What's a 'demon' anyway?

Recent post here with my first reaction to Paizo's Book of the Damned.

You should also try reading THIS post from Against the Wicked City, and the "conceptual density" one linked on the side of the page. I find ATWC pretty accurately drills into some of my objections with Pathfinder's setting.

*****

Sometimes the Book of the Damned has really cool ideas. They are often in the smaller paragraphs of hints or suggestions. The most fun I've had reading this book is in the section on infernal dukes, qlippoth lords, kyton demagogues, nascent demon princes, etc. Pages upon fucking pages of entries like this, most which could be the inspiration for a super-cool demon cult.

The kyton demagogue Fharaas:

As one might read a tree’s years in the exposed rings of its stump, followers of the Seer in Skin divine all a mortal’s days by scrutinizing the whorls and layers within its flesh. Some even teach that, if a destined bond exists, a killer’s life is reflected in a victim’s fateful meat.

Pretty cool right? Other times, Paizo's style really makes me sad:

Orcus is the ruler of this realm of frozen seas, haunted cities, infested swamps, and ragged mountains... The demon lord’s minions include powerful liches and undead-demon hybrids that populate necropolises and ruins across the realm.

What in the hell ass is an "undead-demon hybrid"?

I just... ugh. Words fail me. If the word 'demon' means anything at all, how can such an entity be undead too?

This is what happens when design decisions are made by what we might call "restricted association." The nearest related thing. The shortest possible distance between two points.

Demon prince of undead? Put in a necropolis! Never mind the question of who/what could possibly be buried in a necropolis IN THE ABYSS. Or who the fuck built it in the first place. It's just meaningless window-dressing. Style without substance. How can you tell me that someone actually thought about this before writing it?

I guess this is my fundamental objection to extraplanar settings in D&D generally. Planescape fought against this mightily, but detailing these ineffable realms could only go one way, eventually. It reduces them to human terms. Hell - by definition the worst place that could possibly exist, the very inferno of damnation itself - has mountains, cities, marketplaces, forests, houses, graveyards and even sewers! All the same terrain that clutters the normal world, only the inhabitants have red skin and horns. I find this deeply vexing, and I wish some more imagination could have been put into these other dimensions.

On the other hand, Moloch does look fucking awesome.

JOIN THE LEGION

That guy makes me want to sign up with the forces of darkness. Also on the upside, the book has SO MANY demons in it that I could pick a handful for every campaign I run and never exhaust it in my whole life.

That's the strength of the book. It's a big multiverse and the weird, almost throwaway nature of the one-paragraph entries I find most exciting. Like someone at Paizo got stuck with writing pages and pages of minor demon prince filler entries and said "Fuck It, I'm going to have fun with this!"

Maybe in Land's End I could team Orcus up with: Shax, the Blood Marquis; Zurapadyn, the Beast who Waits in Smoke; Slandrais, the Watcher in the Walls; Jiravvidain, the Duke of Fissures; or Sugroz, the Voice in Screams? Now I'm actually getting excited!

*****

Let's listen to something ACTUALLY demonic for once:

Sage's Report 1 - The Jaguar-Headed Idol

Last session, Vuk Thuul the snake oracle saved up enough money (2000 silver) to pay the sage Vantadel for his first question. The wild half-elf wanted to know the origins of his savage cannibal tribe and the mysterious idol they worshipped - a crude statue of a man with a jaguar's head. This is what I sent the player:

*****

"Much ink has been spilled over the antediluvian fall of the elven race. To your situation, very little pertains anymore. It is enough to know that your tribes have occupied their lowly estate for generations upon generations, scrabbling to survive at the edge of the world.

The human side of your lineage is anyone's guess. Mayhap one of your ancestors was captured in a raid, or was an outcast from Imperial society. Regardless, I wager all your kind are of similar mixed blood these many years.

As for your specific tribe I have no answers. You speak of cannibalism and sacrificial midnight rites - things the long-fallen are not known for. They raid and fight, especially amongst themselves, but keep to their old ways where they know how. I glimpse the taint of Chaos in this news, and I fear for your own future and that of your friends.

