The Hinterlands of Empire

"Men make their own history, but not as they please, not out of the conditions he chooses, but under existing circumstances - transmitted from the past; the traditions of past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

The Successor Empire is sadly reduced by secession, war, conquest, depopulation and decline. 

The Central Provinces of Empire, the only ones loyal to the Emperor, and not claimed by naval mutineers, rogue dux, plague cults, Resurgent Kings or the Solar Popes are top heavy with the accretion of the past.  Every foot of ground has been a field, a home, a barracks and a grave at least once, and almost every mile contains some ruined magnificence - tumbled blocks showing the forgotten master-work of a long dead sculptor lay in a field of alchemically altered flowers, poisonous, but in the perfect jeweled tones to celebrate some ancient Emperor's jubilee.

Even in their wounded grandeur, nibbled at the edges by betrayals and crusades, the Central Province alone is larger then most kingdoms, stretching from the polluted crater lands South and West of the Capital to the Blue Meadows in in the North.  Canals and imperishable high-roads radiate from the Capital to run ruler straight across the provinces, surrounded by tumbled stones and monumental arches of bonewhite that still gleam for past victories -  appreciated only by jack rabbits and sparrows for the shade they cast.  Even fertile regions such as Green Hive are beset by internal feuding among their noble magnates and invaders from without.  Pirate princes from the Province Maratime sail ever Northward, penetrating the rivers and canal networks in brazen plundering expeditions while local militias rob traders and each other.  Everyone know that The Empire is sick, collapsing from the decadent weight of its own glory, but the fall has been so long coming that even those who care put off hard choices for years or generations while the Empire dies in nearly geologic time.

Some regions of course are more vibrant than others, and some divisions, cantonments, wards, departments, demesnes or shires are even growing while the Imperial world fades. 

The Successor Empire and its Rivals

The Divine Wight - Part 7 Animals in the Jungle of Midnight

In addition to encounters with mythical beasts and dangerous inhabitants it seems important that a cursed jungle contain a large amount of wildlife.  While it would be easy enough to include these encounters on a monster encounter table, the goal is to both provide some separation between the (mostly) less dangerous encounters and the deadly, as well as increasing the number of chances for explorers to meet up with strange life.  These creatures also add some opportunity for resupply as many are edible.

D12	Table 4 - Creatures of the Jungles of Midnight (*for stats listed below)
1	Giant Panthers* - A stalk of 1D6/2 Giant Panthers, 8’ - 12’ feet long and cruelly curious these creatures may stalk man-sized prey or lounge with yawning indifferent.
2	Dream Birds - Bursting with color and singing triumphant rilling songs in almost human voices, flocks of 3D6 of these birds are hunted for their plumage which is worth 100 GP a bird. Autochthons hunt them with wax stopped ears to avoid hearing their mournful death songs.
3	Slate Lizards* - Like dull blue river stones, up to 4d6 flat round lizards huddle on a bank or cling to the boles of trees - always basking in the sun.  These creatures are no more aggressive or intelligent than any other 3’ long reptile, but being of the basilisk they are dangerous.
4	Prophetic Birds - Avian shapes made of pure inky night, these immaterial creatures exude the cold of the void and their movements are prophecy.  A cleric may observe the birds to cast Augery without using a memorized spell on a successful 4D6 WIS check.  On a failure the Cleric and companions are doomed with a -1 on all rolls (as a Curse)
5	Glass Deer* - Noble troops of deer, most are placid but the stags are territorial and can be aggressive. The glass deer of Jungles of MIdnight are transparent tending towards translucent with age and somewhat immaterial, but their flesh is still succulent, if light.
6	Blue Bees - The sweet drone of buzzing honey bees indicates the presence of a monumental hive of blue bees.  Glassy and electric blue, the honey in their hives (unprotected raiders will be stung for 1D6 damage per round, for the 1D6 rounds it takes to recover each unit honey) is hallucinogenic, mildly poisonous and valuable - 250 GP per unit, with 1D6 units per hive.
7	Large Serpents* - 8’ to 18’ long these great constrictors are predatory and malicious,devoted to the Colossal Serpent they will be become placid if it is killed.
8	Glass Herons - Flying above in wedges that sparkle with sunlight or stalking fish in the river and pond shallows, these birds are like smoked blue glass with shearing beaks and brittle feathers that shatter with a tinkling snap.
9	Howling Monkeys* - Dirty slate, shambolic scavengers and thieves with 2-6 arms and wizened crafty faces.  They make a near constant cacophony of hateful screams, seemingly from the sheer joy of disruption, and stink with their own foulness.
10	Butterfly Migration - Sapphire lords, a butterfly with a 2’ wingspan, rich vibrancy and long feathery antenna travel in locust like swarms.  They are defenseless to the birds that trail after them nibbling at the edges of the swarm.  THe birds dare not eat too many as the butterflys are deadly poisonous, even to a larger creature if eaten in bulk (a meal’s worth requires a Save v. Poison).
11	Crocodiles* - Mottled purple, blue or grey the crocodiles of the Midnight Jungle are oppressed and disdained by their divinely inspired brethren, but they can be as mean and dangerous as any hungry 6’ - 10’ reptile - hunting in the river’s shallows.
12	Swarm Fish - A colony of thousands of fish, moving with singular intent and mind, flashing blue and silver glass  in the water the fish swarm is curious, but largely harmless.  An excellent food source it can easily be tricked into sacrificing some of its members - going so far as to risk 1D6 rations worth of fish leaping into a net or boat to investigate any sparkling objects displayed within.

