It's been way too long, again. I don't know if I really need to dwell on how long its been again. I gotta get over this taking months-long gaps between blogging. Anyway, here's a link to the first post in this series, here's a link to the most recent one, let's go!
Tabaxi
★★★☆☆
Tabaxi have become such an OC D&D staple (what with all the Furries that play D&D of course!) that it's almost weird to encounter them here in a totally different context. They're pretty much what you'd expect from a race of cat people, although as described here they are much closer to roving bands of paleolithic cat-men (nothing more advanced than bone and wood spears, atlatls, etc. are mentioned, and they're only tool-users when they find it convenient) than to the much more modern and social tabaxi that are more prominent these days. Also, they wear no clothes and do not trade because they find it demeaning (I'm torn on this... does that mean no player negotiation with tabaxi, or does it just make negotiating with them more complicated i.e. more interesting?). Also, love the uncanny vibe of the illustration!
Tentamort
★★★★☆
Maybe I just love weird tentacle monsters, so sue me! The tentamort (banger of a name, super unnecessary that the description opens with "its got lots of names, tentamort is just the most common" who cares, that doesn't add anything) is some kind of giant predatory echinoderm with suction cups on the underside that it uses to adhere to dungeon walls, floors, ceilings and slowly crawl along. They also have two long tentacles, one with strong constricting muscles and the other with a long bone needle on the tip that injects a corrosive saliva that melts the insides of a human-sized creature in 2 rounds (it's a bit confusingly worded... it takes 2 rounds to inject and then an additional 2 rounds to completely melt the insides and kill them, if I understand). The tentamort's M.O. is to ensnare a victim in the constricting tentacle and then inject the corrosive saliva with the other. Pretty basic, sure, but very strong conceptually! It evokes real-world animals in a way that I really love, and feels right at home in implied dungeon ecologies that are some of my favorite D&D things. Great critter all around!
★★☆☆☆
Whatever magic-user-hating referee created the disenchanter must have loved this thing. It feels like something made specifically to counter magic-happy players, in a way that I'm not terribly interested in. Basically, the terithran is a creature of the ethereal plane that gets annoyed when magic-users cast spells because it causes ripples on the ethereal plane, so they come into the prime material plane to kill M-Us with a bunch of spelled-out supernatural powers like stunning blast, cause serious wounds, transportation (to steal away an M-U to the ethereal plane), etc. The idea of higher plane creatures that get annoyed with magic use is something that at its core interests me a lot, but the expression here is mostly boring. I'd want to take more cues from the real-life lore surrounding psychic phenomena for stuff like that! The terithran reads as a monster aimed at countering specific players with little else interesting going on (plus it's a boring little humanoid, there's so many of those).
The terithran is our first monster of this batch to be originally featured in the Fiend Factory column! Featuring this incredibly unsettling illustration that singularly bumps up the terithran to a 3/5 monster for me. Maybe I'm too susceptible to a cool drawing, but the image implied by a monster goes a long way to how likely I am to use it in my game! Mechanically, it is more or less the same. The description here is more explicit about when it will use its powers, with a bit less wordiness to get across that the terithran seeks to capture powerful magic-users and drag them back to the ethereal plane. Don Turnbull's comments open with "This is one of those creatures which is simpler to run than its description would have us believe." Good to know! The description, both here and in the Folio, does come across as very complicated. He also says he prefers anti-magic creatures like this to "klutz factor" as an added risk for magic use.
Thoqqua (aka Rockworm)
★★☆☆☆
A worm so hot that it melts through rock and ruins the arms and armor of characters when it attacks. Seems a bit redundant to me with the remorhaz also being a worm-creature with a heat-attack, but I guess the remorhaz also has an ice association... which honestly makes it more interesting anyway. It's implied the thoqqua is the larval form of some larger elemental creature which is fun. Pretty much exactly what you'd expect as a "fire worm."
