The Maidenmother Crone

The head of any order or convent of priestesses of Tittivilla is known by the title Maidenmother (for example Maidenmother Alexandra or Maidenmother Cruel), the head of all the Tittivillan faithful is known as the Maidenmother Crone.

Like a new pope, each new Maidenmother Crone is drawn from the existing body of high ranking clergy (ie: the Maidenmothers).

Like the Dalai Lama, there is but one Maidenmother Crone endlessly reincarnated, unlike the Dalai Lama, this reincarnation immediately causes a grotesque and unsettling physical transformation to take place in the body of whatever Maidenmother is elevated upon the death of the last Crone.

Two new torsos--complete with arms and heads--burst forth from the Maidenmother's stomach. The resulting creature has the upper bodies of the same woman at three stages of life: young, middle-aged, and old. Generally, the original is of "mother" age but it is not unknown for a maiden-aged priestess or an ancient to be elevated.

The Maidenmother Crone is wise but not omniscient, and spends much of her time attempting to untwine the tangled skeins of fate she holds in her six hands. She functions as an oracle and has access to clerical spells of the highest level; though as a matter of course she prefers to work through others--like the gods themselves.

The personality of the Maidenmother who has undergone elevation is not erased from the resulting Crone, nor is it added--for it has always been there. The aspect of the Maidenmother Crone encompasses all the personalities of all the elevated Maidenmothers there ever were and all the ones that ever will be.

The Chain

The relentless assassins known collectively as The Chain are widely believed to be members of an ancient death-cult, they are not.

In point of fact, the only "members" of The Chain are a pair of small humunculi who use humans as hosts while carrying out their assassination contracts and speaking to clients. The pair have lived for centuries, moving from body to body, growing rich.

Although the humunculi are each about the size and shape of a newborn human, they are able to squeeze themselves into the head of a human host through the mouth (usually while the host-to-be is asleep or drunk). Once inside, the humunculi eat the host's mind and take its place in the cranial cavity--this allows the humunculus to control all of the hosts' actions. A possessed gestalt assassin is stronger, faster, and more resilient than the original host body, and has hundreds of years of training in both armed and unarmed combat.

Once they accept a contract, the humunculi of The Chain will not stop, and will attack from any available body until their quarry is slain--often pursuing a target for decades. If a host is slain, the humunculus will generally exit through the eyesocket (leaving the empty skull to collapse) and crawl quickly off to occupy a new host.

The Wyvern of the Well

The Grey Palace and the Eminent Cathedral loom above Vornheim like a pair of claws reaching for the moon. Between the two of them, there is a square. In the center of the square, there is a well. At the bottom of the well lives The Wyvern.

The Wyvern of the Well is both wealthy and wise. For reasons now lost to history, each citizen of Vornheim has the right--once in life--to climb down into the well and demand the answer to one question from the Wyvern.

In exchange for this (always correct) answer, the Wyvern demands 700 gold pieces and will, in turn, ask the questioner one question.

What the Wyvern does with the answers thus accumulated from the people of Vornheim (or the gold, for that matter), or why it--being, apparently, omniscient--bothers to ask, is unknown.

Naturally, the questions asked of the Wyvern tend to be personal, local, and, of course, petty. How can I get this, will she like it if I do that, how do I get more whatever. It is conjectured that the Wyvern, knowing--as a consequence of its ancient, strange contract or curse--the innermost hearts of the people of Vornheim, despises them for the myopic schemers they are. However, no-one wants to blow their one question asking it.

Some philosophers speculate that the Wyvern is cursed to know nothing except the answers to whatever questions the people of Vornheim will one day ask to know and what they tell him. In which case it is likely that the Wyvern went mad long ago.

Chgowiz, Maze, Minis, Pigs etc.

-First off, RPG blogger Chgowiz is back. This is excellent news if you happen to be a smart person who likes reading about how other smart people play the games that you play.*

His focus has always been on how the game actually works when it's right there in front of you and on getting new people to play. Of which focus this blog mightily approves.

-Y'know how, when someone casts a Maze spell, the victim has to wander in it "for a period of time entirely determined by the creature's intelligence". Well how about some of that "player skill not character skill"? Go here and make a maze to have on hand.

It also works as a cheap dungeon plan generator, if you're having one of those hungover-didn't-prep days.

