[two pages display] Yum ! Fluff !

[I'm A Banana]

So, now you know WHAT was the "pure evil" that killed the humanoid, and WHY this victim has been made into a bodak. As much fluff as before, more informations, less verbosity. 4e win

Not quite.

See, that blurb in 4e makes the bodak into a spawn, a servant creature of other, more powerful creatures, who really only exists at the whim of that 'more powerful creature.'

They may be created from humanoids, but they aren't in any noticeable way that same semi-sympathetic creature. They don't retain their memories, and they have no awareness of their own evil, or of how it came to be.

Mostly in 2e, but even in 3e, the bodak wasn't a servant. It was autonomous, which made it more inscrutable, and made the evil more "evil," being random and cruel rather than specific and motivated by killing.

4e bodaks seem to be, in a lot of ways, +1 Zombies. You kill them because they want to kill you (even if a more powerful evil being is the one telling them to). The plot that springs first to mind is "A nightwalker has created a bodak army that is marching in the village! Go kill the bodak army, then kill the nightwalker!"

In 3e, bodaks were "unfortunate souls". You kill them because they kill things, and it isn't necessarily their fault. The plot that springs first to mind, for me, is a bodak who was once a great adventurer, but had delved too deep. He returns to his home town, vaguely aware of his past memories, and re-visits his family, taking them into his arms and killing them accidentally with his gaze. The PC's are called in to stop this "rampaging beast," and as they do, they discover what his victims have in common, and why scraps of fabric and drawings and various bric-a-brak disappear from the houses he has come to. And when they have the showdown with the bodak in the cave he has laired in outside of town, where he keeps the drawings his daughter made and the perfume his mother war, and the wedding ring from his wife, it's a bittersweet moment of release for this poor, undead being, this creature no-longer of our world who once was. And then the PC's go on to slay the "absolute evil" that created him. The vagueness worked in the favor of the bodak here because that absolute evil could vary with the campaign: in some worlds, perhaps it was the Dark Lord or the Goblin King or the Emperor Necromancer. In some worlds, it was perhaps the Abyss, or Demogorgon or Orcus.

I'd rather have the latter than the former in any game, because the former can be filled with any number of faceless spawn, but the latter is a more unique (and more evocative) creature.

EDIT: And I can see this carrying over to 4e pretty smoothly. The idea of the people who die in the shadowfell getting transformed into Bodaks spontaneously works a lot like the 2e idea of people who die in the Abyss getting transformed into bodaks spontaneously. This doesn't hurt the mechanics at all, and actually gives a pretty good in-game reason why people would have all sorts of trepidations about going into the Shadowfell. If you die there, you come back...twisted. Changed. It alters your soul. The Bodak Skulk may be an infamous thief who died while 'between worlds.' The Bodak Reaver might be a fighter who went into the Shadowfell to rescue his doomed allies.

 

[MaelStorm]

I have to admit, I'm impressed about how much info is conveyed into so little space. They're doing a wonderful job. If all the books WotC release for 4E is able to compress the fluff into useful tidbits of info that does the job and answer most questions related to game play, I won't mind spending money on many supplement books.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I have to admit, I'm impressed about how much info is conveyed into so little space. They're doing a wonderful job. If all the books WotC release for 4E is able to compress the fluff into useful tidbits of info that does the job and answer most questions related to game play, I won't mind spending money on many supplement books.

Y'know, it's weird, having better flavor wouldn't necessarily mean adding more wordspace.

Right now, this is the bodak blurb:

Bodaks are heartless creatures that kill for the sake of killing, serving their own desires or the desires of an even crueler master

In 3e, this is the bodak blurb:

Bodaks are the undead remnants of humanoids who have been destroyed by the touch of absolute evil. A bodak retains fleeting memories of its past life and can speak Common (or some other humanoid language).

Both are VERY short. But if the 3e one is too long, let's try this:

Bodaks are creatures undead killed by absolute evil. They attempt to recapture their lost life, and are driven to kill old friends.

Let's switch the lore a little bit:

DC 20: Bodaks are powerful humanoids who have died in the Shadowfell. Their gaze now kills that which they once held dear.
DC 30: A necromantic ritual exists to create a bodak, and it is sometimes employed by especially vengeful creatures to add horror to their enemy's deaths.

