Gelatinous Icosahedron

 If you're looking for a newbie-safe monster, look no further than the Giant Centipede from the Basic Rules. Imagine me as long as your forearm. These things are classic creepy-crawlies, foot-long versions of our common real-world centipedes, and may evoke the same feelings of fear and revulsion in anyone with a phobia of those tiny critters. They're not tough (AC 9 and 1/2 Hit Die), they're not fast (60'(20') movement rate), they inflict zero points of damage, and they're not encountered in overwhelming numbers (2-8 dungeon, 1-8 outdoors). Even 1st-level characters will likely to be able to dispatch them relatively quickly... but that doesn't necessarily mean they should attempt to do so. The reason adventurers might prefer to be circumspect when dealing with giant centipedes is that they're venomous. To be sure, it's not deadly, but if you fail that save vs. poison, you're out of commission for no less than 10 days . Let that sink in a moment. ...

The first mode of adventuring most of us old schoolers learned was the classic dungeon crawl, in which a party of adventurers explored an enclosed, often underground, area. Dungeons were, and are, generally drawn on graph paper at a scale of 10 feet per square, and explored on a time scale of ten-minute turns. Movement is given in feet per turn. Among the strengths of the dungeon crawl are that it provides natural barriers and boundaries to channel exploration, and that pretty much all the interesting features can be explicitly noted, either on the map or in the dungeon key.  The next mode was the wilderness or hex crawl, so named because the map is typically drawn on hex paper with one terrain feature representing each hex. Hex crawls are conducted on a scale of miles -- the exact scale varies, but 6 miles per hex is widely regarded as optimal -- and take place on a time scale of days. Movement is expressed in miles per day. Hex crawls are great for long range overland travel, and...

 D&D could be accused of being rather Eurocentric in its inspirations, but one thing we can say for it is that it at least steps beyond northern and western Europe on occasion. Case in point: the centaur, a creature of Greek myth.  Centaurs are kind of cool in that they could easily be either allies or antagonists toward player characters. They're Neutral in alignment, and are depicted variously in myth as savage and barbarous or civilized and scholarly. The centaur Chiron was a legendary doctor and healer, while others are shown to be warlike, wielding spears and bows, and sometimes armored, at least on their human torsos.  In D&D, centaurs are described as "somewhat intelligent" which is about as vague a statement as I can imagine. It makes them sound a bit stupid. I prefer to interpret it as being, with some notable exceptions, uneducated in the ways of civilization, "book dumb", so to speak, not actually lacking in raw brain power. They organize them...

 Artificial Intelligence -- whether it be chatGPT or Midjourney "art" or what-have-you -- is THE topic these days. It seems like half the blogs on my reading list have weighed in on it both generally and as it relates to tabletop roleplaying games specifically. Is it a useful tool or a threat to human creativity? Can it, or will it, supplant human game designers/artists/content creators? Is what it currently does (scouring some volume of human-generated creative output and remixing it) essentially analogous to human creative processes, if significantly less advanced at this point, or something lesser or inferior simply by virtue of being artificial? Can it, or will it, ever surpass the quality of human creativity as judged by human minds themselves? These are all interesting questions to one degree or another, but I would submit to you that ultimately, the question of whether it's worthwhile to persist in our own creative endeavors or not boils down to how much we enjoy i...

There are a handful of monsters in B/X D&D that I just love for beginning adventures. The cave locust is one of those. Cave locusts are big (2-3 feet long) stone grey subterranean-dwelling grasshoppers. I imagine them with extra-large compound eyes and a mottled color pattern, rather gangly legs compared with standard grasshoppers, and wings unfolding to reveal some brighter color like yellow or red to startle light-bearing intruders in their feeding grounds. Why do I like these guys so much? Because they're great "training wheels monsters" --  opponents which can be engaged by newbie players/characters with interesting consequences but without a strong threat of a TPK if things go a little sour. They're fairly tough (AC 4 and 2 Hit Dice) and they have some cool auxiliary abilities without being major damage-dealing threats. They're skittish, preferring to flee rather than fight, but are clumsy and have a 50% chance of blundering into characters, dealing out 1...

 Maybe it's a knock-on effect of coming pretty close to death recently, or maybe it's just normal reminiscence, but I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately for my very earliest days of acquaintance with D&D, back when I was first poring over the Moldvay Basic rulebook and taking in all the oddities and nuances of the game. For some reason, the scrolls of protection from the Magic Items chapter popped into my head. There was a scroll of protection from lycanthropes, and one of protection from undead. I think my players only ever acquired a couple of those in the entirety of our first campaigns, but if I recall correctly, they did get used. Anyway, this gets me thinking about the differences between magic items as tools for skillful play, as they were no doubt originally intended, and magic items as plot coupons .  A plot coupon is a thing a character or party must obtain to advance in a particular storyline, to pass some obstacle that would be either impossible or extre...

Back to the BX Monsters series, with a single entry that packs a lot of punch: Cat, Great.  As normal animals go in D&D, there's a lot of utility to be found in the great cats. They're smart, curious, fierce, and powerful, capable of being a credible threat to low- to mid-level parties, but far from an automatic combat encounter. They're also familiar enough that most DMs can readily grasp their possibilities and most players can easily assess the hazard they pose. Great cat varieties listed include: The mountain lion , smallest of the Basic Set's great cats, which will venture farther into caves and dungeons than any of the others. They are adapted to a wide range of terrain types, from forest to mountains to desert, and in different parts of their range they may be known as cougars, pumas, panthers, or catamounts.  With a reasonably sturdy 3+2 HD, a maximum damage potential of 12 points, and up to four appearing, they're nothing to scoff at for a party of leve...

 I don't know if anyone has noticed my fairly long absence, but here's my excuse. In the wee hours of September 24th, I went to the emergency room with chest tightness and pains running down both arms to my inner elbows. It turns out it was a heart attack, and it was determined that two of my coronary arteries were more than 90% occluded, with another at 60%-plus blockage. It was decided I should undergo open heart surgery for a triple bypass, which was performed on the 29th.  My pre- and post-op hospital stay was about as good as one could expect under the circumstances, with a lot of wonderful nurses, CNAs, and other professionals looking after me around the clock. There were a couple stinkers, too, who had no compassion at all for my fragile mental health at the time, but let's not dwell on them.  I was discharged on October 5th (I think; time has become even more nebulous to my autistic brain than it normally is) and, after a brief readmission for pains that turned ou...