Rejected in Reverse

Reverse Medusa. A rejected image from an upcoming project. #KelvinDrawsThings

M People

I was noodling around with a project yesterday and realised that a lot of my favourite D&D-type monsters begin with the letter "M". So in the spirit of those old "make a campaign from only ten monsters" or "only use the Fiend Folio" posts of yore, let's see what's brought to us today by the letter "M"!

We will be using the AD&D2 Monstrous Manual, of course, for it is the best of the D&D monster books that isn't the Fiend Folio. Onward!

Mammal. An inauspicious start, but we have Ape, Carnivorous and Gorilla in there, so there's some pulpy potential.

Manscorpion. Not bad. Monstrous creepy hybrid bastards. Intelligent enough to have a society, and with manscorpion wizards! Nice and pulpy. I'd perhaps give them a tendency towards aggressive mansplaining and other forms of misogyny, just for the pun.

Not from the Monstrous Manual, obviously, but we must always make time for Iain McCaig!

Manticore. These have long been a favourite monster of mine. Lion-bat-scorpion-man monstrosities that are really angry, probably because they are lion-bat-scorpion-man monstrosities. Glorious.

Medusa. Another classic and another favourite. Can't go wrong with snake haired women with stone gaze powers. In the AD&D2 MM we also get the male version, the maedar, who are aggressively dull even by AD&D2 standards, and I will probably ignore them.

Merman. Fine, I suppose. I would probably blur them into sirens and play up elements of capricious horror, maybe even bring in some Deep One aspects.

Mimic. Great. Everyone loves mimics. Of course, I would have them be able to disguise themselves as anything, including people, probably. Imagine if the village blacksmith splits down the middle into a giant mouth and tries to eat you. Imagine!

Mind Flayer. Classic D&D enemies, but I've never much liked them, despite my Cthulhoid proclivities. Maybe I'd include one as a Big Bad type villain, squatting in a dungeon somewhere.

Minotaur. Another classic, literally. I've always liked minotaurs as a player-character option, so I'd include that too.

Mist, Crimson Death. I'm not a big fan of malevolent weather, but perhaps you could make this the centrepiece of an adventure and get away with only including one of them.

Mist, Vampiric. See above. Maybe the crimson death has these as its henchmen. Henchmists.

Mongrelman. Great! Horrific and sad. Monstrous but not necessarily monsters. They also fit into that Low Hit Dice Humanoid niche that every campaign needs. I love these guys.

Morkoth. Weird undersea hybrid thing with a very specific environmental effect, I wouldn't imagine lots of these in an M Campaign, but like the crimson death and mind flayer I could see them as the focal point of a one-off adventure. I'd probably put them into some sort of uneasy alliance with the mermen too.

Mould. Terrifying to me in real life because of a severe allergy, somewhat boring in game terms. They feel like a Gotcha! monster from the old days and if I drop anything it'll be these.

Mould Men. Fine, but we've got a similar and more visually interesting monster coming up, so I'd probably quietly fold these into them and hope no one notices.

Muckdweller. I would probably never use these in a standard campaign, as there are too many other Low Hit Dice Humanoids that would get used instead, but limiting myself to M-monsters gives them a way in and you know, I quite like them. They are Lawful Evil but I'd still put them into a sort of cute little guy role like a sort of amphibious Moogle, just a cute little guy with a burning hatred of land-dwellers.

Mudman. Great visual, boring monster. Another one that I'd probably use as the central idea in an adventure, rather than a common creature. Perhaps there would be some quest to return a mudman to human(oid) form, or at least find out where it came from and what created it.

Mummy. Yes, absolutely. Grade A superstar monsters.

Myconid. Mushroom people make for a great visual, and they are different and weird enough to feel alien, despite their intelligence and society. Like Groot but even stranger. I love them.

---

There's a desert or wilderness theme emerging with some of these monsters, with a bit of mythic Greece in there, and quite a few aquatic, or at least damp, creatures. A coastal desert perhaps, or a series or barren, hostile islands, with a swampy jungle area and some damp caves too. The number of hybrids suggest some sort of curse or experiments or cursed experiments, and I quite like the idea of a blasted "hot zone" that is home to the mists and rumoured to be full of treasure, Roadside Picnic style.

(Maybe the Zone produced the mutant hybrids?)

You've probably got the mind flayer, morkoth, and at least one mummy as "villains", maybe the crimson death and medusa too. Factions include the manscorpions, mermen, mongrelmen, muckdwellers, and the myconids; maybe there are enough manticores and medusas to form groups, maybe not. I like the idea of apes as a faction, although that's perhaps stretching the rules of the exercise a bit.

In terms of player-character options, although "Man" is technically there as an option, we are listed under "Human" in the MM, so I think I would limit players to the intelligent species above. And maybe the apes too. For fun.

Your turn. Pick a letter -- the first letter of your name, or roll a d26 if you have one -- and create a campaign from the monsters beginning with that latter. If you want.

FLYING IDIOT DEATH SPIDER

About the size of a chubby pigeon and twice as stupid, these giant insectoid* idiots are most common in the late summer and early autumn months. They are attracted to light, fly like they've chugged 13 barrels of ale, and seem to do everything in their limited, ungainly power to get themselves killed. How they manage to survive long enough to breed is a mystery that has baffled sages everywhere.

*(As any pedant will tell you, they are not true spiders. Ettercaps get quite exasperated if you mention them as they are a bit of a PR disaster for spider-kind.)