You know the world warms with every passing year. Rivers run high with snowmelt and crops wither beneath the sun. I am older than you by far. I remember a different age when each season kept to its own quarter of the year, not overstepping its allotted time.

Even then, some parts of the world were hotter. In the distant south beyond the reach of the Imperium, beyond your ancestral hunting grounds in the badlands, a hot and misty jungle lies. The cloud forests you visited beyond the eastern Barrier resemble the scattered reports we have of this southern land. Men lived there who bowed not to Seheitt nor any other emperor. Wild and free, as the long-fallen are, they owned only what they could take with their own hands.

Few things these men feared. Only one could be understood by our expeditions. We have no word in our language, in theirs it is forvalaka. Beasts of the jungle that stalk men with human intelligence. So fast and strong that they could pounce upon a hunting party and tear them to pieces in seconds. Impervious to weapons. Impossible to kill. Feared by all.

Animals, spirits, or demons? Their exact nature wasn't understood. Some described insubstantial ghosts, who became solid only to attack. Others said they live in the water, or in the trees. The only coherent reports we have describe them as mighty black hunting cats who stalk the jungle on all fours, but can walk upright like men.

I believe this is what your tribe's idol depicts.

The southern jungle-men said the entire evil race was destroyed by a great magic, cast by their shamans and sorcerers. Although the nature of this spell is unclear, their language seems to indicate a bane or curse was laid on the monsters since direct attacks were near useless.

How this idol left the jungle, crossed the badlands and came into the hands of your people, I cannot say. I fear its arrival cannot be coincidental. Old forces may be stirring, wakened by the return of hospitable climes and brought on the hot southern winds to our quiet homeland.

Yours,
-Nicomaeus Vantadel IV, esq.

PS: I must apologize for the vagueness of these reports - our information on the southern lands is limited by the language barrier attendant on all contacts with this distant culture and the rarity of expeditions returning home."

*****



These hew fairly close to the ones from the Black Company. Sorry/not sorry. If more people cribbed from those books, it would be a badass-er world. Of course, the idol that Vuk Thuul's elf tribe worshipped is one of the last forvalaka, turned to stone by magic. Maybe it became un-petrified and ate his whole tribe? Maybe it's coming after him now? I haven't decided yet, but... probably.


[Stats will be similar to the Jaguar from the Tome of Horrors, but tougher, more HD and a bit magically-enhanced. Lycanthrope "templates" in Pathfinder are fucking annoying, I want a monster I can use right out of the book. They need AC enough that a veteran soldier has little chance to hit. Strong and accurate enough to kill a plate-armored man with one claw, fast enough to kill more than one man in a round. Magically protected enough or with enough hit points that humans with standard weapons have a bitch of a time killing one, even in large numbers. I'll post the stats up later when I finalize and playtest them.]

Get on your motorcycle and crank this up!!!

Tweaking the random encounter tables

I have been reading the Alexandrian and thinking about dice probabilities (both highly worthwhile pursuits). His series on hexcrawls is fantastic and has given me a great format to follow for my random encounter tables, where before I was really haphazard (every region had something different). I can trust that guy to present information that is useful, battle-tested, well thought out and incorporates knowledge of the underlying math.

The Numbers

As for dice probabilities, I have always flip-flopped on how to spread out the chances of running into each monster on a random encounter table. Rolling 2d6 gives you a 'pyramid' distribution (it's unlikely you'll meet those monsters on 2 or 12), which I always liked. You can hide some really evil, nasty beasts under those numbers. But just what are the chances, really? Well I looked it up. Bookmark that one, you'll thank me later.

This pyramid is actually steeper than I thought at first glance. Rolling a 7 is six times more likely than rolling a 2. I think these numbers (6/36, etc) are the limit of the kinds of probabilities that are easy to imagine and manipulate in your head, without writing them down. In fact, I think it's too granular, in a way. Let's compare two possible random encounter tables and see how much I care about the details...

