Book Review: Misfit Monsters Redeemed
If thereâs anything thatâs true about monsters in ttrpgs, they certainly come in a vast variety. Some of theme are magnificent takes on bringing folkloric creatures to life at the table, some are wholly original creations that go on to shape the hobby for years to come, some are blatant or subtle references to movies and video games that came out around the same time they were written, and so on.
Some, however, are a bit of a flop. Maybe theyâre just too silly in appearance or abilities. Maybe theyâre too gimmicky. Or maybe they were originally designed to be one of those look-alike monsters to throw a party that is too prepared for the expected for a loop because punishing players for planning was how some designers and DMs handled things back then.
No matter the reason, there are some monsters that are rightfully reviled⊠or are they?
The fact of the matter is, a little bit of weirdness has been baked into the hobby, and indeed the fantasy genre, for as long as it has existed, so any threshold where a monster becomes âtoo sillyâ is a fog bank of individual preference, not a hard line, creating a dismissive double-standard in what weâre willing to appreciate with our monsters.
And thatâs where todayâs book, my favorite among the Revisited series and Pathfinder paperbacks in general, comes in. Misfit Monsters Redeemed takes 10 monsters (well, more like 12, but some got consolidated) from the history of D&D and attempts to breathe new life into them, altering their lore to be less one-note and more bizarre but interesting, to create monsters that might initially throw the party for a loop but later prove to be interesting combat or even social encounters.
So without further ado, let us begin!
The book starts with a foreword by one of the authors talking about how Pathfinder already had a history of taking monsters that were considered generic or boring and breathing new life into them, such as goblins or rust monsters, and how despite how seemingly irredeemable some concepts are, that the weirdest and lamest could in fact be given the same treatment, which is where we find ourselves.
Our first subject on the docket are Adherers. Originally conceived as weird aberration âsticky mummiesâ to punish parties that immediately reach for the holy water and the Turn Undead ability when they see a shambling humanoid covered in what look like filthy bandages in the dim light. The result is a creature that can ignore the aforementioned tactics entirely and grapple and slay foes one by one with their unnaturally sticky bodies, as if they were wrapped in double-sided tape.
The book gives adherers a much more interesting origin, being the descendants of humans kidnapped and farmed for blood by phase spiders on the ethereal plane until they mutated and bred true, their bodies interwoven with the gossamer living threads they were bound in on a fundamental level before they were finally set loose by the fall of that enclave of interdimensional arachnids. This resulted in their ropey wrinkled and tentacled flesh being supernaturally sticky to all material plane matter and infused the silk threads throughout their bodies with a psychic urge, a memory of their purpose: to siphon blood.
Thus even if their shambling, moaning, half-mad forms didnât estrange them from humanity enough, the urge to capture and bloodlet others certainly closed any potential reintegration off from them. Now, adherers are predators that lurk on the fringes of civilization, lurking in the ruins of older cultures (where they conveniently sometimes get mistaken for undead mummies also found in such places). We even get a slightly stronger variant of adherer where the poor creatureâs solidity breaks down, leaving the adherer a mobile living shroud of flesh and etheric thread.
Our second subject are delvers. Originally just massive slugs with goofy oversized excavator claws that dug around in the depths for no real reason other than perhaps looking for food, However, this book instead adds the lore that this massive slug-like creatures and living earth movers in fact were a created species made by some mysterious ancient creators for the express purpose of excavation (most likely xiomorns, but this is not confirmed and this was probably written before that elemental species was conceived of in the lore).
Though they are now abandoned, the intelligent delvers consider themselves architects of the depths, sculpting according to the will of the masters as they now interpret it (using different combinations of consumed ore to get high enough, of course), though they can be territorial with their creations, or outright violent when having a bad trip.
Next up are dire corbies, a species of subterranean crow-men that in the past were most notable for shouting âDoom! Dooooom!â In shrill voices as they attacked. While this no doubt is quite upsetting to hear in character as you as one is assaulted by a horrible bird man, it can feel a little silly for the players.
Paizo attempted to rectify this by playing up the suicidal savagery and aggression of these beings. If the party manages to get across a chasm to escape the crow-men, they will all without hesitation fling themselves across the gap to continue the assault, ignoring those that fail to find purchase and plummet to their death, the screeching for the death and doom of the party never leaving their lips. Such is the xenophobic hatred and viciousness of these creatures.
The book also makes a point to never clearly explain the origin of these savage brutes. There is speculation that they might be tengu that degenerated after entering into the Darklands, or of drow fleshwarping experiments. No matter the truth, the fact that these creatures barely even utilize tools makes it clear how far and extreme the fall has been from civilization, assuming they ever had such a thing.
