Landshark: Redemption

So in my last post I was kind of down on bulettes. I'll stick by my claim that the name is fucking ridiculous. But the concept of a landshark is just the right kind of ridiculous. A setting where sharks can attack on dry land, despite land being inimical to everything a shark is (I mean there's a reason "fish out of water" is a phrase)... that's the sort of setting where every damn thing is out to get you. I approve.

Check it. This is why Tony diTerlizzi is the master of the deadly joke monster. Every other bulette picture I've seen has them looking like the dollar bin dinosaurs they are - like footballs with toddler legs, like a wizard managed to combine just the clumsy shortbus elements of a turtle and an armadillo. And to be fair diTerlizzi's picture has a bit of that too, because hey it is a monster based on a cheap plastic toy from Hong Kong.

But this bulette works, and I think it works because it looks small. Not the giant lumbering tank where you read how it attacks by jumping and burrowing and think um yeah thanks but no. A deceptively vicious pack hunter, no bigger than a dog, but heavy enough to knock you flat when it leaps right out of the ground and lands on your back. A creature which inspires the sages to write in their bestiaries that the bulette has the highest anger-to-weight ratio of any mammal.

You know what other animal burrows, but also runs quickly and makes mighty leaps? Bunnies. Bulettes are D&D's giant killer rabbits - voracious, fast-breeding, sublimely dumb. One might even say Retro Stupid. I think wood elves breed them to attack loggers. The local hedge wizard sells landshark repellent, and it's probably a scam.

Alternatively this is what a landshark looks like if you ditch all the burrowing and leaping and just have a big fake dinosaur as the avatar of nature's fury fucking shit up. I can dig it.

So Many Monsters: The Rest of the Bs

Onward!

Black Puddings are, for some reason, the deadliest monsters in the first Red Box D&D set I purchased. Tons of hit points, stupid damage, dissolves everything it touches, splits for more attacks when hurt. It's actually weirdly fitting for early D&D that, sure, dragons will fuck your shit up good and proper, but the really terrible threats are giant unthinking amoebas that grew out of magical effluvium. The (good) chance of seeing your high level ass-kicking dragonslayer get dissolved by a fucking ooze is more old school than I really want to be (players hate these things, and not in a good way) but I can appreciate the world where such things exist.

I'm sexy and I know it.

Another early, vivid memory of blobs in D&D (yeah I have more than one shut up): the hysterical shriek of "It's a... GELATINOUS CUBE!" on the inevitable audio CD accompanying an early 90s box set adventure. Like the director had said "Okay Charlene that's very good but do you think you can give me... more? I'm just not sure you're really selling how frightening this 10x10 ft square of Jell-O looks."

If for some reason you actually want to use a pudding in your campaign (or ooze, or slime, or jelly, or CUBE), I recommend looking here, or here if you've already used all those and want to go full retard.

Blink Dogs: So bamfing around like a mofo is pretty sweet. (Seriously, ten years of nigh-constant superhero movies later they still haven't topped that scene.) But a pack of dogs doing that is kind of stupid... the whole point of pack hunting is you get another dog leaping on you from behind, so one dog pulling the same trick feels like a waste. Also? Displacer beasts are already a thing. They're freaky and malicious and awesome, while blink dogs are... benevolent protectors of I don't even know what. What's your deal, blink dogs? Leave the cool Nightcrawler trick for someone more deserving.

Boars: D&D needs more boars. As mounts or warbeasts, either one. Wereboars would be great if they didn't have a silly name and overlap with pig-headed orcs. I'll talk more about that when I get to So Many Monsters: Orcs (some year), but yeah I'm totally down with pig-headed orcs.

Brain Mole: What the hell, D&D. You have a burrowing animal that looks like this, you call it a brain mole, and then it doesn't burrow into people's brains? Minus a billion points for coming this close to being something incredible and wussing out.

Bugbears are stillborn goblins who come back to life after they've been buried. They either live on their own in the woods strangling and eating lost travelers, or they're captured by goblins again and get sicced on people like the gimp in Pulp Fiction. You almost never see them except as great black shadows with leering yellow eyes, but if you do manage to kill one you'll see an enormous hairy freak like a Maurice Sendak monster through the eyes of a toddler. They never make a sound, even when hurt, except for their hunting calls (echoing hoots, clicks, and whistles to distract and terrify) and a soft wheezing laugh right before they strike.

Or maybe they just whisper "I'm sorry." That works too.

I'm a big fan of bugbears, but you should never use more than one in a campaign, and you should keep them out of sight as long as possible, and you shouldn't call them bugbears. It's a very silly name.

Bulette: Speaking of very silly names. But that's actually the least of this creature's problems - across all editions of D&D there's been something weirdly amateurish about the look of this thing. It's built like a tank (or a sauropod), large and squat and heavily armored. But it burrows like a snake and leaps like a panther, and none of it fits together at all. We're only through the Bs and already the ankheg makes a better burrowing ambusher and the behir makes a better ominously cresting landshark. Use those instead.

Sometimes I read the Player's Handbook and I'm like, Nah...

Sorcerer? Superhero? Wuxia monk?

• Work out base attributes whatever way you choose.
• Pick three powers from one line or two powers from different lines.
• Learn a new power when you level up/do a training montage/discover your true potential/steal the scroll of secret katas/attend four consecutive game sessions.
• Shout and Blast are probably just better than Strike, Blade, or Bolt, so they should have one of those as prerequisites and/or cost more essence/fatigue/chi or whatever.
• You can learn Avatar like any other power, but unless you already know nine other powers it only works under very specific circumstances (solar eclipse, elaborate ritual, while you're dying, etc).

Work out what each power does with your friendly neighborhood game master. Or trust each other to make it up on the fly and have fun.

