We Belong Dead: Monsters That Should Never Be
Posted by Joshua on Feb 25, 2009
GROGNARDIA: My Least Favorite Monsters beat me to it, but here’s a list of my 10 monsters that I never want to use or see in a campaign:
- Ear Seekers. Despite my abiding affection for things like the Rust Monster, Ear Seekers cross the line between challenging the player and punishing smart play. Even if the dungeon is stocked by a mad arch-mage intentionally seeking to thwart explorers, this kind of thing is just a reason not to play. Whether to risk listening at the door is not the kind of decision that a GM wants to emphasize.
- Drow. I tried to read R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt trilogy, I really did.
- Krenshar. A big cat that can peel the skin of its face back, so that… what? I’m not getting it, either in evolutionary or mad wizard design terms.
- Troglodytes. Why did cavemen become some wierd lizard creature? And why aren’t lizard men and reptilian kobolds enough?
- Tarentella. (a spider that has a bite that not only causes the victim to dance, but makes onlookers save vs. dancing) Even I have a limit to the pun-inspired game features I can take.
- Girallon. To be honest, I’ve never actually seen or heard of these used, but adding an extra pair of arms to a gorilla and calling it a new monster was not anybody’s finest day.
- Deathbringer. Now they’re not even trying.
- Gem Dragons. Scraped right past the bottom of the barrel there.
- Jermlaines. What purpose do these serve that kobolds don’t do better?
- Forest Sloth. So…it’s a sloth. With lightning fast reflexes, that can move along the ground or climb through the trees faster than a human can run. Why exactly is it a sloth, again? So that when the GM just says the name instead of describing what the characters see, they can get fooled for a moment into thinking they’re facing something slow?
My thanks to Ed Bonny, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, Skip Williams, and Steve Winter, without whose Monster Manual II this list would have had to stop at number 5.
How Long is Your Campaign
Posted by Joshua on Feb 25, 2009
Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » How Long is a Campaign? writes:
The games I’ve run last a few months. Ten to twenty sessions seems ideal. The last one I ran was fifteen sessions. I know some people have settings and characters that they play for years and years, their tale spooling ever onward as their rulebooks get dog-eared and their character sheets fade with age. As someone who loves inventing new settings and populating them with characters, I don’t want to be stuck in any one place for too long.
My reply was:
Procession of the Psychopomp
Posted by Joshua on Feb 23, 2009
Game Summary for 2/22/09, a somewhat abbreviated due to the presence of Rock Band
The Party (Idariel 7, Twonkey, Josepi, and Stan McStan ) made its way back from the SludgeWorks, with their captured Zombot-ratipede corpse and a bunch of the Thaumivorous Ghost-Moths that they had discovered. They boarded the platform and were being winched back up to level 1, when they noticed a bunch of commotion in the Web, with G-Nome couriers racing back and forth on their rocket-skates. This triggered their paranoia pretty badly, as they became convinced they were about to be ambushed, but they made it back to Barbis Boltbiter’s Adventure Emporium (No Adventure Too Dangerous! No Fee Too Big!) safely. After collecting their fee for investigating the Zombot Infestation, they began discussing cashing in on the Moths with Barbis. As a Dwarf of honor, he insisted that they would have to negotiate with the owner of the Sludge Works, Lord Shadrach (one of the few non-Elf, non-Dwarf Lords of Infrastructure). Somewhat surprisingly, the party saw his point. Before they got too far, however, one of Barbis’ nephews burst in with the news that a huge black blimp had docked at the Zep (the zeppelin docks), bearing the Psychopomp of Anathem, and there was going to be a procession.
The Psychopomp of Anathem is the ruler of the city of Anathem, a city that New Ark City had been at war with up until recently (a few game sessions ago) where they practiced the forbidden arts of Necrotech. Josepi announced that there was no way he would buy that there was no connection between the Zombots they’d been encountering and the situation with Anathem. The party decided to go check out the procession.
They used their connections to find a second floor window above an apothecary from which they could watch the procession route from the Zep to the Palace of Instrumentality, where the Lord of Infrastructure meet. The parade route was packed with people, trying to get a glimpse of the mysterious Psychopomp.
