The lost colours of D&D

So I looked up ogres in the 1st edition Monster Manual recently, and I came across this text:

The hide of ogres varies from dull blackish-brown to dead yellow. Rare specimens are a sickly violet in color. Their warty bumps are often of different color - or at least darker than their hides. Hair is blackish-blue to dull dark green. Eyes are purple with white pupils. Teeth are black or orange, as are talons. Ogres wear any sort of skins or furs. 

And I thought: ...wait, what?

Ogres come in three colours: blackish-brown, yellow, and violet. They are covered in 'warty bumps' of 'a different color': so presumably you could have a yellow ogre with violet warts, or some even weirder combination. Their hair is either blue or dark green. Their eyes are purple with white pupils. Their teeth and claws are either black or orange. In short, I have been imagining D&D ogres wrong for my entire life.

All your ogres were supposed to look kinda like this.

Imagine, for a moment: a nine-foot tall brute of a monster with violet skin covered in yellow warts, orange teeth and claws, dark green hair, and purple eyes with white pupils. That, apparently, is what D&D ogres are actually supposed to look like. Did anyone ever describe them like that? Did anyone draw them like that? All the illustrations I can find just depict them as great big grey-brown thugs...

A little more reading soon demonstrated that the ogres were not an isolated case. There were yellow bugbears with brick-red fur, green eyes, and red pupils:

The skin of bugbears is light yellow to yellow brown - typically dull yellow. Their hair ranges in color from lusterless tannish brown to brick red. Their eyes are greenish white with red pupils.

There were silver-haired, amber-eyed elves wearing yellow clothes and purple cloaks, and nicknames based on their eye colour:

Grey elves have either silver hair and amber eyes or pale golden hair and violet eyes. The latter sort are generally called faeries. They favor white, yellow, silver, or gold garments. Their cloaks are often deep blue or purple.

There were gnolls with green-grey skins, reddish manes, amber nails, and armour made of horn:

Gnolls have greenish gray skins, darker near the muzzle, with reddish gray to dull yellow mane. Eyes are dull black and nails are amber colored. Their armor is of horn, metal plates, and leather; like their fur capes and vests, it is shabby, and the latter are moth-eaten and dingy, being brown, black or grayish pelts.

Gnomes were the colour of wood:

Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin.

Goblins can be red, yellow, or orange (no green ones yet), with red or 'lemon yellow' eyes:

Goblins range from yellow through dull orange to brick red in skin color. Their eyes are reddish to lemon yellow.

Or maybe their eyes are actual lemons!

Red hobgoblins with orange faces and blue-red noses:

The hairy hides of hobgoblins range from dark reddish-brown to gray black. Their faces are bright red-orange to red. Large males will have blue-red noses. Eyes are either yellowish or dark brown.

The brown skin of orcs has a 'bluish sheen' and their ears and snouts are pink. (This is back when orcs were still pig-men, of course.)

Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their coloration - brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen - highlights their pinkish snouts and ears.

Red, orange, yellow, purple, blue... all those colours bled out of the game as time went on. Modern orcs are green. Goblins are green. Gnolls are brown. Hobgoblins are sometimes orange but usually brown. Ogres are brown. Bugbears are greenish-brown. Gnomes have human skin-tones, rather than being wood-coloured. Even elves have become far less glam-tastic than they used to be.

Now, there are probably a whole lot of reasons for this. One would be the move away from stories inspired by 1930s weird fiction, which drew its colour palette from the Decadent and Surrealist art of the previous generation, and towards those based on 'map fantasy' novels, which made use of a more chastened colour palette derived ultimately from the Pre-Raphaelite art of the 1840s. Another would be the enormous popularity of the goblinoids from Warhammer, which firmly fixed orcs, goblins, and their kin as 'greenskins' in the popular gamer imagination. A third would be changing fashions in fantasy art, away from the space-rock psychedelia of the 1970s towards the much more grounded grey-green-and-brown aesthetics of most modern fantasy illustrations.  (Erol Otus loved using neon-bright colours. We shall not see his like again.) The move towards more naturalistic colouration certainly makes the monsters feel a bit more 'realistic'; a green goblin and a brown ogre feel like variations on real creatures, things that might conceivably evolve in a natural environment full of mud and trees, whereas a yellow goblin and a purple ogre feel like escapees from a children's cartoon.

Still, though.... orange goblins. Blue-green pig-orcs. Yellow bugbears with red fur. There's something to be said for them. Their 'unnaturalness' could be a strength as well as a weakness: these sound like things which broke out of a wizard's lab, or crawled out of a crashed spaceship, or stumbled through a portal from a world very different from our own. They have an obvious out-of-place oddness about them. Why do bugbears have red pupils? What kind of fucked-up world do they see through their green-and-red eyes?

The bugbears walk amongst us!

In my games, I've always described humanoids as grey, or green, or brown; but the next time I run something with more of an old-school, science-fantasy vibe, I think I'm going to mix it up a bit. Bring back the blue orcs and the yellow goblins and the green gnolls and the purple ogres. If nothing else, they should act as big, brightly-coloured signs that we're not in Tolkien any more. 

