Below Gwarnath: Bestiary – Converting "All the Worlds' Monsters" to OSRIC (Part 2)

Continuing my series of posts about the conversion of entries from the old-school collection of creatures known as All the Worlds' Monsters, a 3-volume set published by Chaosium back in the late 70s. They're full of gonzo, often-overpowered monsters designed by some of the celebrities of the golden age of gaming. Part 1 goes into more of the history of these books.

They were such a huge part of my gaming past, so when building my stocking tables for the Gwarnath mega-dungeon, I decided to parse through each volume, pick out the best monsters, and convert them to OSRIC. Part 1 handled the Level 1 monsters from Volume I, so this post will discuss the Level 1 monsters from Volume II.

There are substantially more Level 1 monsters in Volume II than there were in Volume I, but the quality and usefulness is of the same degree (low-to-medium). From the index, the Level 1 monsters are:

• Beetle, Fire
• Gangbat
• Glitch
• Gremlin
• Helltide
• Imp
• Lert
• Locust
• Pseudowoman
• Raw'yas
• Slesszoyd
• Tate

Obviously, some of these monsters share the same names as those that appear in the AD&D Monster Manual. ATWM Vol. I and the Monster Manual were both published in 1977, with ATWM Vol. II being published in 1979. Many of the monsters in all three ATWM volumes originated in other, pre-1977 sources, or were from homebrew campaigns that existed between OD&D and AD&D, so it's not surprising that some of them share the same name. Let's have a look... 

Bugspittle's Hive

Bryce over at tenfootpole.org reviewed The Heart of St. Althus and gave it a "The Best" ranking. Pretty pleased about that, as this adventure was a lot of fun to design and run. He had a lot of nice things to say about it, so be sure to check out his review.

I'm hard at work on the latest adventure I intend to publish, titled Bugspittle's Hive. The basic premise is that a malevolent faerie wanders the earth, occasionally settling in one place to torment and murder local humans, before moving on again. He lives in a magical mound that he can transport with him on his travels, a lair that combines the comforts of a country manor with the winding tunnels and caves of a subterranean insect hive. Dwelling with him are a slew of magical, fey-infused insects that do his bidding, for Bugspittle created them and can control them. The evil creature has recently settled in a spot near to the party's current location, and his actions have attracted the attention of the characters somehow (various hooks are provided).

This adventure is around 15–16 years old, and was part of my 20-year King's Realm campaign , a pastiche of Arthurian legend, Northern European/Scandinavian folklore, and Church of England-style monotheism. The party in that campaign became embroiled in a religious mystery that would ultimately reveal the ancient pagan roots of the king's throne, and its connection to the faerie realm. The party's investigations led them to confront Bugspittle in his lair, though he was only a middling piece of the larger plot, which involved much greater powers.

Below is the original map for the adventure, just a quick isometric sketch for my personal use at the table. I always intended to draw a proper map, but we arrived at the adventure before I had time to do another version, and then the party made short work of the place, so I never bothered doing it. Years later, I expanded the basic idea for my 5e tabletop campaign, placing Bugspittle's lair as a site deep within the Gloomy Forest hexcrawl map. In this campaign, Bugspittle had a relationship with Etta Capp, the spider-matron of Etta Capp's Cottage, but the party never discovered his mound.

The premise for the original adventure came from reading about the Filipino fairy spirit called the Nuno sa Punso – the "Ancestor of the Mound." He is a temperamental spirit that lives in anthills and termite mounds, and inflicts terrible punishment on anyone who disturbs his mound. Superstitious Filipino farmers know never to plow through an anthill, for fear of angering the Nuno. 

The Nuno curses his clumsy victims by spitting on them. The enchanted sputum causes the afflicted area to swell painfully (like a fire ant bite, I reckon). The curse then expands to other areas of the body, causing a variety of horrible symptoms like high fever, aches and swelling of the extremities, bloody vomit, and black urine. 

I thought the idea of an evil/angry fairy who lived in a hive and manipulated insects was a neat idea, so I borrowed it for my campaign. I converted him to more of a traditional, European-style fairy, and named him Nunyo Bugspittle to honor his origin (and mode of punishment).

When I decided to start publishing some of my old adventures, this one immediately made the list as it's very different from a lot of my other work. In reviewing the original materials and the expansion notes, I decided that the expansion was too much. Realizing the original was just about the perfect size, I decided to revert to that version with just a few extra ideas thrown in (the best few bits of the expansion material).

I don't yet have a firm release date in mind, though sometime by the end of July/early August would be good. The adventure's conversion to OSRIC is complete and a first draft of the write-up is about 90% done. I've finished the first round of new maps as well, though I have more to add and touch up. I'm also working on some original art for the adventure: A cover piece depicting Bugspittle's mound, and several interior illustrations of Bugspittle and his fey-bugs. My timeline may be a bit ambitious as real-life work projects are chewing up a lot of my time (and writing output), but I think it's possible.

Here's a preview of the new maps...

Below Gwarnath – Map Generation Walk-through (Part 1)

As I'm finishing up the final sections of Level 1 of the Gwarnath mega-dungeon, I thought it might be fun and possibly useful to record the series of rolls I made to generate the dungeon from the tables in OSRIC. This is what I have generated so far...

I have zones O and P to complete on the Level 1 map, so this walk-through will be for zone O. As you can tell from the image below, most of the zones surrounding it are completed, so most of the routes into this zone are already set (lettered A-G in the order that I progressed to generate the dungeon). 

Zooming in to zone O, I decided to start in the north-west corner (the 10-ft. wide open passage from zone K marked 'A'). I'm using cardinal directions when referring to the extant map, but while generating the dungeon, directional descriptions become a little more complicated. The dungeon generation tables were built to facilitate solo play, so everything is oriented to how the solo player perceives the dungeon unfolding before them as they explore. Thus, the tables use the terms "left" and "right" to describe the dungeon from the solo player's direction of travel. In this case, the "player" would be traveling south down corridor A. From their perspective, "left" is west, "right" is east, "ahead" is south, and "behind" is north.

As corridor A is a continuing passage, we will roll on Table 18: General (in OSRIC) or on TABLE I.: PERIODIC CHECK (in the DMG). Both versions use a d20 to determine results, with some variations in % and outcome, but roughly the same format. 

We're using OSRIC v2 for these rolls with a few personal modifications, which I'll discuss as we go. The result of the d20 roll is a '15' = "Stairs." The table indicates that there is an immediate follow-up roll on Table 13: Stairs. A quick d20 roll on that table results in a '7' = "Stairs down 3 levels."

Since the first roll indicates "what's next" after the end of the continuing passage ('A'), I simply add 20 ft. to the passage length so as to accommodate the stairs, and then close off the end. I drop in the lines (which are 11 pixels wide, centered on the 1 pixel grid line – so 5 pixels to either side of the grid line). To draw the dungeon walls, I create an 11x11-pixel square using the rectangular marquee tool, filled with black, then I stretch the square to the desired length using the transform tool. This gives me a nice, consistent solid line that lets me line up and connect various wall segments, quickly and easily. For caves, I use an 11-pixel brush and free-hand the contours using Ctrl+mouse clicks.

Once the walls are set, I add a mask and insert the stairs icons, along with a key note to myself that these stairs go down 3 levels to level 4 (the 'v' is a directional indicator, not a letter). These results end this particular route into zone O, so we move on to the next access route 90 ft. to the east (labeled 'B').