Alien, Predator, The Problem of Interesting Monsters

 Note: If you voted to hear the Vampire story, it's still coming in early May, don't worry.

-The Alien and The Predator are both interesting monsters.

-One reason Alien is a better movie than Predator is it found reasons for the cast to talk about the interesting monster and observe its behavior. After Cain dies, like 50% or more of the dialogue is in one way or another, finding out about the monster, explaining it ("using the air ducts", "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.", "big as a man").

-What dialogue isn't about the monster is about The Company's plot ("crew expendable" etc.).

-Simple formula (Lovecraftian even)--create an interesting monster and then the story is mostly just explaining how it's interesting.

-Predator on the other hand: how do we know its an alien? First scene we see its space ship. How do we know it has only thermal vision? We see through its eyes.

-Showing not telling doesn't work here because it leaves the characters almost nothing else to talk about or do--except the same things they'd do in any other non-monster action movie: I'm worried about murdering! I'm not! How will we accomplish murdering? Yeah, they got betrayed by the CIA, but it's so not important to anything and Carl Weathers (the Ash figure, the betrayer) gets killed by the Predator, so that plot resolves itself without anyone having to confront him or make a decision about it or act or anything.

-A problem with all the later Predator and Alien movies: instead of interesting or difficult characters being dealt with by the other characters (as the crew deals with Ash in Alien) they just get killed by the monster. We realize, at some point in every later movie, that this is a slasher formula and none of the interpersonal plot gymnastics matter. Ripley matters, that's all, because Ripley will, in one way or another, survive.

-So what does matter (besides the quality of the kills)? We want to learn more about the creatures.

-This, I think, is what really disappointed everyone most about Prometheus--the whole beginning was a classic Hard SF set-up: we were going to Learn About The Universe and then as soon as we get to the big mystery (What the fuck was that thing in the...chair? in Alien?) it turns into a slasher movie. No, we are not going to learn anything else, the only question in a slasher movie is: how will they die? Not well, it turns out. Also he looks like the Michelin man but that's a whole other post.

-Anyway to retrieve the thread: Interesting monsters. The genius of the first Alien--and nearly all the best parts of all the later Alien and Predator movies--is it turns learning about the interesting monsters into the plot.

-The technique: rationing out the information on the interesting monster scene by scene, piece by piece, kill by kill.

-Failure means: wasting information, wasting kills, and, by extension, wasting characters. Letting the monster chew through the cast before the cast gets to chew on the monster.

-Again, Lovecraftian: the scenes in The Call of Cthulhu where we learn about Cthulhu are more interesting than what Cthulhu actually does at the end (with the Swede and the boat and all that).

-It's all a slow tease, a show whose content is slow revelation. It's why there's this curious deflating effect when you see a Wiki full of information on the creatures, like everything fun is mashed down into a statblock. The Predator tribe is called the Yautja? Did you know that? I didn't. Somehow I wish I still didn't? I want the mystery.

It's like looking at the lyrics to your favorite song all typed out. "Oooh, ye-ahh, baby" I mean yes that's the words but...it felt different in the song.

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Hungry Ghosts + Frostbitten & Mutilated Unboxing

click to enlarge

Some hungry ghosts are pathetic, some are scornful, all feel they are owed something—by their living descendants or by others who failed to acknowledge them properly in life.

Hungry Ghosts are ugly fiends and come creeping on their bellies, smiling, eating junk food and trash. They want to make the living join them in hell by committing suicide, and so do awful things. They will molest anyone until they cry.

Hell makes them so bad they can never be satisfied. They can be exorcised through complex chants in a chalked circle while burning special contracts that send them back to their homes.

Demon City Stats

Typical Hungry Ghost

Calm: 0
Agility: 2
Toughness: 4 (can only be hurt by cold things)
Perception: 2
Appeal: 0
Cash: 0
Knowledge: 1

Calm Check: 7
Cards: King/Queen of Cups (10)

Special abilities:

Ectoplasmic form: Hungry ghosts can touch their victims but neither their victims nor any other natural physical force can touch them. The only exception is ice and things chilled below freezing.

