There Are No Dumb Monsters

[flailsnails]

Jorphdan previews the Spelljammer ship minis available for pre-order from Wizkids.

This (first?) wave includes:

Turtle Ship

Scorpion

Astral Dreadnought -- A monster first featured on the cover of the AD&D Manual of the Planes, and included in every edition since.  Earlier versions were known as the ethereal dreadnought.

Lamprey

Giant Gelatinous Cube -- This thing has got to be even easier to run away from in space, right?

Hammerhead

Esthetic -- The reason Jorphdan couldn’t find a ship card for the esthetic is because it’s technically a creature.  It’s included in the Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix I (MC7), and is created and flown by the reigar, who also have an entry in that book.

Three generic Asteroids -- Useful for set dressing.  Turn them around, let’s see if any of them have mouths!

Megapede -- Another monster on a ship scale.  The megapede was first published for Dark Sun, in Monstrous Compendium Dark Sun Appendix -- Terrors of the Desert (MC12).  I have lost count of the number of Dark Sun originated monsters that have been previewed for this upcoming Spelljammer set.  I think it’s five or six, now.

Wasp -- My post on the Wasp is here.  It’s a fairly sturdy ship, but in OG Spelljammer you had to salvage it or take it from the lizardfolk if you wanted one.

Living Ship -- I have no idea what this is.  It’s probably new.

Space Galleon

Bombard

Squid Ship

Ancient Gold Dragon

Shrike Ship

Star Moth (Elvish Man-O-War)

Ancient Solar Dragon

Ancient Lunar Dragon

Damselfly -- The damselfly is indeed a variation of the Dragonfly ship.  It’s an upgrade, to be honest, made of ceramic, fully enclosed, and with crew reduced to two.  It’s a gamble to try and board a random Damselfly, because you can’t tell what the crew is made of unless they come outside to fire their weapon(s) at you.

Adult Red Dragon

Swarm of Murder Comets

Tyrant Ship -- Tyrant ships are discussed here and beholders are discussed here.  I really, really want to see how they will handle beholders, seeing as a single beholder is already a CR 13 legendary creature, and really complicated to run.

Cosmic Horror -- Ia! Ia!

Flying Fish (Tradesman) -- Discussed here.  A step up from a beginner ship.

Nightspider (Neogi Deathspider) -- Neogi are discussed here.  A Deathspider is not for the weak of heart, or high of THAC0.  I expect that the Nightspider will be largely similar, although neogi no longer automatically come with umber hulk bodyguards.

Nautiloid

Also on offer are two battlemats, one for Wild Space and one for the Astral Sea.

[ommanyte]

Me, a humble draugr, quietly minding my own business in my barrow tomb, doing my daily chores (lighting the candles, taking the frostbite spider for a walk, making the large swinging axes swing in the corridor of large swinging axes), having a sleepover with the lads in the deathlord’s chamber

YOU, loud, alive, obnoxious, barging into our tomb eating an entire wheel of cheese, making a mess, plundering my life savings from my burial urn, setting fire to frosty (the frostbite spider), re-killing me and the lads, WAKING the deathlord

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules (1980s)

[prokopetz]

Concept: GMless, semi-competitive tabletop RPG where everybody is a vampire or vampire-adjacent critter, with a set of randomly selected vampire weaknesses drawn from a big deck of cards. However, you don't hold your weakness cards, or even know what they are: instead, they're distributed to the other players.

At any time, another player can hold up a card (without showing it to you) and declare that the action you just took automatically fails or you suffer a point of damage because you transgressed one of your weaknesses. They don't have to reveal what specific weakness was transgressed – only that it was.

When this happens, you have two choices: you can either accept it, take the loss, and move on, or you can say "bullshit – there's no way that's one of my weaknesses". If you're right, you score some sort of meta currency and/or the player who tried to bluff you eats a penalty.

However, if you're wrong – i.e., if the player you called out is able to reveal a card with your name written on it establishing that you really do have that weakness – then your vampire immediately explodes.

[flailsnails]

Welp, "then your vampire immediately explodes" is going right in the ol' lexicon.

[outofcontextdnd]

DM: You boop the zombie dragon snoot.

[mollyjames]

I based a set of D&D villains around the six main stats called Virtues. (think Full Metal Alchemist sins, except Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, etc..) My favorite of the bunch was Charm. Her conceit was she could persuade, lie, cheat, change appearance, and manipulate the players pretty much however she wanted, but the second someone attacked her she would go down. I introduced her relatively early into the campaign, and I was a bit nervous because I was pretty upfront about her introduction. I didn't say it explicitly, but it was pretty obvious Charm was a Virtue from the offset. I thought "well, I like this character a lot, maybe I'll cheat it a little if I have to." Surprisingly, I never did.

