Here's a map of the system our unfortunate Mechanicus and Psyker found themselves marooned in, 40,000 light years from the Empress and Sector: Throne...(click to enlarge)
And yes, all the names mean what you think they mean.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Starbox
Ran our first Warhammer40k: Dark Heresy session today with Mandy and Viv.
Here's a map of the system our unfortunate Mechanicus and Psyker found themselves marooned in, 40,000 light years from the Empress and Sector: Throne...(click to enlarge)
And yes, all the names mean what you think they mean.
Here's a map of the system our unfortunate Mechanicus and Psyker found themselves marooned in, 40,000 light years from the Empress and Sector: Throne...(click to enlarge)
And yes, all the names mean what you think they mean.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Vornheim Is Hollywood
#11 HOLLYWOOD IS FUNDAMENTALLY UN-AMERICAN
It's a mistake to believe that the first generation of moguls, who escaped the cruelty and poverty and tyranny of life under the czar or king or emperor, left that world behind. Rather, they brought that system to the new world and cast themselves - at last, the dream realized - as the monarch, Mr Big. In the land of the free, they fashioned a city-state where medieval powers existed, and to go with it they invented a cult that was close to the idolatrous nature of religions before the age of reason and science. So their Hollywood was intensely un-American, if you're thinking Jefferson and the Bill of Rights and the code of independent intellect. Hollywood was a harkening back to despotism, slavery, and a belief in the divinity of supernatural monsters. Every fourth year a Dole and a Clinton* feel the need to woo, warm and co-opt Hollywood, while any halfway intelligent politician must realize that the movies are - in their appeal to unreason and unreality, in their excitation of desire and instability, in their worship of power and glamour - the most abiding, virulent virus in the American organism.
-from "20 Things People Like To Forget About Hollywood" by David Thomson
(I have edited it to include some material that was cut from the original book--"Beneath Mulholland", one of the best books written about the city I live in).
___
*Obviously out of date, this would now say "A Bush and a Clinton". My how things have changed.
WhyIsThereNoDeadSpaceInVornheim? + More Fiend Folio
Consider the following 3 Fiend Folio do-overs for monsters beginning with the letter "I" a Joesky's rule payment for the stuff in red at the end.
The original Fiend Folio ice lizard is just a baby white dragon. Which you don't need since you can just make a baby white dragon. I made it into a sort of komodo dragon that can walk on water by freezing the surfaces it touches.
The original Imorph is not plastic-surgery software from microsoft, it's a sort of changeling that slowly copies you in combat. Which would be clever if there wasn't already the enveloper and changeling. So this one imitates everybody in the area simultaneously:
As should be clear from my picture, while waiting to strike, it hides on the bottom of skateboard decks from the early 1980s.
And, finally, The Iron Cobra needs neither introduction nor renovation:
And now, I talk about to some people about graphic design:
_____
Hey layout nerds: You know why there's no empty space in Vornheim? Because then you can fit more stuff in. You know why everything else you don't like? Because I do like it.
I didn't write it for The Public, I wrote it for me so I could use it and so people as smart as me could use it. If LOTFP calls me up and says "Hey, even though this book is our best-seller, I feel we could be making more money if we could sell it to dumb people used to reading Wired instead of novels who can't see letters when they're near other letters, so let's change it", then I just hang up the phone and Mandy and Viv can just cam for 15 minutes and we make all that money we just lost back.
This isn't my job or how I earn a living, so, paradoxically, I have the unusual freedom to make something good rather than full of WhatAGraphicDesignTextbookTellsUsMakesTheMajorityOfConsumersWantToBuyABook. If I'm lucky enough to have that freedom, why not use it?
Everybody in this cash-starved niche has had to sit through endless bullshit and bloat and bad taste because commercial pressure forced this, that and the otherfuck on products, designers rules, magazines, artists, and whole companies. In Vornheim, you at least have the comfort of knowing that the only reason you're sitting through anything is because it worked better that way for the actual human being who wrote it. Vornheim is only as stupid as I am, not as stupid as the average graphic designer thinks the average consumer is. Be happy for that small favor, if nothing else.
I'd rather make a gorgeous little book that I like that works and that (because it all fits in 64 pages) you can get at a reasonable price than "grow the hobby". Or do what some guy in emo glasses tells me will grow the hobby.
