In developing my own stocking tables for the megadungeon, I want to incorporate not only AD&D/OSRIC monsters (including Monsters of Myth), but also thematic creatures from other sources like the Fiend Factory/Folio, Monster Manual II, Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha, Dragon Magazine, etc. I also want to use the classic, 3-volume "All the World's Monsters" from 70s-era Chaosium.
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| ATWM Vol. I |
For those not familiar with that series, ATWM was a collection of monsters from various homebrew sources. Many of the authors are rando contributors, but quite a few are luminaries of the early scene. In addition to being edited by RuneQuest designer Steve Perrin and Jeff Pimper, contributors included Dave Hargrave, Lee Gold, Paul Jaquays, Steve Marsh, Glenn Blacow, Steve Henderson, and Clint Bigglestone.
I was introduced to the ATWM books via my high-school DM's megadungeon, Darconea—a 20-level stack of Dungeon Geomorphs. The DM used lots of ATWM monsters throughout the dungeon, and they provided many harrowing battles and persistent nuisances. Several of the monsters (Doomguards, Gnomes of the Yippurai, Scrubbing Bubbles) became frequently-encountered elements of the dungeon's ecosystem.
The mechanical ranges for the various stats often lack game-logic and seem up to the designer's whim. Some of the numbers get absurdly high. No real explanation is given in this book as to the mechanics of the system the monsters are designed for (maybe OD&D?). Volume II describes the "Perrin Conventions," which was an alternative system of OD&D used by West Coast players (similar in many ways to Dave Hargrave's Arduin system) and, I presume, the native system for these books as Jeff Perrin is the series' editor. Later ATWM volumes also give instructions for converting the stat blocks to RuneQuest and Tunnels & Trolls. I'll discuss the example monster above a little later, as it is on my Level 1 list. I'm sure all the vagueness is related to copyright law and early TSR's eagerness to squash any unlicensed third-party products.
Once I started DMing and learned more about how the AD&D system actually worked, I realized that most of the monsters are horribly designed and mechanically broken. The system is only OD&D-adjacent and seems to bear little resemblance to the mechanical underpinnings of that game. It also bears little relation to Chaosium's alternative-D&D game: RuneQuest. The stat blocks are wildly inconsistent and the dungeon levels assigned to some of the monsters are totally out of whack. You have to adapt all these monsters to D&D standards to use them properly.
Despite the books' many flaws, and though many of the monsters are complete garbage, there are still quite a few unpolished gems sprinkled throughout all three volumes. I want to take these diamonds-in-the-rough and convert them to OSRIC in a way that retains the core creative idea but fixes their broken or half-baked mechanics.
Each ATWM book contains tables of its monsters by creature type, terrain, and dungeon level, so I made lists of the monsters by levels 1–3 (for starters), and then I read them carefully to figure out which ones I wanted to convert for use. I'll discuss each one, but I'm not going to bother converting all of them because many aren't worth it. Not necessarily because they're bad, but because they're pointless or redundant with existing monsters. But make no mistake, a lot of them are just terrible.
This post will deal with the listed "Level 1" monsters from All the World's Monsters, Volume I (according to the index):
- Demon, Serpent (Lesser)
- Goblin, Glass
- Kill-Kill
- Maggot, Mind
- Plink Plant
- Weakling
- Worm, Mind
Several of these monsters are quite deadly for 2nd and 3rd-level characters, much less 1st (if we take the given that "dungeon level" equates roughly to "character level"). When I choose the monsters I want to use and then convert them, I will definitely realign their xp value and level designation. Let's dive on in...
>> Demon, Serpent (Lesser) a.k.a Lesser Serpent Demon
Looking at the stat block above, we see our first "scalable HD" creature. These can be found in a range of 1 to 6, 8-sided hit dice, and the creature appears on all Dungeon Encounter tables for Levels 1–6. Scalable Hit Dice are not that unusual in OD&D, but not typically applied to low-level monsters. The margin of error for low-level characters is tight, so it's good to give them some measure of predictability when it comes to the enemies. Throwing some 3 HD kobolds at a party of low-levels is a set-up, not an encounter.
Despite appearing like a large red dragon, it has a terrible AC and apparently can only fly, as there is no ground speed listed. They range in intelligence from dumb to genius (thanks for giving me more work, designer) and are more dexterous on average (my understanding is that this score relates to Initiative in OD&D or maybe its just a Perrin Conventions thing).
It's alignment is Chaotic. Like OD&D, ATWM utilizes Law, Chaos, and Neutrality as alignments, but also features explicitly Chaotic-/Lawful- Evil/Good as well. ATWM also includes a "Hungry" alignment, which I appreciate, as well as "None" and "Any." They are only encountered in dungeons and you'll only encounter one of them at a time. There's a 50% chance it has treasure, but what it has is completely up to you, Mr. DM.
