Below Gwarnath: Bestiary – Converting "All the Worlds' Monsters" to OSRIC (Part 3)

 

Continuing my series of posts about the conversion of entries from Chaosiums' All the Worlds' Monsters, a 3-volume set of creatures published in the late 70s.

Part 1 | Part 2

This post will deal with the level 1* creatures from ATWM Volume III (*according to the internal logic of whatever game ATWM is playing... so far, I've found little correlation between AD&D's standards and ATWM's outcomes). The creatures on that list are as follows:

• Cuddle
• Death Seed 
• Demon, Succubus (Simplistic)
• Demon, Basic (0th Level)
• Demon, Basic (1st Level)
• Dingo
• Four-Eyed Hig
• Golem, Mud
• Hell Sprite
• Hush Puppy
• Khirra
• Possessor
• Titterer

There's a few interesting ones here on quick read-through, so hopes are high that I can pull some decent monsters out of this batch. I have encountered hush puppies and hell sprites in my capacity as a player back in the 80s, whilst adventuring in the depths of the mega-dungeon, Darconea. Let's get to it...

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... 

Below Gwarnath: Bestiary – Converting "All the Worlds' Monsters" to OSRIC (Part 1)

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 Worlds' Monsters" from 70s-era Chaosium.

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 books were landscape-oriented, written in all-caps, dot matrix letters, and featured crude ink drawings of some (but not many) of the crazy creatures. The stat blocks (example at right) were atypical of D&D, most notably featuring dice ranges for Intelligence and Dexterity, and frequent use of non-d8 Hit Dice that sometimes scaled to make the monster tougher. The stat blocks include details on encountering the creature (lair, wandering, treasure type, etc.) Armor Class is sometimes also a range, or has unexplained modifiers.

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...

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 9 (#Dungeon23)

As I feared, the most difficult part of the #Dungeon23 project (for me) isn't writing a room every day, it's posting the work on a timely basis. 

Between spring landscaping projects, freelance writing projects, and running two D&D campaigns (one weekly campaign online and one bi-weekly campaign irl), most of my free time is spent creating the D23 content. The content is done, I just haven't had much extra time to post it to the blog.

This posting (for week #9) still puts me a full week (#10) behind, which becomes two weeks if I don't post again by this weekend (the current week is #11). My goal is to finish this week's rooms, take pictures of my completed pages, transcribe the pages into a doc, and then post the last two weeks by this weekend (or early next week). That will completely catch me up. I predict falling behind again, though.

I'm fairly pleased with the development of the dungeon so far (one-fifth of the total). It's holding my daily creative interest, and I've sketched out the entire thing in broad strokes, so that's a great sign for being able to complete it.

I was trying to create Tunnels Beneath the Earth completely from scratch (stealing just a few unused ideas from old notebooks which seemed to fit the theme), but elements from my Deep Vaults megadungeon concept began bleeding heavily into TuBE. I finally came to terms with the fact that I will likely never get around to finishing DV, so I may as well just merge the two concepts together.

It's not a wholesale union; the factions are all different, for example, and TuBE's scale utterly dwarfs DV's, but I'm stealing many of the sci-fantasy elements I liked from DV (particularly the crystals and some of the weird technology). I introduced a bit of that material in Level 3 (starting this week), and I started calling the "impervious blue metal" by its new, super-obvious name: impervium.

I have some regrets about how I structured the dungeon at the beginning. I wasn't thinking about the calendar dates; I was looking at the project as 7 rooms per section, with 52 sections total over 12 levels. I did not take into account that each month doesn't have 28 days (only one does, in fact...who knew??).  I don't want to just switch over to the calendar-less format because I like the conceit of having a monthly level theme.

This isn't that big a deal, structurally, but it means most of the weekly blog postings will cover pieces of two different sections, instead of one clean section at a time. Then at the end of the month, I have to add 2-3 "bonus" rooms to close out the calendar month/dungeon level.

If I could do it over, I would key my rooms to the calendar date. I think a lot of people did it that way, but I am dumb and took a weird approach to the structure. I may try to fix that situation here shortly.

On to Week 9. Fingers crossed I can get everything else posted by the weekend...

__________

"The Upper Caves"
Level 2 (FEB) – The Caves Between
Section 4, Cont. (02/22 – 02/28)

Scale: Each square = 20x20 ft.

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 5 (#Dungeon23)

"Bonus Rooms (The Crypts)"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Addition to Section 4 (1/29 – 1/31)

Tunnels Beneath the Earth — Week 4 (#Dungeon23)

"The Crypts"
Level 1 (JAN) – The Upper Works
Section 4 (1/22 – 1/28)