The Slayers Guide to Medusa

[Messageboard Golem]

The medusa is most commonly met as a lone figure in a dungeon, with the body of a beautiful woman and her head covered by a veil. "What in the world could that be?" ask the party jokily, as they pull out their polished mirrors or avert their gazes, having seen through her disguise at once. With this book the jokes will not last long.

Medusas are no longer a simple encounter in the dungeon; from their coveys, to desires and goals, the Slayers guide to Medusas peels away the legends and tall tales of this dread creature, to reveal the depths of their deceit and cruelty.

Inside You Will Find

Medusa Physiology:
Discover the origins and lifestyle of the Medusa, including the tales of how they breed

Medusa Society:
From the formation of a covey, to their hatred and love of beauty. Medusa society is an intertwined web of contracts, find out how their deceits can be countered

Methods Of Combat:
Find out just how Medusas engage in battle and make use of far more than their gaze to overcome their foes

Role-Playing With Medusas:
Within this chapter, Games Masters can discover just how to portray Medusas to their players, including an array of new Medusa Feats and the dread Guiser and Serpentine prestige classes.

Scenario Hooks And Ideas:
Introduce Medusas into your campaign through the use of some easily adapted adventure ideas

Sfineys Gang:
A complete Covey is detailed, demonstrating just how Medusas can me melded together into a threat for any campaign, with detailed tactics and objectives to be used as either a one off encounter or the basis for far more.

 

[GameWyrd]

Popular fantasy roleplaying games have butchered the Medusa myth. She’s no longer the vain beauty who so terribly annoyed the goddess Athena and was cursed as a result. Medusa has become an entire race. The Slayer’s Guide to Medusas doesn’t try and correct this but it does succeed in making D&D’s version of the Medusas far more tempting to use in your game.

Every Slayer’s Guide has an anatomical view of the creature under inspection on the inside front cover and this time the special attention given to how the snakes attach to the medusa’s head is particularly creepy.

The anatomy moves on to the physiology, looking at the dietary requirements of the strange creature, the life cycle and breeding. We’re told that medusa rarely breed but when they do they’ll lay eggs which will hatch into other medusas – and that they’re always female. The father’s generally a human male. Those times when a medusa breeds with some sort of fiend then the result is the same; a clutch of eggs that produce more medusa but its from this we might get the term "half-medusa" even though the daughters are plainly full medusa. Sounds a bit like a biology textbook? I suppose that’s the intent. Much of the actual book is written as an academic treatise from an imagined NPC writing the book. It even goes as far as to compare and contrast the discussions of medusa in the book with other imaginary academic studies on the race. I rather like the resulting effect; plenty of crunching stuff for medusas, plenty of flavour and lots of room for GMs to pick and choose their favourite bits from the book.

As is typical with the Slayer’s Guide the following chapter examines medusa society, their relationship with other races, mindset and religion. It’s here that the idea of the more bestial medusa in separation for the more civilised and educated medusa is introduced. The concept is further extended when we get to the two prestige classes later on. Each of the prestige classes are detailed through ten levels and one, the Guiser, takes those medusa who hide among mankind to extreme and the other, the Serpentine, are those medusa who embrace their snake and reptile inheritance. The Guisers are those medusas with plenty of magical talent (illusions) and a mastery of the disguise skill. I think the Guiser prestige class will make for a great reoccurring villain. Imagine that the old herbalist at the edge of the town who was so terrible to the characters at the start of the campaign turns out to be a vengeful medusa just in time to terrorise the characters after they’ve picked up a few levels. The Serpentines, on the other hand, utterly reject trying to live with other sentient creatures including their own kind. The Guisers’ prestige abilities give them ways to try and put their snakes to sleep or delay her petrifying gaze whereas the Serpentines’ powers are on the opposite side of the scale and increase the potency of their snake’s venom or the growth of extra thick scales. I just like the way the juxtaposition of woman and snake is reflected in the race as a whole as well in each individual.

The Methods of Combat tends to be one of the weaker chapters in the Slayer’s Guides. Typically, the creatures covered aren’t smart enough to develop anything especially cunning. The medusas tend to flee any combat they don’t immediately dominate and with their petrifying gaze its easy to see how they would dominate most combats and rather than killing off the "combat chapter" it introduces elements of tactics and strategy.

