Showing posts with label monsters books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monsters books. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

15 Days Left to Order Tome of Horrors Complete...

The news is Here and Here, order Here.

Sure $99 seems steep, but compare it to the price of a sports jersey, a new video game or a tank of gas...

I can't wait to get my meathooks on it (or my digital meathooks on the PDF)!

Monday, February 21, 2011

Every Monster Book Should Include Encounter Tables

By terrain type and dungeon level, utilizing all of and only the monsters contained in the book, and not those 2-20 tables - which are great for specialized tables, but the failure of the AD&D Monster Manual II is that it doesn't have the comprehensive d% encounter tables in the back like the Fiend Folio.

With the caveat that monsters books containing only a few monsters would be exempt.

With such a protocol in place a DM could easily make up encounter tables like:

d% --- Monster Book Encounter Table
01-24  Human - use Swords & Wizardry City Encounters or other resource
25-49  AD&D Fiend Folio
50       Random Esoteric Creature Generator
51-60  Arduin Trilogy
61-70  OSRIC Monsters of Myth
71-80  OSRIC Malevolent and Benign
81-90  Swords & Wizardry Monster Book
91-00  Tome of Horrors Complete

With the number of monsters listed in each book, an obsessive DM could easily assign d% probabilities according to monster book content quantities.

I think it's great that so many OSR monster books contain indexes with monster listings by dungeon level, terrain type, and so forth, I just wish that they'd take that extra step and tack some sort of arbitrary random table function onto these listings, just for "instant functionality."