	STRIKE	BLADE	BOLT	SHOUT
STORM DEX WIS	Toppling Throw	Wind Whip	Lightning Bolt	Wave of Thunder
IRON STR INT	Hammer Blow	Bonded Armory	Flying Guillotine	Rallying Cry
ICE CON WIS	Freezing Grasp	Ice Dagger	Ray of Frost	Frost Breath
FIRE STR CHA	Ignite	Burning Blades	Flame Strike	Dragon Breath
WILD STR WIS	Beast Claws	Dire Maul	Thorn Sling	Roar of Challenge
SHADOW DEX INT	Suffocate	Subtle Knife	Crypt Dart	Silence
MIND CON INT	Nerve Pinch	Psychic Sword	Mind Thrust	Hypnotic Words
BLOOD CON CHA	Vampire’s Kiss	Living Lash	Sanguine Dart	Vile Venom
CHAOS DEX CHA	Touch of Madness	Mercury Axe	Chromatic Orb	Cry of Panic

	BLAST	CURSE	SHIELD	SERVANT
STORM DEX WIS	Chain Lightning	Buffeting Winds	Storm Barrier	Aerial Servant
IRON STR INT	Shrapnel Bomb	Petrify	Iron Skin	Shield Golem
ICE CON WIS	Blizzard	Wendigo’s Hunger	Frost Armor	Winter Wolf
FIRE STR CHA	Fireball	Passionate Frenzy	Aura of Flames	Infernal Minion
WILD STR WIS	Entangling Vines	Baleful Polymorph	Beast Hide	Totem Companion
SHADOW DEX INT	Grasping Darkness	Strangling Shadows	Shroud of Midnight	Minion of the Eyeless Face
MIND CON INT	Phantasmal Killer	Enthrall	Mental Bastion	Dream Projection
BLOOD CON CHA	Rain of Blood	Grim Affliction	Living Armor	Homunculus
CHAOS DEX CHA	Mass Confusion	Curse of Misfortune	Entropic Shield	Imp of the Perverse

	WARD	CONTROL	GIFT	LORE
STORM DEX WIS	Wind Wall	Control Weather	Light as a Feather	Clairvoyance
IRON STR INT	Blade Barrier	Magnetism	Skill at Arms	Awaken Object
ICE CON WIS	Frost Glyph	Chill/ Freeze	Unfeeling Body	Peer through the Depths
FIRE STR CHA	Explosive Runes	Controlled Burn	Leaping Flame	Infernal Bargain
WILD STR WIS	Wall of Thorns	Nature’s Ally	Regrowth	Commune With Nature
SHADOW DEX INT	Gloom Veil	Shadow Spy	Cloak of Whispers	Forbidden Knowledge
MIND CON INT	Illusory Terrain	Modify Memory	Gestalt Mind	Hypercognition
BLOOD CON CHA	Agony Ward	Flesh Puppeteer	Close Wounds	Blood Tracking
CHAOS DEX CHA	Obscure Object	Cheat	Silver Tongue	Clarity of Madness

	SIGHT	WALK	ASPECT	AVATAR
STORM DEX WIS	Sense the Unseen	Ride the Wind	Gaseous Form	Djinni Noble
IRON STR INT	Tactical Insight	Steel Contraption	Master of War	Towering Colossus
ICE CON WIS	Survival Sense	Arctic Adaptation	Freeze Solid	Frost Titan
FIRE STR CHA	Heat Vision	Resist Elements	Phoenix Rebirth	Inferno Dragon
WILD STR WIS	Feral Cunning	Tree Stride	Wild Shape	Kami of the Woods
SHADOW DEX INT	Pierce the Gloom	By Paths Unseen	Living Shadow	Avatar of the Eyeless Face
MIND CON INT	Sense Thoughts	Astral Projection	Mind Over Matter	Being of Pure Thought
BLOOD CON CHA	Life Sense	Walk the Red Road	Biofeedback	Bloated Horror
CHAOS DEX CHA	Serendipity	Warp Space	Perfect Disguise	Laughing Abomination

Art! Look away!

Back when 4th Edition was in production, WotC had an art contest on some Photoshop forum or other for an image using the new crustacioid beholder concept. This was my entry.

(click to embiggen)

It never got used anywhere I can tell, but the prize money was significant for an unemployed art grad, and for whatever it's worth I had the only image liked by both Wizards (who wanted something recognizable) and the other forum denizens (who wanted something Photoshoppy).

Much more RAWR I'M A MONSTER than I like in a beholder but I'm still proud of the Rider-Waite-ness and the various dead or petrified PCs. Most monster art in recent RPG books has just the creature on a blank background or growling at the camera - the black and white 1st Edition stuff looked pretty crude, but at least those awkward beasts were shown in a dark cavern mauling a dwarf or something. I'm always a sucker for art with a body count.

As the post title indicates, a whole D&D-themed tarot deck would indeed be pretty sweet. (As long as no one involved cared about 'brand identity' - no Lidda or Tannis or *shudder* Elminster.) For suits I was thinking Eyes for sure (I: catoblepas, II: basilisk, III: aboleth, IV: umber hulk...), and either Arms or Limbs (I: um... amputated troll? II: ogre, III: xorn, IV: girallon...). Problem is the larger numbers, particularly the odd numbers, get weird in a hurry. (IX: Modron Nonaton? Man I don't even know if that's true.) For other suits maybe Spells, with the numerals as spell levels? Maybe Blades? Alternatively just go all major arcana, but that's lazy. I'm remembering why I gave this project up.

Oh yeah, plus there's already tarot decks with the suits as the four adventuring classes and the six ability scores. But none with monsters, dammit.

So Many Monsters: BEHOLD!

So this is a beholder.

More specifically this is Tony diTerlizzi's beholder illustration from the 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual. I think it's fair to say I really like these guys. I love how the artist has forgone the usual furrowed-brow menace to make the creature look unhinged, perpetually surprised, like it's just noticed you and is about to start screaming how your presence is unacceptable, but if you weren't around it would still be bug-eyed crazy paranoid because freaking out is a fundamental part of its being.

And then you read the monster's description and you find out it's violently offended by everything even slightly different from itself, and its eyes pack enough magical firepower to kill or incapacitate you ten times over in the span of a round. By, like, blinking. A lot of settings use beholders as the scheming masterminds behind grandiose plots, but diTerlizzi's beholders look like they're trying really hard to just hold it together long enough to kill all those other disgusting life forms so it can finally look at something without gagging.

