OSR – Page 15 – Spriggan's Den

RPG Review: Spears of the Dawn

Spears of the Dawn is another small sandbox setting by Kevin Crawford, who also did the excelent Red Tide setting. While Red Tide uses a great number of elements from Chinese and Japanese culture, Spears of the Dawn is strongly based on various cultures of West Aftica. The book consists of roughly three parts: A complete roleplaying game, the Spears of the Dawn campaign setting, and advice on running sandbox games. These are not clearly divided into three section though, and it’s probably best to read the whole thing even if one only intends to use certain elements of it. It’s made clear in the introduction that this book is meant to be mined for ideas and its elements disassembled and repurposed as any GM sees fit. Like Red Tide, it is more of an example of how a great sandbox setting can look like and how you make one.

The Setting

The setting presented in Spears of the Dawn are the Three Lands. Two centuries ago the empire of the Nyala was close to conquering all of the other five kingdoms of the Three Lands and when the king of Deshur was forced to retreat with his remaining army into the desert he discovered the means to make himself and his followers into Eternals. The Eternals are powerful undead who neither age, nor need to eat or drink, but maintain their youth and heal any wounds through the eating of human flesh. For over a hundred years the Eternal invaded the lands of the Five Kingdoms and causing the empire to fall apart. Eventually the emperor of Nyala accepted that the other four kingdoms were no longer under his control and instead created an alliance of equals to destroy the Eternals and put an end to the terror of the Sixth Kingdom. The Five Kingdoms where victorious and the Sixth Kingdom no more, but they were unable to destroy all of the Eternals as some of them escaped into the wilderness and continue to exist in hiding to this day. In the fourty years that have passed since then, the fate of the new Five Kingdoms has remained uncertain. There is peace now, but the former subjects of the Nyala still have resentments against their former masters and there are still many bands of raiders and new settlements created by refugees from the war are not always getting along well with their neighbours. The last emperor had anticipated that some of the Eternals might escape from the armies of the Five Kingdoms and created a group of warriors, shamans, and sorcerers called the Spears of the Dawn, who were given the duty to hunt down the remaining Eternals and destroy any lingering trace of their evil. With the empire being no more and Nyala being only one kingdom among others, the Spears of the Dawn lack any real leadership or organization. However, with the threat of the Eternal and other evils still around, there are always more people who take up arms and wander the Five Kingdoms to destroy them. With many elders still remembering the terror of the Eternals well, these warriors against evil are highly respected and stand somewhat outside of the normal tribal politics and regular social classes.

It’s a nice compact setting, though I am feeling a bit ambivalent about the post-colonial character of the Five Kingdoms. I would consider my knowledge of African politics and social issues only slightly above average and tribal affiliations and great class inqualities appear to be indeed an important factor in regional and social conflicts. However, to a large degree these conflicts are the result of the British and French colonial empires and their sudden disappearance that left many regions in administrative chaos. Using contemporary Real-World conflicts as a template for a fictional medieval African-inspired setting seems a bit problematic to me. It’s not exactly a respectful treatment of a cultural region and its people to focus on one of their darkest periods which was primarily caused by outside forces. However, Spears of the Dawn doesn’t reduce the African theme of the setting to only that element and there is a lot more than that. And it isn’t like precolonial Africa was all happy paradise. There has always been as much tribal war and violence, as well as slavery and exploitation of lower social classes in Africa as in all the other continents of the world. When empires fell apart in Europe, the result was always just as ugly. So I am inclined to give this setting a pass in this regard. While I probably would have stayed clear of that aspect myself, the way it is treated here seems pretty well balanced and I think you have to actually know what to look for to notice any real world similarities at all. Continue reading “RPG Review: Spears of the Dawn”