The original Fiend Folio ice lizard is just a baby white dragon. Which you don't need since you can just make a baby white dragon. I made it into a sort of komodo dragon that can walk on water by freezing the surfaces it touches.
The original Imorph is not plastic-surgery software from microsoft, it's a sort of changeling that slowly copies you in combat. Which would be clever if there wasn't already the enveloper and changeling. So this one imitates everybody in the area simultaneously:
As should be clear from my picture, while waiting to strike, it hides on the bottom of skateboard decks from the early 1980s.And, finally, The Iron Cobra needs neither introduction nor renovation:
And now, I talk about to some people about graphic design:_____
Hey layout nerds: You know why there's no empty space in Vornheim? Because then you can fit more stuff in. You know why everything else you don't like? Because I do like it.
I didn't write it for The Public, I wrote it for me so I could use it and so people as smart as me could use it. If LOTFP calls me up and says "Hey, even though this book is our best-seller, I feel we could be making more money if we could sell it to dumb people used to reading Wired instead of novels who can't see letters when they're near other letters, so let's change it", then I just hang up the phone and Mandy and Viv can just cam for 15 minutes and we make all that money we just lost back.
This isn't my job or how I earn a living, so, paradoxically, I have the unusual freedom to make something good rather than full of WhatAGraphicDesignTextbookTellsUsMakesTheMajorityOfConsumersWantToBuyABook. If I'm lucky enough to have that freedom, why not use it?
Everybody in this cash-starved niche has had to sit through endless bullshit and bloat and bad taste because commercial pressure forced this, that and the otherfuck on products, designers rules, magazines, artists, and whole companies. In Vornheim, you at least have the comfort of knowing that the only reason you're sitting through anything is because it worked better that way for the actual human being who wrote it. Vornheim is only as stupid as I am, not as stupid as the average graphic designer thinks the average consumer is. Be happy for that small favor, if nothing else.
I'd rather make a gorgeous little book that I like that works and that (because it all fits in 64 pages) you can get at a reasonable price than "grow the hobby". Or do what some guy in emo glasses tells me will grow the hobby.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Fixing The Fiend Folio--Department H
H in the Fiend Folio is for "Ha ha! You bought this book? Choad." No flail snail or githyanki to raise the curtain of gloom. Just some dumb animals and a dead guy. Let's tackle it...
The main thing you'll notice about the Hellcat other than it's indistingushability from other cat monsters is it's size L. I figure: Hell is inside these cats. You have to crawl into their hellmouths to get there.
The hoar fox has one of those names like Jonson the Hammer that probably sounded real flash in 1292 but now just sounds like some troglodyte troll blogger's attempt at a bad pun. Not a bad monster though--icy fox monster. Sure, why not? To distinguish it mechanically from a winter wolf and things like that I feel like it needs a better thing than frost breath, though.
(The scale is goofy: little animal, big cone of cold. Too Looney Tunes.) Starting with how that guy said a fox hunt is supposed to be "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible" let's say the White Fox tricks polar bears and giant lynxes and other polar megafauna into eating it. These animals then freeze to death from the inside out because of the iciness of the fox, and then the clever fox eats them. Suck it, borealan apex predators.
The Hook Horror?
I think they meant to call it the Hook Fucking Seriously Fucking Really Why? Fuck You We're Not Trying. Like idiots, they keep using it even now:
Not only have they made hook horror minis, they have made more than one kind of hook horror mini. And I still can't get a flail snail mini. And Jeffrey C. Jones is dead and Grover Norquist is alive. ANYWAY, here--I will show you horror in a handful of hooks:
The secret horror technique I have ingeniously employed here is to not make the monster look like the fucking buzzard from Woody Woodpecker.
Necromancers take note: How you make a hook horror is you tie up a victim, dip them in various hermetic herbs and spices, replace his or her hands with hooks, hang him or her by said hooks, and leave them like that for a million years. Then they slowly stretch out, then you re-animate them and voila: a horror.
Now the Hornet, Giant...I have a scale issue with giant flying bugs. Somehow those papery wings all gigantic and flapping at helicopter speed just doesn't work for me. Maybe it just seems too technological. Or too Ferngully. Anyway, new crawly giant hornet:
The Hound of Ill Omen is another goddamn dog monster, though, to be fair, it just shows up and portends doom and leaves, so it's not just another demon dog/hellhound/barghest. The mechanics could be handled better than in the Folio, plus it doesn't give a compelling reason the hound is there in the first place, but this is all doable: tie the appearance of the hound to the PC actually doing something and tie the doom power to an ill fate. I -no plug intended but it's unavoidable here- suggest using a variant on the Fortune system in Vornheim for the dog's curse.