B/X Class: The Half-Troll

It's exam marking season here at the university, and so my mind turns once again to B/X monster classes. I've always liked the idea of troll PCs, but struggled a bit with how to reconcile their signature ability, regeneration, with the B/X resource management paradigm: after all, if you can get all your hit points back after (or during) every fight, then you really have no reason not to keep wading into battle. Half-trolls are my solution, based around the idea that 'true' troll regeneration isn't passed on to their half-human offspring; they can regenerate, alright, but all that extra tissue has to come from somewhere. They can't just grow it out of the air: to fuel their healing, they need to eat. They need to eat a lot.

From a game-balance perspective, this means that the player of a half-troll has to balance two resources against each other: hit points, and encumbrance. How much food can you carry? How much food are your comrades willing to lug into the dungeon for you? How much food can you keep fresh and edible under adventuring conditions? You can hire bearers and pack mules, but they have their own problems: good luck extricating your personal baggage train from the middle of a panicked retreat. And, of course, it means that half-troll PCs will be constantly on the lookout for anything (or anyone) who can be used as an extra source of food. You know you want to eat the dead demon. You know you want to. What's the worst that could happen?

B/X Class: The Half-Troll

To-Hit, Hit Dice, Saves: All as per Fighter.

Weapons and Armour: Half-trolls can use any melee or thrown weapons, but their thick, clumsy fingers are ill-suited to using bows or crossbows. (If you insist on trying, you can use them with a -4 penalty to-hit.) They can wear any armour, but their huge, bulky frames mean that it must be made specially for them at double normal cost: human-sized armour will not fit. 

Experience Per Level: As per Elf.

Low Light Vision: Half-trolls can see perfectly in very dim light such as moonlight or starlight, but cannot see in total darkness.

Regeneration: Your body can repair itself at an incredible rate. When injured, you regain 3 HP every ten minutes. If reduced below 0 HP, you continue to heal at a rate of 3 HP every ten minutes unless reduced to more than twice your level in negative HP. (So a third-level half-troll dies at -7 HP, and so on.) This ability cannot be used to heal damage caused by fire or acid. 

Troll Hunger: You require an enormous amount of food to power your regenerative abilities. Every time you regenerate, you feel as hungry as if you had just gone for a full day without food, and must gorge yourself on a day's worth of rations at the first opportunity. (So a half-troll who has just regenerated 9 HP will feel as though they had gone without food for three full days.) Eating a day's worth of food in this fashion takes 20 minutes - which means that if you're still regenerating while you eat, you may finish your meal hungrier than you were when you started it! Normal limits on how much food you can eat at once, or how quickly your stomach can digest it, do not apply to these regeneration-fuelled binges: a half-troll can easily swallow down ten or twenty meals worth of food in a sitting, their swollen stomachs digesting it almost instantly to 'pay off' the enormous calorific debt incurred by their regeneration. 

Metabolic Limits: Your regeneration cannot function forever without food. If you are suffering from a number of 'days' of starvation greater than your level (either due to regeneration or extended fasting), your regenerative abilities will shut down, and will not work again until you eat at least a day's worth of food. 

(Note that this means that your regeneration will never actually make you starve to death - even a 20th level half-troll can only inflict the equivalent of 21 days of hunger on themselves through regeneration, which isn't enough to be fatal - but it can leave you very, very weak. Assume a penalty of -1 to all rolls for physical activity, including to-hit and damage rolls, for every five 'days' of hunger.)

Om nom nom. Art by Peter Mohrabcher.

The Reborn

This is a companion-piece to my last post on clockpunk undead. That was all about installing clockwork components, and clockwork brains, into animated flesh. This post deals with the opposite: grafting living brains into clockwork bodies.

Among the wealthier urban classes in ATWC, the use of clockwork prostheses to replace lost limbs is relatively commonplace. Lose a hand in a duel? Get a clockwork replacement. Both legs blown off in a freak gunnery accident? You'll be running around on shiny bronze feet in no time! Having to wind them up all the time is a pain, of course; but it's much better than the alternative. Given this, it's not that surprising that when they see a loved one dying of stomach cancer, or lung disease, or whatever, their minds immediately turn to clockwork alternatives. Can't we replace those as well, they ask their doctors? Can't we just replace the whole thing?

At this point, their doctors usually start trying to let them down gently. (Golden Ones are very good at this.) Yes, some amazing work is being done with brass lungs and clockwork-powered hearts these days, and, yes, some of the Steel Aspirants have replaced truly shocking amounts of their own torsos with mechanical substitutes; but turning grandpa into a brain-in-a-jar controlling a clockwork body requires a level of expertise in both medicine and clockworking which is out of reach for all but the truly astronomically wealthy.  Then there are the adjustment issues; it can take years to learn how to operate a robotic body via mental manipulation of the clockwork computer connected to your brain, and even then most people never get very good at it. Would grandpa really want you to waste his entire fortune just so that he could spend a few more years in a semi-functional robot body, silently weeping with frustration as he bumps into the wall of his bedroom yet again?

