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D&D MONSTERS, PART II
![[Owlbear]](/img/dndmonster-owlbear.jpg) |
It's this big, owlish, bearish thing. Big deal.
I can play that game too. "Watch out for the hawklion! Beware the
vulturetiger! Don't worry too much about the sparrowspaniel!" The
Monster Manual says that this beastie is "probably the
result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard." Insane
wizards are an important part of the D&D economy, keeping
inefficiently-designed catacombs stocked, adventurers busy, and
dealers in magic items happy. Kind of like the WPA, only
with bushier eyebrows.
D+
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![[Gelatinous Cube]](/img/dndmonster-gelatinouscube.jpg) |
Gygax clearly had some sort of ooze fixation. He
populated his little world with a goobery panapoly of spores, molds,
and fungi, at least one variety of which has psychic powers. Huh.
At any rate, closely edging out green slime for "Best Performance
by a Nickelodeon Game Show Prop" is the gelatinous cube, a transparent,
hallway-shaped, flesh-dissolving, uh. Cube. The sheer ridiculousness of
it is impressive. Here we have yet another monster with no reason to
exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It's genetically adapted
to graph paper, for God's sake! Plus it conveniently fails
to either digest or excrete metal, giving an adventurers a reason to
kill it and scoop coins from its corpse. It's like some sort of living, deadly,
mall fountain.
A
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![[Trapper]](/img/dndmonster-trapper.jpg) |
Like the aforementioned cube, this is yet
another monster perfectly adapted to life in a dungeon. The whole
deal is that it looks like a floor, but eats you like a monster.
It's like the world's most boring Transformer. The odd evolution
of D&D monsters leads me to conclude that one of the following
must be true: dungeons have existed for at least fifty million
years or there's some sort of hyperspeed Lamarckian
evolution going on or evil wizards routinely make new monsters to
relax and impress waitresses or hey, are those nachos?
Can I have some?
D+
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![[Umber Hulk]](/img/dndmonster-umberhulk.jpg) |
It's amazing what you can come up with using
a thesaurus and a box of 128 Crayolas. I'm just sorry the Burnt Sienna
Leviathan didn't make the cut. The umber hulk looks like a cross
between a stag beetle and Jesse Ventura (or, in more recent incarnations,
a cross between an African harvester termite and Crispin Glover):
a big bipedal insect with those weird insect clampy jaws and claws
and fingers and bleh. It has the power to confuse onlookers, which
is a power more D&D monsters should have. "So this is, what?
A perfectly round bird with five legs? I don't get it. What
kind of monster is OW MY HIT POINTS!"
B
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![[Mimic]](/img/dndmonster-mimic.jpg) |
One reason that D&D is better than video games
based on D&D is that in the tabletop version mimics sometimes disguise
themselves as something other than chests. Computer roleplaying
games often have mimics--imitation mimics, if you can wrap your
head around that--which are always disguised as chests.
Chest chest chest. It makes you wish that digital orcs would stick their
electrum pieces in a foot locker or some variety of credenza, just
to break the ennui of another piratey-looking wooden chest suddenly
sprouting limbs and beating you to within an inch of your save file.
It would be refreshing like the breezes of summer to be able to say
"Hey! I just had my clavicle shattered by an aluminum tool shed!"
B-
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