?? about Clockwork Horrors

[Mouseferatu]

Okay, I know these creatures appeared somewhere prior to the Monster Manual 2. Was it Chainmail? Spelljammer? Somewhere else?

In any case, can someone tell me if their original source gave more info on their background/nature/objectives/creation than the MM2 does? And if so, could you summarize for me?

Thanks in advance.

 

[El Ravager]

I don't know of any appearance in 3E, but they were in the 2E Monster Compendium Volume 4. The Clockwork Horrors were pretty cool, but I thought the Clock Swordsman was cooler. I don't have any other monster compendium from 2E, but that book had some funky stuff - robot spiders, aliens, golems made of maggots and a race of intelligent squirrels.

I forgot how cool that book was.

I never got to use half the monsters in their I wanted.

=====
El Rav

 

[Richards]

To clarify El Ravager's reply a little, he's referring to the Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume 4, but before that the clockwork horrors appeared in Monstrous Compendium 6 (the hole-punched insert pages). The two write-ups were virtually identical, and the creatures were from the Spelljammer setting.

According to the "Habitat/Society" entry (don't you miss those?), the clockwork horrors were created by an unknown race called "the Lost Ones," who were fond of mechanisms. Too fond, as it turns out: an adamantite machine of their creation gained sentience and mystical power and destroyed the race. It then created the other clockwork horrors (platinum, gold, electrum, silver, and copper), who proceeded to tear apart entire worlds in their crystal sphere and use the raw materials to create more of themselves. They would have been confined to their own crystal sphere had a fleet of neogi ships not entered the system. After taking over the neogi fleet, the clockwork horrors were free to expand to other crystal spheres. They can apparently strip a planet of all of its metallic resources in a couple of centuries.

Kind of Borgish for a bunch of spider robots, huh? (Or, more precisely, von Neumann machine-ish, as they apparently don't convert lifeforms into copies of themselves like the Borg do.)

Johnathan

 

[Torx]

It was also in the first Spelljammer Monstrous Compendium (I don't have it with me, so I don't remember the number, MC7 or something) for 2e. It had the full gamut of clockwork horrows, something like five different varieties.

As for the rest of the compendium it was eh.... It had some very cool stuff, some stuff easily translatable to other games (mostly the races found in other sources, like the Spacefarer's Handbook), but most of it was very Spelljammer specific - and not a wide variety therein. If you were running a Spelljammer game, there were only so many encounters possible depending on the level and the terrain. It had the tendancy to get real old real fast.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Thanks, everyone. And especially Richards; that was exactly the info I needed.

(And yes, I do miss the habitat/society bits, though I understand why they cut 'em...)