Spes Magna Games

When 3E hit the streets, the idea of monster types was introduced into D&D. As I mentioned yesterday, a monster type is sort of like a monster’s base character class. Its type defines the monster’s Hit Die type, most likely skills, common traits (such as the undead’s immunity to charm spells), and so forth. Among the types introduced to us was the vermin, which I’ve long found curious.

An animal is “a living, nonhuman creature, usually a vertebrate with no magical abilities and no innate capacity for language or culture.” Vermin “includes insects, arachnids, other arthropods, worms, and similar invertebrates.” The difference? One has vertebrae; the other doesn’t. The vermin’s invertebrate status someone seems to mean that vermin are mindless, which means they have “[n]o Intelligence score, and immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, morale effects, patterns, and phantasms). Mindless creatures have no feats or skills.”

I’ve never understood this. Bugs might not be terribly bright, but the things that many of them can do certainly qualify as feats or skills. Clicking randomly on five or so vermin over at d20pfsrd.com confirms this. Five for five have skills listed. So, vermin “have no feats or skills” except when they do. That clear?

But I digress.

Today looks to be offering me two choices. First, I choose animal or vermin. Then, I choose my favorite example of that type. So, I choose vermin, and I choose giant spider. (Nota bene: Click on the picture to embiggen.)

Spiders are awesome. Let’s scour Wikipedia for 1d6 examples of arachnid awesomeness:

1. “Spiders are found worldwide on every continent except for Antarctica, and have become established in nearly every habitat with the exception of air and sea colonization.”

That’s right, GMs. You can almost always use giant spiders. They live everywhere.

2. “Unlike most arthropods, spiders have no extensor muscles in their limbs and instead extend them by hydraulic pressure.”

Whoa!

3. “Spiders use a wide range of strategies to capture prey: trapping it in sticky webs, lassoing it with sticky bolas, mimicking the prey to avoid detection, or running it down. Most detect prey mainly by sensing vibrations, but the active hunters have acute vision, and hunters of the genus Portia show signs of intelligence in their choice of tactics and ability to develop new ones.”

Emphases added to increase your terror.

4. “Spiders’ guts are too narrow to take solids, and they liquidize their food by flooding it with digestive enzymes and grinding it with the bases of their pedipalps, as they do not have true jaws.”

Please join me in screaming now.

5. “Spiders can generate pressures up to eight times their resting level to extend their legs, and jumping spiders can jump up to 50 times their own length by suddenly increasing the blood pressure in the third or fourth pair of legs.”

That’s right. Fifty times!

6. “A few species of spiders that build webs live together in large colonies and show social behavior, although not as complex as in social insects. Anelosimus eximius (in the family Theridiidae) can form colonies of up to 50,000 individuals.”

Anelosimus eximius lives in South America. I’m never going to visit South America. It’s not worth the risk of being mobbed by 50,000 spiders.

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, horror, monsters

Today is a two-fer since I didn’t post yesterday. Busy, busy with the beginning of the new school year, making sure all those T’s are dotted and all those I’s are crossed. For my favorite undead, I’m tempted to just link my old post about the death knight and be done with it, but that seems kind of lazy. I’m not going to do that.

My favorite undead is hard to pin down. If I were writing about movies/TV shows, my favorite undead would be zombies, but only when they’re a metaphor (such as in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead) and/or when they serve as a mirror in which the survivors’ humanity becomes reflected (such as in 2011’s State of Emergency, which I found to be surprisingly hopeful). Of course, I’m not supposed to be writing about movies. This is the 30-Day D&D Challenge, and zombies don’t really do it for me in D&D. I’ve used them, of course, and quite a bit, but D&D and survival horror are a tough match.

For D&D, the mummy reigns as my favorite undead.

“But why, Mark?” you ask.

Well, the picture piercing your soul with its glowing stare probably gave it away, but I reply to your question with a simple, “Because Boris Karloff.”

Sure, you can play mummies like lumbering, bandage-wrapped mashers, and the inferior sequels to 1932’s The Mummy veered in that direction, but that’s not the way I feel mummies should be played. The word “mummy” conjures up visions of ancient Egypt. Pyramids and sphinxes and scarabs. Kings, high priests, and powerful ministers got the mummy treatment, which isn’t quite the whole story, but it provides the hook for what a mummy ought to be.

Oh, sure, the boss mummy could have lumbering, bandage-wrapped mummy lackeys to bash interlopers, but the mummy should be more like Ardath Bey, also known as Imhotep. He’s clever, obsessed, powerful, urbane, and menacing. He doesn’t just lunge out of a sarcophagus and start swinging. To get the full-on Imhotep experience, add some divination powers and a vampire-like ability to charm the PC who’s the reincarnation of his forbidden love.