This is the table for the Rainy Jungle as I used it last session. You can see there are a few oddities that could be fixed:

2d6

2-3  -  giant bee     (3/36, 8.3%)
4  -  1-2 giant geckos   (3/36, 8.3%)
5  -  1-3 neanderthals   (4/36, 11.1%)
6  -  1-3 giant botflies   (5/36, 13.8%)
7  -  1-3 goblin hunters  (6/36, 16.6%)
8  -  1-6 capybaras   (5/36, 13.8%)
9-10  -  1-3 steam beetles  (7/36, 19.4%)
11  -  1-2 orchidmen   (2/36, 5.5%)
12  - roll 2x and combine   (1/36, 2.7%)

Why are steam beetles so popular/? Because the probabilities are in 'chunks'. I can't freely add or subtract 1/36th to any result, except by adding 2 + 3 or 12 + 11. If I have less than 11 results, some have to group up and this creates odd 'lumps' in the probability pyramid. The 2d6 table works well when you have exactly 11 results. Any less and it becomes really awkward to use. 

I *could* move goblin hunters to the 9-10 spot and steam beetles to 7, but this seems needlessly fiddly and annoying to format. Is there a better way?

Let's change it to a straight d20 roll and see what happens:

1d20

1  -  1 giant bee    (1/20, 5%)
2-3  -  1-2 giant geckos    (2/20, 10%)
4-5  -  1-3 neanderthals    (2/20, 10%)
6-8  -  1-3 giant botflies  (3/20, 15%)
9-11  -  1-3 goblin hunters   (3/20, 15%)
12-14  -  1-6 capybaras   (3/20, 15%)
15-18  -  1-3 steam beetles   (4/20, 20%)
19  -  1-2 orchidmen   (1/20, 5%)
20  -  roll 2x   (1/20, 5%)

The probabilities are almost the same (within 3.3%), and I can fit the same number of monsters. But all of a sudden the table is much more adaptable. I can modify a result in the middle of the table (like making the goblins 5% more or less common) without having to rework everything!

The small downside is that I can't have a 2.7% result for the REALLY rare monsters. The smallest unit is 5% but that's a fair trade for versatility, ease of use and less mental math. 5% is the chance of a critical miss, so there is a nice symmetry in it also being the chance of rolling the blood-mad Wights of the Murderous Moors, or whatever harshness is on your table.


The Monsters

Can you feel... the danger?

Random encounters haven't happened often in the last few sessions (my dice seem to love going easy on the players). Given their rarity, I have decided to move away from the more 'naturalistic' monsters. Having the only random encounter in a three- or four-day expedition through the steaming jungle wilderness be with mundane capybaras (pictured) is a bit weak. 

Even if they should be there for 'realism', the encounter can at least be with giant capybaras the size of VW buses, or vampire bats instead of a swarm of normal bats, or sneaky camouflaged giant chameleons with 25' long tongue attacks (that's a cool one actually...) instead of plain giant lizards. Capybaras can be the kind of thing you hunt for dinner.

So here's my rectified random encounter table with better monsters and everything streamlined a little bit. Thanks again to the Alexandrian for this.

1d20

1-3  -  1-3 goblin hunters
4-5  -  1-3 neanderthals
6-8  -  1-3 giant botflies
9-11  -  1-3 steam beetles
12-14  -  1 man-mantis   [2-HD version of giant mantis]
15-16  -  1-2 giant chameleons
17  -  1 jungle bear (hairless)  [too good not to use!]
18  -  1 giant bee
19  -  1-2 orchidmen
20  -  roll 2x and combine

Now the monsters are a bit more exciting. Nothing you could actually encounter on Earth (a few variations are okay). I'm going to do all my random encounter tables in this format. It's customizable and has just enough granularity for me to work with, not so much that it takes any mental strain to manipulate.


*****

I'm on fire this week. Let's see what's on the playlist next?

Play Report: Return to Land's End - Sessions 3 & 4

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Vuk Thuul - level 1 half-elf snake oracle

Leliana Vess - level 1 sylph witch

Nahash - level 1 lizardman barbarian

*****

A Big Score

When we left our adventurous trio, they were in the goblins' basement treasure room digging through all the cool stuff they had found.

