(no subject)

People have been talking about election results a lot. Honestly, I'm relieved by the results in California; there's a lot of stuff out there to be upset about in the country, some of the system seems pretty badly broken, and not everything I'd wanted to see pass actually passed, but I feel like we escaped a couple of bad candidates and one outrageously bad proposal. By contrast, here's some gaming foo;

So I finished looking through AD&D's Fiend Folio again (published 1981, but apparently a delay of stuff from 1979). The number of critters which try to grapple adventurers or which have variable armor classes depending on body part are a lot more than in the (1977) Monster Manual and suggest the inevitable interest in more elaborate combat. The inclusion of critters like flinds and lizard kings "feels" like a workaround to AD&D's initial, hit-dice-defines-species rule.

There are several classes of creature that really seem to repeat throughout the book.

• The Dischanter. Otherwise known as "maybe the +3 Vorpal Hammer of Thunderbolts wasn't actually appropriate to this dungeon." Dischanters, but other critters like jermlaine witch doctors, can dispel magic. These creatures are taxonomically related to Rust Monsters, to crypt things (an undead with the magical power to steer adventurers away from That Part of the Dungeon the DM Did Not Have Mapped) but also to the FF's ultimate in screw jobs, like the Hound of Ill Omen and the Aleax.
  
  Basically the gods have decided that your character is going down, bub. An Aleax is a duplicate of a PC, sent to attack it. If the PC dies, they're dead, and if the PC kills it, the gods take them off to Valhalla or the mystic land of NIP (not in play). Remember that time your wizard used burning hands on the hobgoblin toddlers, and that unarmed hobgoblin caretaker who seemed really eager to give your party plot information? Yeah, well, maybe that was a mistake.
  
  
• The Trapmaker. Mites and jermlaine will leave five traps for every time you actually spot one; galltrits will drain blood until someone notices them and swats them; meenlocks slowly tick off ability scores; jaculi coil around pillars waiting to launch themselves at adventurers; meazels will throttle unwary types. What these entries wind up doing, inadvertently, is creating a much fuller view of the dungeon as ecosystem - that you have critters too weak to stage a frontal attack, but which will hamper you as best they can. One subset seems to be critters which blow up when you whack them.
  
  
• The Parasitoid. Alien must have really caught gamers' imaginations in Thatcher's Britain. There's at least four different FF creatures that lay eggs in paralyzed adventurers.
  
  
• The Questionable Ally. That tween might be great for one player, but not for the rest of the party. Symbiotic jellies or skeleton warriors can also help your party for x values of help. Potentially, you could recruit the aid of a khargra by offering it an especially delicious sword. The most ridiculous is the umpleby, which is basically a wookiee that follows your adventurers, detecting treasure - for it is said that the Wookiees of Mirkwood are much fond of gold - making a hell of a racket, and using nets made of its own hair in fights.