The Bogeywoman's Cave

This is somewhat similar to my "scalable statblocks" post, but I wanted to go through my steps on how I create creatures nowadays. I love monsters, they're among my favorite parts of role playing games. Making a monster, however, has always been a little difficult for me. I know there are no real "rules" to creating creatures in OSR games besides "going with your gut", but I've come up with a rough set of guidelines that I use. Throughout this guide, I will use the notation "L" to denote the dungeon/adventure level that the monster is appearing on. Lets say I'm trying to create a pale, crawling humanoid thing that evolved from humans but became monstrous and unintelligent after generations in the underworld, similar to the crawlers from the film "The Descent". First I need to determine the Hit Dice of the monster, using the following chart. This also determines how many should appear at once. Toughness/S...

Now we arrive at the part which is gonna be a real pain in the butt; the D section of the Monster Manual. I've decided to split this up into two parts, starting with demons and devils and then doing everything else in another post for the sake of my sanity. But before that, I wanted to plug some people who have been inspired by these posts to make their own reviews! Both Marsworms of Save Vs. Worm and Phineas of the Cosmic Orrery have started their own reviews of the Fiend Folio, which can be found here and here . Meanwhile, Locheil of The Nothic's Eye has begun work on reviewing the Planescape Appendix, and his first review can be found here . But, without further ado, here is my review of all the demons and devils in the 1st edition Monster Manual! Demogorgon (Prince of Demons) ★★★★★ Demon lords are great, I love demon lords. They function well as unspeakable evils which you can't really slay but can temporarily stop, similar to Cthulhu. My campaigns are always low level,...

 Continuing on from my previous Monster Manual post, here are my reviews of the monsters starting with the letter C! Wild Camel ★☆☆☆☆ We all know my opinion of mundane animals by now. This guy rules and you can't tell me otherwise Carrion Crawler ★★★★★ I love carrion crawlers, I always have, ever since I first saw them in the monster section of Moldvay basic. They make sense in the context of a dungeon ecology, they look cool (who doesn't love a giant caterpillar with octopus tentacles?) and they are scary to low level adventurers. They're incredibly good and I especially love the older illustrations of them. Catoblepas ★★★☆☆ These creatures are interesting, but I'm unlikely to use them. Instant death abilities are always a bit iffy to me, though petrifaction bothers me less. However, the sheer foulness and feeling of mythological significance makes these interesting to me. They genuinely seem like a creature that the local townsfolk live in fear of and have told storie...

I've been thinking while working my way through the AD&D monster manual about how many monsters I would use if only they were lower in power. Obviously one can easily scale the monster down to a more reasonable level, but I wondered what a scalable statblock would look like. Armor class could remain fairly constant, if you are assuming a low level system/setting, with a bounded armor class, so that wouldn't need to scale. The main things that would need to scale would be hit dice and attacks/damage, which you could decide to link together. For scaling hit dice, I will use the notation "L" to represent the dungeon level. So a monster's hit dice could be written as L+1, indicating that their hit dice are equal to the dungeon level plus 1. Thus, a monster of that type encountered on the 3rd dungeon level would have 4 hit dice. This can also work in reverse, with a monster have L-2 hit dice. A monster whose hit dice would be considered 0 actually has 1/2 of a hit ...

I actually own two Monster Manuals, one is a reprint and the other I got at a used book store. I love the main 3 monster manuals for AD&D (the Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and Monster Manual II), they're aesthetically pleasing and to me have always set the standard for role playing game bestiaries. I figured I'd read through them and review the monsters therein. I don't know how long I'll be doing this, but maybe this could become a daily post thing for a while.  I'll be starting out with the original Monster Manual, starting from the letter A. Each monster will get a rating out of 5 stars as well as a short explanation of why. Aerial Servant ★★☆☆☆ Not off to a great start, the aerial servant always seemed kind of bland to me. That is to be expected, seeing as its one purpose is to be summoned as a servant by a cleric, but the fact that its an invisible air elemental which is routinely compared to the invisible stalker just makes it stink. It gets 2 stars instea...

If you're curious as to what the Free Kriegspiel Revolution is, give this post a read here. I've been constantly thinking about new settings recently, with the three below being the chief among my considerations: O.C.D (Occult Containment Department): A top secret international organization which hunts down and contains (or destroys) supernatural objects and beings, inspired by the SCP foundation, the X-Files, and bad reddit creepypastas. Starship 2000: A retro-futuristic science fiction setting where Mars and Venus are inhabited planets and the Interplanetary Coalition explores the stars in search of new worlds to discover, inspired by Star Trek, old 1950s B-Movies, and old "space men" toys. Contact Lost: Semi-hard science fiction setting focusing on space marines investigating extraterrestrial colonies, space stations, and research bases that have lost contact with Earth, inspired by Aliens, DOOM, and Event Horizon. Initially I sought to design variations of my ADHD...