Relatively harmless but often feared by many a party is the Disenchanter, a curious trunked ungulate that feeds on the magic in items, robbing them of their energies and reducing them to mundane items. In itâs original form, these creatures would show up and threaten to destroy hundreds or thousands of gold pieces worth of equipment, placing them right up there with rust monsters in terms of monsters disproportionally hated for their CR level.
The article on them in MMR adds more character to them by making them the magical creations of a nation of wizards (Nex in the Lost Omens setting) as a weapon against enemy casters and those that rely on magical equipment. It further goes on to play up the childlike intelligence and innocence of the creatures, as well as how they can be harmlessly deterred and even befriended with the sacrifice of weaker, unwanted items.
Another enigmatic but mostly passive beast is the flail snail. The name truly paints a highly accurate image: The flail snail is a giant snail⊠but the tips of their antennae are covered in horny growths capable of being swung with great might to bash interlopers. While this rhyming name and simple description are silly though, the snails also possess the ability to deflect magic in strange, wild ways, making casting spells on them directly a dangerous prospect.
The article goes far to redeem the snails by not just going into their fascinating life cycle, inspired by real snails, but also tapping into their surprising intelligence, revealing that these seemingly mindless beasts are actually quite clever, albeit intelligent in a very non-humanoid way, and are in fact capable of beautiful poetry written in the pheromones left by their slime trails. While it is possible to benefit from harvesting their shells, these gastropods are of no threat to others unless attacked first.
And now we get to the one that everyone has been waiting for: Flumphs. Thatâs right. Before D&D 5e did it, Pathfinder brought back flumphs first. In early D&D, flumphs seem to primarily exist to remind players how weird life can be in the Underdark and other subterranean environs. In practice, they are often seen as harmless, pathetic, and goofy.
While flumphs remain not much of a threat in Pathfinder (relying on injected acid and a smelly spray for defense) the book makes them into interstellar travelers of sorts, able to fling their spore pods into the upper atmosphere at speeds to overcome gravity, sending them into deep space to find other planets. Once on a world, a new colony of flumphs inherits racial memories that give them a strong compulsion to help other creatures, especially when it comes to sensing and warning the natives about interstellar threats and evil, though their strange appearance hinders them in this regard. Even still, the article goes on to speak at length about the deep culture and preferences of flumph-kind, fleshing them out into weird but fascinating beings.
A somewhat disturbing addition to this list are Lava Children. Originally, these creatures of earth and fire were the size and bulk of strong humans but with identical soft, childlike faces and wide mouths in permanent dopey grins would be completely disarming if it werenât for the fact their strength and ability to ignore all metal as if it does not exist, making the mightiest sword and armor useless against them. Still hard to take seriously though.
In Pathfinder, the lava children have a more distorted appearance, with large baby-like heads atop wiry muscular bodies, and an origin as infiltrator slaves created by shaitan genies to spy on the efreet along the border of the planes of fire and earth, these misshapen creatures slowly fell out of favor as the efreet learned to counter them, and eventually sought their own independence. However, while capable of being reasoned with, a lava child is like a willful child, capable of both whimsy and compassion but also the cruelty of one that hasnât fully developed empathy, which is where there normally dopey wide grins stretch into distended horrible maws that glow with internal heat.
Our next topic is actually technically three monsters, albeit related in aspect. Collectively, the species known as Lurking Rays is composed of the juvenile Executionerâs Hoods, male Lurkers Above, and the female Trapper. The first is a strange aberration that drops from the ceiling and engulfs the heads of the unwary to suffocate and digest them, and resembles the sinister head coverings they earn their name for. Lurkers above, meanwhile resemble manta rays that plaster themselves to the ceiling before detaching to engulf foes. And finally, trappers mimic entire sections of floor, only to come alive and wrap around prey like some predatory sea creature.
It only makes sense that Pathfinder would merge them into one species, all three dangerous in their own way. They even retain the hoodâs vulnerability to alcohol as a weakness of their undeveloped body and a way to safely remove them without risking harming the victim, though they remain somewhat ambivalent on their origins, citing evolution from actual sea creatures, being creatures from beyond the stars, and more. Either way, giving them a whole ecology turns these somewhat goofy monsters into almost kin for mimics in the way they prey upon unsuspecting victims that trust the scenery around them to be exactly what it seems. They even make the female trappers intelligent as a display of the sexual dimorphism at play here.
