Hated SRD monsters


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Shadowborn wrote:
DM_aka_Dudemeister wrote:
Air elemental swarm would suffocate you.
Seems to me that an air elemental swarm would do the exact opposite.

Once you get to the over-inflated point, you might still suffocate before the barotrauma killed you...

Whoa. Air elemental swarms sound pretty creepy now.

Liberty's Edge RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16

Lich. It's a spellcaster, AND it's undead? I mean, cmon, believable?

Spoiler:
j/k

Seriously though, I always thought mephits were kind of cheesy. Imps, but in 31 elemental flavors. Why not do elemental angels, or elemental elephants, or elemental tarrasques... why? Because that would be cheesy. Like elemental imps.

EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.


Charlie Bell wrote:

EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.

No way. The yrthak is awesome! There's definitely room in my campaign for an ungainly, flying behemoth that fires bolts of sonic destruction strong enough to pulverize the stone beneath your feet.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber

Reading this thread I'm suddenly tempted to write up an adventure featuring an Island of Misfit Monsters.

I can see it now...

Our heroes have just landed on the island. A sound like the whining and complaining of several horrible (or horribly conceived?) monsters echoes from the icy cliffs! Suddenly, they are surrounded by a group of monsters none of them (or anybody they know) have ever encountered. The reason soon becomes apparent...

Tojanida: Nobody wants to fight an almond-shaped, turtle-beaver. Boo hoo.

Delver: And I'm a meaty pile of acid-spewing tofu. I'll never get to show anybody my special attacks. Waaaa.

Phasm: You think that's bad? I can turn into pretty much any monster you can think of but nobody wants me to be any of them. *morphs into something emo*

Dark Archive

Charlie Bell wrote:
EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.

So many fine sound-related creatures that already existed anyway, like sirens and banshees, that they didn't bother using, to instead come up with those freaks.

For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X, why not make it sonic, and have the Green Dragons 'breath' a thunderous stroke of sound that shatters trees and leaves their prey stunned and bleeding from the ears? That's what I did, for the fun of it. Green Dragons use Bardic progression instead of Sorcerer progression, but can also use bardic performance (through oratory, usually, but sometimes also song, luring men into the woods, where they sing such deadly songs to them that they fall to the forest floor, organs ruptured and bone shattered within their bruised bodies). Their ravenous wyrmlings leap from treetop to treetop, sending down thunderous cracks of sound like falling trees to cripple deer, boar, wolves and similar prey animals, that they then fall upon and devour.


To be fair, the dragon that DOES use a sonic attack is much cooler: the Pyroclastic Dragon.


Velcro Zipper wrote:

Reading this thread I'm suddenly tempted to write up an adventure featuring an Island of Misfit Monsters.

I can see it now...

Our heroes have just landed on the island. A sound like the whining and complaining of several horrible (or horribly conceived?) monsters echoes from the icy cliffs! Suddenly, they are surrounded by a group of monsters none of them (or anybody they know) have ever encountered. The reason soon becomes apparent...

Tojanida: Nobody wants to fight an almond-shaped, turtle-beaver. Boo hoo.

Delver: And I'm a meaty pile of acid-spewing tofu. I'll never get to show anybody my special attacks. Waaaa.

Phasm: You think that's bad? I can turn into pretty much any monster you can think of but nobody wants me to be any of them. *morphs into something emo*

Ha!

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Ugh... the phasm is my LEAST favorite monster in the entire 3.5 SRD, actually. It's a non-monster, basically; has no real abilities of its own except the ability to turn into another monster. Just use the other monster and cut out the middleman!

Dark Archive

Charlie Bell wrote:
EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.

I was a little sad, that both didn't make it into the Bestiary, because I used both of them quite often in my 3.5 games. I loved the Ecology-article on yrthaks in one of the last Dragon issues.

And I loved the look on the faces of my players, as they realized that there's a big, blind dinosaur chasing them through the depths. Before they went down there, they were afraid of encountering drow, but after 50% of the group fell victim to the destrachnan...

Well, I'd love to see both of these creatures in the 2nd Bestiary or in one of the future AP issues.

Grand Lodge

James Jacobs wrote:
Ugh... the phasm is my LEAST favorite monster in the entire 3.5 SRD, actually. It's a non-monster, basically; has no real abilities of its own except the ability to turn into another monster. Just use the other monster and cut out the middleman!

I've seen them effectively copy a party member ... I didn't like that.


Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Schmoe wrote:
There's definitely room in my campaign for an ungainly, flying behemoth that fires bolts of sonic destruction strong enough to pulverize the stone beneath your feet.

I am happy to see the yrthrak fade away myself, as I don't think I would ever use one in my games, though I do remember them being an interesting creature to battle in one of the D&D based arcade games that was out at some point during the third edition era.

Shadow Lodge

Abbasax wrote:
James Jacobs wrote:


Just because they won't show up in a Bestiary doesn't mean we won't do something with them... but at the same time, NO new edition of the game has preserved EVERY monster from the previous edition.
Very true, but no new edition of the game has given backwards compatibility before and part of that, for me at least, would be eventually getting all of the SRD converted. I understand were you're coming from, I guess I was just a little surprised to hear it. Not upset or mad, just surprised.

But that very same backwards compatibility makes it rather unnecessary to convert all of them. Especially when you can do your own conversion in the space of one minute. I'd rather Paizo's talent put out NEW monsters. If I really feel like I need to use a monster they haven't converted (SRD or not) then I can simple calculate it's CMB and CMD. Bang! Conversion complete.


Set wrote:
For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X, why not make it sonic, and have the Green Dragons 'breath' a thunderous stroke of sound that shatters trees and leaves their prey stunned and bleeding from the ears? That's what I did, for the fun of it. Green Dragons use Bardic progression instead of Sorcerer progression, but can also use bardic performance (through oratory, usually, but sometimes also song, luring men into the woods, where they sing such deadly songs to them that they fall to the forest floor, organs ruptured and bone shattered within their bruised bodies). Their ravenous wyrmlings leap from treetop to treetop, sending down thunderous cracks of sound like falling trees to cripple deer, boar, wolves and similar prey animals, that they then fall upon and devour.

+1 MILLION!!

This sounds awesome.


James Jacobs wrote:
Hydro wrote:
I still think elementals are too humanoid in nature. They don't feel like "living (fire/water/wind/earth)" at all; they feel more like something a mortal wizard would shape a given elemental into.

Of the 8 elementals illustrated in the Bestiary, only 1 is what I would call "humanoid."

AIR: A weird multilegged bird thing and a tornado type thing.
EARTH: A dog made of rocks and a man made of rocks.
FIRE: A dragon/snake made of fire and a bat made out of smoke.
WATER: A shark made of water and a wave with a distorted face.

So yeah, I'd agree that elementals aren't necessarily humanoid shaped. In that only 12.5% of those we illustrate in the Bestiary are humanoid shaped.

To me, this implies that you could make the elemental resemble whatever form you wish it to be, so long as you maintain the current stats as listed for the creature i.e.- HD, BAB, number of attacks, damage, etc.). If you really want to be a creative GM, sure, give it multipe attacks as per the the form chosen, but then you might as well treat it as an elemental-template version of the base creature (chosen form), or at least drop the dmage by one step for primary attacks, two steps for secondary. I've done it before with firecats (fire-based tigers), it's really not that hard. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing a elemental template for each of the four primary elements simplified like the advanced, young, celestial, and fiendish templates in the bestiary (really big HINT HINT), something better than the ones in the Manual of the Planes (not that those were THAT bad, but not very well balanced IMO).


Set wrote:


For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X...

Actually changing the green dragons breath to acid based damage isn't that far off the mark... since a green dragons "poison" breath weapon was always called 'Chlorine Gas', in the real world Chlorine gas actually kills you by turning the moisture in your lungs into hydrochloric acid when you breathe it in.

That and by changing it to a direct acid attack they eliminated the potential for multi-page threads arguing about whether a high level monk is immune to green dragon breath or not, such as recently sprouted up on the Dragonsfoot.org 1st edition board ;0)


Some monsters I won't miss for various reasons (had a post I wrote, but the screen switched on me when I went to post it; SO hate when that happens!):
achaierai, delver, ethereal filcher, ethereal marauder, krenshar, phantom fungus, thoqqua, and tojanida.

Some I miss and hope to see in Bestiary II:
gray render, hippogriff (although I think it's been confirmed it will be), tendriculous, alternate lycanthropes or at least a decent template for making them. I would mention the various aquatic races, but something tells me there's a specific reason why those were kept out, like maybe the fact that you're only likely to encounter them IN the water and most adventures take place on land, perhaps? Then again, you're not very likely to see merfolk on land unless they now have the ability to change their tails into legs (why not? Daryl Hannah did it in Splash).