Suicidal Tendencies (roll 1d6 once per round/turn per FLYING IDIOT DEATH SPIDER):

1. Wibbles into the middle of combat and takes a hit meant for something else.
2. Flumps into a lantern or torch, extinguishing it, then flies about in a panic, setting fire to 1d4 random items before burning up.
3. Bumps into a random character's face, causing penalties (-2, disadvantage, whatever) to all rolls until it flies off to do something else.
4. Blunders into the nearest trap, setting it off.
5. Plunges face first into the nearest liquid, drowning itself, and potentially ruining lunch if the nearest liquid was your soup.
   
6. Flip-flops around, bumping into things and causing a surprising amount of noise, alerting any nearby creatures.

FLYING IDIOT DEATH SPIDERS in Troika! and similar games of fantasy fighting:
SKILL 2
STAMINA 2
Initiative 3
Armour 0
Damage 0


FLYING IDIOT DEATH SPIDERS in LotFP and other old-school games of dungeon-based adventuring:
FLYING IDIOT DEATH SPIDER, Armour None (12), Move 120', 1 Hit Dice, 1hp, annoying flapping (no damage), Morale 12 (fearless because of stupidity)

Fly my pretties!

The Thing in the Woods

I don't know what this is. It just fell out of my head.

Slügs!

Let's move on to something more pleasant. Sort of.

Tomorrow is Free RPG Day! For the first time I am, in a small way, involved; among the products being given away by participating shops is a monster book published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the publisher that doesn't do monster books, apart from this one and the other two. It's called Slügs! because all the monsters are slugs. I drew most of the slugs, and wrote a little bit about one of them.

(That's not one of mine. I wish I could do pictures like that!)

It would be brilliant if you pick up a copy of Slügs! tomorrow, but the idea behind the event is to get people into games shops to buy and play, and to build a community. When you do pop in, mention why you're there so the shop staff know what you're interested in and what to order in the future; at the very least they will know that Free RPG Day works and will be more open to participating in future.

Have a chat with the people there. Find out what they're playing, tell them what you're playing. Make some contacts, perhaps try a new game.

Buy something too, even if it's just some dice. You can never have too many dice, yes?

More Than Meets the Eye

The loot table in the last post came to me in my sleep; so did this, although I expect it to be of less utility to gamers everywhere.

I suspect it is in part inspired by the mimics from Final Fantasy XII, which were robotic spider things that turned into chests; it's a small step from there to an actual Transformer, but then I've gone back the other way and made it an organic creature.

The text comes from the Pathfinder reference document.

Spider/Man

Spiders are intelligent. At some basic level everyone knows this, even if they don't admit it to themselves, because admitting it invites all sorts of existential horror.

The little ones aren't much for conversation or philosophy but have a keen and innate understanding of geometry and structural engineering that dwarfs that of any other species except for perhaps the, er, dwarves.

The big ones -- the ones the size of people -- are as intelligent as people, if not more so. The phase spiders are geniuses but they're also weird, even by the standards of spiders, because they're thinking in more than one dimension at once.

The problem is that spiders are obsessed with order and see everything in terms of its place in the grand structure of the universe -- thanks China Miéville! -- so when they try to interact with other sentient species they come across as detached and a bit alien at best, and AIEE! MONSTERS! at worst.

Being clever sorts the spiders realised that they needed some sort of go-between to help them deal with other species and convey their great plans without the encounter descending into stabbing, which is just the sort of inconvenient and tiresome business that upsets the order of things. No spider would be able to deal with the limited and erratic viewpoints of the non-arachnid species for long so they created the ettercaps, hybrids of spider and humanoid and the intended ambassadors of spider kind.

Ettercaps are created when a humanoid is captured -- elves and orcs are favoured because they're the most chaotic and removing them is seen as an efficient way to tidy up the universe -- and encased in a cocoon which is then subjected to a phasey-wasey process that changes the creature within. A few days later the cocoon rips open and an ettercap is released.

Alas, ettercaps are frightening creatures in their own right and despite their best attempts at peaceful discourse often invoke the AIEE! MONSTERS! response -- and that's before anyone finds out how they're made -- but the spiders are working on that.

I ♥ Monsters

Over at his blog, Martin writes about how monster books are his least favourite role-playing products. He then goes on to describe the kind of monsters that inhabit the campaign setting he's been using for fantasy games for a number of years, and presents a good argument for why monster books are of little use to him.

Unlike pretty much every other gaming blogger, I've never attempted to put together a fantasy setting, aside from when I ran a short Fighting Fantasy campaign, but in that case I was making it up as I went along so I don't think it counts. When I was younger, most of my gaming time was spent on Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu, and in recent years I've only played in existing published settings, so it's never come up.

Even so, I love monster books. I have a stack of them here with me; most are for games I don't play while others -- like the beautiful Beasts and its sequel -- have nothing to do with gaming at all. As such, I don't get any practical use out of them, just as Martin doesn't, yet I love them nonetheless. There's something wonderful about a big thick book of exotic and impossible creatures; I have often spent an hour or two leafing through these volumes, reading the descriptions and -- above all -- admiring the illustrations. They are beautiful, despite their utility, or lack of; I doubt I'll ever make use of it in a game again but you wouldn't be able to prise Out of the Pit from my grasp as it's full of monsters drawn and painted by the likes of John Blanche and Russ Nicholson.

(That's Out of the Pit in the image above, with an Iain Mcaig shapechanger; also pictured is Tony DiTerlizzi's Medusa from the Monstrous Manual for AD&D2, and Frank Stockton's Yuki-Onna from Beasts! Book 2.)

I remember some rumblings a while ago about putting together some sort of community monster book, drawing upon the talents of the writers and artists who've sprung up to blog about games in the past few years. It hasn't happened yet, but if it will include things like The Guardian of the Palace of the Perfect Moon, it's nothing less than a great idea.