What's THIS For...? (Best of Dragon 1-5)

After taking a look at the old Lankhmar: City of Adventure supplement and reporting upon all that which I therein beheld, people asked for more reviews of old things. So here goes...

This time, the kind people at Troll & Toad have delved into their warehouse full of used game stuff and sent along The Best of Dragon Magzine Volumes 1-5.

So, what's in there? Mostly, what's in there falls into the following categories:

-Has Long Since Been Integrated Into The Game: i.e. Here's a new class: the ranger! If you're a historian of the game, like James M. or have a penchant for saying "what kind of great game could I throw together by taking what appears to be a misprint here in the illusionist description seriously" like Jeff R., then this is great. If you're like me and let James and Jeff comb through first drafts of old game ideas so you don't have to, this is filler.

-Conceivably Useful To Some Other DM Somewhere, But Not To Me: i.e. "Shlump Da Orc" explaining that asbestos weighs 125-175 pounds per cubic foot or Roger Moore finally explaining what exactly the fucking Astral Plane is.

-"Humor"

-NPC Classes: If it's an NPC class, do we really need all these level-progression charts and shit? Do your PCs really go "Well we'll consult the alchemist--but only if you can tell me exactly how many experience points she has." And if you've managed to snag a professional jester or duellist and make them into a henchman long enough that s/he's started accumulating xp, can't you just say s/he advances as fast as the slowest advancing member of the party and be done with it?

Most of these NPC classes do exactly what you'd think they do, and so don't really seem worth the expense, with the exception of the oracle and the witch, which seem to have had some genuine research and/or creativity put into them and have ideas in them which might conceivably make a campaign more interesting and complex.

-Random Tables Full of Random Adjectives: Hey, I like my random tables as much as the next guy, but the day I can't find "5-Orange, 6-Blue and bumpy" on the internet or just make it up is the day they need to put me in the ground.

-Antedeluvian DM Advice: "When drawing your map, first sketch in major terrain features..." Ok, sure, I'll try to remember to do that.

So...

Stripping out all that, what struck me as interesting was...

Volume 1 has an article on witches comparable to a really long and involved entry by one of your favorite D&D bloggers about how you might run a witch class, with spell descriptions and items that never made it into canon. Not gold, but solid. And wacky.

Also, Volume 1, predictably, corners the market on retrogroovy ads and pictures, including the wad of solid genius illuminating the top of this here blog entry. The other Best of Dragons are sadly light on cool pictures--in many cases they seem to have commissioned newer, lamer art to replace the art from the original issues.

Volume 2 is the best of the lot, and includes an article containing short but evocative descriptions of alternate vampires (including the Blautsauger, which has no skeleton and huge eyes, and the Alp, which appears to be a butterfly) complete with esoteric vampire-killing methods.

It also has two excellent articles on how to use the mathematical concept of the tesseract to generate crazy Escheresque dungeon architecture with weird gravity. They do a great job of not only explaining the geometry well enough that you could map it, but describing it convincingly enough to make it sound like fun in a game. Inspiring as fuck.

This volume also has a lot of Gygax musings, if you're into that sort of thing, and the notorious-but-boring "Politics of Hell" article wherein Satan is provided with D&D stats.

Volume 3 is pretty dull if you strip out all the stuff that later made it into Unearthed Arcana. This begins the more clearly Silver Age products--corporate design, no ads.

Volume 4 has a decent roll-a-one fumble table that includes damage to the weapon, and a detailed article on runes including both history and possible D&D uses.

Volume 5 has the Oracle class--containing 20-odd forms of -mancies, what kind of information can reasonably be gleaned from each, and what level the oracle has to be to perform them. Full of adventure seeds, if you think about it

It also has a couple Ed Greenwood articles on pre-modern firearms, in historical context and with game stats. Though I'll probably never use this stuff, it is thoughtful, careful, interesting, and displays pole-arm-like fine detail.

And if you still need to know more before handing over your hard-earned dollar, just hang on for the comments, where lots of people will write in about all the awesome articles that they like that I didn't.

In Your Face, Dungeon Master

It's Wednesday, time for some show notes:

Here we see the party after 8 hours of D&D--some people are tired and some are drunk* but they all want to get out of the dungeon, so we keep going...

Some people can't stand DMing when everyone's gone loopy, I think it's funny. Like war, D&D should always begin with exquisite order and preparation and end in total chaos.

This battle was entirely vertical. Frankie aced the spider queen.

Connie and the oil: Of course there are more than 2 kinds of oil, but I meant 2 kinds that the party had gotten their hands on so far.

The blanket scheme: It wasn't the worst plan, but, seriously, no matter what Sasha says, you roll a one and that's that.

Next week:

The first Justine Jolie episode. It's sunny, everyone is rested and sober, and they get to find out all about what's in that Goblin Palace.

Click here to see it bigger and without the banner ad.