An adventure for any number of characters of any level

A few weeks ago I wrote a short post about the problems I have with published adventures. One of the pretty big problems that makes most adventures unusable to me is that they are not only written for a different game than the one I am running, but have also been designed for a group of player characters of a specific power level. While am talking a lot about published adventures here, the main point I want to make further down is really about designing adventures in general, so even if you don’t usually use published adventures either, this might still be interesting to read. The earliest adventures for Dungeons & Dragons were pretty vague on this subject, simply saying they are for adventurers of “1st to 3rd level” or characters should be “5th to 10th level”. Since at that time nobody had any pretense that character levels and monster experience were an exact science, it really was just very rough eyeballing. But soon it got more specific like “This module is designed for 6-8 characters of 4th to 7th level. […] The party should possess somewhere between 35 and 45 levels of experience.” Since experienced henchmen were a common feature of the game at that time, it really wasn’t any big deal to get a few more of them to make the party ready for adventure. I make no secret of the fact that I think AD&D was really terribly written and had really bad ways to deal with numbers. But while the 3rd edition did some good work in straitening up the rules (mostly fixing attack bonus, armor class, and XP tables), it also went of into a completely wrong direction with long steps. A derection into which I, being totally new to RPGs, happily followed.

Over time people realized that any claims that there was a balance between the classes and experience, treasure, and monster abilities were carefully calculated and weighted against each other was complete nonsense. It was still nothing but eyeballing and often pretty bad one. But you still got all this huge amount of additional math that didn’t actually make anything better! But the published adventures might be one element of the game that suffered the most. From now on published adventures would usually make a statement like this. “The Sunless Citadel is a DUNGEONS & DRAGONS adventure suitable for four 1st-level player characters. Player characters (PCs) who survive the entire adventure should advance through 2nd level to 3rd level before the finale.”

Great. What if the characters are already 2nd level? What if I have another adventure I want to run that is for 2nd level characters? At these very low levels it’s not such a big deal yet, but when you get adventures that are for 10th level characters and take them to 14th level it does become a real issue. My campaigns are usually with new players and run for perhaps a year or so, so I usually ran games with characters that are all 1st or 2nd level. (It’s easier for new players.) Which means lots of great adventure I never got an opportunity to run. But it got worse. The way things were described in the rulebooks and the first adventures that were published for 3rd edition, players had the expectation that the encounters would be “balanced” and “suitable for their level”, which means they should win the fight without any big trouble. I did. I am guilty. I was young and stupid.

But of course, that idea is nonsense. While Gygax was pretty bad at explaining himself, he did understand that D&D was not just a game about individual fights, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about rationing your strength and resources. Part of that is judging when to let the warriors clear the room with their swords and when the wizards unleash their full awesome power against enemies the warriors can’t handle on their own. And when you put it this way, it is obvious that individual encounters should be highly imbalanced in either direction. Many fights should be pretty easy while some should be pretty hard, and the key to being a successful adventurer is being able to tell which type of fight you’re currently dealing with. If you rush in with full force, your resources will be quickly exhausted. And if you then get into a fight against a strong enemy, it could be your death. But if all fights are balanced to a level where the players will be able to win without great difficulty or great risk, what is there really to do for the players other than “I guess I attack it with my sword again” over and over and over. 3rd edition tried to “fix” this with lots of special attacks and feats. But that’s where everything started to go wrong. They tried to make the round by round attack and damage routine more entertaining, but that part was never meant to be center of the game. It really was about judging the strength of your enemies, using the environment to your advantage, and making calls which fights to pick and which ones to avoid. The notion that fights should be balanced according to a mathmatical calculation killed all that. The Sunless Citadel did include a fight that would be really difficult to win and force players to retreat and come up with outside the box solutions or avoid that particular monster entirely. But as the story is being told, people complained about the encounter being unbalanced and that practice was discontinued from there on. Paizo eventually became not only the biggest creator of published adventures but actually the biggest RPG company of all. (Seems like WotC has left the field.) But even though there’s lots of great stories, I only really ran three of their adventures. Flight of the Red Raven and Escape from Meenlock Prison and The Automatic Hound from the Dungeon magazine. All three of which I completely rewrote to fit the size and level of the party I was running them for.