★★★★☆
I love the thork, but I also just love weird birds in general. Thorks aka boiler birds are copper storks that heat up water inside their bodies to spit as an attack. The imagery of a bird made of metal standing in water with steam rising from its beak is just too good to pass up, and I honestly appreciate that they are explicitly non-hostile, only attacking in self-defense. But they very well might want to defend themselves, because they collect platinum in their subaquatic nests! The choice of platinum is a bit arbitrary and clearly just picked because it is so valuable, but having a valuable treasure protected by these boiling water birds is a great excuse to make players interact with them. Maybe, although this isn't very stork-like, thorks should build elaborate nests out of treasure, just to make it doubly hard to get the stuff out without attracting their ire.
Throat Leech
★★☆☆☆
Pretty basic, a bloodsucking leech that inhabits fresh water, looking like a twig, and if consumed latches onto the back of the throat and sucks blood (1-3 hit points of damage) for 10 melee rounds at which point it is distended with blood and stops sucking. The only way to kill it is with a heated metal rod inserted down the throat, which has a chance of horribly damaging the host's mouth and throat which is fun. But the chance of getting the leech in the first place is only 10%... So many words writing this stuff out, all just on the off chance the players even have to deal with it? I like the basic building blocks here, just wish more was done with it; drinking water hazards are always great!
Throat leeches were also a Factory original! Pretty much the same as in the Folio, except the description is mercifully much shorter. Did someone at TSR require that monster mechanics be written out in the most verbose possible way??? The illustration makes it look like throat leeches go for your throat when you go for a swim, despite what the description puts forward.
Tiger Fly
★★★☆
The tiger fly is, at is simplest, a sexually dimorphic giant predatory stinging insect. Except, for some reason, they have a human face? Their intelligence is listed as "non-", which does bring to mind the question of just how uncanny it would be to see an explicitly non-thinking human face would be. Male tiger flies have two sharp sickle-like forelimbs they use to attack, and a venomous sting that deals a whopping 4d6 damage; females, on the other hand, have four arms which they use to grab victims, holding them in place to paralyze them with their stinger and lay a parasitoid larva in their body. Parasitoid insects are an absolute favorite of mine (and have cropped up in these reviews before, with the assassin bug!), and the combination of a parasitoid wasp-esque creature with a totally unthinking human face is very freaky. I'm imagining the face of a female tiger fly completely placid and uncanny as she injects her spawn into your abdomen, a fantastic visual! The illustration of a male tiger fly leans more goofy than uncanny, but it is still very fun either way.
Tirapheg
★★★★★
I LOVE THE TIRAPHEG!!! This is one of those monsters that I was introduced to before ever getting my hands on the Fiend Folio proper, via a mention in a Bogleech D&D monster review. And, keeping with the uncanniness implied by the tiger fly, the tirapheg is quite possibly one of the creepiest looking creatures that one could imagine shuffling out of the darkness in the dungeon depths. Seven feet tall, completely naked and hairless, with three heads, only one of which has any actual facial features, three arms, only one of which ends in a hand (and a sharp-clawed one at that), three legs, only one of which ends in a foot, and a large fleshy-lipped mouth with waving tendrils above in the middle of its torso. An inexplicable body horror monstrosity that is described as preferring to eat decayed flesh, the tirapheg is normally shy (this combined with the eating of decayed flesh perhaps implies tiraphegs are decomposers/scavengers? Yet, interestingly, they have average i.e. human-level intelligence) but sometimes will attack adventurers for "no apparent reason" (more accurately what seems like no apparent reason to the players). Additionally, the tirapheg can project illusory copies of itself in combat, which take no damage but can damage opponents, as well as creating a sudden blinding flash of light that causes confusion effects. Tiraphegs seem to be furtive dungeon scavengers, with supernatural abilities that serve to give them opportunities to flee combat and hide away somewhere... and they look like that.
For some reason, in their initial appearance in the Fiend Factory column, the tirapheg was called Lauren. The reader-provided description thankfully explains that Lauren is an anagram of "unreal." OH YEAH I FORGOT TO MENTION, tiraphegs/laurens have a third eye on the back of the head and double-jointed arms that allow them to attack from either direction. That element is the same in both versions. Otherwise, the two versions are much the same, although the Factory version is much simpler. The illustration goes for a more AHH! Real Monsters gross-out sort of vibe than the surreal uncanny of the Folio drawing, and while I think for the vibe I get from the description the Folio illustration is better, I can't help but love the scrappiness of the Factory rendition.
