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.)