Random Monster Generator Shootout 4 - Curse of the Random Monster Generator Shootout!

I dug through the mailbag, the comments and some of my books - wouldn't you know it, I found enough tables to warrant another round.


*****



Elegant Fantasy Creature Generator
by Raphael Sadowski
from Nine Tongues Tales
get the pdf here (PWYW)

I dig this one. Mr. Sadowski packs a big punch in a simple little 16-page PDF. Like the tome of adventure design from last time, the EFCG concentrates on 'top-down' generation. Rather than rolling stats, it generates creature's shape, size and attributes and leaves it to the DM to assemble & stat up in the end. Although it means more work for the long-suffering DM, the possibilities are limitless. The first few tables remind me of Raggi's RECG a little bit (is that really a crime?) and it distinguishes itself elsewhere so I'm fine with that.

It includes a few entries rarely seen in creature generators, like "static" for creatures that don't move, or the classic "swarm." The Mental Faculties table was a nice touch too. The Random Features section is a really good mix. Special abilities, visual quirks and odd behaviours all mixed together, so you really don't know what direction it'll take you. If he had only covered the basics this would still be pretty decent, but the Finishing Touches section puts the icing on. Peculiar Circumstances, the Weirdifier and Horrifier tables add strange behaviours, compulsions or abilities that you almost never see in these things, like "oneiric - you will have ominous dreams about its presence long before you even meet it." Fuck yeah. Let's give it a try.

THE LONELY ALIEN

I rolled:
Static; alien; instinctual; iridescent purple, blue and orange; precious trophy; levitation; singing; tragic; materializing.

Holy christ I damn near rolled up the horta! This rules. How to make sense of all this strangeness? A carcosa-coloured creature of otherworldly anatomy that can't move, but levitates. It has a tragic past which it sings about. Some part of its body is valuable, which could account for the tragedy - maybe the rest of its race has been hunted down for parts? Materializing is good - through a particular ceremony you can summon this creature from the ether if you seek to kill it for valuable parts (rare spell component anyone?). Then you must deal with the entity's tragic song which reduces you to tears, rendering you unable to act (mass Hold Person) while it eats you. If you cast Comprehend Languages and learn that it laments for the death if its race, maybe you get an attack of conscience about killing it? Fuck yeah. Put some clues in a ruined temple in the wilderness, I've got myself a great swords and sorcery hex location!

Number of Rolls? There are 9 tables, but Sadowski encourages the reader to continue rolling until the idea comes together. I didn't use every table and made 12 rolls to generate that creature up there.
Would I use this in the middle of a session? No way. Sadowski explicitly says not to in the introduction.
Variety and Reusability? Looks like it has enough possible combinations to get over the 'almost infinite' hump. I'll be using this one again for sure.



The Monster Machine
by Vincent Baker

from Fight On! magazine #2
print or PDF here

Holy shit, Vincent Baker wrote a piece for Fight On!? Well, this one is weird as hell and doesn't resemble any other generator I've reviewed so far. After four rounds of this stuff, that's a damn good thing.

Start by rolling twice on the Materials table. Then pick or roll for abilities based on what materials make up your monster. Pick a weakness associated with one of the materials. Then write up a description and tie it all together. That's it! Just as much space is taken up by a sample bestiary of 9 monsters generated with these tables. All of those are pretty cool, and I would be happy just swiping a few of them for my own game either way.

This table won't generate many "naturalistic" monsters. More like magical beasts, aberrations and sorcerous experiments. If that's what you need, give it a look! On the downside, like most of the early FO! material this thing is written for OD&D I think, and some of the terminology is unfamiliar. What's defense class or "DC"? Is that like Armour Class? What does "level" mean in this case? Is it like hit dice? What's a HTK? I'll just go with it and see what I get:

FOSSIL GUARDIAN

LVL: 4
DC: -1
Speed: 6

I rolled:
Made of - Bone, Stone 
Abilities - Impale, Frighten, Knock Down, Armor, Bludgeon
Weakness - Slow-moving

Ancient skeletal guardians assembled from multiple creatures. Look like 10' tall humans with spikes and blades of bone protruding everywhere. Now so old that mineral deposits have built up and begun turning them into stone. What antique culture made them? Usually assigned to guard a single place (doorway, treasure vault, etc). Because of slow movement, they'll only pursues fleeing opponents if they are recognized as interlopers a second time.