 Oh jeez oh god I haven't posted in a month, here have a very simplistic set of encounters/rooms for a 10 room dungeon involving a vampire countess: Empty Rooms Bats roosting in a wine cellar, there is some wine of a good vintage which can be sold for a considerable profit. A pile of staked vampire corpses; the remains of the vampire countess's husbands who she grew tired of. A stable with extremely anemic and emaciated horses. Darkest Dungeon has good vampires. Combat Encounters A guardian werewolf chained to a stake in the center of the room using a silver chain. The sleeping quarters of the countess's husbands, filled with luxurious coffins. The countess's husbands are all rather feral vampires, dressed in fine silk clothes and chosen for their handsomeness. They wear high quality jewelry. The countess's chambers, containing the countess herself and a velvet lined coffin. She wears a ruby necklace and wields a knife with magical anti-coagulant properties, causing...

I don't like XP for gold because I like making randomly generated dungeons, and having a system where people gain in experience by how much treasure they acquire makes randomly generating treasure a lot more complicated and quite frankly I'm bad at math.  XP for gold has the following upsides: Provides a mechanical reason for players to want to acquire treasure Encourages exploration and critical thinking over combat It also has the following downsides: Doesn't make sense from an in-universe standpoint (though leveling systems barely do anyway) Doesn't make sense for certain kinds of characters (what does a hermit monk need all that gold for?) Gives the player characters way too much money to play around with, which is only a good thing if you're trying to do some domain play I propose this instead; for every 10 obstacles a character overcomes (obstacle being defined by the referee, for example a very easy fight with 2 giant rats might not be considered an obstacle,...

There is some gross/gory stuff on this post, so I'm putting it behind a jump break.

Mad scientists are an easy source of adventure, and since I've been watching a lot of horror movies recently, I thought I'd come up with a random table of failed experiments, to serve as adventure seeds. These could easily be used for mad scientists or evil sorcerers. (Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein) D66 Goals Of A Failed Experiment 11. To restore life to the dead. 12. To travel to the beginning of time and learn the mysteries of creation. 13. To travel to the future to learn the destiny of humanity. 14. To create new life from inanimate matter. 15. To create automatons to serve as slaves. 16. To develop a device to transport instantly across space. 21. To create a potion to provide immortality. 22. To transfer souls/minds between bodies. 23. To create an army of clones. 24. To give humans improved strength. 25. To give humans the ability to regenerate body parts. 26. To give humans the ability to turn invisible. 31. To determine the true cause of fear an...

I recently developed a set of 10 worldbuilding questions for settled regions in your campaign world, and have been working on answering them for various locations in my home campaign setting (which I have recently named Visterra). Below are the questions, and then below that are the answers for two nations. What is the government like here? What are the people like here? What religious beliefs do people follow here? What are some notable cities/settlements? What are some noteworthy people who live here? What goods are available to purchase here? What unusual laws are there which PCs should be aware of? What kind of adventures can be had here? What is the environment like? What is a brief history of this place? The Holy Empire of Norenlund It is a theocratic monarchy. The church and the state are one and the same, and it is known as the Imperial Orthodoxy. There is an emperor who is ostensibly in control, and some whispered rumors have it that he is the ...

So a while back I decided to give solo dungeoneering a go, and also attempted to make a megadungeon by delving through it and generating the dungeon as I went. This eventually petered out, but I still got a good 21 decently developed rooms out of it. I'm planning on attempting to make a dungeon using this method again, but perhaps setting my sights a little lower, perhaps a 1-2 level dungeon instead. Regardless, I hope you enjoy this first, incomplete level of... The Tomb of Unrelenting Hatred Background Originally built over 2000 years ago by the pre-Imperial kingdom of Moskaj, this subterranean complex was built to house the corpses of the kingdom’s warriors who were slain in battle. 1500 years ago, Moskaj warred with the nearby kingdom of Segik, a country ruled by the necromancer Sigbind Gnarlwood. Segik was conquered, its undead armies destroyed, and the peasants who toiled under Gnarwood’s reign were free. However, with his last breath, Sigbind cursed Moskaj, saying that ...