_____________
*Apparently on a very sweet white wine Danny Wylde (straightedge) picked up at the liquor store--Sasha hated it, Frankie loved it and Mandy, while acknowledging its failings, nonetheless found it in her heart to accept it.

No Wonder Vampires Are So Lonely

...reviewing all the monsters, you'll notice there's only one decent monster that starts with V. Unless you count the Vargouille, which is a type of vampire.

Vampire

The usual problem with vampires in D&D is squaring the typical (and very interesting) conception of a vampire as a spooky Machiavellian subtle horror movie monster with the fact that the easiest thing for a vampire to be in D&D is a guy just like you who hits you with things and can turn into a wolf or a bat and is really hard to kill. Basically a sort shape changing Goth-themed super villain

I'll just record a few rules you might be able to use to make a spookier vampire:

A vampire can never (and knows it can never) touch the same victim twice--so if it goes after you, it's going all the way.

A vampire can never appear to the same person in the same form twice--so you never know if you're fighting the vampire or just one of its minions.

A vampire can never change shape in front of anyone else and if reduced to 0 hp it will have to be rescued.

Vargouille

My best shot at the vargouille was this.

The Two Monsters That Begin With U Have Nothing In Common

All the monsters...U time.

Like its good friend Q, U has but two monsters:

Umber Hulk

In the comics, the Hulk got his name 'cause he was marauding around and some soldier said (approximately) "It's some kind of....hulk!" Do you imagine this thing got its name because it waddled out of the shadows and some terrified henchman went "oh no, it's some kind of...hulk! A-and it's umber!"

In recent years, illustrations of the umber hulk have turned it from its original Kirby-esque form into a sort of bipedal giant flea. The original at least has wackiness on it's side, the new one is the kind of thing that'd look really great in the 3d animated giant bug movie but has very little cache in the imagination. The original umber hulk--if we ignore the comic bookiness of the picture-is really not too far from a Bosch demon: it looks at you and you are confused and then it bites you with mandibles. I think my real issue with the hulk as originally presented is that it's treated like an ordinary species rather than some abyssal abomination.

Unicorn

We are all the way down to u, very near the end, so you probably already know--if you've been reading these since the beginning--two things I'll say up front:

-the unicorns I'll use will be nasty or gruesome or gritty or appalling victimized and,

-the girls would desperately like to get their hands on one.

But what else? Long before Christians or even Europeans got ahold of unicorns, their defining feature was untamability--it signified this to every culture that ever dreamed of a horse with a horn. Why?

Well, what's a horse? To the kinds of people who sit around thinking up things to engrave and to symbolize, a horse is an aid to war. You ride on it so you can fight people and the horn is a weapon. In other words, in a unicorn you've got the horse and you've got the sword, so who really needs a guy since all they really do is sit on the horse and hold the sword? It's the premodern equivalent of a tank. So a unicorn very neatly symbolizes self sufficency--it is, if nothing else, independent.

This is perhaps why riding a pegasus into battle seems a little bit less overkill than riding a unicorn. It's actually a kind of interesting paradox: no matter how it's set up, the point of the unicorn is generally going to be that the PCs want the unicorn--but the other point of the unicorn is that the unicorn makes the most sense when it's independent. Doing pretty much the only thing a PC could do with it takes away the very thing that makes it itself.

Most monsters you can only kill their bodies, but a clever enough PC can actually do worse to the unicorn: it can rob it of meaning.

T Monsters Are Funny

All the monsters--T.

The monsters that begin with T are a little funny. Some are downright silly.

Thought Eater

Mandy: This is just Psyduck from Pokemon except before Pokemon. The joke about psyduck was that he was stupid and bumbling.
Zak: But aren't psychic monsters always smart?
Mandy: Let's look up psyduck in the Wikipedia.
Zak: No! I don't wanna look up Psyduck in the Wikipedia.
(Mandy looks up Psyduck in wikipedia.)
Zak: Do you think that the Psyduck was based on the Thought Eater?
Mandy: I think the Psyduck is better than the Thought Eater, but yeah, based on it.
Zak: Why?
Mandy: It has a whole back story like the Psyduck has a headache and it pretends to be stupid in order to lure people into a false sense of security--it has more character. This thing is just a dumb predator that's like (duck voice) I'm gonna eat your brains!
Zak: So if you were running a game would you include a Thought Eater and just give it Psyduck's back story?
Mandy: Maybe, I'd probably do some other adjustments.
Zak: Like what?
Mandy: I'm not gonna tell you 'cause then you'll do it like when I mentioned the Shrieker as a kind of spell and you were all like 'oh now that I think of it there's all kinds of ways to use Shriekers as spells.'
Zak: No, sugar, I'm gonna leave that one for you to do.
Mandy: What the Shrieker as spell or the Psyduck?
Zak: The Psyduck.
Mandy: I'd rather have the Shrieker spells.
Zak: You wanna run the game on Friday?
Mandy: Sigh.