Comparisons to Doctor Who's daleks are apt - both are xenophobes, both try to overcome a somewhat comical appearance with horror of concept. (Obviously I think the eye tyrants do a bit better in that regard.) Beholders don't whisper in the dark, they scream at the injustice of a universe that contains something other than themselves.

More beholders and beholder-kin. They're so much alike that of course they hate each other worst of all. Flipping through the Monstrous Manual as a kid I always had to hurry past these pages (while also, of course, being enthralled). Too many eyes. Too many mad stares.

The "stock" beholder has ten eyes on stalks, each with a different magical eye ray, plus a magic-dispelling ray from the big eye in the center (some editions have turned this into an antimagic cone, but then the creature would have to shut its big eye to use any of the others, and that simply won't do). The beams of petrification and disintegration get lots of love for being batshit deadly, but a lot of the others are essentially duplicates (charm monster and also charm person? Really?) or just kind of weaksauce. I like more variety - seeing an eye beam hit should always inspire some mix of confusion and panic.

That said, if my party were meeting a beholder for the first time and had no idea what to expect anyway, this is the list I'd use:

• True seeing on the main eye. I kind of like the idea that the little eyes are mostly just weapons, and if you rip out the big one its vision kind of sucks. So the main eye lets the beholder see through invisibility and illusions and things, and also extends the range of its other eye beams. (Incidentally if your RPG of choice doesn't let you attack specific body parts, by rule or by ruling, you should fix that. Half-blind beholders with big gory sockets are the best.)
• Scrying and X-Ray vision. It's called a beholder; you shouldn't be able to hide from it behind a wall or in another country. These also give another way to target you if you blind the big eye and stay out of range, albeit a way needing lots more concentration.
• Disintegration and petrification rays. True story: One time I drew a beholder at art camp and the instructor said it "brought back a lot of memories of characters getting turned to stone." These two eye beams are pretty iconic, is what I'm saying.
• Freeze ray and fire ray. Maybe a little video gamey, but I think being slowed or immobilized by a coating of ice is much more evocative than just a slow or hold person spell. And the fire ray is for straight up settin' bitches on fire. Worked for H.G. Wells, works for me.
• Telekinesis. Because hands are for suckers.
• Command, and feeblemind rays. The command ray works like the spell (one verb, followed for one round) unless used on someone already feebleminded. Then it lasts indefinitely. So the beholder can just yell OBEY and watch the witless monkeys scamper about like good little underlings.
• Death ray. Before our good friends Fortitude, Reflex, and Will came along, saving throws had wonderfully evocative (and confusing) names like "save vs rods, staves, and wands" and "save vs dragon breath". And of course, save vs poison or death ray. The way I'd run it, the disintegration and petrification rays affect a body part at a time (slowly building dread), while for most of the fight the eye with the death ray is swollen shut like it's been punched by a boxing glove soaked in pepper spray. Then when the beholder is badly hurt the eye opens and it's this awful blood-red thing and you tell someone to save vs death ray and when they frantically search their character sheet for what the hell that even means you say just roll a d20, and if the result is lower than 20 minus their level you set their character sheet on fire.

So Many Monsters: Here! "Be-" Monsters!

(Bats too. I just couldn't help myself.)

Bats come in two varieties. The flitty screechy things like tattered bits of darkness you're afraid will get stuck in your hair; even the vampiric ones you're not so much afraid of the bite as you are the crazed mindless presence of the thing. If little bats were made of sound they would be nails on a chalkboard, grating and discordant in ways nonsensical but impossible to ignore. Big predators you want to run away but somehow a panicked bat is even worse. The embiggened types feel wrong somehow if they're larger than a pony, but I could see them making great mounts for goblins.

The other type of bat is the giant fruit bat. Like the little bats these things fly out in huge numbers at sunset, but a group of giant bats feels more like a procession than an swarm. They're so silent and still, like they're floating and the wings just move them along, like you're looking up from a riverbed at boats being rowed across still water. Beautiful and kind of unnerving. Giant bats are the best mounts for wraiths and banshees - dark shadows, the slow flap of endless wings, then a harrowing death shriek from the rider.

Bears suffer from overexposure I think. At national parks you're always told to lock your food up because bears can rip open your car like a tin can, but that just makes them seem like desperate and pitiful scavengers, like if you're not careful a bear will come into your camp and wreck your stuff. There's something oafish about bears, like they're just big clumsy louts. A person turning into a wolf is scary, but turning into a bear is comic relief, no matter how much effort you put into describing its rage and its bulk and its great slavering jaws. (Counterpoint: armored polar bear warriors are pretty sweet, and someone riding a bear of any sort is not a person to fuck with.)

Beetles are a lot cooler than they're given credit for. The Boring Beetle, most famously, is... well it's hard to get around the name, isn't it? But reading the Monster Manual entry they're so rich with potential, though more often as part of the scenery than as combat encounters. Let's see...

• Bodies eaten by beetles get chewed up so thoroughly only a wish will restore life - I'm thinking a fantasy equivalent of the gangster's pigs in Snatch, with uncaring hitmen tossing bodies into a pen of ravenous clattering bugs for disposal.
• Some beetles (according to the MM) form a hive mind when they gather in swarms and learn to grow their own fungus farms. That's pretty sweet.
• So are caravans of pack beetles winding their way through the Underdark, with cages on their shells full of slaves for the neogi fleshmarkets.
• Speaking of the Underdark, glow worms (not really beetles but close enough) are a wonderfully evocative and strange source of light, without being as overused as glowing mushrooms or as twee as fireflies.
• A setting where armorers work with shells and chitin more often than metal is a setting I'd like to play. Or at least see pictures of, since that's basically Dark Sun.
• Mountain-sized acid-spewing beetles make way cooler doomsday monsters than some half-assed Godzilla knockoff.
• Scarabs are beautiful.

