BX Monsters A to Z: Griffon
Crawling up out of the slime and taking to the skies! The griffon is next on our alphabetical exploration of the monster lists. Griffons have a pretty extensive pedigree in real-world mythology, having roots all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. The monster is usually depicted as having the body, tail, and hind legs of a lion and the head, forelegs, and sometimes wings of an eagle. (Wings, of course, are a vital feature of the D&D iteration of the beast.) At least one scholar wrote of griffons that they are "enemies of horses", a tidbit enthusiastically seized upon by D&D's authors. The D&D griffon is a pretty formidable creature. The rulebook entry describes it as a voracious predator, and it has the stats to fill that role quite admirably. Its AC is a medium-tough 5 and its 7 Hit Dice make it bigger and tougher than the lion from which it derives (pardon the word play) the lion's share of its physical form. It can dish out an impressive amount of dam