Nahash used his cheap 50' rope to strap the two treasure chests to his back. Throwing the last of their hacked-apart neanderthal corpses outside the room distracted the two surviving anemone men enough for the PCs to escape the basement. Imagining themselves safe, they barred the door and rested for the night to recover spells and a few hit points. At this point the wildmen leader snuck into the inn in the dead of night seeking revenge.

Nahash heard something, and crept upstairs to investigate. Unfortunately lizardmen don't have darkvision, so when he saw a pale shape moving in the darkness and lunged with his spear, he succeeded only in crashing into a pile of furniture and waking up the other PCs. Lucky for him, since the wildmen leader's greatclub smote him fiercely for 12 points of damage, leaving the seemingly-indestructible 15-hp barbarian close to a KO. Leliana woke up, ran into the mix and one sleep hex later, Vuk Thuul knifed his ass and everyone went back to bed.

The next day the PCs headed back home with the treasure. [The wandering monster tables were quite lenient these two sessions, and I wonder if I should step them up even more, but that's a subject for another post]. They scrambled back up the cliff and arrived, muddy and bleeding, back in Land's End. The first order was paying the sage Vantadel to house Nahash away from the prying eyes of the villagers (nobody likes foreigners, especially not 6-foot talking lizards with spears).

After all the gold, silver, trinkets and art objects were tallied up the crew had raked in about 5400 silver, and almost 6000 XP!! Vuk Thuul used most of his share paying the sage for research projects. The other PCs bought new clothes, backpacks, adventuring gear and a few better weapons.

[I am using a silver standard, but the costs in gold listed in the Pathfinder book - so everything is 10 times the price it normally would be. They had to pull in this big score just to get some 'standard-grade' items instead of rope that's falling apart, weapons that break, etc.]


Return to the Inn: Exploration and Revelations




Deciding to push their fucking luck in a serious way, the party returned to get paid by the goblins who first gave them the job. You know, the job where they swiped all the goblins' treasure they could carry?

After burying their visible loot (Nahash's bone sword, etc) they returned to the goblins' ruined fort and showed them some wildmen scalps. Sgt. Horgh gave them their bounty of silver and offered a new job: go north to the goblins' caves near the quarry, and find out why nothing's been heard from them for weeks. They elected to rest up in the fort and spent some of their night trying out the strange magical torches they... erh... looted from the goblins' treasure room. [I don't think any of the players realized what they were doing. When those turn up missing, someone might remember those adventurers...]

Instead of going north, the team returned to the goblins' inn and climb down the well they meant to check out before. Turns out it opened into an old cave system underneath! The wildmen had wrecked everything, and fled with some goblin prisoners. Those they didn't eat, kill or enslave were a few goblin children and some wounded adults in a cage. They spoke common (these goblins are a pretty well-educated bunch. I wonder why?) and were a bit helpful, especially when the PCs released them and Leliana healed everyone with a hex [the witch is a resource monster - those hexes never run out. Jesus Christ].

Delving deeper, they passed through a deep flooded cave and into the goblins' underground base, originally built by the dwarves in ages past. The place was ransacked, corpses of goblin and neanderthals everywhere. The wildmen had fled with the valuables, except a few boxes of palm-sized heavy brass coins stamped with outlandish faces and creatures. The party took a few as the full crates were far too heavy to carry.

One barred door opened into a tiny foul-smelling room. A great crude stone idol of a hideous toad squatted on a defaced altar to the dwarven gods. Ritual implements, knives and tools littered the room. In the center, a great basin filled with slime, covered in moss and mold, emanated a deathly odor. The party poked into it with a stick, which promptly dissolved and they decided to leave it a lone. Leliana did find a wickedly curved ritual knife (normal dagger stats, but a well-made metal weapon is still a precious commodity at this point in the game!). Nahash pried the smooth yellow-green gemstone eyes out of the frog statue.