First came the music, a Heavy Metal dirge. Then came the marching guards, seven-foot-tall cadaverous humanoids in tattered gray cloaks, indistinguishable save for the slight variations in the black patterns on their ivory masks, rifles over their shoulders. Following them was the Psychopomps float, drawn by a pair of Zombie Mammoths. Occupying the rear of the float was a steam calliope, from which the music wailed. In the center of the float, supported on iron bars, was the Psychopomp itself…a grey metal sphere, 10 feet in diameter, bound in loops of darker metal. Nobody knows whether it is a machine intelligence, a sentient artifact, or is there something else, something organic, encased inside.
Kneeling around the Psychopomp were pairs of figures, one set each of the Precursor races, Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Orc, Dryad and Satyr…all attractive and richly dressed in elaborate robes and jewels, several wearing crowns, and all chained by their necks to the Psychopomp’s float. Their eyelids have been sewed shut.
Behind the Psychopomp’s float, row after row of iron-collared human soldiers bearing spears.
Just then, as the party was discussing “Why aren’t we at war with these guys any more?” a small figure skidded from one of the cables that make up the web, and tumbled to the street in front of the stamping feet of the Zombie Mammoths. It was a G-Nome girl, with small goat-horns and little cupid wings, who had slipped as she was racing by….
Stan McStan started desperately slapping together a robot, knowing that there was no way he could finish in time. Twonky contemplated jumping from the window, only to conclude that he would crush more people than rescuing the kid would save. Idariel and Josepi stared helplessly.
The mammoth’s foot descended, then stopped in mid-air. Kneeling beneath the foot, holding it up with one hand, was a figure completely swathed in bandages, wearing a red, hooded cloak. The other mammoth, being just a zombie, obliviously tried to continue forward, and the float started to swerve. The Corpse Guards turned, raising their enormous rifles. The figure scooped up the G-Nome girl and darted from beneath the foot, the mammoth stumbling then continuing onward. Red-cloak deposited the girl at the side of the road, just at the edge of the crowd, as the Guard leveled their rifles.
By this point Stan had snapped together a hawkbot, and sent it winging towards the scene, with instructions to interpose itself between the riflemen and Red-cloak (and the crowd), international incident be damned. Before the riflemen actually opened fire, there was a sonic boom, glass rattling and cracking in most of the nearby windows and the rifleman were knocked from their feet…the first row of riflemen’s weapons all snapped in half, and Red-cloak was gone.
Stan recalled his hawkbot before (he hoped) it could be observed by any of the Psychopomp’s minions. It was at this point that he noticed some wetness on his upper lip… his nose was bleeding. Nobody else suffered this (they all made their vigor rolls), and he shook his fist at the Psychopomp and muttered something about “Keep out of my head!” Eventually, after a bunch of men in the livery of the Lords of Infrastructure showed up and had earnest discussions with the Psychopomp’s servants, the procession straightened itself out and made its way out of sight towards the Palace of Instrumentality.
The rest of the session was spent discussing what the Red-cloaked figure could possibly have been, whether they should try and find the G-nome girl, who they saw had been grabbed up by her mother, why the sudden peace with Anathem, and what the connection might be between the zombots and the Psychopomp.
You Say Po-tay-to, I Say Po-tah-to
Posted by Joshua on Feb 21, 2009
Scott, of World of Thool, writes, in Dropping out of the Old School
JimLotfP has written an “us vs. them” opinion piece over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Jim’s blog is one of my daily early-morning Google Reader destinations. From what I’ve seen, I genuinely like him, I suspect we’d get along just fine in real life, and I especially enjoy the effect his posts have on the excitable.
However, Jim’s post today highlights why I’m not part of the “Old School Renaissance” and my name can safely be stricken from the rolls. I refuse to serve in the Edition Wars. If necessary, I can have my insignia ripped from me in a humiliating divestiture ceremony, complete with expectoration.
The whole enterprise seems exhausting and silly. I do very much think of my setting project as, in a way, my reaction against gaming consumerism, including my own. I react the same way fairly often in real life. I don’t find it distressing that people buy stuff — I’m firmly in the capitalist camp, and a great fan of buying stuff. I find it distressing that people buy stupid, superfluous, low-quality stuff, and they do it reflexively.
My feeling is that you shouldn’t take this kind of stuff too much to heart.
