Quirin Mythology #1: A Handful of Epic Creatures

[Grum_l]

Let the characters become a part of your own Quirin Saga. Look out for the independent "Quirin Mythology" series. Every issue can be used in your campaign world. Feel free to adapt the material presented here as you see fit to make it work with your campaign.

A Handful of Epic Creatures is a short monster accessory for epic play, containing five new epic creatures. Each has a detailed statistics block, descriptive text, and tactics section, a portrait and several adventure ideas for use.

The Handful of Epic Creatures:

• Unique gargantuan magical beast: Alcorn - the Flying Serpent (CR 28)
• Fine outsider (abomination): the deshayvine (CR 18) and the deshayvine assassin (CR 21)
• Huge outsider (demon): the gomthu (CR 26)
• Unique colossal+ construct: the Milmang, an old divinity draining guardian of the Door to Simit Al (CR 150)
• Colossal giant: the threyclops (CR 28) and the threyclops champion (CR 43)

Additional Features:

• A new armor and shield special ability: tattooed
• Two new magic items: Alcorn's armor and goggles of identification
• A new spell: greater globe of invulnerability
• Five black&white monster portraits
• A black&white item picture

Time for Fun and More!

If you like this product, you might like the Quirin Mythology #2: A Handful of Artifacts.

 

[Crothian]

Quirin Mythology 1 Handful of Epic Creatures

The game has seen very little epic level support so it pleases me to see a few epic level creatures come out. Just looking at the book though makes one understand why so many people fear DMing campaigns this high. The Stat blocks on these are a bit large with lots of abilities and options as they should. I do not really look over stat blocks to make sure they are accurate and this is defiantly a product that might be nice to see happen to.

Quirin Mythology 1 Handful of Epic Creatures is a PDF by GMC (Game Master’s Choice). The PDF is eighteen pages long. The layout is pretty good but the art is rather mediocre. It is black and white and looks like pencil sketches. It is important I believe to have good art in monster books. So the bad art in here really hurts the book. The book is nicely book marked and easy to use from a computer.

There are only five creatures in this book. That seems rather light as epic creatures are hard to use as just placing them in a dungeon like environment just does not seem right for creatures like this. The beasts here I feel also do not have enough information to use them. Creatures of this type of power I would have really liked to see more history and information on. The stats on most of these are easily three or four times as long as the brief creature descriptions. Information like what can be learned from a knowledge check or Bardic knowledge checks would really have gone far to make these monster more useful.

The first creature is Alcorn the Flying Serpant. He seems to be a unique creature though the stat black does seem treat him like a type of creature one can see more then one of by giving advancement rules for instance. The creature is thirteen thousand years old and I would have loved to see some examples of the plots and strategies this thing has been doing over those many millennia. It says he works behind the scenes through minions and plots and very power hungry. But what has he accomplished so far? What other goals does he have? These questions really left me wondering and I would have liked to have seen the writer go more into this. The stats of the creature seem okay for the Challenge rating though it does have a pretty low will save. Most of the highly intelligent creatures actually have wil saves as their best and not their worst of all saves.

The next creature is the very small Deshaywine. There is little useful information on what these guys are. They are unwanted offspring and serve people more powerful then them and other then that the DM has many blanks to fill in.

Next is the Gomthu. This is a demon created to help serve a god that is not described here. Now the reader knows as much about these creatures as I do. The creature has two paragraphs describing it and one of them is pure physical description. The creatures in the book do have a nice round to round tactics which can be useful. There are also adventure ideas for the creatures. But many of the adventure ideas refer to other books GMC has put out. That’s great if one has the books and wants to use them, but other wise it makes those particular adventure ideas useless.

The Milmang actually seems to be more of a plot device then a creature the player characters are expected to defeat. It has a challenge rating of one hundred and fifty and is called a Quasi deity. This creature is directly tied into one of the adventures GMC has. It is built to guard the Door of Simit Al which is presented in one of the their adventures (Quirin Adventure 6: Lost and Forgotten).

Lastly are the Threyclops. It seems a little odd that these giants with over seven hundred hit points and challenge rating of twenty eight would be used as shock troops. The saves aside from the Fort save are pretty low for a creature of this type of power. They do have a good Spell Resistance so maybe they would do well against spell casters.

Overall the book provides monsters that just feel like they are there to be killed. There is no really reason for the creatures to be there other then because. This complaint is common one of many monster books but with epic monsters I think it rings even more true.