Sadly, we won't see beholder, githyanke, githzerai, or yuan-ti in any future Bestiaries, but that won't stop ME from using them. After all, it's MY game, and I'll do whatever the Hello! I want :-)

Dark Archive

cwslyclgh wrote:
Set wrote:
For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X...
Actually changing the green dragons breath to acid based damage isn't that far off the mark... since a green dragons "poison" breath weapon was always called 'Chlorine Gas', in the real world Chlorine gas actually kills you by turning the moisture in your lungs into hydrochloric acid when you breathe it in.

Oh, I know. I've done the accidentally mixing bleach and ammonia and getting a building evacuated thing before. :)

I just liked the idea of the five dragons having five different distinctive breath weapons. It had a certain symmetry.

Shadow Lodge

drakkonflye wrote:
Sadly, we won't see beholder, githyanke, githzerai, or yuan-ti in any future Bestiaries, but that won't stop ME from using them. After all, it's MY game, and I'll do whatever the Hello! I want :-)

I will not be bothering with gith_____ or yuan-ti, but I will eventually be converting beholders (and the many varient beholders) and illithids.

Dark Archive

Kthulhu wrote:
I will not be bothering with gith_____ or yuan-ti, but I will eventually be converting beholders (and the many varient beholders) and illithids.

I never got the Gith-love, and Beholders just never struck me as anything but ridiculous, both mechanically and visually. (And I know that I'm agreeing with a race of anthropomorphic hippopotami as to what is 'ridiculous,' but I'm okay with that.)

But Mind Flayers are iconic to me. I replaced them with a race of kinda-intelligent darkmantles that have some psionic-like abilities (daze, mental blindsight) that drop down onto dazed / stunned / sleeping humanoids and take them over, kinda like an Alien face-hugger. Once bonded over a humanoid's head, they tap into it's brain, and become significantly smarter, and remain perched there, making the humanoid look like it has a squid for a head, and causing gradual changes to the body of its host, with the skin changing colors to match the creature bonded to it's head (as a result of a fungal growth that exists symbiotically on the creatures flesh, and spreads like a rash over the host as well). Once bonded in this manner, they are loath to give up their increased intelligence, and any further mental powers they develop, but, if in the course of a pitched battle, the body is damaged to the point of death, the creature will launch itself off of the dead host and try to escape, reduced back to an Int of 6 with much-reduced powers, forced to start all over again...

It's *nothing* like the 'Illithid' of recent years, with elder brains and whatnot, growing from tadpoles injected into human skulls, but it has a lot of the same feel for me, with some twists, such as an ally possibly being turned into one, and needing to be 'rescued' by finding a way to get the thing off of him, without killing him (only to find out that his own mind and personality has been erased, and needs to be restored somehow).


re: Mind Flayers...

Maybe Reaper Miniatures will make the "bathalian" race OGL. ;)

-The Gneech


Set wrote:

But Mind Flayers are iconic to me. I replaced them with a race of kinda-intelligent darkmantles that have some psionic-like abilities (daze, mental blindsight) that drop down onto dazed / stunned / sleeping humanoids and take them over, kinda like an Alien face-hugger. Once bonded over a humanoid's head, they tap into it's brain, and become significantly smarter, and remain perched there, making the humanoid look like it has a squid for a head, and causing gradual changes to the body of its host, with the skin changing colors to match the creature bonded to it's head (as a result of a fungal growth that exists symbiotically on the creatures flesh, and spreads like a rash over the host as well). Once bonded in this manner, they are loath to give up their increased intelligence, and any further mental powers they develop, but, if in the course of a pitched battle, the body is damaged to the point of death, the creature will launch itself off of the dead host and try to escape, reduced back to an Int of 6 with much-reduced powers, forced to start all over again...

It's *nothing* like the 'Illithid' of recent years, with elder brains and whatnot, growing from tadpoles injected into human skulls, but it has a lot of the same feel for me, with some twists, such as an ally possibly being turned into one, and needing to be 'rescued' by finding a way to get the thing off of him, without killing him (only to find out that his own mind and personality has been erased, and needs to be restored somehow).

This needs to be stolen by Paizo.....I absolutely love this idea, and I think it's potentially far creepier than a mind flayer ever was.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Intellect Devourers > Mind Flayers. Oh, and they're OGL.

Dark Archive

Gorbacz wrote:
Intellect Devourers > Mind Flayers. Oh, and they're OGL.

