Classic Monsters Revisited: The Shade (MMII)

The Shade first appeared in the AD&D Monster Manual II. It's a curious entry as it's more of a template than an individual creature. The shade is supposed to be built on the chassis of a leveled NPC by simply adding abilities and features to the existing numbers. For extra complexity, the shade's abilities and features vary according to light conditions.

There's a lot of moving parts to this monster. After figuring out the shade's original statistics in life, the DM then has to consult two separate tables in the monster's description to calculate its current scores and powers, which can be altered mid-battle as light conditions change. 

Typical of late-1e and 2e materials, the shade's description suffers from a "wall-of-text" that hides an interesting monster concept behind a lot of superfluous, often-contradictory detail. I'm using this monster in Moormist Manor, but I want to break the original shade down to its core components and then rebuild it into a more-interesting monster for AD&D (plus a 5e version because I haven't decided which ruleset I'm using yet).

Moormist Manor Design Goals

Work continues apace on restoring Moormist Manor—my 80s-era mega-dungeon. As the weather turns cooler and I spend more of my time indoors, I've been experiencing a lot of creative energy around this project and I'm having a (mostly) good time revisiting my past self through the pages of my old notebooks.

Despite this dungeon being a tribute to Tegel Manor, I stupidly decided not to emulate the Judges Guild module's sparse style and concise descriptions. By this point in the late 80s, 2e's storytelling mode was in high gear and, like many would-be authors, I decided this adventure had to be BIG. It couldn't just be a mysterious haunted house on the hill; it needed HISTORY! I wrote a ridiculous amount of background lore in college-ruled notebooks, squeezing two mechanical pencil lines per page line. The text got so dense that the pages became permanently rippled.

This ultimately created a situation in which actually playing the adventure required its own campaign to do justice to the epic scope. My manor wasn't built to drop into and out of like Tegel Manor was; it needed to be THE focus of the campaign. On top of that, I felt like the entire thing had to be scrupulously complete before I was comfortable running it. The idea of creating the manor in broad strokes and then winging the details seemed like madness, and I lacked the confidence in my DMing skills to pull the trigger.

By the time the manor felt "complete" enough to play in the early 90s, it just didn't fit the tone of the low-fantasy, feudal European-style campaign I was running then (and ran until 2012-ish). That campaign was heavily influenced by Arthurian fables, Templar legends, and the cultural friction between early Christianity and pre-European paganism. The manor, on the other hand, was a wonderfully-creative mix of Hammer horror, Saturday morning cartoons, Arduin-style weirdness, and Monty Python-style humor. The two things just didn't work together, so the manor notebooks got tossed into a box (but never forgotten).

As I move forward with updating the material and getting it ready for my Tuesday-night players (perhaps sometime later next year when I resume DM duties), I want to make use of the lessons I've learned over the years since "finishing" it initially, and I want to apply the lessons of the OSR's analysis of early dungeon-building techniques. To help me order my thoughts and keep my work focused and consistent, I've established some goals for myself as I go through this design process.

Spell Saves and Magic Resistance in 5e

My gaming roots lie firmly in Basic D&D and First Edition AD&D, but my gaming sensibilities have changed over the years. The OSR edict: "Rulings, not rules" makes perfect sense to me in theory, and I'm quite certain there are lots of players out there who can work with a DM to make this practical around the table. My longtime Tuesday night players, on the other hand, are...curmudgeonly(?)...to say the least, and any free-form decision I make at the table is likely to provoke a spirited debate from at least one of them. 

We all came out of a local gaming community in the early 80s where the DM was definitely the opponent and the players had to scrape for any possible advantage. The local DMs weren't so much "killers" as they were "sadists"—cunning, cruel, and merciless—so we learned to be confrontational as a strategy. Sometimes it worked (but usually didn't.) Post-session player chatter usually amounted to how bad the latest screw-job was versus how much fun the adventure had been. I mean, surviving to complain about it was its own kind of fun, so I guess that made us masochists.

In any case, one of the things I enjoy about 5e is the reliably-simple core game engine. The mechanics are easy to understand, they provide a good flow through the action economy, and there are just a few sub-systems to learn rather than dozens. My curmudgeonly players get it and, more importantly, they abide by it. It's right there in black and white, where I can point to it and say, "Welp, that's the rule..."

It gives them structure within which to behave, and that takes almost all the pressure off me. I appreciate that and it makes me a more confident DM because in most cases, my players' innate skepticism about everything is soothed by an easy rule reference (even if they still don't necessarily agree).

That said, the official game is barreling off in a direction I don't appreciate: a pablum of high-fantasy nonsense and performative virtue. Much of the inherent "threat" of the game has been outright neutralized as a result because the current designers don't seem to believe characters should ever lose (or even be mildly inconvenienced). This is especially evident in the monster designs, where much of what made the creatures unique, interesting, and/or deadly have been dramatically altered or dropped altogether.