-I said I was going to write a paean to Shannon, the mini-painter Reaper assigned to "I Hit It With My Axe" as soon as I was able to take a decent picture of the minis she painted? Well here's my best attempt so far:

-Goblin Pigballoon Scout info:
(As Seen On TV)
The pig balloon is generally made by a goblin alchemist. The actual process involves removing the organs and bones, coating the pig with a glossy sealant (often of a gaudy color), and sewing the pig's mouth (and other orifices) shut after filling it with a lighter-than-air substance.

An average pig scout balloon can carry one goblin or one halfling plus 20 gp's weight. Altitude control is not good. The scout is usually armed with vials of standard green slime. Any failed missile attack on the balloon will have a 50% chance of hitting the pig, which will cause the balloon to descend rapidly and comically.

The scout's d20 stats are below, if you're using the old system that's AC 6.

Larger balloons made from giant frogs, giant puffer fish, and even whales have been conjectured but have never been observed.



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*If you're wondering why Chgowiz ever left in the first place, it's because he was sick of internet drama. Those specifically and desperately interested in seeing the last straw (plus some poorly fact-checked guesses about what system my group uses) can look here. It's all over now, though, so if you have some brilliant opinion about it, bear in mind that no-one cares anymore.

Unicorn Brainstorm

What to do with a unicorn?

Riding unicorns is preposterous. Seriously, it always feels like a dumb idea--the image of it. Its overkill--you have a sword and your horse has a horn? What the fuck? The unicorn needs to be its own thing. Maybe Satan could ride a unicorn, that's it--maybe.

The-unicorn-is-secretly-someone-else. Ok, who?

-Someone good? Seems boring. If the unicorn is someone good then they're basically the same as they were only a unicorn--they "mean" the same thing either way, and act the same. But then maybe if the unicorn acts like an animal then maybe once you get the unicorn you have to let it go because it's secretly someone good. That's tragic. Though in D&D, seriously, who gives a fuck about some NPC? Plus what's the point of the pre-transformation unicorn-having part of the story--to temporarily have a magic horse to play with? Lame. It's the idea of the unicorn that's interesting, not the mechanical possibilities.

-Someone useful? Ok but then so either the unicorn is a unicorn--which is interesting, or is themself--which is interesting. But they're pretty much separate things that aren't better together. Unless it's a wereunicorn. Man, what a dumb idea. Next!

-Someone evil? Obviously this has merit. Then the question is whether the unicorn acts evil or just is a dumb animal. And, etiher way, there needs to be some threat of the evil person becoming a non-unicorn any minute.

The esoteric unicorn--it's like some sort of spectral 2D-seeming unicorn that sort of crosses your field of vision like it comes out of one side of a tree. Like a sort of heraldic image of a unicorn come to life. You could do a whole creepy sort of playing-card Camelot thing with weird stiff symbolic chivalrous types moving around and being inscrutable. Ok.

Victim Unicorn. You can be sure the bad guys are bad because they're fucking up a fucking unicorn. That's even worse than cutting down the magic pixie forest. The best bet here would appear to be to cruelly objectify the unicorn like in some Mackinnon/Dworkin wet dream (or would that be dry dream?) and just have the bad guys be fucking it all up and the beast itself has no agency at all.

In effect, the unicorn is, in this case, just a ground upon which the badguys can display their badness. Thinking up exotic badnesses to have them practice upon it is the hard part.

Unicorn-as-ingredient. The unicorn contains something of value, or something which will cause trouble if left uncollected. The unicorn can either be a victim (as above) in need of rescue or can be just out there and the PCs have to get it--in which case it gets to act like a regular monster (finally) and fight back.

Mutant unicorn. Like for example that creepy RuneQuest unicorn-head guy, or some sort of deformed abomination. Pretty much writes itself, since the creepiness and corruption is automatically embedded in the concept.

Important unicorns--like, unique ones which are exalted and meaningful to some group of people or citystate or reigion--are annoying. Ok, maybe not if it isn't obvious where they are. But having one just in the middle of town like "hey this is our unicorn", I hate that. Some random unicorn in a forest somewhere that you can't kill because it will make all the children of Grophyndoria grow a second head that will bite their first head, that's ok. Important but obscure is the point, I guess. Not a fucking mascot.

And if it glows or something, fuck it.


Trapper-Keeper Unicorn. So, it's like pink and sparkly and frolics. I sometimes think it'd be fun to have some acid-trip adventure where the girls have to fight some deluded princess in her horrible sparkly pink kingdom with kitten warriors on unicorns and clouds that cry rain on you. Not today, though.