Monster Archaeology - Magical Beasts

MYTHICAL BEASTS OF LEGEND

It's hard to know exactly where to start and stop the next set of monsters from Monsters and Treasure, bestial creatures that are (with one interesting exception) pulled directly from classic myth and legend.  These creatures are best described as "Dragon-like", but depart from the common structure of Monsters and Treasure in that they don't represent a hierarchy from weakest to strongest within a specific monster class.

Manticores ("Manticoras"), Hydras, Chimeras and Wyverns don't really share much descriptively or in any conceivable ecology, though all have some special attack, all appear in small numbers and all are dangerously powerful with 6-12 Hit Dice and decent armor class.  They seem to exist to provide a lone alpha predator, menace or 'boss monster' when dragons aren't appropriate.  This is somewhat unfortunate as most of these creatures are quite evocative and offer interesting encounters.

Manticores are perhaps the least dangerous of these large monsters, and Monsters and Treasure describes them as follows and continues to use the name "Manticora" which is the name of a genus of African beetle and the Latin term for Manticore - it describes them as follows:

MANTICORA: Huge, lion-bodied monstrosities with men's face, horns, dragon wings and a tail full of iron spikes.  There are 24 of these spikes in a Manticora's tail and they can be fired 6 at a time in any one direction with the range (18") accuracy and effect of a crossbow. Their favorite prey is man.

As a 6+1 hit die creature with great speed (12/18) and a good AC of 4, Manticores seem like they would be excellent hunters of man - and in the ancient Persian that provides the name it translates to "man eater".  They mythological Manticore seems to be one of those monsters of spirits of the wasteland that explains why shepards, hunters, travelers and herdsmen go missing and thier bodies are never found.  Allegedly the mythical beast devours its prey whole after stunning with it's poisonous sting.

As a monster the Manticore as a mechanical concept is far less interesting then it's parts imply.  It's a burly ranged attacker (though limited to one attack in melee) that can launch a dangerous (an with an attack bonus of +6 or the ability to hit a plate and shield armored character on an 11 or better) flurry of missiles.  The mechanics of the Manticore's missile attack present interesting possibilities, in that it can target a single enemy six times in a round at range, picking off magic users and other dangerous but unprotected characters.  Played with the human cunning that it's man's head implies a Manticore could be very dangerous, sniping party members from ambush and flying by to kill at long range.  One envisions them as predators and raiders, flying, retreating to filthy bachelor lairs in the wastelands, decorated in stolen frivolities and aping humanity, but scattered with bones and bloody bits of meals.  Goblin Punch has this lovely piece on Manticores, making them more mythical then the original myths of confused man faced and poison tailed tigers, or the later ones of cats with the faces of beautiful spiteful women, confused with the sphinx and as an allegory for fraud.  More recently Trey at Sorcerer's skull released his Manticore wizard focused adventure which takes the beast in a somewhat different direction but still focuses on the   It's hard not to think of Manticores as the idea of a monster in need of more interesting statistics.

Hydras are the next of the magical Beasts listed in Monsters and Treasure:

Monster Archaeology - Cockatrice, Basilisks, Medusae and Gorgons

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In the City at Night - The Night Holds Terrors

The roads are pure and timeless, and around them the detritus of a civilization that has failed from efforts  tawdry efforts to emulate the roads' perfection. Bright avenues run to the horizons - imperishable blocks of bonewhite and alchemical stone set straight and true to the compass points, surrounded by gardens of tangled briar, monuments of crumbled ruin, industrial yards where a few lackadaisical workers loaf in the shadows of ancient machines, store front churches to venal gods and dusty monuments faceless with time.

1970's Sci-Fi art - artist David A. Hardy

While this expanse of baroque decay calls out for contemplation, there is no safety here. Whether native son or bold intruder from some savage remoteness, the streets are hungry for flesh and the stuff of mortal souls.  Fellow citizens are hardened and travelers predatory even in the bright noon light, but at night other things come creeping and hunting from the endless ruins, to waylay the unsuspecting.

Below is a table of 38 random encounters for the Imperial Capital.  I expect that with these encounters, the locations table and the treasure table I have previously posted under the title "In the City at Night" one would have sufficient material to run the location.  A 3D6 table of random new PC/NPC equipment and identity might also be helpful to flesh out the citizenry a bit.

