Is it OK to come out? Have the joke posts stopped?
I am dissatisfied with the dungeon monster encounter tables I have created for my general use (see Old School Dungeon Encounters on the right) because when I port them into javalinks I come to the realization that "2d10, lowest" = 20% of encounters being giant rats, etc.
This is fine when I stock dungeons. For example, if something seems boring or trite to me I give it a twist, using the stats but changing the presentation. In an ancient complex with synthetic-men bodyguards I had ghasts become spoiled examples of synthetic men exiled to their own chamber and with acid touch instead of paralysis. A rust monster becomes a rust lizard - they'll never see it coming! And so on.
But I can't program that into javalinks. In short, those tables are based on a very Monster Manual-centric world with occasional weird peek-ins from the other AD&D books. I want more variation, while still keeping some things more common than others.
Assume I've dug deeper and brought in most of the non-awful monsters from Fiend Folio and MM2. I also own Realms of Crawling Chaos, and the Cthonic Codex monster book. Tome of Horrors mostly overlaps with the classic books, and really would only be useful if I needed specific stats toned down from AD&D to Basic/Original level. Apart from that, what D&D-based monster books or sources do you think are good, again avoiding 3rd or 4th edition statlines as incompatible with the older editions?
All The Worlds Monsters volumes 1,2, and 3. Pretty darned oldschool packed with monsters for all tastes and power levels.
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