Tick, giant

Of course, what I want to say--what anyone would want to say--is that giant ticks suck but over the course of this alphabetical exploration I started to wonder if maybe my attitude toward stupid monsters is a little too harsh. All I know is that if I ever do use a giant tick I am going to hear Kimberly Kane say "This thing fucking sucks!"

Tiger

Mandy would like me to note for the record that the smilodon is the only big cat that gets a bite attack.

I would like to note that I think white tigers are a perfectly acceptable addition to a vikingy landscape via Siberian tigers and Micheal Moorecock's Tigers of Pan Tang. I'd have it as a sort of exotic import that somehow managed to thrive.

Actually, starting this alphabetical monster run down has made the wastes between Vornhiem and Nornrik a considerably more interesting place. In addition to white tigers it has snow leopards and maybe even the occasional giant lynx--it used to just be all wolves. I think it's still mostly wolves though.

Titan

The titans in the manual are kind of meh. If I was gonna have a Titan I'd want it to be something really different from a giant--I'd want them to be like the titans in Greek myths or at least the crazier ones, very distinctive--one with like 900 eyebrows and bees for arms and each one different from each other one and like everybody knows that there are these titans around and they're all different just like everybody knows there are a certain number of them, like hockey teams.

Titanothere

Titanotheres, though more closely related to horses than rhinos, represent a rare example of a prehistoric animal being less cool than the modern one. While rhinos get horns, all the titanothere gets is shoehorns which is especially weird since shoes hadn't been invented yet.

Toad, giant

"The ice toads have their own weird language." I said most of what I have to say here under Frog but I just want to note ice toads are as smart as people.

I like to imagine a whole ice city built by ice toads with everything designed for those who hop and have no hands and it's full of devices that can be operated only by the proper use of webbed feet and sticky tongues.

Trapper

Trapper--frequently called the Lurker Below--is, like the Lurker Above, really dumb. The question then becomes is there a way that they might be stupid in the sense of stupid awesome rather than just garden variety stupid?

There is a certain pleasing elegance in the idea of defeating a lurker above by rolling a lurker below out underneath it and letting them fight it out. I also find myself wondering why later editions--generally so fond of variant monsters--never produced a lurker sideways?

Treant

I cannot abide friendly treants. The idea of the woods as a helpful and smiling and comforting thing is as anathema to me as having one of the stones in the wall of a dungeon decide it wants to take care of the players.

The environment is hostile--why else would you be in it? There might be sprites or fairies or even goblins that are friendly but it should be obvious at all events that the natural world itself--and any emanations of it--are absolutely opposed to the PCs and that their movement across it is therefore always a movement behind enemy lines. A friendly tree or friendly bush or a friendly blade of grass or a friendly example of anything that defines the landscape and is everywhere in it suggests that part of nature might want the PCs around. In unique cases maybe but as a philosophical principal, never. A friendly tree implies that at least one of the trees in the landscape isn't a spooky twisty doomforest tree and that is entirely unacceptable.

Triton

Like mermen only allegedly tough. I'm not buying it.

Troglodyte

Troglodytes are a cross between lizard men and cave men and so are like the thing about lizard men I like least. They do have interesting gimmicks though: they have chameleonlike skin and, when angry, they emit a secretion which weakens humanoids. I think the idea of distinct races of lizard men each of whom emit some distinctive sort of slime, though I see no reason why they can't just live in lizard houses rather than caves.

Troll

Giants have to be big, ogres have to be brutal and trolls have to be ugly. The troll doll is no exception. The Skáldskaparmál says:

They call me Troll;
Gnawer of the Moon,
Giant of the Gale-blasts,
Curse of the rain-hall,
Companion of the Sibyl,
Nightroaming hag,
Swallower of the loaf of heaven.
What is a Troll but that?

Wikipedia also says:
"A fairly frequent notion is that the trolls liked to appear as rolling balls of yarn."

Notions about what exactly a troll is vary wildly but to modern ears I'd say the outstanding connotation is ugliness or at least distorted features. I imagine the billy goats' troll as a green thing with a very big head and a very big bump on it's very big nose and a black hat.

Another thing about trolls is that, unlike giants, the connotation is almost always undesirable and, unlike ogres, it's not necessarily clear why. The word "troll"--though unspecific--is always insulting. You wouldn't call someone you didn't like a goblin or demon or ogre--that'd suggest they were too tough, or they were genuinely getting to you--but "troll" is just about right.

A troll is a supernatural equivalent (to modern ears) of a maggot or a slug--something undesirable but that reaps no power of intimidation or badassness from it's undesirability. The trolls in D&D regenerate, but even this power is given overtones of grotesquerie in the manual "the loathsome members of a troll have the ability to fight on even if severed from the body; a hand can claw or strangle, the head bite, etc."

Turtle, Sea, Giant and Turtle, Snapping, Giant

Certain turtles live a very long time, but all turtles--because of their slowness and wrinkles--seem old (with the possible exception of the odd cartoon turtle or baby red eared slider). This gives them unusual pathos for reptiles: you can feel bad for a turtle, and if you watch them you frequently do.