I mentioned the owlbear losing its Hug special attack in a previous post, but some other examples include rust monsters no longer eating magic items, carrion crawlers having a single tentacle attack (and a superfluous bite) instead of eight (!) tentacles, and displacer beasts whose primary defensive ability (displacement) is automatically nullified if they are hit by a single attack during a round. Silliness like that abounds, turning many 5e monsters into the much-maligned "boring bag of hit points."

Broadly, one of the most awesome monster abilities in 1e was magic resistance. Back in the day, it was a simple "percentage chance of any spell absolutely failing in the monster's presence." The base percentage indicated the monster's resistance against an 11th-level spellcaster, with a commensurate 5% increase or decrease in the net difference between 11th level and the level of the PC spellcaster. "Thus, a magic resistance of 95% means that a 10th level magic-user has no possibility of affecting the monster with a spell..." That's bad-ass. It certainly made creatures like demons, devils, and powerful undead absolutely terrifying in combat (especially if you are the now-nearly useless magic-user).

On top of that, "(e)ven if a spell does take effect on a magic-resistant creature, the creature is entitled to normal saving throws." So 1e magic resistance provides a potent additional layer of defense, scaled by the percentage listed under the monster's description. Finally, it's "always-on," meaning that your BBEG will be completely ignoring many/most spells. 

One of my favorite D&D images from my absolute favorite artist, the great Erol Otus. In your face, wizard!

This was a huge component of 1e boss fights that has been trivialized to the point where 5e sort of warns DMs against using a single enemy opponent because they won't survive long. But the concept of fantasy heroes uniting to defeat a singular powerful entity in a final, all-or-nothing battle is a staple of heroic fiction. A staple which 5e struggles to support.

Moormist Manor

I drew the picture below in 1984, in Mr. Griffin's 3rd-period American History class. It started as errant scribbling, but by the end I had created an image that would occupy my mental space for nearly four decades.

Lurid Lairs: Owlbear Den

While the Gloomy Forest is a dense, old-growth woodland, it also lies in the highlands of Brackleborn province. The underlying terrain consists of steep-sided hills, with deep valleys running between them. Climbing the hills involves rigorous activity that eats up valuable daylight, meaning the party has tended to follow the maze of gullies, culverts, and channels that characterize the forest at ground level. They haven't quite realized how many areas and encounters are up on the hillsides that they've simply wandered beneath without ever realizing it.

Some of these encounter areas are lairs, the denizens of which populate the wandering encounter tables. If the players can locate a lair and wipe it out, then that creature type might disappear entirely from the tables. While a lair persists, it also generates an additional encounter check if the party wanders within a certain distance of it. Thus, wiping out a lair of monsters can have long-reaching exploration benefits.

I've sprinkled lots of these encounter lairs across the Gloomy Forest map: peryton nests; an awakened grove full of intelligent animals, plants, and myconids; a bullywug village; an ancient cemetery; an ettercap nest; etc. 

One such lair is the following owlbear den, a bit of content I cribbed from my old Frozen North campaign. With a few minor flavor changes from a Viking-style setting to a European/fey one, the content works just as well here. Reusing adventures is something I'd always avoided in the past...no idea why. It saves so much time and effort, and let's me revisit the adventure with a fresh perspective. With the right changes, I've even reused adventures for the original players and they didn't catch on.

As with most monsters in the 5e Monster Manual (particularly the classic monsters), I've had to de-neuter their archetypal special attacks. I don't know why 5e took away some of the core monster abilities (like the owlbear’s classic hug attack, or the rust monster’s ability to eat magic weapons and armor...it just makes no sense). I digress; my owlbears will hug the crap out of you. Changes to the core monster are described below.

Owlbear Den

This is the lair of a sleuth of owlbears—(8) “sows,” (6) juveniles, and a massive “boar.”

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Sessions 4-6)

My regular group only meets from 7-10-ish PM and we always have dinner along with it, so we often only get an hour or so of actual gameplay in and not a whole lot happens. I've condensed the next three gameplay reports into one post to save time and knock out several sessions to catch up to the present-day campaign (the following sessions occurred in May, 2020.)

Previously...

After the party came to the local lord’s attention, he tasked them with entering the Gloomy Forest and rescuing his daughter, Emelia, who has been kidnapped by bandits. The party accepted his mission and set off for the Gloomy Forest along the Gold Road where they encountered a trio of bandits accosting a local hunter. Making short work of the thugs, the party captured one and learned some info about the bandit leadership.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 3)

Previously...

The heroes entered a series of rat tunnels and confronted a “rat-man,” who managed to escape. After rescuing the innkeeper’s son, the party finds some loot as well as clues to a sinister plan, but they are left with more questions than answers.

Session Events

The party returns to the burned-out building to further investigate the clues. There, they suss out a plot to poison the town. The two sealed barrels in the cellar turn out to contain liquid poison — a LOT of it. There are four tunnel exits in the old cellar; the party knows that one leads to the cellar of the inn, while a second tunnel leads to a hidden exit in a culvert on the edge of town. Checking out the other two tunnels, the party follows the third one to a hole that opens deep in the shaft of the town well, just above the water line. The fourth tunnel forks in two directions: one heads toward the bakery and the other toward the keep. Both passages end abruptly, indicating that the tunneling was still in progress.