Continue reading “An adventure for any number of characters of any level”

RPG Review: Red Tide

Red Tide is described as a “Campaign Sourcebook and Sandbox Toolkit” and even though it tries to do two different things at once, it does a very good job at both. In fact, the two complement each other very well and make this book a lot more than just the sum of its part. Released in 2011 by Kevin Crawford, it is both a short and compact campaign setting as well as probably one of the best guidebooks to creating your own settings for a sandbox game. You could probaby use the Red Tide setting to play a different type of campaign and if you make your own setting you don’t have to use any of the Red Tide elements at all. Each element of the book takes up about half of its pages and are mostly separate from each other, but reading only half the book would do it a great disservice. The Red Tide setting is a great example how the theories and tool from the toolbox section can be effectively used, while at the same time the rules for creating sandbox content really help to bring the setting to life.

The Red Tide Campaign Setting

The first half of the book, which has a total of 159 pages, describes the world and background of Red Tide. 300 years ago a red mist appeared that killed the land and everything it, leaving behind a hellish wasteland haunted by terrible monsters. However, a single prophet saw the comming doom and organized a great evacuation with hundreds of ships to an unknown continent in the west. Something in the rock of the mountains that dominate the continent keep the Red Tide at bay, and this cluster of large and small islands may be the only place in the world still inhabited by the living. However, the refugees were not the first people to settle this land, as it was already the land of the Shou, a large collection of numerous tribes of goblins, orcs, and bugbears (though except for their stat blocks they are always simply called the Shou). The human refugees come from cultures that are mostly inspired by the Chinese and Japanese, but there is also another group in the smaller islands to the north that is inspired by Vikings and there are some dwarves as well, and also some elves and halflings. Through a fierce and brutal war, the refugees from the east managed to conquer half of the main island from the Shou and created several new kingdoms, but things are looking far from rosy. Hordes of countless Shou warriors are still in the wild, eager to take back their homeland, while the Red Tide is still waiting out there just beyond the horizon, raveshing the rest of the world. And to make things worse one of the kingdoms has turned to demon worship as a way to escape from their seemingly hopeless situation. While there is a good amount of very intersting history and background, it’s a very compact and almost minimalistic setting when it comes to locations and NPCs. The seven described countries have about two pages each, with another four pages dealing with various other important cultural elements. It’s done with good reason, as the methods of how to populate the world are what the second half is about. There are another 26 pages with information on standard and new character classes, spells, and equipment, and 10 more pages with new monsters and that already wraps the first half of the book up.

The Sandbox Toolkit

As interesting as the campaign setting is, the second half of the book is where the real gold is to be found. The central idea presented by the book is the use of a Campaign Folder. The campaign folder is an actual folder that is meant to be a setting sourcebook which the GM constantly expands by adding new pages with new information to it. Any time something happens or the players do something that changes the world, which in a sanbox campaign should be happening all the time, the GM updates the campaign folder by adding new notes to any locations or NPCs. Between game sessions, the GM also adds new pages for new locations and NPCs, which are already prepared but have not yet appeared in the campaign. The great benefit of this system is that the GM does not have to completely make up everything as the game goes along while not having to decide what to do with each element from the start. If the players have a random encounter with bandits and decide to track a fleeing survivor back to his camp, you can just flip to a bandit camp you already prepared and simply add a note where on the world map this camp is located. If you really want to do a hard sandbox campaign, I can’t really imagine how you could possibly manage it any other way.