The other thing about turtles is that they have this piece of architecture on their back--so symmetrical and structural (and attached more incongruously than a crab shell to a crab). These two characteristics combine to suggest the common idea that the turtle is part of the earth or connected to it.

These to me are the really interesting giant turtles, the turtle that has the whole world on its back, or the turtle that has an inhabited island on its back or the turtle who's head and limbs stick out from some fantastic gem.

Tarrasque

The tarrasque never seemed weird enough to me. It's supposed to be the most terrifying and earth-shattering monster, but it's presented as just a stack of (very high) stats. If there really was a tarrasque I would want it to be storied and tabooed and steeped in philosophical mystery, I would want it to have obscure effects on the colour of goat's horns and fishwive's dreams. Anything that wants to be taken seriously as a god or a demon has to be thought about as often and as seriously as a god or a demon.

The tarrasque of Christian legend is one of those mix-and-match medieval terrors (turtle shell, lion head, etc) native to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. St. Martha used her feminine wiles to tame it. This is all fine and good, but a great deal has been not so much lost as re-scripted in the translation--the tarrasque-as-medieval-Godzilla and the tarrasque-as-fable-fuel will take some work to hybridize or reconcile, but it might be worth it.

The thing about D&D is the obvious lateral thinking solutions (showing the medusa a mirror for example) are part of the monster description to begin with. To redesign the tarrasque as a puzzle monster would take considerable cleverness on the DMs part, the solution to the tarrasque would have to be unexpected yet at the same time couldn't just be some random obscure thing (say, if a bluebird kisses it on the cheek it dies). Of course, the tarrasque is somewhat of a puzzle monster already--common solutions include wishing it into the center of the sun or building walls of force around it and then filling it with water, but both those include a considerable quantity of brute force in addition to brains.

A good puzzle-tarrasque would, I'm thinking, be something along the lines of the tarrasque cannot be killed by anything that moves or anything that has seen the moon or something like that.

Thri-kreen

Why have a tri-kreen when you could just have a giant praying mantis? Because thri-kreen have hands and also because they have those cool three-bladed weapons that they throw. I never liked the S&M-gladiator look that they had in some pictures, but mantis men seem like a fine idea and mantis women absolutely nightmarish.

Troll, marine (scrag)

See this.

"S" Is Where The True Classic Monsters Hide

Perusing all the monsters alphabetically, "S" is clearly the mother lode. "D" has demons, devils, and dragons, but for real-life terrors--sharks, snakes, skulls, scorpions, slugs--you can't beat "S". Things that start with "S" have been frightening people since before the letter was invented.

Sahuagin

Along with the ixitxachitl, the morkoth, the masher, and several other pointless underwater monsters were apparently created by Steve Marsh for the Blackmoor supplement in 1975 (if you spend more time researching than I want to then I'm sure you can figure out what's Marsh and what's Arneson and what's Gygax here, ANYWAY...).

The sahuagin entry is one of the longest in the book and details sahuagin society extensively though god know's why. I think Marsh was working in the wrong medium: his manta ray philosophers and brutal shark men and crazy fish might have been great in a pulp novel or in a Jae Lee-illustrated run on Sub-Mariner but, as gaming material, all these interlocking, backstoried monsters boil down to is a set of stats and a small crappy black and white illustration (or, in later editions a cartoony, superdeformed color illustration). And in that medium, they do not come particularly alive.

There are lots of details about the organization of sahuagin society with weapon lists and percentile charts, but no details on, say, what makes them any different from underwater hobgoblins or what weird beliefs they might have or the peculiarities of their architecture or beast-of-burden breeding practices. Telling me the percentage armed with a trident vs. the percentage armed with a net might--theoretically--be useful, but not as useful as giving me details that make me care whether one has a trident or a net.

The sahuagin looks like a dumb ape with fins and nothing written in the entry overcomes that. If I mentally change their name to "sea devils" rather than their egregiously pseudo-exotic original name and transpose the finned ape picture with the awesome Trampier salamander on the next page I suddenly feel like a race of cruel sea slavers might might might be worth all the effort and non-dungeoneering it would take to get my players to care about things happening dozens of miles underwater to yet another race of ill-tempered humanoids.

Salamander

Actual salamanders sleep inside logs, so sometimes when you build a fire you suddenly see salamanders crawling out of it. This gave rise to the idea that they had an affinity for fire. I like salamanders a lot (it's probably all down to Trampier).

I like that they come to the material plane for "purposes known only to them". I imagine them surrounding people and hissing and poking them with their strange spears bathed in a wrong glow.

I also like the idea of frost salamanders. Lizards and amphibians usually hate the cold, but in our minds they are cold so somehow it all works out.

Satyr

The modern conception of Satan is a streamlining of the satyr or, more specifically, of the satyr and the satyr-gods Bacchus and Pan. Through an injection of serpent blood--or perhaps simply because of the difficulty of carving curls into stone--the image of Satan often lacks the goat hair on his goat legs. It's an improvement.

