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.