Climbing: All hungry ghosts can move across walls and ceilings at normal speed.

Infinite mutilation: If a hungry ghost slices or bites off a part of a creature, the victim will never bleed out—simply remain alive and maimed at 0 Toughness.

Devouring: A hungry ghost can chew through any substance as if it were meat.

Mutant physiognomy: Hungry ghosts come in many shapes—spheres with bloated faces, serpent-centaurs, bizarre concatenations of limbs and heads, massive eyes for heads on distended necks with teeth down either side. If a ghost has a strange shape, it may add some minor extra ability. They are never flying creatures, however.


Weaknesses:

Ice and things chilled below freezing can hurt a hungry ghost as can sorcery.

Hungry ghosts cannot kill a living being, only torment it until it wants to kill itself.

Hungry ghosts are greedy but cannot tell the difference between real and fake food or money.

Hungry ghosts are also confused by patterns, and patterned wallpaper or carpets will disorient them.

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The True Nature of Existence

Broadly applicable, but I specifically wrote it for Demon City:

New painting for Demon City, click to enlarge

Imagine a laid-flat brick of black gelatin. Pick a spot on the left wall and, imperfectly and at a diagonal, slide a soda straw in until it sticks out the right side.

The left side of the brick represents the second you were born, the right the second you die, the brick itself all you might've experienced and the path of the straw all that you did experience.

This tunnel through the gelatin is the path of your life. Now imagine a second tunnel, shaped like a crazy straw--carving likewise broadly left to right but looping and wild--intersecting and sometimes overlapping the path of your life, but rounding off and taking its own route at many places. This tunnel is the life of someone else you know.

Your story and another person's only have to agree when these paths overlap. Only if you both witness the same event will your stories need to be alike in order to maintain a sense of an objective and sensical world. If your father was alone in a field and says he saw a length of rusted wire, this cannot threaten your sense of reality if you were a thousand miles away at the time. Why wouldn't your dad have seen a wire?

Your exact position in any given space and at any given time, like your experience, is unshared and unique to you. You experience the look of you favorite picture and the taste of your favorite food in ways that do not necessarily precisely match the experience of any other creature that ever was or will be.

Imagine now further, that due to your unique pattern of shape, mass, and velocity, the precise physical laws that govern your existence are also unique to you. You move in a reality envelope where the air is generally 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen and free-falling objects where you are gain speed at 9.8 meters per second squared and fireflies glow golden with a darkening around the edges and people, when you ask for directions, are generally kind.

The truth is this: it is not necessary that everyone share these rules, all that is necessary for the spreading network of reality to maintain its shape is that the rules of the subrealities experienced by everyone in the one greater reality look the same when and only when they intersect.

Having a cigarette on the train platform at 10am, you tell your sister there's no such thing as ghosts--and your sister says there is. You are both right--by the rules governing your tunnel through the gelatin there can be no ghosts, and by the rules governing your sister's tunnel there can be, but so long as you both agree there are no ghosts to be seen right now on this train platform at 10am, reality holds.

The key, then, to ruptures in the ordinary face of life, to accessing the vast distortions of what we think of as natural which might be possible if free-falling objects gained speed at .00000000000000000000001 meters per second squared more than they should or if an effect might in some circumstances precede a cause or an action not have a precisely equal and opposite reaction is isolation.

The farther from things with which one might interact, the farther the unique curve of an individual's unique set of laws might bend from the norm. This isn't because things change as you move away--it's because this is always how it was going to be. The universe is organized in such a way as to keep consistent. Your father was always going to be alone when he saw the rusted wire, and your sister was always going to be the last one to leave the office when she heard the voice that wasn't a voice from that white face pressed against the far side of that window.

Divagations from the understood are less likely when more disparate bystanders appear whose subrealities the larger reality needs to satisfy. This is why the greatest wonders and terrors are witnessed lonely hills, in basements, on dead streets when the background music of life seems to have dropped away and a sneakered footstep sounds as clear as a nail being clipped...or in the presence of severe ranks of disciples who have trained their souls to follow a single and common path. And, likewise, this is why such events will never be believed or understood in the wider world--at least until the last generation discovers the implications of whatever rules they earned that position by ignoring.

