The Witch Queens of the Basic Bestiary

 On Monday, I mentioned some plans for Basic Bestiary, namely to include many of my various Witch Queens with stat blocks.  I wanted to talk about it today.

As my Basic Bestiary project has grown (and grown, and grown) it has also morphed. I originally planned this to be a collection of monsters from my various witch books and monsters from my notes that never had a proper home. Later it morphed as a nod to not just the Monster Manual, the book that got me into D&D, and two of my favorite books the Fiend Folio and Deities & Demigods. What I liked about both was the variety of creatures and beings they included.

Tea with the Witch Queens by Brian Brinlee

While I have a lot of Witch Queens, I can only include some of them. Many belong to other people and IPs. Great for a game here in my home, bad for a publication. Others would not work for the scope and design for Basic Bestiary.  

The idea started when I was trying to figure out what to do with Baba Yaga. Was she Faerie Lord? Some sort of Outsider? Something else? No. She was a Witch Queen, and in my worlds, that is something special.

Here are the ones I am thinking about so far. Linking to stats when I have them, but all will need to tweak all of them at some level.

• Baba Yaga
• Circe
• Darlessa
• Elena the Fair (change the name to Vasilisa)
• Marissia (but strip out some of her histories)
• Morgan Le Fey
• Nicnevin / Nic an Neachneohain

I would like to include Ceridwen, Louhi, Lilith, and Sycorax. While I am at it, I would like to also include others like Bloody Mary, Grimhild, Mother Carey, Prättäkitti, and Sebile.

Others I have good substitutes for. For example, much of what I have been doing with Kersy of Mystara is close enough to the witch Urganda to work as a stand-in, much like Vasilisa works for Elena the Fair.

So far, my plan is to put them all in an appendix at the end of the book. They are not really monsters, even if myth and history have portrayed them as such.  I also don't think a major heading like Witch Queens (like how many books do with Demons or Devils or Elementals) will work because other than being witches and immortal, they are not allied and don't have a lot of powers in common.  Still, I might change my mind about that. 

Something fun to look forward to.

I also have to get art for all of them too. And...there is still the question of the cover art for all four books.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 29

 This room opens up from the hallway to reveal the last creature worked on by the Necromancers. 

It is a Zombie Owlbear (5HD, attacks like an owlbear, but last in initiative like a zombie).

This creature lacks any intelligence including the knowledge or the will to move to another room. It will attack anything this room.

There are three skeletons on the ground. They wear the remains of what could have been wizard robes. The robes have been slashed. The story here is a little obvious, these were the wizards working on this beast and it killed them. 

One of the robes has a wand of magic missiles with 5 charges left. Another has a ring of protection +1, and all have about 45 GP total.

Searching the room will find a lot of lab equipment, some materials for sewing up corpses and surgical gear. There is a stone slab near the door out with the word "Jabrexi" on it in the language of magic.

Review: Blue Flame, Tiny Stars

I was on Mastodon a while back (and I really do need to do more over there) and I struck up a conversation with Stephen Wendell.  He was promoting his new book Blue Flame, Tiny Stars, and I asked for a copy, which he happily sent me.  I got it in the mail about a month ago and I finally sat down to read it.  Honestly it was hard to put down.  While he was not expecting a review when he sent it, I said I would review it. So here it is. 

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars

Blue Flame, Tiny Stars, or more properly, "Blue Flame, Tiny Stars: A Memoir of Early Experiences Playing the Holmes Edition of the World’s Most Superlative Role-Playing Game" by Stephen Wendell, is a memoir of one man's first experiences with Dungeons & Dragons. 

Stephen's story here is a familiar one. I could have recounted a very similar tale of the summer of 1980 after being exposed to D&D back in December of 1979. But his tale is an earnest one and an engaging one.

The sales pitch for this book includes the line "Warning: Reading this book will make you want to play D&D!" and that is 100% true. Reading through Wendell's recollections of his first encounter with D&D, via the Holmes Basic Rules (same as me) made me want to pull out my Holmes set and roll up a new character. It reminded me of summer days coloring in my own dice with a white crayon and then playing games at night with my brother or friends. 

This is not a long book, a little more than 30 pages. It also reads much faster than its size would suggest because it is so engaging. Wendell manages to do something rather magical here. He engages you in his own discoveries and makes you recall your own at the same time. It is not just a fantastic new tale; it is a fantastic OLD tale that you already know. 

I have talked a lot about Holmes Basic and its enduring appeal. This book is a love letter to that set and that time. 

The book is on sale in lots of places, and Wendell sells it in a variety of formats (print, pdf, epub), all at Pay What You Want (at DriveThru).  But seriously, find the suggested price and pay more than that. 

Regardless of what you pay for it or how long it takes you to read it do pick this one up. Especially if you started as part of the "Second Generation" of Gamers that did not learn from war games or from the ancient masters. We taught ourselves or learned from others that also taught themselves. This is the group that both Wendell and I (and likely many of you) claim membership in. 

Props also for including the quote from Carl Jung. Seriously was this book custom-made for me? We even have the same dice.