Scorpion, Giant

It's hard not to like scorpions, but my heart belongs to the man-scorpion. It's one of the very first monsters in history--Gilgamesh meets them when they're working as underworld bouncers (one of the only jobs available to monsters in those less enlightened times).

"...their glory is terrifying, their stare strikes death into men, their
shimmering halo sweeps the mountains that guard the rising sun."

It's interesting how no matter how much we think we know about the world, the scorpion's sting still strikes us as fundamentally dishonest just because it's on its tail. The scorpion always has to play the bad guy.

Sea Hag

I did not realize until looking at this entry just now that the canonical sea hag had a three times daily death gaze. Anyway...

For me there are two kinds of sea hag, the one with a sense of humor and the one without.

The sea hag with a sense of humor is the one you might find at the head of a lusty pirate crew and the one that turns you into a frog just for fun. The sea hag is mad and reckless and will pretty much do whatever.

The sea hag without a sense of humor is the hag who bemoans her lost youth (what are hags when they are young? Maybe dryads, maybe nymphs?) This sea hag has straight gray hair and turns you into a toad specifically so that you will be as miserable as her. She generally occupies a lonely sea tower and is anti-social.

When there are three sea hags they must all be of the same sort, otherwise the PCs may be able to exploit their differences in disposition. Plus then what's the third one?

Sea Horse, Giant

If you ever go to an aquarium and look at seahorses they're almost unbelievable. Like you look and go "I do not believe that I am seeing an animal that;s real". Not just their shape, which is--granted--very weird, but the fact that they manage to stay upright bobbing like fishermen's hooks no matter what. They look more like they were designed by some rococo theatre-background painter than by natural selection. I find the idea of anything really violent managing to get around to its tactical satisfaction while mounted on a seahorse pretty implausible.

I think the giant seahorse is more made for your underwater annoying magic weirdo types like water sprites or sea goblins. (Mandy opines that sea goblins would ride on these.)

Sea Lion

The sea lion is ok in a kind of public-swimming-pool-Neptune-mural-gone-wrong-aquatic-Lewis Carrol kind of way. I've got nothing against it as long as it doesn't ask to be taken too seriously.

Shadow

I like to treat shadows like shadows: I like them to be related to some indentifible source (as in the shadow of some object or monster) and I like them to depend on where the light is coming from. I also really like that part of Peter Pan (the only part of Peter Pan I can remember) where he gets detached from his shadow and has to sew it back on anyway, point is the possibilities are endless.

Shambling Mound

The shambling mound is the DnD version of the Man-Thing. The carrot/tuber nose is the giveaway and makes it more like the Man-Thing than the Swamp Thing--who was invented a year later by the roommate of one of the guys who invented the Man-Thing. Both of these, in turn, derive from an older character known as The Heap and The Heap no doubt derives from an even earlier monster which I have no idea what it is but I'm a hundred percent certain that someone in the comments will let me know all about it as soon as I post this entry.

Anyway the point is--in the seventies a lot of people thought that fighting things that were sort of dull green and slow moving and shaggy was a good idea. Was it because they were hippies or because they liked the idea of fighting hippies? Who can say?

Shark

What you'll notice about the Monster Manual shark entry is that it's completely wrong in every way down to the fact that most sharks do NOT have to keep moving in order to survive. The manual also leaves out the coolest fact about sharks which is that they're immune to bombs. According to Wikipedia "In 1957, after a series of shark attacks, the South African government ordered a warship to drop underwater bombs on the sharks, but it failed and the attacks continued."

Although they are fairly predictable as a monster as you'll find at sea (the Rat, Giant, (Sumatran) of marine encounters), I'm not going to be such a stick in the mud as to say sharks are boring. Really, as Steven Spielberg knew, it's the threat of sharks that's great: "Oh look you're in the water, oh look you're bleeding, what will you do now?"

And the megalodon? I don't know how big a megalodon is really supposed to be and I don't feel like looking it up but I imagine it's about big enough to eat a sailing ship or to take a decent sized bit anyway and I imagine it likes to eat wood as much as flesh. Or at least I imagine that's what the PCs have heard.

Shedu

The most interesting thing about the shedu is if you drive to Anahiem from Los Angeles there's a whole bunch of them carved into the shopping mall you can see from the freeway. It's like they were thinking "Wal Mart is stupid, Shedus are stupid, let's just put everything stupid in one place."

Shrieker

I like shriekers. It's odd because I hate car alarms. I wonder if intelligent monsters who live in dungeons get pissed off about shriekers the way the rest of us do about car alarms.

What I don't like is the idea people purposefully cultivating shriekers as guards--or at least I'm afraid of overdoing it. After you do it once or twice, they become less weird and mysterious and they feel like just a piece of technology.

