The Gappa
Yesterday, I watched Monster From a Prehistoric Planet via Amazon Prime. This one is boilerplate giant monster movie, complete with two distraught parent monsters on a destructive quest to retrieve their stolen offspring. The dubbing is pretty bad. The movie is preachy, maudlin, and sexist. Of course, the various toys and firecrackers deployed against the gappa fail to do anything other than make noise, smoke, and start fires. In other words, the movie is silly fun that took me back to the days of UHF and Saturday creature feature movies.
When writing up the gappa for Mutant Future, the scale of the monster presents some challenges. Most weapons are useless against the gappa. These beasts are more like natural disasters. To help me with the stats, I pulled my AD&D Oriental Adventures off the shelf to re-read the Gargantua monster entries.
Gappa
Alignment: Neutral
Movement: 120′ (40′), Fly: 480′ (160′), Swim: 180′ (60′)
Armor Class: 2
Hit Dice: 25
Attacks: 2 (stomp/stomp) or 3 (claw/claw/bite)
Damage: 5d10/5d10 or 3d10/3d10/6d10
Save: L25
Morale: 11
Hoard Class: None
XP: 10,000
Mutations: None.
The gappa appears as an enormous bipedal creature combining the features of reptiles and birds with a distinctive humanoid body shape. It can hold its breath for hours. An adult gappa stands nearly 100 feet tall and weighs in excess of 125 tons. Its thick hide is nearly impervious to harm. Primitive firearms, primitive melee weapons, and advanced melee weapons cannot damage the gappa. Other advanced personal weapons (pistols, rifles, and grenades) inflict one-half minimum damage (drop fractions). For example, a plasma rifle inflicts but 4 points of damage to a gappa with a successful attack. Nothing as weak as a stun baton or stun pistol could ever stun a gappa. A plasma grenade inflicts 6d6 points of damage to a gappa, and bombs and missiles inflict one-half normal damage. If wounded, a gappa regenerates 10 hit points per round.
Against targets on the ground, the gappa attacks by stomping its enormous feet. Each stomp affects a 15-foot radius, but the two radii cannot be more than 50 feet apart. Make a melee attack against each creature in the area. Success inflicts 5d10 points of damage; a failed attack inflicts half damage. Instead of stomping, the gappa may sweep its tail, affecting a 90-foot wide, 90-foot long cone. Each creature in the path of the tail must make a death save or suffer 8d10 points of damage. Against airborne or suitably large creatures, the gappa attacks with its claws and beak-like maw.
Each round of combat, there is a 1 in 6 chance that the gappa forgoes all melee attacks in favor of its fiery breath weapon that affects a 10-foot wide path along a 200-foot length. Against targets on the ground, this path need not be a straight line, but may sweep an area, making one 45-degree change of direction every 40 feet. The gappa’s breath inflicts 100 points of damage to everything caught in its path. Living creatures must also make a save versus radiation or suffer the effects of class 10 radiation. The gappa is immune to fire and radiation.
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