Gelatinous Icosahedron

 There's a lot more to the power curve of old school D&D than just being able to take on bigger and tougher monsters as the party levels up. Newish players and DMs might be forgiven for thinking that way, but they'd still be wrong. In this post, I'm going to look at the different dynamics that emerge over the course of an old school-style campaign, and then compare that to what happens with a lot of the "innovations" of new school play. First up, though, we're kickin' it old school! Low-level play is a game of stark contrasts and sudden death. Randomness can turn victory to defeat, or vice-versa, in the blink of an eye, and the players' primary challenge is to minimize its effects as much as possible through careful and clever play.  New player characters in old school D&D are fragile. Most have a fair chance of being slain by a single hit from a 1d6 attack. Even if you use the popular house rule of allowing new 1st-level PCs maximum hit point...

 Well, it's been a few seconds since I last felt inspired to write and post here, but here I am again. An A to Z Monster post feels like a good way to ease back into the flow. We come now to another perennial staple of low-level play: the hobgoblin.  Hobgoblins are described as bigger and meaner relatives of goblins, presumably with a similar appearance (e.g. chalky tan to livid grey complexion, red eyes, etc.) though that is not explicitly stated. Though they live underground, they are able to function in full daylight without penalty, unlike goblins. Mechanically, hobgoblins are exactly what it says on the tin. Their AC of 6 is equal to a goblin, while their 1+1 HD give them an extra couple of hp on average. They are slightly faster at 90' (30') (compared to 60' (20') for goblins), and a bit braver with a Morale score of 8 (vs. the goblin's 7). Their damage is listed as "1-8 or by weapon," so it's implied that they wield swords or perhaps battle ...

 Next up, another creature with firm roots in the fertile soil of real world mythology: the hippogriff. The Classical world certainly did love its animal hybrids. The hippogriff, a beast with the front parts and wings of an eagle and the hind parts of a horse, is a prime example. The entry in the Expert Rules is one of the shortest in all of B/X, and by extension, in all of D&D, at a mere four sentences. The first describes the creature's appearance, the second notes that it can be tamed and ridden, the third briefly expounds on its natural enemy relationship with the pegasus, and the fourth states that it nests in rocky crags. That's the full extent of it.  Stats-wise, the hippogriff is a moderately formidable opponent. Its AC of 5 and 3+1 Hit Dice are fairly stout, a little better than the average war horse. It is a swift flyer, at a movement rate of 360' (120') and somehow it manages to run almost as fast as a good horse on its eagle-talon forelegs. It's able...

 Time for another monster! We're still working through the H-critters, and next up is the hellhound. By the book, a hellhound is a large canine monster, reddish-brown in color and the size of a small pony ("That's quite strong, that is!" -- Eddie Izzard). It is impervious to normal fire, and highly intelligent (saving as a fighter of its full HD rather than half), often dwelling either deep in dungeons or in hot, fiery places such as volcanoes, and consorting with fire giants and other fire-loving creatures. Mechanically, the hellhound is a bit odd. Its Armor Class of 4 is quite a bit tougher than one would expect. Its Hit Dice run anywhere from 3 to 7; apparently whoever designed the monster either wanted it to be flexible with regard to the levels of parties it could be used against, or to create uncertainty for players, or perhaps both. Its physical attack is a pretty standard bite for 1-6 damage. Its movement seems a bit slow and lumbering at 120' (40'), e...

 It seems fitting, after the harpy, to focus on another creature of wing and feather, this time one of a more natural and less malevolent persuasion. I give you the hawk. We all know what hawks are, so there's no need to recapitulate that here, even though the monster entry in fact does describe what a hawk is. What is of note is that all hawks do double damage on their first attack if they surprise their targets. Two varieties are detailed, normal and giant. It is noted that normal hawks won't attack human-sized or larger targets unless they appear unable to defend themselves. (It seems extremely unlikely that they'd attack even halfling-size creatures unless for the same reasons or maybe in cases of desperate hunger.) Their stats, AC 8, 1/2 Hit Die, and 1-2 damage per attack, bear this out pretty soundly. Their movement rate is an impressive 480' (160'), though, and their Morale of 7 is decent. It's the giant hawk you might need to watch out for, especially if...

