D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: Fiend Folio

[RevTurkey]

I used to love "The Flumps" on BBC TV in the UK

 

[MerricB]

I'm glad James has covered the flumph. They're the iconic poorly-designed D&D monster, and they need to continue to exist... as a poorly-designed monster!

Cheers!

 

[Dausuul]

Wyatt's mistake is in trying to "redeem" the flumph and make it into a proper, serious monster. This is impossible. The flumph's history as the poster child for stupid monsters in D&D means no one will ever take it seriously. Instead, Wyatt should embrace the idiocy. Play up the silliness of the flumph. The comic possibilities of the Monastic Flumph (which I hadn't heard of before this) are endless.

And don't forget a shout-out to "Order of the Stick." I think the Monastic Flumph should be able to cast feather fall at will.

 

[Stormonu]

The Flumph is pretty much irredeemable, but if I were to try my hand at it, I think I'd kind of model them after the ancient Yith of At the Mountains of Madness.

The normal flumph is essentially a sort of "caveman", the degenerate - yet still intelligent - remnants of an older Flumph society reduced to a sort of barbarism due to their loss of psionic abilities; perhaps hint at their downfall being orchestrated by one of the other abberant race such as mind flayers or aboleth. Flumphs might congregate in ancient ruins ripe with psionic power, moping and anguishing over what they have lost, or be completely oblivious to it. They don't have to be of low intelligence - they could be a mental match for a human, but they are but a shadow of the race they once were.

Monastic flumph are those flumph who still maintain their powerful psionic/magical abilities. They treat and care for regular flumph as we might treat someone who is mentally deficient (to monastic flumph, common flumphs would essentially be in the same category). Much fewer in number, they protect their brethren, seek to reestablish the grand society they once achieved and may even seek out psionic individuals to study or experiment upon in a vain hope to "fix" their brothers.

 

[AmerginLiath]

I had to sign in for the first time in a thousand forevers just to comment on the image that popped into my head when reading the Flumph entry: a Project PRISM-style bit where Monastic Flumph's spend all day psionically sifting through the info and metadata produced by the intellectual communication of a world's mages...

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't mind his take on the flumph (though I'm not sure why we need psionics?). I've always envisioned them as Far Realm-y, tentacled alien things that aren't necessarily hostile. Paizo did a very solid job with them when they did Misfit Monsters Redeemed, and this reminds me a little of this take. Honestly, Paizo generally gets it more right with D&D monsters than WotC does, which is pretty ironic.

 

[Greg K]

Until ENWorld, I didn't know anyone liked the book. Personally, if I owned D&D, 90% of the 1e Fiend Folio would be buried and never see the light of day- the flumph included.

 

[JeffB]

Until ENWorld, I didn't know anyone liked the book. Personally, if I owned D&D, 90% of the 1e Fiend Folio would be buried and never see the light of day- the flumph included.

I have a very vivid and fond memory of my Fiend Folio purchase when the book was first released

But I am with ya on utility. 90% is about right.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I liked both revisions. I admit I loved the way the flumph turned into a sort of stellar/planar do-gooder wandering "thing" in Pathfinder, but I've always been partial to weird and aberrant monsters so what can I say. The flumph is just one more oddity that can make for an amusingly weird encounter.

As for the Fiend Folio, I love (and still love) that book. It was very iconic for me in terms of "D&D" monsters and has remained so. It seems like people fall into two camps with it, though...hate and love. A lot depended on one's tolerance for exotic and weird monsters that more often than not had no ecological niche to fill.