You survived part one? Well done! But there are more trials that lay before you, just as there are questions that lay before me, as we all proceed to show this challenge who it’s daddies are and just what they do!
QUESTION THE MATT SMITH: Favourite Adventure I’ve Ever Run
I talk about it all the time. I talked about it in part one. Heck, there are a handful of writeups for that very adventure in this very blog. It’s called Worldbreakers, set in Eberron. It was good times.
QUESTION THE AFTER MATT SMITH: Favourite Dungeon Type/ Location
I am not a huge fan of dungeons, usually. Long crawls disinterest me. I like a short and well planned out one, now and then. Cities can be way more fun. Ship-to-ship combat is also a blast, and by that I mean the payers can go from one ship to the other, not necessarily ships firing on one another from a distance. Typically my games don’t stay in one location for very long. I suffer from wanderlust so I take my players all over the worlds I run.
QUESTION THE JASON VOORHEES: Favourite Trap/Puzzle
Because we don’t dungeon a lot, my traps are often few and far between. I like to make them memorable, which either means they are huge set pieces that move and terrify, or they are designed with the intent of causing the most annoyance possible. My favourite of all time was such a simple design. It was a long straight corridor in a kobold warren. As the players walked down it, kobolds started shooting darts and dropping cages full of bees on them. One character/player was not a team player and decided he would rush ahead and leave the slower characters to deal with it. He ran headlong into a Kissing Maiden, which is a lever that pops out of the ground and does knockback. As he recovered, while being assaulted with more bees and also rats, the rest of the group caught up. In case it had reset he decided to leap over where he figured the trap was. He cleared it easily, landing exactly on the trigger for the second kissing maiden. I was not overly cruel. The maidens didn’t reset and he didn’t suffer a chain of them. Those were not the only maidens in the tunnel, nor were they the last he in particular hit. I wasn’t allowed to do traps for over a month after that happened.
QUESTION THE WHAT THE HELL AM I WATCHING? Favourite NPC
I talked about Snapjaw earlier, but he’s eclipsed by another DMPC, this one from my Eberron game. That one had a memorable cast: Smiley, the depressed warforge; Lily, the character designed to make my cousin feel as uncomfortable as possible; Thyre, the guy everybody loved to hate and didn’t realize was around half the time that he was. But above them all was Biskik, the Kobold Pope. Convinced that his god was a gargoyle statue, his faith was shattered when some adventurers crashed through his burrow, animated the gargoyle, and then killed it. Stunned by this display of power, Biskik pledged his eternal servitude and faith in them until such a time as they too were defeated. However, they grew fond of him. He was given presents of gear and a giant spider to ride. He was then charged with freeing other kobolds and, in a moment of inspiration and a natural 20 on a diplomacy roll, he convinced the entire colony of the part’s divine nature. He went on to found the tenents of the religion, spreading the worship of the heroes far and wide. Never has an NPC been more loved and celebrated in one of my games.
QUESTION THE FURY ROAD WAS RELEASED ON MAY 15, 2015: My Favourite Undead Monster
They are not impressive. They are not usually that effective. i don’t even really like having to keep track of them in combat. But I love skeletons (affectionately called Skellingtoms by my friends). They’re dumb but they can be great fun from a thematic point of view, and of course you must engage them in swordplay or a dance off.
QUESTION THE SIXTEEN CANDLES: My Favourite Abberrant Monster
I’ve never had the chance to use one, but it has always been the Ethereal Filcher. First, because ‘Filcher’ is such a fun word to say. Filcher. Second, because the concept is SUCH dick move on the DM’s part: a creature that watches you from another plane of existence, teleports into your plane, steals your precious belongings, and then goes home where you can’t follow it? Utter insanity and glorious bullshit. And the third reason is, well, look at him. Just look. Look at his two faces and one goofy foot-hand. I’d like to give a shout out to the Ethereal Marauder, which has a similar MO except it just wants you nom you a bit. Mostly I just like it because they totally ripped it off of Tremors 2, and the Tremors movies are my favourite horror-monster fanchise.
QUESTION THE 17TH BECAUSE I GOT TIRED OF MOVIE REFERENCES: My favourite Animal/Vermin
3rd edition Badgers and their boundless rage!
QUESTION THE LEGAL IN HALF OF CANADA TO DRINK, BUT YOU CAN VOTE: My Favourite Immortal/Outsider
The nightmare. Gods, in my teenage years of thinking evil things were really cool because it was the 90’s there is nothing I wanted more than to get one of my characters, bearing in mind I hadn’t played a game yet and wouldn’t for over half a decade, than one of these. Then I grew out of it. Then I started playing and now I’ve worked out that if I can find one of those old AD&D Opposite Alignment items I could put one of them on this badass demon-horse and hopefully turn it lawful good.
QUESTION THE LEGAL TO DO ANYTHING IN CANADA EXCEPT SOME PORN: My favourite Elemental/Plant monster
The Hangman Tree, of course. It’s a sentient, blood-drinking tree that has vines in the shape of nooses. The efforts you need to go through to make this thing a threat to a party are numerous and daunting, but totally worth it for that moment of “Oh my god, what is that?”
QUESTION THE TWENTIETH: My favourite human-no, screw that it’s boring. What is my all time favourite monster?
It is the one, the only, Gleatinous CUUUUUUUUUUBE! By now you may have noticed I like ridiculous monsters and nothing is more ridiculous than this, nearly invisible, giant jello monster. I have seen amazing things done with this creature. At a Con game, the DM blew my mind when he used an empty dice container as the cube’s model, putting our figures inside of it as it enveloped them. There was a pathfinder published adventure I was running that had a fantastic bait-and-switch as it appeared an animated suit of armour was attacking when it was really just a knight’s remains suspended in the transparent creature. And there was the session in the Worldbreaker’s game where I used them myself, chasing the unknowning cleric down for 7 rounds before the cube finally caught him and carried him further down the tunnel away from the fight. I love gelatinous cubes. I paid money for a T-shirt.
End of Part 2
