Bad Monsters: The Urge to Improve

Close behind the temptation to laugh at bad monsters (ha, ha and ha) is the temptation to improve them. It's the same urge that led Neil Gaiman to write a "Prez: The Teen President" story in heroic rather than camp mode in Sandman, or Alan Moore to use Mr. Mxtyplxzwhatever as a very serious villain in one of his DC series. This upgrading from silly to serious is known in TV Tropes land as Cerebus Syndrome, after the Dave Sim comic series that evolved from a funny-animal spoof of Marvel's Conan series to something altogether more profound.

Soon to be released, if not already out, is a fine example in the D&D canon: Paizo's Misfit Monsters Redeemed. How successful have Messrs. McComb, McCreary, and Sutter been? Hard to judge from just the blurb. Some of their "misfits," like the dire corby and flail snail, I never thought were that bad to begin with. With others, like the disenchanter, I'm highly skeptical about their chances for redemption at all. And others show real inventiveness and promise, like the adherer rethought as a horrible spider-silk mutant, and the flumph as a Derlethian herald of the fight against the Great Old Ones.

For some monsters, as for film star Frances Ethel Gumm or pop star Stefani Germanotta, a change of name is going to be a necessary part of any serious rebranding. There's no room for a "flumph" in the Cthulhu Mythos, and I'm guessing most people hate the flail snail because of its silly rhyming name. This point was grasped by Max, of the currently inactive blog Malevolent and Benign, in his great series of Tirapheg Week posts. Five differently named variants on the classic half-baked, purposeless weirdo monster from the Fiend Folio - living statue, alien wizard, mutant mishap, limb-collecting pirate, and three-headed lounge singer - for five different game systems, all brilliantly executed.

What drives people to upgrade the classic old stinkers of monsterland? The urge is greatest, it seems, for the "failure to converge" monsters. These collections of haphazard bits, pieces and abilities form a kind of Rorschach test, an irresistible challenge to create meaning out of meaninglessness. I'm sure there are other improvements out there that I haven't come across, and it would be interesting to know of them.

Next: my own tirapheg variation.

Bad Monsters: Failure to Converge

The most spectacular failed monsters are those that bring together elements never yet joined before - the head of a rabbit! the body of a lemur! tentacles that smear you with liquid cement! - but without apparent thought as to how all these elements make a viable whole. In problem-solving terms, the bad monster represents a lot of playing around with the puzzle pieces, but not hitting on a solution that works.

This raises the question, "what works for a monster?" The answers are many, explaining why bad monsters are so hotly debated, as you can see if you even get two flumph haters and two flumph lovers (or at least flumph toleraters) in a chatroom together.

 
Because of this, I am forced to conclude that no monster is bad in and of itself. Even the Fiend Folio's umpleby - yes, the umpleby, my friends, that hairy master of static electricity discharge - would make a great goofy character in a children's book. Or a cool Pokemon. It's just completely out of place in a dungeon.

(Well, all right, there is one exception that wins the crown of the intrinsically worst monster in all of AD&D. It doesn't have a cult of awfulness, it doesn't inspire mockery or jokes. It is not imaginative or interesting enough to even be magnificently bad. I will reveal and explain in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile, guesses are welcome.)

Now, some of the things that go into a working monster are ...

Problem-solving challenge. A monster's habits or abilities can make it a particularly memorable or versatile adversary. Trying to find its vulnerability (it's hideously ugly, was once human and has smashed every mirror in the mansion ... hmmm ...); being surprised by the classic "gotcha" monsters (whoever would have thought that ten foot pole was a giant stick insect?), or just marveling at its strange tactics (it's using the vines on the ceiling to get away!), are all things that make a monster interesting.

The surprise factor, of course, drops dramatically once the monster is published and becomes generally known. And a DM who relies too heavily on "gotchas" like the mimic ... goldbug ... um, cloaker anyone? ... will end up with a paranoid, slow-moving, and generally disillusioned party, and a silly dungeon. Which, indeed, might be the point.

Resonance with setting. The number one cause of disagreement on bad monsters is their fit to the setting. One DM may play the game as a gritty, boils-and-billhooks medieval affair. Another might prefer a backdrop of vaguely Renaissance, vaguely Orientalist weird fantasy. Still another might run a gonzo campaign where just about anything goes. They will all have different ideas about what monsters are appropriate. Some examples:

• Dark Ages or Ancient World epic: Pretty much only the monsters of that epoch's folklore, or plausible variants on the same, fit in. Satyrs and aegipans, not orcs.

• Medieval romance: This is the middle and dark ages as glimpsed and fantasized through the rear-view mirror, for 500 years of European history - from the Renaissance chivalry novelists (Ariosto, Spenser, Tasso) to Tolkien. Mythical, legendary, and wholly allegorical figures abound. Orcs rub elbows with hippogriffs and dragons. Stick with combinations of people, heraldic animals, and the occasional plant and you are on safe ground here.