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True transformation--the changing into something else--is always coincident with a life of profound and complex isolations. Just as the good work of the rules-as-written Calvinist Protestant does not earn a place in Heaven by doing good but rather doing good demonstrates she always was predestined to be there, the other worlds that interpenetrate the familiar world are not formed by the desperate and the strange but rather their desperation and strangeness are part of that same offshoot from the mainstream of life that allows such eddies to jell and pool and develop their own ecosystems.

By this token the many systems of supernatural and metaphysical wisdom recorded across human history are not so mutually-exclusive as they might first appear. What the Babylonian heresiarch inscribed on a tomb wall, what the Han dynasty sculptor cast in impure bronze, what the Elizabethan witch-hunter printed and circulated--these things are as real as anything in a life that we have not lived can ever be, as are the declarations that these things are impossible. They are simply rules for tunnels that never intersect.

What then is necessary to summon demons is to observe carefully the reality you are in, and look for the rules that have always been there--as a character in a book might guess the ending by discovering the genre he's being written in.

Once these rules begin to be found, the adept will grasp that all activity has a second meaning. Gestures, decisions, echo forward in ways not previously understood--for you, and for anyone who will encounter you. Even your words are a dialogue in a performance judged by new gods.

To know these things, the research must be done, the books read, the practices observed, but most of all: experiments must be conducted. And what will be unleashed is what was meant to be and what is then wrought can only be no more than what should have been.
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Solidly Platonic

So modrons are the little geometric monsters from the Plane of Order Gary Gygax dreamed up while he was drunk staring at dice, and which I think first appeared in the AD&D Monster Manual 2.
Tony DiTerlizzi and Monte Cook later steampunked them out (before steampunk was even a thing) for Planescape and made them playable characters, but the core of their deal remained: they were creatures of ultimate order, hierarchical, and lawful.

So, I was thinking about how this could be turned into something that actually affects how you use them in play, rather than just being like another jerk that hits you for d8+2 only this time the DM does a robot voice. And I figure: Modrons know the rules. They have System Mastery.

Like Plato or those guys who used to write in to Dragon that castles wouldn't exist in a world with the AD&D spell list: they believe all that currently is is the one and only possible consequence of the principles by which the world operates. And they believe they know those principles. Like if you know the principles of the universe you should know how many feathers a chicken has--the world's not that complicated and Heisenbergian uncertainty doesn't exist.

Practically speaking, this means: they know how many hit points they have, how many you have, how many Cone of Cold does, how many xp they are worth. They'll say stuff like "Humans: if you slay me, you will advance 27/100ths of the way toward reaching another tier of skill but if you allow me to show you where the Jewel of Epoch lies, you will advance 7/20ths toward reaching another tier of skill and be less injured should you face the Epsilon Beast, which, if successfully slain will bring you 63/100ths of the way toward reaching your next tier of skill".

Their only problem is they only know the system. Anything that would require a DM call they just can't do. If you jump on top of one of their heads and they have to try to hit you with one of their dumb spears without hitting themselves they're just like fuck doesn't compute. If they're running down a hill from an erupting volcano on their clanky legs and you're like "Dude just roll it's a volcano and you're a sphere" they'll be like "Cannot! Maximum move speed is 10 feet per second". Until WOTC publishes it, they can't do it--if you thumb wrestle them, they'll always lose--and, in a deep irony, they can't play chess.*

Also some of them look like the bad geometry angel from Evangelion.

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*Wait I guess they could play if you literally walked through each second of the game but they couldn't abstract a game of chess to some kind of int/perception roll or whatever and do it because that'd be a GM call.

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26 days to go

Temple of Elemental Bickering

Elementals are boring. A clear framing of the problem and some good solutions for the basics of the problem are here on Chris Hogan's blog, but the underlying problem--which generates the others--is they lack personality.

To take a 3000-foot view, there's just too many conflicting conceptual demands on them--on the one hand, earth air fire and water are supposed to be interesting because together compose everything. On the other hand, the metaphysics of D&D (and Shadowrun and RuneQuest and Elric and RIFTs and other games that use them...) have other Primary Forces with way more personality like war gods and Tiamat and Cthulhu. The dullness of their powers and appearance and behavior comes out of the fact they don't really have a thing.