In the City at Night - Trade your Dreams for Tawdry Fashion

Pennington -Year One

The Capital is eternal, possessing the hubris of something that is, and it's 2,800 year history of continuous metropolitan occupation gives it some claim to being the largest, longest continuously occupied human city in the world, unless some poor bastards still cling to something akin to life in the blasted cities of the Imperial Heart Provinces. Still discounting bone singers, the Capital was a bustling city of high industry when the Papacy of the Red Sun's was truly the scattering of nomadic cattle raiding tribes that Imperial propaganda still paints it as.  Only Far Vehisu claims a longer history, and far Vehisu also claims to have been founded a thousand years in the future.

With great age, comes a deep, wide detritus of knowledge and a deeper one of trash. Much of the Capital's trash is magic, and some is still useful.  Below is a 2D20 table of magic items that may be found in the Capital.  The items shown are varied, but tends towards the less martial and more esoteric functions as conflict in the Capital is just as often whispered intimations in a dusty salon as it is knives under a canal bridge.

The City at Night - They Stalk Darkened Streets - Blackhearts

Michael Whelan - Descent

This began as a random encounter list companion for the most recent post of random urban landmarks for the capital of the Fallen Empire, but became a long monster description relating to a form of ghoul designed for Fallen Empire.  Ghouls are one of my favorite D&D monsters and almost always make an appearance in my games, being a truly horrific source of imagery for me, and the 'Blackhearts' below are an especially horrible and pathetic variety.

One of the things I decided when running Fallen Empire Games was to use mythological monsters from less common mythos, and for various reasons the folktales of the Caribbean became the source of some of the monster design, Blackhearts being based on the legend of the Blackheart Man/Uncle Gunnysack (not Bunny Wailer's reinterpretation as a symbol of resolute anti-colonialism but a boogeyman that steals children and carries them off in his gunnysack).  Likewise Duppys and the Rolling Calf are likely to appear on Fallen Empire random encounter lists, though in equally twisted forms.

There is no safety in the winding and convoluted streets of the Capital, paths overlaid, rewritten, and turning in on themselves and ruin crumbling next to commerce, while hideous things creep up from the underways, down from the abandoned stories above, and out of the canals.  Palisades of repurposed masonry and expensive imported timber protect the dockland redoubts of the Resurgent Merchants a Wreckers, magical wards still have some power around the manses of the craft and trade castes and the nobility and their servitors are more often than not themselves predatory beasts that hunt the night.

Most citizens and visitors to the Capital have no such protection and rely of stout doors, heavy locks, iron shutters, silence and low folk magic to protect their homes and family.  These protections are effective for most, but each night at least one family is reduced to red ribbons and one band of late night revelers dragged under the green scum of a nearby canal by something long dead.

While many potential dangers stalk the Capital’s crumbling streets from renegade Knights Perilous to duppies formed of an angry spirit and cyclones of trash, one of the most common and most awful is the Blackheart, skulking at the fringes of society with their sacks of human bones and preying on the weak.

In the City at night

It takes two days of canal travel from the Eastern and Western canal to reach the Docklands after one has passed through the shadowy enormity of the Capital's great walls and the mercenary militia and trade towns that cluster about the gates.  Two days of distant spires, and endless vistas of ruin as the bargemen pole furiously up the green canals - past fishing rafts, and under the black snapping flags above the dens of feral thralls.  Through expanses of arcane lilies that project the ghostly images of ancient beauties from their blooms, and over the fish gnawed bones of thousands of years worth of suicides and murder victims.

Hubert Robert - 1789

The Capital sprawls at the confluence of two great rivers, bound and channeled within the great circuit of it's two hundred foot, bonewhite walls and emerging again as canals that lead outward, rays from a dying sun.  For even though the Capital is dying, the spires of the Imperial Presence still gleam in the sun with its ancient shadow stretched out to cover entire blocks and neighborhoods of insula.  Within however is only a wilderness of dust and great polities of vermin, the street a mazed jungle of imperfection and abandoned buildings.   Imperial tower blocks stand in indestructible bonewhite and magically extruded stone, but the less permanent materials of their interiors are rotted and burnt away to leave only regal shells for the pigeons to roost beneath.

Urban Life is limited to to the North Eastern Quadrant of the Capital, around the foreign quays and the outlanders market where the men of the Resurgent Kingdoms gather to trade the salvaged wealth and mysteries of empire for the earthly dross of grain, dried meat and clean wine. Only here are the canals clean of unnatural life, and the night streets safe from haints, ghouls, blackhearts, and ferals.  Magical sinks cover much of the Capital's Southern half, the once towering factor hives collapsed into themselves, teaming with feral thralls and worse - the roaming sports of curdled magic: parliaments of owlbears, cockatrice, hollow men and even the rumored demon.