[I know I put them there, and it was kind of obvious, but my heart still filled with joy when he pried those eyes out with the other two holding a blanket so they wouldn't fall into the vat of slime.]

Another room had goblin-sized fortifications in it - facing inwards. In the center was a shaft going straight down, with climbing gear, anchors for ropes and travelling equipment everywhere. When Vuk Thuul cast light on a pebble and dropped it in, I played him this video:

They elected not to climb down. [Smart.]

The last door in the complex had debris and furniture piled haphazardly in front of it. Clearing it away and sticking his head through the door, Nahash was greeted warmly.

"Come in," a deep and sinister voice purred. "I've been waiting for more visitors..."

The voice belonged to an eight-foot tall, fire engine-red talking slug with a smug grin. ABSALOM GLOP was trapped inside a glowing circle of salt on the floor. Leliana's arcane knowledge identified it as a Magic Circle against Law. Curious...

Absalom explained that it had been summoned from deep underground by the white goblin priest Guzboch and trapped inside the magic circle. It was desperate to be freed. This led to some hard bargaining. Absalom explained its (currently very weak) Lawful aura prevented the PCs from stealing any goblin property or taking any of their stolen loot out of the room. [Remember when they signed a mercenary contract with Guzboch back in session 1? I was planning for this.] If the circle were broken, it could leave and they'd be free to take anything they desired.

Vuk Thuul struck a deal. Absalom swore to wage no aggression against the party for one month, answer three serious questions and one personal inquiry. Vuk Thuul asked about these things:

1 - What do you know of the ancient god called VORN, who sleeps beneath the Dreaming Mountain?

2 - Do you know anything about these carved ivory plates we found?

3 - Tell us about the petrified forest?

Absalom answered these as its knowledge allowed, expounding on these topics long into the night. It lived deep in the earth, and has travelled far, even visiting the surface sometimes. It is is old - personally remembering the rise of Vorn's priesthood a thousand years ago, and relating some facts about that time. Of the ivory plates it could say little except they were of high elven make, thousands of years old. The stone forest was created during the cataclysmic fall of that same ancient race, when their magic ran amok and nearly destroyed the world.

4 - For his last question, Vuk Thuul pulled down his ragged bandanna to reveal the mysterious brand that mars his face and neck: two serpents coming down his chin and curving around his jaw to whisper in his ears.

Absalom was intrigued by this development, leaning in close to Vuk Thuul's face and murmuring to itself about "definitely being on the lists." It could only relate a tale of a tattooed man it had met once, who hailed from a place called Scrivenbough and named his master - ABRAXAS.

His questions answered, Vuk Thuul scratched the salt circle. Absalom was out of the room in a flash leaving only a trail of slime, diving into the cistern in the cave outside and swimming downward into the darkness out of sight.

*****

[The day after this session I realized I had forgotten to describe a series of adventure hooks in the form of the goblins' intelligence reports piled in a closet the PCs had searched. I posted them up in our 'scheduling a game' group chat. I reproduce it here so it won't get lost, and because I feel pretty good about it.]

"When you were searching the cabinets for treasure after Absalom left, there was a 'booklet' of papers bound together with string, and some loose pages scattered on top. None are magical. The booklet is written with Imperial characters, in a language or code none of you recognize. The loose papers are scratched out in Imperial Common and each one is a brief report on some subject of interest to the goblins. All written in different scribbly handwriting, they read as follows:

1 - 'Black robes a few days south in jungles. Look like pinks, maybe. Tall bone-walkers too. All of them hunting for something.'

2 - 'Tall, tall white buildings in the jungle southeast. Scouts afraid.'

3 - 'Tall green lizards more fighty for months. More with the red paint come out of the swamp into our territory. Yellow-eyes down the river too hard to fight.'

4 - 'North along the river past the fork. Stone building is covered in trees. Big snake carvings. Lots of dead black-robes around. Smells bad!'

5 - 'The rock pit by the cliffs is dangerous. A few scouts and guards have disappeared. Why do we have to build a new fort anyway?'

6 - The last piece of paper is a series of scribbles and scratches, done in charcoal. Some notes underneath in a different, more practise handwriting say: 'Stone under the inn. Bears further study.'"


