Monkbat

Level 2
Small Semi-Humanoid (religious)
Number Appearing: 1-100
Habitat: Ruins

Monkbats are lesser imps who inhabit abandoned holy places. Resembling bat-winged, pot-bellied and tonsured chimpanzees, these creatures live in the style of a religious brotherhood. One in ten casts spells as a cleric, and one in any lair will be a robed Abbat.

Monkbats attack by throwing gruel and their own particular brewed beer. Typically, they grow the grain and hops themselves, though they have been known to trade for supplies with local townsfolk and denizens of the lower planes. They will also rob merchants carrying necessary supplies, sometimes in the company of goblins.

Qualities: 1 in 10 monkbats has the following:

• Miracle working: Casts as a level 3 cleric.

Iron Devil

Level 9
Medium Armored (exterminate)
Number Appearing: 1
Habitat: Graves, Caverns

Before he was imprisoned beneath the earth, the god Loki passed the fiercest of his followers through a fire, burning each down to a single, ever-hot cinder of purest hate and resentment. He implanted the cinders in iron shells, with the horned helms of the most fearsome raiders and stout construction resembling kegs of the heartiest ale. Each stares its hate at the world with a single, unblinking eye. He set them sentinels over buried ships and treasures, to mercilessly destroy any plunderer with their beams of divine fire.

The Iron Devils are widely considered Loki’s greatest achievement or greatest failure: a race of monster with absolutely no sense of humor.

Grue

Level 5
Large Beast (presumably)
Number Appearing: a
Habitat: Colossal caves, Twisty little passages

When you are exploring a dungeon, and your torch goes out, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. Possibly an impatient sort of night gaunt, this creature is known for its rapid attack, leisurely dining habits, and extreme cleanliness. If the lights are, by some miracle, turned back on, your companions will find that you have been very neatly cut apart for food, elegant utensils have been used, and that there is no trace of the grue who did this to you.

The grue is likely to be a relative of the night gaunt, or a particularly large variety of deep goblin. If you should ever wish for one to attack you, it is advisable to extinguish your torch and loudly call it a “mendicant.”

Deep Goblin

Deep goblins are goblins that have lost their sight due to living underground for long periods of time. They find their way by listening to the echoes of running water along cavern walls. They can do this with great accuracy. However, they can’t see quite as well as those who have working eyes, so they have perfected a sort of magical darkness they can spring on spying spelunkers. This darkness first extinguishes all light sources, then irritates the eyes, causing blindness for several hours.

The goblins usually leave disposal of these intruders to the grue, but, if in a generous mood, may invite the intruders to share their community and be rehabilitated.

Qualities:

Chiroptarach

Level 1

Small Vermin

Number Appearing: 1-10

Habitat: Woods, Caverns, Ruins

To describe a chiroptarach as a bat-winged spider is to understate just how gross their hairy little legs are. (Hairy feet, of course, are a noble mammalian tradition.) The chiroptarach’s features vary: some have the eight eyes of a spider while others have the two red eyes of the typical giant bat. Their exact number of legs may also vary, or perhaps they are just difficult to count when they wriggle so much.

Chiroptarachs like to infest rafters, caverns, and the hair of adventurers.

Qualities:

• Headgrab: On a successful melee attack, the chiroptarach grabs the adventurer’s head. This is gross, and requires a successful melee attack to dislodge. Any 1s on the attack roll damage the grabbed adventurer.

Jack Chick would only fear this image more if it was the Virgin Mary

…Fantasy Heartbreaker is the number one Google result for “Elfstar.” This is, of course, thanks to the massive and generous linking of Whatever Happened to Elfstar?, far and away my most popular entry. Eight months later, I believe this is still the only Jack Chick femslash available. I’m rather proud.

Jack Chick’s original “Dark Dungeons” doesn’t even make the first page. I guess he needs to revisit his SEO strategy.

FH is also the number one result for “Warhammer BSDM.” I’m afraid the link is somewhat disappointing, though.

Thanks, everyone.

Chuck Wendig, Advanced Beardmonger

Beardmonger

Level 5

Medium Human (bearded)

Number Appearing: 1-6

Habitat: Steppes, Tundra, places where shirtless men seem out of place

His beard has made him mighty, but it has exerted a fearsome pull on his brain! Lacking the natural balance of the dwarves, this king of men has been corrupted. Now he seeks only destruction, and the finest beard-ornaments he can steal.