Hubert Robert Again

Within the civilized Northern half of the capital the dockyards form a new and growing metropolis of Resurgent adventurers rebuilding from rubble as locust like they plunder the Capital's ancient glories or trade them for necessities and cheap intoxicants. Swaggering mercenary guards, white haired men and women of the Pine Hells, or wilder places that once were the Empire, provide rough security to those who can pay and it is not uncommon to find such oddities as a pair grey skinned, lamp eyed Ibian wrestlers, guarding a hook handed corsair captain from the Southern Isles or a merchant caste family protected entirely by amazons from across the mud sea clad in the corroded golden plates worked from the shells of ancient automatons.

Beyond the dockyards are the mansions of the trade and craft caste families, both afraid of the ways the Resurgent newcomers ignore the all consuming Imperial system of courtesy and caste, using violence as a negotiation tactic, and intrigued the Resurgent appetites for Imperial craft, salvage and trade. Even with the new trade most of the craft and merchant families ape the manners of the nobility and remain immured by custom within their mansions, or possibly extinct - a few bones in the high rooms of a darkened and moldering house.  Here and there though there are signs of growth and life, with gardens that are more then overgrown tangles of magically augmented plants, and windows that glow with light in the darkness.

Surrounding the Palace Spire itself are the Spires of the nobility, a world of their own, still inhabited by the degenerate and decadent remainders of the caste and their servitors.  Many towers are empty, but a salvager can never tell if somewhere within a hundred stories of crumbling opulence a great magus noble remains, surrounded by her pack of dedicated servitors and ready to protect her inherited mountains of rotting finery with fel sendings or life draining sorcery. 

Hubert Robert 1783

To wander the streets of the Captial is too witness broken wonders built on a scale larger then human ambition and abandoned because their care is beyond human ability.  It is to age and decline in every crack and worn stone block and to know that humanity's best days are behind it, to feel one's own insignificance, overshadowed by the past.


Sight in the moonlit Capital Streets, random Locations (A-Z or 5D6)

Monster Archaeology - Greater Undead

 If animated corpses, ghouls, wights and wraiths make up the common undead, D&D has always had room for more dangerous abdead foes, and unlike ghouls wights and wraiths, these more powerful undead are not simply increasingly dangerous versions of the same creature.  It's unclear exactly what purpose greater undead, as I've taken to calling spectres, mummies and vampires, serve in Monsters & Treasure, are they tougher versions of wraiths and wights to threaten higher level players, are they puzzle monsters designed to threaten mid level parties in small numbers or leaders of undead factions?   Whatever the intent powerful undead are an important part of the higher level random encounter tables and each represents a significant threat to characters.  Following the trend established with Lesser Undead, the danger from the more powerful creatures is largely the result of immunity to some attacks and the ability of their attacks to do permanent damage in the form of status effects.

Warhammer Fantasy has this wonderful way of breathing life into the cliche

MUMMIES: Mummies do not drain life energy as Wights and Wraiths do, but instead their touch causes a rotting disease which makes wounds take ten times the usual time for healing.  A Cleric can reduce this to only twice as long with a Cure Disease spell if administered within an hour.  Only magic weaponry will hit Mummies, and all hits and bonuses are at one-half value against them. Note, however, that Mummies are vulnerable to fire, including the ordinary kind of torch.

Mummies are strange creatures then, not much stronger then Wraiths, but more accurate and very slow (they have the same AC and 5+1 HD to a Wraith's 4), moving a a rate of '6', the same as zombies and skeletons.  They have a seemingly less terrible special attacks then wraiths and wights, causing a disease rather than draining life force but they are invulnerable to regular weapons, not just missiles.  It almost sounds like the Mummy is a stronger form of the animated corpse, the skeleton/zombie, rather then a quick, self-willed form of revenant like the ghoul, wight or wraith.

The most complex aspect of the mummy is it's special attack seems like a clumsy and confusing mechanic, especially in a system where a common convention is re-rolling HP at the start of each session.  My own take on "Mummy Rot" is that the disease prevents magical healing and reduces HP total to 1/2 the rolled amount at the start of each session. I'd also add a permanent -1 to HP even if the rot is cured by cure disease spell, plus the rot is disgusting and makes the character smell bad. Obviously there's a lot of room for a far more horrible disease, something with statistics loss and progressive HP damage culminating in death.  I'm not really sure if it's necessary as the consequences as written have a pretty nasty overall effect.  The only plus side of death by Mummy as opposed to death by Wraith is that the victim of a Mummy will not rise as a Mummy.

Funnel Equipment Lists for Fallen Empire's Desolation of Zubrab

FALLEN EMPIRE
ON THE PATH TO ADVENTURE

PDF OF WITH LISTS HERE

The Fallen Empire is a place where the lives of the citizenry are constant hostage to contingency.  No day goes by without rapacious tax assessors turning a village into desolation ready for sale to outside interests, a sink beast surging up and invading a nearby croft, or that the simmering conflict between two ancient houses is finally settled in a bacchanal of slaughter.  The survivors of these tragedies, insignificant to the callous and exhausted powers of the world, find themselves without sustenance, support or succor in a time where the oppression of time and the past means that even compassion has guttered down to the barest coals.  Some die. Most suffer and then die.  A few survive, and the rarest prosper.

