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:

Heraldic Beasts

As regular readers of this blog may know, I don't love Monster Manuals, and rather enjoy designing my own monsters - usually via a quick re-skinning of something simple (A bear, giant rat or 1st level fighter being the most common).  This doesn't mean I'm uninterested in monsters for tabletop games, or the general concept of monsters as a sociological phenomenon.  I've been slowly reading through "Monsters & Treasure - the earliest edition of D&D's monster manual, thinking about the foes provided and how I'd personally make use of them.

One that's struck me about Monsters & Treasure is the somewhat clumsy feeling of its adaptions from mythological sources.  It pulls in various words for creatures from European and Classical myth, but often ignores many of the interesting elements of the underlying story.  The Monsters & Treasure Hydra seems the best example of this, transforming a sneaky, oddly botanical, regenerating, many headed snake thing into a super dinosaur.  Additionally, Monsters & Treasure (and the Monster Manuals that follow from what I can tell) miss a rich vein of mythical beast lore by almost entirely (the Dragon, the Wyvern and a few others are retained) ignoring the legacy of Heraldic Beasts.

Heraldic Beasts are the fantastical creatures used on shields and as devices for (primarily) European nobility, and there are lots of them.  Below is a list of several I found interesting and worthy of inclusion as strange monsters in your tabletop game.  I'm not sure why exactly, though many of them have rather mundane names (Tyger, Lion or Wildman), their descriptions are as bizarre as anything else in the monster manual  Heraldic Beasts seem like they would make an especially valid or even a key addition to a setting that seeks to remain quasi-historical (such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess's default setting) or to provide a knightly, even Arthurian element.

The 'Queen's Beasts' of England

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.

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.

Monster Design and Necessity

So D&D 5E is about to put out a new monster manual... Volo's Guide to Monsters  it might be awful, and it might be really cool.  It sounds like they are focusing more on unreliable narrators and ecology to tell a lot more detail about the monsters in the book, rather then just provide a cacophony of statistics.  Now I fear Volo's Guide will not amuse me, though it is definitely taking cues from Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princesses "Fire on the velvet Horizon", but only because I don't think Elminster flavor text can be anything but dreadful.

Arthur Rackham
(because one needs better goblins)

Still there are things to be said about monster design, and I agree with Mike Merles and 5E when they want to focus on the intangibles of their monsters: their behaviors, ecology, hooks related to them and similar inspirational information for the GM - up to a point.  Monsters are iconic and a central theme to table top fantasy, and doing them well goes a long way towards doing a game well.  The issue is - what's really useful and necessary in a monster design, especially one published as a supplement.  For this I think to the games I've played recently and what makes encounters in them good.

I'm been playing in Ben of "Marazin's Garden's" Dreamlands game a bit and I have noticed that one of the things I enjoy is that we've yet to encounter any monster from a book, at least as far as description and characterization goes.  To me this is a mark of a good campaign and good world building. 

Using unique monsters means among other things that the GM needs to describe them and that the players need to think about them as more then a reference to a Monster Manual.  One of my major complaints about published modules, and even the 5E Monster Manual, is a lack of description for monsters, beyond dull formalities.  There is a balance in designing pre-made monsters, somewhere between several pages of (likely dull with Elminster invoked) of genre fiction the Volo's Guide promises and the terse statistics based descriptions found in the Little Brown Books. I'm not sure where exactly it lies, certainly Fire on the Velvet Horizon is pretty lyrical in its monster descriptions, but its a fun read because its descriptions are full of evocative detail that gets a GM thinking about how to use the monsters described within - and of course anything done well is better then the best thing done badly.

Personally however I have little use for Monster Manuals, even good ones.  For me, the aesthetics of monsters aren't hard to think up and design, and the most important element about an encounter is that it makes sense in the setting.  I tend to run non-standard settings, and making monsters that fit those settings, tell stories about the setting and generally provide a point for player interaction, wonder and decision making is often far easier then fitting monsters from other sources into a non-standard setting.

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.

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.

Making a Beast - Making Large Monsters More Effective

MAKING A BEAST

One of the things I’ve noticed in running and playing classic tabletop games for some time is how ineffective large dangerous ‘monsters’ are.  Fantastical beasts such as Owlbears and even Dragons are often less dangerous to adventurers under the older dungeons and Dragons rules then a pack of humanoids or bandits. 

HMS Apollyon Diabolic Abomination - A "Starfish" - Beast Candidate

I remember worrying one time about a ‘brown bear’ encounter being the first encounter by a new party in ASE.  There were four adventurers against a bear with 4 HD or so and a couple of dangerous attacks.  I figured it’d be a fairly tough fight.  It took two rounds before 20 odd HP of bear was being skinned and the choice cuts buried to take back to town. The party was smart, they peppered the innocent beast with arrows and bolts while it was standing near its lair and growling – displaying deadly claws (just as the ‘mildly hostile’ roll on the reaction die suggested it might), and then the adventurers charged in to surround the poor injured thing and cut it down before it could attack.  This sort of tactics and results might make sense for big mundane animals like a bear, it’s pretty much how are ancestors hunted the things after all (also with dogs, but that’s a murder hobo staple as well), but it seems awfully anti-climactic for mythical beasts of legend to go down in a couple of rounds, mobbed under by a pack of bec de corbin wielding hoodlums.