Behirs are like dragons for when you don't want the mythic connotations of fighting a motherfucking dragon. They also burrow through sand instead of flying, so they can't follow you everywhere but on their home ground they're better at ambushing you despite being 40-foot twelve-legged lightning-breathing serpents. So like, if you had a giant desert, and you wanted a reason no one crossed the Great Silt Sea without an airship, you could fill that desert with behirs. If your cosmology had a "backstage" plane no one was supposed to visit full of bright orange sands and peyote nightmares, you could fill that plane with behirs. They'd be like the most metal "No Trespassing" signs ever, and lo, it would be awesome.

(Fig 1: You hate 'em, right?)

Beholders are also Be- monsters, but they get their own post, because beholders.

So Many Monsters: The Basilisk

(Fig 1: Sometimes when we put clothes on the cat he makes this face too)

This entry goes for the cockatrice too, because you don't need two petrifying animals in your game and snakes are cooler than penises. I mean, roosters.

The big question about gaze weapons is: should one glance (with or without a failed save) kill you, or should the damage be gradual? The first is certainly more in fitting with the legends, and makes fighting one a big fucking deal, but there's something to be said for campaigns where you're not bringing along ten henchmen apiece as trap and ambush fodder. And if players don't have multiple characters and character making takes forever, a monster that kills with a glance might as well be a giant middle finger pointed at one player's whole evening. Here are some gaze weapons that could be lethal but could also lead to some interesting challenges or scenarios if someone gets hit. Some classics, some... a little odd.

1d12 GAZE WEAPONS

1. King Basilisk - a snake so poisonous it kills with a glance. Constitution drain or poison damage every round. The basilisk can delay, reactivate, or nullify this venom with a thought. It likes when people owe it favors.
2. Geolisk - petrification, bitch. Stone gets in the joints, immobilizes the limbs. Take dexterity drain every round and turn into a statue at Dex 0. Statue can still see and hear (somehow) and can be communicated with telepathically. If statue is broken, body survives until reanimated as long as the head is intact. So, this.
3. Pyrolisk - its gaze sets you on fire, like a boss. Rolling on the ground won't save you but jumping in water might. Cover yourself in soaked hides before you approach - it just might buy you enough time.
4. Cryolisk - ice lizard that freezes you solid. Slows actions and reduces movement each round; at 0 movement you're helpless. Can stop the process for a round if you take damage from fire. (Downside: gives no resistance to fire.)
5. Sanguilisk - you look in its eyes and then your eyes explode and you start bleeding from every orifice and it's awful. Blindness and rapidly escalating damage over time. Maybe immediate healing will close the wounds, or maybe if you want to get all Cronenberg you can still control your body parts when your limbs fall off and your guts slide out.
6. Chronolisk - The serpent's gaze TORE OPEN A PORTAL IN TIME. The other players will have to fight the snake without you while you have your own weird adventure in the scaly past or terrible future.
7. Gravilisk - Eye beams reverse gravity. Usually lairs in caves with lots of stalactites in the roof. Gaze weapon remains potent for some time (hours? days?) after death.
8. Mutalisk no wait Teratolisk - horrible tumescent green wormy thing with a gaze that makes flesh grow back quickly and wrong. Heals every round but also causes a random mutation.
9. Psychelisk - weird warbly eyes like the Hypnotoad or that snake in the Jungle Book movie. Gaze implants suggestions or causes uncontrollable rage, lust, paranoia, cannibalism, all that good stuff.
10. Gomorralisk - gaze turns people into pillars of salt. Can be turned or rebuked like an undead monster; is frequently commanded by clerics to smite heathens. Won't attack if targets can persuade the serpent of their virtue.
11. Nihilisk - small, ash grey, extremely grumpy lizard. Gaze erases body parts from existence, painlessly and bloodlessly. Once the body is completely gone the spirit remains trapped in the world - can observe, but is powerless to act. Those able to see ghosts notice the lizard is surrounded by the mopey dead.
12. Ossilisk - desiccated white worm with a gaze that animates skeletons - even if they're still in a body. Can use your muscles to fight for control at the cost of massive internal damage, or let the worm use you like a puppet. If you die while your skeleton is animated the bones rip their way out and go on a happy skeleton rampage.

EDIT: Just as I was finishing this entry I discovered this is a thing. Fortunately not much in the way of duplification. More gazes for everyone!

So Many Monsters: The Axebeak

The axebeak, or terror bird, is just a poor man's velociraptor. Really. If you're going to have a big flock of screeching biting clawing two-legged hatebeasts leap out of the jungle from the wrong epoch in your game why aren't you using raptors? Unless you just want an exotic pet for the indolent menageries of the shadow elves, in which case I recommend jeweled raptors, or possibly cassowaries.

(Fig. 1: So cool.)

Axebeaks do have some potential as mounts, like in Final Fantasy (the chocobo) or Golden Axe (whatever that thing was). Bird mounts are fast and weird and brightly colored and kind of primitive looking (but not as overtly pulpy as dinosaurs) - all good qualities to have in a mount. And I think I've mentioned already how birds are just about the most ill-tempered and filthy creatures alive, so having to ride one is pretty much putting up a big sign that says Civilization: The Other Fucking Direction.

So mount up your kobolds or your cannibal halflings and have at it. Just remember... those axebeaks could have been scythe-clawed reptiles that can open doors.

(Fig 2: I'm comfortable with my choice.)

So Many Monsters: The Aurumvorax

The aurumvorax always felt pulpy to me, like something you'd find escaped from the holding pens in the crashed spaceship dungeon. Is it the eight arms? The shiny raygun-gold color? Not sure but it's a pretty cool little beasty.

Something else to try: aurumvorax as Guardian Lions (aka Fu lions, lion dogs, Shishi, Qilen, whatevs). Animal statues that come to life to protect a location. Maybe bronze, maybe gilded, maybe actual (magically hardened) gold - as much a status symbol as a guardian.

(like this but with more legs mebbe)

The Aurumvora  - more commonly known as Greeds - were creations of the seven ancient Empires of Sin. They guarded treasuries and temples (often the same buildings) and their teeth were often enchanted to turn intruders' bodies into gold with a single bite. Greeds were favored for their opulent golden coats, their ability to sniff out precious metals, and their immunity to rust monsters.

