A Geeky Blog: Dungeons and Dragons
So the website this comes from doesn't exist anymore... so I had to dig a bit to find these. But as someone who happens to have rolled a twenty sided die at a few points in my life - I found this quite funny. It is from a website that was called bookofratings.com.
Displacer Beast
As far as I know, the idea of a six-legged panther with squid tentacles that looks like it's somewhere other than it really is originated in the mind of D&D creator E. Gary Gygax, possibly as the result of blunt trauma. Not that I'm complaining. The displacer beast is an excellent example of synergy; a panther with squid parts is considerably more intimidating than a squid strapped to a panther. My main complaint with the name. Not only is it alarmingly prosaic, shouldn't it be called a "displacing beast"? We don't call flying fish "flyer fish." We don't refer to the Ukrainian burrowing elk as a "Ukrainian burrower elk." On the other hand we do have leafcutter ants and nipple-kisser voles, but it just sounds wrong to me. B+
Beholder
The biggest disappointment in the D&D movie (a phrase equivalent to "the dustiest end table in Pompeii") was the five seconds of CGI beholder action in which this eleven hit-die aberration is fooled by the old "throw a pebble" trick. Ooh, I'm angry. Beholders are much cooler than that. Their array of eyes is a veritable snack machine of doom, provided said snack machine was stocked with deadly magic rays. And Funyuns. Gotta have Funyuns. Add to that skin that made "chitinous plates" a household name, the ability to fly, and a standard-issue toothy maw and you've got experience points that you've got to earn the fuck out of. A+
Rust Monster
I have to admit, this is pretty funny. Anything that can render an adventurer's +3 agnostic sword of oozebane into so much mucus-coagulating dust is good for a laugh or two. The problem is that the thing is pretty distinctive what with the propeller tail and the antennae and all, so the adventurer in question just pulls out a bow and keeps his distance. Yeah, you could argue that the characters shouldn't act on player knowledge, but I find it hard to imagine that the paladin's wise mentor never mentioned that if you come up against a big propeller-bug thing, it's time to hand your page a big stick and send him in. Seems like that'd be high on the curriculum. C
Blink Dog
These intelligent, teleporting, other-dimensional fox terriers are the natural enemies of displacer beasts. I love that Gygax had this whole magic-spewing ecosystem going on. Of course blink dogs are the natural enemies of displacer beasts! And esophagus monsters feed on the tender leaves of the rare-but-majestic elf ficus! It all fits together! Anyhow, blink dogs are chaotic good, which means that they're one of the few creatures in the Monster Manual that don't exist solely to guard treasure and draw blood. Instead they can aid the party, provide information, and look really surprised when you kill them to search their spleen for emeralds. C-
Githyanki
I complain about the boring descriptive names of D&D monsters, but if this is the alternative, it's just as well. "Githyanki" sounds like one of those midwestern lake names that means "the place those white people keep asking about" in Pawnee. The githyanki (plural, "whole bunch of githyanki") live on the Astral Plane, which is a place adventurers can go when they've completely wrecked the economy of their home world by flooding it with gold and portable holes. They often have silver swords that can cut the magical cord binding astrally projected creatures to their home dimensions, which I'm led to understand in badass. This is entirely mitigated by the fact that they look like angry, emaciated Smurfs. D+
Owlbear
It's this big, owlish, bearish thing. Big deal. I can play that game too. "Watch out for the hawklion! Beware the vulturetiger! Don't worry too much about the sparrowspaniel!" The Monster Manual says that this beastie is "probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard." Insane wizards are an important part of the D&D economy, keeping inefficiently-designed catacombs stocked, adventurers busy, and dealers in magic items happy. Kind of like the WPA, only with bushier eyebrows. D+
Gelatinous Cube
Gygax clearly had some sort of ooze fixation. He populated his little world with a goobery panapoly of spores, molds, and fungi, at least one variety of which has psychic powers. Huh. At any rate, closely edging out green slime for "Best Performance by a Nickelodeon Game Show Prop" is the gelatinous cube, a transparent, hallway-shaped, flesh-dissolving, uh. Cube. The sheer ridiculousness of it is impressive. Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It's genetically adapted to graph paper, for God's sake! Plus it conveniently fails to either digest or excrete metal, giving an adventurers a reason to kill it and scoop coins from its corpse. It's like some sort of living, deadly, mall fountain. A
Trapper