The next 50 pages are basically tables to randomly generate ideas for interesting locations or encounters. Usually I hate these, but in this case the ideas are actually really excellent. The reason they take up so many pages is because each item on the lists comes with plenty of useful explanation and elaboration. There are four types of sites: Court Sites, Borderland Sites, City Cites, and Ruin Sites. However, they are not so much about describing places (and maps don’t enter the picture at all at this point), but all about describing the kind of people and situations you’re going to encounter there. Court Sites are any places where a group of powerful people comes together. Which can be the court of a noble ruler, but also the estate of a wealthy family, a wizard school, a great temple, or the backroom of a cheap tavern where the local gang bosses tend to hang out. Each type of court has a table with 10 types of important people, 10 reasons why these people do have power in this court, and 10 additional minor NPCs who have a strong personal bond to the important people. For example, in a Temple you might have a “slightly heretical scholar” who “comes from a powerful family” and has some kind of connection to the “cook”. Within a few minutes you can randomly create one to three such NPCs as well as selecting one of ten conflict types they are currently involved in. It’s very bare bones, but the combinations are often interesting enough to create a solid inspiration for a whole conspiracy or murder mystery with just a few die rolls.

Borderland Sites are small villages, manors, or strongholds in the wilderness. Their exact nature can easily be decided by the GM, but the book offers 40 ideas for a current problem that plagues the site. Each pf these offers a number of suggestions of additional elements, like possible allies or enemies for the players, or special circumstances that complicate the situation or may be useful to solving the problem. For example, you could have a fortified outpost that is suffering from a hidden demon cult that meets in an abandoned temple to a forgotten god and the players get help from a traitorous cultist, but it turns out that the cults magic is actually the only thing that keeps the outpost from being overrun. Instant adventure plot, takes only two minutes. Not a complete adventure, but a solid hook that can be quickly made into one. And since in a sandbox game any possible outcome can be worked with, experienced GMs might even be able to do it on the fly. City Sites work basically the same way, but have their own list of 40 possible plot hook generators.

Finally there are the Ruin Sites, which are usually dungeons, but also inhabited by one of 20 possible groups of people, which each come with six or eight ideas for a twist that makes them more than just a random group to fight. It could be a group of necromancers who believe the tomb of an old great necromancer to be somewhere in the ruin and are trying to find his tomes that might be burried with him. It would be up to the players to decide if they want to stop them, help them, or perhaps even steal the tomes for themselves (if they are actually there at all). And there would likely be some random monsters in the ruin too, which the necromancers might be able to help the players with, or the players could use to kill the necromancers. Since there isn’t any real plot, the possibilities are endless and it’s entirely up to the players what they want to do, which is the great charm of a well done sandbox.

And that’s really what separates a great sandbox campaign from a pure dungeon crawl campaign where the players can pick which dungeon they want to crawl. There are a few paragraphs on quick and dirty map making, but it’s generally a topic Red Tide doesn’t concern itself with at all. This sandbox toolkit is to create roleplaying situations based on social interactions, not on generating random dungeons to plunder. And that’s what really makes it such an outstanding book. You can get advice on map making everywhere, but actually running a game is something very few people ever bother adressing (probably because they don’t really know either). And that is also why it’s not only a useful book for people who want to run pure sandbox games, but any GMs who want to run campaigns that are not strictly plotted out in advance and allow the players a great amount of freedom which paths to take to the great goal of the campaign and how to interact with the people they meet along the way.

At 6.50€ for the pdf this book is a steal and there isn’t really any question whether my call is yay or nay. Clear yay! from me. Get this one, it’s really as great as its reputation. If not even better.

I think I am done with Weird Fantasy

I discovered Lovecraft only a few years ago but found that there is a real charm to his works. And the more I read, the more I realized that it’s really not a lot like the “Cthulhu Mythos” I’ve been hearing about for several years before. All the many horrific gods and the alien races with their billion year old wars barely make any appearance in his stories. Calling it the “Cthulhu Mythos” is particularly puzzling as he appears in only one story, which I admittedly found rather lacking, and so much more talk is about Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. There are some hints here and there that strange creatures have been to Earth in the distant past, but there isn’t anything about ancient histories of cosmic wars. Turns out Lovecraft never called it Cthulhu Mythos and all the other stuff was written by other people. And I have to say I find Lovecrafts own stories to be much higher quality because they don’t explain things and leave things vague. All the systemization, cataloging, and historic recording was the work of people who wanted to expand, but in my oppinion didn’t actually get what Lovecraft had been done. Still, most of Lovecrafts own writing is quite good and I still regard those stories very highly.