As for the Hound itself, it should definitely look more fucked than the one in the Folio...
Now the Huecuva as presented in the Folio is just Another Fucking Skeleton. But thanks to this Dragonsfoot thread I know it's supposed to be some kind of MesoAmerican monster. Which is fine because there aren't really many good D&D monsters in this semiTecumelian vein. So I sent it to Pre-Columbian Ecuador for some redesign work...
...as for mechanics, it'll need something better than just "hey, maybe you got a disease". I'm thinking a curse where every time you kill something it comes back to life as a zombie and keeps trying to kill you and you can only stop it by destroying the huecuva.
The main thing you'll notice about the Hellcat other than it's indistingushability from other cat monsters is it's size L. I figure: Hell is inside these cats. You have to crawl into their hellmouths to get there.
The hoar fox has one of those names like Jonson the Hammer that probably sounded real flash in 1292 but now just sounds like some troglodyte troll blogger's attempt at a bad pun. Not a bad monster though--icy fox monster. Sure, why not? To distinguish it mechanically from a winter wolf and things like that I feel like it needs a better thing than frost breath, though.
(The scale is goofy: little animal, big cone of cold. Too Looney Tunes.) Starting with how that guy said a fox hunt is supposed to be "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible" let's say the White Fox tricks polar bears and giant lynxes and other polar megafauna into eating it. These animals then freeze to death from the inside out because of the iciness of the fox, and then the clever fox eats them. Suck it, borealan apex predators.The Hook Horror?
I think they meant to call it the Hook Fucking Seriously Fucking Really Why? Fuck You We're Not Trying. Like idiots, they keep using it even now:
Not only have they made hook horror minis, they have made more than one kind of hook horror mini. And I still can't get a flail snail mini. And Jeffrey C. Jones is dead and Grover Norquist is alive. ANYWAY, here--I will show you horror in a handful of hooks:
The secret horror technique I have ingeniously employed here is to not make the monster look like the fucking buzzard from Woody Woodpecker.Necromancers take note: How you make a hook horror is you tie up a victim, dip them in various hermetic herbs and spices, replace his or her hands with hooks, hang him or her by said hooks, and leave them like that for a million years. Then they slowly stretch out, then you re-animate them and voila: a horror.
Now the Hornet, Giant...I have a scale issue with giant flying bugs. Somehow those papery wings all gigantic and flapping at helicopter speed just doesn't work for me. Maybe it just seems too technological. Or too Ferngully. Anyway, new crawly giant hornet:
The Hound of Ill Omen is another goddamn dog monster, though, to be fair, it just shows up and portends doom and leaves, so it's not just another demon dog/hellhound/barghest. The mechanics could be handled better than in the Folio, plus it doesn't give a compelling reason the hound is there in the first place, but this is all doable: tie the appearance of the hound to the PC actually doing something and tie the doom power to an ill fate. I -no plug intended but it's unavoidable here- suggest using a variant on the Fortune system in Vornheim for the dog's curse.As for the Hound itself, it should definitely look more fucked than the one in the Folio...
Now the Huecuva as presented in the Folio is just Another Fucking Skeleton. But thanks to this Dragonsfoot thread I know it's supposed to be some kind of MesoAmerican monster. Which is fine because there aren't really many good D&D monsters in this semiTecumelian vein. So I sent it to Pre-Columbian Ecuador for some redesign work...
...as for mechanics, it'll need something better than just "hey, maybe you got a disease". I'm thinking a curse where every time you kill something it comes back to life as a zombie and keeps trying to kill you and you can only stop it by destroying the huecuva.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Die-Drop Instadungeon + Continuing Adventures of Mandy, Zak & Raggi
Quick generator for when you need a dungeon now...
1. Print out a copy of this chart:(click to enlarge)
2. Grab a number of dice (any standard dice) approximately equal to the number of interesting rooms you need in your dungeon.
3. Drop them on the chart:
3. Grab a red marker and make a box around every square a die landed on, like so. Also: draw lines connecting these rooms.
4. For each place a die landed, that's a room (the lines you drew between them are empty corridors. If a die landed on a line, you may include both rooms or just pick one). To find out what's in a room, read what's under each die and then, using this table...
