As described in my recent series of megadungeon posts, the world's largest rewrite monster series is pretty useful for generating monster ideas, so I'm returning for another batch of 10 to add to the pile. When this series is finished, we'll sift through it for the best monsters, and (if they are very good) we'll add them to our megadungeon.
#126: Unicorn. You thought we were done with weird horses? We are not done with weird horses.
OSE gives unicorns the “empathy with maidens” and “teleport” powers. The maiden affinity comes from myth, but I went down a rabbit hole (jackalope hole?) on the teleportation ability. It appears to originate with AD&D, possibly to give unicorns a countermeasure against players hunting and harvesting them. That would make sense, given Gary Gygax's focus on the benefits of hunting or capturing monsters.
The unicorn doesn’t really make sense as a prisoner in our dungeon-prison, and while it is lawful, it isn’t really a dungeon guardian. Rolling on the Monster Overhaul’s excellent “Dubious Methods to Lure a Unicorn” table, we get “a wounded Dryad.” The unicorn is here to help a dryad in distress. We haven’t rolled dryad yet in this series of posts, so we’ll revisit what exactly is going on when we get to that result.
#34: Dwarf. Are these dwarves prisoners, intruders, or guardians? We’ll just choose randomly, and we get guardians. OK, so a clan of dwarves is sworn to protect this place. They are comfortable underground, reasonably long-lived, and could repair structural damage to the dungeon, so they make sense for this role.
OSE suggests groups of dwarves have a leader, and we can use the Overhaul to detail this leader, and in turn, better understand these dwarves. OSE does not have dedicated entries for dwarves or other PC ancestries, but they appear under the general “adventurer” category. Rolling on the random tables there, we get “sloth” as a vice and “wealth beyond dreams” as a goal. So the dwarves delved too greedily and too... lazily. Our leader is Fingmir… Silverstone… no, no, absolutely not. Fingmir… Silverheart. He has blue and red heraldry and is a prophet (!). His specialty tool is “targeted poisons.”
The story becomes clear. The prison builders (celestials or other uncompromising lawful types) contracted a dwarvish clan to guard the prison. The dwarves’ commitment to the pact has weakened over generations, particularly as it became clear the prison builders either could not or would not deal with the progressive deterioration we’ve seen in other parts of the prison. The dwarves become despondent and lazy, and Fingmir, driven by greed, poisoned the previous clan leader, his mother, believing that she was hiding secret wealth from him. She was not. He is now trying desperately to figure out some way to get rich quick before his crimes (and lack of treasure) are revealed to the other dwarves.
#27: Dervish. The OSE bestiary is kinda wild. We don’t have time to unpack the layers of cultural misinterpretation that transformed an ancient Persian ascetic tradition to the “fanatical desert warrior” archetype that Gygax and his successors had in mind. I guess it kinda gestures at condensing 2000 years of history, ranging form Parthian horsemen to Ottoman janissaries, into one pulp fiction stat block.
There are a few ways to do something more interesting with this entry, but I think keeping the idea of “lawful extremists” and throwing out the Orientalism is probably the easiest way to get something useful. We can use the knight entry from the Overhaul to add some new stuff in its place. The Overhaul tables give us the following.
Sir Guy Truthspeaker is a knight of middling renown who duels everyone he meets to develop his combat skills. He’s bedecked with weapons and wracked with religious doubt. His heraldry is azure, with a pale division and a lion charge surrounded by ivy.
We just had Dwarven guardians, so I'm going to make Guy and his retinue outsiders. They’ve come here on a religious quest, but Guy has doubts. Maybe seeing the state of the prison has shaken his confidence in the celestials.
#83: Nomad. Yes, we’re rolling randomly, but as with the stone-adjacent monsters last time, the dice do like to suggest connective themes. So after an entry about dervishes, who wander steppes and deserts, living in tents, we get to an entry about nomads who… wander steppes and deserts, living in tents. We haven’t even gotten to the bandit/brigand pairing yet.
The Overhaul saves us once again. Whereas dervish was an excuse to use the otherwise-unrepresented knight entry, nomad points us to the Overhaul's barbarian category. Rolling on the random tables, we get “Dream-readers. Dour, fatalistic.” They want “Strong drink. Herbal distillations preferred.” They are led by Slagnar Urn, who is “feverish and ill, desperate.”
So Slagnar is ready to imbibe a fatal dose of rare herbs that will take him on his dream-quest into the afterlife. He and his family are here to gather the necessary herbs. Unlike the gnolls and other intruders, they’re a much more practical faction for the PCs to cooperate with.
