Best 3E era monsters?

[Celebrim]

That's a rather extreme assumption. I didn't intend to imply that nothing should be completely alien. But neither does everything from the inner planes have to be a completely alien, incomprehensible enigma. Anthropomorphic glimmerskins interest me. Anthropmorphic xag-ya do not.

Fair enough I suppose.

Fire learned what it was when it first encountered ash.

No, it learned what ash was. The best you could say is that in knowing ash, fire learned it's future. But, in the terms of an elemental, even that is not clear. There is no particular reason that the elemental plane of fire shouldn't burn forever, and it certainly does it without fuel or air. Fire, as an elemental, doesn't need anything but itself to exist.

(Fire in our world is not elemental. This fact creates difficulty in understanding elemental fire. You'd probably never say, 'Sodium learned what it was when it first encountered potasium.')

No. It's like a cubic centimeter of steel buried inside three square miles of steel not knowing what metal is.

A cubic centimeter of steel buried inside three square miles of steel doesn't know alot of things. But it does know what steel is. In fact, that's pretty much all it knows. Explaining what steel was to it would be easy. It would answer, "Oh, you mean like all this stuff." But explaining to it what wasn't steel would be tough. You'd try to explain what water was, and you'd have to say, "It's like steel but softer." The responce would be, "What's this 'soft' you speak of?" That would be hard to explain to something that had never known anything but steel.

That's a pretty good analogy of a fire elemental's situation, but it doesn't come close to the existence of a glimmerskin. A glimmerskin is like the cubic centimeter of steel not having a unique identity. It's like a drop of water in an ocean of water.

Which doesn't mean that a droplet of sentient water forever in communion with the ocean doesn't know what water is.

But it was my intention to be helpful, not to start a flame war.

Looking back, I see that I took your attempt to be helpful as an insulting presumption that I lacked creativity or intelligence and hense needed your help.

A fire elemental who confronted water would not cease to be an elemental. That seems a strange idea.

When the elemental becomes mixed with something else, it ceases to be elemental. Elemental things are defined by thier purity. Elemental oxygen is pure oxygen. Elemental sodium is pure sodium. When an elemental thing confronts something else, it must remain apart or else cease to be what it is. Fire cannot confront water without both of them becoming something different.

You don't read many fairy tales do you?

Whether they are additive or subtractive is not important.

Because of enthropy, there is no such thing as an additive parasite in our experience. But on the positive elemental plane, they don't experience enthropy. Hense, a symbiote creature from the positive elemental plane doesn't exactly fit within our existing vocabulary.

Good is not associated with the Positive Energy Plane in any fashion.

Now that is an argument for another day. It would be rather difficult to argue the reverse - that the negative energy plane is not associated with evil in any fashion.

The plane has no alignment traits, and all of its native inhabitants are neutral. Good deities prefer to heal than to harm, and good deities prefer to rid the world of soul-sucking horrors.

You mean the ones from the negative energy plane?

It is part of nature, just as negative energy is. Both forms of energy are vital for the cycle of nature to continue. Both types of energy can be harmful or beneficial, depending on the situation. Neither type of energy is safe if you're exposed to too much of it.

So spake a nuetrally aligned deity. But, it isn't necessarily the goal of good aligned dieties to see a cycle of nature continue. They don't aim for balance or stasis. Rather, they hope at some point to see the cycle broken and eternal goodness reign. In parallel, the evil deities also want to see the cycle broken, but broken in a negative way and eternal evil reign.

Are you completely positive that the negative and positive energy planes have nothing to do with this?

I have had no problems explaining this in the past.

I'm sure you didn't. Do you think that this means that I'm more obtuse than anyone else you've spoken too?

 

[DMH]

Dragon Annual #5 has a 3E Ecology and stats as well.

Your correct, it is 3.0 and not 2nd ed. It is still a great ecology written in the old style.

 

[Kunimatyu]

I'd just like to chime in again and say that the Boneclaw is an amazingly fun undead -- I generally set my Boneclaw encounters to the music from the episode of Buffy with the Gentlemen -- to run; it's got the creepy claws, keeps players on their toes(and teaches AoOs really well), and if you Spellstitch or Evolve them and give them touch spells, it gets even more fun.

Also try Spell of Opportunity(Year's Best d20) and Standstill(Expanded Psi Handbook) with advanced Boneclaws for even more goodness. Using the Paragon template makes them into incredibly deadly foes for an epic game, too.