Did you every play pretend as a turtle when you were a kid? Did you ever imagine that you as a turtle had the same sort of anatomy as the old cartoon gags, with the shell being treated as a removable piece of outerwear or even a bigger on the inside home for the turtle? If so, you might have also imagined being able to stick your limbs out of the various holes in the shell in any configuration. If so, you immediately understand the tojanida monster, a creature from the plane of water that has no top or bottom, only multiple holes in itâs shell from which it can extend itâs head, four fins, and two pincher claws in any configuration it chooses in defiance of any sane understanding of fleshy anatomy. In a game with rules for facing, I have no doubt this would have made the tojanida an interesting monster⊠but no version of D&D had facing rules, and so it was just kinda a weird turtle thing whose gimmick was entirely carried by DM description aside from having all-around vision.
And I think this is the first monster in the book where Iâm torn by the route that Pathfinder took to try and redeem this weird monster. Rather than keep the impossible limbs, the tojanida became a more clear blend of turtle and crab with eyes ringing the outside of itâs shell to explain the all-around vision.
What the creature lacks in retaining the original premise, however, it makes for in a tragic species-wide backstory, as according to legend, tojanida were once a type of legendary shapeshifters among water elementals, able to take nearly any shape. However, after a now-forgotten slight, the tojanida were cursed by the wish of a powerful marid ruler to be locked in one form forever. In a way, they are an embodiment of waterâs resistance to being contained forever. However, the half-remembered memories of former greatness and yearning to stretch beyond their shell prisons turn most of their kind into half-mad hedonists desperate for new sensations to distract them from their plight. Interestingly, many develop a fascination with forgetfulness, as such a state allows them to re-experience old sensations as new, a rare commodity given their racial memory. Interestingly, tojanida made the cut into 2e, though under a new name: tantriogs.
Finally, we come to our last subject, the Wolf-In-Sheepâs-Clothing. The name is a bit of a mouthful but it is also entirely on the nose, as the whole gimmick of these monsters is appearing to be an ordinary stump with a small fluffy animal curiously unafraid of onlookers. In truth, the animal is nothing more than a fluffy lure, with the monster ready to pounce with itâs root-like tendrils. A shocking encounter certainly, but probably one you can use with a gaming group only once, and even then itâs kinda silly.
Misfit Monsters rectifies that by modifying the formula. Rather than a fluffy natural part of the creatureâs anatomy, the lure used by a wolf-in-sheepâs-clothing is in fact the corpse of an actual animal, puppeted by tendrils burrowed into the creatureâs flesh to seem like a vulnerable prey animal to predators, and an innocent little cutie to most humanoids. However, while the result is the same, the beast isnât afraid to trade up to bigger lures if it thinks it will work⊠and sometimes the entire body of a previous humanoid victim is found silently watching onlookers while sitting on a seemingly innocuous stump. All of this adds an element of horror that makes the creature much more interesting than âcute bunny but actually not.â
The art in the book is delightful, with the cover showing the iconic sorcerer and rogue being lured in by a wolf-in-sheepâs-clothing in the background while the foreground reveals the creatureâs maw and the bones of previous victims. Throughout the book, each chapter has splash art of a monster attacking an iconic or in the flumphâs case, goblins, alongside a short paragraph story of someoneâs account of running into such a creature. The book is also rife with art of the creatures themselves and various related images that add to the discussion of anatomy, life cycles, and culture. I am especially delighted by the effort made to make these creatures stand out as different from the traditional appearance of these creatures in the older editions of D&D.
This is a spectacular book. If thereâs any book that stands at the pinnacle of the âRevisitedâ formula, this is it. The book takes monsters that nobody cared about at all and gave people reasons to care with in-depth lore and updated takes on the core concept that may still be a bit goofy, but in a good, fascinating weird way. Itâs honestly the best way to bring back old monsters from the TSR days that got left by the wayside. And yes, D&D may have eventually brought a lot of these back in 5e, they tend to lack the complex nuance this book made the effort to give them. Letâs be honest, bringing back flumphs in 5e was just nostalgia bait with no substance, even if you liked those flumphs.
I am almost tempted to say this book is the first one I could say âno notesâ to⊠but I do have a note, just one. I honestly donât like what they did with the tojanidaâs physical design. I get that itâs a more cohesive design while also fulfilling all the physical aspects for itâs stats to make sense⊠but it also just betrays the core premise of the creature as a weird shelled thing for which anatomy is a suggestion. If I had to complain about anything else, Iâd say itâs that while some of these creatures did get some love in future books and materials, some of them, like the delver, were never brought up again to my knowledge, and most of these critters straight up have no representation at all in 2e. Part of that I get, especially with the reasons behind the Remaster, but still, it is disappointing.
That will do for today though. Expect a shorter entry on some holy warriors next though!