Its golden talons "fight like five swords" (is this damage? Like, 5d8 damage??), and it gets 1–3 strikes per round, based on Hit Dice (the Level 1 version would get only 1 strike). If a claw attack for 5–40 points isn't enough to do away with a 1st-level character, it has a follow-up bite attack that does an additional 3–30 damage. That's a potential average damage output of 39 points/round for the Level 1 version of this creature.
The Lesser Serpent Demon fills no interesting dungeon niche nor has a purpose, is hideously overpowered, and incompletely designed, so it does not make my list for Gwarnath. This is surprising, as its designer, Steve Marsh, is responsible for, or influenced, several early creative decisions for OD&D and AD&D, such as including good/evil alignments and creating most of the classic aquatic monsters. This one is a hard pass, though.
>> Goblin, Glass
This entry is from contributor Sean Cleary. According to its description, this creature "(l)ooks like a goblin made of glass." Fair enough. Its glass hide, however, is "rigid enough to resist penetration and flexible enough to resist blows" yet allows the creature "supple...movements." What this means in mechanical terms is that it is only harmed by a "critical hit," and since the glass goblin has but a single hit point, it shatters upon striking. There is no description of what constitutes a critical hit. It "carries five two-handed swords and a pair of 'glass' bows with a quiver of arrows for each." The reason it carries so many is that there is a 5% chance with each strike that the sword shatters.
They also carry bags of "very special sand" and have a chance to possess "1D4 Fireball Wands." Hmm. Being mostly transparent, glass goblins are good at hiding in shadows and their suppleness makes them silent. A good-sized paragraph is then spent on the glass goblins' penchant for sex, with a detailed description of their mating ritual which involves the special sand and the wands. I'm going to take a pass on this as-is, but I *like* the concept of a transparent humanoid made of glass, so I'm keeping it on a second list of interesting ideas I want to revisit.
>> Kill-Kill
So, I dig the name right out of the gate. Sounds like something dungeon explorers might name a 1st-level pest. It's a Dave Hargrave monster, so it's possible this also appears in Arduin somewhere. Hopes are high, but the description leaves a lot to be desired: "Little, green-furred, rat-like mammal which runs in a pack like piranhas, attacking all in sight regardless of their size. Immune to all mental and emotional spells and powers." That's it...the whole thing. They have 1d4 hit dice, animal-to-low intelligence, and are encountered in the wild in packs of 10 to 200. They have a bite attack for 1 damage. I suppose a DM could assume a single-mindedness that makes morale checks unnecessary, but other than HD, these aren't different enough from rats to warrant being a separate monster (a recurring problem throughout ATWM's numerous design misses).
>> Mind Maggot
Another recurring problem with ATWM creatures is that they don't really function as monsters, but more like dungeon hazards. There are similar such creatures in D&D: green slime, rot grubs, brown and yellow mold, shriekers, etc. These are not meant to be "fought" in the same manner as a statted monster; rather, they are meant to be overcome by spells, application of fire, or other non-combat method. Aren't they, essentially, a Trick/Trap? Do such creatures deserve individual entries in a bestiary? Do they need AC or hit points? Those are legit questions, but here we are.
These maggots (Type: Animal) cling to ceilings, undetected 80% of the time, and then drop down on a victim (no mention is made of rolling to-hit to land on a victim, though the stat block does note an attack and damage: "1 mouth" for 0 damage). The victim has a 50% chance to notice the creature's anesthetic bite. If not, the maggot burrows into the host's brain in 2 turns and begins draining 1 point of INT each turn, permanently, with death at INT 0. The victim won't realize anything is wrong until they've lost 6 points of INT, but even when detected, it requires a Dispel Evil (a 5th-level cleric spell) followed by a Remove Curse (a 3rd-level cleric spell) to kill it. Keep in mind, this monster is intended for Level 1 dungeons.
This one is a "Gotcha!" monster and a poorly-designed one at that (by contributor Scott McCartney). Okay, it has some barely-there monster functionality, but this is basically a wandering infestation. There are more examples of this type of monster-hazard ahead. I'm putting this on the "Maybe" pile, because the threat of a mind-eating worm could be useful in a campaign featuring wizards, mental mutants, and psionics. I'd want to redesign the whole thing, though.
>> Plink Plant
Cool, a plant creature. Classic D&D has a few good plant monsters, but there's always room for more. This one was created by Steve Perrin, and seems pretty solid at first glance. It has 1 HD, AC 8, and a DEX of 18, meaning it goes quickly, which makes sense given its attack. When it detects warm-blooded creatures within 60 ft., it fires a seed pod at them "which hits like a heavy crossbow fired by a champion." If it hits, the pod "will try to penetrate armor like a two die monster." See, this is *not* a D&D mechanic, and no explanation of what it means is given.