I think the concept of the shrieker could be extended to a great many different creatures: something basically immobile and dumb that explodes in howls whenever anyone comes near. That's what I was thinking when I had that woman filled with spiders that showed up in the third episode of I Hit It With My Axe. Mandy just had an idea--a spell you cast on someone, a curse that makes them like a terrible infant: you shriek uncontrollably whenever anyone (except perhaps some single specific creature) comes near you.

Now that I think of it, there's really all kinds of shrieker spells you could do, turning someone unwillingly into an alarm system or maybe you could just put shriekers in their food. Alright I'm gonna keep quiet now so as not to give anything away to my players.

Skeleton

Why do the dead hate us? Well like they say in Full Metal Jacket "the dead know only one thing, it is better to be alive" but also, they seem to hate us because they smile. That's really hard to take, I think.

Why are they smiling? Since the idea that they're smiling because they're dead seems to be anathema, we assume it must be some sort of evil glee like they're laughing at us. It's pretty self- absorbed, maybe they really do just like it better that way.

There's also monster skeletons--which are nice because, often, they look like whole new creatures under the skin. An ironic law is in effect here: the kindest animals change their aspect most radically. A snake skeleton has roughly the same aura as a snake--but a cow or a horse turns completely fiendish, and few things look as positively diabolical as an elephant skull.

Once in a while I'll come across a monster in the course of these entries and ask if anybody reading has ever used it. With skeletons I have to ask whether anyone reading hasn't?

Skunk, Giant

I will simply say that the skunk backs up my S monster thesis. People are afraid of skunks. In real life, anyway.

Slithering Tracker

I don't think the slithering tracker has to be boring. It could be a sort of three foot long centipede sort of thing with a gelatinous body like a jelly fish and when it drinks your blood you can actually watch it fill with red before slithering back to it's master.

Slug, Giant

Anything a giant slug can do a flail snail can do better.

Snake, Giant

Like skeletons, snakes are almost too good. Plus there are all these snake monsters with snake parts.

In order to avoid feeling like you're just repeating the same thing over and over, I like the idea of organizing snake monsters into a snakey hierarchy. The Greeks did it: they assumed that most snake monsters were related--as in "had the same parents". My ideas about relationships between snakes and snake monsters are pretty involved and I'm going to keep it a secret for now.

Spectre

Although it's a synonym for ghost, "spectre" is a more ominous word. A spectre is (etymologically) something you see but don't fully understand. Ghost is a kind of harmless-sounding word--it still has something of a person about it (maybe just because of Casper), "spectre" though is definitely bad.

A spectre is not something that you can just ignore, a spectre is a serious problem. There are alternate kinds of ghosts: spooks can be things other than what we think of as ghosts--spirits of single dead individuals. The "egregore" or at least one version of it, is a collective spirit created by a shared emotion--a spectre could be an egregore formed from feelings originating with a massacre or other horrific event something much more complicated and subtle than one dead see-through person. I think a spectre should be a master villain.

Sphinx

The only sphinx that interests me is the gynosphinx (though I will say that the hieracosphinx seems pointlessly close to a gryphon).

I like the idea that they are smart, that they go around collecting information, and that they are neutral. Occasionally a sphinx will pop up in one of my dungeons disinterestedly commenting on the action and possibly willing to trade information.

Of all the monsters with the heads of women-the sphinx is the most catlike and so can combine the fuck-off-ness of cats with the fuck-off-ness of beautiful women. It's a formidably vigorous hybrid fuck-off-ness.

Spider

Completing the scary trio of classic archetypes--with skeletons and snakes.

What is it about spiders? The many legs, the many eyes, and especially the webs suggest intelligence--but a totally alien intelligence. Snakes are just pretty clearly the enemy--they are predators with heads full of poison--but you look at their heads and it has a face that we recognize: clean shaven, but still following the plan.

The spider is something else entirely, even if we don't feel that they're a threat to us, we could see them very clearly being cruel on their own scale in basements and windowsills. Is there any other animal that nearly everyone on earth can say: I have seen it hunting, I have seen a trap it laid, and I've seen, moreover, that they have a continuous and coherent world existing in the margins of our own world.

Plus, spiders can actually kill you. Which seems ridiculous. But obviously something deep in your DNA knew it all along. Spiders are perhaps the smallest animal which the caveman part of your brain still registers as deadly. And it's right. And this is maybe another reason a spider seems crafty. If you find a black widow in the garden or in the garage or--worse--a funnel web spider, part of you will think "this thing's been living in my house for god knows how long and it could have killed me at any time--it's just toying with me."

So: inscrutable, discreet, alien, deadly, crafty, unique, poisonous--and all that even before you make it into a monster.

Sprite

It's hard tot ell a sprite form a pixie but if something has crazy hair sticking out in all directions it's gotta be a sprite.

Squid, Giant

Because of its pointy head the squid seems a little bit dumber than the octopus, but because it's streamlined it also seems a little more malevolent.

Giant squid exist and are still, to this day, mysterious. A 50ft squid will leave a 4" diameter sucker mark on a sperm whale but 16" diameter sucker marks have been found. The corresponding 200 foot squid has not been found but scientists conjecture it may exist.

