D&D 1E Changes to Monsters: 1e through 4e

[Dragonbait]

I once described orc to a friend of mine as a "6 foot tall green anti-social Miss Piggy".

Heck, I think there was an old dragon magazine ariticle featuring orcs (in the #60's somewhere) that hinted at a "Mys Pyggui" orc goddess of love and beauty.

Did they team up with bullywugs?

 

[Jhaelen]

Some background flavour for berbalang

Ha! Thanks for the link. Very interesting.

For some reason, reading that, I was reminded of another odd Fiend Folio original: The penanggalan. After googling, I found the following:

The penanggalan of Malaysia according to the folklore of that region, the Penanggalan is a detached female head that is capable of flying about on its own. As it flies, the stomach and entrails dangle below it, and these organs twinkle like fireflies as the Penanggalan moves through the night.

Funny!

 

[hamishspence]

Oriental Adventures had it.

Book is hard to find now. Think some beasties and concepts from it will make it into 4th?

 

[pogminky]

I meant that orcs/orcus have stopped being pig headed - at least as far as the 4e MM art goes.

 

[Bolongo]

I meant that orcs/orcus have stopped being pig headed - at least as far as the 4e MM art goes.

Orcus has always had a ram's head AFAIK.

 

[GQuail]

i compared the two monsters side by side. The 1e monster had 1 Hit Die; 4e is a Level 10 Solo Skirmisher with 408 hit points!

Big difference there.

This isn't just C-listers, of course: Drow, Githyanki, Githzerai and Ogres all go from being low level threats to being primarilly in the teens. Even Orcs have one level 3 stat-block in 4E, and a few at level 4: making them masterminds at best for 1st level heroes. There's been a lot of shifts

What this does in practice, though, is cast villains at levels more appropriate to how they are actually used. Githyanki are an extraplanar race as written, so what's the point of having them available for starting players to fight? They're going to need to get into the Astral Plane/Sea before they cross silver swords with them, so the stats in the 4E monster manual feature Githyanki at the sort of level players might start dabbling in planar travel. The classic 1E Drow adventures were for mid-level characters: D1 is for 9th-14th level charactrs, yeah? So the same principle is in use: the Drow get cast at levels 11-15 in the 4E MM.

Frankly, if there os one problem I have with the MM in 3rd Ed, it's the amount of monsters stacked near the bottom of the CR lists. I'm running a game at ECL 18 right now, and short of piling on templates or class levels there's very little I can pull out for my PCs: out of the book the amount of decent challenges are pretty few. Combine that with the design blog on Wizards site way back complaining about building Drow as NPCs for an adventure, and how their lack of HD for their CR made them pretty flimsy.... I think the decision to kick some monsters up the level list is a very purposeful and probably quite practical move. The Berbelang and his psychic duplicates now stand out more as a level 10 bad boy than they did when they were just one of a hundred 1HD critters.