Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 9279433" data-attributes="member: 6915329">At this point, my backlog has practically run out so I’m going to take a couple of weeks off to take a breather, make some more monsters, and work on my new LU campaign more. Victorian-era magic, tech, and society (minus the discrimination), lots of social unrest because of the $&@* nobility (and most of the PCs are criminals), plus two neighboring countries are at war and there's ongoing colonization of a neighboring plane, which I'm basing very loosely off the Sunset World from Dragon #140--the pre-Far Realms home of the mind flayers (although with things other than mind flayers, since as much as I love aberrations, the illithidae have never been my favorite; when it comes to monsters, I'm a wee bit of a hipster and mind flayers are too mainstream for me <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).Our next Dragon’s Bestiary is by the prolific Gregory Detwiler and is about dungeon monsters. As he puts it, “The ‘perfect dungeon monster’ doesn’t necessarily mean the ‘perfect character-killer.’ Instead, it’s a creature adapted to living in underground environments.” The first two pages are dedicated to describing how creatures adapted for underground living would eat, navigate, reproduce, and so on—a useful tool for many GMs.This particular article, and many of the previous articles, and many 2e monsters in general, goes into detail about what parts of what animal could be used for making mundane and magical items, or how much the young go to. Of this, I’m of two minds—it’s cool to see how fantastic beasts would be used in a fantastic economy, but of course in the real world, too many animals have been hunted to near or total extinction for the exact same reason. And since many of the monsters are intelligent, it brings in the horrors of slavery or collecting trophies from murdered people as well. And I hate the idea of trophy hunting in general (if you’re going to eat the animal you kill, that’s different; if you’re killing it just to stick its head on the wall, that’s gross). On the other hand, D&D monsters are far more powerful than real-world animals (and thus able to defend themselves far better than) and are often a genuine and active threat to people and other creatures around them, and probably a lot of them would collect humanoid bits themselves. So… I have no idea where I was going with this. It’s mostly just a stream of consciousness. What are your thoughts on collecting monster parts?Anyway, here is the tunnermouth dweller, a ginormous toad-thing with a 10-foot-wide mouth. The only way to keep it from swallowing someone whole, the article says, is to jam a pole or polearm in its mouth. You know, considering how many monsters swallow people whole in this game, or have breath weapons, maybe there should be actual rules for jamming things into mouths. Maybe it should be turned into a basic maneuver. You can jam a weapon into a creature’s mouth, and it has to save against your maneuver DC. On a failure, it can’t close its mouth, swallow anything, or use a bite attack or breath weapon. But you lose your weapon whether it fails or succeeds (you can retrieve it later). There’d have to be rules for the size of the creature versus the size of your weapon, probably, since you’re not going to be stopping a dragon from biting you by using a dagger, but it could be done. Ideas?[ATTACH=full]348947[/ATTACH]Tunnelmouth DwellerDragons’ Bestiary, Dragon Magazine #267Creature by Gregory W. Detwiler; art by Bob KlasnichResembling a huge, scaly, eyeless, stone-colored toad, tunnelmouth dwellers are native to deep caverns and dungeons. They are little more than a mouth and stomach, with four short, splayed legs attacked. Their mouths are lined with rows of backwards-facing teeth and are indeed tunnel-like and are ten feet in diameter, which easily takes the entire width of a typical dungeon corridor. Should a creature venture near, flaps on the inside of the tunnelmouth’s mouth dart out to encase the creature and force it down the tunnelmouth’s throat, where it is quickly shredded and then dissolved by stomach acids.Fortunately for subterranean creatures, the tunnelmouth dweller is extremely solitary. They rarely move from their chosen hunting ground, and rarely need to; their metabolism is so slow that they need very little food. They only move to reproduce (females will lay a clutch of eggs and then leave, and a male, smelling the eggs, will approach and fertilize them) or in an attempt to flee a superior foe.Climate/Terrain: temperate, subtropical, tropical; cavern, dungeon, UnderlandTunnelmouth DwellerHuge beast; Challenge 11 (7,200 XP)AC 18 (15 inside of mouth)HP 187 (15d12+90; bloodied 93)Speed 10 ft., swim 20 ft.STR 26 (+7) DEX 7 (-2) CON 22 (+6)INT 2 (-4) WIS 12 (+1) CHA 4 (-3)Proficiency +4; Maneuver DC 19Skills Perception +5, Stealth +2 (+1d6)Damage Resistances cold, fireCondition Immunities blinded, proneSenses tremorsense 60 ft., passive Perception 15Languages —Tunnel-Sized. Creatures have disadvantage on any check made to move through the tunnelmouth’s space, and the tunnelmouth has advantage on opportunity attacks made to attack a creature that is trying to move through its space.ActionsBite. Melee Weapon Attack: +11 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 34 (6d8+7) piercing damage. If the target is a creature, it is grappled (escape DC 19). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained and the tunnelmouth can’t bite a different creature.Swallow. The tunnelmouth makes a bite attack against a Large or smaller creature it is grappling. If the attack hits and the tunnelmouth as not swallowed another creature, the target is swallowed and the grapple ends. A swallowed creature has total cover from attacks from outside the tunnelmouth, is blinded and restrained, and it takes 17 (5d6) acid damage at the start of each of the tunnelmouth’s turns.If a swallowed creature deals 25 or more damage to the tunnelmouth in a single turn, or if the tunnelmouth dies, the tunnelmouth vomits up the creature.</blockquote>

Verification