But there are two factors which ensure that the technology to transplant human brains into clockwork bodies is still used from time to time. The first is that the bodies, once built, are reusable; so a family which has already gone to the trouble of buying a clockwork body for grandpa, complete with brain-jar, might well keep it around after his final death, ready to be used by grandma or auntie or whichever elder of the family is the next to fall mortally ill. The second is that psychics, who have a lifetime of experience at manipulating objects with their minds, find the transition to clockwork bodies very much easier than other people: so if grandpa is part of one of the Mindblade orders, or an Adept of the Diamond Mind, then his telekinetic powers may well reduce the adjustment period he needs to learn to use his new body from years to days. A number of the most prosperous Diamond Mind schools even transfer their ailing senior tutors into clockwork bodies as a matter of course, viewing it simply as an efficient means of ensuring that their students are able to benefit from their teaching expertise for as long as possible.

Alchemical golem miniature, made by WizKids.

These, then, are the Reborn: clockwork automata with the brains of mostly-dead humans instead of clockwork computers inside their skulls, controlling their mechanical bodies via complex Logician implants which connect directly to their gearwork. (Some psychic Reborn opt to dispense with the implants and simply control their bodies directly via telekinesis.) Keeping a human brain alive in a vat of nutrients requires the attentions of an expert doctor, such as a Golden One or one of the Serpent Folk, of at least 5th level; this doctor must spend at least 30 minutes per day checking and adjusting the balance of fluids and the level of electrical conductivity in the brain-jar, or risk irreversible brain damage. (For each day in which this 'check-up' is missed, roll 1d6; the Reborn loses this many points of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, and if any are reduced to 0 then they die. Going back to their normal medical routines will restore lost points at a rate of 1 per day, but the Reborn must pass a FORT save or lose 1d3 points of each stat permanently.) Their clockwork body and logician implants also need to be maintained and repaired if damaged, which means that they or their attendant must have a Tech Rating of at least 5. (If they're a psychic who didn't bother with the implants, then Tech 4 will suffice.) Their bodies cost no more than any other clockwork body would, but the implants which connect them to their brains are staggeringly expensive. If you have to ask how much they cost, you definitely can't afford it.

Aside from this, Reborn follow all the same rules as Brass Men. Normally it takes them 1d6 years to get used to operating their new bodies, although for psychic characters this is reduced to a mere 1d20 days; psychic Reborn also have the option of winding themselves up using their own telekinetic powers, allowing them to operate indefinitely without any need of fuel. As long as they receive proper medical and mechanical upkeep, they can survive for up to (1d10 + half their Constitution score) years before finally suffering irreversible degradation of their brain tissues and sliding into final senility and death.

Rumours persist of a special alchemical formula which allows the brains of the Reborn to survive indefinitely inside their jars, even without medical upkeep. These same rumours usually also claim that the Wicked King had this procedure used on him when he grew old, and that he now lives on as an immortal evil brain inside a giant bronze murder-robot somewhere near the top of the King's Tower. Hopefully that bit, at least, is completely untrue.

Clockpunk Undead

Image by Scott Purdy.

The fundamental fact about clockwork machinery is that it needs to be wound up before it will do anything. It doesn't have to be wound by hand: you can use wind power, or water power, or steam power to turn the key and wind the spring, and the presence of ubiquitous coal-powered 'autowinders' in ATWC basically exist as an excuse for PCs to surround themselves with clockwork technology without having to spend their whole lives winding the damn things: instead they can just say: 'I take off my clockwork legs, throw some coal in the autowinder, and go to sleep.' But you need to wind them with something. They don't just run by magic.

They can, however, run by zombie.

They might not be the brightest or toughest of the undead, but even the humblest zombie is basically a perpetual motion machine. It never needs to eat. It never needs to sleep. It can crank a handle, or walk a treadmill, for weeks or months or years on end. It can't actually work forever: eventually simple friction will wear its fingers to the bone, or reduce its feet to stumps, and after a few centuries you'll just be left with a dessicated zombie uselessly waving the stub of its arm at the wheel it's supposed to be turning, or a legless corpse helplessly flopping beside a treadmill that it no longer has the power to move. But they can work for a very long time.

Traditional D&D undead are something I've deliberately left out of ATWC so far, partly because they're not a good fit for the mythology - the living dead of Central Asian folklore are ravenous horrors like the Hortlak, not servile drudges - and partly because I'm wary of adding a source of effectively 'free' energy to a clockpunk setting. But there's no reason that a few of them shouldn't exist here and there, created by odd little wizard cults, or by crazy Dahakans, or by the creepy aristocratic Bone Witches of the Wicked City; and when they do, then combining them with clockwork is the next logical step. Or logical by the standards of the kind of people who spend their spare time turning corpses into zombies, at any rate.

So here are some clockpunk undead.

Image by redblackstripe.

