In the tomb of horrors, there is a door that summons a monster to attack the players if the players stab the door. This is apparently something that not only happens in Gary Gygax’s campaigns, but happens often enough that he encoded it into one of the most famous dungeons of all time.
It used to be a common strategy to poke or stab things to see what is real and what wants to hurt you, I think stranger things even touched on it a bit.
Yeah ten foot poles were standard gear for a reason.
I don’t really like traps too much as a DM, it seems too easy to make a lethal trap (at least in a fantasy setting) and why would the makers bother with a non-lethal one?
Look, you spring a door mimic on them just once…
It was probably even worse in 1st Edition, when characters could buy experience with gold and when they said “adventurer” it was understood to also mean “mercenary”
I’ve played a bunch of 1e, and this is accurate.
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I am with this 99 % of the time. I have met the 1% DM sadly. He simply never shuts up to let his polite players input ideas
I think that blue slice should be way larger.
Lovecraft monsters are great.
I cant help but feel like they’ve lost their appeal over the years though. When you can point at a monster and say “oh thats a Shoggoth! it has x stats and y HP and has z special ability” on sight, the fear of unknown that’s so essential to lovecraft is gone and its just a funky slime.
Many games can turn into Surprise, It’s Call Of Cthulu.
Which seems appropriate. Few of Lovecraft’s protagonists set out to discover untold horrors. They’re investigating a murder, or searching for a missing person, or seeking magical power. They don’t know what genre of story they’re in.
Yeah best Lovecraft inspired creatures still attempt to tap into that fear of the unknown thing instead of just “giant octopus uwooo”.
Yeah that only works well when your players don’t know them… Or you modify them.
Players: “What does it look like?”
DM: “It’s entirely unimaginable. I couldn’t possibly describe it.”
"It’s different every time you look straight at it, but the details are always viscerally repulsive. Fractal insect limbs and cracked teeth and spores all co-mingling in wet, stretching flesh. Its outline is sharp and fluid but your left and right eye can’t agree on the details. The edges of it feel too far away, and the middle won’t focus unless you look at your own nose. When you do, all its eyes glance there as well. "
“Pieces continuously break away and reattach to the whole. Some shrink away into nowhere while giving the impression of getting closer. Others boil into existence and join themselves together. All give the sense that they belong to a single being, but you cannot find the connections between them. You feel heat radiating from the closeness of its flesh, from a direction with which you are not familiar.”
Fuck, that last line. That is uncomfortable. Well done.
I think a lot of people say they like Lovecraftian horror without fully grasping what makes a creature Lovecraftian rather than just “a monster”. Like in the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG where having enough Int to understand what you just experienced makes it worse. If you can look at a thing and it makes rational sense in the physical world, like a giant humanoid with tentacles on its face, then it isn’t Lovecraftian. It’s not just that it’s unknown, it’s incomprehensible in the context of our reality. In Lovecraft’s own words, “The Thing can not be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.”
The way they’re presented in a lot of RPGs don’t really help this. Giving any kind of Mythos being a stat block inherently violates the idea of it being some kind of incomprehensible horror, because now it’s rigidly defined with numbers and words within the rules and context of the game.
Say it looks like an oversized kitten. But use the blockstat of the mindflayer
