Credit: Paul Carrick
If you haven't seen the previous post, I've started a series where I'm talking about all the classic(ish) D&D monsters with my brother Ben. Welcome to the B monsters.
Banshee
Ben pointed out to me that the original banshee from folklore is actually not undead. It's just another type of Celtic fairy. A strongly death-themed one, but certainly not a ghost. It figures that D&D (and, as a consequence, all other fantasy fiction) instead remakes them as "lady ghost with a sonic attack."
Oddly enough, this is one of the few monsters that seems to enjoy some amount of wider cultural purchase beyond fantasy nerds. It's probably because "banshee" is such a good word, right? I like almost anything from a Celtic source, but in this case I think I have to conclude that La Llorona is simply better.
Basilisk
My dwarf artificer has a section on his character sheet labeled "things I dun blowed up." It includes a basilisk, which I had to blow up from within because it swallowed me whole.
Basilisks are good both as fantasy and as game objects. They have a lot of pedigree as a monster originating in the medieval European imagination, enjoying a fair amount of popularity in that world. And in terms of gameplay, they offer: 1) a big tough non-intelligent monster to duke it out with, 2) a really strong gimmick to challenge you and force you to change up your strategy, and 3) the ability to fit into most situations easily.
Historically there's been an issue of basilisks being conflated with cockatrices, so I endorse alternatives. Harry Potter did the big snake thing, which is pretty good. There's something that just makes sense about assigning a dangerous gaze to snakes. Reminds me of Kaa in The Jungle Book. The depiction of "lizard, but with tons and tons of legs" originates in medieval sources and is more uniquely fantastic, so it wins. And the art in D&D usually sells it pretty well. But check out this version from Warhammer.
Behir
Their entry in the Monster Manual says that they have a special rivalry with dragons. Well, sorry bud, but the dragon's entry is pages and pages long and it doesn't once mention you.
Beholder
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." To perceive is to evaluate. To see is to judge. And to see without purpose, to watch without power, is to become a pervert. This is the root of the beholder's hubris. The pretension of being an exception to this.
If you're a GM and you haven't run a beholder yet, whatever reason you have is bad. Go remedy that mistake and thank me later. Life is too short to save the iconic stuff for "the right moment."
I'm not sure TSR or WotC have ever fully appreciated what they have on their hands here. It is simply staggering what a good monster the beholder is. The look, the stat block, the flavor, everything. It's a shame that they don't seem to know how to use this thing. They just completely fail to recognize its true potential. The beholder is meant to be the very concept of pride and xenophobia taken to its furthest extreme. Judging by how corny and lame Xanathar is, apparently WotC's best attempt at that concept is little better than a goofy, quirky, gloating Saturday morning cartoon villain. If the best you can come up with is "eccentric collector of art and trinkets," that tells me you don't understand just how threatening "obsession with beauty" can be. I'll remind you that real human beings, in horrifyingly large numbers, have convinced themselves before that insufficiently "beautiful" artwork is grounds to justify literal genocide.
Just look at this thing. This freakish screaming nightmare. For goodness sake WotC, they're an aberration, not a goddamn Dalek. They should be fucking insane. We're not here to trade quips with a mere hate-head. We want to have our brains splintered by the psionic rage of a psycho-sphere.
The beholder I ran was, I hope, a little closer to that vision of demented, reality-warping obsession. "The Oculus" believes itself the only thing worthy of possessing the gift of sight, as it is the only real thing. All other beings are restless dreamers trespassing in the waking world. Accordingly, its dungeon is filled with people driven mad by its waves of psychic anger, each of them tearing out their own eyeballs in submission to the beholder's authority. And when it learns of adventurers in its lair who dare to still have eyes, it sets out to correct reality according to its vision of purity. Echoing through the halls are its screams of "DEGENERATES! DEGENERATES! PERVERTED AND UNFIT!"
Oh, and I revised its list of eye rays a bit. No need to have both a "Charm Person" and a "Charm Monster" beam. So now they have a ray that causes you to vomit violently whenever your eyes are open and another ray that causes your skin to peel off and your organs to rupture.
Black Pudding
Oozes are the finest of all monster types. They're everything you want out of D&D.
They provide so many unique and interesting gameplay opportunities. They're halfway between a combatant and an environmental hazard. They hurt you not by attacking, but by occupying your space. But you can also give them pseudopods and tendrils and sprays if you want to. Their bodily properties can also render your attacks ineffective. Maybe they corrode your weapons, or suck them in upon contact, or bounce them backwards at you. Or maybe the goop splits apart and becomes multiple goops.
