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B/X Monsters A to Z: Ghoul

 Oops. Once again, I'm posting a monster out of alphabetical order, this time because I just plain overlooked it. It's a good one, too, a staple of many a low-level dungeon-delve: the ghoul from the Basic Set. And finally, our first undead creature! Ghouls are described as hideous, bestial undead humans who will attack any living creature they see. I generally imagine them being dressed in rags, with filthy, cracked grey skin, wild hair caked in dirt and offal, drooling mouths full of jagged, broken teeth, eyes somehow  at once lifeless and filled with hatred, moving with a hunched, shambling gait. They are the third rung on the undead ladder, just above skeletons and zombies and beneath wights, and can be turned by clerics, though 1st level holy folk need an 11 on 2d6 to manage the feat, and might make better use of a round swinging a mace at a skull. With a middling (for beginning parties) AC of 6, a sturdy 2 Hit Dice, and a slashing frenzy of three attacks per round for 1-3
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BX Monsters A to Z: Giant

 In the D&D Basic Set, we got an iconic monster of six distinct flavors, the dragon. In the Expert Set, we have giants, also iconic monsters of six distinct flavors.  For the most part, I've just never gotten excited about giants as I have about dragons. Sure, they're a fantasy staple, but I always struggled to imagine how they really fit into the D&D world, as well as how a fight between giants and human and demihuman characters would look. More on that later, though. The six major species of giants, in ascending order of Hit Dice, are Hill (8 HD), Stone (9), Frost (10+1), Fire (11+2), Cloud (12+3), and Storm (15). Armor Class is a 4 almost straight across the board, except the storm giant, which has AC 2. Obviously, these guys are no mean feat to take down, even the (relatively) lowly hill giant. Except for the hill giant (2-16 damage), the damage for each type escalates in multiples of d6, from 3-18 for the stone giant up to 8-48 for the storm giant. Working from the
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BX Monsters A to Z: Gelatinous cube

 And now, the most iconic monster in D&D history, the Captain of Team Ooze and Slime, the inspiration for the title of this very blog... the wonderful, wobbly, and weird gelatinous cube! I've always had a bit of a soft spot (pun intended) for the slimes and oozes of D&D, and the gelatinous cube particularly captured my interest from the first moment I thumbed over its entry in the monsters chapter of the Basic Set. (I have a deep fascination with both transparent substances and polyhedral solids. Maybe it's an autistic thing.) I'm sure the gelatinous cube is one of, if not THE, first monsters to arise from the conventions of the game itself, specifically that of the 10'x10'x10' corridors seen on almost all dungeon maps. What better size and shape to roam those corridors scouring them clean of delicious organic detritus? So the head janitor of ruins and catacombs came into being. As one would expect, gelatinous cubes are pretty squishy, with an Armor Clas
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BX Monsters A to Z: Gargoyle

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 In medieval times, they were architectural flourishes, placed on pillars and rooftops as silent guardians against evil spirits. In D&D, they tend to be evil themselves, or at least Chaotic and hostile. They're gargoyles, from the Basic Set. Protect your outdoor statue-monsters with Garg-Oil! From the makers of Min-Wax minotaur conditioner. Gargoyles are immediately stated to be magical monsters which save as Fighter:8. While that's a significant bit of information, it's far from the most interesting thing about them and the saving throw is readily evident in the stat block. It really seems as if Tom Moldvay struggled a lot in coming up with opening sentences for monster descriptions. Anyway... Gargoyles can be harmed only by magic or magical weapons, which right away makes them a serious threat to Basic-level characters. Like their real-world inspiration, they are described as horned, clawed, fanged, winged, and hideous, with skin that often looks exactly like stone, s
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A different take on falling damage

 It's always bothered me a little bit that falling damage in D&D is something that can be withstood by having more hit points. Sword blows, sure; hit points represent the skill and combat reflexes to turn potential killing strokes into glancing blows and superficial wounds. Arrows are a little trickier, but it's still possible to envision saving oneself from a shot to the heart with honed instincts and conditioned reflexes. Falling, though... gravity and inertia don't give a flying fork about how good a warrior you are. We all fall at 9.8 meters per second squared. There's a certain limit within which it's conceivable that a nimble and trained person can control his landing so as to distribute the force of impact to minimize injury, but if you're falling 50 feet, it's much less likely to make a difference whether you land gracefully or awkwardly. It's possible to model something a bit more "realistic" without abandoning the essential 1d6-pe
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B/X Monsters A to Z: Elemental

I thought I had posted this entry of B/X Monsters A to Z months ago, but I was just perusing my drafts, and there it was, clearly unpublished. So here it is now, hopefully better late than never. Just try to imagine it sandwiched between Efreeti and Elephant, where it should have been all along. I have to confess, I have never, ever used elementals in my D&D games. Was this a good choice or a poor one? Let's jump in and check these fellows out. Elementals are creatures made of one of the four classic elements: fire, water, air, or earth. Right off the bat, the description focuses on the summoning of elementals, noting that they can only be brought forth from a large quantity of the appropriate element, e.g. a bonfire, a pond or larger body of water, open air, or an expanse of bare earth or stone, respectively. It is also noted that a summoned elemental must be controlled by its summoner to the exclusion of all else: the summoner cannot move faster than half speed, take any dama
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Discourse on defense

 Combat offense in D&D is modeled with attack rolls, using d20, modified by class and level plus ability score modifiers or by creature Hit Dice, in either case representing some combination of skill and physical power, and by a damage roll, generally representing the amount of force brought to bear on a successful attack. It can be a wonky system, and sometimes counter to our intuitions of how combat and bodily injury actually work, but it serves its purpose well enough in the game. Defense in D&D combat can be even wonkier and less intuitively satisfying. Like offense, it's broken down into two primary components, Armor Class and hit points. Both, conceptually, serve the same broad function, which is to represent the avoidance or reduction in severity of bodily injury, but they do so in ways which are mathematically distinct and very different intuitively.  Armor Class is the more intuitively comprehensible of the two, though it itself represents two semi-distinct concept
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