Corpse Puppets: These are zombies animated with a combination of necromancy and clockwork technology; the kind of thing you might expect a novice necromancer to create, using clockwork to work around the limitations of their black magic. An animated corpse is fitted with a clockwork exoskeleton which helps to move it around, giving its movements greater force than they might otherwise possess; clockwork machinery may also be used as a substitute for missing body parts, replacing lost limbs or rotted joints. Whenever it's not doing anything else, the corpse puppet winds up its own clockwork, ensuring that it's ready to lurch into action the next time it's called upon. Because the necromancy which animates them is so weak, corpse puppets are usually unable to do much more than flop about helplessly if someone disables their clockwork machinery.

• Corpse Puppet: AC 13 (leathery flesh and metal bars), 2 HD, AB 0, clumsy smash (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 16, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Tech difficulty: O0 M1 R2 C2.

Augmented Zombie: Whereas the Corpse Puppet uses clockwork technology to make up for the weakness of the necromancy that animates it, the Augmented takes an already fully-functional zombie and enhances its abilities through the addition of clockwork prostheses. There's no need to worry about the zombie dying during surgery, so the only limit is really the skill and resources of the builder: one might add extra clockwork limbs, replace arms with guns or fingers with blades, graft clockwork wings onto a zombie's shoulder-blades, and so on. Like corpse puppets, the augmented can wind their own clockwork parts during their own downtime, so fuel is a non-issue; they will normally need regular maintenance, however, as their zombified brains are hopelessly inadequate to the task of maintaining anything except the very simplest of clockwork machinery.

• Basic Augmented Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 2 HD, AB +1, gun arm (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or finger blades (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 16, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Tech difficulty: O0 M1 R2 C3.
• Advanced Augmented Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 3 HD, AB +2, 2 gun arms (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or 2 clockwork arms with pop-out claws (1d6+2 damage), FORT 12, REF 14, WILL N/A, morale N/A. Clockwork wings allow it to fly in short 'hops'. Tech difficulty: O2 M3 R3 C4.

Image from some Pathfinder thing or other.

Brainbox Zombies: These are basically what you get if you take the clockwork brain of a Brass Man and connect it to the sinews of an animated corpse rather than the gears of a clockwork body. (The top and back of the zombie's head are usually removed in order to make room for the bulky clockwork brain in its reinforced metal casing: thus the name.) The result is a zombified body controlled by a human-level clockwork intelligence, and thus vastly more capable of independent thought and action than any ordinary undead. Many brainbox zombies are also fitted with additional augmentations, and/or covered in armour plating: building a clockwork brain of this sophistication is neither easy nor cheap, and their creators will usually be keen to safeguard their investments! Unlike regular augmented zombies, brainbox zombies are quite capable of maintaining their own clockwork prostheses.

• Brainbox Zombie: AC 16 (armour plating), 2 HD, AB +2, gun arm (1d8 damage, 3 rounds to reload) or finger blades (1d6+1 damage), FORT 13, REF 14, WILL 14, morale 7. Tech difficulty (body): O0 M1 R2 C3. Tech difficulty (brain): OM N/A, R5, C5. (NB: The brainbox zombie has a Tech Rating of 2, allowing it to operate, maintain, and repair its own body indefinitely.)

Necro-Mecha: The pinnacle of the clockworking necromancer's art. Take a mech, but instead of a pilot, insert a zombie with its limbs welded directly to the controls: then weld the hatch shut. Replace the boiler with a bunch of zombies on a treadmill, with orders to never stop walking unless the mainspring is fully wound: then seal them inside. The result is, effectively, a fully-automated mech which obeys your orders, never needs fuel, doesn't need to worry about overheating, and cannot be boarded; all you need to do is maintain the machinery in decent working order. Necro-tanks are also completely possible.

• Necro-Mech: AC 22 (reinforced mech armour), HD 10, AB 0, giant sword (1d12+6 damage, ignores 4 points of physical AC) or swivel gun (2d8 damage, ignores 4 points of physical AC, 4 rounds to reload), FORT 5, REF 12, WILL N/A, morale N/A, immune to missile fire from weapons smaller than a swivel gun. Tech difficulty: O2 M2 R3 C4.

Give me a snake-man and I will explain the monster manual

People who look through D&D monster manuals often say things like 'how would this evolve?' or 'why would something like this even exist?' or 'why are there, like, a hundred slightly different humanoid creatures all competing for the same tiny ecological niche?'

I propose that all of these questions can be answered with one and the same answer, and that answer is a snake-man with an unlimited research budget and a whole lot of time on his hands.

Postulate 1: There was an Ancient Snake-Man Empire. (This is true in most fantasy settings already.)

Postulate 2: The Snake-Men maintained a large population of human slaves. (This is also usually true.)

Postulate 3: The Snake-Men loved freaky bio-magical archanotech alchemy and had very limited ethical oversight when it came to using it on mammals.

Given only these three postulates, I shall now explain D&D!