...and the encounter group doesn't need to be changed much at all, really.

Yeah, the whole "kill because they kill!" thing is getting slightly more annoying the more I think about it.

 

[vazanar]

So you agree that more is better
Of course, it could hardly be worse than 3e MM (look the nighwalker fluff... abyssal...).

But the 4e fluff seems to have an advantage : it is consistent. There are relations between the various monsters, they do not exist in a vacuum.

The 3e original MM book was sparse. Personally I still find this lacking over something like Privateer Press's MM. Then again in the basic DD MM I want as many monsters as we can, so short fluff is a neccesary evil.

 

[MaelStorm]

@ KM
lol, the 'kill because they kill' thing is not very bright I admit, but this syndrome plagues many games description of baddies. There will always be 'kill because they kill' baddies because that's their main function in the game.

But if you compare the MM for 3.5 and the upcoming 4.0 there is a fundamental difference. Open your 3.5 MMI and watch how much space is wasted under the Combat section. Now tell me if 4.0 is worst or not in this regard.

 

[FadedC]

Hmm....well flavor text aside the 3e bodak was often held up as one of the worse examples of monster design. It either kills you outright or it is pretty much helpless and doesn't hurt you. No amount of proper flavor text will save a monster that should never ever be used for mechanical reasons.

But yeah even if the 4e bodak is vastly superior from a mechanics standpoint, I have to grant that he's not necesarily better from a flavor perspective. Ultimately the monsters are being shuffled up enough that as long there are some sympathetic undead (not that I ever remotely considered the bodak to be one.....Kamikaze reads way more into their flavor then I ever did, not that this is a bad thing) there is room for some pure minions of evil.

 

[I'm A Banana]

lol, the 'kill because they kill' thing is not very bright I admit, but this syndrome plagues many games description of baddies. There will always be 'kill because they kill' baddies because that's their main function in the game.

True 'nuff, and 'kill because they kill' baddies have a good role to play (the aforementioned faceless army). Zombies and skeletons fill this pretty nicely from an Undead standpoint in D&D. Any memories or past lives they have are a lot less relevant than hacking them to bits and going on to fight their creator.

Bodaks weren't that, though. And it's a bit tragic that they've turned into that, IMO.

But if you compare the MM for 3.5 and the upcoming 4.0 there is a fundamental difference. Open your 3.5 MMI and watch how much space is wasted under the Combat section. Now tell me if 4.0 is worst or not in this regard.

Definately better. But I didn't think that 4.0 should divest itself of the goodies under the old edition in order to embrace the goodies of the new except where necessary.

The flavor change for the bodak seems ENTIRELY unnecessary, and it doesn't give me very good vibes for what else will come with the MM.

Hmm....well flavor text aside the 3e bodak was often held up as one of the worse examples of monster design. It either kills you outright or it is pretty much helpless and doesn't hurt you. No amount of proper flavor text will save a monster that should never ever be used for mechanical reasons.

I absolutely agree, the 3e bodak was a lousy mechanical beast (and the 2e bodak wasn't much better, if at all). But I don't see why the 4e bodak needed to abandon what was cool about previous bodaks in order to change what wasn't. Or at least couldn't replace them with new cool.

"I kill because I kill!" is not very cool.

 

[hbarsquared]

I agree that the "kill because they kill" bit is annoying.

I agree that despite being more sparse than I had hoped, the amount of fluff/flavor is incredibly concise: there is a lot in that small amount of space.

Finally, the boneclaw has already inspired a high-level encounter for me... The BBEG has created boneclaws and learned the secret from said hag. The characters must find the night hag (and all sorts of dungeonny goodness getting there), and negotiate with her to find the secret to creating a boneclaw... for the express purpose of finding the weakness to undue their creation.

This has been my impression from the "Story Team" and all the fluff I have seen. Not truly enough to stand on its own, but extremely inspiring. Which I think is the perfect balance.

 

[hong]

Wait, what? There was something cool about the previous bodak?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wait, what? There was something cool about the previous bodak?

Yeah. This is definitely true in 2e, and there is some legacy in 3e. Not that it was ever as smooth a monster to run as it is in 4e, just that it had a lot cooler of a reason to exist in earlier editions than it does in 4e.