Taking a tip, like yesterday, from a dead Milesian philosopher--this time Anaximander, here's one: the elements are always fighting each other. Every time you summon an elemental, things go out of whack.  They live on their planes, but they have reluctantly agreed to let ours be neutral ground with no one element predominating. Magically bringing a sentient quantity of any element onto our plane fucks that up.

You summon a fire elemental, things go ok for 2-3 rounds, then the earth begins to rebel, the water and air, too. You can make a table for each element, like tremors start, the moisture in your body begins to increase and slow you down, the wind picks up or it gets hard to breathe.

Any elemental monster on our plane will eventually attract three counterparts to tear it apart. Water weirds bring xorns and dust devils and firesnakes.

Rather than being personified like scheming gods, the elemental consciousness is chemical--they just seek a balance. It may be too much of a stretch to imagine them as complex villains while keeping to their extraordinarily simple (and thus easy to grasp) themes, but making them always and inexorably react to each other at least means each one implies something else--and that's a big step toward making them move from just a ball of numbers wizards whip out once in a while to adventure fuel.
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Maze of the Vanilla Medusa

First:

Here is an interview with me talking about Jeff Grubb's Marvel Superheroes game--and why I like it better than all other superhero games. In a lot of detail.

Second:

Many of you know James Raggi, who usually publishes game books I make, but you don't know Ken Baumann of Satyr Press, who published Maze of the Blue Medusa when it became clear James had too much on his plate this year to put it out (and that's a good thing--James should get behind a variety of stuff). Here's Ken Baumann, child star and literary publisher, explaining to a non-rpg audience why he put this book out. And here's a review that compares the Maze to a city in Croatia.

Third:

It's cool that we got nominated for 5 Ennies--if you're worried about the great DIY D&D stuff that got overlooked, you have a wee bit of time left to register to be an Ennie judge next year.

Fourth:

The actual blog entry--

I've noticed that if you have a weird room and a weird monster (not just reskinned weird,  but like what it does is weird) then sometimes it's super fun but sometimes it's just incomprehensible.

Weird rooms plus nothing is sometimes spooky but sometimes just like the players are like whatevs and walk past.

Weird room plus normal monster though--that's almost always a good time. Understandable enough that players can use their heads, novel enough that they have to.

The first draft of The Maze of the Blue Medusa--based on my map/picture--had a lot of weird rooms. (Patrick talks about how we changed it over the drafts here).

My thought was: ok, so we can get away with some normalish monsters especially on the wandering monster table--things that just try to kill and eat you and don't, like, want to buy your legs and turn them into crystal in order to build a monument to their Glassfisted God or whatever. The Chameleon Women, for example, are, mechanically, just stealthy humanoids packing one spellcaster per group. However, even the relatively simple creatures, in the environment of the maze, sometimes just make people go "Ok what the fuck Quay Bros shit is it this time?"

So anyway, point is I think the Maze tastes good with a scoop of vanilla--and the Wandering Monster chart is a good place to put it, since there are a lot of unique monsters on it that will probably get killed and just be replaced with more chameleon women. It would probably make this guy happy, too (though if he wanted to look at the art why'd he get it on pdf?).

So, here's a list of vanilla monsters you can toss in as your players trip through those 300 rooms.

Bats

d100 bats. The AD&D rule for bats is there's a (# of bats)% chance of putting out torches. I think the Maze is a lot more interesting as a true resource-depleting dungeon, then when you run out of stuff you face the difficult choice of finding a hidden exit, finding a way past Lady Crucem Capelli or Mad Maxing supplies together from scraps and stolen equipment inside the dungeon.

Diseases are an option with bats but I kind of hate them in D&D because either you get rid of them and, yay, just made the cleric do a thing or you don't in which case you just hate your character for a while. Or they're "interesting" (now your piss is lobsters!) which is kind of a gonzo grotty zany Old School cliche.