• Dwarves: Human slaves genetically modified for mining.
• Elves: Human slaves genetically modified for use as research assistants.
• Halflings: Human slaves genetically modified for doing delicate jobs on the inside of giant machines, in much the same way as small children were employed in Victorian factories. 
• Gnomes, Pixies, Quicklings, Leprechauns, and all those others small annoying fairies: Like halflings, but modified even further in order to carry out tasks deep within the machinery of immense archanotech engines, which required nimble fingers, instinctive magical awareness, and the ability to fit into very small spaces. Quicklings were emergency-repair units, able to climb through a machine to the heart of a malfunction in seconds. Gremlins are fairies who went rogue deep inside the gear forests and began sabotaging machines instead of repairing them.
• Orcs: Human slaves genetically modified for warfare. (This is why they're perpetual minions; they're always looking for a commanding officer, trying to fill a big snake-man shaped hole in their little orcish hearts. Sometimes they'll go to work for an evil wizard who really loves hissing at people, and they'll feel all happy inside, and they won't even know why.) 
• Goblins: Defective castoffs of the orc creation project. The Snake-Men tried to exterminate them, but the damn things escaped into the Underdark and multiplied. Their massive genetic defects, the result of their malfunctioning genetic programming, explains their very high rate of mutation and insanity.
• Hobgoblins: Goblins whose genomes finally stabilised at something approximating the desired target (i.e. an orc) after several dozen generations of chaotic interbreeding. 
• Bugbears: Weirdly stable strain of goblin mutants blessed / cursed with hereditary gigantism.
• Gnolls: Uplifted hyenas developed as a response to crippling difficulties in keeping armies supplied in the field; as scavengers, they were able to live on the corpses and carrion generated by their own campaigns. Flind sub-race bred for use as NCO class. 
• Humans: Uplifted apes genetically modified for use as a general purpose slave-race. An early success of Snake-Man bio-thaumaturgy: hardy, adaptable, and much less intelligent than they think they are. Formed the template for a number of subsequent slave-races developed for more specialised duties.
• Lizard Men: Uplifted lizards bred as soldiers and bodyguards for more conservative Snake-Men, who never really felt comfortable with having all these mammals running around.
• Kobolds: Dwarf strain of lizard men bred as household servants and pets.
• Giants: Human slaves genetically modified for use as shock troopers. Multiple sub-types were created for different environments (cold climate operations, high-altitude operations, etc), thus leading to a proliferation of sub-races.
• Ogres: Stunted and defective giant sub-breed. Too stupid to be useful as soldiers. Kept around for further experimentation after giving rise to Hags and Ogre Magi.
• Ogre Magi and Hags: Mutant ogres who lucked out and acquired hereditary magical powers. The Snake-Men weren't sure why this happened, and kept them (and the ogres) around for additional study and experimentation.
• Dragons: Gigantic bio-engineered terror weapons. Genetically programmed to assert dominance over a region through displays of terrifying force, gather up all useful local resources, and then hand over the materiel thus accumulated to the Snake Man armies when they finally turn up. Their hoarding behaviour is a result of this latter instinct; and now, as dragons sit on their hoards, they are occasionally troubled by the thought that they know they should be turning all this loot and magic over to someone, they just can't quite remember who...

• Trolls: Experimental creatures designed for minimum-fuss harvesting of tissues and organs. Go ahead, take its kidneys: they'll grow back in a couple of minutes!
• Demons, Devils, etc: Pure-energy beings created by the Snake-Men in order to explore the fantastically hostile environment of the Lower Planes. They were mostly built out of dreamstuff harvested from human slaves, which means that hell is basically an enormous projection of the collective dream-life of the slaves of the Snake-Men. (This is why it's so horrible.) These days they go around calling themselves things like 'Orcus, Arch-Duke of the Abyss', and don't like to talk about the whole 'being made by snakes' business. 
• Dryads: Magical tree symbiotes created as a solution to the problem of slaves constantly escaping into the woods in heavily forested areas. The dryad charms any passing slaves and keeps them with her; then the Snake-Man slave recovery squads just have to go from one dryad's tree to the next, gathering them all up for reprocessing. Nixies and lamia served similar functions for wetlands and deserts, respectively.
• Nymphs: Over-successful spin-off of the dryad creation problem, with supernatural beauty so powerful that it blinded and killed people rather than enthralling them. Kept around for their potential military uses.
• Minotaurs: Genespliced creatures created as slave-overseers and prison-wardens for populations of human slaves. Their bad tempers and inclinations towards violence were seen as desirable traits. Their ability to instinctively navigate mazes is an ancestral memory of their origins in the endless slave-warrens of the Snake-Men.
• Mermen and Aquatic Elves: Elf and human slaves genetically modified for service in and around the domed Snake-Man cities on the ocean floor. 
• Sahuagin: Genetically engineered bioweapon introduced into the seas to hunt down and exterminate escaped populations of aquatic elves and mermen, after traditional methods of containing and recapturing them proved ineffectual in submarine oceanic environments.
• Chimeras, Manticores, Harpies, and other apparently pointless 'crossbreed' creatures: The Snake-Man equivalents of PhD theses, these creatures were engineered by up-and-coming Snake-Man biomancers as demonstrations of bio-thaumaturgical skill. Like PhD theses, the best ones were preserved for posterity in menageries which functioned as living libraries. After the empire fell they escaped and established breeding populations in the wild.
• Slimes, oozes, gibbering mouthers, etc: Created by alchemical run-off from Snake-Man laboratories.
• Ilithids: Created to act as living components of a biological super-computer: their 'always on' telepathy was supposed to enable their minds to be connected into a kind of psychic wi-fi network, able to answer any question provided it was fed enough human brains. Unfortunately for the Snake-Men, the Ilithids soon deduced what was going on, mind-blasted their handlers, and fled into the depths of the Underdark.
• Beholders: Mobile weapons platforms designed for use against high-threat magic-using targets. Their eye-rays made use of bio-thaumaturgical breakthroughs for which the catoblepas, basilisk, medusa, and cockatrice had served as prototype proofs of concept.
• Ghouls: A bioweapon intended for use against population centres; each ghoul infects its victims, who rise as more ghouls in turn, until a large chunk of the population have been replaced by low-level undead easily controlled by any competent Chaotic cleric.
• Vampires: Recipients of a prototype 'immortality treatment' which, while sufficiently developed to have reached the 'human testing' stage, was still exhibiting an unacceptably high number of negative side-effects (blood dependency, light vulnerability, etc) by the time the Snake-Man empire fell. 
• Yuan-Ti: In the chaos which followed the fall of the Snake-Man empire, a bunch of desperate humans tried splicing themselves with Snake-Man genetic material in the hope that the guardian automata protecting the remaining supply depots would mistake them for genuine Snake-Men. It didn't work, but at least they got funky snake powers.
• All those giant animals all over the place: Early Snake-Man experiments in magically-engineered gigantism, of the same kind that would later be employed in the creation of giants, dragons, and ultimately the Flesh Moon Project. The Flesh Moon itself was last seen shortly before the final collapse of the Snake-Man empire, propelling itself off into space on its stubby little wings. If it's still alive then it must be the size of a planet by now. 