In retrospect, I think the context of the Charm encounters was a huge boon. The party really only confronted her twice: the first time at a dinner party and the second at a war council, where leaders from various factions met to discuss retaking the main city for the finale of the campaign. Neither were explicitly combat scenarios, and both times it would have looked pretty bad for the party if they just up and killed Charm for apparently no reason. The end result was I had villain with only eight hit points to her name run around and torment my level 16 party unpunished for several sessions. Let me tell you, as a DM, that felt amazing.

[captainwolfstar5]

To add onto this as a player perspective, Charm was immediately positioned in such a way that, in the social and emotional dynamics of the roleplay, she was untouchable.

Charms first introduction was as the foreign dignitary of a far off nation who we knew had secret ties to the Church. We were at a mansion dinner party held partially in our honor - we were in part invited directly by the King, who we were favored by and wanted favor from. Charms plus 1 at the party was our party leaders sister - they were good friends. This was all true the second time she appeared at the war council, which was not only an expressly political appearance but also one where she represented the nation from which we were trying to secure military aid from.

It didn't matter at any point that we could have rolled a few dice for an attack roll and destroyed her. To destroy Charm of the six virtues, we had to murder, in cold blood, someone who was well liked, well connected, and well loved by some of the npcs closest to the party.

The only way we defeated her was because when we threatened her, subtly, she tipped her hand. Charm openly threatened the party leader's sister, who from then on no longer believed in her. We came to the bargaining table with her and convinced her (with no deception!) she could leave the battle march and be done with us. And when she got on her boat to leave, as it left port, our Bard (independently of anyone) snuck onto the ship, snuck into her room, and killed her in her sleep. The only kill that character ever got in the entire three year campaign.

It was an extremely well executed factor of the game because it was essentially a social encounter Boss fight. We had to construct and push and change the context of the situation until we could kill her without everything else crumbling around us - personal relationships as well as political ones.

[mollyjames]

I should add, Bard character *chose* not to kill anyone. She would willingly torment enemies and assist the party in combat, but never did any killing herself. She only killed Charm after everything had been resolved and Charm had effectively exited the campaign. She would have gotten away scot-free if Bard hadn't decided to take action. It was a great moment, and as a DM I couldn't have asked for a better character death

[mollyjames]

Here's what the fight with Tenacity (Constitution) looked like:

That little red bar at the top is her health. I don't show specific numbers, but I like having the health bar available for players to see so they have a general sense of how wounded the enemy is. I believe for this fight I started Tenacity at 999 HP out of a possible 20,000.

I greatly enjoyed watching my players realize what they were in for after they hit for 50+ damage on their first attack and saw the health bar get one pixel smaller.

[mollyjames]

Ferocity (Strength) was the most conventional of the Virtues, but context was everything. The players hadn't fought a Virtue yet, and were debating whether to defend some potential allies or lay low, only for the Paladin to slip away and confront Ferocity by himself. I was personally prepared to save the fight for later, but when a Paladin does something heroic and foolish you gotta let them have it.

I did not skimp on Ferocity's stat block either. She had a greatsword fashioned out of a massive hunk of stone that dealt bludgeoning damage and was much too heavy for anyone else to even lift. She could grab players and throw them across the map, resulting in fall damage from the distance thrown. She could chuck her sword at someone and leap to where it landed from a standing position. Paladin stood no chance by himself. The result was a mad dash to the join the fray while Paladin tried to hold out for as long as possible, with new party members arriving round after round to help. It was a very close fight, and my favorite combat of the whole campaign.

Incredibly, Monk found a way to disarm Ferocity after she threw her greatsword at him. He couldn't lift it of course, but he could use his new magic item to teleport away with it and hide it in a nearby river. Ferocity spent the rest of the combat leaping around the map to find it, allowing Barbarian to finish her off. Really ingenious play.

(Pictured above, Ferocity and Paladin.)

[mollyjames]

Celerity (dexterity) was had a similar setup to Charm. She was fragile, with only 8 hp. The trick was hitting her, or, thanks to her ridiculously high Stealth, even knowing she was there in the first place. I wanted to give the party a puzzle to solve, as opposed to an enemy to fight.