Beholder

Not exactly a vanilla monster, but a standard one. Plus something where at least you know just how scary it is on sight, unlike all the other cryptic bosses hiding in the Maze. Or maybe it's just a gas spore. Maybe not wandering, maybe tucked away in one of the hidden rooms.

Arya Fucking Stark

Faceless assassin 13-year old. But who is she trying to kill? Maybe one of the statues? In which case how? And who is she pretending to be?

Blindheim

The frog so fucked looking you go blind is a good cascade-effect monster. Plus like did we do frogs? Don't think there's any frogs in there.

Carrion Crawler

Scavengers go wherever, right? 

Drow

The drow are so fucking Maze. They'd be like shit who built this lit Maze we should kick it with them this is so #goals. We should kick it with them and turn them into weird spider hate cult friends underground. Whoever built this place must've read Vault of the Drow like...twice. Definitely that. And then they'd be like whaaat? Party of adventurers? You are asleep with our sleepy dust crossbows and we don't give a FUCK. Let's find something blue to touch until it's blaaaack and then resist 25% of all yr magic.

Goblin

Goblins are, as established, bad ideas. Going into the Maze is a bad idea. They'll talk backwards and try to steal art. Players will be like "Hah, idiots" and then the goblins will punch them and then what? The players punch them back but..wait, fuck, some of them are

Nilbogs

haha. Nilbogs get hit points when you hit them. Fucking read a Fiend Folio illiterates.

Lava children

Speaking of the Folio, just like "You hear a hissing sound down the corridor and smell sulfur". And a representative of WOTC is like "We decided it was inappropriate to have players murdering things that basically look like human children" and you'll be like "Yeah we're the OSR, you're lucky you have us, huh?" and then the players fail their Wis save and hug the babies and then scalding.

NPC party

NPC adventurers are like chickens, they're good with anything and they can replace you if you die. Tom Middenmurk's are the best.

Pudding

I can very easily see a chubby blanket of custardthick ooze like the unyellow part of a sunnyside egg scouring the lonesome smooth corridors. Color indicates resistance type: red= edged, blue=fire, etc. Standard biomedical approach to oozes: trial and error it until you get the right combo, then remember which is which. unless everyone who fought oozes last time is dead...

Rats

Rats start to look pretty tasty after all your food's been eaten by rats.

Wizard

In search of exotic stuff to put in stuff and do wizard stuff with. Probably the boss of like the goblins. Accompanied by 2 or 3 at all times.

One Of Those Sunday Posts Nobody Reads

Some notes:

*Despite what I said at first, aside from the usual Gurrrls Play DnD????? stuff, the comments on the Vice article on their Facebook page were incredibly sweet and surprising. So many people just love the game and want to play--there was not a single nerd-baiting comment. In Vice. In 2015. Weird.

*Sometimes I write actual play reports because there's a point they can make--sometimes I write them because I'm afraid I won't remember how insane shit is--like remembering a dream.

*Example of the latter: on Monday my AD&D group picked up a cursed object that attracts totally random encounters. I roll…Juiblex. The players are levels 8-11. They kill Juiblex. He tried, man.

*Spike's blog--Gorgonara--is new to me, but I like this:

Shadow people. They look like Asian shadow puppets. Theyre 2 dimensional organisms from the 2nd dimension that have immigrated to the 3rd dimension. The process of going into a bigger dimension has changed they permanently to be 2.5-d, they occupy a space 3-d space like anyone else but look the same from every angle. They were sent here to colonise the 3d world, and send back messages, but they failed miserably. Because they are different now they can never go home.

*I stopped rewriting the 5e Monster Manual because my manual was getting so taped over it was literally falling apart. I need to find a new way to do it. The monsters from there I did use turned out to work pretty well.

*People troll and play shitcritic because it's fun. (If fun--or "social re-enforcement"-- weren't the motive they'd be doing something more effective.) The way we made them stop is make it unfun. Really unfun.

*I liked Patrick's Marvel pitches

Luke Cage is lost in time. While he tries to survive and find meaning in a post-apocalyptic Britain somewhere between the fall of Rome and the Battle of Hastings, meanwhile Jessica Jones and his Kid search for him.

*Arnold Punch put up all his monsters on one list. Some entries are long, but all are interesting.