If you are part of that Second Generation, then you owe it to yourself, or at least that 9-11-year-old version of yourself, to pick up this book. It is more than just a nostalgia grab. It is the real thing, and I am happy to have it.

I am sticking my copy inside my Holmes boxed set where it belongs.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 28

This room is really a wide hallway with many smaller cells on each wall to the left and right. There are four on each lower row on both sides and four above these in an upper row for a total of 16 cells.

The cell doors are steel and not bars. It is difficult to hear anything at all on the inside, but the doors do feel warm. The locking mechanism is broken so unlocking one will cause the others to open as well.

Opening the cells will release 8 Hellhounds (3 HD each).  These animals were going to be used for breeding purposes but they have been forgotten. They are hungry and quite insane. They will attack everything in the room, including each other.  

Once one Hellhound is down the nearest three will attack it and attempt to eat it. If they succeed (two rounds to do this) then their HD increases to 4 HD.

Each hound is wearing a jeweled silver collar with 500 gp.  The magic of the collar kept them locked onto this plane.

Monstrous Mondays: What's Next for This Old Dragon (and more BB updates)

Combining two posts into one today. Mostly because I don't have a monster to share.

A few years back, I bought two large collections of Dragon Magazines. They were in terrible shape, most missing their covers, many had water damage, and a few were in great shape. So I started on a plan to do "This Old Dragon." I'd pull one out at random and review the contents. Not review-review, but talk about what was inside and reminisce about what was going on for me then and how I could or still do the material inside.

It has been a fun trip.  One of my personal goals was to reread the ones I had in the past AND to find new material from Dragons Issue #50 and below.  I had one other goal that developed in my readings too. More on that.

But I am now running out of Dragons. I grabbed one the other day, Issue 95, only to remember I had already done it. 

So how does this all relate to monsters?

The goal I developed while reading these was how much I enjoyed the old Ecology Of articles.  Since so many of these were in terrible shape to begin with, I was fine with cutting out these sections and putting them into my AD&D 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendium binders. I am growing the definitive collection of AD&D monsters over here. 

So for the next phase of my This Old Dragon, I want to go in the other direction. I want to find Dragons that cover the 2e era. 

My personal start of the AD&D 2nd Era would be sometime after Dragon #150. I know for a while Dragon was doing both 1st Ed and 2nd Ed stats for monsters, and some of those I still have here. I might re-sort what I have left and clear out all my ones from below #150. I think my cut-off Dragon for AD&D 2nd then needs to be #274 when Paizo took over.

Now I need to find a good collection that covers the 90s issues of Dragon.

Do not tell me I can get issues online. I don't condone piracy of any sort. Besides, I have the Dragon Magazine CD-ROM that goes all the way to issue #250. 

The goal here is to have physical magazines in hand to review.

I don't need collector's copies; I don't even need table copies. I need readable copies, and if they are missing a page here or there, no big deal.  Nor am I looking for handout copies. I will buy what I need. 

I will wrap up my "Classic" This Old Dragon copies and then move on to the ones I have that are after issue #150.  After that...well, it depends on what I can find out there.

If you see any for sale online, let me know!

Basic Bestiary Updates

Did not get as far as I wanted to get last week. I made some more updates to BB1 and BB3. What can I say? Demons are fun to write about. I am not happy with my stat-blocks for dragons yet. Glad that is for BB4, and there are no plans to get that out until 2024. All four may come out then unless I get busy.

I do need new cover art for all four, and I would like them all to be from the same artist.

I *DID* however, come up with the plan to include the various Witch Queens in my game world in an Appendix. Obviously, I will not include ones based on others' intellectual property. But I have enough mytho-historical ones and my own for it not to matter.  I like this idea a lot and it fills a gap I had in the various power structures of the book. These witches will be part of BB1. 

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 27

Coming down the hall from Room 26 is another chamber. This one has a locked door similar to those on Level 2.

Inside, this room appears to be empty. There is a door directly in front of the door the party just came in. Next to the door is the statue of a knight.

The statue is a Living Statue (D&D Basic Set).

This is a Rock Living Statue, a creation of the wizards that used to control these lands. Now it is a forgotten guard to the magic laboratories beyond.

Instead of spotting magma from its fingertips it will spit it up from its mouth. It can only do this once every other round. It does 2d8 points of damage. Its fists do 1d6+1 twice per round.

#Dungeon23 Tomb of the Vampire Queen, Level 3, Room 26

Going left, you go through a hallway to another chamber. This one is square. There is an opening straight ahead.  There is a statue of a demonic-looking dragon figure. It has gems for eyes.

The gems are not real but the dragon is.

Coming within 5' of the "statue" will breathe a gas that turns the victim to stone.  They get a saving throw vs. Petrify/Paralysis. Victims get a +2 bonus to their save, the dragon is rather hungry.

This is a creature, but its own skin has been turned to stone due to a horrible magical experiment to create a dragon that could breathe a cloud of petrification gas and it worked, to a degree.  The dragon turned itself to stone.  It is still alive and it can't move or eat, so it is quite insane now.  It can't be killed. 

Once it breathes it has to wait another hour to breathe again. Anyone turned to stone will become normal again in 5 turns, but their Dexterity will suffer a permanent reduction of 1 point.