Talking unicorns suck. What are they going to say? Anything a unicorn has to say is too funny. Can't do it.

Snakes Are Books

Here's one: snakes are books.

Every serpent is a text. Certain people (and non-people) know how to read their scales.

As they grow, the animals revise and expand themselves until they die.

The most common and convenient method of reading a snake (among human ophdiobibliologists) is having it slither through an ivory serpent-reader--a sphere with ornately carved orifices and channels.

Unusually large specimens can be read with the use of specialized lenses.
(And here you thought that was just a Chinese puzzle ball.)

Those who know the spoken language of the Yuan-Ti know what snakes hiss. Each snake is hissing its name--the title of the book that it is.

Common snakes are usually fairly uninteresting works--garter snakes tend to be cookbooks, corn snakes are generally works of adventure fiction with cliche characters or too-convenient endings. Rarer breeds--100' anacondas, albino cobras--often contain long-forgotten secrets or comprise unique works of poetry or philosophy.

Since snakes are natural phenomena, and all books are, in one way or another, discussions of natural phenomena or its effects, snakes could be considered a continuous monologue that the world produces about itself. Thus the symbol: a serpent eating its own tail.

Giant snakes are typically encyclopedias or great multi-volume sagas representing the myths and theogonies of entire cultures.

Scholars disagree: the amphisbaena is either a palindrome or a work which reveals an entirely different (yet equally coherent) narrative when read backwards.

Nagas are linguistic texts, translating from the languages of snakes to the languages of humans.

The snakes growing from the heads of medusae are generally reference works and the medusaes themselves are often cataloguers--tending private libraries containing nothing but caged snakes,, selectively breeding exotic and daring new works.
The Librarians--known in the east as Yuan-Ti--also catalogue and breed works, though in a far less dilettantish and casual fashion--they believe that careful control of cross-species breeding can and will one day unveil a Great Glistening Book containing all the secrets of creation. Each Librarian is a visionary religious work attesting to the perfection of one or other path to the Great All-Serpent.

Mariliths contain terrible secrets and blasphemies.

It is said that beneath every great library in human civilization a cabal of wizard-scholars tends to a chained Lernean Hydra. They carefully transcribe and translate the information gleaned from the beast's skin before pruning off each head in turn and reading what grows in its place, thereby nurturing a constantly updated stream of knowledge.

Dragons are books of magic spells. Owing to the difficulty of reading them while alive, complete dragon hides will almost always fetch a higher price from the right sorcerer or alchemist than from any armorer.

Pseudodragons are helpful but incomplete summaries of the contents of their larger brethren.

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I like this'cause it explains and rationalizes how every other monster is part snake, fits with ideas common to all kinds of cultures equating snakes with knowledge, and gives the party some pretty all-purpose adventure hooks, whether they want money, power, knowledge, or all three.

Who Is This?

Last time I drew something I couldn't identify and asked what it was, the answers y'all left were a lot of fun. Let's do it again.

Click the picture to make it bigger.

The Alphabetical Monster Thing Available As A .pdf...

...you must be shitting me. No fucking way.

The whole thing is available right here in friendly HTML, with no download bullshit, no file-size issues, no compatibility issues, no waiting around to flip to the next page. Seriously, you want a pdf? When you hear music you like do you go "That was awesome, but can I get it on wax cylinder?" Plus the originals have all the peoples' comments with their ideas about monsters, many of which were brilliant even if I never did get around to saying it.

What Is It?

I drew it. What should it be? Click to see less blurry.

Nephilidian Vampire

So decadent are these creatures that they fear equally the sun, the sea, dry land, and, indeed any surface not hewn by an intelligent hand.

Most prefer never to leave their half-drowned empire of Nephilidia. Inside its tarnished palaces and rotting halls they sit--forever knee-deep in black and stagnant water, with strange algaes stretched like
cobwebs from the surface to the once-ornate walls and crumbling statuary--endlessly elaborating cruel and languid intrigues, attended by salamander men and eyeless fish.