Some time later I came into contact with various videogames that had some kinship with the style I appreciated in Lovecrafts stories. The Japanese Silent Hill series, and the Ukrainian Stalker and Metro games. All these works have themes of desolation and decay, with protagonists who have to deal with events and environment which they don’t understand but have to deal with alone. And one thing that is really compelling about all of them is not what they explain about the events and environment, but what they leave highly vague and ultimately unexplained. The stories themselves have some interesting ideas, but it’s really everything around the characters and the plot that’s really selling it. In the sphere of games the common term is Lore, but it’s really the same thing as worldbuilding. Perhaps even a better term as the worldbuilding is really the creative process of making the world, while the Lore is the information that actually gets presented to the audience in the finished work. They don’t care so much how it’s done, just what the final result is.

Both the Stalker and Metro games are based on Russian science fiction novels and few people would think of Silent Hill as Fantasy. It’s simply Horror. (And the most terrifyingly, pants-shitting horror I’ve ever seen anywhere.) But they still intrigued me greatly as inspirational sources for the worldbuilding on my own Ancient Lands setting. Having really gotten into fantasy both with Dungeons & Dragons, rereading The Lord of the Rings, and playing the Warcraft games, my encounters with fantasy were highly dominated by works that explain absolutely everything down to the smallest level. The more minimalistic approach of both Lovecraft and Horror games, which also have a lot of Lore but it’s much more uncertain and speculative, seemed both more entertaining and intriguing. I later encountered other Japanese fiction like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Elfen Lied (the manga, the anime sucks), which also went a similar route and did very well, at least for me.

So when I heard of fantasy roleplaying games created with the express intend to evoke the bizarre and unknowable it had my curiosity. James Raggi is the posterboy for this movement with his Lamentations of the Flame Princess game, but there are plenty of others whose creative output is just as important. Raggi made the choice to call his game Weird Fantasty Roleplaying, which all things considered seems quite accurate. I haven’t read any of the Bas-Lag books, which are probably the most popular work by which the “New Weird” is identified, but from all I’ve heard about it there seems to be a clear kinship.

And over the last two or three years, I’ve learned a huge amount of things about creating fantasy that is based on and revolves around the inexplainable and extremely lethal. I came, I saw, and I learned. But I also find it to get really tiresome and also going overboard. The Weird Fantasy roleplaying material seems too deeply focused or even obsessed with the grotesque and being outright repulsive. Mutilated corpses and baby-eating penis monsters get from being horrific to being just obnoxious very quickly. I can’t speak for the literature, but in the area of roleplaying games, the Weird seems to be taken as almost synonymous with being both random and repulsive. And that’s just not doing it for me.

When I am looking at a great mystery, I am seeing a small piece of something bigger. Potentially much bigger; who could tell where it ends? In a good mystery I learn what happened here and now, but how it is connected to all the hidden forces and powers I might never know. That’s just what Lovecraft did. But in the Weird Fantasy there often isn’t anything to know. Weird shit just happens and because the characters of the story will never know, the writer doesn’t make any effort to give some reason or purpose for it. And I think the story as a whole suffers greatly from it. In a total vacuum of information, the characters have no meaningful agency. Investigation is pointless if there isn’t anything to learn. Surviving in a situation you can’t begin to understand might be interesting and exciting at first, but ultimately it really is just pure luck and the writers whim that keeps the characters alive. They don’t really have a hand in their fate. And while that’s bad in literature, it’s just outright terrible in a roleplaying game.

