20 Interesting Things from Monster Manual 2

[Drkfathr1]

Yeah but... well, consider me less impressed.

The "you get full residue unless you actually fed the item to the monster to abuse this rule, in which case you only get the standard one fifth" rule is a kludge pure and simple.

Atleast they could have bothered to come up with a semi-believable explanation why Rust Monster poop is less valuable in captivity than when it gets to eat the stuff you don't want it to.

But would it kill the PCs to have their stuff lose a point of plus (five levels)? No, it wouldn't. And it would keep up the RMs reputation.

(And, incidentally, it would solve the "I can't enchant stuff above my level" problem; because it's rather unlikely for an adventurer to carry around a level+6 item.)

Cheers,
Zapp

I guess its fairly easy to explain by keeping in mind that if you kill it, you remove the residue from its stomach...before it's gone through the digestive tract. However, if you wait for things to work through the full digestive tract, the beast absorbs most of it to fuel its weird magical metabolism. Thus only a much smaller amount from the feces.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

The Insane Noble is a perfectly fine NPC, weird but yeah, I can see it!
Such raving regal kooks are a staple of fantasy AND history...Caligula, eh?

 

[Obryn]

Guys, I think we're starting to lose sight of the real issue here, which is whether or not swamps are generally dismal.

Seriously, get this thread back on track!

-O

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Wetlands in general strike me as humid, insect-filled, and hazardous to city-folk such as myself. I am aware that to some folks, swamps are beautiful parts of nature, but I am not one of those folks. I'm much happier with Internet cafes and bookstores. Your opinion isn't wrong -- I just don't share it.

Apart from that, there is a certain literary tendency in fantasy and horror to see swamps as dark and dismal. The monster is more likely to live in a swamp than on rolling farmland. There is no more literal validity in that then in the pretense that wolves are evil or that you can stop volcanoes with sacrifices, of course.

Seeing swamps as dark and dismal probably has several sources. First, since swamps are very different depending upon where you are, it is quite possible that the swamps that inspired that view are different from the everglades. Our literary heritage has a lot of england in it, after all, and dark, dismal descriptions of swamps and swampy moorland seem to be de riguer in Sherlock Holmes stories--and Charlotte or Emily Bronte novels, etc. (Such descriptions are also standard in Solomon Kane stories, but I don't think Robert Howard is writing from firsthand experience).

The second is that things are very different if you are traveling through a swamp in (or on your way to or from) a nice, air conditioned car within easy reach of modern medical facilities and sleeping in a light, waterproof tent with mosquito netting than if you aren't. Even rubber boots are a relatively new invention. When you spent days traveling through a mosquito infested swamp along bad roads (which the swamps only made worse) risking diseases that were not easily treatable, wearing boots that were not entirely waterproof, and slept in a tent that didn't keep the bugs out, I imagine that you would come to a rather different conclusion about what kind of places swamps are.

Even more so, if you had been disarmed by your government and would have to fend off whatever dangerous animals might decide to see if you taste good with a only your walking stick.

 

[amethal]

I went to college with a girl who grew up halfway between Valhalla, N.C. and the Great Dismal Swamp.

My next character will definitely have been born halfway between Valhalla and the Great Dismal Swamp.

 

[DreadPirateMurphy]

[joke over head]*vroom* Swamp Thing *vroom*[/joke over head]

No, no, I got it. The post was just an opportune place to hit reply.