I’ve already covered the two prestige classes and these make up the bulk of the "Roleplaying with Medusas" chapter but there’s also a decent collection of scary feats that warrant a mention. If you jump to the back of the book and to the ever present stat reference list you’ll see how much more dangerous the medusa become if you treat them as a race still due a character class rather than an undecorated monster race.

There’s an especially big scenario in this Slayer’s Guide. Sfiny’s Gang is seven pages long and that’s a fair chunk of the 32-paged book. The adventures in the Slayer’s Guides do seem to slowly be getting bigger, progressing from more than just a sample village or lair into a lair with a basic encounter wrapped around it. The quality seems to be increasing too; there are three half page maps with this encounter.

It’s good timing. I think the The Slayer’s Guide to Medusas is different enough from most of the other Slayer’s Guides (in terms of topic if not presentation) to help maintain a bit of enthusiasm for this long running d20 series. At the same time, the book is traditionally Slayer’s Guide in nature and will still appeal to those die hard Slayer’s Guide fans. Still on the issue of timing, I couldn’t but help notice that the Medusa book came out at the same time as Mongoose’s The Slayer’s Guide to Female Gamers.

* This GameWyrd review first appeared here.

 

[kenjib]

I'm curious. Do you think that there needs to be a book on such a tiny niche of a topic? I have trouble seeing much practical utility in this book. Ecology and life cycles of orcs, sure, but medusas? What do you think?

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By Glenn Dean, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack

Sizing up the Target
The Slayer’s Guide to Medusas, the 12th book in Mongoose Publishing’s Slayer's series, is a 32-page softbound supplement written by Ian Sturrock and retailing for $9.95.

First Blood
At some point in time, every adventuring party has probably come across the “lone, hooded woman in the dungeon” – and promptly pulled out their mirrors and butchered her. Mongoose’s Slayer's Guide to Medusas aim to give Games Masters some clever ideas to make their medusa opponents more interesting, while giving players some hints to aid in the butchering.

Medusas goes into great depth about these mysterious and maleficent women of the dark. It describes their physiology – long-lived, warm-blooded reptiles who lay eggs after a mysterious and obscene ritual involving human males; society – well-ordered coveys who pursue secret aims under the control of evil geniuses; and mind set – psychopaths who have a love-hate relationship with things of beauty. Suggestions for their combat tactics include a predilection for bows and daggers as well as deceptive hit-and-run tactics.

Medusas gives the Games Master a wealth of hints about roleplaying a medusa as an evil adversary worthy of great heroes. Two medusa prestige classes can provide quite a surprise for an adventuring party expecting a run-of-the-mill snake woman: the Guiser (a jack-of-all-trades who disappears into human society by using a number of gaze powers) and the Serpentine (a melee-oriented fighter-type). Six specific feats can give the medusa some new options for poison use, snake attacks, and gaze powers – imagine not turning her foe to stone, but doing so over the course of a week! The rules summary at the back of the book also provides a few other medusa options ready-to-run, like a fiendish variant.

If you need an excuse to use these fearsome women in your game, there are a number of great adventure ideas and plot hooks provided, along with a fully-fleshed covey of medusas and their temple lair. This is the most useful bit in the entire book in my opinion – that covey of villains could provide a number of ongoing schemes to fuel your campaign for some time, and all the mirrors in the world won’t protect your players.

Critical Hits
The included lair and its inhabitants are great – a useful demonstration of the rest of the book. The prestige class options for the medusa are pretty useful as well; they fit the monster perfectly and will definitely upset the average adventuring party’s assumptions. It’s not likely they’ll expect a beguiling gaze or melee attack from a monster that might otherwise be a real pushover. Medusas can really spice up a monster that’s fairly standard fare otherwise.

Critical Misses
The prestige classes aside, not much of Medusas really breaks new ground. While the Slayer’s Guides as a whole excel by hanging an entire framework of society and psychology on the bare bones of the Core Rulebook III description, enhancing the given monster’s stereotype, I don’t feel that Medusas quite does the others in the series justice – you’d get most of the flavor text watching reruns of Clash of the Titans.

Coup de Grace
The Slayer’s Guide to Medusas provides all its rules mechanics as Open Content, reserving its art and flavor text. A well-designed and balanced supplement that GMs will perhaps find slightly more useful than players, Medusas lacks a little in the originality department, coming across a bit blander than some of the other works in the series.

To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.