Fairy

   - Candy - Turn your horrible old weapons into sugar.

   - Flower - Turn your boring old food into flowers.

   - Gem - Turn your shiny gold into awesome glitter.

   - Ice - Turn all of dangerous flammables into lovely toys.

   - Tooth - Can steal the teeth right out of your head.

*Dungeon Dozen is on-point, too, this weekend

9. Involuntary, boundless levity in approach to all things, no matter how dire, all conversation framed as hilarious "bits", great effusions of genuine or feigned laughter the glue that holds society together

*Some people want online to be a bar where they rib each other constantly but it means nothing.

Others are obsessed with civility.

They don't get along.

A third kind, the obviously fragile people who can only report on their emotions, follow neither the barfly rule of the first kind or the Always Ignore Really Bad Things rule of the second kind but are tolerated by both.

None of them can at all relate to the fourth kind: people who actually wanna get shit done.

*Harry Potter (as a structure) seems less D&Dable than Harry Potter inverted: you are the person trying to murder someone who is safe in the arms of the institution. I think this may also be true of Arthurian D&D: infiltration of stable and complex institutions is a more player-centric adventure than being invited into them and then having to ferret out trouble within. Or, at least, you get to tour more of the institution with the inverted structure. Like: you don't want to joust or drink when everything's going fine and you just wait for the trouble--you want to be the disrupting presence, so each of these events is full of drama caused by the PCs and the PCs have to examine the tourney from all the angles.

It's like that rogues-and-sandboxes thing but it also applies to anything with periodically repeated rituals (classes, feasts, etc): there's only a point to gaming through them when they become a problem, and it's better when the players are motivated to make that problem happen.

*Call of Cthulhuish dream:

In the form of a documentary trailer. There's people who believe humans and frogs and newts share a common ancestor.

This animal is currently alive:

it looks like a small fat stylized frog with a somewhat pointed hace and stubby legs, but with faces  on both ends. One set of small legs. One of the 2 janus-faces is always covered in an algae-colored goo. The dividing line is very clear and straight.

A scientist is trying his whole life to disprove that they are related to us, but also killing them in the process.

The imagery of the documentary contains an evolution-denier-style science museum exhibit, sort of natural-historyish, sort of totemic, of stacked sculpted creatures and faces, in a 1950s style. Lots of manilla-colored nameplates.

*Here's a game: Ask whoever you're sleeping with which of the Fellowship you most resemble, if they had to pick.

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The Ones With No Chill

Quicklings, only halfling-tall, are one of the many disasters made possible by the union of man and elf. When the humors mix awry, the resulting offspring inherit the capacity of experience of an elf, but only the mortal span of a human to experience it in.

You ever notice how capricious and stately elves are with their fucking stag horn crowns and twisty lathed smooth wood and shit? This is because they have all the time in the world. They wallow in unacknowledged temporal privilege.

Not quicklings. Their eyes are red with stimulants and bad frenzy, their homes are chaotic with the clicking of clocks. Their lives are desperations. They want more. You move so slow, you talk so slow. You bore them so much.

They always win initiative, their voices are shrill, and they attack three times per round. Their principle occupation is to acquire experience before death. They want more life, fucker.

A typical quickling encounter begins with the local lord awaking to find his cupboards bare, his animals behaving strangely, his maids terrified, his art stolen, his secret doors wide open, his drugs dispersed about the halls and maybe a lone leftover quickling on a chandelier--inebriated and dangling and babbling a poem about smocks or some shit. The rest are long gone.

Occasionally long but barely-legible works of food or art criticism are left in place of the items themselves, the ink still wet. The reasoning in these essays is solid, if unnecessarily prescriptive.

Parties occasionally encounter quicklings because they possess something unique, or have gained access to a unique place. The quicklings must sample it. A ring of fire breathing? Must know what that's like. The Unknown Caverns of Vacuous Glear? Must know them. 

What is that? A bootlast? What do you do with it? Why do you do that? Why do you exist? I hate you. Poke poke poke poke poke you full of holes I hate you so much. Now what do you look like inside out?

