The Bogeywoman's Cave

 Things have been happening and I've been too lazy to work on this, but here we are finally with part 4! Dinosaurs (Yep, All Of 'Em) ★★★☆☆ Three stars for dinosaurs may seem a little harsh, but mainly this is just a personal gripe with how they are laid out. Dinosaurs are objectively cool, especially the scientifically inaccurate big lizard fellas depicted in the Monster Manual. However, the fact that they are all labeled by their scientific names, the fact that few of them actually have illustrations, their obscenely large numbers of hit dice, and the relative redundancy of having so many similar species listed, all makes my opinion of these entries go down significantly. I would use dinosaurs in my game, and I might pick and choose a few from here, but this isn't how I would go about it. Displacer Beast ★★★☆☆ These critters are interesting, I've actually read the story that inspired their physical appearance, and honestly I think these are slightly more neat than the ...

Inspired by this post by Wizard Lizard over at Underworld Adventures. I like Zweihander from an aesthetic standpoint, I really do, but unfortunately I have OSR/FKR brainrot and so I can't run or play a system that complicated. However, what I could do is use the character creation method from that game and tweak it for use with a less complicated system. The stats in Zweihander are Combat, Brawn, Agility, Perception, Intelligence, Willpower, and Fellowship. Normally you roll for these stats by rolling 3d10 and adding 25 to the result for each, but that's a little too complicated for my tastes, so instead how about you just roll 3d6 for each. Write down any stats that are noteworthy, ignore average stats. Combat 13-18      Skilled Fighter 9-12        Average 3-8          Poor Fighter Brawn 13-18    Tough 9-12      Average 3-8        Weak Agility 13-18...

Oh boy its rambling theory crafting time yet again here in the Bogeyman's Cave! I'm gonna be comparing the general proportions of empty rooms, traps, monsters, and special rooms in dungeons by edition of D&D. Now, Original D&D has a very simplistic suggestion of rolling a d6 for each room and space, with a 1 or 2 showing that a monster is there, 3 to 6 showing that there is no monster. There is no consideration for traps or "tricks" as OD&D called special rooms. This crude system gives us the proportions of 33% monster encounters and 66% empty rooms (or at least, rooms without monsters). As near as I can tell, Holmes Basic D&D didn't have any guidelines as to Dungeon encounter proportions, instead just allowing DMs to wing it using the included dungeon geomorphs and monster and treasure assortment.  AD&D had a rather complex random dungeon generation system, with a bunch of tables to fool around with. However, I'm gonna be focusing on TABLE...