My favorite aberration bears some defining ahead of time. Early D&D didn’t have monster types as introduced by 3E. A monster type is sort of like the monster’s base character class. “An aberration has a bizarre anatomy, strange abilities, an alien mindset, or any combination of the three,” says the SRD. Classic D&D aberrations include monsters such as adherers, blindheims, boggarts, and cloakers.

And, of course, the dreaded aboleth. Evil, intelligent, vaguely fish-like, and tentacled, aboleths fool your senses with illusions and crush you will with charms. Aboleths lair in lightless, flooded caverns or deep under the sea. It’s almost a moral imperative that choirs of aboleths chant obscene litanies to Lovecraftian horrors.

“Ia! Ia! Nyarlathotep Fthagan!”

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, horror, monsters, undead

I’m going off-topic again today. I have to. My favorite NPC of all time isn’t a D&D NPC. (Yeah, yeah. I know I could write about my favorite D&D NPC instead of my favorite NPC, but I don’t feel like it.)

Way back when, we played a lot of TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying Game. Pretty much from the get-go we decided we’d play our own heroes rather than established comic book heroes (although such heroes did make cameos once in a while). Established comic book villains were used more often, but we also enjoyed facing our own villains.

Which brings me to Volt.

When I first introduced Volt, he was an electrical martial artist loosely patterned after the Shang-Chi villain Shockwave. Volt was one of a baker’s dozen of street-level bad guys who figured what they lacked in individual power they’d make up for in numbers. This gang of villains initiated a city-wide crime wave intent on overwhelming first responders in order to bring the metropolis to its knees.

Their plan didn’t work. The heroes captured all of the villains except Volt.

A couple of adventures later, I decided Volt needed to show up again. I reworked his powers a little, making him a bit tougher. I also made him the leader of a group called the Sinister Six: Mastermind (wicked mentalist), the Clown (high-tech prankster), Ogre (mentally challenged muscle), Blindside (mute speedster), and Raven (bird-winged feral woman, who later reformed and became an ally of the heroes). The Sinister Six staged a daring public abduction of the U.S. President, snatching him from his motorcade en route to a conference. Again, the heroes defeated the villains, and Volt escaped once more.

More adventures passed, and then Volt came back again, rebuilt to be more formidable and with a richer background and personality. He’d morphed from a small-time villain to a mercenary with an international reputation for ruthlessness and a warped sense of honor related to his current contract. He had a new Sinister Six. The Clown was replaced by Gravity’s Angel (gravity manipulator) and Raven was replaced by Machine (psychopathic technopath). The Sinister Six had been hired by an evil wizard known as the Evoker. Evoker was attempting to assemble the fractured pieces of an ancient artifact, and the Sinister Six were doing his heavy lifting, robbing museums, et cetera.

What Volt didn’t know was the Evoker’s real plan was to assemble the artifact and then sacrifice the Sinister Six in order to achieve god-like power and rule the Earth after it had been transformed into a hellscape. The heroes uncovered this plan, and they confronted Volt and the Sinister Six with the full truth. Volt did not take kindly to being hoodwinked by his employer, so he joined forces with the heroes in an epic smackdown against the wizard and his demon horde. During the fight, the Evoker and Volt were both sucked through an interdimensional vortex, and the Earth was saved.

More adventures passed, and Volt returned again, mutated by his exposure to alien worlds so that he was powerful enough to no longer need a team for back-up. At this time, Volt entered semi-retirement, but the damage to the heroes’ psyche remained. The mere hint that Volt might be up to something was enough to put the heroes on high alert.

Volt made appearances in other game systems as well. I had a Champions version. Volt tore up parts of the DC universe in Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes when I was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. No matter what the game system, Volt remained the villain who was never caught.

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, NPCs, superhero games

I enjoy a clever trap or puzzle. When it comes to favorites, two come to mind.

Once upon a time, I ran a 1E adventure for Fred and someone else who I’ve forgotten. Fred ran Blake. Someone Else ran something. Their mission was to defeat an evil overlord who oppressed the people of his domain. Justifiable fear of assassination motivated said evil overlord to lair in the center of a maze rumored to be impenetrable. From within the maze, evil overlord sent forth his monstrous minions to do his wicked bidding.