Other pets of the Sin Lords include the Leucrotta (or Envies, foul and unsightly badger-deer able to mimic a voice with perfect accuracy after eating the speaker's tongue) and the Folivora (or Sloths, two- or three-toed tree climbers that moved so slowly their fur became host to memory-eating Obliviax moss).

So Many Monsters: The Ankheg

True story: in one of my first high school campaigns a player noticed the ground trembling while on his way to the moathouse of the Temple of Elemental Evil. He immediately declared he was jabbing his spear into the ground and (despite considerable penalties for full concealment and cover) rolled a critical hit for more than double max damage. The burrowing ankheg (a random encounter) died before it had even breached the surface. The player never saw what he had killed.

So of course he assumed he had killed the earth. For the rest of the campaign, every desert, every blighted battleground, every dead tree... "It's all my fault! Gods, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!"

Yeah. High school.



I've always thought the marines in Starcraft must have the suckiest job ever. Not just because they're always getting killed by grotesque insectoid monsters, but because those monsters could jump out of the ground at any time.

Ankhegs are hideous chitin-covered acid-spitting bugs that could jump out of the ground at any time and kill you. You could also use giant termites, or kruthics, or zerglings, but ankhegs do the job.

Thanks, ankhegs.

So Many Monsters: The Aboleth

Today we're talking about the aboleth!

That's the original, AD&D Monster Manual 2 illustration for the aboleth. Here's the two newest versions, from 4th Edition...

...and concept art from D&D Next:

Remember in Ridley Scott's Alien, when the whole movie you just saw little glimpses of the alien and then at the end when Ripley blew it out the airlock you saw the whole thing and even with its giant spine protrusions and cockroach-black skuttliness it was just a guy in a suit with a dick-shaped helmet?  I think the newer pictures of the aboleth are kind of like that, except replace 'guy in a suit' with 'evil catfish'.

Granted, catfish are freaky-ass animals and noodling just proves we're even weirder. Still. Fish. It's not threatening, it's tasty.

Writhing mouthparts and slime and tentacles and too many eyes on something that's ambiguously a head and certainly not a face... something where you'd feel unclean knowing one had been nearby... yeah. Yeah, more of that. 

As in any good Lovecraft story the real horror is that people worship this thing, this slimy spasming horror that makes you need to bathe just looking at it, there are whole temples, whole towns of people who love this thing and will do anything to enact its will. You look at the creature and it doesn't look intelligent, it looks like filth, but the wise old priest and the senator and your best friend want to attach it to your face.

And then it starts to crawl inside your thoughts and you realize they were right all along.

So Many Monsters: The Aaracokra

So there's this book called the Monster Manual, right? And it's where (pretty much) all the iconic D&D monsters come from. And on this here blog I'm going to go through it and offer my thoughts on those monsters, because monsters are pretty darn cool.

Stop me if you've heard this one.

Okay yes not the most original idea. But a uniquely D&D idea. Other games have a set world or backstory and you can talk about your theories on where the Scarlet Empress went or what mages were active in 1920s New York, but D&D expects you to make your own setting. I don't know the history of your campaign world (and I'd likely find it as tedious as you'd find mine) but if you're playing D&D you probably have goblins of some sort and liches of some sort and if you've got a unique spin on those that's something I'd like to hear about and maybe incorporate.

Used to be all the worlds had a bridging cosmology in common - Sigil, the Great Wheel, the elements - but that got scrapped 13-odd years ago now, and talking about it is likely to start bickering about editions. Or ranting about how kids these days don't understand how amazing Planescape was, which is pretty much the same thing but more bitter and true.

The other common ground is alignment, but... no, let's not.

Monsters.

First up we have... the aarakocra? Sure, let's go with that.

Bird people. I can get behind bird people. Birds are nasty, filthy creatures - I understand not eating beef or pork because cows and pigs are kind of smart and personable, but chickens man fuck those guys a foot-cube industrial metal cage is too good for them. For aarakocra (or arakkoa, if you don't mind a Blizzardism and don't want players snickering at the cock in the middle) I'd play up the tattered violent bastard angle, make them the bad-tempered hobos of the humanoid races. Bit of Skeksi, bit of... whatever those things were in the mind-swap episode of Farscape (okay those were pretty much Skeksi too). Myth II had the bre'Unor, evil jawbone-throwing pagan types, who worshiped a "profane spirit of elemental air" they believed would become a god if it could feed on the last breaths of their dying enemies. That's totally metal so I steal it pretty much every chance I get, but it fits for dirty air elemental-summoning bird men more than most.

A whole group of javelin-throwing, barbed whip-swinging avians swooping down on travelers through the high mountain passes is a pretty cool image, and would make for a damn difficult fight. Could be fun difficult or frustrating difficult depending on how many ranged options the party had. Bring nets!

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station also had the garuda, which would be another way to handle these, just not a very interesting one. Garuda are proud and obsessed with freedom and live in the desert and hate cities. They're... kind of dull? But the book does give an excellent sense of how unsettling and alien something with a frickin' bird head would be to interact with, all unreadable and predatory, and how huge a bird of about human height would feel. Their bodies are all head and torso, their heads are all jagged killing beak, and their wingspans are so much more than their height. Like with giant eagles you always know this thing is built to rip your face off and eat it.

So take all that and make them also worship a profane spirit of elemental air that wants to suck the dying breath from your lungs. Much better.

(Next up's the aboleth. I'm excited.)

Beasts of the Dark Zodiac

(Expanding on an idea from Noisms' Forge Monsters challenge.)

Time in the world above is measured by the progress of the moon, sun, and planets - an endless cycle of months and seasons and years. The zodiac divides time into increments and assigns each increment certain traits - an element, a mood, and most prominently, an animal. But while one born in the year of the Monkey may share the beast's cleverness and joy, the spirit of Monkey cares no more for dates and calendars than it does oceans or asphalt. The animal gives its name to the year, but that animal's god is not a god of time.

Below ground the stars are hidden and the seasons pass without notice. Time passes at the pace of shifting continents. Years are not named, but imposed. If the signs of the zodiac still bare the names of animals it is only because those creatures choose to make it so, because they find such ordered delineation useful.