#119: Toad, Giant. This is the classic sticky-tongued ambush predator. We can drop them in the same general area where our other “freshwater invasive species” entries landed earlier. They dwell in a log jam in the “river” that is pouring through the roof of the dungeon, and they love to eat beetles, which they snag from the nearby swarms. The devil swine who run the area prefer human flesh, but aren’t above snacking on toads that intrude into their territory in search of beetles.
#63: Invisible Stalker. OK, here’s a special guy. The invisible stalker is a flawless tracker and nasty ambush attacker. It has a clear fit with the dungeon theme, as a summoned creature deployed by the prison builders to track down and capture escaping prisoners. But as the enchantments that bind it have weakened, its behavior has grown erratic. The Overhaul directs us to elementals to cover the stalker. Rolling for air elementals, we get a motivation of “a sealed building or tomb opened.” So the stalker is now doing roughly the opposite of what it was originally employed, hunting guardians or aiding prisoners. We could include a random mood table, where the stalker -- if encountered multiple times -- is sometimes more cogent, completing its original duties, and other times rebelling against them.
#12: Brigand. I mentioned them when talking about nomads, so of course they showed up almost immediately. They have little distinguishing them from bandits, except that the brigands are fighter-coded, while the bandits are closer to thieves. We’ll use the Overhaul’s mercenary entry here, and worry about bandits later.
Rolling on the mercenary tables, we get the Legion of Gold, led by William Osprey. They prize cleanliness and order! Apparently William’s astrologer-wizard started gibbering about “moondrops” and “silver rain” and ran off into the night, entering the prison in a delusional state. The mercenaries are understandably wary of following him in, but want to get him back, presumably because his magic is essential for some scheme they are pursuing.
They’re camped right at the main entrance to the dungeon. They’re more than happy to opportunistically tax adventurers coming out, or even outright steal from them (I think among the old-school megadungeons, it is possibly Rappan Athuk that is famous for brigands camping the front entrance?) Then again, the brigands could be merciful to adventurers willing to go back inside and find that wizard…
#127: Vampire. After a series of guardians and invaders, we finally meet another unambiguous prisoner. The vampire has a massive entry by OSE standards, mainly detailing all the classic folkloric vampire powers and weaknesses. Compared to some of the monsters with rather thin premises behind them, the vampire almost has too much to work with.
Fortunately, random tables can provide focus just as well as they can provide inspiration, and the Overhaul has a full three pages dedicated to the vampire. Ours is named Kirkstein, and they have a classic ruff, frills, and handkerchief aesthetic, with decadent indolence as their demeanor. Anyone who kills them is doomed to gradually become a vampire – that would explain why they were imprisoned instead of destroyed. They possess a sublime charm that makes them difficult to attack unless they are already hostile. Their favored follower is a giant albino snake!
#5: Bat. It keeps happening! Themed back-to-back monsters. We want our giant bats to hunt our giant beetles, so we’ll place them in the same region. Both the OSE and Overhaul entries are pretty minimal, but the latter gives us “pushing prey towards a cliff” as a reason to attack. The lefthand edge of our prison flowchart features a lot of wildlife and cave-dwellers, so there must be a broken precipice where the bats are chasing giant beetles, driver ants, boars, and the occasional terrified kobold over the edge, then eating them after they die from the fall.
#104: Shrew, Giant. In terms of monster detail, the humble shrew is quite a lot closer to the vampire than the mechanically generic human subtypes. Click that link and see how much this guy has going on. In summary:
- Insectivore
- Burrower
- High morale (most beasts have 8; the shrew has 10)
- High movement (180/60, similar to a wolf!)
- Always wins initiative in the first round
- Ferocious; creatures with 3HD or less have to save or run away (the shrew itself is only 1 HD, but bugbears and harpies are fleeing in terror before its shrewful presence)
- Territorial
- Echolocation
OSE does not even mechanically apply the venomous saliva that allows some real-world shrews to paralyze their prey! You're leaving money on the table, OSE!
As burrowers, the shrews also help us create dungeon connectivity and emphasize how the space has changed from its original usage. I’ve recently been reading through Demon Bone Sarcophagus, which also demonstrates how a burrowing animal (in that case, a giant sloth) can provide navigational complexity that breaks up a very orderly, grid-based, built environment. Our shrew tunnels will be a useful navigational hack, but also dangerous for low-level characters to exploit; you do not want to get caught trespassing in these tunnels by a gang of ferocious, brave, fast, echolocating shrews.
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