Monsterlist download

(edit: I had misspelled the title! Oops!)
 
I decided to collect all the monsters in the officially published monster books from FDP for Tunnels & Trolls. When running a game I often have to scramble through the booklets to try to find where this or that monster i located. Hopefully this document can be of some help to those you you who like me never seem to find the right monster.

Check over on the left on this page, there you'll find a download link. Please let me know if you have any problem with it, or any other suggestions!

Raven c.s. McCracken would be proud

Tonight when I got home from work, my wife told me what the kids had been playing when taking their bath. Apparently our son had said "I'm breathing fire!" and had been playing a dragon. Determined to top this, our daughter (creator of the Chaos Turkey) decided that "...and I'm shooting laser beams from my eyes!"

Her explanation for what lasers are became very labyrinthine and involved. Lasers are for shooting out of your head... 

Ain't that grand?

Using D&D modules with T&T

I found this nice table on my hard disk. No author or indication of where I got it from, sadly.

(edited to include the table as a picture so it fits the page. I really need to take some time to investigate another layout of this blog. Thanks for the heads up, Timeshadows!)

Now I am thinking that maybe this can be used to be able to convert monsters in Rappan Athuk to T&T on the fly. If, say, a 5 HD monster is called for, I look at the line for level and finding 5 I read out the MR in the column for Normal, or maybe Hard if the monster have class levels. How about that?

Every time I get back to a game I haven't run in a while I get this sense of dislocation before the old reflexes kick back in. Right now the feeling of how to gauge a fitting MR is really rusty.

Reading T&T 7.5 - Monsters & Magic Book

Today I was thinking of doing a walk through of some of the magic spells, and talk about what they can be used for, how they are cool and how some of them seem to be quite wonky. But, since that is a very complex subject that I just haven't been able to wrap my mind around I have decided to focus on the Monsters & Magic Book included in the 7.0 and 7.5 boxed sets.

The first thing you notice is that the basic rules for calculating MR and adds are repeated. Then we have what I consider to be one of the best additions to the T&T systems since 1979, the Special Damage system. While I have sometimes groaned about how FDP seem to have tossed the game out in the marketplace without editing it at all, and thus felt a bit of dislike for how they have handled the T&T property, I will say this is just pure genius. Ken St Andre posted in the comments earlier in this series of posts and told me that concept was their idea. FDP redeemed a lot of editorial sloppiness by that inclusion! It's excellent. Let me expand upon it a bit.

The basic way monsters are statted is with a single stat, MR. From that you can calculate all the stats needed for combat. If you have seen the stat block for a D&D3 monster, "Goblin, MR20" as the "stat block" is very liberating! But the news with Special attacks is using Spite (sixes rolled to attack) as a trigger for a Special Attack. "Goblin, MR20, 2/Vicious Bite 2d6" is now goblins who will bite their opponent for 2 dice of damage for every two sixes rolled! Not only that, but Special Attacks ignore armour just like Spite does. I had totally forgotten that until I re-read that section today. Ouch. There's even a short section with suggestions for different types of Special Attacks and other Special Abilities. It gives the classic MR based monster a little bit more spice. Very groovy.

Next comes a section that feels seriously out of place. There are rules for balancing encounters, and that talks about a 4 person party, and then there's a section referring to the "Revised T&T rules presented in the Special Anniversary Edtion set" which talks about a standard 4 person party. Which is it? That SAE set mentioned is the 7.0 box, and the Revised T&T rules from that one are not included in the 7.5, which makes it feel odd to have that even mentioned. FDP have inserted a "[released in 2005]" disclaimer in that paragraph so I can't understand why they just didn't remove it. Those Revised T&T rules are better treated with nothing but silence. I have never heard of anyone liking or using them.

We get 24 monsters described in the next section. Illustrated and statted. They are mostly legendary and mythological creatures like the manticore and harpy. They work and I have used them to good effect. Interestingly, what dungeon level they usually inhabit is also mentioned.

The last section of the booklet contains what meagre rules T&T have about magic items. It's made clear that items are for sale, and there are a niche in the Trollworld economy for magic items. Personally I find that having shops where you can buy magic items to make those a bit less fantastic. I have used them in my games, though.