Blake and Something entered the maze. They could not help but notice the strange runes over the archways leading from one maze chamber to the next. The heroes decided that the runes must be the key to navigating the maze. So, while fighting off one ambush after another, and never discovering from whence the ambushers came, Blake and Something made meticulous notes about the runes and applied their code-breaking skills.

There was one huge problem with this approach. The runes were a red herring. They had no intrinsic meaning related to the correct path through the maze because there was no correct path through the maze. Indeed, there was no maze at all. The entire labyrinth was a complex and powerful permanent illusion situated in a large cavern beneath the evil overlord’s castle. The evil overlord and all his monstrous minions were immune to the illusion. Blake and Something weren’t.

After a couple of hours, Blake said something to the effect of, “This doesn’t make any sense. There are no secret doors anywhere. The runes aren’t helping. I can’t believe anyone could get through this maze.”

I said something to the effect, “Save versus spells for Blake.”

A die clattered. “I made it.”

“The maze isn’t real. It’s an illusion.”

Much cussing followed, and then Blake and Something pierced the veil and brought the fight directly to the evil overlord.

In another adventure for 2E that I wrote as a sidetrek for Return to the Tomb of Horrors, the PCs had to retrieve a magical key. The key was at the bottom of a dungeon, of course. The heroes fought their way through the hordes of undead to the key’s chamber, which was described something to this effect:

“The chamber is a large rectangle, at least 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. Two rows of ornate stone columns to the left and right support the arched ceiling. The far wall is pitch black. About 15 feet in front of this black wall is a pedestal. Floating over the pedestal in a shimmering light is the key. A tendril of light extends from the black wall to the shimmering sphere that holds the key.”

Investigation revealed that the black wall was transparent. Behind it in inky darkness swam undead things, including an enormous snapping turtle skeleton. The shimmering sphere around the key seemed impervious, as did the tendril of light.

“Let’s see if dispel magic will work,” someone said.

They did, and it did. What the heroes didn’t know is that the shimmering sphere of light was not a product of the transparent black wall, but vice versa. Once the shimmering sphere of light was dispelled, the heroes could get the key, but only after the transparent black wall vanished and hundreds of thousands of gallons of cold water full of undead monsters rushed into the chamber. Better still, the columns that supported the ceiling didn’t really support the ceiling. They weren’t solidly anchored to either floor or ceiling, and the surge of water toppled them to inflict crushing damage on whomever they fell.

Ah, good times.

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, tricks/traps

Today’s 30-Day D&D Challenge topic seems a bit, well, vague to me. I’m not a huge fan of megadungeons, so those are right out. I’d be happy to never get involved in another megadungeon as long as game. I like short dungeons with clearly defined goals which can be reached through a variety of different paths. I also like dungeons that aren’t really dungeons. It’s not that I mind an old-fashioned crawl through dark caverns full of monsters, but a “dungeon” can be any setting which requires exploration and confrontation with some obstacle in order to achieve a goal.

For example, last OwlCon, I ran a scenario loosely designed for Sine Nomine Publishing’s wonderful Stars Without Number. The set-up involved the PCs running a mission to salvage a long-lost luxury space yacht. Unfortunately, the yacht was haunted by horrible evil. Beyond this premise, I had little of the adventure detailed. There were no NPCs to interact with, and the only locations were the PCs’ ship and the yacht. Instead, I had a short list of spooky events. The PCs interacted with each other and the environments. The players hatched theories and asked questions. I took notes and made stuff up as a I went along. The players themselves ended up providing most of the details, to include the final resolution of the scenario itself.

And now a bonus monster!

Tangle Bug
Hit Dice: 6
Armor Class: 5 [14]
Attacks: Bite (1d8)
Saving Throw: 11
Special: Tangle
Move: 9 (Climb 6)
Alignment: Neutrality
Challenge Level/XP: 7/600

This yellow and brown insect grows to lengths of 5 feet. It attacks with its powerful bite. Tangle bugs have an unusual defense mechanism. When it suffers damage, fibrous branches sprout from its body.

These branches break off easily and harmlessly close to the surface of the bug’s carapace, leaving nearby creatures tangled in the tough fibers. The branches that sprout after damage reach out to a length equal to twice the number of points of damage inflicted. Thus, striking a tangle bug for 7 points of damage causes fibrous branches to extend out to 14 feet. Creatures within the reach of the branches must make a saving throw to avoid being tangled. Otherwise, it requires a round and a successful open doors check to break free. A tangled creature moves and fights at half speed. Tangle bugs are immune to these fibrous branches.

Tags: 30 Day D&D Challenge, monsters, Stars Without Number, Swords & Wizardry