Trilloch
★★☆☆☆
Trillochs are a terrible force from the negative energy plane that thrives on siphoning life-force from dying creatures and uses its field of influence to accelerate death (but it cannot start death). If combat occurs in the presence of a trilloch, all attacks have +1 to-hit and +1 damage, unintelligent monsters are more likely to attack, etc. Trillochs apparently gravitate to especially evil and violent creatures and attaches itself to whatever ends up killing their "host." The basic idea is one I really vibe with, but I wish it wasn't just an invisible indistinct energy-creature. Literally anything else would be more interesting. I'd much rather have an awful little piece of shit critter that hangs around evil monsters and goads violence on than a... wait what I just described is a minion.
Trolls
There are four new types of trolls described here in the Fiend Folio, but most of them are uninteresting and repetitive!
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| It's a pretty good creepy drawing though! |
Giant Troll & Giant Two-Headed Troll
★☆☆☆☆
Hybrids of trolls and other giant humanoids (hill giants in the case of the giant troll and ettins in the case of the giant two-headed troll). I get bored of mostly uninteresting humanoid hybrids. I'd much rather normal trolls just sometimes be allowed to be really big, or have two heads, than these get written up as totally separate monsters with naturalistic explanations. The two-headed troll is basically just a normal ass troll with a lower chance of surprise! Who cares!!
★★☆☆☆
These are both mildly more interesting than the other two troll variants. Ice trolls are not literally made of ice, but have the appearance of a translucent crystalline structure. It isn't mentioned here, but I'd love if you could see their internal organs, shivering and pulsating inside their icey exteriors. The ice troll is probably my favorite of the whole set here, namely because its regeneration only works when it is immersed in water. Almost like the opposite of Minecraft's enderman, goading the monster out of the water is an interesting strategy for combatting ice trolls, and presents good OSR-style problem solving on top of the already existing challenge of troll regeneration. Spirit trolls are hybrids like the giant trolls and giant two-headed troll, but they are hybrids of trolls and invisible stalkers. My distaste for humanoid hybrids loops back around to me now being morbidly fascinated at the very question of how that match even works. The magical breeding that produces spirit trolls is literally described as "perverted." Only the most nasty of wizards make spirit trolls. Spirit trolls are basically just trolls that are invisible and deal damage to STR as well as HP.
Tween
★★☆☆☆
A stupid name for a very strange monster. Tweens are entities that exist only on the ethereal plane and partner up with people on the prime material plane, forming a hazy shadowy mirror image of them that exerts a strange sort of effect on the host and those around them. Tweens can see a few seconds into the future and increase their host's luck while making everything worse for those around them. Basically, the host always has advantage on every roll, while everyone else around them, friend or foe, always has disadvantage. They didn't have that kind of language back when the Fiend Folio was published, so this whole system is explained in way too many words. I wish more was described about the relationship that the tween has with its host. It reminds me a lot of the vibe of an X-Files episode and... dammit, that makes me want to bump it up to three stars. If this was described differently, and more of an emphasis was placed on the, for lack of a better term, human element, I think I'd like it so much more. Something that just barely nudges swords out of the way and exerts an unlucky field around itself latching onto someone that it seemingly cares about, cares about enough to make lucky instead of unlucky, is such an interesting idea... I just wish it wasn't shackled to AD&D's kinda clunky implementation.
The tween was also originally featured in the Fiend Factory column! The illustration is much more unsettling than the Folio illustration, depicting a hunched-over, hazy, emaciated thing, and the description is pretty much the same in the broad strokes as the Folio version. However, the Factory version does note that the host will not be aware of the tween's presence! That explicitly cuts out the most thought provoking part of what I liked about the tween, the idea that they may be aware of something supernatural going on even if they don't necessarily understand it, and that the tween might literally care about their host. Turnbull's comment opens with a note that the tween could have easily been a character class which is actually insane. He also delights in the confusion that players might experience having to do all these extra rolls for no clear reason if one of the party members has a tween latched onto them, and provides some advice on how to handle that sort of thing.
Well anyway! Next time, we will be picking up where we are leaving off, with the letter U! I also think that it is very likely that our next installment will be our last, since there are very few monsters in those last letters of the alphabet. Looking forward to finally getting there, after much, much too long!