HOW SHOULD FIGHTING A BEAST FEEL?

The ravening power of an enraged mythological beast should be a near unstoppable torrent of violence and ferocity, and even with group tactics the creature should be dangerous, faster, stronger and more tenacious then any normal creature and especially the sentients that have invaded its territory.  It don’t want the giant dangerous creatures my players face to feel like stacks of HP to be whittled down, I want them to be frightening and worthy of respect, requiring cunning to overcome commensurate with the wealth in magical hides, teeth bones and meat that they provide.

Since a beast is something that is not especially intelligent, I would like to make out thinking these monsters the real trick.  Luring them into enclosed spaces and traps for example rather than simply slugging it out with them.  Slugging it out should be very dangerous.

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.

The Haunted Dungeon - a series of tables

IN THE SHADOWS   OF   THE   DEAD

One of Goya's creepier etchings

Sarin the Mambo immediately knew something was wrong as the familiar hatch swung open. The pair of Shrine Fanatics, their unarmored bodies covered in devotional tattoos of ancient mechanical schematics - meanings lost, but the ancient clean lines still a lure to protective spirits of the vessel - could even sense something uncanny.  The two men, emboldened by the priestess' presence, cranked away at the hatch’s manual override wheel, but their loud chanting of the 537^th sutra to the Prime Engine shrank to a whisper. Beyond the hatch, the formerly domesticated companionway leading to a slaughterhouse and several large, elementally powered meat freezers was wreathed in fog, fog and utter wrongness.  Sarin’s various fetishes of the Winding Gear, her patron, felt as if they were vibrating atop her armor and her frail elderly hand tightened involuntarily on the cord that held the heavy mace to her gauntlet.

Sarin didn’t even need to borrow the eyes of the Winding Gear spirit that “rode” her and filled her with its power to see that there was foul magic beyond the hatch.  It was as if death, hate and sorrow were pushing out from the peeling wall papers of the companionway beyond, weeping from around every bent rivet in the companionway walls beneath, and dripping like curdled oil from the ceiling.  The fog was the worst of it, light from the lanterns held by the Mambo’s companions would not penetrate more than a few feet into the shifting miasma whose swirls and eddies gave an impression of intentional, malicious movement.

The slaughterhouse had gone bad, and those who had died within had not merely risen as common revenants or individual spirits, but instead corrupted the whole of the region, the fear and horrors of their deaths leaking into the walls and fixtures of the slaughterhouse to turn the entire area into an expression of hate, fear and a deep abiding sense of betrayal that sought with inchoate fury to punish the living for its multitude of deaths.    

  

Orcs are a Disease, a look at the Little Brown Book Orc.

ANCIENT ORCS

Disney's  to Blame/Thank for the Pig Nosed Orc

I was reading through the Little Brown Books, yesterday, specifically  from the 6^th edition of the Dungeons and Dragons “White Box”, which still has the 1974 copyright (but came out later) and the strange combination of absurd detail, messy layout and bizarre inexplicable rules that mark it as an idiosyncratic hobby project, rather than something designed for a sophisticated market.  Specifically I was flipping through “Volume 2 of Three Booklets” (see idiosyncratic) – Monsters & Treasure, and came across the paragraphs about orcs.

It’s worth noting that many of the monster entries in Monsters & Treasure are minimal, i.e the 30 word entry for “cavemen”, the “Orcs” entry is not and takes up almost a full page (the longest entry is for “Dragons” and takes up almost two and a half pages).  Going with the idea that monster manuals are de-facto setting books, and that what inhabits a setting defines it, orcs seem clearly to matter in the world of the LBB’s, and are certainly one of the most iconic monsters of table-top fantasy games.  They’re also famously badly defined, even if popular culture currently understands them as some sort of WOW derived noble savage version of the Warhammer universe “Greenskin” (a fine bit of fantasy worldbuilding there both in Warhammer and Warhammer 40K)

Yet, what does Monsters & Treasure imply about setting with its specific Orcs, having been written at a time when really the only model for the creatures was J.R.R Tolkiens anti-elves, or perhaps (no not really) Blake’s Promethean spirit of creativity.  The LBB describes Orcs as follows:

Trust The Random Encounter table

When one cracks open the hoary spine of the “Underworld and Wilderness Adventures” (well not spine, they are zine like pamphlets, stapled together) one almost immediately finds a set of dungeon encounter tables.  They look 'normal' at first, table 1 contains low hit dice dungeon vermin (giant rats, centipedes, spiders) and sniveling humanoids like kobolds.  Table 2 starts to get some real opposition on it: hobgoblins, gnolls, berserkers and ghouls.  By the time you’re on table three and four there are the sort of monsters that can really spell danger to a low level party, such as wights, wraiths and giant animals.  This might seem reasonable, even conservative if these tables were broken down by dungeon level, but they are explicitly not by dungeon level.  On the first level of the dungeon there is a 1 in 6 chance of encountering one of the horrors off of table four, and this includes ogres (which are reasonable enough) but also wraiths and gargoyles.  I focus here on gargoyles because they are utterly immune to normal weapon damage in most versions of the rules, including silver weapons.

Thouls! ... Owlbears!

Thouls and Owlbears oh my!

Inspired by Hereticwerk’s 6 Tigers and 6 Lions of Wyrmspittle here’s 10  Owlbears and 10  Thouls.  Owlbears and Thouls have a special place in mid -80’s D&D, showing up in a large number of the B-series modules that I have been reviewing.  I like both these monsters, they are D&D originals, the owlbear (like the bullette and rust monster) is one of those early D&D beasts based on a set of plastic ‘dinosaur’ toys, and the thoul is an absurd horror seemingly designed as a mechanically infuriating trick monster with several special abilities and very poor justification of them.  Owlbears are the embodiment of bestial fury for low level adventuring parties, a dumb brute capable of tearing apart anyone foolish enough to stand against it in melee combat.  The Thoul is more mysterious, some kind of goblin undead super-soldier or strange hybrid goblinoid. I think Thouls exist primarily as a means to trick parties who gleefully set about massacring humanoids, but there's a place for them as some kind of altered goblinoid: undead, enchanted, possessed, mechanically augmented - whatever goblins are into in a setting culminates in a Thoul.  Below are the stat blocks for both creatures along with the descriptions taken from the Moldvay Basic Rules. 

Thoul		Owl Bear
No. Appearing: 1-6(1-10) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 10 Treasure Type: C Alignment: Chaotic	Armor Class: 6 Hit Dice: 3** Move: 120' (40') Attacks: 2 claws or 1 weapon Damage: 1-3/1-3 or weapon	No. Appearing: 1-4 (1-4) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: C Alignment: Neutral	Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 5 Move: 120' (40') Attacks: 2 claws/ 1 bite Damage: 1-8 each
A thoul is a magical combination of a ghoul, a hobgoblin, and a troll (see D&D EXPERT rules). Except when very close, thouls look exactly like hobgoblins, and they are sometimes found as part of the bodyguard of a hobgoblin king. The touch of a thoul will paralyze (in the same way as that of a ghoul). If it is damaged, a thoul will regenerate 1 hit point per round as long as it is alive. (After a thoul is hit, the DM should add 1 hit point to its total at the beginning of each round of combat.)		An owl bear is a huge bear-like creature with the head of a giant owl. An owl bear stands 8' tall and weighs 1500 pounds (15,000 coins). Owl bears have nasty tempers and are usually hungry, preferring meat. If both paws of an owl bear hit the same opponent in one round, the owl bear will "hug" for an additional 2d8 points of damage. They are commonly found underground and in dense forests.

Owlbear Classic by Demos-Remos

 The above stat blocks don’t tell the reader much about the glory of the Owlbear or the Thoul and as creatures without a mythical basis, there’s really nothing else to go on.  One of the saddest things in a tabletop game is when monsters lose their terror and mystery and become simply stat block.  This is a problem with the late period TSR modules, and one that I personally find make me want to stop playing a game.  A monster should have a description and evoke wonder rather then simply be a set of mechanical challenges.  Below are ten new descriptions of Thouls and ten descriptions for Owlbears that don’t qualify as reskinning but are hopefully more flavorful then the ones above and allow the monsters to be use in a variety of settings.

 

OSR Superstar Round II Submission

So Tenkar Tavern's OSR Superstar contest continues.  I've made it to the 3rd round,and decided to put my winning monster submission up below.

Robber's Bride

"The Robbers’ Bride a nightmare of settled man, the keening memory of a kidnapped daughter and the shadow of a wife fled into the night.  To the vagabond, the proscribed, the outcast and the criminal they are the manifestation of hopes and dreams.  Robbers’ Brides appear both as the motherly prophets of blood-soaked wilderness brigand bands and as the child saints of the urban underworld.  These thieves’ oracles been reported to hold court in the low dens of tomb robbers and self-proclaimed ‘Adventures ‘, where these murder and gold crazed vagabonds pay homage to them as voices of true prophecy."

PDF of Robber's Bride 

The One Page Dungeon Contest also ended this week, and Dungeon of Signs Thunderhead Manse managed to make it to the final round.