The "Gotcha" mentality of the Original Adversarial Game Referee is responsible for more than one in thirty-six monsters in the AD&D Monster Manual ... between mimics, lurkers, trappers, rust monsters, ear seekers, rot grubs, jackalweres (my high school dungeon had one who used the not very clever pseudonym Jack Alwere), other lycanthropes, dopplegangers, rakshasas ... later books and editions continuing the trend on well into the zone of
sheer awfulness. Add to the "Gotcha!" factor all the cursed items, tricks, traps, perma-spells and situations, and we have a clear candidate for one of my thirty-six genre tables. You don't even get a verb. Just GOTCHA!
May I also remind you that the tedious process of rolling d20 on each of the three (well, here, two) columns of the table has been automated, and the results added to a gigantic generator including all (by now) 24 genre tables, on
this perma-page. One, two, three ...
"Petrified tree trunk taming dubious oracular advice."
"Sasquatch living with illusion of ruins."
"Ogre mage healing a shaft to the surface."
Did I mention you should feel free to change the verb? Either that, or live happily with surrealism.
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