This amphibious species can change into a small, mobile pool of black blood, or take the form of a strange, darting, long-tendrilled aquatic animal resembling a hybrid of a lionfish and a manta ray. If reduced to zero hit points on land, the creature will revert to the former form. Consequently, if sufficiently injured, the Nephilidian vampire often sinks into the soil and becomes hopelessly trapped and intermingled with the earth. If grievously wounded in the water, this bizarre creature will turn into sixteen black stones and sink to the bottom. In either form, a drop of blood from another vampire is sufficient to revive the creature. Due to these vulnerabilites, the Nephilidian vampire prefers to travel via subterranian aquaducts, sewers, or other shallow, watertight, artificial constructions. They despise, but can--with an effort of will--tolerate clean running water.

In their humanoid form, they are distinguishable from ordinary vampires by the gills on their necks and their glassy blue eyes.

Moon Man Monster

The cursed faces of Selenians--or Sublunary men--change as the month progresses.

When "full" none can stand in their light and lie. When "crescent", none can stand in it and tell the truth.

Selenians can root an enemy's feet to the ground or teleport d4 creatures to random locations with a glance.


When crescent, Sublunary men have been known to remove their own heads and use them as edged weapons.



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Images: the photo is Peter Lorre, the mini is by Pete Taylor and the painting is by John Blanche.

Vomiter

...the inhabitants of the dead city had, no doubt, some elaborate and beautiful name for them, but we just call them Vomiters. Victims of some disease--probably synthetic, definitely magical--they still appear on occasion, looking ill and looking pitiful, they stagger and moan and cough and reach out their hopeless hands and then hopelessly open their hopeless hellmouths, and out comes almost anything. Always a beast, always terrible--two in ten seconds, during the worst fits. Roll d100 + 5 and consult the corresponding page in the monster manual--or any other method you prefer.

They are, for all that, ordinary and capable of being killed by ordinary means--and will welcome it.

Four Ways Of Looking At A Vampire

So the girls are vampire hunting. They really don't know much about the vampire yet, and, frankly, neither do I.

But I do know I hate to waste a monster, especially a high-level one, especially with a group of players that've never fought it before.

So I've been thinking about my options, and reading up, and thinking of how to wring every drop of doom and danger and scheming and minion and mood and campaign fuel out of the situation...

(No, you are not allowed to post "Don't worry what tha' other mofos, do! Just do it man! Don't overthink it! i'm sure whatever you think up will be awwesumm!" in the comments. Thinking is my idea of fun. Thinking about how I want this to roll is a pleasant problem to contemplate.)

What follows is not so much four different types of vampires (the pennangalan, the moroi, the strigoi, etc.) as four different kinds of ways vampires are treated in stories. Obviously, there are lots of other ways, (Abbot and Costello Vs. Dracula, for example) but I'm just talking about pre-modern stuff and modern stuff that copies the classic templates...


Puzzle-Monster/Disease-Victim Vampire

(Die! Dracula! Die!)

From this point of view, a vampire is a category of monster mainly distinguished by the fact that it requires special tricks to kill it. Sunlight, stakes, running water, etc. Like a medusa or a hydra. The tricks and rules are well-defined and usually adhere closely, in-game, to the tricks and rules the players know from out-of-game sources like TV and books. The theme of vampire-as-disease-victim (as opposed to vampire-as-curse-victim or vampire-as-personification-of-evil) is important since the idea that there are specific rules for infection is really important.

This is the obvious D&D default vampire.

The nice thing about this aspect of vampires is that there is more broadly-known and consistent lore about vampires than any other monster (like are wights vulnerable to acid? Who knows? But vampires don't like garlic, we all know that), so if you're designing a strategic or tactical challenge using the Old School D&D motto "player skill not character skill" it's hard to beat a vampire for a foe that PCs can really think about before kicking down the door. The more the PCs know about any given situation, the more opportunity there is to see the situation as a strategic challenge. Here are the rules--go!

Typically, if a PC ends up as a vampire, then it's hard to escape sticking pretty much to this model, since it's relatively easy to describe a vampire this way in game terms and then just let the PC do whatever they want.

Movies typically look at vampires this way for the most part because then they don't need as much backstory. Even profoundly arty movie vampires--like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu or Andy Warhol's Dracula, end up, despite all the metaphors involved, having a lot of the puzzle-monster vampire about them.

Spooky Screw-You Puzzle-Monster/Disease-Victim Vampire

(Everything you read in Dracula is wrong)

As above, only the DM goes on wikipedia, looks up "vampire" and reads something like this...