I also found myself trying to make all my monsters horrifying, until I realized that I didn’t really have any idea why I would think that might be necessary or even desirable. Reading Hellboy this week, where fey spirits of Britain and Russia play a major role, I remembered that I went looking into this whole Weird Fantasy business to learn about how to make monster threatening and dangerous, and most importantly ambigous. And there just isn’t anything ambigous about a 30 meter tentacle penis with huge teeth. What I am really after with the Ancient Lands is a world in which spirits are real, potentially dangerous, but also worshipped as protectors and bringers of prosperity. What I am after is “awe”. Not terrified panic. In good fairy tales the protagonist has to get face to face with the spirits and atrempt to have a human interaction with something that deep inside is utterly inhuman. That is the fear I am after. The fear of overplaying your luck and slipping up right in front of a being of unbelievable power and primordial and unrestrained emotion. Something that is like a person, but ultimately not a person at all. Which is something none of the beings in Weird Fantasy have. They just attack as soon as they see you and turn you into screaming goo as soon as they touch you.

My time with Weird Fantasy certainly was not a wasted one. There are actually some really good ideas to how approach and structure things. But these are fine tools, which I believe are much more often misused as sledgehammers. I rather go with Hellboy.

Forgotten Realms, the North, and the importance of art

Over the past couple of days I was rereading the old Forgotten Realms supplement The Savage Frontier. Released in 1988, it was one of the very early Realms product that expanded upon the original Grey Box set. Waterdeep and the North had been released the previous year and The Savage Frontier greatly expanded the “and the North” content. I got into RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons much later with the Baldur’s Gate videogames and when Neverwinter Nights followed four years later, there was a very active German scene of homemade online games based on that game. And for reasons that always have eluded me, that German scene was almost completely in line with the North sub-setting of the Forgotten Realms. I think there were about a dozen or so big servers and almost all of them had their game world set somewhere in The North. That was before World of Warcraft and we playing online with 20 people in the same game at the same was quite a big deal back then. We played that a lot and I even became one of the admins for the server I played at. Since I was good with the level editor I did quite some work on expanding the game world with new areas and dungeons. And if you think RPG geeks are obsessive about canon and accuracy, remember we were German RPG geeks! So I had to know all the source material inside out! Which I very gladly did.

The 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting was very brief on The North and Silver Marches wasn’t really covering the area we were building on. (Looking back, we were way too obsessed with realism and the world would have been much better if we had skipped all those huge outdoor road maps and focused more on actual adventure sites.) So our main source was the 1996 box set The North for 2nd edition. I also got The Savage Frontier on ebay, but being young and stupid and obsessed with detail, I found it very lacking and much to short and brief and didn’t really pay it any attention. It was kinda cool, but The North is about five times its size and more detail and more up to date information is always better, right?

The past couple of years I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with my own Ancient Lands setting and been doing a lot of research on what other settings did right or wrong, and I also did a complete 180 from d20 games and fully embraced rules light games. Both led me to greatly appreciate the older editions of Dungeons & Dragons and take a more serious look at the 1st edition Forgotten Realms material in particular. And as the very first outline of my Ancient Lands setting was “The High Forest, 4,000 years in the past”, I also came back to The Savage Frontier and gave it another close look.

And I have to say, I now actually greatly prefer it over The North, even though it’s much smaller. But for the last years I never really was sure why I like it more and what it actually does better. Having read the wonderful thread Let’s Read The Known World – ALL of it by Blacky the Blackball and NPCDave, I dug up The Savage Frontier another time to read the whole thing and compare to how things changed in the later versions of the sub-setting I am much more familiar with.

