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#51: Green Slime. This could again be interpreted as a connection to the dragon, but I don’t want to make an entire section of the dungeon oops-all-slimes. I’m instead going to put the green slime(s) below the pixies – in both senses of the word. We haven’t been very specific about verticality yet, besides some broad strokes, but I’m thinking that the upper left corner (where the fresh water comes in from the "roof") is near the top of the dungeon, while the lower right corner (where seawater comes in from the ocean) is near the bottom. I like the idea that the green slimes are forming on the ceiling on the level below where the dragon is, as runoff from its breath attack, and moving laterally through some point of connectivity that could potentially be exploited by explorers.
#116: Stirge. I’ve got a bit of an order of operations going for responding to these random rolls. Some of these immediately suggest a fit based on what we’ve already established about the dungeon. Others become clear once I check the OSE entry and notice some evocative bit of flavor, or an ability I didn't know about.
If I need more beyond those two steps, I’m going back to the Monster Overhaul once again. The stirge (“skeeter” in Overhaul terminology) has a table for reskins that are mechanically identical, but very different in aesthetics. I rolled and got “Rotting floating head. Lank hair, no eyes.” This immediately sparked some ideas. Perhaps some number of the prisoners in this prison were executed by beheading, and now those severed heads are mindless blood drinkers, wandering the halls. I’m going to place them near the wights, on the assumption that the execution chamber would be near those undead wardens.
#137 Yellow Mould. No entry in the Overhaul, possibly because yellow mould is more of a dungeon hazard than a “creature” per se. It is also possible that its functionality is captured by the lavish two-page spread for myconids. OSE doesn’t appear to have myconids, so we can liberally use the Overhaul tables to figure out what is up with this yellow mould.
Rolling on the “spore attack” table, we get “fungal curse,” which means that a creature failing the save will eventually sprout a “mother fungus,” forming a new colony. I like the idea that this fate befell a prisoner who was interred here, and a new colony formed in the dungeon.
Riffing off this idea further, I imagine these fungi are somewhat like the mycorrhizal fungi that allow trees to communicate in some forests. Rather than a purely parasitic dungeon hazard, I like the idea that the fungi are symbiotic, and are probably a major source of food, exchanging (non-toxic) edible mushroom growth with other dungeon denizens for things they want (especially water and fertilizer). Because tiny fungal filaments connect many parts of the dungeon, they can provide information or facilitate communication. We’ll place the mother fungus near the fresh water, but assume that their filaments have spread to many parts of the dungeon where there is at least some moisture and not too much heat.
#21: Centipede, Giant. A classic, flexible dungeon monster that can go anywhere. OSE notes they favor damp areas, but we need to narrow it down further than that (remember, dungeon is wet). The Monster Overhaul includes both a monstrous vermin category, and another section for ancient anthropods. Going with the latter because it has an intriguing “why fight these ancient anthropods” table, we roll a prompt that “one of them ate the key to this chest.”
I’m going to tweak that and combine it with the other tables in the entry that generate weird head-shapes for these bugs. These “cellipedes,” known colloquially as the prisoner’s best friend, have evolved key-like protuberances on their heads. They are drawn to places like prisons; the more locked doors, the better it is as a breeding habitat for these sickos. They can be used to open some doors, and particularly rare specimens have a skeleton key ability, and are able to open many locked doors.
#99: Roc. I love that OSE has giant roc, large roc, and small roc. Given that the roc’s brand is “very large bird,” I'm kinda skeptical that three categories were required. We don’t have manual entries for “tall halfling” or “non-animated skeleton.”
OSE notes that rocs are lawful creatures who react negatively to non-lawful creatures, and can also be trained as mounts. So let’s associate them with the prison builders. We haven’t yet decided pinned down the builders’ whole deal, but for the prison to make sense as an adventuring site, it helps to presume that their authority and control has partially or completely lapsed.
To put a twist on the roc here, let’s make it a big egg. Not every monster has to appear in its fully grown adult form. And finding an egg is a classic sort of unusual “treasure” for PCs; a player in one game I ran took a deep interest in the unhatched egg of a giant carnivorous parrot, which became a focus of downtime work for many sessions afterward. We’ll drop it near the wights, on the assumption it has or had something to do with the builders/jailers.
#78: Mule. Another mundane animal. My first thought was to make them a population descended from working animals when the prison was built, like the wild burros of the southwestern United States, who descended from domesticated donkeys brought to the area by prospectors. Then I remembered that mules are, uh, by definition not the type of animals you’re going to find breeding in the wild.
So we’ll go with a more ordinary explanation, and say that mules are survivors of adventuring parties that have entered the dungeon. Some of them have gathered here to dwell among their own kind. I like the idea that mules regularly appear on the dungeon's random encounter table as well, with each mule encountered giving hints as to the status (or final fate) of the adventurers who brought that mule into the dungeon. Mules also have a few useful sundry items on them ("found a mule" is local dungeon slang for a stroke of good fortune; more dungeons should have custom slang). An amusing recurring motif is mule-as-evidence of a TPK. Somehow the lowly pack animal always survives.