...read what came up on the die sitting in that square.
(The chart with the squares is mostly environmental factors, the table with the dice is mostly inhabitants and encounters.)
So , for example, a d8 showing a 4 landed in the square that says "corpse in here" that would indicate there was a wizard and a corpse in that room.
Obviously: assume some standard corridor width, room shape, etc. since you are being lazy and generating this dungeon on the fly.
The results have not been designed to be too terribly creative--they were designed to be generic enough that they would fit a large number of need-a-dungeon-now situations yet specific enough not to leave you scratching your head trying to think of a situation or monster that'd fit a given result.
Untested. Playtest results welcome. I made the stuff for my own use so if you don't understand some of the shorthand on it, go ahead and ask. Or just write your own.
_______
In other news, here's Me and Mandy Morbid and James Raggi talking on the radio about (first) Vornheim (second) LOTFP:Weird Fantasy and (Third) story games and story gamers and hedgehogs. James feels like he did a pretty good job saying what his game is about on there, if you're curious. Also, there's a promo code for a discount to buy our game stuff buried somewhere in all that audio.
1. Print out a copy of this chart:(click to enlarge)
2. Grab a number of dice (any standard dice) approximately equal to the number of interesting rooms you need in your dungeon.3. Drop them on the chart:
3. Grab a red marker and make a box around every square a die landed on, like so. Also: draw lines connecting these rooms.
4. For each place a die landed, that's a room (the lines you drew between them are empty corridors. If a die landed on a line, you may include both rooms or just pick one). To find out what's in a room, read what's under each die and then, using this table...
...read what came up on the die sitting in that square.(The chart with the squares is mostly environmental factors, the table with the dice is mostly inhabitants and encounters.)
So , for example, a d8 showing a 4 landed in the square that says "corpse in here" that would indicate there was a wizard and a corpse in that room.
Obviously: assume some standard corridor width, room shape, etc. since you are being lazy and generating this dungeon on the fly.
The results have not been designed to be too terribly creative--they were designed to be generic enough that they would fit a large number of need-a-dungeon-now situations yet specific enough not to leave you scratching your head trying to think of a situation or monster that'd fit a given result.
Untested. Playtest results welcome. I made the stuff for my own use so if you don't understand some of the shorthand on it, go ahead and ask. Or just write your own.
_______
In other news, here's Me and Mandy Morbid and James Raggi talking on the radio about (first) Vornheim (second) LOTFP:Weird Fantasy and (Third) story games and story gamers and hedgehogs. James feels like he did a pretty good job saying what his game is about on there, if you're curious. Also, there's a promo code for a discount to buy our game stuff buried somewhere in all that audio.
"Burning cookies don't smell like elves""How do you know?"
Me and Mandy and James Raggi talk about games on this here podcast for, jesus, 2 hours.
Guide for the impatient:
-First half is mostly James (including a fun bit of everybody comparing notes on how Death Frost Doom went when they ran it) and LOTFP:WFRP, second half is me and Mandy and Vornheim.
-Both halves start with us doing a lot of talking like responsible business people about our respective products that just came out and then, happily, degenerate rather pleasantly into everyone telling funny RPG stories, which is nice because then it's fun.
-Buried in there is Mandy calling herself a genius, calling me obnoxious, everyone having in-depth discussions of Keebler elves, James admitting to playing Dogs In The Vineyard, and the host giving out a 20% off LOTFP promo code.
Guide for the impatient:
-First half is mostly James (including a fun bit of everybody comparing notes on how Death Frost Doom went when they ran it) and LOTFP:WFRP, second half is me and Mandy and Vornheim.
-Both halves start with us doing a lot of talking like responsible business people about our respective products that just came out and then, happily, degenerate rather pleasantly into everyone telling funny RPG stories, which is nice because then it's fun.
-Buried in there is Mandy calling herself a genius, calling me obnoxious, everyone having in-depth discussions of Keebler elves, James admitting to playing Dogs In The Vineyard, and the host giving out a 20% off LOTFP promo code.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Fiend Folio Do-Over: G
The G's in the Folio are really really depressing. The ideas are bad, the names are worse...oh I need a doctor...not even "flumph" funnybad but more like "oh-I-don't-remember-that-one-huh-oh-well-go-back-to-my-knitting" bad but, hey, we're making lemonade here. (clicking these will generally enlarge them far beyond the original size they were drawn at.)