If you get hit, you pass out immediately, and if someone else doesn't slap Cure Disease (a 3rd-level cleric spell) on you, then you die in 1d6+1 "melee turns" (so, rounds?). It isn't a bad design, but each plant has multiple pods and a Champion hits a lot more reliably than a 1 HD monster. The no-save death mechanic if when it hits is going to be frustrating for the players. I like the concept of a "missile turret" plant, though, so this is going on my "Maybe with a redesign" pile.
Oh wait, I almost forgot the truly broken part. Plink plants are only encountered in their lair, and are found in numbers of 10d10 (so an average of 55 plants per "lair"). This means the 1st-level party is likely to stumble across clumps of plink plants, thus enduring multiple volleys of death-pods fired by 7th-level fighters every round. Brutal...
>> Weakling
Created by Sean Cleary, these Humanoid-type creatures "...look like small, narrow-limbed monkeys. A red one is a person who has been polymorphed into a weakling; black ones are second generation weaklings." Ohh-kay... what color are first-generation weaklings? This baffling sentence has no relation to any other aspect of the monster. It's likely a stray bong-thought.
Now, weaklings come with scalable HD; in this case, they go from 1 to 15. That's quite a range. They are super-geniuses (18 INT) and incredibly quick (18 DEX), and they love traps and can activate them at will. A weakling only has 4 or less STR, and "half its original level in hit points." I assume that means it has 1/2 HD (i.e., 1–4 hp) per level, but you could also read it as 1 hit point per level/2. It appears on all 13 dungeon level encounter tables, so I don't know what the hell's going on here. In any case, the presumption is that it hits like a monster of the appropriate level.
It "bungles" spells cast against it (i.e., reflects them back on the caster), or dispels them altogether, requiring the DM to calculate a complex formula on the fly each time: "Exponent = (Level /10) + 1; Bungle = 1 / (2**Exponent) [where ** means "raised to the power of"]; Dispel = Bungle." Look, this game was invented by math-nerds; it's hard to get mad at stuff like this. But it's obviously impractical for the average DM to manage.
Worse, the bungle effect also affects magical weapons, wands, and staves. The weakling gets 2 melee attacks in which it tries to touch a character's magic items and bungle them, which sort of energizes the item. When the weakling is slain, the item "discharges all its powers into the surrounding area. Anyone caught thusly must defend against all the magical attacks and is subject to all the damage."
Hard pass all around.
>> Worm, Mind a.k.a. Mind Worm
Another Dave Hargrave creature, this tiny, transparent worm hides on loot and can hardly be seen. When the person carrying it sleeps, the worm uses its anesthetic bite (sounds familiar) and bores into the victim's brain in 1 hour. It slowly eats the brain, assuming the cranial functions of the consumed areas. The victim acts (mostly) normal until the entire brain is eaten, at which time both host and worm die. Oh, the whole time their brain is being eaten, the victim is pooping out little wormlets to continue the beautiful cycle of nature.
No method of detection or elimination is given, though the worm is given an attack ("1 Special") for "0" damage. How does one even run this?
"Oh hey, John; your character falls over dead. Why? Well, last night while you were sleeping, a worm crawled out of your loot bag and into your brain, and then ate it. What's that? No, it was almost-invisible, so you didn't notice it clinging to that sapphire you took. A roll? No, there's no roll to detect it. Saving throw? No, not really."
Again, this is more of a parasitic infestation than a monster, and an ill-advised "Gotcha!" monster at that. Pass on the Mind Worm, but I'm still keeping the concept of a brain-eating worm as a hazard in my megadungeon.
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That's it for the level 1 monsters from ATWM volume I. I've decided to adapt three of these for the Gwarnath bestiary: the Kill-Kill, the Mind Maggot, and the Plink Plant.
>> Kill-Kill
I kept this one mainly because I like the name a lot, but I've been using some swarm mechanics in my tabletop game recently and thought this would be a cool way to convert the original idea of this monster. It was a neat idea from 5e (or maybe earlier?) to treat masses of small creatures as a single organism with an area attack, and pretty easy to adapt for 1e.
To the right is the original ATWM I stat block. Not much to go on other than they are encountered as a swarm of green rats with sharp teeth and an big appetite. When encountered in a lair, there can be up to 2,000 of them (with decent treasure). It's not clear whether each kill-kill is meant to have 1-4 HD, or a swarm does (knowing ATWM, it's each; the individual attack and single point of damage is a clue that it was, I suppose, though a 4 HD kill-kill only doing 1 damage also seems silly).
According to the original numbers, an average ATWM "pack" of kill-kills would contain 105 creatures with 2.5 hit dice (~9-10 hp ea.) Granted, a nice fireball would take care of the lot, but this is a Level 1 monster, so... An encounter with a group of these is going to generate a lot of mindless dice-rolling which I don't like, particularly.
