The J's are a quiet neighborhood, only 2 monsters: Jaculi and Jermlaine.
The Jaculi is profoundly Ok, I guess. It's a sort of leaping snake with decent paleocryptozoological cred. It's just, well, hey one more snake-monster. But then since snakes are books then an expedition to the Viridian Jungles to hunt the rare javelin snake for its enlightening flesh is an ok thing to have to do, I suppose. I added little feet things to make the launching-itself-from-trees thing more convincing.
The original Jermlaines--little mousemen--look, to be charitable, like melted coneheads. Or, to be accurate, like naked retarded people.
The nicest thing you can say about the later versions is that they made them look less like retarded people, but still not less retarded.
So I just ignored all that. Ok, so they're mouse people. There's nothing wrong with mouse people--Fritz Leiber had mouse people. Warhammer has rat people. D&D already has wererats. The big difference between mice and rats is personality. Mice are cute.
Ok, so this guy came out looking like a Mouse Guard mouse, or Desperaux. So the local difference between wererats and jermlaines will be that wererats are as big as people and you feel good about killing them and jermalines are little innnocent wee folk and you feel really bad about killing them._____________
Notes from Day One on The Isle of Oth:
-So after sailing across the sea the PCs finally land on the mysterious Isle of Oth (motive? "I wonder what's on the Isle of Oth?""Yeah, let's go there.") and they are greeted by soldiers who think Connie is their boss. Actually Connie's long lost sister is their boss. They look alike.
-Then, because this is always how it goes, the next session Connie couldn't be there. So the whole talking-to-your-long-lost-sister business is pushed to the wayside.
-Luckily, the Isle of Oth is a sort of insane urbanized semi-democratic teratocracy generated this way and the PCs quickly get caught up in inter-monster politics.
-I remembered, after the fact, that I have 50-odd random "things NPCs want from other characters" cards which I made up and really oughtta use next time. Ever make game stuff and forget you made it a month later?
-Mandy's snake-cleric got fucked the fuck up by some new, improved hook horrors and so abandoned her faith, switched religions and got busted back down to first level but now with weird witch-powers, courtesy of her new mistress (for a year-and-a-day) Germanotta.
-Satine rolled a new character. Following my "go through enough dead normal characters and you can start creeping into the exotic races" rule, she's a snow-leopardperson.
-New method for improvising encounters: just have a picture of every single monster or person in the environment on the laptop desktop. Faster than having a list since seeing is faster than reading. Categorize by monster type next time? Maybe.