Foci, potions, weapons, jewelry and Other Items are described, with cost and how they might look like. I am notoriously bad at analyzing the economical effects of rules like this. But, there's one potion that makes even me raise an eyebrow.

A healing potion heals 1 CON and costs 400 gp. If you now take a look at your rulebook at p.44 you will find "First-aid kit (5 uses)" and "Second-aid kit (5 uses; cures 5 hits per)". The latter cost 99.9 gp and the former 10 gp. From those prices you would guess (since there are no rules about it) that the First-aid kit heals less than 5 CON. 99.9 gp on the other hand will cure 5 CON five times. That's 19.98 gp per dose and thus 4 gp per CON. Suddenly that Potion which costs 400 gp sounds quite expensive. Actually it seems totally broken.

The other place where the economy of magic items seem odd is the general rules for items, bespelled, enchanted and magical. The odd thing here is that if you want to make an enchanted sword, are the "cost of the spell" mentioned including the Dura-Spell Battery which I assume is powering the item? It seems like these rules were written without full knowledge of that spell. I did ask Ken about who made what, and he said "It seems to me that most of the stuff about magic in the extra booklet was my work", which makes you wonder about that Dura-Spell omission. Frankly it feels like it wasn't tried out, really. Since there were no rules like that in 5th ed, and I feel kind of bad about shopping for magic items anyway I guess I'd prefer just to make it all up. Then it would help to have a longer list of examples to compare to if you're as uninterested in spending time inventing a full economic system as I am.

The only other thing I want to remark upon is the wish that this kind of material would be included in the rulebook. Either that or expand it and incorporate a few of the other booklets in the 7.5 box.

I will try to spend some time with the spell list and post on that last section of the rules. But, since I know my limits, I have invited a guest blogger! It will be great fun to see what we will get to read.

How to design and populate your dungeon

I have been thinking of starting a new dungeon. Still I am missing an important thing to get my campaign going again, players. But, just for fun and in order to keep some of the creativity flowing I'm thinking of putting pen to graph paper and digging a new dungeon.

Most of you have probably read some hints on how to write an adventure. You should have a plot, a setting, antagonists maybe a McGuffin and some nice scenery. When designing dungeon adventures it's fairly common to start with the location, the windling tunnels. It makes sense. Without somewhere to explore, there will be no place to put the monsters, treasure, traps and wonders. Right?

Since a couple of days I've had my copy of Dangerous Denizens out of the shelf, thumbing trough it. For those of you who don't know of it, it's the Tellene specific monster manual for 3rd ed Kingdoms of Kalamar. I'm a fan of KoK and have many times felt it would be cool to have a game there, but it haven't happened yet. For some other reasons I've also had my copy of 1st ed Monster Manual out of the shelf a few times to look up monsters other bloggers have been writing about. There are quite a few fairly weird monsters out there for D&D, I tell you.

All of this have gotten me to think of a new way to design a dungeon! Some of these monsters just scream out to be used, or at least some of them makes you wonder "how the hell could I use that one to make sense, at all?" Could be a nice creative exercise, right? It would be fun to hear if somebody tried it out?

So, take out a monster book, pick some really odd stuff and try to figure out how to make that monster fit somewhere, or where it would look cool. I'm going to try it out myself.

Reading T&T 7.5 - Monsters and Monster Rating

Now we have come to an interesting section in the rules, monsters. In some other games, it's well known that stat blocks take up quite a lot of space. In T&T the space needed to describe a monster is minimal, thanks to the very elegant solution of Monster Rating, MR.

From one single number you get the dice a monster will roll in combat, its combat adds and its stamina or CON. Now, while the procedure is simple, it still involves an element of confusion. To get the dice you have to round down, and to get the adds you have to round up. Why? I know that some people have made fun of this tendency in rpgs to spend silly amount of time on dictating rounding. Sometimes I think the criticism is valid. Why on earth can't we just assume everyone learned rounding in school? Well, it's not a fault of T&T, really.

One thing is different enough from former editions to warrant a note in bold letters. The dice rolled for a monster never decrease, like they used to. Now only the adds whittle away as the MR decrease. Small changes in how this have worked, with e.g. full MR only used on the first combat round, have been tested. I think the present system works just fine, and the beauty of it all is that it's dead simple to use any way, in concert.