In order to ward off the threat of vampires and disease, twin brothers would yoke twin oxen to a plow and make a furrow with it around their village. An egg would be broken and a nail driven into the floor beneath the bier of the house of a recently deceased person. Two or three elderly women would attend the cemetery the evening after the funeral and stick five hawthorn pegs or old knives into the grave: one at the position of the deceased's chest, and the other four at the positions of his arms and legs. Other texts maintain that running backwards uphill with a lit candle and a turtle would ward off a stalking vampire. Alternately, they may surround the grave with a red woolen thread, ignite the thread, and wait until it was burnt up. If a noise was heard at night and suspected to be made by a vampire sneaking around someone's house, one would shout "Come tomorrow, and I will give you some salt," or "Go, pal, get some fish, and come back."


...and so, instead of the standard post-Hollywood stakes-and-sunlight model, comes up with some weird new vampire with new vampire-killing rules.

While using unfamiliar folklore to define the vampire has the advantage of making it spookier (at least if you go with the old-women-with-the-knives type of thing, the running-backwards-with-a-turtle thing might not exactly bring the arcane terror), it has the disadvantage of taking away the player-knowledge-comes-in-handy tactical aspect, plus it could be read as just a Fuck You from the DM if the players don't know about it ahead of time.


Ghost Story/Curse-Victim Vampire

(Dracula--Love Never Dies)

A vampire is what's become of an individual person with an individual history and so getting rid of the vampire involves somehow tying up the loose ends of that person's life or otherwise dealing with them, possibly in addition to the "usual" vampire-killing methods. Getting rid of the vampire will necessitate finding a lost love, righting a wrong, satisfing an oath, moving a symbolic object etc. The vampire's predatory nature is nearly always pretty obviously a sexual metaphor.

From this point of view the vampire is less diseased than cursed, his or her condition is specific to him or her. Though the vampire might be able to create more vampires with its bite, its own vampirism isn't necessarily the result of another vampire's bite (that would make the vampire less unique)--it could be some sort of divine punishment or the result of an improper burial. This kind of vampire can have unique abilities tied metaphorically or symbolically to its past or situation, and often enacts magical-thinking-ghost-type-behavior-patterns like, for example, if the vampire died by suicide then it lives in a well and tempts everyone who looks in or if the vampire's mortal body was killed by someone with red hair it always attacks people with red hair, etc.

In this case, the vampire is the center of a traditional ghost story--curses and taboos are in effect, and the PCs have to enter this system of spooky thinking in order to get rid of the vampire. It typically appears in an investigative-type situation.

(The closest obvious referent in D&D here would be Strahd from Ravenloft, who always seemed like a sort of a Castlevania-style Dracula-clone puzzle-monster sitting on top of a megadungeon with a little of the romantic ghost-story stuck on top. Probably the proportions of each vary from DM to DM.)

Sometimes aristocratic vampires are this kind of vampire and sometimes they aren't. It depends on whether you're supposed to be sympathetic to- or intrigued by- the aristocrat's history or whether his/her aristocraticness is just basically a metaphor for his/her vampireness.

In general, vampires are scariest when they aren't there yet--and the ghost story vampire emphasizes this aspect. S/he is just sort of an excuse for all the other moody and spooky things--like how in Lovecraft the actual monster is less the point than just the atmosphere of madness and terror that it generates. The plot is the real monster, the vampire is just the thing that gives it a center.


Demonic/Mythic/Evil-Force Vampire

(Dracula--from dracul, meaning "dragon")

A vampire is like a demon or is a kind of demon. It personifies evil forces (generally ones associated with animalistic rather than civilized behavior), and while its nature is vague and insubstantial and partially metaphorical, it's extremely powerful. This is the kind of primal evil from the dawn of time found in the oldest myths and is often distinguished from other demons only by the fact that it drinks blood. It often looks more like a creature than a human. It does not scheme, it simply preys.

Slaying this vampire will require either epic-level skull-splitting with some sort of gimmicks that make the PCs the equal of the mythic heroes that killed these things back in the day or righting some sort of larger-scale spiritual or moral wrongness. This kind of vampire is, above all, blasphemous, and so the solution to the vampire, viewed from this angle, will often involve invoking piety, righteousness, or divine intervention.

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It goes without saying that in most stories these kinds of vampire overlap--just as the classic vampire themes of disease, lust, and blasphemy overlap. But in looking at pre-modern vampire stories, it's usually pretty easy to fit the story pretty squarely into one of these three models.

Anyway, six first-level PCs against a vampire is going to be a long-haul adventure, so I've got a while to think about it.