• Weird fantasy and horror: Looking to far-past and far-future decadence and barbarism, this genre is much more forgiving of tentacles, blobs, giant insects, psionics, human-animal hybrids, and other quasi-science-fictional elements as long as they are eerie and frightening - just being weird is not enough, Mr. Umpleby. Prehistoric creatures are also fair game.

• Sword and planet: Alien worlds from the first half of the 20th century abounded in life forms bearing suspicious resemblance to earth creatures with dye jobs, extra limbs, horns, etc. Humanoids "evolved" from terran-analogue creatures are also common among writers less rigorous in their xenoanthropology than Burroughs. Weird fantasy critters can also be worked in; the main difference between the two genres is more in the equipment of the heroes than the nature of what they're fighting.

• Science fiction: And in this genre, the weirder the more believable. If it looks too much like an Earth-whatever, it's suspect.

Natural or symbolic coherence: The really great monsters have parts that go together, and abilities that go with those parts; symbolically, if not literally. The griffin, for example, combines the nobility of the mammal and bird monarchs, for an ultimate symbol of ultimate nobility. The necrophidius, praised previously, combines two classic symbols of fear, and adds abilities in keeping with those of a snake - poison and swaying charm. It doesn't hurt that it would also be at home in either a medieval or weird fantasy setting, and many people's conception of "proper D&D" combines the two of those elements to various degrees.

The opposite of this is ability-platform syndrome. You come up with a great ability ... let's say, draining magic items. You then ruin that ability by taking about 2 seconds to decide it should go on a glowing blue camel with a prehensile trunk. Or jumble syndrome, where you jumble two or three critters together, add and subtract parts, and voila! The dread one-eyed gorilla shark of Planet Mongo. Again, great for gonzo or heavily sci-fi campaigns, but not so great for the fantasy genre most people are used to.

Next time: The fine art of redeeming monsters; or, Captain Save-A-Flumph.

Bad Monsters: Failure to Diverge

Allow me to resurrect this article on creativity that came to my attention via Trollsmyth several months ago.

I'm passingly familiar with the psych literature on creativity, but the short review in the article reminded me that creativity is not just about making up crazy stuff (divergent skills), but also vetting the crazy ideas to make sure they serve your purpose (convergent skills). The convergent skills in particular are what makes the difference between "Yeah, she's very 'creative' (eyeroll)" and "Wow, she's really creative!"

Now that we're ready to move from the good side of the Fiend Folio to the bad, this theory can help explain bad monsters - in AD&D or anywhere else. Monsters can either fail to diverge, or converge. Converging is the more spectacular kind of failure, so let's cover failure to diverge first, AKA basic lack of creativity.

The prime example of this is where you take an existing monster, jack it up by a hit die or two, and pretty much call it a day. I'm not saying the Fiend Folio didn't have its flinds and what not, and even the Monster Manual needlessly promoted the otyugh to the, er, neo-otyugh. But the real champion of the phoned-in monster upgrade was Monster Manual II - greater basilisk, greater lammasu, annis, xaren, margoyle, storoper, thessalhydra, different colored slimes, jellies, puddings and oozes for Pete's sake ...

Mmm. White pudding.

Then you have the even more wrongheaded monster downgrade - the moral equivalent of letting your players feel important in the Star Wars universe by having them meet Dark Helmet. Thus, you have FF's mini-red dragon, the firedrake. And then MM2 goes hog-wild with a mini-beholder, mini-stone golem, and hey, if you want to say you bagged an elephant too, we'll give you one the size of a Jack Russell terrier.

Let's not forget the gratuitous monster breeding program, the kind that dares to envision the offspring of two critters already in the same niche - kind of like those towns where a Norwegian dating a German is considered "interracial." Thus, the FF's ogrillon, giant troll, two-headed troll (oh, they forgot the ogg-roll, which is what you get when you cross an ogre and a troll, right) ... yeah, and the gorilla bear.

Look, either you need a gorilla, or you need a bear. You are never going to need a gorilla bear.

What's sad about all these monsters is that they show so little faith in you, the DM, and your ability to add, subtract, or average basic numbers. If you want a super-tough ... let's call it a russet ... hulk, you should really be able to gin it up on the fly, adding some hit dice here, subtracting some AC there. AD&D is simple enough that you don't have to worry about his Spot skill or Charisma.

Next: The convergently challenged ... source of the truly legendary WTF's.

Grimlocks vs. ... Every Other 2HD Soldier

Okay - one more damn good Fiend before we start fixing up the bad ones.