Random Encounter Tables: The Steppe

This is the first of a bunch of wilderness encounter tables to complement the ones I wrote last year for the Wicked City itself. I'll do one each for the desert, steppe, and taiga, and then maybe one for the tundra. After that, I'm really not sure there's much of ATWC left to write. Maybe something about hirelings?

The main thing to remember about encounters in the steppe is that it's very, very big and has very, very little cover. You are going to see them coming. They are going to see you coming. Evasion is going to be about speed rather than stealth nine times out of ten. Consider investing in a very high-quality telescope and you might just see them before they see you...

Random Steppe Encounters (Roll 1d12)

1. A band of evil spirits are camped out on the steppe; they look mostly human apart from their very long noses, but closer examination will reveal both that they have no shadows and that their horses have no tails. They are eating a horrible tarry black sludge of indeterminate origin, which they cook up in a huge pot over a fire, and invite travellers to share it with them. They will interpret outright refusal as an insult, but will accept polite excuses if they can't think of a plausible-sounding reason not to. Actually eating their food will induce vomiting, sickness, and spirit possession, in that order.
2. A shaman from one of the steppe tribes, riding with her apprentices to make offerings to a powerful spirit of the land. She has a deep knowledge of the personal histories, likes, and dislikes of all the nearby spirits, but will be reluctant to share it with outsiders unless bribed with high-quality drink or tobacco from the city, for both of which she has something of a secret weakness. Anyone who harms her can expect furious retribution from both the local spirits and the local tribes. 
3. A warband of steppe warriors looking for a chance to do some opportunistic raiding. They're heading in the direction of the Great Road, hoping to shake down a few caravans for 'tribute' and maybe steal some horses from rival clans along the way. Their leader is one of the sons of a minor local khan, and is keen to achieve some deed that will help him to stand out from amongst his many brothers. Wise PCs will want to persuade him that helping them with their mission will be a better route to glory than robbing them of their treasure or besting them in combat. 
4. A team of wrestlers on their way to a major competition. (They'll take part in the horsemanship and archery events too, which they're also pretty good at, but for them the wrestling contest is the main event.) They are always looking for chances to show off their prowess and will challenge people to wrestling matches on the slightest of pretexts. PCs who demonstrate high levels of skill and sportsmanship will be rapidly befriended and invited to attend the next tournament for a rematch. 
5. A headless clockwork giant, 14' high, stumbles across the steppe with a distinctive lurching gait: one of its legs is slightly longer than the other. Creaking windmills rise from its shoulders, allowing it to partially power itself with the wind that blows across the steppe. Its pilot, a middle-aged woman from one of the far-off Rust Clans, steers it from her seat within its torso, peering out at the world through the ancient bullet holes which riddle its armour plating; a chain around its waist attaches it to a sturdy cart, in which her two brothers bump along behind it. The three of them have heard of the Cogwheel Sage, and are midway through an epic pilgrimage to find one of her holiest shrines, in which they hope to be initiated into her faith. They regard any non-initiates they encounter along the way as completely fair game for raiding, especially if they happen to be carrying supplies of spare parts or coal.
6. A band of treasure seekers from a nearby city, accompanied by local guides. Their leader is a scholar who believes that he has discovered the approximate location of the tomb of one of the Wolf Khans, and maybe he has; but his knowledge of their empire comes entirely from books, and he's now riding back and forth across the steppe, eagerly examining every grassy mound in case there's a ruin under it. It is worryingly easy to persuade him that just about any vertical stone of man-size or larger was originally a balbal. He is willing to pay for information about any ruins or monuments the PCs come across in the area. Each month after he is encountered, there is a 10% chance that he finds the tomb he's looking for and promptly gets beaten to death by its guardians.
7. A clanking caravan of brass men on bronze horses, stomping their way slowly across the steppe. They wouldn't normally come this far from the cities, but a wealthy local khan has commissioned them to make guns for his warriors and clockwork toys for his children and they don't want to pass up the opportunity to earn some of his gold. The greatest artificer among them is an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of logician implants, and will offer to bolt clockwork computers onto people's skulls at very reasonable rates. (Weirdly, none of the nomads he's met so far have been interested.) He dreams of building a new generation of brass men to serve as his 'children' and apprentices, and hopes that the khan's gold will help him to achieve this.