Beardmongers often live in beardbarian tribes.

Qualities: One of the following:

• Beardzerker: +1d to attack.
• Beardmage: Casts spells as a magician.

Now for the dark side of middle school gaming.

There used to be this bit in every White Wolf book. Or most of them. Remember our golden rule, it said. Take what you like, leave what you hate, and if the dice don’t give you a result that makes sense, forget them. Serve the story, not the rules.

Sometimes it was addressed to the Storyteller, the benevolent father-dom-god who rules over the characters’ lives like the Tick Tock Man. Sometimes, it was just there.

Innocent enough, yes? By the authority of the designer — and since the days of TSR, wasn’t that the highest authority? By that authority, you could change anything. Tell the Internet that something’s terribly wrong, that you don’t want your Ravnos gone in a week of nightmares… and that’s what they’ll tell you. Golden Rule.

Who does the golden rule serve, though? From there derives the authority of the Dungeon Master, yes… but was it ever intended for the hands of the Dungeon Submissive? Can the golden rule be a safe word, can it say “no, you cannot break my character for your story because I need him intact for mine?”

There’s another response, of course, also familiar. “Don’t play with groups you don’t get along with.” But that’s just a straw man, or, when the flames come, a wicker one. Because we all disagree sometimes. I can point you to the best, most cooperative, most creatively coherent group I’ve ever seen… and they still disagreed. Came to words, even, looked in rulebooks. But the book’s no defense, is it, not in the face of the golden rule.

The Dungeon Master does more work… supposedly. Does that entitle him alone to apply the golden rule? And if so, isn’t that a different golden rule: that he who owns the books, rules?

The Swordsman’s Alphabet returns next week, hopefully along with a design blog on something I’ve been getting questions about. Today, though, we have the second installment in a new feature: Know Your Monsters.

Antwerp

Level 10

Large Something

Number Appearing: 1

Habitat: Any

The antwerp is among the most feared of all monsters. It has the head of a two-moustached man in a winged helmet, and the body of a giant bouncing ball, the touch of which causes deadly ricochet. It is rumored to have venomous spines on its rearpaws, but no one has ever seen paws of any kind on the creature, so it’s sort of hard to judge. How this creature breeds, feeds or what it wants is completely beyond the ken of adventurers, scholars, and dark lords alike.

No one understands the antwerp, and this is presumed to be its greatest tragedy.

Qualities:

• Bounce Off: Missing a melee attack causes the adventurer to bounce to ranged attack distance. A move phase is required to get back into position.
• Bounce On: The antwerp inadvertantly lands on an adventurer, making a melee attack which ignores armor.

“Sometimes, I forget that the D&D® Fantasy Adventure Game is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a film I’m watching.”

– Tom Moldvay, Dungeons & Dragons, 1980

The comparison between roleplaying games and movies is at least as old as I am. As Moldvay suggests, the classic pitch to new gamers is “it’s like a movie where you’re the star.” Several years ago, the most common buzzword for a new system was “cinematic,” and it’s still one you hear a lot.

I think, though, that two very different playstyles huddle the umbrella of movie-like gaming. Consider this classic scenario:

GM: “The night’s dark and stormy, like it always is. You hear a noise from the basement, something at once like the rattling of chains and the cry of a baby. What do you do?”

Playstyle A goes like this: “I’m the star of this movie, so I’ll do what people in movies do. I’ll go down into the basement.” You’re enjoying participation in the conventions of the source media.

Playstyle B goes the other way: “I’m the star of this movie, and I am not going to do the dumbass thing that characters in movies always do. I’m staying in the kitchen.” You want to improve upon the source media, or just see what happens when a character breaks the conventions.

Most people shift back and forth between the two. There’s more to B than risk aversion,^{Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.}

Similarly, style A often ends up associated with author stance gaming,² but I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Games like Buffy the Vampire Slayer build in rewards for character actions that reflect source media, but may hose you in the short term.

Overall, I’m more of a style A person. I enjoy doing the kind of thing you only get away with³ in the movies, and like seeing favorite tropes emerge in play. What about you? Do you game to do things like what you see in the movies, or to defy and fix them? Do the people you play take the same approach? How well does that work out?