 I've always been a Classic D&D guy. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that my first exposure to any form of the game was the Moldvay Basic set. I wasn't aware AD&D was its own separate thing until I got a copy of the Player's Handbook. Since that day, I've harbored a deep fascination for the game, with all its baroque design, its dense and often unnecessarily verbose prose, its inelegant asymmetry, and its plethora of heavily footnoted charts and tables, but I've played in maybe one or two sessions and have never run the game myself.  I know many gamers see AD&D 1e as the pinnacle of D&D, sometimes with a corresponding disdain for the classic Moldvay and Mentzer iterations ("kiddie D&D" is the term used by those who have no interest in veiling their elitism). One prominent blogger in particular, who was once the foremost champion of B/X, now only extolls the perfect virtues of AD&D 1e. Much of this change of heart seems to ...

 Here's a monster that seems to be the product of a mashup between two very similar mythical creatures: the harpy. Mythological harpies are hybrids of women and birds who were traditionally associated with storm winds. Some early incarnations describe their human aspects as attractive, but mostly they were held to be quite repugnant. So far, it matches pretty closely with the D&D harpy. What it's missing is a song that can charm humans. That ability is traditionally associated with another mythical being, the siren. While sirens in later years are usually thought of as mermaid-like creatures with the lower bodies of fish, in their earlier incarnations they were described as having the faces of women, and the bodies, feet, and wings of birds. The D&D harpy is described more specifically than either, having the lower body of a giant eagle and the upper body and head of a hideous woman.  Stats-wise, harpies are pretty formidable opponents for Basic-level parties. Their AC...

 We've finished off the Gs, so let's start the Hs, with another PC-as-monster entry: the halfling. These entries in the B/X bestiary tend to be brief, and the halfling is no exception to that trend, weighing in at a mere four sentences plus the obligatory stat block. By the stats, halflings are not very threatening, having a mediocre AC of 7 (Is it leather? Is it a shield and a +1 Dex bonus? Who knows?), 1-1 HD, 90' (30') movement, damage by weapon, and Morale of 7. It's interesting to note they have by far the highest dungeon Number Appearing of any PC-as-monster type, at 3-18, well ahead of Veteran at 2-8, and are tied for wilderness Number Appearing with dwarves at 5-40. It is also noteworthy that their wilderness "lair" (i.e. village) explicitly disregards the standard rule of thumb of five times the listed number appearing (25-200 in this case) with an alternate number of 30-300. A village will have a leader of level 2-7 and a village guard of 5-20 in...

 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...

 We'll roll with the slimy theme for another post, because the next monster is the ever-popular Green Slime. Stats-wise, green slime doesn't look like much. It doesn't even have a proper AC (it can always be hit). It's a bit tougher than a typical 1st-level character, at 2 HD, it moves at a glacial 3' (1'), it doesn't do hit point damage at all, and you'll only encounter a single one at a time. For all that, though, green slime is a deadly threat to the naive and unwary.  It "attacks" by dripping from a ceiling or wall onto a victim, or by being stepped in if on a floor. A fiendish DM might place it in other locations which characters will be tempted to unwittingly touch it. The description says nothing about whether the creature needs to make an attack roll at all; certainly I wouldn't require one for stepping in/touching the slime, but I might make a roll vs. AC 9 for a drip attack. In any case, the slime can dissolve wood and metal in 6 ...

 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 ...

 And for its next trick, B/X Dungeons & Dragons will split one monster into two! In Greek mythology, Medusa was the name of a specific, unique being, one of the three Gorgon sisters (the others being Stheno and Euryale). In D&D, though, medusa and gorgon are separate and very different creature types, united by the common theme of petrification attacks. The D&D medusa is based on the mythical Gorgon, Medusa, while the D&D gorgon is based on... livestock. The gorgon is described as a magical, bull-like monster covered in iron scales. (Random digression: What happens when a gorgon and a rust monster fight? Inquiring minds want to know!) It has large horns, with which it gores opponents, and has the ability to charge for double damage. Gorgons are usually found in small numbers (1-4 appearing) in foothills and grasslands. Befitting its hide of iron scales, the gorgon has a very solid AC of 2, and 8 Hit Dice, making it nearly as robust as an elephant but even harder to ...

 The word "golem" in D&D seems to be almost a catch-all for any sort of enchanted automaton. (Though there are exceptions, such as gargoyles and living statues, though why they are exceptions there is not even the barest attempt to explain... but I digress.) Monsters and Manuals had an excellent post arguing that the catch-all concept of golems is overly broad, if not straight-up incorrect, and I concur: it dilutes what it really means for something to be a golem, and destroys a lot of the flavor of the thing. A golem, according to noisms, must be humanoid in form, it must be made of "raw material" (no finished or worked material such as stained glass or steel, nor anything that's ever been alive such as wood), and it must be unfinished, implying a degree of roughness or crudeness in form, e.g. it hasn't been completed as a statue or other work of art or technology before being animated as an automaton. I like these criteria tremendously, and they defi...

 When I think back to my earliest days playing D&D, the monster I think of most isn't the dragon. It isn't the orc, the gelatinous cube, or the ogre. It's the goblin, from the Basic Set, naturally. Goblins are stated to be small, incredibly ugly human-like creatures. How small, exactly, isn't specified; they could be dwarf-size, halfling-size, or smaller, depending on how you like your goblins. The entry does tell us that they have red eyes that glow in low light, and pale earth-colored skin, "chalky tan" and "livid gray" being given as examples. They're identified as avowed underground-dwellers, with infravision to a 90' range. Full daylight hurts their eyes, and they fight at a -1 penalty. They hate dwarves so fiercely that they will always attack them on sight, so no negotiating with goblins if there's a dwarf in the party! There's also a 20% chance that one in four goblins encountered will be riding dire wolves, which substant...

 It's been said that gnomes never really found their niche as a player-character race in AD&D, but as an NPC/monster type in Classic D&D I've always had a soft spot for these guys. To be sure, there is some overlap with dwarves, and to distinguish the two some sources have taken gnomes in a more comedic direction than I would like, but done well they've fit quite nicely into my own campaign settings.  Regarding gnomes, the Basic Set says that they are related to dwarves but are smaller. Whether this means shorter, more slender, or both is not stated, but I generally picture them as being both shorter and less stocky of build than the typical dwarf. Like dwarves, they sport full beards (at least the males do; nothing is said of gnome-women, so indulge your own preference there) but are also stated to have long noses. While dwarves are typically dwellers in rugged mountains and deep caverns, gnomes are explicitly stated to prefer burrows in the lowlands. In theory, at...

 Some D&D monsters are adapted from myth, legend, and folklore, some are taken from literature and fiction, and some seem to be wholly original to the game. The gnoll belongs mostly to this last category, having no direct mythological analog that I'm aware, and seemingly bearing only a passing phonetic resemblance to Lord Dunsany's gnoles. Gnolls are rumored to be the hybrid creations of an evil wizard (a well-worn fantasy cliche, but also a timeless classic) combining gnomes and trolls. The truth of this is left to the DM and his or her particular campaign setting, but where it is true, the gnolls really got the shaft, having neither the gnome's industrious intelligence nor the troll's regenerative powers. They're basically big dumb brutes, higher up the humanoid food chain from orcs and goblins but beneath bugbears and ogres. Even so, it's a niche that needed filling, and the gnoll is a pretty good fit.  With an AC equal to mail armor, a stout 2 Hit Dice, ...

 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...

 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 th...