Have you ever seen some real baseball fans arguing over the Designated Hitter rule? Passionately believing X is better than Y for reason Z and arguing about it seems to be part of the pleasure of being a fan. It’s Kirk vs. Picard. Batman vs. Superman. First Gundam vs. Mobile Fighter G-Gundam. (Sorry, very obscure joke.)
People can be assholes about they way the argue about it, particularly on the Internet where you’re arguing with strangers instead of your friends, but simply arguing about it doesn’t make you an asshole per se.
I think JimLofP is nuts if he thinks the “Old School Renaissance” is anything more than some people using the power of the Internet to connect with others way out there in the end of the long tail. Hey! There are other people out there who are still into this old version? Cool! That’s the thing about the long tail…you don’t need to convert a single gamer from 4e in order for Old School to thrive, not even if you assume that people only have time for one or the other. All you need is a way for the people with minority tastes to find each other.
So I think it’s a bit of an overreaction to repudiate the Old School tag if that something that can help congenial people find your blog, enjoy what’s written there, and maybe contribute to the conversation. You might even meet up with them in person and be able to game with them. I can see from the blogs I read that’s happened to several of them already in different parts of the world. If I find myself in Chicago or Toronto, for instance, with some free time, I know who I’m going to try to look up and sit in on a game with. And that’s because I’ve found them through their interest in Old School play, even though that’s not necessarily their exclusive interest, and it’s certainly not mine.
If there’s any windmill more hopeless to tilt at than “Someone is wrong on the Internet!”, it’s “Someone is arguing on the Internet!”
But Oh, If we call the whole thing off,
Then we must part
And Oh, If we part it would break my heart…
Monsters I Have Loved
Posted by Joshua on Feb 20, 2009
Following the lead of Monsters and Manuals: Top 10 Monsters, here are my Top Ten D&D Monsters, in no particular order:
- Gelatinous Cube: I love these guys. They’re creepy as all get-out, particularly when they’ve got a partially digested skeleton or something suspended in them, they’re not so dangerous as to be unfair and they’re the perfect accoutrement for that oubliette….
- Purple Worm: It’s a worm big enough to swallow you whole. It can come at you through the dungeon wall. And it’s purple. What’s not to love?
- Umber Hulk: I just like the look of them, back in AD&D 1e. Mandibles are scary. The 3rd edition version just looks like a bug missing some legs. I can take or leave the Confusing gaze.
- Cockatrice: Stoning is an awesome ability, but I’m not a huge fan of gaze weapons, so I like this guy better than the basilisk. Did I ever tell you about the time I used Telekinesis to hurl a black pudding at a cockatrice?
- Troll: One troll on the wall, on the wall, one troll on the wall,
if one of those trolls should happen to fall, Two trolls on the wall on the wall…. - Green Slime: it’s a horrible way to go, and a really useful weapon against other monsters.
- Golem: they come in a wide variety, and they can stand there century after century waiting to bash in the head of the next adventurer to come through the door.
- Liche: I never actually used these that often, but the fear of them was so strong that I once had an orc with a couple of faintly glowing gems held in front of its eyes bluff a party into retreating by advancing on them from the down the dark corridor. For the rest of the campaign, players would tease each other by making a holding gems in front of their eyes gesture and saying “Run away! Run away! I’m a liche!”
- Balrog: for some reason Balrogs, and not dragons, were the ultimate bad-ass monster in D&D to me.
- Dinosaurs: Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
“I’m fighting a dinosaur! With a Sword! Coooooool!”
For us settings come in and out of rotation. We’ve got one setting I’ve been GMing off-and-on for about 15 years. That setting has seen about 5 different systems used to run it. My friend GMs one that she’s run since High School, about 25 years, using the same AD&D plus house rules she’s always used. On the other end of the scale, we’ll often do a one-shot in a setting that we’ll never revisit; usually those use one of the old stand-by systems, so the players don’t have to learn two things at once, but sometimes they’re a test run to see if we like some system we haven’t tried or a play test of a homebrew one of the players is working on.
Half the fun for me is making new settings and new systems. The other half of the fun is playing a setting long enough that the players really start to have a good understanding of the world and it really feels detailed and full of history. So there’s a definite tension there…
What about you?