the spectral dead

D&D has numerous varieties of ghosts. I am going to treat them as variations of the same thing. What all spectral dead have in common is that they fly, move through solid objects and are resistant to physical attacks. One idea I saw elsewhere was that there is a distinction between the spectral dead and the ghostly dead: the former is visible and consumes energy with its energy drain attacks, while the later is generally invisible and generates its own power. Pathfinder 2e introduces the generic shorthand term “shade” to refer to all spectral/incorporeal dead. Shades would include: Shadow, specter, poltergeist, will-o-wisp, banshee, ghost, wraith, allip, etc.

My trolls are different?

Scandinavian mythology has a diverse array of creatures all referred to as trolls, ranging from dwarves to giants. D&D, on the other hand, has a single variety of troll whose shtick is that they are nearly impossible to kill without fire (they were copied wholesale from a single troll encounter in Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, which was presumably intended to be a unique individual rather than a race).  I decided to bring the mythological diversity into the game and expand the variety of trolls, using Trudvang Chronicles as a guide.

Ecology of plague doctors

Monsters of Porphyra 3 introduced plague doctors as a monster. It explains them as appearing to be benevolent doctors treating victims of plague epidemics, but they are secretly undead creatures which spread the plague as a pretense to euthanizing their patients. Plague doctors have a long history in real life.

lurking cephalopods

Lurking cephalopods are camouflaged ambush predators that seemingly originate from the Shadowfell. They include the darkmantle, decapus, tentamort, and sand kraken. Other fanciful nomenclature includes “tree octopus” and “land squid.”

Monster intelligence, part 2: undead

For my second post on intelligence scores, I decided to look at undead. Undead have changed dramatically in 5e compared to 3e (for whatever reason nobody remembers 4e). They are no longer mindless or lacking constitution scores, at least in the 3e sense of the terms. This is because 5e takes cues from 2e and earlier, but I digress...

Fantastical animals are not literally patchwork hybrids

I have already said my piece about the illogical and inconsistent treatment of fictional animals in fantasy gaming and the lack of consistent criteria for determining what constitutes a beast or monstrosity. In this post, I will explain the place of real and fictional animals (or beasts in the D&D rules) within my cosmology.

the Duckbunny

While typically derided as the class experiment of apprentice wizards, I would posit that duckbunnies are in fact a naturally occurring animal related to the platypus.

• http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/07/30/stupid-monsters-of-dd/
• http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2014/03/31/bizarre-bestiary-the-dreaded-duckbunny/
• http://dungeonsandduckbunnies.blogspot.com/2015/03/duckbunny.html