Gelatinous Icosahedron

 Slime time! Our monster today is the gray ooze from the Basic Set. Despite the sheer bulk of the black pudding, the gray ooze may well be the most dangerous of the slimes and oozes I've covered so far. Gray ooze is said to look like wet stone, making it difficult to see. One might well expect a bonus to surprise opponents because of that, but apparently it's only a flavor detail here, not something to be represented mechanically. That might be just as well, considering... The monster's stats don't immediately impress: its AC of 8 makes it easy to hit, and 3 Hit Dice, while a lot for Basic-level parties, doesn't take too long to whittle down. If you can stay alive long enough, that is, because this thing is bringing some serious hurt. A gray ooze secretes powerful acid that inflicts 2-16 points of damage on a successful attack. After that, it does 2-16 points per round automatically, in addition to automatically destroying non-magical armor. (Magical armor can hold ...

 One of the tropes of D&D, and fantasy RPGs generally, that I've come to dislike the most is the cosmopolitan society depicted in so many settings and adventure modules. It's arguably reached its apotheosis in modern iterations of Dungeons & Dragons and its close kin, in which not only dwarves, elves, and halflings, but orcs, lizardfolk, elemental-kin, half-demons, and even more outlandish beings regularly coexist closely with humans and each other, socializing, working, cohabitating, even interbreeding freely. Even in older products, as well as more recent OSR and OSR-adjacent material, however, the trope is in evidence. Try to think of the last human village or stronghold described in an old TSR or newer OSR product which actually featured a human smith instead of a dwarf. Setting aside that most wildly overused cliche, though, you'll generally find that almost every predominantly human settlement will have enclaves of non-humans, and NPCs prominent enough to warr...