On thing I really like is that Ken gives us some idea on how to scale the MR of a monster to the strength of the delvers. Some gamers in the OSR contingent sometimes rage against the "decadence" of 3rd ed D&D, where Encounter Ratings and similar calculations play an important part of encounter planning. Personally I find the idea of encounters scaled to the strength of the player characters to be a complex subject. If the players start to expect everything to be beatable, or "fair", I groan and long for the bygone days. But, I also think that having some kind of way to know when you send in certain death is nice, at least it will give me the opportunity to drop hints of the danger before the first character bites the dust. But, back to T&T. I think the advice Ken gives is good, but one of these days I'm going to collect hard data on the importance of combat adds. The characters in my campaign had totally brutal adds, but could sometimes roll quite bad, which changed a lot.

After telling us all about MR, the rulebook talks about monsters. The list of monsters we get in the rulebook is just a list of names, and MRs. Frankly, it's not very useful. I will now turn to one of the other volumes in the boxed set, Codex Monstrum, since it's actually referred to in this section. The monsters in this book is described, are illustrated and have notes about special defences, attacks or magical abilities. The neat thing here is how sixes rolled for attack (which I'll talk more about later) trigger special effects. This is a new addition to the T&T system which I find very inspired. I used similar effects on magic items of my own design, and it worked very fine. The CM is a fine addition to the 7.5 rules. Now I once again wonders a bit about the organization of the rules. Having described the MR system, and how it can be used, I wonder why the idea of spite damage or triggers for special effects isn't mentioned until you turn to the monster book? A list of monsters take up most of a page in the rules, and it could have been better used to just describe all the rules about monsters and how to design them.

There's another thing which I think deserves mentioning. More than once on these three pages we can read how fun it is to create your own monsters, and how the creativity of the individual GM is a fundamental part of monsters. That's the spirit!

Considering how I wrote a few days back about how the world of Palladium fantasy is presented in the rules, I find it notable that the monster section in these rules actually mention Trollworld, and gives us some glimpse of it's fauna. I kind of wish there was more of that in the rules. I will probably write more about that later, though.

Next we will write about fighting all these monsters, in the Combat Rules!

Creature Feature - The Chaos Turkey

This is the first time I've posted new game material of my own making, I don't really know if it will happen again. If so, I've posted a licence and the preamble below will be used for all such material when applicable. My daughter invented this, and told me all about the beast. Kids are fun. Now I present it to you, with stats for the most ubiquitous or familiar (to me, I have never done S&W stats before!) old school systems. [edited for clarity]

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The entirety of this monster is hereby designated as Open Game Content via the Open Game Licence.

The Chaos Turkey

This benign overseer of the farm yard, is a feathered beast resembling the common turkey. This unique creature walks around among the other animals, sometimes suddenly snacking on some of the smaller animals like rats and rodents. Equipped with a peculiar sense of humour, animals with long ears (say, like a donkey) will sometimes find themselves the butt of the cruel jokes of the Chaos Turkey. Those poor animals will have their long ears pulled by the fowl-like beast which then jumps away gleefully with a shrill sound like laughter.

The most astonishing ability of the Chaos Turkey, though, is its ability of telekinesis. When larger animals like horses and cows fall over, like they are prone to do, this beast show a gentler side. It will use its psychic power to carefully help the quadrupeds to get up on their feet again.

When attacked, the fowl will use its telekinetic powers to throw attackers aside, and otherwise hinder their advance.

Swords & Wizardry stats: One random attacker will be telekinetically disengaged from action, or dropped from high altitude with a roll of 1-2 on a d6. Chaos Turkey: HD 3+1; AC 5[14]; Atk 1 beak (2d4); Move 12; Save 14; CL/XP 3/120; Special: Telekinesis, 33% chance.

End of Open Game Content

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Tunnels & Trolls stats: MR: 65 Special Ability:2/Fly Me - attackers will be telekinetically moved out of combat, and might be tossed aside and be damaged. Tunnels & Trolls is trademarked by Flying Buffalo Inc and used with permission.