The second sentence, I agree with. The Intellect Devourer really does nothing for me. It comes across as a bit lame, actually, with the whole shrinking thing.

If it crawled down into the stomach and intestines, causing it's hosts to appear bloated, and to suffer gradual starvation (adding gaunt and drawn and tremorous), as they are unable to feed, their bodies only sustained by the psychic energies of the ID, *that* would be creepier, IMO.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

We'll be doing a fair bit more with intellect devourers to expand upon their role as a brain-eating menace in the Darklands (first described in "Into the Darklands") on and off over the next few years, probably. I'm using them as one of the main bad guys in my office Pathfinder game, in fact, and they seem to be working pretty well at scaring and grossing out the players.

As for directly replacing mind flayers in Golarion with another humanoid race of octopus-headded psionic using brain eaters... not gonna happen. Partially because we don't want to taunt WotC with the opportunity to sue us, but mostly because I respect the fact that WotC wants to keep the mind flayer for themselves to use, and I'm not really interested in disrespecting them by doing fakey mind flayers.

I WILL (and have) put neothelids into Pathfinder though, since they're open content. They're not associated with mind flayers in Pathfinder, though... but they DO also have a strong presence in the Darklands.

And then there's also the wormlike seugathi, who can also serve to scratch the "creepy underground race" itch that folks miss from mind flayers.

"Into the Darklands" is the best place to go to see what we've done to "shore up" a deep underground setting when we can't use things like umber hulks or mind flayers, in any event. And since that helped us make our Darklands feel less like a generic Underdark... that's good!

Shadow Lodge

Plus, there's nothing that prevents anyone from putting mind flayers proper into their own personal game.


James Jacobs wrote:
a bat made out of smoke.

Never saw this until now.

Went back and looked. Mind blown.

Scarab Sages

James Jacobs wrote:

We'll be doing a fair bit more with intellect devourers to expand upon their role as a brain-eating menace in the Darklands (first described in "Into the Darklands") on and off over the next few years, probably. I'm using them as one of the main bad guys in my office Pathfinder game, in fact, and they seem to be working pretty well at scaring and grossing out the players.

ThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouTha nkYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankYouThankY ouThankYou....

I'v really started to love the intellect devourers recently, and was even toying with a self-written adventure containing one. I've enjoyed the PF interpretation.

Any chance we'll see some ID's in an AP?


OK, i am new to the message boards, sorry for kinda inserting this q in here, but what is SRD?

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber
Erik Mehring wrote:
OK, i am new to the message boards, sorry for kinda inserting this q in here, but what is SRD?

System Reference Document.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Aberzombie wrote:
Any chance we'll see some ID's in an AP?

Eventually, absolutely! Not sure when though...


System Reference Document.

awesome, thanks!

Shadow Lodge

James Jacobs wrote:
the arrowhawk

Can we please have the arrowhawk back, please? I loved summoning that creature...


Aberzombie wrote:
I'v really started to love the intellect devourers recently...

You just like them 'cause they have the same diet as you :)


Zurai wrote:
To be fair, the dragon that DOES use a sonic attack is much cooler: the Pyroclastic Dragon.

Don't forget Bahamut's Sonic Disintegration breath weapon :)


Paizo...you have set the par high for the old boys club. 2 thumbs up from the northern barbarians of the great white north.

We have ordered in some of your core pathfinder RPG stuff.....the dragons bestiary and the other monster books.....well had us drooling and yakking like old camp maids by the campfire to see the days of old flavor again.

yer paying tribute to the what we feel was lost from the first edition days.
If your a newbie with no imagination....wow....just reading about one of the dragons and the extras.....instance adventure juices start to flow and ya have the starting blocks to run with it....same for the monsters....
As old gamers from yore and then yoe again. we knew the temperament and ecology like true biologists. and the next gen needs that to be the next story tellers and keep the spirit alive around the table.

So we suggest...go for it.....do the same detail for all the hated monsters..and post for a vote....and let the subscribers decide what to add.....to the next monster manuals....

you folks have made D$D and 3rd edition better and so flavorful that old gary G would have blessed.

keep it up

Shadow Lodge

Bushtroll wrote:

Paizo...you have set the par high for the old boys club. 2 thumbs up from the northern barbarians of the great white north.