To the right is my adapted version. I kept the variable hit dice, but clarify it as the swarm's total HD rather than for individuals. I also removed the lair probability and treasure, as I want them to only be encountered as a roving swarm. As a reference for the swarm attack mechanics, I remembered the quippers in the Fiend Folio as being AD&D's version of piranhas, so I started there.
Quippers are encountered in schools of 5d10 or even up to 10d10, but only 20 can attack the same target at the same time (that's a sensible limiter). There's a chance they don't attack swimmers immediately, but when they do, the DM is to roll a random percentage of the school that attacks, then make that number of attacks against one or more party members (up to the 20 per victim limit). If all attacks miss, the school may not bother continuing the attack; if they do hit, the entire school attacks.
This sort of lazy, math-intensive attitude to feeding doesn't really sync up with the kill-kill's description, so I opted with making a single attack roll, representing dozens of swarming kill-kills, against each character (or other creature) within an area-size based on the swarm's HD. I then give a damage dice range depending on swarm size that decreases as a kill-kill swarm's hit points are reduced. This version also provides a means for the swarm to rejuvenate over time, and ties the kill-kills' immunity to "mental and emotional spells and powers" to their mindless appetite.
>> MIND MAGGOT
I decided to combine the mind maggot and the mind worm into a single creature. I like the basic idea of a mental parasite, and each monster version has pros and cons. I prefer the name "mind maggot" to "mind worm" (it's alliterative and sounds more mutant-y), and I like the mind maggot's initial attack form better, but the mind worm's effect and motivation are way cooler. Here are the original versions:
The original mind maggot has a difficult-to-detect attack that eventually kills its victim, and its an "evil curse" somehow, so the obvious Cure Disease doesn't work to get rid of it. You're pretty much F'd in the A if you contract one of these at low level. The mind worm has a dumb and pointless method of infestation, but its attack is much more interesting, basically turning the infested character into a mindless automaton under the control of worm, like an inside-out doppelganger. The victim acts peculiarly as the worm takes over (I can only think of Vincent D'Onofrio's marvelous Edgar in Men in Black), so it provides for the possibility that a savvy party could figure out what's up and save the victim.
My version combines the mind maggot's essential attack with the effect of the mind worm's infestation, and then applies the mechanical logic of the classic rot grub to fill in the blanks. I also extended the infestation period and applied a saving throw to extend it even further, so as to allow time for a party to realize they have a problem and come up with a solution. Again, this is supposed to be a Level 1 monster and a low-level party probably doesn't have access to (or can't afford) Cure Disease yet, so I think it's fair to give them a fighting chance to do something.
>> Plink Plant
I like this one because it's a decent plant monster with a Gamma World-sounding name and a ranged attack form, which is always a nice twist on an encounter. Touching the characters at a distance (esp. when casters are also targets) can instill a little chaos and panic in an unprepared party.
From the description, I'm guessing the reference to heavy crossbow is for determining attack modifiers vs. armor class, as the plant's 60' sensory range is within short range of both light and heavy crossbows. A Champion is a 7th-level fighter, which definitely rolls on a better attack matrix than a 1 HD monster does (with an effective THAC0 of 14). Does it have to hit first and then roll to hit again as 2 HD "armor penetration?" Who knows? ATWM is all over the map.
My version clarifies some of these issues, giving the plant a single attack as a 2 HD creature. Since this is a fatal attack unless the low-level party has access to Cure Disease (same problem as above), then a 7th-level fighter's to-hit score seems overly harsh for a Level 1 monster. I also gave the plant a more thorough physical description than the original version, and permitted a saving throw to resist the pod's effect, but it otherwise remains fairly accurate to the original; moreso than the others anyway.
Well, one major deviation is the treasure. The original has Treasure Type A, which is the second-best in AD&D. That seems a bit excessive for a patch of immobile plants, so I left it up to the DM to decide based on the circumstances of the encounter. I can totally see the justification for a big treasure haul near a dungeon site or civilized area, but Type A may not make sense if encountered in the uninhabited wilderness.
Another big deviation is the creature's Level/XP values. The ATWM plink plant is listed as a Level 1 monster, but its precise ranged attack and deadly effect bumped its XP range to the Level 2 table (similar to how larger kill-kill swarms are on higher level tables).
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I'm pleased with how this first batch turned out. They'll make good, interesting encounters for my low-level Gwarnath explorers. I can see swarms of kill-kills roaming the city ruins and the broken cellars. Plink plant patches dot the outskirts of the city, on the edge of the Plateau of Jiin. Meanwhile, mind worms squirm along the cavernous ceilings below.
Part 2 of this series will deal with the Level 1 monsters found in ATWM Vol. II. There are quite a few more in this volume, and some of them get really weird.
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