Those individuals that are able to withstand the buffets of ill fortune mostly become treasure hunters, grave robbers, and mercenary agents.  Guides, wildmen, spies, travelers, chroniclers, prophets and reavers - adventures, starting from nothing these men and women shift and bully the Empire’s somnolent powers, dusty mores and resigned masses, carving themselves places of note. 

Before riding a wave of blood, magic, fire and cunning to wealth and power all adventurers were something else – usually something contemptible and piteous.  To start an adventurer on their path to death or glory roll 3D6 once for each of the following stats: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma.  If the score is 5 or under the adventurer has a -1 in that statistic, fifteen of over it’s a +1.  Strength grants a bonus or penalty to melee damage and to hit. Intelligence a +1 or -1 to initiative, Wisdom to Saving Throws, Dexterity to Armor Class, Constitution to Hit Points on a per die basis, and

Equipment in the PDF below  is defined by the region and past of the adventurer, with  several potential tables to determine starting equipment and past for adventurers in the regions around the Desolation of Zubrab – The Pyre Sea, The Pyre Coast, Provence Maritime, and Green Hive Canton.

PDF OF EQUIPMENT LISTS

Fallen Empire - Rules of Setting Creation

SETTING RULES FOR FALLEN EMPIRE

Thinking about settings and the generic assumptions of fantasy games and where I want to place "Fallen Empire", my current online game, within those constraints made me realize I need more than just a vaguer sense, I need some ‘rules’ or ‘truths’ about how the setting works at a high or conceptual level. I visualize the setting as my version of 'vanilla' fantasy, a sprawling world of jumbled faux-medieval, classical and renaissance bits where dragons and unicorns exist (likely in a twisted form - but still there).  In order to make the setting consistent I want to create some core ideas, and I want them to be interesting, ideally running against some of my least favorite fantasy archetypes.

This is complicated by a couple of factors, first I abhor vanilla fantasy settings, and second classic settings are already ably represented by numerous products, many of them far, far slicker then anything I could ever deliver.  Consequently I want a setting that is high fantasy, but not derived from Tolkien, Greyhawk and The film Excalibur. Even dispensing with the obvious influences, high fantasy settings come with their own problems – principally really high fantasy is sprawling, better suited for heroic games of conflict between great forces with players acting to pursue world changing adventure.  The titanic conflict between forces of good and evil, order and chaos don't really work well with the rule sets I like, which are at their best providing when a game is about exploration and trickery and picaresque adventure for personal gain. An open world is therefore essential, with room for the players to scheme and explore but there is very little open world left in many high fantasy settings. High fantasy games of great empires, kingdoms and might wizards logically leave very little of the map to explore – there problems aren’t on a human scale, they are epic: ancient evil awakening, barbarian invasions from the realm of nightmare or conflicts between stately pantheons of deities.  OD&D doesn’t really support that sort of game, and while running a version of Journey to the West about reformed demons and pagan gods fighting back against the bureaucracy of heaven and sometimes on behalf of an upstart populist religion has an appeal – it’s not the game I want to run right now.

I find having high level setting truisms helpful keeping my setting and adventure design focused, for creating expectations and building a sense of how the game should works.  One traditional way of doing this is to focus on a monster manual for the setting - what are the common creatures encountered?  A world where goblins are on every random encounter table is radically different than one where dragons are.  An abundance of either implies something about both the world and the goblins or dragons involved.  I want to do this for fallen empire - define its singular monsters (I’ve been doing this in my Monster Archeology posts), but more I want to create a few other ‘truths’ that define the setting.  While it's likely these setting constraints will grow and change in play, it seems useful to set up specific guidelines for everything I produce for Fallen Empire so that it has a distinct look and feel.

While a good chunk of that look and feel is purloined art from Roger Dean and other 70’s/80’s progressive rock album cover artists, I want that to be a bit more than an aesthetic draped over a standard D&D game.

Rodney Matthews (Not Roger Dean) - so smooth

Monster Archaeology - Lesser Undead

SKELETONS AND ZOMBIES

I'm not sure if the animated skeleton is the most iconic Dungeons & Dragons monster, but it's certainly close.  Interestingly there are few undead in Tolkien (other then the Ring Wraiths who are a clear inspiration for the wraith in D&D), but plenty in the other Swords and Sorcery inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons. In the Monsters & Treasure undead are broken down by power level, but unlike humanoids each variety has some variation in abilities and a variety of statistical differences.