Grimlocks are, of course, the Fiend Folio's version of H. G. Wells' Morlocks from The Time Machine. They fill that "2 hit die troops" niche that your party starts bumping into once they have a level or two under their belts. Grimlocks are in direct competition with gnolls, troglodytes, lizard men, crabmen and so on.

And they win. Hands down the best 2nd level dungeon soldier.

The great advantage of grimlocks is they are not ani-men, human-imals, beast-oids, zoo-morphs or what have you. They are human ... and not human. Most plausibly descended and degenerated from us, they belong to a great old pulpy tradition of inbred cave-dwellers. Consider, for example, how much creepier Clark Ashton Smith's The Dweller in the Gulf would have been if it had been set on Earth not Mars, and with Earthlings and not Martians populating the strange society the explorers find.

Unlike gnolls and their kindred, unlike the weaker humanoids the party has been battling on the shallow levels, grimlocks are utterly of the underground, natives of its deep places. They may raid on the surface ... but they don't have to. Grimlocks are fundamentally different from the Tolkienoid grunts; imports from the world of science fiction, they nonetheless fit perfectly in a world of weird fantasy.

Completing the greatness of grimlocks is their blindness and Daredevil-sense. Different things work against them. No illusions; no casting light on the face; then again, if they surprise you, it's not because you've been holding lanterns and torches to light your way. Visual dangers of the dungeon - medusa's gaze, bedazzling mosaics, enchanting purple flames - hold no peril for them. But clouds of pepper, or the din of beaten shields? That just might work. One more way their traits and attributes hold together and create a memorable picture of underground horror.

So, one last time - sometimes the Fiend Folio is better.

Fiend Folio and the Horror Esthetic

As Halloween approaches, paging through the AD&D Fiend Folio in search of gems among the rubble for a series of posts rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns, I find that some of the strongest entries distinguish themselves by evoking, not weird fiction or science fiction, but the horror genre.

The following Fiends in particular are noteworthy for being written up as little mini-dramas reminiscent of EC comics or Clive Barker stories:

"Don't worry.
 Russ can draw us scarier."

Meenlocks: You haven't felt the same since the party unsealed that foul-smelling tunnel. Now your companions snicker and tap their heads when you complain of whispering, shuffling in the shadows, and dreams that they are coming to get you. You wish that you were crazy ... but you're not ... they are coming ...

Penanggalan: Although at first you were suspicious of that druid you found in the woods, she soon proved her worth, helping you past the swamp and calming down the crocodiles in the river. Now she has gone back to her home for the night, and shameful, sinful dreams of her persecute you ... and when you wake, you feel weaker ... but vinegar ... why the smell of vinegar on your blanket?



Revenant: The purse the Thieves' Guild offered you to smuggle their wanted man out of the city was heavy enough for you to jump at the prospect. The law may have lost the scent ... but that stooped, awful-smelling hooded figure that dogs avoid is right behind you ... and you don't really want to know why the thief fainted to see the sword that it carries ...

Each of these "horror story monsters" (literally, in the case of meenlocks which seem to be adapted from this 1973 film) figures in a well-defined haunting that plays out over several days, quite unlike anything the original Monster Manual had to offer.

Ed Greenwood's famous criticism of the FF, offered in the pages of Dragon magazine, was that many of the monsters were incompletely developed. These three write-ups quite conspicuously avoid that flaw. If anything, they fall into the opposite one: the monsters are so scripted-out that they end up dominating and creating an adventure, rather than being worked into it. Compare this to the vampire: we are given a set of abilities and some hints at motives, but the exact strategy and behavior of the creature are left up to the DM. This leaves room for the vampire to be anything from a brooding Strahd to a feral Nosferatu to a cunning super-villain.

The scripted approach may be friendly to the inexperienced adventure runner, and was eventually the way D&D would go under the influence of Greenwood and others, with monster ecologies and tactical notes. But it also leaves little room for creativity, or for surprise if the players have read the monster book. To innovate, the DM has to write over already-written-in space, rather than project into blank space.

I will go further and say that Greenwood's criticism misses the mark. The bad monsters in AD&D are bad not because they are under-described, but because they are misconceived in the first place. If you need any proof, behold the abundance of uninspiring and ridiculous monsters even in the 2nd and 3rd edition epochs, where the norm got close to two full pages of stats, description and ecology. And in the Fiend Folio, no matter how much detail you give the flumph, how much we know about its gizzard and egg sacs, it's basically a little flying saucer alien out of place in a medieval fantasy world it never made.

Well, I guess the point of diminishing returns is here. There were some other worthy creatures in the Fiend Folio - the kuo-toa and drow (though here, also over-written; most of their surprising abilities and details should have been kept in the original modules, for the above stated reasons) - the iron cobra - the githyanki and githzerai - and a decent roster of b-list humanoids and critters for weird worlds without orcs and minotaurs.

And a whole sackful of clunkers. Can they be rehabilitated? We'll see, in the weeks to come.

