Go Towards the Lich

Spent a goodly part of today working on this page:

... and I am glad to have it largely behind me.   I need to address the list of a spells that a lich has, picking out from the spell list the "best" choices, those that are most lich-friendly, but as I haven't properly working out the magic spells themselves above 4th level, I think I'll leave off doing this until another time.  I'm not likely to throw a lich in anyone's path soon.

I have no idea if this is anyone else's idea of a lich or not.  Surely there must be one such creature written about in some truly awful and popular game module with which I have zero familiarity, which every D&D player in the universe bases their lich upon, being so very very fond of that module.  Occasionally, I've tried to dig up such references, to use them, only to find them unspeakably tenth-rate in their quality or attention to detail ... and yet everyone LOVES them to death, because that's the lich they fought in their utterly overpowered game show contestant campaign that they played at the age of 7.

So.  This lich isn't like that lich.

I've dispensed with the word "phylactery," which is a Jewish holy article, and which I do not think is the appropriate article to be used in describing perhaps the most evil creature in the D&D lexicon.  People who want to carp about the abuse of orcs for their ugliness and drow elves for their blackness ought to add this particular abuse to their social justice cause list.  The 5th level spell, magic jar, seems perfectly appropriate.

I play it that the soul never leaves the jar, and that in fact the body doesn't have to be the original lich's body.  But it is all explained on the post.

Key to this is that it remains within the realm of a player character choosing to take their sufficiently high level mage and become a lich of their own free will.  Essentially, there's nothing to stop the mage ... most definitely not alignment, because I don't use it.  If a player character wants to go that route, I have absolutely no problems with it.  Of course, they have to get there first.  Starting at 1st level, as everyone must in my game, means it will take a little time.

A Silly Monster Redeemed

I’ve just had such a good idea about gas spores that I feel I must post it.

I’ve always hated this creature, primarily because once a party knows that it isn’t dangerous if you don’t hit it, it is a useless balloon floating around dungeons. And what player doesn’t already get the joke – yes, we know its not a beholder.

I’ve always felt, however, that a gas spore could be some kind of monster in its own right.

Consider the cattail. Once the flower is ready to germinate, the hard brown shell splits, allowing the downy material within to fluff out; the wind then catches the fluff, which supports the seed, scattering the plant throughout the marsh.

Now, suppose the gas spore is made of the same hard fibrous material on the outside (let’s give it more hit points, as well). The entire creature doesn’t split at once – only compartmentalized pockets, which have matured. Effectively, there is always some part of the creature which is in gestation mode.

Allow the gas spore to emit the down it produces; this down supports a seed just like a cactus, but the seed retains its parent’s floating capacity ... so that the seed and its downy surrounding, no wider than a few centimeters across, can float its way along. Stone and dead wood it ignores, but once it attaches to living tissue, the seed at once begins to affect the skin as a disease – which must be saved against or cured.

Nasty, but quite practical.

About Encounters

Here is what I have to say about encounter tables. They don’t fucking work. You can spend weeks sorting out the monsters according to the climatic, vegetative or demographic region you want; you can assign them frequencies and number appearing; you can carefully construct the tables so you can roll a hundred sided or a thousand sided dice…but when you start rolling on that table because a party is stumbling through some forest, you can bet your ass that “wolf” is going to come up the dice every fucking time.

Fact is, you won’t like the results, they won’t fit into the campaign that day and you’ll find yourself rolling again and again on your carefully constructed table until you toss the piece-of-shit table out and just pick the monster you like.

This frustrates me endlessly. It has done so for the past thirty years. Whereas my world is intended to be a self-acting system, it just doesn’t work out that way when it comes to monsters and to this day I haven’t been able to fix it.

And oh, I’d like to.

I know that a great part of the problem is the relative number of monsters. There just aren’t enough. And there aren’t any new ones.

Oh, yes, I know, there are hundreds of “new” monsters in all the books that have been printed. So I am told. Except that they don’t seem very “new” to me.