Cephalopods have a sort of lite version of the unintelligability and craftiness of spiders, but they're a little more relatable. In the mating frenzy male squids have been known to miss the females and accidentally inject their own arms with sperm.

Stag

Stag-headed monsters are scary enough that I can't think of too many reasons to use a regular old stag unless you're doing some kind of chivalrous hunting thing so I haven't much to say on the subject.

But here's a new monster while I'm at it--it's a demon with a body like a man and the head of a stag. Entwined in its antlers are candles made from (something gruesome) its weapon is a long thin brass staff with an ever burning candle at either end. They generally wear long white robes.

Stirge

I have nothing against the concept of the stirge, but the original pictures look like angry sparrows wearing bad halloween costumes. If I want a blood sucking bird I'll make it like a nightingale or something.

Strangle Weed

Aside from being a perfectly decent minimum-wage-utility-monster the strangle weed also has a pretty decent mechanic attached to it:

"A victim compares its strength against the frond or fronds which have entangled it. The difference in the victim's favor is it's chance of escaping, i.e 1 equals 10%, 2 is 20%, etc. A negative difference, a balance in favor of the weed, indicates the victim has taken that number of points of crushing damage, i.e a victim's strength of 18 compared to the 3 fronds holding it, 30, so the strangle weeds inflict 12 points of damage on their prey."

Su-monster

I think the su-monster is supposed to be some kind of pseudo-Asian evil monkey though I'm not really sure what the point is supposed to be. Anybody know? Same problem with the kech.

Sylph

Aside from the wings, the sylph can be distinguished from the dryad and the nymph in that it's both less attracted to-, and less hostile to-, ordinary humans. It can be distinguished from the SILF by the fact that it's not related to you.

Scarecrow

When I do hex maps I tend to be interested in the cities and the forests and try my best to ignore all that farmland that, in any reasonable facimile of medieval Europe, should be in between.

The only thing that tempts me to maybe stick a farmhouse in is the possibility of getting a chance to use a scarecrow.

Slaad

The key for me to making these demonic frogs convincing is that they aren't all round and bouncy like Mister Toad--their skin hangs and sags around their aging eyes. I always imagine a slaad leaning on a poleaxe, both hands holding it high up on the shaft, its head sinking into its old man neck folds: bored with you, bored with life, bored with your plane of existence. The neutralest evil.

Baudelaire:

But here among the scorpions and the hounds,

the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,

monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,

in all the squalid zoo of vices, one

is even uglier and fouler than the rest,

although the least flamboyant of the lot;

this beast would gladly undermine the earth

and swallow all creation in a yawn;

I speak of Boredom which with ready teats

dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.

The "R" Monsters

All of the monsters: R.

Rakshasa

The smoking jacket is the key. Without it, it's just one more organic impediment with a zoomorphic head. Strangely, the game often ignores the smoking jacket and all it implies and treats the Rakshasa as just one more high-level nasty. A recent WotC product has a beholder summoning one as a kind of bodyguard.

A quick perusal of the wikipedia finds no mention of the tiger head at all--the Rakshasa is just a sort of catch-all magic cannibal demon. The tiger head,gives the D&D Rakshasa a distinct identity: tigers have both the coiled poise of housecats and the pimpiness of their striped orange coats. Tigers seem to be saying "I know you know I'm right here, and I know that you know that I know that there's nothing you can do it about it. Because I'm a fucking tiger." Ferocity and royal ease. This eastern demon is not a tempter but a tyrant. Shere Khan acts like Shere Khan for a reason.

Ram, giant

Slightly more dangerous and slightly less interesting than Goat, giant.

Rat, giant (Sumatran)

Giant rats appear all the time in dungeons, they're the monster that tells you that you're in a dungeon but you haven't gotten anywhere that anybody else hasn't managed to get yet.

Giant rats do actually exist and--aside from horses--probably therefore qualify as the real animal most likely to appear in Dungeons and Dragons. The giant rats in the Manual are size S which means that they probably aren't yet riding-animal size, but that never stopped people from writing them that way.

What I like about the idea of a goblin or something riding around on a--say--wolf-sized giant rat is the image of the rat getting up on its hind legs and sniffing the air while the goblin scouts around. Perfect thing for going around a dungeon on.

Ray

It's strange how modern rays seem. It's difficult to picture anyone before the Sherlock Holmes era having anything to do with them (except maybe in Japan).

Judging from the Monster Manual, Gygax apparently regularly had need of rules to determine what happens when a PC gets swallowed whole by a giant version of a regular animal. He also seems extremely prepared for the prospect of PCs looking for treasure while they are in there. "The manta ray's stomach is the repository of indigestible items--such as the treasure types indicated."

I catch myself wondering if Gygax's original players didn't spend half the Greyhawk campaign just wandering around temperate salt water biomes hoping to get swallowed.

