Iconic Adventures: Bad New Monsters?

[Spiteful Dwarf]

I'm a little disappointed so far w. the WOTC official adventures. They're supposed to be the building blocks of taking a character from 1st level to 20th, right? They're supposed to represent all of the great stuff that D&D 3E has to offer, right?

So why do they insist on introducing brand-new (and in my opinion, weakly designed) monsters in adventures that are supposed to showcase the coolness of the monster manual?

I love Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury, but I was extremely dissatisfied w. The Standing Stone and the other adventures that have come out so far, mainly due to their adventure-specific monsters.

Have you looked at the Faux humans of Standing Stone? That aberration in Speaker in Dreams?

I know that some will argue that even the greatest adventures made up new monsters for the PCs to fight, but come on! A moonCALF!? Those batpeople from Deep Horizon? I can only hope that Lord of the Iron Fortress and that other Bruce Cordell adventure can make up for the others...

(P.S: If you need a good dungeon crawl for 3rd lvl PCs, I heartily recommend Forge of Fury. It's really good...)

 

[baseballfury]

I'm a little disappointed so far w. the WOTC official adventures. They're supposed to be the building blocks of taking a character from 1st level to 20th, right? They're supposed to represent all of the great stuff that D&D 3E has to offer, right?

I know that some will argue that even the greatest adventures made up new monsters for the PCs to fight, but come on! A moonCALF!? Those batpeople from Deep Horizon? I can only hope that Lord of the Iron Fortress and that other Bruce Cordell adventure can make up for the others...

(P.S: If you need a good dungeon crawl for 3rd lvl PCs, I heartily recommend Forge of Fury. It's really good...)

You know, that's pretty funny. I hadn't really thought about it, but you are so right. Twig blights (which they even made minis for!) and bat people indeed.

The mooncalf has a really stupid name, though it did give my players a run for their money.

I didn't really care for Forge of Fury personally. Rather dull IMO. Good maps though.

 

[Scarab]

Oh, I found the twig blights quite useful. You see... the twig blights were only small saplings.

Think "thorn hulk" from Diablo 2.

I have an entire plot evolving around this. A band of corrupted druids were breeding twig blights, hoping to grow them into thorn hulks so they can use them to destroy (insert enemy here).

I have some stats for the thorn hulks I think I'll post when I get home.

 

[Maniac]

MoonCalf was definitely a bad name but the monster was cool. I mean come on a giant Cthulhu head with wings, how cool is that.

Lord of the Iron Fortress contains the Steel Predator a sort of iron muscled great cat (Like Colossus from X-men?). It is an OK monster but there is one problem. It is Deaf. It can't hear. It has blindsight because of its sense of smell but it can't hear. Steel predators also speak "a harsh, growling dialect of Terran". In the module, you can even speak with them - just not quite sure how (maybe they can smell your breath?).

M.