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.)