I had Celerity stalk the party in secret as they made their way through a lengthy dungeon, until eventually the Barbarian made an abnormally high perception check; not enough to know she was there for sure, but enough to sense something was off. They later verified her location through a magical telescope.

Deducing (correctly) that Celerity was there to try and capture an important npc, they decided to lay a trap. The Druid disguised themselves as the npc and drew the attention of a nearby Ancient Deep Crow. As they were about to be snatched up, Celerity intervened, eviscerated the crow, and spirited away the disguised Druid. Before she could realize she'd been tricked, the Paladin, who had been disguised as a spider on the shoulder of the Druid, smote Celerity while her guard was down, killing her instantly.

I remember this encounter fondly, as my players spent a good two hours planning their trap, which then took only about 5 minutes to execute. It was quick and clean, exactly what it should have been.

[mollyjames]

I struggled a lot with what to do for Wisdom. I already had Brilliance (Intelligence) cast as my big bad mastermind final boss encounter, which ate up a lot of the design space. I could make her a religious figure and lean into the divine casting aspect of D&D, but there was already a quasi-religious sect of corrupt paladins hounding the players and I don't like to double dip.

Eventually I settled on Vigilance, a machine made up of wires and tubes with a network of mechanical eyes that spied on the players as they made their way through the capital city. Wisdom is the stat use for Perception after all. I was happy with Vigilance as a background presence. She contributed a lot to the eerie atmosphere and aloof puppeteering nature of the Virtues. The problem was turning a network of cameras into a compelling boss fight.

I wish I could say I had a clever idea here but, uh... I really got nothing this time. She just showed up and harassed the party as a giant tentacle monster. I do like how her token came out though.

In hindsight I think this still could have worked if I hadn't given her a voice and made her a silent powerful threat. Unfortunately, I did give her a voice, and a very silly one to boot.

Oh well, no campaign is perfect.

[gameraboy2]

Tomb of Horrors

[flailsnails]

A perfectly normal box, go ahead and reach right in!

[scienceninjaturtle]

TMNT Crossovers

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Do they have pizza on Eternia though O.O

[flailsnails]

Queen Marlena's from Boise

so, you know, they oughta.

[mariacallous]

How many people do you think wouldn't vote for bidens replacement but would vote Biden? Would be surprised if any. We know there are people who would vote for anybody but biden, so shouldn't we want Biden to drop out ASAP to get more voters? What am I missing here

There’s no guarantee and no indication that anyone who replaces Biden will see an increase in support or beneficial media coverage, and none of the proposed replacements come close to doing as well as he does against Trump, which is the one consistent thing with the polls.

It also opens the democrats up to a lot of challenges and risks by the republicans to fuck with ballots and candidacies, and would create a serious issue with campaign donations and funding.

[mariacallous]

[mariacallous]

[pagecommando]

Black and Jewish dems are statistically the most loyal party voters. Guess who Our Ivy League/Craven News Betters have decided to try and ignore.

[flailsnails]

Joy Ann Reid said recently that this whole thing is an effort to keep Kamala Harris from running in 2028.

[vixensdungeon]

BX or BECMI?

This one's a bit tricky. I'd probably say B/X because it's the more coherent system, simple and clean. It'll take you from a starting adventurer to a big deal lord of the land just fine, though it was never finished as the planned Companion volume was released for BECMI instead.

That being said, there's something to just how nutty BECMI gets, especially once you start adding in supplementary materials like the Gazetteers. It's just too bad they couldn't really figure out thieves past level 14.

[flailsnails]

There's at least one fan made B/X Companion out there!

[guiltiest-gear]

They're dropping the sequel to HRT which turns you into a beast or creature of some sort

[flailsnails]

t4t (teratomorph for teratomorph)

[tgraywrites]

People insisting they're going to tear up the entire foundations of the economy and politics at any moment in a glorious revolution when the most revolutionary thing they've done in their lives is stand under a slightly edgy banner that one time.

You know what? It ends up sounding a lot like excuses not to do anything at all - but I guess it helps them to feel superior whilst blaming everyone else for their particular brand of not delivering anything to help anyone.

The one thing Starmer and keyboard commies have in common? Neither will lift a finger to actually change the status quo no matter how much they bleat about change.

[asoapylife-deactivated20240815]

God you are funny you know that mate. I mean you lack the most basic understanding of what communists actually do its fucking hilarious.

[tgraywrites]

I know some real communists who do real politics and really deliver for their communities - today.

You just aren't one of them. Go back to your political sci-fi and leave the people doing the work to make a difference.