The next day my brother said "Oh snap. This is better than Elder Scrolls."

Feels pretty good!!!

Fun on the Velvet Horizon: ABHORRER

More Fun on the Velvet Horizon. Today we get into the heart of the matter with a difficult but rewarding total fucking dick of a monster. I am not going through the book in alphabetical order, these are just the first two monsters from the book that I used in my game.


ABHORRER

These guys are a bit tricky to run. No player likes to be told 'well, you find yourself compelled to be nice... to the slug that you hate.' I started with the 'lawfulness field' and I'll try to make the players hate it over time. If the players can't attack something, they will want to. When the abhorrer starts doing its dick moves, they will gradually dislike it more and more until they start working on a way to wipe it off the map. I can see the players on other adventures, always thinking in the back of their minds: "Hell, we have to go back to goblin town and deal with that big red slug pretty soon." If they take too long, the goblins will be fucked up when they get back!

An abhorrer showing up feels like a handful of adventures in itself, and wherever it arrives will never be the same again, so we can't just put it in a wandering monster table...

Nevermind that! Of course we can: it just raises new questions. What would it be doing strutting a dungeon or wilderness? A dungeon is total anarchy and madness already, which makes it vulnerable, it would have to be on its way to or from somewhere important. 


REASONS THE ABHORRER IS IN THE DUNGEON:

1 - Just escaped death at hands of angry mob, very jumpy
2 - Off to store treasure in numbered underdark bank accounts - heavily mobbed up with bodyguards/cronies
3 - About to turn the underworld market into a Rand-ian capitalist nightmare
4 - Recruiting heavily-armed, psychopathic bodyguards: do the PCs need work?
5 - Prisoner, in a transport on the way to super-jail
6 - Prisoner, on the way to epic ceremonial execution (lava pit, green slime, etc)
7 - Imprisoned. This part of the dungeon already is a prison, and it can't leave.
8 - Actually, there *are* laws and a society in this part of the dungeon. It's lived here for a while.
9 - Just arrived in this area. There are laws, but the abhorrer's control only covers a small area. The situation is tenuous.
10 - Has insinuated itself into a pre-existing dungeon faction, culture or society. Things have only begun to get nasty.


I feel for your players to hate an NPC or villain, you need a name they can latch on to, something weird and memorable. I am notoriously bad at making up names, so let's give this a try:


ABHORRER NAME TABLE

Old Testament figure (d20)

1 - Abimelech
2 - Abraham
3 - Absalom
4 - Ahasuerus
5 - Belshazzar
6 - Cain
7 - Eliazar
8 - Elkanah
9 - Ephraim
10 - Holofernes
11 - Issachar
12 - Jephthah
13 - Lamech
14 - Manaaseh
15 - Melchizedek
16 - Mordecai
17 - Naphtali
18 - Nebucadnezzar
19 - Sennacherib
20 - Zebulon

Nickname / Bad Reputation (d12)

1  - Hangman
2  - Guillotine
3  - Lash
4  - Excruciator
5  - Rectificator
6  - Scourge
7  - Pacifier
8  - Butcher
9  - Torturer
10 - Rack
11 - Hammer
12 - Anvil


Gross Words (d66)

11 - Algae
12 - Amoeba
13 - Bog
14 - Bile
15 - Gorge
16 - Fen
21 - Fungus
22 - Gel
23 - Goop
24 - Gunk
25 - Glop
26 - Gorge
31 - Glut
32 - Lichen
33 - Marsh
34 - Mire
35 - Morass
36 - Moss
41 - Mucus
42 - Mud
43 - Muck
44 - Mold
45 - Ooze
46 - Putrid
51 - Quagmire
52 - Rot
53 - Retch
54 - Scum
55 - Snot
56 - Sludge
61 - Slime
62 - Slough
63 - Slop
64 - Spew
65 - Swale
66 - Vomit

Just roll once on each table to determine your abhorrer's name. Sometimes each type works better as a first or last name - mix it around to your liking. The one my players met in Land's End last weekend is Absalom Glop, the Excruciator!