Interestingly, Skeletons and Zombies are grouped as a single class of enemy with only minor indications that they might be considered different sorts of monsters.  The taxonomic mania of AD&D is less fully evolved in the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons, with monsters having a variety of Hit Dice or types within a larger class and with almost none of the detail and ecology that defines later monster manuals.  While this doesn't go as far in building a default setting for the game, that is a blessing of sorts, encouraging GM creativity and interpretation of these monsters and by extension the fiction they inhabit.

The description for Skeletons and Zombies is long on behavioral description by Monsters and Treasure standards and provides some interesting ideas:

SKELETONS/ZOMBIES: Skeletons and Zombies act only under the instructions of their motivator, be it a Magic-User or Cleric (Chaos).  They are usually only found near graveyards, forsaken places, and dungeons; but there is a possibility of their being located elsewhere to guard some item (referee's option).  There is never any morale check for these monsters: they will always attack until totally wiped out.

The statline for Skeletons and Zombies (or animate bodies more generally) includes Hit Dice and Armor Class distinctions allowing for 1 Hit Dice(HD) or 1/2 HD and Armor Class of seven or eight.  Possibly, or even likely, these distinction are meant to be the difference between Skeleton or Zombie as separate creatures, but such limited variety seems far less interesting then a mere random variation between creatures.  Other more bizarre or interesting reading are possible, even if utterly unsupported by the text.  One could reasonably use the higher stats for undead thralls that are undamaged, but the weaker set for ones that have been damaged (knocked to zero HP) after they get back up or reform.  Another option would be to use the higher Hit Dice and Armor Class for creatures directly under the control of their creator, rather then left as guards.  

Also interesting in the description of skeletons and zombies is that they are the same creature, animated dead bodies.  There's no reason to make a distinction between the amount of bone vs. flesh on the horrifying shambling corpses (and the do shamble with a move of 6 rather then the 9 for most humans).  For a GM this is a nice change, breaking free of the overly taxonomic approach to monsters that table top games seem to relish sometimes, and encouraging the GM free creative reign.  The real limitation here is that Skeletons/Zombies are mindless undead, raised and controlled by magic.  While Monsters and Treasure grudgingly acknowledges that they might be left as guards somewhere it almost demands that a wizard or evil priest is controlling the flock of stumbling corpses - this makes skeletons and zombies far more interesting, not because it effects them much, but because it implies that all undead encountered outside of the thrall of some sorcerer are something else - wights or mummies seem the logical candidate

The animated dead in Monsters & Treasure are also something designed for use as war game opponents - figures on the field rather then narrated enemies in a table top Role Playing Game. Skeletons and Zombies are the bodyguards or an accompanying unit for evil priests and wizards rather then an enemy on finds while disturbing a tomb.  These creatures chance of being in a liar is listed with a 'Nil' (Nil being one of those D&D anachronisms that while originally a shorthand slang for not on list and the Latin for nothing, has returned thanks to Gygax's esoteric brand of pedantry and autodidact's vocabulary).  What this means it that Skeletons and Zombies are never in their own location, and never have treasure of their own - they are purely automatons, created and commanded by others.

Monster Archaeology - Large Humanoids

OGRES, TROLLS & GIANTS

I actually like the 5E Ogre Art

Under utilized in my own games, large humanoids have been a staple of Dungeons & Dragons from the beginning.  The three modules that later made up "Against the Giants" were first written and published in 1978, around the same time as my 6th edition of the "white box" and only shortly after the first edition of Basic D&D, but before the AD&D Player handbook.  The 'Giants Series', still represents one of the better examples of Gygax's incremental approach to monster design and open world world adventure design. It's unclear exactly what place large humanoids have in D&D though it seems that they fit well at the top of the 'humanoid ladder." G1 recommends a 9th level party (name level for a fighter), and is not an easy adventure, though 9th level seems high given that Hill Giants are 8HD creatures.  In Monsters and Treasure Ogres, Trolls and Giants range from 4-12 Hit Dice, making them in the top tier of monsters with 'Hydras', 'Dragons' and 'Purple Worms', though large humanoids are encountered in larger groups then these other top tier menaces.

It is also notable that ogres at least have always been a monster to throw at beginning parties - wandering ogres are a particularly tough and rare random encounter on the 1st dungeon level based on the tables in "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" in of the 'White Box', but trolls and giants however are reserved for the deeper levels.  The inclusion of a single ogre in "B2 - Keep on the Borderlands" as well as the idea that the chiefs and bodyguards of hobgoblins and gnolls fight as ogres and trolls also suggests that large humanoids aren't just a late game enemy.

Monsters & Treasure suggests little else about large humanoids.

OGRES: These large and fearsome monsters range from 7 to 10 feet in height, and due to their size will score 1 die +2 (3-8) points of damage when they hit.  When encountered outside their lair they will carry from 100 to 600 Gold Pieces each.

So we really get little description about ogres, and mostly focus on their ability to do greater than normal damage and the way they carry around wealth (relatively rare).  Ogres are dangerous melee combatants, and that seems to be the entirety of their existence. The statistic box for Ogres, and the mention of them elsewhere in the monster list provides a few more clues.

