been forgotten in most worlds. Gemstone magic was not an exact science, and the capabilities of the original gemstone golems diverged from the intentions of their original creators. This divergence can be even more marked today. Gemstone golems are subtly flawed, following their own gem-magic natures to an extant that renders full control of them impossible. Magicians who expect their constructs to conduct themselves with perfect efficiency eschew gemstone golems, while wizards with a sense of flair are drawn to them despite their drawbacks. Many gemstone golems encountered by adventurers are operating on their own initiative, following some interpretation of ancient orders rather than a present-day master.

Gem magic, like Greenwood's herbs and other things, was an effort to a) add some elements of real-world magical practices and superstition into a D&D context, and b) an excuse for great variations between wizards back in the days before feats and alternate class features. Again, we're looking at series AD&D ADHD, because while the Monster Manual entry for creating a golem looks like this:

A clay golem’s body must be sculpted from a single block of clay weighing at least 1,000 pounds, treated with rare oils and powders worth 1,500 gp. Creating the body requires a DC 15 Craft (sculpting) check or a DC 15 Craft (pottery) check.

CL 11th; Craft Construct, animate objects, commune, resurrection, caster must be at least 11th level; Price 40,000 gp; Cost 21,500 gp + 1,540 XP.

Gemstone golem construct looks distinctly more...antique:

The heart of a ruby golem is a great ruby that must be worth over 10,000 gp. The golem costs an additional 55,000 gp to create, which includes 2,000 gp for the semiprecious stones that make up the body. Assembling the body requires a successful Craft (gemworking) or Heal check (DC 15).

The creator must be 16th level and able to cast arcane spells. Completing the ritual drains 1,500 XP from the creator and requires limited wish, move earth, polymorph any object, and stone shape.

Yeah, I don't know how they missed the "Craft Construct" feat either. These things also bug me from a completionist standpoint 'cause they muck up the other crystalline based golems, like the later Psion-Killer.

The final golem in the entry is actually the most interesting: the Thayan golem is a wooden construct of an archer priced at (minimum) 40,000 gp, for which you get a single rather accurate archer who is immune to magic missiles. Yes, they miss out on full magic immunity even though they cost as much as a flesh golem. Also, they're made of wood - why not just work fire immunity in there? Maybe that's the upgrade package that the Red Wizards try to sell you at the dealership enclave.

D&D tries to go full kitchen sink all the time. Even when it's not particularly wise to do so. And one of the places that gets silliest is in the proliferation of beastmen. Sooner or later, every animal you can think of will have a furry version of it incorporated into D&D. And so at last, we come to badger people. Not the Armand, who are also badger people – that is from the Monster Manual 3 and hadn't happened yet. No, we are talking about the Groundlings. They are a “race” of Dwarves who happen to work as Assassins for the Zhentarim and were turned into badger furries by an evil wizard because um... I guess he really likes badgers or something.

What do you get when you cross a otyugh and a hydra? If you answered "An aberration," you're correct! Behold the mighty gulguthydra.


I don't know how the drow wizards bred that thing, but quite a lot of hydra viagra must have been involved.

It's a bit underpowered at CR 12 since its special powers appear to be sucking and blowing. Not kidding, it has a lot of hitpoints, six bite attacks and two tentacles attacks and a nauseating stench (Ex), but that's it. No regeneration, SR, immunities, nada. I'd probably call this a CR 10 max, and even that's generous because AC and BAB-wise I wouldn't bet on this thing against a Samurai in full kit.

Keeping with the “Evil Drow Wizard Did It” theme of this book, there is a whole entry for Half Fiend Drow. The Draegloth. This dates back to before the standardization that 3e brought, where each half fiend was its own special snowflake. Hell, each random mating pair of anything had to create a minor true breeding subrace that no one gave a fuck about. Forgotten Realms had fucking Dwelfs in it.

But one of the things they kept coming back to was half-fiendish versions of evil races. So you had Durzagon and Tanarukk and shit. And this book gives us four armed half-Glabrezu, half-Drow special snowflake half fiends. It's an amazingly terrible way to use up space in books. But unlike most of the stupid Drow shit in this book, it went on to inspire some pretty cool art. So I guess I'm more ambivalent about the Draegloth than I should be.


Draegloths are most popular for their place in Forgotten Realms fiction, where they fill the place of sexy werewolves. Not kidding:

I'd go on, but I'm saving the Helmed Horrors for Frank.

Dekanter goblins seem to get a mention in an FR novel, The Nether Scroll. (September 2000 release - when did Monsters of Faerun come out?).

And the Dekanter Goblins are one of those new things.

Is wine involved?

who is immune to magic missiles.

Doesn't it say they specifically make them on the cheap and sell them to suckers, pinging magic missiles off to "prove" they're totally immune to magic? It's either that or another book that says it. So basically if you see someone with Thayan Golems, they're not a Red Wizard, they just used to be rich. At this very moment, a Red Wizard is on another plane, doing lines of coke off succubus asses.