This gives me another idea: this table would also be a good start for a lich or vampire - you'd only have to swap the 'gross words' section for slavic names, grandiose titles, etc. I will work on this for later.

*****

Ouch, there goes my tinnitus acting up again.
Well, let's make it worse!

Fun on the Velvet Horizon: ANEMONE MEN

Buy it you animals

I bought this book RIGHT when it came out.

Since then I have put it on the shelf, taken it down and read it, and set it on my bedside table for months at a time. I cleaned my room and put it back on the shelf, then took it back down, put it on the bedside table to flip through, back up on the shelf, back and forth again and again. I'm sure I have read it through a half dozen times, but I still open it up and see things that I swear are brand new to me.

I have few complaints about this book: sometimes the text gets too close to the spine and I have to crack it open really hard to see a few words, and I don't want to wreck this thing because it's so nice. Many of the monsters are huge fucking bummers: their stories are tragic or they are just miserable assholes. I think many of these monsters will remain obscure to the players: I can't think of how I would communicate the bizarre histories these monsters have in their interactions with the PCs. Maybe I gotta work on my acting??

Instead of spending much time on a "review" about a book everyone knows is great, I thought in the best traditions of this and this, I'd go through and blurb about the monsters that interest me. I am not planning on being comprehensive with this or updating the series regularly. I'll focus on writing about monsters once I have used them in my own game. Maybe someone else can benefit from my experiences.


ANEMONE MEN

These guys are one of my favourites in the book, and I think they are damned near perfect just the way they are. They can live anywhere underground, so they already have a reason to be in the dungeon. I really like the "dangerous but non-aggressive" monster concept. It makes me feel a bit better to know not everything in the game world is a massive dick, and I can throw in something that isn't just there to pimp the PCs over but is still dangerous if they don't handle it properly.

I am using them as a living trap/barrier: something the players want is on the other side of these guys. Imagine trying to have a fight while both you and the enemy are endeavouring to be as quiet as possible, so as not to wake the anemone men like this:

"DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!!"

"Damn it, shut up you stupid orc..." 

*CHOP!!* 

[Roll a Will save to avoid crying out when you get hurt. Penalty equal to HP damage dealt. How badly you fail equals how loud your scream is when the orc chops you in the guts with his rusty cleaver.]

When I used them in the game just recently, the strange dreamy questioning and squeaky voices definitely unnerved my players. They were asleep guarding a doorway and the PCs wanted to see what was on the other side. I would have mourned their deaths if they had been poisoned, but I gave them ample warning in the form of dead bodies nearby.

What made the setup cool is the PCs didn't fight them all. They passed the Anemone Men by distraction, but then they had to get back *out* of the dungeon with treasure on their backs. All those gold coins sloshing around in the chest provoked some nerve-racking stealth rolls! In the end, the players chopped up a Neanderthal's corpse and threw chunks of it to the sleepers who began chowing down, occupying their dangerous tendrils long enough for the adventurers to slip past.


ANEMONE MAN SLEEPINESS / HUNGER REACTION TABLE:

Just like a normal reaction roll (table taken from my Labyrinth Lord book - I use these rolls even in Pathfinder), but modified by how quiet you've been. At the basic level, use your DEX in place of CHA. The result of this table will modify your players' stealth checks. Each result is twofold: how sleepy is the anemone man, and how will it feel if it wakes? Roll once and read across, or if you want more variety you could roll twice.

ROLL     Result
2              Like a baby. Very hard to wake [+2 stealth] / Disoriented, hungry and slow. 
3-5           Mmmm, food! Satisfied in the dream [+1 stealth] / Ready to catch & eat anything!
6-8           Dreams of distant lands and alien skies. / Confused, not sure which world is real.
9-11         Dreaming of the room it's in [-1 stealth] / Instantly notices anything amiss.
12            NIGHTMARES! Jumpy [-2 stealth] / Poisons the nearest stranger!


*****


Next time a PC is poisoned to death in your game, play this: