dungeons & dragons – Page 4

Cruella de Vil – Greatest Disney BBEG?

“If she doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will” is a bold statement. Not only does it imply that Cruella is the scariest thing imaginable in the world 101 Dalmatians, but the same character that sings that line is standing up the fur-obsessed villain just a few scenes later.

Scary, to some extent, sure. Hateful, despicable and unsettling, definitely. If you’re looking for inspiration for a villain in a Table Top Role Playing Game, Cruella gives some great ideas on how you can make a your main evil guy a great source of grief for your players.

But is Cruella the Greatest Disney BBEG?

Dungeon23 – Week 5

We’re going deeper underground.

The end of January means the completion of the first layer of the Megadungeon, and the beginning of the next. So I needed to make sure that the first was rounded off at 31 rooms, and I needed to think ahead to what the next layer should be.

What I’ve found curious about this self-imposed project is how the ideas flow steadily. I came up with an overall idea for the whole megadungeon from the start, but I didn’t really know how I wanted the whole of Layer 1 to look until it was half-formed. As I started on Layer 2, I had even less of an idea of how it should look. Nevertheless, day by day, the mental image is developing. I don’t think I would have created the same dungeon if I’d sat down to build it in one go.

A new layer in my mega dungeon means a new time period, a new Prophecy leading to its creation, a new clan living within its halls, and new threats for the party to face.

Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Yeti

We made it. All the way to the end of the book, two years later. 98 Fantastic Beasts turned into D&D monsters.

Some have been unique, weird and wonderful monsters that were a challenge to convert, some were a new version of a pre-existing critter, sometimes less impressive because the description in the book lacks the outlandish abilities in the original’s stats. It’s a slight downer, that the last beast falls into the latter category, but the result is, I think, a different brute of a yeti from what Dungeons & Dragons already has.

Dungeon23 – Week 4

One of the aspects that intrigues me about a Megadungeon is how they can feel so ‘lived in’. A standard dungeon might be completely barren of life – just ancient traps and treasures left behind – or it might still be occupied by a big bad monster or evil villain. If you greatly expand the limits of the rooms and landscape within, suddenly theirs room to add whole ecosystems, small pockets of civilisation, clans, potential allies and enemies.

I have an overall idea that several of the layers of my Dungeon23 creation will have humanoid groups living within. Remnants of a bygone age, or people seeking refuge from the calamities outside. As outlined in earlier blog posts, this ‘dungeon’ was a high-tech complex trying to save the world. Whilst it failed, and has since given way to the chaos, collapse and corruption, some pockets of the dungeon still support life.

If nothing else, offering a party potential companions/nemesis that are just trying to survive amongst the aging machinery and monstrous abominations, has the potential to create interesting scenarios and problems for the players to overcome. Unless they blast through human and monster alike without a second thought… that’s okay too.

Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Winged Horse

I was recently looking at a friends Lego Harry Potter set when I observed the Lego Thestral and thought: “Have I missed a monster? I’m half a dozen Fantastic Beasts from completely D&D-ifying the whole book, but I don’t remember seeing the Thestral in it.”

The reason turned out to be that Thestral are a type of Winged Horse, and are mentioned in a single half-sentence. Which is an odd way round in my opinion; in a world of griffons and hippogriffs and dragons and pixies, choosing to define a creatures by the fact that they can fly and not by its ability to be invisible to anyone who has not had a specific trauma is more than slightly odd.

What this does also mean, as I round on the penultimate entry in Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them, that I actually need to create three different stat Blocks for the Winged Horse.

Dungeon23 – Week 3

I knew, going into the creation of my ‘megadungeon’, that the first layer would have areas that were sealed off. I didn’t actually know why they were cordoned off, but I had a vague image of a clan living in the rear of the dungeon, cut off from several rooms because of prior events. This was because ‘Cut’ was my week 1 prompt, and I liked the idea of a dungeon clan that could be befriended if these areas were cleared of their dangers.

Last week, I built up one sealed off area based around the ‘idol’ prompt and the residential sector rend asunder by the former android guards. This week, I knew I wanted to make a laboratory sector, with the ‘mask’ prompt, but I couldn’t decide what was the cause of the abandonment of this zone. So I asked the lovely people on Mastodon to help me decide:

So this week starts out with a lab containing a monster grown from a failed experiment, with ‘mask’ as the key word. The week ended with me moving on to the rooms where the party can first interact with the clan that lives in the rooms not currently infested with monstrous plants.

Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Werewolf

I’m not a fan of the Harry Potter werewolf. It’s far from the hottest of takes, but I’ve always had a particular expectation of what a werewolf should look like. American Werewolf in London, great look for a more wolf-like monster . Underworld, I didn’t like beefy muscle boys. My personal favourite werewolf movie will always be Dog Soldiers, which in my opinion has the best looking version.

Dog Soldiers (practical effects) Vs. Harry Potter (CGI)

The spindly, fleshy, CGI thing in Prisoner of Azkaban barely registered on my good-bad spectrum of werewolves. It’s definitely a monstrous thing, but it just isn’t lycan enough for my liking.

The lore of the Fantastic Beast werewolf does, however, do something I appreciate: it goes for the old-school ‘transforms only on a full moon’ version of the curse. If D&D, the werewolf has to change on a full moon, but they can also turn ‘shapechange’ whenever they feel like it. As curses go, most players would actually quite like to be bitten by a lycanthrope. The extra strengths and abilities quickly stifle the negative aspects of the curse.

So this monster conversion means that I can actually create a ‘true’ werewolf for your D&D game.

Dungeon23 – Week 2

One of the options for this lengthy creative project is to turn to random tables and generators for inspiration for what can be found in each room. I haven’t needed to do this (yet) because I have a reasonable grasp of what I want to do on this month’s layer. Yet, the original post about Dungeon23 came with a list of key-word prompts, and I’m inclined to use them. Not so much to inspire me when I’m stuck, but to see if I can add a twist to the idea I already have.

In week 1, the prompt picked for me from the list (my wife picked a number from 1 to 52) was ‘cut’. So some of the first seven rooms have doorways cut off from fallen debris, and there are strange lazer burns in the floor and ceiling that all suggest a great battle once surged on the land above , adding a layer of intrigued to the dungeon I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

In week 2, my random prompt was ‘idol’…

Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Wampus Cat

Finally, with just four beasts left in the book, I’ve finally hit a monster that has an ability that stumped me. Two words in the description had me scratching my head, trying to figure out how that could possible work on a mechanical level:

“Outruns arrows”

I googled how fast medieval arrows could travel. Opinions were varied, but 150 to 180 feet-per-second was a good average. A creature’s turn is six seconds. That would put the Wampus Cat’s base speed as ‘1080 ft.’. The fastest speed I’m aware of in any D&D monster stat block is 150 feet, and that’s rare. Most characters move at 30 feet around.

A monster that can move over 30 times faster that the average hero is problematic. I think I found a solution that sort-of works…