[asoapylife-deactivated20240815]

“Real Comminists” in question who have never read a lick o marx. Dinnae you fucking tell me wha I am when you dont even fucking ken me mate aye.

Jesus your about as clever as a fucking wheely bin ye ken that? Go read a fucking book or something.

[tgraywrites]

I love how you all think "read Marx" is the biggest put-down, when there's not a single commie worth the name who hasn't, as has literally anyone who's studied politics.

It's like claiming that all real physicists are charlatans just because you read Hawkins' 'Universe in a Nutshell' once. Setting the lowest possible bar and saying no one else could have gotten over it because its the only one you've bothered to.

[keeper-of-the-flames]

To quote Big Bill Haywood, one of the original leaders and organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World, and biggest socialists in American history:

“I have never read Marx, but I have the marks of Capital on my body.”

Yeah reading and learning class consciousness and ideology can be a good thing, but it’s absolutely worthless if you don’t actually get up and do something with it. The Revolution isn’t the rapture, it’s not Jesus returning like a thief in the night. You need to get up and be the change you want to see in the world. Help the poor, the struggling, the exploited. Advocate for a better society and the changes that can be made to get there. Don’t sit in the sidelines wishing for a day of fire and blood that you can watch as a spectator of. Organize your workplace, help people who want to vote but have a hard time leaving their home get to a place to cast their ballot. Go to local government meetings and be a voice for your fellow working class. Just DO something. Cause any socialist or communist who hasn’t read a word of Marx or any other figure but still goes out and does something for their people and community is worth a hundred people who just spend hours pouring over literature and then don’t actually apply it.

[tgraywrites]

100% this

[vaspider]

I spent like 10 minutes scrolling that person's blog -- they got into it with @ayeforscotland earlier with just as much efficacy -- and they seem to be literally everything I find tiresome about online "The Glorious Revolution Will Save Us All & Anything Less Is Worse Than Doing Nothing, Reading Theory Is Everything" 'communists.'

Right down to calling anarchists Nazis.

And ofc on top of that they reblog anti-transmasc shit. It's exhausting.

Don't bother -- seriously, you can lead that horse to water but you can't make them stop spouting empty theory not connected to anything useful and concrete.

[flailsnails]

Gawd, every time the Rapture Revolutionaries come across my dashboard, I speedrun the whole Christian "faith versus works" argument.

[alphamecha-mkii]

Hammerhead by Brom

[spirk-trek]

Georgia Schmidt, Carole Shelyne, Serena Sande, Meg Wyllie, & Sandra Lee Gimpel

A tribute to some lesser-known women of Star Trek :)

[puppygirl-hornyposting2]

[ghostsandgod]

The women aren't even wearing masks...typical.

[lost-carcosa]

They don't in the comic. Their "secret" identities are known from the beginning.

[flailsnails]

Dr. Manhattan isn't wearing a mask, but then he is hairless and several shades of blue. And he doesn't have another identity anymore.

[thaethiira]

Illithids and Gith are from the most batshit wackypants setting in D&D and you want me to believe I should take them super seriously and be afraid? Y'all talk about Lae'zel being from a very super srs grimdark place but you have to remember something real important about the Astral Sea: It's a B-movie.

it's where the illithids and gith come from but we also have giant hamsters, hippo people that all sound like blustery English explorers and love explosions, vampirates, jawas in the shape of rainbow penguins, and fuckin SPACE CLOWNS.

I'm sorry I can't take the idea that the illithids and gith are 'zomg so scary srs bznss' seriously because of ::gestures:: all of that.

This isn't Space designed by Lovecraft and HR Giger.

This is Space designed by Weird Al and Jim Henson.

[flailsnails]

Come over here within 60 ft of me and say that.

[thaethiira]

Illithids and Gith are from the most batshit wackypants setting in D&D and you want me to believe I should take them super seriously and be afraid? Y'all talk about Lae'zel being from a very super srs grimdark place but you have to remember something real important about the Astral Sea: It's a B-movie.

it's where the illithids and gith come from but we also have giant hamsters, hippo people that all sound like blustery English explorers and love explosions, vampirates, jawas in the shape of rainbow penguins, and fuckin SPACE CLOWNS.

I'm sorry I can't take the idea that the illithids and gith are 'zomg so scary srs bznss' seriously because of ::gestures:: all of that.

This isn't Space designed by Lovecraft and HR Giger.

This is Space designed by Weird Al and Jim Henson.

[flailsnails]

MIND BLAST!!!!