It's so easy to proliferate new slime types. Blood ooze. Snot ooze. Mud ooze. Paint ooze. Darkness ooze. Glue ooze. Sand ooze. Mayonnaise ooze. Tar ooze (bonus undead inside!). My co-writer has pointed out before that you can take any other monster and recreate it in blob form. Vampire? A sunlight-sensitive slime that creates zombie spawns from its victims. Bulette? Sentient oil that geysers out of the ground. Mind Flayer? A jelly that sends neural impulses through its tendrils and emits psychic-damage-dealing sound waves. Goblin? Flammable blob swarms maximizing mayhem. Displacer Beast? A mold whose prismatic form refracts and reflects light to create an illusionary double. Dragon turtle? Sludge island, like a giant mass of gunk floating in the ocean.
Which is why the D&D slimes disappoint me so much. They're so bizarrely committed to their handful of ooze types, which aren't even very good. Why have we had to endure edition after edition of just the ochre jelly and black pudding? How many opportunities have they had to just write in "Magma Muck" and they didn't? How easy would it have been to create the "Booze Ooze" that intoxicates you as you fight it?
The only good thing the black pudding gave us is the word "pudding" as a synonym for slime, putting the idea in players' heads to try eating the monster. I wholeheartedly endorse this.
But seriously, someone should force the entire D&D team to sit down and watch the remake of The Blob from 1988.
Blink Dog
Ben: "Is this based on something? It feels like it must be based on something." It is not. It seems like someone tried to make a dog counterpart to the displacer beast. It doesn't work great. "Ethereal dog" isn't a terrible idea though. Always makes me think of Celtic folklore about ghost dogs and fairy dogs and demon dogs and omen dogs and that sort of thing.
Brown Mold
This is part of a category of "monster" that's really just, like, an environmental hazard you gotta watch out for when dungeoneering. At some point they took these out of the Monster Manual and hid them in the Dungeon Master's Guide instead. And it's a shame, because modern gamers don't really know about these things. It's one of the more subtle bits of cultural divide between the old school and the new school. The current crop of players has lost that knowledge of the green slime, the brown mold, the yellow mold, rot grubs, and so on. I always liked that D&D had a kind of universal dungeon ecology which players slowly learn (likely through tragic and hilarious trial-and-error). It's what separates amateurs from seasoned adventurers.
Anyway, we should come up with more of these. What would be the effects of "blue rust" or "red lichen" I wonder?
Brownie
There's a lot of conceptual overlap here with halflings and gnomes. They're drawing from the same folkloric ideas. I guess the best thing is to make them like 6" tall and riff on Gulliver's Travels or The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. But in a world without halflings and gnomes then I'd be happy to include more household spirits, since it's a mythological trope I quite like.
Bugbear
It's such a good name. It makes sense to have bigger boogeymen than just goblins. It's unfortunate then that the classic D&D "goblinoid trio" is so weak. I already have a post about bugbears with lots of pictures you should look at, so please go enjoy that.
Bulette
Another underrated Gygaxian original. One of the "Chinasaurs," alongside the owlbear and the rust monster. It's not exactly rooted in some primal psychological idea like a vampire or unicorn or something, but it's a perfect monster. Honestly, the main problem with them is that nobody seems to know how to draw a good picture of one. This one miniature is the only rendition I've ever seen that I think truly nails it.
This is a Reaper mini. Painter credit here
I get that "land shark" is a funny idea but seriously. A fight in a tunnel against a burrowing beast whose top fin is trailing through the dirt before leaping out at you, darting in and out of the floor, walls, and ceiling? Hell yes. Throw in a little bit of dodongo DNA and molduga makings from Legend of Zelda and you're set.
Bullywug
I'm not big on animal-folk but I will gladly make an exception for frog men. They just have so much going on.
Like, think about the sort of characteristics that an animal gets boiled down to in the mind of a child. Foxes = cunning, owls = smart, skunks = smelly, turtles = slow and has a shell. But frogs and toads? They jump, they have long sticky tongues, they eat flies, they croak, they ribbit and puff out their throat, they live in swamps, they metamorphosize, they give hives, they're poisonous, they climb trees, and they have weird eyes. These are all things that even a small child might know and think of when they hear "frog." That's a lot of good stuff to work with.
