Monsters of Suck

[warlord]

Three words: Giant Space Hamster

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Gez is my hero of the day. Old concept, but it kicked off the old creative juices all the same. Nicely worded.

Well, for the first time since S3, I can now see using a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Hey, Paizo, reprint ToH1 (with an appropriate cover price) and make my players cry!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Cloakers.

You can use them exactly once, before your players twig and they will never, ever take chances again. If they see a cloak hanging on a hook, they'll set fire to it by default. What kind of stupid idea is the monster that looks like clothing anyway? Much better to use a phasm or a mimic - they can look like anything.

Cloakers. For sure.

Well, you can't use them as trap monsters. If you use them as creepy intelligent cave rays with a strange past, you've got something pretty interesting and not at all suck. But yes, as their name suggests, they were at least partially a trap monster at the start.

 

[Nuclear Platypus]

There are a lot of Spelljammer monsters that deserve to be in this category. I don't mean the lovable weirdos like the giff or the dohwar either.

Things like the gameroid, which was a blatant rip-off from Japanese TV, or the space giant. Sheer suckage there.

But gameroids are really neat cuz gameroids are full of meat and all the kids love gameroids! Sorry, MST3k flashback.

No one's mentioned the black (carnivorous) squirrels from MMII (1E)? Which critter looked like Alfred E. Neuman of MAD Magazine? The catoblepas is kind of a sucky monster but what about that psuedo beholder that was really a spore colony? Oh, and that funky one legged, one armed, one eyed monster from OA. I know its borderline blasphemous considering what it looks like but what about the Thought Eater aka the anorexic platypus? Or was that the quadrapedal brain?

Enough with the freakin' giants too! Someone might confuse them with elves and their messed up family tree.

But the worst artwork ever is the 2E illustration for the Invisible Stalker. The artist had no concept of shading, proportions or even perspective.

 

[jmucchiello]

The flind have also always annoyed me.

Actually this reminds me of an unfavored type: creatures carrying special weapons the party cannot use. The flind had their disarming flindbar. Kuo-toa had the pincer staff (man-catcher). And in earlier editions these kinds of weapons all had ad hoc ways to resolve the disarm or grapple effect.

And I never took kuo-toa seriously after the 1e FF illustration of the fish-headed man in a diaper. The drawing looks like a man in a rubber suit.

 

[BOZ]

I never even heard of a topiary guardian before this thread (except in The Shining ). . .

i'm almost positive that's where they came from. in fact, they partly inspired me to read the book again.

 

[Plane Sailing]

carbuncle

But that was a genuine mythical beast too!

 

[Plane Sailing]

These are okay if played correctly IMO...having been on the receiving end, PCs get peeved because DMs don't tend to play them very fairly (i.e. giving no giveaways that something's up whatsoever, because they so want the wolf-in-sheep's to work, whereas in D&D reality and retrospective player opinion it's done something that would spill a bean or two).

I remember the first time one of my PCs ever came across a 'wolf in sheeps clothing', we were in barrier peaks (I think?). The DM described a rabbit sitting cutely on a stump and my danger sense went off - I cleaved it in two with my mordenkainens blade (getting a massive critical hit and doing about 120 damage - a heck of a lot in 1e, even considering our houserules of the time).

The DM humphed, and showed us the picture of what -would- have happened if we had approached the encounter 'properly'

Cheers

 

[Atavar]

Three words: Giant Space Hamster

Four words: Miniature Giant Space Hamster

 

[ephemeron]

Besides the trap monsters (cloakers et al.) and the monsters with cool weapons that stop being cool when the PC's get them (flinds, kuo-toa, quillans, githyanki...), 1e's legacy also includes a lot of "gotcha" monsters whose main gimmick is being mistaken for something else. The gas spore is the poster, er, fungus, for these. I don't miss them much. I also suspect that a lot of nasty undead started out with "I want something that overconfident players will mistake for something wimpy" (see also OOTS #431 ).