Saturday, June 5, 2021

Updated monster list

I play tomorrow, but I updated my monsters list. Random notes:

Sources: I added a few new ones from "The Demonic Temple of Felltower" in Pyramid #4/1: Fantasy/Magic I and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 5: Demons, as well as some from "The Magic Desert" in Pyramid #3/38: Natural Magic. The latter required me to add Classes to them; most were obvious. I also modified the page numbers to handle the new run of Pyramid.

Class: I added the subclasses for Demons from DFM5.

Number Appearing: I have separate entries for number in Lair and number Roaming. Rolls are simplified for these and for treasure, so you never have to roll more than 4d6. This does mean you are taking tenfold a die roll more often, so adding or subtracting a monster from a group won't matter a whit.

Light?: A new column showing monsters would address darkness. Many of these have no entry even though I think the designer intended them to work in darkness, so be warned. For some I listed Magery. I figure that if an elf down in a dungeon didn't learn the Light spell and isn't carrying a torch he's dead anyways. If you're designing a dungeon, it helps to know that ogres do need some torches but orcs don't.

Hit Location: The hit location table from GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns or GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races. Not only is this to speed looking this up, it's also a shorthand to describe monsters. "Hamarskel" isn't an obvious name for a monster (picking one at random), but it's an Animal that's a SM +4 Quadruped, which gives me a little better way of imagining it before I look it up. (I didn't take Icelandic. Sorry. Yes, I checked and know it's basically a stegosaurus.)

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