I really love the name bullywug but, 1) it is a wee bit silly, and 2) it's a WotC trademark. Ben pointed out that Pathfinder's name is very close to "boggart." He went on to suggest that, rather than the traditional goblinoid trio, you should just lump in every little tickle boi monster into the parent category of "goblin." Bullywugs, kobolds, imps, brownies, etc. This would be a better goblin schema than "goblin, hobgoblin, bugbear."
-Dwiz
Blink dogs are great because they have human intelligence and are Lawful Good.
ReplyDeleteI like to play them as having a sort of absolute doggish sense of loyalty and justice, plus their ability to see into the ethereal plane and teleport around means they know about all the bad stuff in the area. Since they have trouble communicating with humans but get protective about them anyways, you have a pack of good doggos warring against the evils of the wild on behalf of people who probably don't appreciate it at all, which is good drama. Will the players mistake them for a threat and drive off the town's secret guardians? Will they try to ally with them and discover that a dog's black-and-white morality and absolute devotion to their people grates on them? Will they help the pack defeat something they couldn't handle on their own, or try to exploit their loyalties to rope them into something more ill-advised and adventurer-y? Has the pack seriously misinterpreted something, like mistaking the new Duke's troops for bandits? Plus it's always fun to RP a dog, haha.
The GURPS dungeon fantasy line had a whole book devoted to Slimes, Fungi, Spore Clouds, Oozes, Puddings, Mold and such. They had varieties, colour-coded, for each monster. Bonus points, they introduced the idea of “moldy monsters” - undead and constructs could ALSO have Mold covering them for additional defences. Another monster book had the Undead Slime, which is a huge gunk made of an undead horde that’s decayed and melted into one big gross animated sludge.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Goblinoid trio, my take on them is that they're the same species:
ReplyDeleteThe three recognised “races” of Goblinoid are in fact a single species. A pregnant goblin’s body utilises available resources in three distinct ways, resulting in variable gestation lengths and young optimised for different conditions.
The first method produces a single, oversized infant with a neurology customised for a more solitary existence than goblinoids typically prefer. This is a bugbear, noted for their self-sufficiency, comfort operating as lone scouts, and surprising capacity for stealth. A bugbear gestation is longer than average, and the infant is born at a higher level of physical and mental development. A bugbear can only be born to other bugbears or hobgoblins, as the smaller frame of a goblin cannot survive the strain. Originally, bugbear pregnancies were the consequence of plentiful times, when a given population of Goblinoids was secure in an apex predatory role. They could afford long gestation periods, and favoured minimal offspring to avoid upsetting a healthy food pyramid with uncontrolled population growth; a failsafe against the possibility of turning boom into bust through excess breeding. Instead, each new life was provided with the full resources of its healthy mother and prepared for the world as thoroughly as possible before being born. For all that some races stereotype Goblinoids as “hoard-like” (a result of the Goblins’ mob-like conduct coupled with an aversion to the warfare that is so intrinsic to Hobgoblins), Goblinoids are in fact creatures of inherent restraint and balance, right down to the biological level. They are almost tailored to successfully hold a predatory niche without succumbing to extremes of failure or of success; the latter being potentially as disastrous in the long-term.
The second breeding method produces a small litter of 3, 4, or 5 young, with resources distributed more or less equally between the developing foetuses. This produces a “Hand” of Hobgoblins, who possess a natural affinity for order and discipline, having bonded within the womb from earliest development, subject to a selective and balanced system of biological oversight. Hobgoblins are accepting of deprivation and plenty as equal forces shaping a cooperative, and combine tight devotion to peers with instinctual stratification. Restraint is once again an inherent feature of their biology, and as the division of resources is governed as much by the mother’s body as actual availability of food, Hobgoblins are naturally shaped into Lawful creatures.
The third method channels the mother’s resources into producing a litter of 7-10 Goblins, diminutive young given to chaotic mob behaviour over organised pack-hunting, her body rushing to produce viable offspring and in large numbers, rather than slowing to ensure an even distribution for a lesser number of fully-develop young.
Biologically, the Hobgoblin might be considered the “standard” for the race, with Goblins and Bugbears common deviations produced under certain conditions to maximise the survival chances of the social group. In a modern state of civilization, different factors of nutrition, environmental pressure, divine favour, or magical exposure can influence which type of gestation a pregnancy will result in. Goblinoid politics and immigration patterns are often informed by current caste balance, and attempts on a societal level to find preferable or favoured percentages, or else to influence the outcome in favour of personal preferences.