They are as culturally developed as any elves (they learn fast, naturally) but their culture is deeply unclean. They've already done everything normal-fun and have long-ago moved into fucked-up fun. 

True elves (what they call "snail elves") value their counsel on matters such as aesthetics, fencing and the natural world (their various analyses being the result of far more observation) though, being obviously abominations against the natural order, they are wary of them. A Seelie lord may ask a party to locate (never easy) and bring in a quickling consultant to address some pressing* matter.

They have names like "Skrinthian Ipting" and "Scree-Act Proth".


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(*In the elven sense of the word, so this could be "What do we do about the fucking orcs over there?" but also "What is the ideal length of a horn to sound on the first day of spring after the meerkats wake?")


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Goblinforce Murdervengeance

Every goblin incarnates a bad idea. In this case--retribution.

For what? For all the fucking goblins you killed. They had families, you know.

They have some good ideas, too--like sneaking up on you using Greater Invisibility and coating your escape paths in marbles and flaming oil. They are, of course, horrible.

The even more horrible version is red goblins--who explode in a random baleful spell when slain.

THE SCOUTS

These are the first you'll encounter--if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, they find you, scamper back where they came from, and then you encounter the suck-end of surprise round and a wall of bloody blades.

They have abilities as thieves of their level and can turn into large balls of thread about the size of a cantalope.

Sneaking Samantha

HD: 10

HP (AD&D/5e): 40/60

AC: As leather+3

Atk: Poisoned blade--melee or thrown + poisoned darts

Save each round or lose 3dice hp until you save twice in a row.

Other equipment:

2x flaming oil, choking powder, climbing claws, grappling hook, garotte, 1780gp worth of coins sewn into lining of dress

Mondle Beasty

HD: 9

HP (AD&D/5e): 36/54

AC: As leather+2

Atk: Short sword (poisoned) + crossbow (poisoned)

Poison= Save each round or be stunned for that round. Keep saving until you save twice in a row, then you're fine.

Other equipment:

5x flaming oil, net, telescope, caltrops, marbles, green slime vial, ornate (stolen) short sword is worth 3000gp

THE HARRIERS

These are the ones that will chase you down, or fall upon you once you tumble into snares set by the scouts.  These three are Nilbogs--that is: they gain hit points when attacked, and can only lose them by being healed.

Carved In Black Iron

Fighter

HD: 11

HP (AD&D/5e): 55/88

AC: As chain +2

Atk: Two attacks per round

Short sword+2, long bow, bite
Immune to psychology due to warpaint

Nurnvykk of the Mangling

Cleric

HD: 10

HP (AD&D/5e): 50/80

AC: As plate

Atk: Mace+2
Spells:
5th Level: raise dead
4th Level: cure serious woundsx2
3rd Level: growth of animalsx2 (usually used twice on the same animal), locate object.
2nd Level: hold personx2, grasping floor (Roll or be grappled by hands from the floor), silence 15' radius.
1st Level: cure light woundsx3, light, resist cold.

Brindleminsk Ninst

Fighter

HD: 11

HP (AD&D/5e): 55/88

AC: As chain +2

Atk: Two attacks per round

Longsword+2, crossbow, Grappling hook, Net


THE MASTERS

They are in charge. Or, as goblins would say "They are lowly and subservient".

Batbite and Gork

Batbite--Fighter

HD: 14

HP (AD&D/5e): 70/112

AC: As plate +shield

Atk: Two attacks per round

Longsword+4, throwing axe+4

Gork--Boar
HD: 5
HP: 25/40
AC: As chain
Atk: Two attacks per round
Gore +5

Thrugness the Okk

fighter

HD: 16

HP (AD&D/5e): 80/128

AC: As plate +shield

Atk: Three attacks per round
Club or throw for massive damage

Nozzlwyse and the Swallower

Nozzylwyse (Witch)

HD: 13

HP (AD&D/5e): 39/78

AC: As plate (magic cloak)

Atk:

Pick or sickle +1

Usually has at least:

6: Programmed Illusion

5: Animate Objects, Telekinesis

4: Stone Shape, Gr Invisibility, Polymorph

3: Haste, Slow, Stinking Cloud, Nondetection

2: Web, Darkness, Mirror Image, Hold Person, Suggestion

1: Sleep x2 Detect Magic, Grease x2 Tasha's Hideous Laughter

Swallower

HD: 6

HP: 30/48

AC: As chain

Atk: Swallow

2dice damage per round after a successful swallow. The swallowed must make a Con check and a Dex check per round to successfully take any action.

