Epic, mythic and divine rules suck!

The 5e PHB divides character levels into four tiers, based on what the heroes are expected to be saving. These are: save the farm/village (1-4), save the city/kingdom (5-10), save the region/continent (11-16), and save the world/universe (17-20). You may notice that this ignores systems like "epic," "divine" or "mythic." Those systems are stupid and I will give three reasons why below the break.

Exemplars of Law

Exemplars of Law have been published in numerous d20 books over the decades. What follows is a list, by no means exhaustive, of creatures that could populate your planes of law.


Legends & Lairs: Portals & Planes

• P&P Automations, Dreadnaught
• P&P Automations, Spiked Demolisher
• P&P Automation, Vemonhacter
• P&P Champion of Law

Creature Weekly

• CW1 Dreadgem
• CW3 Emu-lok Template

Classic Play: The Book of the Planes

• CotP Inevitable, Jarut
• Exilarches

SRD v3.5

• SRD Inevitable, Kolyarut
• SRD Inevitable, Zelekhut
• SRD Inevitable, Marut

Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary

• PenB Zenzoga

Blood & Treasure

• Polyhedroids

Blood & Treasure Monster Tome

• Geometrons
• Metal monsters

PRD Pathfinder Reference Document

• Axiomites
• Inevitables
• Kytons

Tome of Horrors Complete

• N'gathau

Dark Roads & Golden Hells

• Axioms
• Maxim

Secrets of the Planes: Planar Races

• Neirut

I noticed a number of Recurring Archetypes:

• The Axioms/Axiomites/exilarches/etc are formed from mathematical formulae
• The Automations/Inevitables/etc are constructed
• The polyhedroids/geometrons/metal monsters/etc are living dice
• The kytons/n'gathau are cyborg torturers and stuff
• The maxim and neirut are planetouched

Inverted beasts

I'm of the opinion that the various fictional animals like owlbears and griffins in D&D are not unnatural abominations created by a mad wizard's experiments, but entirely naturally occurring fantastical animals that are natural to the fantasy world. That said, the universe could easily have a sense of humor.

Hence, the bearowl, noffig/noffirg, leogryph/leogriff, and other inverted beasts.

The bearowl appears in Behind the Monsters: Owlbear by Fat Goblin Games and Octavirate Presents: Lethal Lexicon Vol 1 by Octavirate Games. It is best described as a reverse owlbear or leftover owlbear. Maybe whichever god was responsible for creating owlbears decided to recycle the leftover parts.

The noffig is a reverse or leftover griffon. It appears in Octavirate Presents: Lethal Lexicon Vol 2 by Octavirate Games.

I'd like to explore more inverted beasts in the future.

Oriental dragons

Past editions of D&D included loads and loads of new kinds of dragons. The world building was ad hoc, so there wasn’t too much logic involved. The default dragons were Western-style dragons, so later oriental dragons were added. (Oddly enough, the gold dragon was originally depicted as an oriental dragon.) Most of their folkloric roots were absent. The interesting thing about oriental dragons in mythology is that they are literally gods. For example, rain dragons cause the rain and so forth. This is really interesting to me so I want to integrate it into my own settings.

Links

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dragon
• https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Oriental_Dragon
• https://www.scribd.com/document/317737017/The-Dragons-of-the-Orient-for-5th-Edition-d-d

Renaming true dragons

Like elemental and giant, the term "dragon" in the game rules refers to both a monster type and a monster entry. The rules acknowledge that this distinction is needlessly confusing, so I would prefer to replace it. (tl;dr I labeled the iconic articulate hoarding dragon "zmey", the Russian word for that exact concept.) UPDATE 3/15/2018: decided to use "tarragon" instead. UPDATE 9/19/2018: decided to use drake instead, taking after the original firedrake.

Ecology of the Lammasu, Shedu, Sphinx and Simurgh

Sphinxes attested in archaeology

Nomenclature: alad, apsasu, chamrosh, cherub, foo dog, foo lion, lammasu, Neo-Hittite chimera, purushamriga, shedu, simurgh, sphinx, tetramorph, urmaḫlullû

Description: Celestial beings with the body of a winged lion or bull and the head of a human, ram or hawk; assigned the duty of guarding scared places and secrets from intruders, but those that pass their tests are rewarded.

Slaughtering sacred cows: armor class and saving throws

The rules for armor class and saving throws suffer from redundancy. I think it makes more sense to condense them.

Ecology of the Vegetable Lamb (Cotton Plant)

Medieval bestiaries were filled with all sorts of fantastical creatures based on distorted accounts of real animals and plants. One of these was the vegetable lamb. Medieval Europeans did not really understand where cotton came from, but since it was similar to wool they believed that the cotton plant grew lambs. This is an excellent plant to populate the fantasy world! What follows is my attempt at an ecology for this plant.

©2015 Deimos-Remus

Beasts versus monstrosities, part deux

In past posts I explained my disagreement with the questionable logic behind the "beast" and "monstrosity" types. In this post I will explain some possible alternatives in greater detail.

Some bestiary art history books

Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art, by John Vinycomb
Curious Creatures in Zoology, by John Ashton

The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell

Distinguishing leonine monsters: chimeras, lamias, manticores and sphinxes

D&D has introduced a number of leonine monsters which look like they could be related. In my cosmology, this is merely an artifact of the morphic fields underlying spontaneous generation. UPDATED 10/24/2017

© Humon Comics

Pronouncing djinni, genie and janni

The genie family has a number of homophone names. What is the difference in pronunciation between genie and djinni? There isn't one! Genie, djinni, janni and so forth are actually alternative spellings of the same word. The same goes for efreet and ifrit. In this post I will provide a scheme for pronouncing the names of the genie tribes.

The physics behind martial arts (aka weeaboo fightan magic)

In my campaign setting, really more of a cosmology at this time, martial classes have "martials arts" or less charitably "weeaboo fightan magic." The reason? Having Conan the Barbarian adventuring alongside Naruto is stupid. Since my cosmology does not make an arbitrary distinction between magic and non-magic, but defines nature and technology as types of magic, it is natural for martials to develop wuxia and other capabilities that would be considered supernatural in real life. In fantasy land, this is par for the course.

Agathions, angels, archons, azatas, argh!

The 5e Monster Manual only lists angels as its major celestial group, but past editions and Pathfinder added loads and loads of other varieties. As with many of the older groupings, monsters were often grouped into arbitrary or poorly distinguished categories. With the OGL, even more were added in third-party supplements.