8. A group of Blood Man mercenaries wandering across the steppe, looking for a good war to get stuck into. They ride big, angry, poorly-trained stallions, and are constantly getting bitten and kicked by them, which they mostly think is hilarious. In the last town they stopped in, someone tried to steal their enchanted cauldron; as a result of this their chief is extremely paranoid about its safety, and never lets it out of his sight, going so far as to sleep inside it at night. Anyone behaving remotely suspiciously will be assumed to be in league with the thieves.
9. A murderous band of skull wearers haunt this part of the steppe, preying upon anyone who looks weak enough to ambush, loot, and eat. Their victims are littered all around the area, buried in dozens of shallow graves. They avoid anything resembling a fair fight, and much prefer to attack at night. They are strong, skilled, and ruthless killers; but they all hate each other, and only barely manage to function together as a group. It would only take a very small amount of provocation or frustration to set them at one another's throats.
10. A large grassy mound with a few stones sticking out of it is all that marks the fact that this was once the site of an ancient city. The local inhabitants are members of a wizard-cult, who believe that the sorceress who once ruled the city will one day return to rebuild it. In the meantime they worship a bejewelled statue of her which they believe to be inhabited by her spirit, but which is actually just haunted by the ghost of a child who starved to death nearby on a cold night two thousand years ago. Their 'goddess' demands constant offerings of food and fire, but in truth she is nothing but the spirit of a scared little girl whom any sympathetic shaman could probably lay to rest if given the chance. 
11. A nomadic clan is encamped here. Fearing that their enemies may attack them at any time, they have decided to activate their greatest asset, a skull chieftain: so now the spirit of one of their great warrior-ancestors is wandering around the camp, giving the young men archery tips and watching out for raiders, while everyone around him does their very best to avoid reminding him that he's actually been dead for a couple of hundred years. Enemy scouts lurk nearby, and will offer substantial bounties to any outsiders willing to enter the camp and get rid of the skull chieftain in order to clear the way for an attack.
12. The grave of a recently-deceased heroine of the steppes, complete with newly-erected balbals and a modest shrine in case she returns as an ancestor spirit. Her faithful Kergerden mount refuses to leave the side of its mistress, even in death, until it meets someone else worthy of riding it: until then it simply grazes the land around her tomb. So far everyone who has attempted to mount the beast has been impaled or trampled for their troubles. Anyone riding it would win enormous prestige among the heroine's clansmen, who are much the most powerful clan in this region of the steppe.

Your Demon Lord Doesn't Need That Many Hit Dice

[This post is just me rambling again. Feel free to skip it if you're just here for the actual game stuff.]

People talk a lot about how D&D characters have become 'more powerful' in more recent editions, but power in D&D is relative: if you have twice as many hit points, but all the monsters do twice as much damage, then nothing has really changed except the size of a number on your character sheet. (See also: the entire history of World of Warcraft.) So the real question is: 'more powerful when compared to what?'

'When I was level 1, I could kill the orcs and wolves in the level 1 area in two or three hits. Now I'm level 100, I can kill the super-orcs and mega-wolves in the level 100 area in... two or three hits. So it was totally worth the wait!'

If one compares the abilities of PCs with a range of monsters across the various D&D editions, it swiftly becomes apparent that, as usual, it's been the poor old humanoids who have been the biggest losers. In both Basic and 1st edition AD&D, a single lowly goblin was very nearly the equal of a 1st level fighter in combat; but more modern PCs are expected to be able to scatter goblins, kobolds, skeletons, and similar low-level foes like chaff, even at level 1. The mid-level monsters have remained roughly stable: some, like the various save-or-die monsters or the level-draining undead, have lost their scariest abilities, but the general assumption that a troll or an ogre should be a pretty tough fight for a low-level party has held pretty constant across editions. PCs have been big winners, going from fragile dungeon explorers to badass, tough-as-nails fantasy superheroes, but they haven't been the biggest winners. The biggest winners have been the high-level monsters.