Minotaurs

There are some things that are really hard to sculpt properly at miniature scale--foxy women, hydras.

And then there are some things that are very easy to get right--or at least people regularly manage to do it.


Dwarves come out ok quite a bit--and minotaurs.

Man are the miniatures people good at making minotaurs.

I am firmly of the opinion that there should usually be minotaurs. Minotaurs hang out in laybrinths, which are the coolest places to hang out.
Even that Warcraft-looking anime-ish guy up there looks fairly decent.

For more information on minotaurs, visit your local library, or just click
here.









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Video is Kyle Kinane. He rules almost as much as minotaurs, and his first CD just came out.

The Fishwife

Fishwives typically appear clad in long white dresses of moist lace and inhabit rotting, rudderless vessels or lonely towers perched atop islands far out at sea. They use magic to ensnare passing ships, order their subordinates to shanghai the luckless crews, and seek to marry the comeliest males among them in short, bizarre ceremonies presided over by docile, stoop-shouldered, fish-headed clerics in tweed vests.

In appearance, the fishwives are entirely horrific, with their fishy heads and fish-scaled skin contrasting more decisively and more grotesquely with their human anatomy than in the case of the (perhaps unrelated) kuo-toa.

Despite their fondness for human finery, the fishwives are aware of the loathesomeness of their condition, and deplore it. It has been theorized that they hope, through unions with attractive human males, to gradually breed the hideousness out of their bloodline. The efficacy of this strategy is as yet untested, as every man awakening groggily from this or that unsuccessful attempting to repel a seaborne raid to find himself dressed in formalwear in a crude chapel on the arm of a fishwife has either divorced her immediately or died trying.

The magics employed by the fishwife are akin to those employed by the sea hag, typically imparting influence over weaker creatures, foul weather, the body, and the brine.

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Photo and, probably, whole idea taken from the album cover of the Captain Beefheart album "Trout Mask Replica".

The Thog or, Chiron Crawler

None know the true origin of the thogs (or digitaurs, or Chiron Crawlers, or, simply, 'crawlers') but sages feel it is safe to assume it involved sorcery, lunacy, and strong drink. They have the head, arms, and upper torso of ordinary men, while their lower bodies are shaped like gigantic human hands.

There are two major subraces, known as "tall" and "long" in the common tongue.

Tall thogs (with the fingers emerging forward from the torso--as in the photo) are generally given to intellectual pursuits, including bureauracy, politics and magic. These fearsome hybrids are often found in the employ of sea hags, misanthropic alchemists, and power-mad magi, though some have been known to betray their masters in order to pillage eldritch secrets from their libraries and laboratories.

Long thogs (with the thumb characteristically emerging from the front of the torso and the fingers facing backward, as in the sketch below) are fierce warriors. In the gladiatorial pits of Cors-Edeth and lower Vornheim thogs are pitted against driders and centaurs, and few who wager on the misshapen abominations are disappointed.

Their weapon of choice is the poleaxe, with which they strike ordinary foes from above.

Although they make excellent guards, "right" crawlers will only allow themselves to be partnered with "left" crawlers, and vice versa.

In wilderness areas, both subspecies have been observed to grow their leg-nails long and use them to scratch or claw as they move toward opponents, though this tactic is impractical in urban areas or stone-floored dungeons.

While few play the violin, the one in the photo does.

Crunch:

Basically, thogs should be totally scalable--i.e. about as scary as you need them to be the first time the PCs meet them. Long-nailed thogs get one extra "scratch" attack per opponent (up to a maximum of 5, obviously). Their move stat should be faster than ordinary humans but lower than that of a true centaur. They're a good monster if you're in the mood for hit-location charts.

If you really want to go nuts, you can give magic-using tall thogs a slew of unusual or especially deadly spells activated by the gestures and movements of their lower body, or by a mated pair of thogs moving around in unison.

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Image and, in all likelihood, entire concept, taken from the cover to the Gray Matter album "Thog" from Dischord records.

...And From There It Writes Itself (Pt. 2)

Ok, so what are a medusa, a vampire queen, a fat unconscious demon, and a goblin alchemist all doing in the same dungeon?

You could just throw all those monsters in there, but having a logic to it all actually makes it easier to write. If the monsters are there for a reason then it's easy to decide how they'll react to unexpected behavior on the part of the PCs.