I don’t need any new dogs, cats, golems, demons, dragons, jinxkins, humanoids (christ in a sidecar, tieflings?), jellies or plants that capture things with tentacles. These are not new monsters, these are the same old monsters with marginally different characteristics. They don’t add anything to the existing three-dimensional environment because most of them are too silly to a) be taken seriously; b) to be anything other than kill-the-party drones; or c) include any graspable dramatic quality not already present in the original tomes. Books like Monster Manual III are just long complicated descriptions of what are, effectively, “flail snails.”

I have read over them several times and I can’t see how their inclusion will help “fill up” the empty places in my world.

But perhaps you don’t understand what I mean by that (I haven’t really explained my problem yet).

When I take the profoundly usable original AD&D monster manual (where every monster actually makes sense) and add to it the Fiend Folio (about 50% useful) and a scattering of other monsters from other books, I get a total of about 800 useful, original monster types. Dividing this into vegetation (desert vs forest vs prairie), and further dividing this into climate (dry-hot from cold-rainy from cool arid and so on), then finally by season (winter vs. summer), I typically get from 5 to 60 monsters per region. Jungles and forests have the most types (with the exception of subterranean), but arctic/tundra regions have very, very few.

Thus, “wolf.”

I have, for the past year, given up on the idea of a die roll to randomly determine the appearance of any monster. I have been trying to think outside of the box, and this has led me to rethink monsters in many different ways. I have come up with a few conclusions, mostly about frequency and number appearing.

Any 20-mile hex, being about 313 sq.m. in area, would have to have a healthy number of every kind of monster present. In a wilderness forested area, there would have to be dozens of bears and hundreds of deer. Those would be earth numbers. To what degree would they be supplemented or replaced by the massive herbivores and carnivores that supposedly exist? If a hill giant is 8 times as massive as a human being, would 20 hill giants be more or less easy to locate than 160 people?

These are questions that I have been as yet unable to answer. If I set some total of hit dice as the base upon which I should gauge the population of a hex, then we’re looking at a hex allowing thousands of hit dice.

How is that?

Well, 150 acres of arable land will support 75 cattle, which, as every knows, have 1-4 HD (let’s call it 2 HD, for simplicity of use). There are 640 acres in a square mile, and 313 square miles in a 20 mile hex…that’s 640 / 150 * 313 * 75 * 2 (for hit dice) = 200,320 HD per hex.

Ah, but most land is NOT arable. And forests are very not arable, at least as far as humans go. But what about treants? What do they eat? If dead leaves, then a forest could feed an awful lot of treants. Still, we ought to limit the above number somehow…lets say that 5% of the land in a forest is practical for the feeding of the monsters therein. That leaves us with 10,016 HD per hex.

If we distribute this equally throughout a given encounter table, say the temperate table of the DMG (p. 186-7), where there is a 1% chance of encountering a hill giant, then we find we have 100 HD distributed towards the hill giant population—resulting in a total population of some 12 to 13 hill giants…in every hex.

Hm. Seems a little high for me. Perhaps you could adjust the “arability” of the land downwards some…to the point where every hex would have it’s prerequisite hill giant. That would be a total of 801 HD per hex…or approximately 0.4% of the forest actually being arable.

Which seems…low. Especially for somewhere that has such a reputation for being thick with growing things.

All right, so we lower the frequency of hill giants. To what, exactly? Because to be honest, I have no idea. And it wouldn’t matter anyway, because the problem is that a hill giant encounter is going to be a LOT more interesting than a wolf encounter, though wolves are clearly going to be more common in their occurrence (thus there is an 8% chance of encountering them on the DMG table referenced). But I know of no party who would be interested in going through 8 wolf encounters (a total of 32 wolves) before encountering one hill giant.

So, clearly, there’s nothing to be gained by following any system of logic. A useful system would have to be designed on the encounter’s “interest” quotient.

Which is where I’m stuck. I’ve thought about intelligence as a guideline, on the argument that the greater the intelligence the more desirous the monster would be in bugging or attacking the party…but I’m still waiting for the scales to fall from my eyes.