Like the aforementioned cube, this is yet another monster perfectly adapted to life in a dungeon. The whole deal is that it looks like a floor, but eats you like a monster. It's like the world's most boring Transformer. The odd evolution of D&D monsters leads me to conclude that one of the following must be true: dungeons have existed for at least fifty million years or there's some sort of hyperspeed Lamarckian evolution going on or evil wizards routinely make new monsters to relax and impress waitresses or hey, are those nachos? Can I have some? D+
Umber Hulk
It's amazing what you can come up with using a thesaurus and a box of 128 Crayolas. I'm just sorry the Burnt Sienna Leviathan didn't make the cut. The umber hulk looks like a cross between a stag beetle and Jesse Ventura (or, in more recent incarnations, a cross between an African harvester termite and Crispin Glover): a big bipedal insect with those weird insect clampy jaws and claws and fingers and bleh. It has the power to confuse onlookers, which is a power more D&D monsters should have. "So this is, what? A perfectly round bird with five legs? I don't get it. What kind of monster is OW MY HIT POINTS!" B
Mimic
One reason that D&D is better than video games based on D&D is that in the tabletop version mimics sometimes disguise themselves as something other than chests. Computer roleplaying games often have mimics--imitation mimics, if you can wrap your head around that--which are always disguised as chests. Chest chest chest. It makes you wish that digital orcs would stick their electrum pieces in a foot locker or some variety of credenza, just to break the ennui of another piratey-looking wooden chest suddenly sprouting limbs and beating you to within an inch of your save file. It would be refreshing like the breezes of summer to be able to say "Hey! I just had my clavicle shattered by an aluminum tool shed!" B-
Shrieker
Allow me to quote from the Monster Manual: "No. of attacks: 0; Damage/Attack: Nil; Treasure type: Nil." What's the point, then? It shrieks. It makes a whole bunch of noise when anything approaches. It doesn't make your eardrums bleed, it doesn't shatter your potion vials, it doesn't render you deaf or impotent. It just attracts wandering monsters. Wandering monsters lead shallow lives. Giant yelling fungus is pretty much the high point of their social scene. You'd figure 90% of the time the shrieker is just reacting to some other wandering monster, but wandering monsters feel it's worth it to check out on the off chance that they might be hacked to death. D
Rot Grub
These have about the best picture in the Monster Manual. It depicts a horrified adventurer with a Village People mustache gazing at his arm as a small stampede of worms tunnel moistly therein. Remember "Slimey"? From Sesame Street? Oscar's pet worm? They look like that. Your options, if you find yourself engrubbed, are to apply flame to the entry point, to have a cure disease spell cast upon you, or to die in 1-3 turns. That's it. Your vorpal cudgels and spheres of annihilation are of no use to you here, Frodomir! If you don't have flame or cure disease, you're worm food. Moreso, I mean. B
Bulette
These are big sharky-turtle things that burrow in the ground. According to the MM, "they love halfling and will hungrily dig them from their burrows." I knew Fellowship of the Ring was missing something! "Greetings, Gandalf. I'll bumble about the place while you make cryptic pronouncements instead of telling me what the hell's going on and OH GOD IT'S GOT ME THE PAIN IS INCREDIBLE OH GOD OH GOD HAND ME A MUFFIN WILL YOU?" B
Mind Flayer
Among the many variations on brain-eating found in D&D, the mind flayer is about the coolest. First off, it doesn't look like a platypus or star-nosed mole. Seriously, those are options. Secondly, the brain eating is not purely metaphorical. This thing doesn't just feed on your thoughts or emotions, it pulls your damned brain out of your head with those face tentacles and swallows it like neuron sashimi. Frankly I think you could make more money by videotaping this process and selling it over the Web than by raiding ogre dens for random coinage. B+
Roper
Okay, let's consider the inevitable Three's Company joke as having been made and get on with it, shall we? Great. This creature has the ability to capture adventurers with sticky tentacles, drawing them to its toothy maw and mistaking them for homosexuals so they can share an apartment with Chrissy and Janet. Whoops! Sorry about that. At least it's over with. The roper can disguise itself as a stalagmite or stone mound so as to avoid having sex with its extremely randy middle-aged wife. Damn! Sorry. Okay, seriously. This creature was replaced by Don Knotts in season three and oh screw it. C
So the website this comes from doesn't exist anymore... so I had to dig a bit to find these. But as someone who happens to have rolled a twenty sided die at a few points in my life - I found this quite funny. It is from a website that was called bookofratings.com.