Yet, there's nothing that suggests the 5E ogre should be definitive

Ogres wander quite a bit, outside of their lairs 70% of the time and are always carrying at least 100 GP when they are.  Within their lair they have a guaranteed 1,000 GP and a good chance at additional treasure, making them acquisitive in an almost human manner.  Likewise Ogres can be found with other humanoids, working with Orcs some of the time, especially in Orc villages.  It's unclear if these "Orc Ogres" are huge Orcs, similar to the giant Hobgoblins (who fight as Ogres) that make up a Hobgoblin court, or are Ogres who work with Orcs for pay or because they have been compelled to somehow.  What's interesting about all this is that Ogres are obviously social, interested in money and willing to work with other monsters (or presumably humans) to benefit themselves.

Monster Archaeology - Small Humanoids

SMALL HUMANOIDS

Let's give this 'lil fellow a rest

Monsters and Treasure, volume 2 of three booklets, the 1970's box set version of Dungeon & Dragon's "Monster Manual" moves on from men directly into humanoids.  There are five normal sized humanoids, and most get only a line or two of text. They are also statistically uninteresting, lacking even the armor and weapon variety of human enemies and having no real flavor beyond a progression through four classes of enemy with incrementally improving AC, HP and Attack.  As much as battling orcs and goblins is a mainstay of tabletop gaming, and the mainstream of the heroic fantasy, these creatures are totally uninteresting as presented in Monsters and Treasure.  Perhaps they are a blank template to project one's own monstrous expectations upon, but here the difference between a kobold and a goblin is a single point of AC and a hit point or two.  

Orcs, which have a very long entry and which I've discussed previously, are an exception, but otherwise these humanoid descriptions are quite devoid of interesting information.  Kobolds have only a name and some mechanical details, while the entire goblin entry is:

GOBLINS: These small monsters are described in CHAINMAIL. They see well in darkness or dim light, but when they are subjected to full daylight they subtract -1 from their attack and morale dice.  They attack dwarves on sight. Their Hit Dice must always equal at least one pip.

Composition of Force: When in their lair the "goblin king" will be found. He will fight as a Hobgoblin in all respects. He will be surrounded by a body of from 5-30 (roll five six-sided dice) guards as Hobgoblins also.

They're small monsters that don't like the light, that's about it.

Monster Archaeology II - Nomads, Pirates, Cavemen & Mermen

MONSTERS & TREASURE
BEASTIARY AS SETTING “MEN” PArt II

In an earlier post I considered some the first half of the 1^st and longest entry in the 1970’s Whitebox edition of Dungeons & Dragons from the perspective of bestiary as implied setting and with an emphasis on how I would model these foes in my own Fallen Empire setting.  Monsters & Treasure contains several other types of “Men” as adversaries, all in large numbers and all more or less fitting into two mechanical categories the “Bandit” model for an average combatant and the “Berserker” category for exceptionally dangerous types.  It’s noteworthy that the real deadliness of these “Berserkers” is far greater under the original Chainmail rules in that they receive a huge bonus (or extra dice – it’s unclear to me) when fighting normal soldiers.  A band of berserkers can tear through a normal Chainmail unit. This ability is less when facing adventurers, but the danger of a +2 bonus in Original Dungeons and Dragons is not to be underestimated.  There are also cavemen, but cavemen are strange, something distinctly outside the rest of the "men" entries.  Reading this list of human foes I also suspect that the miniatures available to Gygax were a major influence.

MEN (DERVISHES, NOMADS and the Rest)

Maybe this guy can lead those nomad raiders?

Nomads are an uninteresting addition to the list of monsters in Monsters & Treasure, and like Buccaneers and Pirates seem to be a way of placing bandits on different terrain encounter tables.  Nomads of course are horse focused bandits riding out of the desert or plains. Nothing especially interesting, just another element of Gygax’s “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” (look it up) approach to monster taxonomy that focus on the weapon mixes of identical enemy units with a wargammer’s specificity. 

Though when thinking about the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons and their monster lists it’s worthwhile to remember that the game was envisioned as a variety of fantastical miniature battle and at the time of the White Box fantasy miniatures were hard to come by. Miniatures for Arabian riders, Mongols and bandit types were likely far easier to find, or already at hand.  This lack of fantasy miniatures is taken to its amusing peak in the December 1975 Strategic Review (issue 5) article “Sturmgeschutz and Sorcery” where Gygax provides a plan report and conversion rules for a game involving a WWII German patrol encountering the monstrous retinue of an evil wizard.  Nomads and the general focus on ‘men’ and humanoid monsters as enemies in the White Box are likely the result of this lack of monster models.