Remorhaz

A remorhaz is another one of those sci-fi type monsters that you can't really picture properly unless you've seen an illustration. The job with the remorhaz is to distinguish it from the purple worm and (later) from the frost worm. The only thing that really makes it come alive is the original Trampier picture.

When I was younger I never realized it, but I realize now that he had a peculiar talent for defining things. Whether or not any individual one of his pictures was spectacular or memorable, the Trampier picture always etches the substance and the aura--the idea of the monster--very clearly. I can't immediately think of any comparable artist in that regard in all of art history.

With, for example, Ian Miller or Erol Otus' expressionism you always seem to get more mood (or more Otus, or more Miller) than monster--not that this is a bad thing, it's just that they're more about the image than the thing.

Other artists can define a thing, but in the way a dictionary does--they generally rely so much on realism that it ends up looking like the thing has been observed rather than summoned. A Bosch demon, for example, just looks like he just saw that bug-faced five eyed thing walking around in the Netherlands somewhere and painted it. Durer's work looks like every monstrosity he ever drew resulted from careful scientific study of the beast in its habitat or on a dissecting table. Frazetta seemed to be trying to carefully re-create vividly-colored dreams using all the technical tools at his disposal.

Trampier stylizations, on the other hand, seem to be neither expressions or observation--he looks rather as if he has lived with the legend of the remorhaz as did his father before him and his father before him and so when he's called upon to depict it he gives you a sort of codified but still vital representation of this thing--his work is a sort of pulpy equivalent of the eerily specific monster sculptures produced by early Chinese and Mesoamerican artists with a sort of supreme cultural confidence that the monster has a broken tooth right there and a third arm right there and that you have a sort of sacred responsibility to represent it properly.

Anyway, he makes me want to make the girls want to know what a remorhaz is.

Rhinoceros

I can't really picture my campaign including a rhinoceros, although I can imagine my PCs seeing a bizarre print on the wall of the library depicting one and wondering what the hell kind of crazy monster that is and wondering whether there is any treasure in its stomach.

Roc

See Eagle, giant.

Roper and Rust Monster

I would maintain the roper is superfluous and the rust monster isn't.

Superficially, they have a lot in common: both are original to D&D, both are sort of sci-fi-ish, both have tentacles.

But the roper is basically nothing at all interesting without its tentacles--and so many other things have tentacles. And if they don't then you can easily stick them on.

The rust monster, on the other hand, has a unique ability, is less shapeless in the mind's eye (a roper is "cigar shaped" whereas the rust monster is basically a giant four-legged bug), and the rust monster has personality.

It has personality because while the roper is just one more yellowish brown blob trying to kill you, the rust monster has the subtle agon of all insects--it means you no harm, it's simply gross and in your way and wants to eat something you happen to value.

In an actual fight, the roper is going to lash out and try to eat you and if it doesn't then what's the point? The rust monster, on the other hand, has a million different uses: goblins can prod it toward you or drop it on you, it can simply be in your way minding its own business in a narrow tunnel you need to get through, or hundreds of them can infest a town like rats.

Mandy wants to know if--when you drop them--they helicopter slowly to the floor with their propeller tails.

Now is as good a time as any to mention that when I complained about the gelatinous cube in the G entry, the nice people at Otherworld Miniatures sent me a very nice deluxe cube and also threw in a pair of rust monsters. I'd like to put a picture of them here but I had a hell of a time gluing them together and I wouldn't want my hamfistedness to reflect poorly on them. Anyway, point is they make some pretty good rust monsters over there at Otherworld.

Rot Grub

I'm sure there's some story about some circumstance that made this incredibly boring kill-your-players-immediately monster seem necessary when they were originally invented.

I feel like if I was an entrepreneurial lower planes creature aiming for Demon Prince of something, there's unexploited psychobioarchetypal real estate in the Lord of Rot Grubs, Cerebral Parasites, Ear Seekers and Other Creatures That Are Ubiquitous, Almost Undetectable, and Almost Always Fatal niche. Why isn't there that guy? He'd be the boss in no time.

Revenant

Classically, a revenant refers to someone who's dead, walking around, corporeal, and still in possession of all or most of his or her faculties. So: not a ghost, not a zombie, and not a vampire (the revenant doesn't necessarily have any special powers).

The interesting thing about this kind of revenant is that if it's still walking around and thinking, then what--in practical terms--makes it dead? For this reason, the revenant asks you to define "soul" in one way or another, in order to define, therefore, what it would mean to be "soulless".

In the medieval mind, the soulless were considered animalistic (thus vampires), in modern pop terms we think of soullessness as almost the opposite. "Soulless" suggests to us something Kafkian--without emotion, without appetites or drives, mechanical. Without the passions of the animal.

Strangely, we think of the soul as the animal and the body as mere machine, whereas early Christians though of the body as the animal and the soul as the restraining mechanism.

At any rate, revenants in a campaign that already has ghouls or vampires would be modern Kafkian constructs joylessly going about repetitive rituals or bureaucratic tasks. Better than ghosts, in my humble.