Displacer Beast
As far as I know, the idea of a six-legged panther with squid tentacles that looks like it's somewhere other than it really is originated in the mind of D&D creator E. Gary Gygax, possibly as the result of blunt trauma. Not that I'm complaining. The displacer beast is an excellent example of synergy; a panther with squid parts is considerably more intimidating than a squid strapped to a panther. My main complaint with the name. Not only is it alarmingly prosaic, shouldn't it be called a "displacing beast"? We don't call flying fish "flyer fish." We don't refer to the Ukrainian burrowing elk as a "Ukrainian burrower elk." On the other hand we do have leafcutter ants and nipple-kisser voles, but it just sounds wrong to me. B+
Beholder
The biggest disappointment in the D&D movie (a phrase equivalent to "the dustiest end table in Pompeii") was the five seconds of CGI beholder action in which this eleven hit-die aberration is fooled by the old "throw a pebble" trick. Ooh, I'm angry. Beholders are much cooler than that. Their array of eyes is a veritable snack machine of doom, provided said snack machine was stocked with deadly magic rays. And Funyuns. Gotta have Funyuns. Add to that skin that made "chitinous plates" a household name, the ability to fly, and a standard-issue toothy maw and you've got experience points that you've got to earn the fuck out of. A+
Rust Monster
I have to admit, this is pretty funny. Anything that can render an adventurer's +3 agnostic sword of oozebane into so much mucus-coagulating dust is good for a laugh or two. The problem is that the thing is pretty distinctive what with the propeller tail and the antennae and all, so the adventurer in question just pulls out a bow and keeps his distance. Yeah, you could argue that the characters shouldn't act on player knowledge, but I find it hard to imagine that the paladin's wise mentor never mentioned that if you come up against a big propeller-bug thing, it's time to hand your page a big stick and send him in. Seems like that'd be high on the curriculum. C
Blink Dog
These intelligent, teleporting, other-dimensional fox terriers are the natural enemies of displacer beasts. I love that Gygax had this whole magic-spewing ecosystem going on. Of course blink dogs are the natural enemies of displacer beasts! And esophagus monsters feed on the tender leaves of the rare-but-majestic elf ficus! It all fits together! Anyhow, blink dogs are chaotic good, which means that they're one of the few creatures in the Monster Manual that don't exist solely to guard treasure and draw blood. Instead they can aid the party, provide information, and look really surprised when you kill them to search their spleen for emeralds. C-
Githyanki
I complain about the boring descriptive names of D&D monsters, but if this is the alternative, it's just as well. "Githyanki" sounds like one of those midwestern lake names that means "the place those white people keep asking about" in Pawnee. The githyanki (plural, "whole bunch of githyanki") live on the Astral Plane, which is a place adventurers can go when they've completely wrecked the economy of their home world by flooding it with gold and portable holes. They often have silver swords that can cut the magical cord binding astrally projected creatures to their home dimensions, which I'm led to understand in badass. This is entirely mitigated by the fact that they look like angry, emaciated Smurfs. D+
Owlbear
It's this big, owlish, bearish thing. Big deal. I can play that game too. "Watch out for the hawklion! Beware the vulturetiger! Don't worry too much about the sparrowspaniel!" The Monster Manual says that this beastie is "probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard." Insane wizards are an important part of the D&D economy, keeping inefficiently-designed catacombs stocked, adventurers busy, and dealers in magic items happy. Kind of like the WPA, only with bushier eyebrows. D+
Gelatinous Cube
Gygax clearly had some sort of ooze fixation. He populated his little world with a goobery panapoly of spores, molds, and fungi, at least one variety of which has psychic powers. Huh. At any rate, closely edging out green slime for "Best Performance by a Nickelodeon Game Show Prop" is the gelatinous cube, a transparent, hallway-shaped, flesh-dissolving, uh. Cube. The sheer ridiculousness of it is impressive. Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It's genetically adapted to graph paper, for God's sake! Plus it conveniently fails to either digest or excrete metal, giving an adventurers a reason to kill it and scoop coins from its corpse. It's like some sort of living, deadly, mall fountain. A
Trapper
Like the aforementioned cube, this is yet another monster perfectly adapted to life in a dungeon. The whole deal is that it looks like a floor, but eats you like a monster. It's like the world's most boring Transformer. The odd evolution of D&D monsters leads me to conclude that one of the following must be true: dungeons have existed for at least fifty million years or there's some sort of hyperspeed Lamarckian evolution going on or evil wizards routinely make new monsters to relax and impress waitresses or hey, are those nachos? Can I have some? D+
Umber Hulk
It's amazing what you can come up with using a thesaurus and a box of 128 Crayolas. I'm just sorry the Burnt Sienna Leviathan didn't make the cut. The umber hulk looks like a cross between a stag beetle and Jesse Ventura (or, in more recent incarnations, a cross between an African harvester termite and Crispin Glover): a big bipedal insect with those weird insect clampy jaws and claws and fingers and bleh. It has the power to confuse onlookers, which is a power more D&D monsters should have. "So this is, what? A perfectly round bird with five legs? I don't get it. What kind of monster is OW MY HIT POINTS!" B
Mimic
One reason that D&D is better than video games based on D&D is that in the tabletop version mimics sometimes disguise themselves as something other than chests. Computer roleplaying games often have mimics--imitation mimics, if you can wrap your head around that--which are always disguised as chests. Chest chest chest. It makes you wish that digital orcs would stick their electrum pieces in a foot locker or some variety of credenza, just to break the ennui of another piratey-looking wooden chest suddenly sprouting limbs and beating you to within an inch of your save file. It would be refreshing like the breezes of summer to be able to say "Hey! I just had my clavicle shattered by an aluminum tool shed!" B-
Shrieker
Allow me to quote from the Monster Manual: "No. of attacks: 0; Damage/Attack: Nil; Treasure type: Nil." What's the point, then? It shrieks. It makes a whole bunch of noise when anything approaches. It doesn't make your eardrums bleed, it doesn't shatter your potion vials, it doesn't render you deaf or impotent. It just attracts wandering monsters. Wandering monsters lead shallow lives. Giant yelling fungus is pretty much the high point of their social scene. You'd figure 90% of the time the shrieker is just reacting to some other wandering monster, but wandering monsters feel it's worth it to check out on the off chance that they might be hacked to death. D
Rot Grub
These have about the best picture in the Monster Manual. It depicts a horrified adventurer with a Village People mustache gazing at his arm as a small stampede of worms tunnel moistly therein. Remember "Slimey"? From Sesame Street? Oscar's pet worm? They look like that. Your options, if you find yourself engrubbed, are to apply flame to the entry point, to have a cure disease spell cast upon you, or to die in 1-3 turns. That's it. Your vorpal cudgels and spheres of annihilation are of no use to you here, Frodomir! If you don't have flame or cure disease, you're worm food. Moreso, I mean. B
Bulette
These are big sharky-turtle things that burrow in the ground. According to the MM, "they love halfling and will hungrily dig them from their burrows." I knew Fellowship of the Ring was missing something! "Greetings, Gandalf. I'll bumble about the place while you make cryptic pronouncements instead of telling me what the hell's going on and OH GOD IT'S GOT ME THE PAIN IS INCREDIBLE OH GOD OH GOD HAND ME A MUFFIN WILL YOU?" B
Mind Flayer
Among the many variations on brain-eating found in D&D, the mind flayer is about the coolest. First off, it doesn't look like a platypus or star-nosed mole. Seriously, those are options. Secondly, the brain eating is not purely metaphorical. This thing doesn't just feed on your thoughts or emotions, it pulls your damned brain out of your head with those face tentacles and swallows it like neuron sashimi. Frankly I think you could make more money by videotaping this process and selling it over the Web than by raiding ogre dens for random coinage. B+
Roper
Okay, let's consider the inevitable Three's Company joke as having been made and get on with it, shall we? Great. This creature has the ability to capture adventurers with sticky tentacles, drawing them to its toothy maw and mistaking them for homosexuals so they can share an apartment with Chrissy and Janet. Whoops! Sorry about that. At least it's over with. The roper can disguise itself as a stalagmite or stone mound so as to avoid having sex with its extremely randy middle-aged wife. Damn! Sorry. Okay, seriously. This creature was replaced by Don Knotts in season three and oh screw it. C
The last time I played D&D was this past summer. A friend of mine set up a D20 modern game for me to play. It was set in an urban landscape--a pulp detective story, in which I was the detective. The trail led me to a black magic sorceress, and her zombie lover. Fortunately, I aimed for the head, and my saving throw saved my life. It was fun. What's even better--I hadn't played in years, proved I still got it. I didn't get killed once.
You may have seen this before, but it is worth repeating.