So here's the logic:

The demon is from a gazillion years ago. He and his brothers once ravaged the Earth--as colossal demons will.

So along comes a horrible necromancer. He's horrible, but he likes living and not being stepped on, so he recruits some medusas to walk around and turn the demons to stone.

So the demons are turned to stone. The last demon is blind so he can't be turned to stone, but they stop the last demon anyway with some kinda black magic.

So then the problem is imprisoning him. So they slice all the petrified demons into blocks and imprison the last demon underground inside a prison made from his brothers.

The horrible necromancer builds a whole underground complex around the imprisoned demon--with a very nice library. He can use it to leech off arcane power from the demon for various nefarious purposes. Plus the demon has a sort of subtle evil influence over local events even though he's chained up.

The necromancer's got a thing with one of the medusas (facilitated by some sort of petrification-proof charm, I guess), she lives there too.

Sooner or later, sometime in the past, what with all these adventurers going around adventuring all the time in D&D-world, the necromancer gets neutralized by some do-gooders. (Some PCs in some campaign some guy I've never heard of who lives in Nebraska ran in 1983, probably.)

He is then entombed, in a semi-living state, in his own dungeon. In a secret location.

His medusa girlfriend sticks around, statue-fying occasional visitors, living the lonely life of a medusa. Collecting art, etc.

Thousands of years go by, eventually the entombed necromancer develops enough power to place a necromantic curse on an ant or small spider. The ant will turn the first person it bites into a vampire.

In the hopes of creating enough trouble in the outside world that someone might stumble on his tomb, the necromancer sends the ant out to cause trouble in the outside world.

It bites a hapless halfling.

So the halfling, she becomes a vampire, and raises a ruckus with enslaved fellow halflings.

They all move underground so she can stay out of the light--the complex is naturally the place they go since it's close to where they live.

Meanwhile, a sphinx--being, like all her kind, a scholarly type--has been looking through the library (it's a very nice library). When the vampire queen finds the sphinx in there, she captures her and locks her up in the lowest dungen levels so she can ask her questions, if need be.

Now the medusa isn't happy about this, but anybody who comes near her door she turns to stone, so she's willing to tolerate the halflings being on the other side of the complex for a little while.

The vampire and company have been there for like a month when the posse shows up.

The goblins just recently showed up because they got lost and a cave collapsed behind them when they were in the area. They've been here about a week.

Then, as usual, you got brainless wandering monsters that live udergorund and eat stuff.

And then there's the posse, who just showed up.

Makes sense, right?

I Got Your Endgame Right Here, Buddy

Tower Golem

These enormous magical stone constructs--allegedly a hybrid of goblin alchemy and dwarvish engineering--are as tall as castles and feared in every civilized nation. In siege warfare, the looming juggernauts are employed to crush battlements, stomp infantry, carry archers in their stony crowns, and act as living bridges across moats and parapets.

In order to control a tower golem, one must--during the battle--employ a specially-prepared and highly-accurate scale model of the battlefield upon which it is to be deployed, including a model of the golem itself quarried from the same stone as the golem.

The golem's hulking bodies burn magic quickly, and few remain animated more than four or five hours. When the energies that power them dissipate, they slump over, immobile, and are often converted into fortified residences. Occasionally, depending on where they come to rest, their "corpses" become integrated into the strongholds they once were employed to destroy.

On rare occasions, it has proven possible for clever wizards to re-animate these living siege engines after their "retirement", and on rarer occasions, the creatures have been known to live on in strange and subtle ways long after their original purpose has been served.

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Crunch:

A tower golem isn't something ordinary PCs should be able to take on directly. Big h.p., big damage, big in general, great A.C.--4-10 storeys tall. They're slow, though, so their to-hit on any individual target smaller than an elephant should be pretty hopeless. If you wanna really get under the hood you might say it ignores any AC due to armor but AC due to dexterity or size counts double.

In most cases, you'd be fighting a tower golem in a large-scale-battle. Taking it out would be an objective in a daisy-chain-of-death-and-destruction-type-situation, by hitting it with a catapult or tricking it into a trench or taking over the controlling model or by going inside the golem and attacking its power source or vital systems or something like that.

High-level PCs, of course, might have a shot at it, in which case I'd say remember that it's big and slow and made of stone and its vulnerabilities should reflect that--picks do more damage than hammers which do more damage than axes which do more damage than swords which do more damage than arrows. Fire likely only makes it angry.

