Posts Tagged by monsters
| January 19, 2012 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
If you’re like me you’ve found yourself thinking the following: “I need to make an encounter table for this area. It’s a swamp, so I’ll just go though all my monster books and make a list of all the monsters that can live in swamps…” and then three pages of paper and way too much time later you succumb to information overload, shelf it and go do something else. A simple template can help reduce option paralysis and provides structure for an encounter list. Guidelines…
| July 30, 2010 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
As a GM, wandering monsters and other random encounters can be difficult to utilize without being a burden on the game. The best illustration of this point I’ve so far seen is in Rich Burlew’s excellent comic, Order of the Stick. But is it true that the wandering monster is nothing but a boring waste of time? Where did they come from in the first place, why did they seemingly disappear from modern games, and are there valid uses for them? In the early days…
| June 30, 2010 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
Recently, Jared von Hindman wrote an article for the Wizards website on why playing evil races is perfectly legitimate, and how to properly integrate yourself into a party if you are playing one. I’m a long-time fan of Mr. Hindman’s work at his website Head Injury Theater. In fact, one of my first major “Wooo! Someone on teh Intarwebz noticed me!” moments was getting my name in his article on the movie The Manitou for sending him an article on foetus in foeto. O.K. Fan…
| October 28, 2009 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
Making players — and by implication, their characters — feel as if they are in over their heads is the hallmark of a savvy GM. Especially for your horror-themed game session. It also takes players who are willing to buy into the moment — the payoff comes when the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach starts churning. Creating that moment of dread requires more than dropping a dragon on your players’ doorstep. That’s just providing an insurmountable foe. While daunting, it doesn’t capture…
| February 4, 2009 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
A recent online search for folklore information on Scandinavian-styled trolls for a future gaming session I was planning took me to a site I hadn’t encountered before. Monstropedia.com turned out to be the proverbial pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow — and there wasn’t even a leprechaun guarding it. But there was an entry for leprechaun — and those pesky trolls, too — full descriptions of their origins and the folklore and legends surrounding them. For a GM, it was better than…
| October 20, 2008 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
Some could argue that the Fourth Edition designers took the bite out of Lycanthropes — literally. The Monster Manual lists only two, the wererat and the werewolf. And making the condition hereditary rather than an affliction makes them no different than shifters, at least thematically. The two shifter templates, for the longtooth and razaorclaw versions, provided in the racial traits section of the Monster Manual, can serve in a pinch, though. They’re a serviceable overlay for any characters the DM chooses to have “afflicted” by…
| October 6, 2008 | Posted by Troy E. Taylor |
It’s a given that your October- or Halloween-themed 4E-dungeon’s going to have a hovering ghost (page 116, Monster Manual) haunting the undisturbed crypt, at least one gruesome hag (page150) stirring a kettle with a noxious brew and a blood-thirsty vampire (page 258) waiting in the wings — so to speak — to strike. But here are some other monsters from that glorious tome you could use to slip into a Gothic horror setting and not sacrifice one iota in suspense, or at least good fun.…