Number of Rolls? 8-10
Would I use this in the middle of a session? Nope. Even though there are only a few tables, it takes a bit of thinking to get a useable monster.
Variety and Reusability? Fair ta middlin'. There are only so many abilities, but the vagueness of the Materials table throws a lot of this work back on the DM. The attacks and weaknesses are broad enough that they could fit any application, but I worry that with such a broad-strokes approach, you won't be able to roll a result on this table strong enough to force your thought outside its normal track. Which is the whole point of a random monster table.



RPGPundit Presents: Weird Gonzo Race Generator
by RPGPundit
from Precis Intermedia
get the pdf here ($4.99)

43 pages? This better be good! It starts out oddly, asking me to roll on a Favoured Ability table for which stat gets a +1 bonus, then for hit dice. Not putting your most Gonzo foot forward...

After those tables and some explanations regarding notation used in the document, we make it to the meat of things. The Basic Species table determines what category of creature we have. From there, we scroll down to a subtable that offers a selection of abilities or traits unique to it. Each of these is a page or two. That's why this thing is so long! For any given creature, you'll only use a small section of the whole document. The Basic Species entries are decent, with some standards (lizardman, underwater, anthropomorphic mammal) and some really odd entries (asshole species, wuss species).

Progressing to the individual tables, I was irritated by the piddly entries. Why am I rolling on tables with results like "add +2 to an ability" or "+1 to willpower saves"? After reading through a bit more, I started to understand why these minor bonuses are included. Rather than wild-ass monsters, this PDF is for creating new (mostly humanoid) races with stats on a human level, like dwarves and elves. Just as dwarves have that bonus to detect unusual stonework and elves have resistance to paralyzation, this blob-creature I rolled has "half damage from fire, double damage from cold."

In the introduction Pundit writes that these races aren't intended for player-characters, unlike "Mutant Hordes of the Last Sun," which I am considering checking out next. This pdf is not without its flaws, but for 5 bucks I'd say it's well worth it for the intended application.

I rolled:
Favoured ability - Intelligence
Hit dice - 4d6
Species - artificial (non-robot)
Ability - enhanced resilience
Special powers - herbivore only, innate spell ability (one 1st-level wizard spell)

Fuck man, I wish I had a bit more to work with... These tables gave me no clue as to the look of this race, though. I'm going to roll again on the Basic Species table for another entry to combine with:

More rolls:
Species - blob (no tentacles)
Ability - toxic

So a race of small, artificial magic vegetarian blob-men. Now we're talking! They can't manipulate objects, so weapons and armour are out, but they defend themselves with a secreted poison and their minor magics. Created by a radical sect of druids to protect wildlife from encroaching civilization. I'd run that shit in my game.

Number of Rolls? Minimum of about 8. In rare cases (lots of "roll 2x and combine"), could be as many as 17.
Would I use this in the middle of a session? Maybe. Depending on your rolls, generation could be dead simple or involve a bit of flipping back and forth. The party entered a new dungeon and you're really tired of orcs? Need a quick humanoid opponent for this random encounter? This thing gotchu.
Variety and Reusability? Reusability could go a long way, but the variety is limited. This document aims for a specific type of creature. It's not a one-stop shop for monster generation, but might have exactly what you need - I think I will refer to it more for strange alien races in Land's End.


******

Fuck man, a lot of really strong contenders today. Baker's Monster Machine is classic old-school wild imagination, especially for being a tight three pages! Pundit's entry is good once I got a handle on it, but long and of very specific usefulness. I think my personal favourite is the Elegant Fantasy Creature Generator, as it balances length, breadth and depth well and creates a LOT of material for my brain to grasp onto.

I'll use all three of these in my home game.

Now for something fast & nasty (just like a good monster table):

REVIEW: Library Generation Table & Locks, Vaults and Hiding Places - and a blurb

Sorry I've been away. Work for my whole gaming crew picks up in the summer months, so we haven't been playing much and I've spent my free time on other things instead of gaming prep.

But commentary and controversy have bestirred themselves of late, and I tried to answer the call! I first heard rumblings on MeWe (I find it about as annoying as Facebook, so I'm not on it very often). Then this thread "The State of Post-OSR Content" on the tenfootpole.org forums [1]. Melan posted "Third Year's the Charm: The End of the OSR", and Anthony Huso wrote his own response. EOTB wrote a response too. Finally, noisms dished up "A Lot of RPG Books are Too Expensive." and the follow-up based on extensive commenting "The Price of the Hobby."

We can also backtrack to Huso's modern classic "I Will Not Relent," which is HIGHLY fucking relevant 100% of the time.

In response, I wrote, deleted, re-wrote and re-deleted a long and annoying manifesto/screed on the subject of: how to stay underground in a scene crammed with folks trying to make money on their RPG writing. I just couldn't get it to come out right! I feel passionately on this subject, but I started to seem like a dick even in my own eyes. It felt like lousy teenage angst and so many more eloquent folks have captured things far better than I could.

Instead of that garbage, here is a double-feature review of two little pdf supplements I found on Drivethru. As Samiam once sang, "life can be so dull." So I try to focus on the things that actually matter, like what to prep for my next game!

*****

Library Generation Table
pdf here for $1.00

Locks, Vaults and Hiding Places
pdf here for PWYW

by Larry Hamilton
Published by Follow Me, and Die! Entertainment
https://followmeanddie.com/

A ten- and a thirteen-page PDF including cover art and intros. These are a useful resource if you can get past the meandering writing, grammar errors and lousy formatting.

They remind me, in approach, of the classic Hack & Slash treasure document (PDF link - I still use this one religiously). Table after table attempts to exhaustively catalogue the subject matter. These two PDFs don't quite reach the transcendent heights of -C's classic though.

The LGT starts off strong, with tables for a book's shape, size, material, subject matter and age. Tables for the filing system a library uses. Tables for the experts' interpretation of a book. Anything and everything you could need to stock a library!

On the downside, it's plagued by formatting problems and really disorganized. There are sections or headings - it's just table after table after table mixed together, unrelated entries side-by-side. Sometimes a new magic item is thrown into the middle! If I want a specific table, like "lost in the library," there is no way to know that it's on page 3 between the table for "number of buildings in the library" and the description of "The Book of Worthless Facts and Useless Information." Of course the short length of the document itself means it can't ever take that long to find anything, but... didn't we learn from the 1e DMG?

Sometimes instead of a table, there is a list or a few suggestions on a given topic, like "Specialized Libraries: Medicine, Law, Religion, Magic." I feel as though these could have been cut, moved to their own section or expanded into full tables. They seem like afterthoughts, and probably should have been cut completely or expanded.

As for LVHP, it begins on the right foot with Hamilton recounting stories of assisting his father - a locksmith - in his work and offers food for thought on the field. It's nice to see someone drawing on their life experiences for a gaming supplement. I had high hopes for this one, because I find integrating traps, secret doors and such into my dungeons pretty tough.

Unfortunately, just like the LGT this one is riddled with errors, awkward wording and other symptoms of an overall "rush to press." The tables for locks and keys are pretty good, but the Hiding Places section is sorely lacking (do we really need a "what is hidden?" table with entries like "Good guys hide something from bad guys.")

Actually, I think the best parts of this supplement are not the tables. When Hamilton is laying out his thoughts about locks, or describing a thief's thought process in the Entrances & Exits section, I felt I was learning something useful and interesting. Still, these blurbs lose focus towards the end, and are in serious need of a cleanup. Also, despite the cover art there wasn't anything about traps in there at all!

Overall, these PDFs are rough around the edges but can be useful if you look past the formatting and other issues. For a buck the LGT is worth a look, but LV&HP is on the level of "long, rambling blog post" right now. If Hamilton did a real editing pass, trimmed the fat and expanded a few sections, added headings, etc, these could really be great resources. But they aren't there yet.


*****

PS: I think anyone who aspires to a kind of 'cataloguing' supplement like these or -C's treasure document, should probably read House of Leaves to start with.

Now I'm out, I bought a used copy of WG4 at my local game store and I'm eager to crack into it! In case you need more instruction, ya boy dishes it up. Try to see the parallels between the music and RPG bizzes:

[1] The discourse gets pretty heated in that thread, but don't judge everyone too harshly. Most of the time we all get along quite well.