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Sketches by me. They're a little more cartoony than I imagine the thing to be. Hopefully you get the idea.

The Skrath

The Skrath

The Skrath is indeed horrible, and feared in every corner of every land, more even than the dread Tarrasque. His body is the loathsome body of a hideous crawling thing, and his face is a grotesque mockery of the faces of men.

He creeps along the undersides of carriages, whispering foully to coach-horses and exposes his horrific tongue to lone fishwives on the wharves in the night.

It is said that the coming of The Skrath makes doves abandon their eggs, it is said that the coming of The Skrath causes gourds to grow in unclean shapes, it is said that the coming of The Skrath makes good men weep and wail and gnash their teeth and clean their knives until his coming is ended, it is said that the coming of The Skrath bodes ill for the education of children, yet it is also said that he teaches them the secrets of the Moon and the White Star.

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Crunch & Notes:

Basically, The Skrath is a unique three-foot-long greyish-green monster that shows up one day in a town or city and is usually found just lying there doing nothing (there is a 25% chance it will be found lying there doing nothing with its tongue hanging out). Treat The Skrath like an artifact or relic in AD&D--what exactly The Skrath actually can do is left entirely up to the DM, but the main thing is that the villagers, townsfolk, nobility, and other excitable 0-level types see The Skrath as the worst possible omen and have copious legends built up around it that may or may not be true and are terrified of it.

In imagining possible properties of The Skrath, remember that The Skrath may be powerful but it is not flashy: it won't just shoot fireballs at people, but maybe anyone who points at it will slowly melt over the course of a day, or maybe The Skrath just makes everyone roll at -15 all the time, or maybe it eats kindness and so removes all tender feelings from people, or maybe it is impossible to kill not because it has a million hit points but merely because anyone wanting to kill it immediately loses all motivation, or maybe it makes everyone's wishes at the exact moment it appears come true--so if someone's thinking "I wish I could find my shoe" then s/he'll see The Skrath and find a shoe, and if someone's thinking "I wish I'd never had a child" then their child disappears, or maybe The Skrath is a benevolent wizard doomed to crawl the earth in a detestable guise, or maybe The Skrath is a magical rorschach test that responds to people in whatever way they treat it, or maybe The Skrath is a philosopher that says disturbing things like the Earth revolves around the Sun and monarchy is not the ideal form of government and women should have the same legal rights as men, or maybe The Skrath is just a one hit-die greyish-green animal that lies there looking horrible and not doing anything and people think it's evil even though it's actually just ugly.

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Image credit: me

Top 10 D&D Monsters Sort of

I wasn't blogging yet when the 10 Favorite D&D Monsters meme went around. I keep trying to write one but I always end up with too many. Plus, really, I just love the classics. Especially compared to, like, Noisms and his Yak-men and people who actually like owlbears.

Basically, my favorites fit into these categories:


Things the Greeks thought up:
Minotaur, medusa, hydra, sphinx. Deep in the human mind is a maze and in the maze is a monster. It's a Greek monster. This probably has something to do with the invention of geometry and the Apollonian/Dionysian tension at the heart of all human endeavors. Or something. Maybe it's just me. Basically all I know is, if it refuses to die, turns you to stone, asks riddles, or is the product of an unholy union of man and beast I want to see it, then see it die.

Goblins:
The spooky magic kind with shrill voices that scare birds and eat babies and make terrible things happen to you if you tell lies or touch their weird magic tree.


Flail Snail:
Pretend you don't know what a snail is. Pretend you don't know what a flail is. Now look at the picture. God that's fucked.

Demons:
Medieval demons, Lovecraftian demons, effete 19th century demons, succubi. Whatever. Your parents were right about this game.

Smart skeletons:
Lich, Death Knight, Eye of Fear and Flame. It is dead, yet it knows something you don't. Or, worse: It is dead, therefore it knows something you don't.

non-Draculoid vampires:
Vampire halfling queens with pet vampire monkeys, for instance, or the Hollow Bride. Vampires are generally metaphors for the evils associated with The Old World and its ways. And D&D is all about the Old World and its ways. So fighting vampires cuts to the crux...no, bad pun...gets to the heart...no, worse pun...anyway vampires seem very close to the point of the whole thing.


Beholder:
Worst. Eye. Ever.


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Image credits:Minotaur Adrian Smith, Beholder Tom Wham, Skeleton Harry Clarke, Flail Snail--Alan Hunter.