The Necrophidius Takes On MM1 and MM2 ... No Contest!

How do you improve on skeletons? Those evergreen, Harryhausenish, all-weather, no-feeding-required, make-players-circle-every-pile-of-jumbled-bones-cautiously staples of the scary dungeon?

The Fiend Folio knows. You stick a human skull on a snake skeleton ... you give it a couple of snake-related magic powers (snake dance, paralytic bite) so the monster makes sense.

And oh yeah, you make it NOT UNDEAD. You're a bitter, wise and experienced monster designer who's had one too many bone-pile ambushes rebuffed by some low-level crucifix jockey.

"Unfair!" you might cry in defense of the Monster Manual. "The skeleton is merely the basic monster, of course it is going to be improved on as the game develops!"

So by that token the skeletal monster from the Monster Manual 2 should be all kinds of awesomeness rungs above the Necrophidius, right? Like - a skeletal unicorn-pegasus whose horn blasts Mandelbrot fractals that do 10d12, or something, right?

"I call it the Necropiggyus."

Here. Have a skeletal dog. Or perhaps a skeletal sheep, or chinchilla, or something. It's MM2's answer to the Necrophidius: the animal skeleton. Par for the course, from the book that statted up goats, squirrels, and the herd animals of the lower planes.

Sometimes the Fiend Folio is better ... both forwards and backwards.

15 Bad Games I Learned Something From

No, no, no. I can't be like everyone else. I got to be negative. I got to be me!

1. Monopoly, Munchkin, etc., etc. Sometimes even a "bad" game in terms of board game developments in the 90's can be the "right" game because everyone knows it. Hence my decision to stick with a core D&D system rather than more novel rules-lite systems.

2. Source of the Nile. Commits so many board game sins by modern lights. Is not faaaaiiiir. But the very unfairness and tedious stretches make the good parts fun as all hell!  Previously.

3. My own crappy 11th grade AD&D campaign. Someday I'll do an expiatory post on this rules-bound monstrosity.

4. My high school friend's home-brewed "urban combat" role-playing game, Gay Slayer. I was so repulsed by the prospect of being invited to this that I started running my own transgressive alternative for the group, City Crime, in which you rolled up your race, social class, sexual orientation, and criminal compulsion at random. And GMing that game taught me the joys of fast and loose improv rules.

5. F. A. T. A. L. At the end of the slippery slope of any attempt to include sexuality in your role-playing game rules lurks this anal-circumference abomination. The more rules, the less meaning.

6. Hyborian Gates, Redemption, etc., etc. Elements of a customizable game with different power levels should be costed differently. Amazing how many first-wave CCGs missed this particular lightbulb.

7. HumAliens CCG. Not every kiddie franchise out there is Harry Potter gold.

8. Diskwars, Clout, etc., etc. Most fantasy gamers would rather roll INT than DEX when competing in real life. (These were games where part of your success depended on accurately throwing Pog-like cardboard discs or poker chips.)

9. The Hundred Years War (Strategy & Tactics magazine game). When you are putting a new wargame out every 2 months, simple little playtesting details can fall by the wayside, like whether you have the right counter mix for the set up instructions. Quality over quantity.

10. Power Kill, Train, etc., etc. "While you thought you were playing an innocuous pastime, LOOK, you were actually causing the deaths of innocent people!" Manipulative, morally didactic games don't work.

11. Cleopatra and the Society of Architects. Cool components do not excuse, in fact may encourage, over-complicated mechanics and multiplication of mini-games. I'm looking at the Tetris puzzle in this one, in particular.

12. Champions CCG. Not even the most cynical planned obsolescence gimmick in all of gaming can overcome crap design and humor insulting even the intelligence of 8-year-olds. (This was a British CCG I saw a few packs of, where your monster cards actually permanently lost hit points as you scratched off their damage dots, so you woudl continually have to buy new ones after each game.)

13. Every goddamn eurogame where you use one thing to buy another thing and then another thing which in turn buys another thing which you use to win the game; overcomplicate with auctions, worker placement, and special effect card decks to taste. If you have a good mechanic, bring it front and center rather than covering it up with all the usual dreck. Particular offenders: Princes of Florence; Hamburgium.

14. Dwarf Fortress. Space bar does this on the one screen but this other thing on the other screen and yet a third thing over here? Sometimes, a user interface that is actually hostile to human input - the equivalent of switching road signs to confuse the German paratroopers - can come to feel like an initiatory ordeal into an exceptionally cool and all-consuming cult. See also the rules of De Bellis Antiquitatis.

15. Spore. If you want to release a creature generation toy, release a creature generation toy, but don't hype it to be the most cosmic and profound thing since 2001: A Space Odyssey when it's actually boring and baffling to play. Lesson: Don't believe the hype.