19 Fave Plant/Elemental
Plant or Elemental? Plemental? I think
Shambling Mound (a la Swamp Thing) is the only thing that fits this definition.
I also think whoever started this 30 Day OSR Hot Mess might have wanted to save
some monster categories for next year. ; )
Oh well, let’s go with plant monster. Can’t
beat Myconid (mushroom men). They’re there underground, minding their own
business, tending to their mushroom fields, then someone pisses them off and
BAM spore attacks, healing shrooms, etc etc. Fun stuff.
I always had problems DMing ‘normal’ plant
monsters – tell players their characters are in a garden or jungle and they
insist they’re always on alert, or start lobbing flaming oil or chopping at
every vine. Besides having a stationary plant monster guard a treasure or small
passageway (and again being burnt out), I never found much use for them.
20 Humanoid/Natural/Fey
Again with the multiple post-2e monster
taxonomy. I dunno what ‘natural’ even signifies, and as a proud grognard I ain’t
about to find out.
Let’s go with fairies, specifically
Sprites. Aside from the good soft drink associations, whenever a sprite
randomly cursed a player character back in the day I felt like D&D was
actually fulfilling its promise of emulating fantasy literature and escaping
its wargame roots. Alas, the cure was often a few thousand GP to the local
cleric, when a quest would have so much more fun and added magic to the playing
experience. Oh well, when I DM I try to put as much unexplainable magic and
wonder back in my games, and quests to break enchantments beat the vending
machine mentality of getting an X level poobah to cast a spell any day of the
week.
21 Dragon
I disremember if this existed in D&D,
but I loved the Shadow Dragon from Darksword Adventures (remember that paperback-sized
game by Hickman & Weiss based on the novels? Always wanted to run/play that…).
As the colors multiplied, D&D dragons kind of lost their ethereal,
force-of-nature quality, and became another set of attacks and abilities. Shadow
dragons were part of shadow, and shot down stars from under their wings if I remember
correctly. Good, atmospheric stuff.
22 Fave Monster
Favorite monster overall as opposed to all
the categories of monsters we’ve traipsed through already? Yeesh!
OK, my favorite monsters are those that the
players cannot beat in a stand up fight. In video games like Resident Evil
(specifically 2 & 3), zeds and lashers soon lose their menace, but
those hulking horrors in trenchcoats that can’t be stopped? When you hear their
BGM your pulse races. Ditto The Thing for movies – you can kill parts of it,
but if even a cell escapes, the world is toast. The old Deities & Demigods
even made gods mortal by giving them stats, which I found a terrible thing, and
would use to represent avatars, not the deities themselves. The book also gave
killable versions of Lovecraftian & Elric Mythos’ creatures, while Chaosium
kept them in their primal, unbeatable and thus more fearsome form. In
Stormbringer, if you see a herd of colossal metal oxen come your way, hear the
dread voice of Bellbane in the mist or the tentaculared horror of the Kyrenee,
you run, regardless of whether you have demon arms and armor or not. Even in
Call of Cthulhu, access to the awesome destructive power of guns and explosives
will most likely only hasten your demise.
These unbeatable threats not only keep the
thrill and uncertainty alive, they also force players to be more creative in
finding solutions and can also further the narrative. Want to stop a Tarrasque
ravaging the kingdom? You could quest for a Wish and all the other junk you
need to kill it, but you might need to find a sage first to find this stuff
out, or you could just try to lure it through a gate to another plane, or find
its natural enemy (a la the Grahluk and Elenoin from Elric), or any other
number of solutions. As a DM, just keep quiet and let players run through a
number of plans – they may surprise you and add some invaluable, magical
adventure to the game. Look at the end of Death Frost Doom – no way the players
can fight what they’ve unleashed head on, so now they’re forced to think waaaay
out of the box to solve the problem they’ve caused.
(Or move to another continent and take up
mushroom gardening…)
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