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Bulette…or not

Back to redoing the monster manual...

The bulette never convinced me--the hulking, silver kaijulike creature in the late miniatures have their appeal but (as I've said before) I can't really picture them eating a knight. So fuck 'em for this game.

The silt shark from Dark Sun on the other hand, does the same thing with more charm. I imagine it parting the sand with the prow of its frictionless, pointed face. I love the subtle claws they did on the fins.

And god do players freak the fuck out when they see a silt shark come up. Something about the single fin in the sand seen on the successful perception check--or the toothy suddenness of the attack in the wake of the failed one.

Sharks aren't terribly complex creatures--and I have no desire to make them any moreso. The one twist I added was based on the whole drop of blood thing--like rhythmic footsteps calling sandworms, killing anything in the desert risks bringing more. And, of course, killing a silt shark spills silt shark blood--and risks bringing more. Plus the kinds of predators hungrier for metal than meat.
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7 D&Dables From Doctor Strange

Click to enlarge.

365-level wizard wants you to live in this crappy castle forever instead of him

Clock pendulum trap

Just show them that

The damsel you saved wasn't meant to be saved

You are divided into several poorly-rounded selves

Some freaks to fight

Each star is scheming against every other

Werewolves as Worldbuilding

Ok, so a thing about the second edition of the game Chill which is also about other games, too:

-Start out with addressing what Chill 2e was not:

-Chill 2e was not Chill 1e, that is: not a light-hearted Universal Horror RPG. So it took its monsters seriously.

-Chill 2e was not Call of Cthulhu, that is: it couldn't just say "Monsters are like go read Lovecraft or else make something up".

-Chill 2e was not Vampire or any other World Of Darkness game where the player was the monster and so, therefore, the monster had to be intelligible, fully describable and described to the player, and had to be within an arm's reach of what a person would want their own in-world player to be and act like.

-Likewise it was not Warhammer--where the existence of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle and 40k lines meant the that mythology of the monsters of chaos was fleshed out in such a way you could take the chaos side of chaos in a tabletop battle.

-Chill 2e was not D&D or the Marvel RPG or any other fantasy game or superhero games: that is, it didn't assume a world of magic operating on magical rules which the monster was part of. It was a horror game: magic is evil and operates as disruption. Monsters are not ubiquitous scenery that we can just assume show up now and then, each monster is a distinct mystery. Horror has to take its monsters one at a time.

-Chill 2e was not Dread or even Night's Black Agents, both of which have enough new school in their blood to constantly remind the GM that the monsters and world as presented are not canonical and there would be no point to doing that, these are just options anyway, pick what you like best.

-Add all this up and it suddenly becomes clear that the second edition of Chill had to do something that no other game I have played quite had to do. It had to present it's monsters as:

*Complete and original enough to form the setting of the game.

*Rare and shadowy enough to be a mystery the players must penetrate.

-Thesis:

The way Chill 2e uses monsters is the template for how the current wave of RPG bloggers (and the products they make) has most productively used monsters: as secret worldbuilding, hidden from players until they adventure into it. A compelling but wholly GM-facing fiction that only needed to be nuts and bolts enough that players could fight it in the last scene.

The monster is no statblock or character class or random-encounter collage element--it is a piece of a new mythology, known to the GM, that the players slowly penetrate.  D&D only did this once a monster got a module about it--Chill 2e took it for granted: they don't give you a monster unless they can give you a backstory for it, and the backstory (the silver bullets, arctic hideouts and running water) needed to be penetrated to defeat the monster.

Chill was all about committing to the monsters, reworking them into something new and spooky no matter how cranky or cliche they were. Using the mythic resonance and building on it rather than taking it as read that it needed to be replaced. Which I think is a very OSR thing.
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