Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6240414" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 352: February 2007part 4/6Monsters of Bas-lag: And now we have the more bizarre creatures. Actually, many of them seem quite PC-appropriate too, but with monster HD and higher LA adjustments, you'll have to play at higher level to include them in a party. As usual, it all depends on how much of a challenge you want as a DM, and if everyone being a special snowflake annoys you or not. Anophelii are another heavily gender-dimorphous race that struggle to maintain a civilisation because of it. Like real world mosquitos, the females drink blood ravenously while the males are mostly vegetarians, and since the females are also far stronger and more aggressive, you have to tread carefully if you don't want to become their next meal. Understandably, they've been driven almost to extinction and confined to a single island. Maybe with a little more evolution they'll be able to create a functional society again in the future. Garuda are freedom obsessed bird-people who soar over the coasts and deserts. They can be both deadly hunters, and just about fit into mixed species cities, although they have to deal with some discrimination. Just need to find a job that doesn't involve lots of time spent indoors at a desk, as like most other bird-people they can get claustrophobic. Grindylow are enormous-jawed eel people who can also float slowly through the air, and like to capture people for magical experiments. They're more than scary enough to have myths grow up around them, since very few people escape if they venture into their territory. Handlingers are basically detached hands that fuse with people and take over their bodies, eventually killing them. The right-handed ones are more physically powerful, but the left-handed ones are the bosses. They put a particularly interesting spin on an invasion of the body-snatchers scenario. If you see one scuttling around, stomp it pronto and inspect your family for any odd lumps under their clothes. Scabmettlers are almost human, but have blood that clots almost instantaneously into incredibly hard scabs when cut. They can use this to create incredibly intricate and effective body art, and even tools, but have to regulate their diet carefully to keep their blood from clotting while still inside and killing them. This leads them to be stoic and patient, and very disciplined warriors, for those who don't take good care of themselves get weeded out pretty quickly. Another good example of how a small change in capability can massively affect both individual personalities and a society. Slakemoths are dream-eating monstrosities that can grow to horse size, yet still squeeze into your house through tiny gaps. With hypnotic wings and considerable physical power, they take very specialised equipment to hunt involving mirrored helmets on your head and powerful ranged weaponry. Perfect X-files material. Weavers are giant spiders from another universe that can predict the future and manipulate the threads of fate to exercise scary amounts of control over it. This perspective obviously makes them very hard to understand and communicate with from a human PoV, and trying to negotiate with one is a dicey business. Just like any oracle then. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  Wyrmen are your basic little flying gremlin thingies, scooting around, serving as (unreliable) messengers, and generally being vulgar and mischievous. Some fantasy creatures don't need all that adaption to fit in here. So not all the ideas in here are original, but most have more than enough good spin to be interesting and distinctive in flavour.</blockquote>

Verification