However, this isn’t to say that humans shouldn’t be a common enemy in contemporary games.  Most fantasy table top game settings present humanity as very common in the game world, with cities, empires and villages, while monsters skulk in ruins or crouch in the hinterlands.  With the number of humans in game worlds, and their evident power to keep their lands mostly free of monsters it makes sense that a large number of encounters in the wilderness will be with bands of armed men. I personally don’t find that making these encounters fit with stereotyped historical models is especially useful.  Just as not every mob of Berserkers needs to be Norse raider rip offs, not every Nomad has to mesh with Arab or Turkic/Mongol models.

Monster Archaeology I - Bandits & Berserkers

MONSTERS & TREASURE
BEASTIARY AS SETTING “MEN”

There’s a tabletop RPG maxim that monsters determine setting, and while it can be taken too far there’s definitely a bit of truth to it.  The antagonists faced by players and their characters, especially in an emergent game (by which I mean one with a sandbox or where the player’s decisions and interests otherwise largely set the tone and nature of the game’s locales, enemies and intrigues) the players opinions and goals are likely to be at least partially formed by how they feel towards certain early encounters.  The death of a character in the first game to goblins can make the player angry enough to devote several sessions to being goblin eradicators for example.  In a game where the goblins are replaced with bandits, draconians or halflings there will be a very different tone to these subsequent adventures.

Of the original D&D booklets - tiny ugly things published in the mid 70's - the second is titled "Monsters & Treasure" and contains Dungeons & Dragons ur bestiary, with 68 or so monsters (or classes of monster, it's not always clear).  Reading through these I can't help but wonder what kind of implied setting this set of adversaries make for.  The monsters are not ordered in any real way in Monsters & Treasure, though the idea that they are listed from most common to rarest is a bit appealing, secondly the descriptions of these Monsters are heavy on practical details, such as the weapons mixes of human and humanoid enemies, but sparse on ecology, description or other evocative detail.  It seems interesting to me to take a look at a few of the monsters and to think about how to use, describe and elaborate on the various Monsters & Treasures enemies.  For this I have decided to tie my reskins (minimal I hope) to my Fallen Empire setting (the place where I play around with vanilla tabletop fantasy concepts).  I won’t be commenting on the statistics of these monsters except generally, because OD&D statistics are quite simple and really rather easy to imagine on the fly.

MEN (BANDITS, BERSERKERS AND BRIGANDS)

The first entry in Monsters & Treasure is either incredibly monstrous or terribly mundane – Men.  It is also the longest entry and comprises at least seven subcategories (for my purposes Cavemen and Mermen will be separate monsters, but they likely shouldn’t be).  The category of Men includes various dangerous types inclined towards robbery and violence: Bandits, Berserkers, Brigands, Dervishes, Nomads, Buccaneers & Pirates.

This is what Monsters & Treasure has to say about Bandits (I’ve removed excessive mechanical detail):

“BANDITS: Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are supernormal fighters, magical types or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4^th level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5^th or 6^th level fighter; for every 100 bandits there will be in addition one 8^th or 9^th level fighter.  If there are over 200 bandits there will be a 50% for a Magic-User [of 10^th to 11^th level!] and a 25% chance for a Cleric of the 8^th level…

[Bandit leaders have a small chance of having magical equipment]

Composition of Force: Light Foot (Leather Armor & Shield) = 40%; Short Bow (Leather Armor) or Light Crossbow (same) = 25%; Light Horse  (Leather Armor & Shield) = 25%; Medium Horse (Chain & Shield, no horse barding) = 20%.  All super-normal individuals with the force will be riding Heavy, barded horses.
Alignment: Neutrality”

Not These Guys - from Dark Souls

Bandits then aren’t scruffy types one encounters here and there a handful at a time, they are legions of warriors, encountered in groups of 3D100 and led by powerful and special NPCs.  Bandits seem to have a degree of military organization and certainly military equipment, albeit not the best, and they aren’t necessarily evil.  My own mechanical inclination is to make the encounter number (for everything in Monsters & Treasure) the number of the monster type residing in a hex rather than a single encounter.  A bandit band of 200 presumably has infrastructure to guard (A camp at least) and not all of its force will be set in ambush (without good reason).  Instead smaller groups of bandits will watch the road, patrol their perimeter and generally act as random encounters, and will warn the camp/fort if they encounter anything dangerous.

What the numbers, organization and powerful leaders of bandits seem to imply is that they aren’t just robbers, highwaymen or thieves, but entire armies of misrule.  That they can roam the countryside (along with their less pleasant offshoots) without interference implies a lack of social order.  In Monsters & Treasure “Bandits” imply two possible things about the setting.  First that there is some sort of rather nasty and titanic war occurring (or perhaps just ended) in the game-world, leaving large bands, full military units up to size of a small battalion roaming the countryside and preying on travelers.  The Second, and perhaps less apocalyptic world building implication from the bandit entry is that the bandits aren’t really ‘bandits’ in the classic sense of highwaymen, but rather the local forces of order outside any sort of legal structure or control.  The local lords, barons, mayor, cult leaders and other leader types have large armed bands of militia or retainers and they tax whatever comes through their domains heavily.