#65: Kobold. Our first humanoid! OSE uses the old-school characterization of kobolds, noting they are “canine,” while the Monster Overhaul goes with a modern take, describing them as "reptilian" and dropping them in the “dragon” section of the book. I’m sympathetic to Skerples on this taxonomic decision, given how much more prevalent that portrayal is these days, and I'll go the same route since I'm sticking to OSE where I can. But I cannot continue without mentioning that the very good boy Kuro makes a strong case for the canine kobold. I love the Dungeon Meshi portrayal, especially because “dogfolk” never really clicked in D&D the way tabaxi did. It’s a minor gripe, but I always thought the dogfolk in Thracia were the least interesting of the beastmen faction members.
…What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the World’s Largest Dungeon. Kobolds, regardless of aesthetics, are known for being numerous and individually weak, so I don’t think they make much sense as prisoners. Instead, let’s imagine they have entered the dungeon while delving underground. Did they get here intentionally or accidentally? Rolling on the Overhaul tables for prompts, we get “geckotian” kobolds (“sticky pads, marbled eyes”) with a current activity of “prodding a corpse” and “bucolic mushroom farms” as a current scheme. I think this is already more interesting than just making them dragon servants and calling it a day.
Let’s say they entered the dungeon seeking the yellow mould mother fungus. Prodding a corpse suggests they are corpse retrievers (and possibly even grave robbers) because they’re gathering fertilizer to bring to the fungus. There may be some tension with the mother fungus; the kobolds ideally would like to domesticate it, while the mother fungus wants to infect them. So they want different things and are in tension, which is a good scenario for the PCs to crash into.
#59: Hobgoblin. The humanoid hits continue. Modern D&D treats hobgoblins as martial warriors, something like how orcs were originally portrayed. OSE reverts hobgoblins back to their earlier presentation, but that doesn’t give us much to work with, as they are just “bigger goblins,” a trait they share with bugbears. At least bugbears have the element of surprise. The Monster Overhaul (correctly) just folds hobgoblins into the orc category, which we’ll save for when orcs come up in this dungeon. So that’s no help. Hobgoblins, hobgoblins, what do you do with those hobgoblins?
It’s a thin sliver of lore, but the OSE hobgoblin entry does note that thouls sometimes serve as bodyguards to hobgoblin kings. If you’re not familiar, thouls are an infamous monster from early D&D that combines aspects of hobgoblin, ghoul, and troll, and probably originated as a typesetting mistake.
Perhaps we can make our hobgoblins more interesting by playing up the connection to goblins, ghouls, and trolls. Let’s say that hobgoblins are themselves goblins who are particularly susceptible to mutation, something already implied in other treatments of goblins. Mutation has made them bigger, for starters, but some of them have also been able to mutate into traits from other creatures. We’ll hold further specifics of their mutative powers for a future monster that hasn’t been placed yet. I’m also not sure whether they are prisoners, tresspassers, or something else. We’ll revisit that later.
#32: Driver Ant. Part of the fun of this exercise is looking at the stripped-down presentation of creatures in OSE. There’s a less-is-more vibe to these monsters. At first glance, driver ants are giant bugs with a standard bite attack and not much else to distinguish them. But on second glance…
- Omnivorous and rapacious: “Consume everything in their path, when hungry” – I feel seen.
- Morale: “Attack relentlessly, once they are engaged in melee (morale 12). Will even pursue through flames.”
- Gold: “30% chance of 1d10 × 1,000gp worth of gold nuggets, mined by the ants.”
So there are a couple of adventure vectors here. The ants are driven by hunger and can eat a lot of different things. We can imagine them chewing through barriers made from organic material, invading and connecting different regions of the dungeon.
The morale aspect is compelling for games that use morale rigorously. One of my biggest complaints with modern-style play is the strong presumption that every fight only ends when all the monsters are dead. When I run games, I stress how advantageous it is to compel monsters to flee or surrender, rather than slaughtering all of them because of video game logic.
Contrasted with our expectation of how morale may quickly end a fight against hobgoblins or kobolds or mules (please, do not fight the mules), a monster that goes into a 12-morale frenzy when you melee with it is a big problem. PCs who study their behavior could distract them with food, pelt them with arrows from a distance, or trick other monsters into fighting them. But also… the ants may have gold in their lairs. So there’s also a strong incentive to risk engaging with them further.
#135: Wraith. This is our first incorporeal undead. OSE notes that they “Dwell in deserted regions or in the homes of former victims.” I think this suggests that they are prisoners, perhaps murders or other capital criminals who persist after death, but are trapped in the "deserted region" of the prison.
We had previously decided that our wights could be guards. Perhaps part of their role is to guard the wraith prisoners? The OSE SRD description of energy drain doesn’t specifically state that it wouldn’t work on undead, but it follows logically from the flavor of the power to say that wights would be immune.
Next time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans