Don’t Be Frank
Chapter: Season Three
Characters: Brett Kringle, Sam
There was a lot of talk online this week about monsters (and potential monsters) in the new edition of D&D. It is a hot-button topic for many and everyone seems to have a dark horse favorite for the first monster manual. Luckily for me, I love undead and beholders, both of which are 99% certain to appear. This led me to think about iconic monsters in D&D (both good and bad) and today’s comic.
There seems to be two camps when it comes to Flumphs: Love or Hate
I tend to love them for their ridiculousness and their subtle reminder that D&D at it’s heart is a game and games should never take themselves too seriously.
Commenters:Â Okay lay it on me, favorite monster (or monster type)?
Do you like dice? Look what we have in the online store!
Love the nod to the mighty flumph.
As for me, it’s all about dragons. Not only are they super iconic, but they are just as fun to run as to slay.
I just read “super iconic” as “supersonic” and it made dragons that much more awesome.
well there ARE gold ones…incidentally, they have the strongest breathweapons…
The DuckBunny. I think it should be the default familiar in DnDNext.
Pfffffft. Bards are awesome.
yeah so are flumphs the comic is accurate in that regard
You say that until you read Misfit Monsters Redeemed, from Paizo. Daigle took the lame flumph and made it glorious. GLORIOUS, I SAY!
Yeah, I don’t know what you’re talking about. In Pathfinder, Flumphs and ESPECIALLY bards are awesome!
dude in pathfinder, bards are tanky as hell! longsword and shield, rock some good studded leather armor made of demon hide for DR? it only gets better from there.
I’m drawn to the undead, goblinoid and “Ravenloft” style monsters. The Flumph is bad, but some of the random animal pairings got me even more here’s hoping there’s no Garbugs or Spider-Horses.
Gah! No love for bards OR flumphs!? Dead to me! Dead! 😉
Owlbears! And Displacer Beasts.
My favourite D&D monster are dragons and the devete. The devete is an obscure AD&D 2nd ed monster. It is a little blue monster that looks a bit like a goblin. It is not very powerful but it mimics the emotional state of the people it interacts with. If you act friendly, it will be friendly. If you try bluff it by being friendly while secretly planning to betray it, it will be trying to bluff you by acting friendly while scretly planning to betray you.
It is a great role-playing monster. It is not an easy one to portray but that’s also the fun aspect. 🙂
Trolls, of any variety. Swamp, mist, cloud, etc… I fuckin love ’em all.
Dragons & Drow all the way for me.
I prefer Dragons to be extraordinarily dangerous though, no 2HD pushovers in my games.
The Drow make a fantastic big bad behind conspiracies too.
Illithids and displacer beasts.
As a DM, Dragons are the most fun to run, both as the big bad pulling the strings and as just a brute force reminder to the players. Same for the beholder.
As a player, I’ve got to go with the displacer beast.
As a DM, Mindflayers would usually end up as the villans in most of my high-power campaings, an entire evil, psychic empire is just so much fun.
As a player, I adore Psudodragons. every (non-evil) wizard I have played has had a psudodragon familiar after level nine or so.
Kobolds. And not “they-might-be-dragons” kobolds (from whatever edition that was). Plain, old, vanilla kobolds. I’ve seen a dozen kobolds with rocks, a couple crossbows and a pit-trap TPK a mid-level party.
Lava sharks! When your players laugh and run lightly across the surface of the volcano, throw a flaming, fire-breathing, terror of the deep at them!
This is closely followed by my second-favourite, Lightning sharks!
I love kobolds so much I made a kobold-expy race one of the major races in my fantasy novels.
Now the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing…there’s a monster I never really liked. It’s a stump with a sideways mouth, two tentacles, and a growth on top that looks like a rabbit. Tell me whoever invented that one wasn’t on drugs.
I have particular love for Xorn and Otyughs.
I sometimes get so lost in the details that running monsters feels like interchangeable Stat Blocks. It’s something I need to improve. I find dopplegangers to be a lot of fun because they offer many interesting plot options.
Dragons are obviously enjoyable because they grab everyone’s attention immediately!
The greatest D&D monster was the Nilbog. Especially against an unsuspecting mid level character. What do mean I gave that goblin my stuff?
Hell. Yes.
I like the campaign arc my buddy is running for us. We are working our way through the Kingmaker Precon for Pathfinder and we decided to start out with an evil party. I ran a werebear fighter, and his npcs were a tengu anti-paladin and a tiefling rogue poisoner. We ended up crushing the wills of everyone we were supposed to kill and started our kingdom with many of the “enemies” as our henchmen. Kingdom then got random rolls for population growth… We have a huge kobold pop, with orcs, tengu, ogres, werewolves, tieflings, and the outnumbered humans as the minority. Its a beautiful thing. And yes, Pathfinder makes the bard awesome, especially with a few of the optional archetypes
Something that made me sad with the early cancelation/replacement/retirement of 4e was that it never had a chance to find its own icons. And correct me if I’m wrong, but 3e/3.5 seems the same way (haven’t played, not counting pathfinder, but basing this observation on the fact that I don’t see anything in 4e that didn’t really show up in my 2e monstrous compendium). I am really hoping that 5e comes out of the gate swinging with NEW stuff, not just selling us the same stuff they’ve made for 30 years. I still want dragons and goblins and that, but shouldn’t a new game have new content, not just new rules?
Uhh, no? Definitely not, in fact. The races and monsters should depend on what world you’re playing in, not what rules you’re using. D&D isn’t a videogame, where “content” is everything, rather in D&D the rules are the “content”. The statted up creatures included are just examples of what can be done with them.
This may sound impossibly first level of me, but goblins will always hold a special place in my heart.
I LOVE goblins.