We have ordered in some of your core pathfinder RPG stuff.....the dragons bestiary and the other monster books.....well had us drooling and yakking like old camp maids by the campfire to see the days of old flavor again.

yer paying tribute to the what we feel was lost from the first edition days.
If your a newbie with no imagination....wow....just reading about one of the dragons and the extras.....instance adventure juices start to flow and ya have the starting blocks to run with it....same for the monsters....
As old gamers from yore and then yoe again. we knew the temperament and ecology like true biologists. and the next gen needs that to be the next story tellers and keep the spirit alive around the table.

So we suggest...go for it.....do the same detail for all the hated monsters..and post for a vote....and let the subscribers decide what to add.....to the next monster manuals....

you folks have made D$D and 3rd edition better and so flavorful that old gary G would have blessed.

keep it up

+1 for Bushtroll!


Set wrote:
Charlie Bell wrote:
EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.

So many fine sound-related creatures that already existed anyway, like sirens and banshees, that they didn't bother using, to instead come up with those freaks.

For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X, why not make it sonic, and have the Green Dragons 'breath' a thunderous stroke of sound that shatters trees and leaves their prey stunned and bleeding from the ears? That's what I did, for the fun of it. Green Dragons use Bardic progression instead of Sorcerer progression, but can also use bardic performance (through oratory, usually, but sometimes also song, luring men into the woods, where they sing such deadly songs to them that they fall to the forest floor, organs ruptured and bone shattered within their bruised bodies). Their ravenous wyrmlings leap from treetop to treetop, sending down thunderous cracks of sound like falling trees to cripple deer, boar, wolves and similar prey animals, that they then fall upon and devour.

Agreed. Your solo bard needs something to fight at high levels...

Shadow Lodge

Least favorite SRD critter? Black Puddings (or any metal eating acid spewing ooze for that matter). I understand they're iconic, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Every time we've met a black pudding it's been virtual death for the fighter involved (who has failed his saving throws (multiple) after being engulfed and watched his entire allotment of gear get disintegrated in a matter of rounds. Maybe if you're looking for a way to trim the PCs equipment and treasure this is a good thing, but it seems that every time I've seen them they're just placed nonchalantly in various modules as a way to destroy player equipment for no good reason.

Case in point? Roll up new character (decide on a fighter), first encounter is with three black puddings, walk out of the encounter with a shield. Yes a shield. Roll up new character. This does not make for fun campaigning.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Monsters like the black pudding are specifically why Pathfinder has MUCH easier ways to fix broken or destroyed items. AKA: It shouldn't be easier to fix a dead guy than it is to fix his sword.


Set wrote:
Charlie Bell wrote:
EDIT: Also destrachans and yrthaks. Ooooo look we have a sonic energy type now, we need sonic monsters. Just cause it's there doesn't mean you should use it.

So many fine sound-related creatures that already existed anyway, like sirens and banshees, that they didn't bother using, to instead come up with those freaks.

For that matter, since they were already changing Green Dragons poison breath to an energy type attack for 3.X, why not make it sonic, and have the Green Dragons 'breath' a thunderous stroke of sound that shatters trees and leaves their prey stunned and bleeding from the ears? That's what I did, for the fun of it. Green Dragons use Bardic progression instead of Sorcerer progression, but can also use bardic performance (through oratory, usually, but sometimes also song, luring men into the woods, where they sing such deadly songs to them that they fall to the forest floor, organs ruptured and bone shattered within their bruised bodies). Their ravenous wyrmlings leap from treetop to treetop, sending down thunderous cracks of sound like falling trees to cripple deer, boar, wolves and similar prey animals, that they then fall upon and devour.

Just out of curiousity, which metallic (Gold or Brass) were you planning to give the sonic breath weapon to, Set?

Dark Archive

Steven Purcell wrote:
Just out of curiousity, which metallic (Gold or Brass) were you planning to give the sonic breath weapon to, Set?

Didn't use metallics for that campaign. Five dragon types seemed like enough for me, and I didn't see a need for dragons to be hard-coded for alignment-by-color. Were I to adapt this thinking to a Golarion campaign, the dragon in Hermea would be a red, or maybe a blue or green.

I'm not a fan of hugely powerful good critters running around (especially when they are grossly mismatched against their foes, like Silver Dragons vs. White Dragons, or Solars vs. Balors). That's what adventurers are for, dealing with that sort of thing.

But it totally would have been Brass. Totally fits with their chatty nature, and similarly fitting them with Bard levels in place of Sorcerers levels would also fit the theme. 'Cause that's evocative of big, brass bells and all tintinabulariffic.