So, the G's, renovated...
The Galltrit is a little generic gremlin that flies up to you, drains your blood, and flies away, often undetected. It's just a very dull form of GM fiat with stats. I re-did it as this guy who creates an artificial center of gravity (kinda strong) in the room and is called a Gauntlet. It usually appears in the midst of other monsters and is fairly inactive, but any hit not directed at it is likely to get pulled toward it slightly and therefore miss. Missiles at -6, melee at -4, dropped items always hit the Gauntlet (who usually then eats them).
Oh, the Gambado...shoot me and eat my eyes, it's so lame. And the name is lame. It's a skull that's actually a springy jack-in-the-box only no box just the ground. It's so fucked. I re-did it as a thing called an Inhabiter, it's a small demon with oracular abilities and hermit-crab-like habits only instead of using shells it uses heads.
Garbug. Garbug? Fuck you Fiend Folio "G" authors. Galltrit, Gambado, Garbug? Oh no! The Garbug! Fear it! Fuck. Goddam egg-sucking soccer hooligan waterheads wrote this thing. Anyway: half bug! half lobster! The black variety does something lame and the violet variety does something also lame.
It is now called a Gurgler and it's a foot long and it's like a little Igor and it helps evil wizards and alchemists carry out experiments by like taking measurements and handing them shit. "Clawing" I guess. Its unique attack is if you put a substance into the glass jar fused to its back then its saliva can replicate the effects of said substance.
Giant, Fog and Giant, Mountain are lazy re-treads of the already-suspicious Giant, Cloud and Giant, Hill, respectively. A giant is a giant, ok? That's pretty exciting right there. If you want to get fancy with the concept you need to do a lot better than say "And it lives in Colorado!"
So: Fog Giant...
Mountain Giant...
I'll be the first to admit the Mountain Giant looks like a big Galeb Duhr but there's only so much that can be done with these "G" Fiends.
Giant strider. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Fire-breathing repti...oh, you have. Ok, new giant strider:
Gibberling these are like some grubby humanoids with some hit dice and stuff. They make some noises, I guess, which is supposed to make me forget I need more gross subhumans with clubs like I need a hole in my...AAAAH! I'm doing it too, the cliches the CLICHES!!!! fuck. My brain. Ok, calm...The Gibberling is now this:
It is an intelligent relative of the Shrieker, it speaks most local languages, is saprophytic and telepathic. It reads the PCs thought and--rather than shrieking--simply tells passing monsters everything it knows about the PCs so that they'll kill them and the gibberling can eat their rotting flesh. Occasionally a gibberling can be convinced by PCs to give them info on monsters so, y'know, vice versa...
Githyanki. I am so happy there's a semi-decent monster here I'm gonna not talk about how lame some of the mechanics associated with them are...
Their less-interesting-cousins the Githzerai need a redesign. They're supposed to be kind of like monks, ok...
The goldbug is a poison bug that looks like a coin. Let's make it a bug that eats coins..
...or we could make a version of it that's inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story and make it a bug that's really fucking racist.
Gorbel. Fuck. Fuuuuck. Jesus fucking fuck on a fuck. It grabs and won't let you go. Also, it is a sphere. With 3 eyestalks. And little grabby claws. How I yearn for the green grass of home...What am I on about? That made as little sense as this monster. Ok. It's now a Grasping One and it does the same thing--grabs and won't let go, only it does so over your face. And it has a face:
Gorillabear. I lack the energies of disgust the gorillabear deserves here. I'm calling it Grendel and redrawing it slightly and moving on...
The Grell just needs its stupid beak removed:
Now the Grimlock. The original grimlocks were indistinguishable from gibberlings only quieter and blind. They should never have been invented. However, the word "grimlock" is good. Here's a new one:
The original Gryph is just a crow with a lot of legs with a laying-eggs-in-you trick stolen from Alien and the giant bluebottle fly in this very folio. Reeeeeplaced:
It's hard to argue with the concept of Guardian Demon though the mechanics they give it are some dumb fire powers. Here's a new picture, the rest I bet you can handle. It asks riddles or curses you or makes your entrails try to crawl out of your nose or something:
Last up we got the Guardian Familiar which (good news) is a cat with nine lives, each a hit die scarier than the last, but which (bad news) is just a cat, really. I decided that each cat is inside one of those Russian dolls and inside each cat is another Russian doll with another cat in it.
