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...

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 ...