Cant blame ya but Niblogs bring the thunp even more
I’ve always been more of a fan of humanoids than monsters, myself.
My favorite monsters are humans. There are too many monsters that I love to pick just one: illithid, lizard folk, dragons, owlbears, displacer beasts… for “big bass” I like demons, devils, and daemons.
As a DM my favorite classic would have to be the rust monster – just to make the paladins and tanks hike up their skirts and screech like little girls -bwahahahaha!
As a player, the absolute bane of my existence is the grey ooze. What do you mean my +N magic weapon just got disenchanted?
woo, bring on the Undead baby!
The trap type monsters: mimic, lurker above, trapper, cloaker, roper, piercer, etc.
And the flumph was created by some Brits.
Actually all those came from the Fiend Folio which was a british product of mostly fan submitted monsters like the Quillan and sons of Kyus plus other notable aberrations and monstrosities … most were on the level of weird to “what were they thinking?”
So, I’m working on this May of the Dead adventure… and it just might have something horrible, undead, and relevant to the comic.
Goblins are great to use as pc characters, they are one of the best critters ever
Since I haven’t seen one of mine mentioned: Xvarts!
Also, I’ll second Rust Monsters as the MOST fun to run as a DM. I had the pleasure to run a table of Living Greyhawk at a convention for a bunch of …ahem… challenging people. One of whom walked right up to my rust monster and hit it with his +5 every enchant possible greatsword. And rolled a 1 for the save…
Undead, always has been always will be, specifically Skrellingtons
A bit of thread necromancy here, but I’m I fairly new reader to this comic (completely awesome comic btw!) so I thought it wouldn’t be too bad 😉
Anyway I’ve always been a sucker for Aboleths, Illithids, the old-school and quite insane Death Knights from Ad&d iirc, Nightwalkers aaaand outsiders (yeah all of them!)
I’ve been having so much fun reading your comics but this ones dated for 2012 is there no more? What happened??
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Gelatinous Cube. The only monster genetically adapted to graph paper.
And say what you will about flumphs, they make darn good landing pads. (If you don’t get that joke, you need to read Order of the Stick.)
Undead will always be my first love too. Even now, I’m running a nine-year-old off-and-on play-by-forum D&D campaign where half of the PCs are descendents of a cursed bloodline; those PCs (along with the rest of the House of Ainsley) will most likely become undead PCs as soon as the House’s foreseen demise arrives. The players of those characters may or may not know that yet. 😉
But my VERY close second love is elementals. Two of my past campaigns had a story arc involving a nemesis to the PCs, a high-level Magic-User known as the Ice Tyrant; though he favored water magic, he had gone to all four elemental planes to draw up contracts with an elder from each plane, so that his palace — the Dominatus Glacies — would be encased by a magic shell immune to all forms of harm. So when the party hounded the Ice Tyrant all the way to the Land of Eternal Winter (my homebrew world’s analog of Antarctica) and learned of this, they ended up retracing the Ice Tyrant’s path through the elemental planes in an effort to steal and destroy the Ice Tyrant’s seals (given to each elder as his signature on each contract), break the wards fueling the shell around the Dominatus Glacies and thereafter return to the Prime Material Plane, enter the palace and bury the Ice Tyrant once and for all. It would not be an easy quest.
I remember how surprised my players were when they first set foot in the Elemental Plane of Air. They were expecting nothing but sky, clouds and the same air elementals that you see whenever a mage summons one up, so they were surprised to see a cloudy metropolis with marketplaces, homes, airy steeds hauling airy wagons, rainbow bridges (built as a courtesy for visitors from other planes, since air elementals can, of course, fly) and so on. It was pretty much like the cities they were used to on the Prime Material Plane, just that everything was made out of air in solid, liquid and energy forms (along with the usual gaseous form). They didn’t have any of the local currency (since gold doesn’t exist on the Plane of Air), but they got a nice cloak from a band of highwaymen (or highway-air-elementals) who tried to rob them outside the city; the cloak wasn’t particularly special, but it always flowed and moved as if wind-tossed, even when no wind was present. So one of the party’s Fighters kept it, just because an ever-waving cloak looks cool. 🙂
The party spent about two or three sessions in each plane, and the second-to-last plane they visited was the Plane of Earth. They started running into some serious resistance here, especially near the end, when they ran into the earth elder’s Monk-like bodyguard. Even though I had been fairly consistent in giving the more noteworthy elementals the appropriate names — with air elemental names having lots of sibbilant sounds (“Ssalsisasshah”), fire elemental names having lots of R’s and K’s (“Durrkarrodd”) and so on — I very-tongue-and-cheekly defied my own “earth elementals have lots of hard consonants and few vowels in their names” rule and named the elder’s bodyguard Van Damme. Van Damme the Earth Elemental proceeded to kick seven shades of crap out of two-thirds of the party until the other third nuked and hacked Van Damme into rubble. Then they shattered the Earth Seal of the Ice Tyrant and moved on to the Plane of Water, where they also ran into strong resistance (though not quite as much resistance as the Earth Plane put forth). They ended up shattering the final seal in that plane and shutting down the shield around the Dominatus Glacies, and they even got some permafrost daggers and short swords from the Plane of Water before they left. They also got a suit of permafrost chainmail which provided 20 Damage Resistance against Cold Attacks as well as 1d6 Cold damage to anyone striking the chainmail’s wearer in melee. It didn’t do anything to prevent drowning, aside from the chainmail becoming weightless when submerged. The other Fighter kept the chainmail, as it was plenty more useful than the first Fighter’s cloak. 🙂
And then 3.5 Edition gave us Libris Mortis, which includes (among many other things) undead elementals! Talk about me getting the best of both worlds. 😀