The twelve beasts of the dark zodiac are prophets, sages, historians. Each is immortal - perhaps a god, perhaps just fantastically old. Naturally, all are completely mad, though some do well to conceal it.

Some find communication with the surface world suits their agendas, and have gained a certain notoriety. The Skull Hermit deals in cataclysms and the death of gods. The Wyvern of the Well can answer any question, but only once the question is asked. The Weaver considers itself an artist, beautifying the future's web of possibilities by violently cutting certain threads. Many-as-One, a rat king of unequaled population, reads the fortunes of cities by crawling through their entrails.

Others are less well known:

Grandmother Scorpion, five-tailed and bloated, can poison time itself, granting visions of one's past or future, prolonging life, or aging one to dust in an instant. Attending her is a cult of hideously withered elves, and she speaks through a mummified head and torso affixed to the end of her largest stinger. The price for her venom is a fresh elven sibyl, delivered within a year. To ensure the deal is kept she injects a thought-delayed poison that persists through magical healing, resurrection, reincarnation, and if all else fails, lineage.

Echo Serpent is an enormous, blind white rattlesnake that hunts by sonar like a bat. When its warning rattle echoes off cavern walls the echoes themselves are serpents, writhing shadows that strike and then vanish in a hiss of air. It is old as all Creation - not the tempting serpent of Eden, but born of the same divine word. If you tell the serpent a lie, it will whisper the lie back, and the lie will twist and coil in your brain until you tell it again. The thrice-told lie will deceive even gods, as long as telling it causes harm.

Still Carapace - a gnarled, chitinous old thing, not quite roach or trilobite - predates not just this multiverse but several others as well. Witness to the destruction of countless worlds (and countless more extinctions), Still Carapace is the best possible sage on all matters eschatological. Problem is, no one else can verify a damn thing the old bug says, to tell if the rituals he spits are meant to avoid yet another apocalypse, or cause a disaster only he knows how to survive.

Even more obscure beasts include a vampire bat that feeds on entropy (with anticoagulants in its bite that cause bleeding portal-wounds between worlds), a giant house centipede with antennae sensitive to temporal intrusion, and a planar mollusk with the black pearl of a new underworld accreting beneath its shell.

Tales of a "memaggot" that hides its own existence by eating thoughts as they putrefy into memories, and the ramblings of one amateur magician regarding a so-called "deep crow", are rightly dismissed as total bullshit.

Skills, part 3: The Skill List

More on skills. See also my initial thoughts and revised skill rules.

My skill list is very 4th Edition derived, so run away if that's not your cup of tea. I used 4E as a starting point because it's a short list but pretty much anything you can think of falls under one skill or another. Plus, realism be damned, lumping all the thief skills together and the burly movement skills together and the magical knowledge skills together makes it easy to just be good at your job and still have some points for fun flavor stuff.

You could base all of what your character knows and can do on your class, but I rather like the idea of a commando-type fighter who knows how to hide in shadows or a rogue who knows a bit of the arcane.

I avoid having skills required or limited by class for the same reason. I've never known a thief who didn't want the full suite of thief abilities but if you want to just be a knowledgeable expert of the Van Helsing school that's just dandy. And the skills outside the norm for your archetype are going to be far more interesting than the ones that every fighter (or whatever) chooses by default. Plus, a pick-what-you-will skill list feels a lot simpler than having a unique class kit or feat or prestige class for every type of character you can think of.

Sometimes I want to expand the list I have to make it an even 20 skills - being able to roll a d20 (say) three times for an NPC and knowing what they can do and what they've prioritized learning sounds like a nifty little trick. But really that would just be padding the list for liking round numbers, so I've stuck with these 18.

Acrobatics: Flipping around and walking on narrow ledges and other nimbly ninja tricks. I don't have formal rules for attacks of opportunity but I give characters with lots of Acrobatics more leeway in describing how they avoid the big hulking brutes in their path. More Acrobatics makes it more justifiable to try fancy swashbuckling movie shit, which is never a bad thing.

Arcana: So Spellcraft is the practical manipulation of magic, but Knowledge: Arcana is knowing about magic, I guess? And Concentrate is something else entirely? And Alchemy is maybe its own skill or maybe a specialized subset of Craft? Nuts to that. Arcana is the magic skill. With enough of it you can identify spells or magic items and such - maybe I'll have you roll, but only when not giving information or telling horrible horrible lies would be as interesting or more interesting than the truth. Having a skill for aura reading rather than a spell to cast over and over that says "yup, there's magic here" is wonderful.

Athletics: The other physical action skill. Kind of ambiguous whether this or Acrobatics covers jumping - in real life you jump with your muscles but flying around like a tweaking chipmunk is usually something the halfling wants to do. I like to split the difference and use Acrobatics for gymkata parkour and Athletics for long-distance huuuurrrr leaps. Honestly though if you wanted to really condense the skill list you could fold the Acrobatics stuff in here too - there's some overlap with climbing already, and it's not like adventurers willingly go in the water ever so you don't really need to worry about the swimming application. One skill for all the movement stuff just seems implausibly broad though, so I keep them separate.

Bluff: Lies, damn lies, and misdirection. You can't just say "I bluff him! I rolled a 7!" of course, but higher Bluff lets you get away with more on sheer chutzpah (technical term). Superhuman levels of Bluff probably let you get around mind reading and such, though admittedly it hasn't come up yet.

Craft: 4th Edition didn't have a Craft skill. I thought that was stupid. 3rd Edition had a ton of crafts but you couldn't use it to save money and the rules for crafting times were go-sit-in-a-corner-level BAD MATH, so I cut all that out and made Craft one skill. Obviously Craft: Baking and Craft: Weaving and Craft: Golemancy are all very different (unless you're making a Lattice-Crust Pie Golem, and if so I salute you), but I'm okay with that. No one has a problem with a local knowledge skill covering every city ever, so in my games Craft is the generic skill for making And fixing stuff (and also sometimes sabotaging stuff), and at high levels you can make magic items if you have the tears of a phoenix and the beard of a fish or whatever. If that kills your sense of realism you can pick an area of expertise and everything else is at one or two mastery levels less. Metallurgy's kind of like printmaking, right?

Diplomacy: As with Bluff, Diplomacy should not let players say "I roll Diplomacy!" and have that be their argument. Diplomacy gets rolled because both the incredible result that leaves a whole village inexplicably smitten and the natural 1 that causes a huge international kerfuffle are results I like to see, and if there's a skill associated I can let the dice decide which happens first.

Endurance: The theory was having this skill let you make a marathon runner or the sort of fighter you see in epics where fighting someone to a standstill takes days and people stay awake without food or water all that time by sheer power of badass. Or like the fellowship chasing the uruk-hai across the plains nonstop for a week. But in actual play none of that ever happens, because it's hard as a player to set up situations where your Endurance matters and as a DM if you make it so players need to stay up for a week the one Endurance guy will be like "Okaaay..." and everyone else will have to sit that adventure out. In conclusion: Endurance is bad and I'm a bad person for not realizing it earlier. Moving on.

History: Real-life history is great because it's full of cool stories and characters. Fake history (or "adventure background") is lame because if you want to talk about the what happened in the Aztec-Atlantean-Alien Empire you should be playing the game in that era, or showing what the Empire was all about by just letting their ancient machines come to life and try to kill people. So if I could take away everyone's character sheets and make a few judicious edits I'd rename this Geography and make it the skill for knowing what's all out there in the world in the present. Either way it's a knowledge-type skill, so you're letting a player decide "My character's really smart so I want to be the font of exposition." You shouldn't roll dice for this unless failing to remember something has comical and/or deadly consequences.

Insight: Also known as Sense Motive. I love this skill because when players use it and realize "Hmm this dude's kind of skeezy we better keep an eye on him" they feel like the skill gives hidden life-saving information, and when they don't think to read someone and that person stabs them in the back they blame themselves for letting their guard down, not me for surrounding them with treacherous backstabbing liars. You don't need Insight for this - ask about a schemer and, skilled or not, you'll almost always hear some variation of "He's definitely a bastard but he doesn't seem interested in killing you right now" - but having the skill is a nice comforting security blanket so you can sleep in a world of manipulative pricks.

This is taking longer than I thought so I'm going to play the Harry Potter card and split this last skill post in half. Stay tuned for Skills: Part 4: The Skill List Part 2: Breaking An Unexpected Hollow!

Skills, part 2: House Rules

A continuing talk about skills (part 1 here). Here's what I've come up with for myself:

So there's the ability scores ranging from 3 to 18, with modifiers in the 3rd-4th Ed model ranging from -4 to +4. Simple, no-prep-required skill system for campaigns that didn't use skills before or are looking to gut a lot of character sheet clutter: pick whatever ability is most relevant to the skill. Strength for climbing, Wisdom for searching, etc. Apply that modifier when you roll a d6.

Just like that. Most of the problems with 3rd ed ability checks come from using the wrong damn die. A +4 to -4 spread on a d20 means not only can Stephen Hawking beat Lou Ferrigno at arm wrestling, if they try 10 times, it's likely. With a d6 you'll still get some underdog victories but nothing quite so impossible, and certainly not very often - Median Joe* (Str 10) can out-muscle Biff Meatslab (Str 18) one time in 36 ("He tripped! He fell in a ditch! The ditch had a gun!"), but assuming tied results go to the higher bonus, his kid brother (Str 8) is shit out of luck.

Another example: bashing down a locked door. If Joe is in a world that rolls d20s, the Strength DC to break that door is probably around 18-22. Maybe he has a chance but it's gonna take a lot of time and/or luck. For Biff to break down that door...   it's certainly possible, but only marginally more likely. The d20 itself is a much larger factor than the +4 bonus. Now let's say the door has a d6-based difficulty. A DC of 7 means Joe (d6+0) is left looking for a convenient air duct, but Biff (d6+4)  has even odds to break through on the first try.

Now: skills.

Each class gets a certain number of skill points (more for rogues, less for paladins), with more added when leveling up. Pretty much like 3rd Edition. But here's the big difference: there are only 5 levels of skill mastery. Few enough that each rank means something, in real world terms:

1. You’re familiar with this topic. It’s a hobby, or something you learned growing up, or studied briefly. (Medicine example: a certified lifeguard.)
2. Professional grade. The equivalent of a full degree or completed apprenticeship. (Medicine example: a nurse or general/family practitioner.)
3. Renowned. One of the best in a given field, combining natural talent with years of experience. (Medicine example: Any number of television superdoctors. I'll go with Simon Tam from Firefly.)
4. Singular genius. Only a handful of people have been this good at something, ever, and people are still talking about it. (Medicine example: Hippocrates.)
5. A literally superhuman level of skill – the craft of Weyland, the guile of Anansi, the strength of Heracles. (Medicine example: Dian Cecht, Irish god of healing, who made a fully functional arm out of silver, or his son Miach, who did the same thing out of actual flesh and bone and got killed by his dad for being a smartass. Gods are like that.)

You can add your mastery level to a d6 roll, like with ability checks - the results are a little more random, since the biggest difference is between +0 and +5 rather than -4 to +4, but sometimes that's not a bad thing (Stealth vs Perception). Maybe you also apply the relevant ability modifier, maybe you count skill ranks double (if you really want to emphasize the importance of different training levels). I use just the mastery level as a bonus, and if mastery levels are equal I let different ability scores settle ties.

But here's the rub: since the mastery levels have comprehensible, descriptive names, they're also handy for figuring out what your character just knows or can do without rolling dice at all. Intimidate +9 could be great (at level 1) or pathetic (at level 20). But Intimidate 4 under this system always means you are the scariest motherfucker who has ever lived, almost as frightening as a full-on god, and even without rolling that's damn handy when describing how the goblin flunky defenestrated himself when he heard who his master pissed off. If you're rolling Perception +5 you're probably not having much fun. If you're poking around a crime scene and say "I've got Perception 3, what do I find?", you're telling the DM "I want my description in CSI terms - not quite Sherlock Holmes terms yet, but maybe someday..."

Here're some numbers. As always feel free to tinker:

Low skill classes (fighters, clerics) get 4 skill points, plus 1 per level.

Medium skill classes (monks, rangers) get 6 skill points, plus 1 per odd level and 2 per even level.

High skill classes (bards just rogues, unless you have some variant rogues like ninja or something) get 8 skill points plus 2 per level.

Your maximum mastery level equals your level/4, rounded up. Add 1 to the maximum if it's a favored skill, one appropriate to your class (Stealth for the rogue) or race (Acrobatics for the halfling). A skill is either favored or not; doubling up doesn't keep increasing the cap. If you have feats or traits or whatever in your house rules those can give favored skills too. Maybe add another if you can come up with a cool backstory, or just because your character is a special snowflake.

The skill mastery cap means you'll see professionals up to level 4, world-renowned experts at levels 5-8, semi-mythical geniuses at levels 9-12, and demigods at level 13+. Everyone has a different idea how D&D levels translate to the real world or fiction (see this old chestnut, for example) but that feels about right to me. And it's easy to adjust the values by a few levels to taste.

When I talked about expectations for a skill system, I mentioned wanting a way to handle different degrees of success. Descriptive skill levels help with some of that ("You're an expert, and it's a simple task, so it only takes you half as long"), but rolling a smaller die (with skill mattering more than the random result) helps too because small modifiers make a bigger deal. Let's say each adjective you append to a skill  - sneaking quickly, finding rumors anonymously, etc. - gives you a -1 penalty to the roll, or -2 if it's particularly demanding. Every 3 points you roll over the required difficulty (or over your opponent) give you a free adjective after the fact (defaulting to "effortlessly" or "badassfully" if extra effects don't matter and you want to look cool).

You can also add one to your roll after seeing the result if you let your opponent/the DM pick a negative adjective - "barely", "temporarily", "destructively", etc. So if you're one short on your Athletics check to leap the pit you can let the DM say you made it, but painfully, breaking your kneecap when it smashes against the far wall.

Up next: the skill list.

*Median Joe. For when your average Joe is too mean, and Joe Mode is too common. Median Joe. The man in the middle.

Skills, part 1: History and Goals

Shoulders-of-giants and all that: Read The Alexandrian for why 3rd Edition was brilliant, Hack & Slash for the rebuttal (and why great conceptual design doesn't always work in actual play), and Rod of Lordly Might for an entirely reasonable compromise/summation.

Here's where we've been:

1st Edition didn't have skills, except it kind of totally did. Thieves had their thieving percentages. Elves and dwarves had secret knowledge and crazy perception abilities that only worked sometimes, which sounds a lot like a skill system to me. Strength modified how well you could open stuck doors (and later, "bend bars / lift gates", with typical endearing/absurd specificity), Wisdom modified surprise chances, Dexterity modified initiative, and everyone had the same chance to find secret doors. Unless you just found the secret door by saying "I tap on the panels, do any feel hollow?" and working out the mechanism to open it by poking around the torch sconces or whatever. That worked in some modules, but others were of the "yep, secret door, 1 in 6 chance of finding, marked with a little S on the map" school. A mix of hard and fast rules and ad hoc rulings right from the get-go. And just like when the magic-user said "I'm putting on the chain mail" and the DM kind of stammered "Um you can't do that it's not allowed", the rules didn't really have anything to say about trying things under someone else's purview.

2nd Edition had non-weapon proficiencies, which let you decide which skills you knew but without a  mechanism for learning more over the course of play or, really, figuring out what exactly those skills did. It also let thieves choose which thief abilities to improve, down to the percentage point chance of success. Because that's fun? I dunno man it was the eighties everyone was on cocaine.

I won't compete with the Alexandrian describing 3rd Edition's charms, but I will add two anecdotes from personal experience:
-To DM at GenCon you have to actually learn the rules-as-written for skills. The climb/balance/tumble rules are downright Lovecraftian. The more you know about them the less you understand, and the more you want to run away in horror.
-Ever had a situation where the thief (or whatever, but come on, it's the thief) could roll a natural 1 and still run past the guards unseen while doing backflips in her unmentionables, while the fighter couldn't sneak past a sleeping ogre in a zone of magical silence with marshmallows tied to his feet? I think that happens in every 3rd Edition campaign ever, starting around level 2.
-Pathfinder added the Fly skill. Someone somewhere thought that was a good idea. This person was paid money. What? No, I'm extremely bitter, can't you tell?

4th Edition streamlined the skill list while removing the ability to improve a skill except through magic or level advancement (at a slow, uniform rate). It also wedded skills to a "Skill Challenge" minigame. I think the designers' hearts were in the right place for skill challenges. Encouraging creativity by letting any skill contribute to success with the right description... sounds admirable. But it's so much worse than that. What are the skill difficulties? How many successes are needed? What are the consequences of failure? Skill challenges are a way of giving exact, unwavering answers to all those questions with math, while completely ignoring the actual circumstances of play and stifling the creativity it was meant to foster. Also, the math is terrible - not hard to understand, just wrong.

So that's what's gone on before. Here's what I'd want, cherry picking elements from each:

-Let anyone try anything. No "sorry but unless you're a thief you can't do that".
-Allow for character customization. Not every ranger should be alike.
-Give room for progression. Both by level, so players feel like they're getting better as they level up, and by training or DM fiat, so when the players spend a few months in a psychic yeti dojo playing the Final Countdown they can come out with a real improvement.
-Keep it simple, for the DM to run and for players to interpret. No giant tables of modifiers. No wondering what exactly a +14 bonus means in the real world. This goes for character creation too.
-Minimal rolling, and when the dice come out, make them matter.
-Degrees of success and failure. Easy to go too far the other way with this and need ten different results for every roll, but ideally there would be some mechanical difference between "you grabbed the ledge at the last second and are dangling from one hand" and "you somersaulted through the exploding window with nary a scratch, then got up and straightened your tie."

Next time: putting all that into practice.