James Jacobs wrote:
we can't use things like umber hulks

I was just bemoaning the lack of umber hulks this past weekend. Oh well, time to pull out the pencil and convert!

-The Gneech

Sovereign Court

Hydro wrote:

i think that's a lot cooler than the faceless dudes in the 3e MM, but if it were up to me a fire elemental's stats would be less like a creature and more like the stats for an actual fire. They'd be what you throw at players when mundane natural disasters stop being a serious threat.

An ice elemental is an avalanche that WANTS to kill you.

Are Paraelementals WOTC Property? I've always been a fan of ice/smoke/slime/etc elementals, mostly because players all scratch their heads and go "Wait, what are the two constituent elements to this again? What is it immune to?"

Actually, half my players have been playing D&D for longer than I have, and it takes all the fun out of the mysterious monster "Oh yeah, it's got 5 hit dice and I have its stat block memorized".

P.S. Except for when the Otyughs started talking. Best thing about Pathfinder Otyughs ever!! Even though technically they always had int, we just never ever played it that way until you guys pointed it out.

Sovereign Court

I liked Delvers and Yrthaks because the former gave some excuse for all these ludicrously huge and stable non-limestone-based cavern complexes all over the world (In my mind, the folks that built the Vaults of Orv are Delvers), and the latter were a much needed taste of Kaiju goodness in my D&D.

But, honestly, I don't need 'em in my bestiary. I trust the folks at Pathfinder to give us lots of crazy kaiju when they do their sourcebooks for the Mysterious East, and I don't think James Jacobs is going to kick down my door if I make Delvers be the Vault Builders, or even make the Vault Builders an important part of my game.


I tend to go to bat for unloved monsters, if only because so many of the iconic D&D monsters came out of early developers' habits of throwing all sorts of stupid ideas out into the world and seeing what stuck. There's nothing about the beholder or the owlbear that isn't hilariously bad at first glance, but these monsters have become a part of the game's shared heritage. I think that the current gaming community does itself a disservice when it dismisses initially foolish-looking monsters without giving them a fair shake.

Speaking only for myself, I miss the arrowhawk. Low-level fliers with ranged attacks are few and far between in the Bestiary, mephits aside (and that's a really generous definition of "ranged attacks" in their case). The delver was a poor design with some bad flavor, definitely, but I do have to say that it works well as a bare-bones concept that could probably be salvaged with a new look and better fluff. Speaking of decent monster ideas that never recovered from their artwork, the dissolver isn't all that bad a monster if you can get over how gawds-awful stupid it looks.

Show a hated monster a little love, and you might just find that it pays off in spades. Whatever else one might say about the destrachan, it at least filled a role that wasn't already being filled better by another monster. If you ever want to contemplate a truly useless monster, ask yourself why the Bestiary needed to contain the shadow, spectre and wraith, when it could have just as easily duplicated them by giving the ghost some alternate power templates.

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber
Nani Z. Obringer wrote:
Actually, half my players have been playing D&D for longer than I have, and it takes all the fun out of the mysterious monster "Oh yeah, it's got 5 hit dice and I have its stat block memorized".

Albino red dragon. Problem solved. :)

Dark Archive

Nani Z. Obringer wrote:
Actually, half my players have been playing D&D for longer than I have, and it takes all the fun out of the mysterious monster "Oh yeah, it's got 5 hit dice and I have its stat block memorized".

A fun thread full of ideas to deal with this issue.


TriOmegaZero wrote:
Nani Z. Obringer wrote:
Actually, half my players have been playing D&D for longer than I have, and it takes all the fun out of the mysterious monster "Oh yeah, it's got 5 hit dice and I have its stat block memorized".
Albino red dragon. Problem solved. :)

There was a story in The Dragons of Krynn with that premise.

Shadow Lodge

My solutions for dragons is that the color of their scales has nothing to do with their draconic "race". To determine if it's a blue dragon or a gold dragon, you have to look at it's eyes. Of course, by the time you're looking into it's eyes, you'd better be hoping it's a friendly dragon, no matter what it's draconic "race".

Scales are often, but not always, matched to an appropriate camoflage color for the environment the dragon lives in. Desert dragons are either sand-colored or blue (to blend in with the sky), jungle dragons are green, etc.

I also don't hard-code alignment to the draconic race. Chromatic dragons TEND towards evil, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule.


Kthulhu wrote:
I also don't hard-code alignment to the draconic race. Chromatic dragons TEND towards evil, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

Like in Eberron.

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