First thing I noticed is that it is really very short. 64 pages plus maps, you can read the whole thing in one go. But at the same time, it is still a complete setting. You could perfectly run a whole campaign with it that runs for years without having the main box set or even knowing anything about the rest of the Forgotten Realms at all. The only thing that is missing are the descriptions of the gods, but these don’t actually play any role in this sub-setting and all you need is a post-it note that tells you which domain each of the listed gods has. This book doesn’t tell you how everything works, it just tells you what it is called, where it is located, and what its purpose it. That really are the most important parts a GM needs to know to be able to create some own content based on it. The exact amount of orcs that inhabit a fortress and the name of their chief and the level of their shaman really are not that important or barely relevant. By letting the GM come up with these things the setting becomes actually more usable. You think it might be a good idea to have the party sneak into a goblin lair and fight their chief? But the PCs are only 3rd level and it says the chief has 12 HD and is always guarded by twenty warriors with 4 HD each, so that’s not really an option. We’re actually better off when these things are left to the GM. As a result, the descriptions of towns, dungeons, and regions are usually very brief, rarely more than a short paragraph or two. The Savage Frontier may be short, but it’s long enough. Continue reading “Forgotten Realms, the North, and the importance of art”

Fantasy Safari: More BECMI creatures

Back in the 70s, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons established the tradition of presenting the primary rules of the game in the form of the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, which is still continued to this day. Both by the official D&D brand and a large number of OGL games based on it. (The first game from 1974 also had three small books, but they were divided up differently and were sold as a single box set.) At the same time, the original Dungeons & Dragons got a new edition as well, released as the Basic Set in anticipation that there would be more sets to follow later on. The Expert Set followed four years later in 1981 (at the same time as a third edition of the Basic game), and from 1983 onward came the Companion, Master, and Immortals Sets set one year appart (with a fourth edition of the Basic Set). Each set added more character levels, spells for these higher levels, and also new monster. This was the same approach that was used for the first edition of the Dragon Age RPG a few years ago (though it now gets a second Editon where everything is in a single hardcover book).

I got the 1983 Basic and Expert Sets, as well as the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia, which contains most of the content from all five BECMI sets. Mostly the monsters are classic D&D critters like orcs, goblins, owlbears, rust monsters, gelatinous cubes, and so on. But there are also a couple of monsters that never made it into the AD&D line or were picked up by 3rd, 4th, and 5th edition (though there was one Mystara Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2nd Edition), which are the ones I’ll be covering here.

Basic Set

Oh, right off to a good start: BECMI can rightfully be considered the Dad Joke edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Some people on the time really had a great fondness for them. The largest of the giant spiders in the Basic Set is the Tarantella. Maybe you are like me and think “Don’t you mean tarantula? Isn’t tarantella some kind of dance?” And yes, it is. The tarantella is a giant tarantula that has a special poison that does not kill but instead causes the victim to start dancing. It’s a magical poison and everyone who sees a poisoned person dancing must make a saving throw or also start to dance. After about an hour of dancing, they will collapse from exhaustion. *groan*

According to legend, the Thoul was inspired by a typo. The creature that was made from it is a magical crossbreed of a troll, a ghoul, and a hobgoblin. A thoul looks almost exactly like a hobgoblin, but has a paralyzing touch like a ghoul and regenreates 1 hit point every round like a troll. They are not terribly strong, but for 1st and 2nd level characters they might actually be quite mean and a lot more challenging than a regular hobgoblin. Nice boss for a 1st level dungeon crawl, I would say.

Expert Set

The Devil Swine is a special type of lycanthrope. It can change shape freely during the night, but stays in whichever form it had last taken during the day. It prefers to eat human flesh and at 9 HD is a really mean beast, much more dangerous than even werebears or weretigers. As a special ability, a devil swine can cast charm person three times per day and often is accompanied by a few human minions. Lawrence Schick confirmed to me that the devil swine is indeed based on the swine things from the novel The House on the Borderland which he and Tom Moldvay quite loved. And whose title should also sound quite familiar to long time D&D fans.

Not a new monster, but I think it’s interesting that the types of giants in the Expert Set are the same ones as in the 3rd Edition Monster Manual, while the Monstrous Manual of AD&D, on which the 3rd edition is primarily based, has a lot more varieties that never really made much of an appearance in the later editions. Continue reading “Fantasy Safari: More BECMI creatures”