Remember Lolth, spider-goddess of the drow? When Sutherland and Gygax wrote Queen of the Demonweb Pits in 1980, their assumption was that she would be a tough but not impossible boss-fight for a party of level 10-14 characters. How about Tiamat, mother-goddess of all evil dragons? According to the AD&D 1st edition monster manual, she has AC 0 and 128 HP, although 80 of those are 'in' her various heads: doing 48 damage directly to her body will kill her outright. (You don't even need magical weapons to hit her!) Orcus? 120 hit points. Asmodeus and Demogorgon? 199 and 200 HP respectively. Yes, they're crazily powerful, and, yes, they're quite capable of killing your PCs: but they still clearly exist on the same scale as trolls and giants and dinosaurs and high-level player characters. Tellingly, Asmodeus, the overlord of hell, capo di tutti capi of all the other arch-devils and all-around second-baddest dude in the multiverse, is described as being 'physically stronger than any other devil', but we're then immediately told what that actually means: he is 'as strong as a storm giant', i.e. Strength 25. The single strongest devil in existence is stronger than your fighter, but he's not that much stronger. If a party of, say, 18th level PCs really went gunning for Demogorgon, and managed to solve the obvious problems involved in getting to his hell-realm and breaking into his throne room and so on, then they'd probably have a pretty good chance of taking him down. 

He's only got 120 HP! Just kill him and take his wand already!

Now, as much as D&D PCs have been boosted over the years, their top-end foes - dragons, demons, demon lords - have been boosted even more. High age-category dragons, for example, have gone from 'a bit tougher than a giant' to gigantic mega-monsters with completely surreal numbers of hit points. In AD&D 1st edition, the maximum number of hit points for a regular goblin was 7, whereas in D&D 3.5 it had risen to 9: but over the same time, the maximum HP for a red dragon of the largest size had risen from 88 to 880, meaning that the toughness of the dragon had increased roughly eight times as fast as that of the goblin. (It's not a completely fair comparison, because the 1st edition rules for dragons meant that their maximum HP were also their average HP - but even an 'average' maximum-age red dragon has 660 HP in D&D3.5.) The demon lords are now meant to be capable of taking on whole parties of level 25+ PCs, even though those PCs are vastly more powerful than their same-level equivalents would have been 'back in the day'. I think Asmodeus and Demogorgon may have transcended stats entirely. Early D&D presents a universe with a relatively 'flat' power distribution, in which something like a night hag or a fire giant or a 9th level PC is already about halfway up the scale. Modern D&D puts them all way down in the foothills, staring wistfully up at the mountain above, while Orcus sips cold drinks with a great wyrm dragon somewhere near the summit.

'I increased my hit points by 900% by following this one weird tip...'

The thing that got me thinking about all this was reading a list of Pathfinder's demon lords and thinking how much more useful they'd be if only they were a bit, well, smaller. A demonic sadist with the head of a dove, who eats the eyes of his victims, makes minions made from their flayed corpses, and lives in a house in which every room contains some new tableau of the macabre? That's great! Stick him and his horrible skinless minions and his horrible creepy house in a hex somewhere right away! But wait: he's 'challenge rating' 26, meaning that only a party of level 25+ characters would have a decent chance of beating him, and his 'house' is an entire dimension. Boring. How am I supposed to use that? (Yes, you could send the PCs in to rescue someone or something and then get out before he catches them, but once you've done one 'escape from hell' scenario you've done them all.) A demonic princess who looks like an angel who has been dismembered and then stitched back together with copper wire, her eyes and mouth sewn shut, presides over a ruinous city of profaned churches and drives its fallen priests to suicide: awesome. Except she's a god-level enemy and her 'city' is a layer of hell. Boring. A city you can save, or at least save parts of, haunted by a demon you can fight, or at least evade: that's something you can get a decent game out of. An urban hell-realm ruled by a demon goddess is just another abstract bit of spiritual real estate floating around in the Abyss somewhere. Why should your PCs care about something which is so manifestly beyond their power to meaningfully affect?

In the original Conan stories, the hero can't seem to manage a half-hour's walk without tripping over some benighted valley full of crazy demon-worshippers revering a monster-god from before time. These stories almost always end with Conan stabbing the beastie to death and wandering off. That's not because Conan is a super-duper-high-level-mega-ultra-badass fantasy superhero: it's because the demonic god-monsters in his world just aren't all that tough. Early D&D reflected that sensibility, and I think it was the stronger for it, because it makes the resulting monsters - dragons, demons, archdevils, and the rest - so much easier to use in actual play. There is a place in games for enormously, unbeatably powerful monsters, but it's quite a small place, and you're unlikely to need very many of them in any one campaign. The further removed they are from human-scale action, the less likely they are to be useful in stories which are, ultimately, always going to be about human beings. Or almost-human beings, at any rate.

So before you give the super-awesome demon you just came up with a thousand hit points and nine different kinds of get-out-of-death-free cards and seven layers of the abyss as his personal fiefdom, just pause for a moment to reflect whether he wouldn't actually be more useful to you as the seriously scary but far-from-invincible demonic patron of a single horrible city someplace, instead...