So, the G's, renovated...
The Galltrit is a little generic gremlin that flies up to you, drains your blood, and flies away, often undetected. It's just a very dull form of GM fiat with stats. I re-did it as this guy who creates an artificial center of gravity (kinda strong) in the room and is called a Gauntlet. It usually appears in the midst of other monsters and is fairly inactive, but any hit not directed at it is likely to get pulled toward it slightly and therefore miss. Missiles at -6, melee at -4, dropped items always hit the Gauntlet (who usually then eats them).
Oh, the Gambado...shoot me and eat my eyes, it's so lame. And the name is lame. It's a skull that's actually a springy jack-in-the-box only no box just the ground. It's so fucked. I re-did it as a thing called an Inhabiter, it's a small demon with oracular abilities and hermit-crab-like habits only instead of using shells it uses heads.
Garbug. Garbug? Fuck you Fiend Folio "G" authors. Galltrit, Gambado, Garbug? Oh no! The Garbug! Fear it! Fuck. Goddam egg-sucking soccer hooligan waterheads wrote this thing. Anyway: half bug! half lobster! The black variety does something lame and the violet variety does something also lame.
It is now called a Gurgler and it's a foot long and it's like a little Igor and it helps evil wizards and alchemists carry out experiments by like taking measurements and handing them shit. "Clawing" I guess. Its unique attack is if you put a substance into the glass jar fused to its back then its saliva can replicate the effects of said substance.Giant, Fog and Giant, Mountain are lazy re-treads of the already-suspicious Giant, Cloud and Giant, Hill, respectively. A giant is a giant, ok? That's pretty exciting right there. If you want to get fancy with the concept you need to do a lot better than say "And it lives in Colorado!"
So: Fog Giant...
Mountain Giant...
I'll be the first to admit the Mountain Giant looks like a big Galeb Duhr but there's only so much that can be done with these "G" Fiends.Giant strider. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Fire-breathing repti...oh, you have. Ok, new giant strider:
Gibberling these are like some grubby humanoids with some hit dice and stuff. They make some noises, I guess, which is supposed to make me forget I need more gross subhumans with clubs like I need a hole in my...AAAAH! I'm doing it too, the cliches the CLICHES!!!! fuck. My brain. Ok, calm...The Gibberling is now this:
It is an intelligent relative of the Shrieker, it speaks most local languages, is saprophytic and telepathic. It reads the PCs thought and--rather than shrieking--simply tells passing monsters everything it knows about the PCs so that they'll kill them and the gibberling can eat their rotting flesh. Occasionally a gibberling can be convinced by PCs to give them info on monsters so, y'know, vice versa...Githyanki. I am so happy there's a semi-decent monster here I'm gonna not talk about how lame some of the mechanics associated with them are...
Their less-interesting-cousins the Githzerai need a redesign. They're supposed to be kind of like monks, ok...
The goldbug is a poison bug that looks like a coin. Let's make it a bug that eats coins..
...or we could make a version of it that's inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe story and make it a bug that's really fucking racist.Gorbel. Fuck. Fuuuuck. Jesus fucking fuck on a fuck. It grabs and won't let you go. Also, it is a sphere. With 3 eyestalks. And little grabby claws. How I yearn for the green grass of home...What am I on about? That made as little sense as this monster. Ok. It's now a Grasping One and it does the same thing--grabs and won't let go, only it does so over your face. And it has a face:
Gorillabear. I lack the energies of disgust the gorillabear deserves here. I'm calling it Grendel and redrawing it slightly and moving on...
The Grell just needs its stupid beak removed:
Now the Grimlock. The original grimlocks were indistinguishable from gibberlings only quieter and blind. They should never have been invented. However, the word "grimlock" is good. Here's a new one:
The original Gryph is just a crow with a lot of legs with a laying-eggs-in-you trick stolen from Alien and the giant bluebottle fly in this very folio. Reeeeeplaced:
It's hard to argue with the concept of Guardian Demon though the mechanics they give it are some dumb fire powers. Here's a new picture, the rest I bet you can handle. It asks riddles or curses you or makes your entrails try to crawl out of your nose or something:
Last up we got the Guardian Familiar which (good news) is a cat with nine lives, each a hit die scarier than the last, but which (bad news) is just a cat, really. I decided that each cat is inside one of those Russian dolls and inside each cat is another Russian doll with another cat in it.
