This map dates back to Dave Dalley's 2nd edition AD&D campaign, circa 1990. Dave was a really great DM when working in small settings and low levels. He could make a game seem epic even when it was just a handful of 3rd level PCs saving the Hammlet of Croak from a demonic cattle rustler. The creature in question turned out to be a berbalang, one of the weird monsters from the 1st edition Fiend Folio.
Fighting this guy on a farm in the dark was quite a kerfuffle. We wounded him and he fled. One of his wings was badly mauled in the initial encounter and he half-flew/half-hopped back to his lair, leaving a trackable trail. The thing's lair was a small dungeon of course. Every monster's lair was a dungeon back then. It's just how we did things. So we crawled our way through some traps and spiders and whatnot. The other players thought we had this guy's number when we caught up with him before he had time to heal. Then the real berbalang showed up.See, berbalangs (at least in previous editions) had this weird power of projection. It's pretty much like Doctor Strange's astral projection in reverse: the projection hunts for food on the Prime Material plane while the host body chills out on the Astral. So the wounded faux berbalang disappears to be replaced by the fully functional Real Deal. I knew all this was coming, since I had owned the Fiend Folio for years, but I didn't let any word of it slip to my fellow players because I wanted to see their reactions to this turn of events. Some days I can't stop thinking like a DM even when I'm a player.
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Ah, see, now that's the mark of a good player.
ReplyDeleteIt's why I've always insisted that to be a great player, you've got to at least try your hand at GMing, and to be a great GM you've got to first be a great player. So much depends on empathy :)
I just got the Fiend Folio for the first time this weekend and I was really struck by the creative creature designs. I can't think of any other core AD&D book that had this level of crazy pure D&D imagination.
ReplyDeleteThe sad thing is that the FF was panned when it was released and continues to be regarded as a bit of a mess. Personally, I think the Fiend Folio is one of the best critter books ever put out, precisely because it is so unapologetically batshit crazy.
ReplyDeleteThe Fiend Folio is the greatest AD&D manual by approximately 344,389%
ReplyDeleteIt would be 344,407% - but the DMG has potion miscibility and random hookers and stuff, so this stays my hand from hyperbole.
It's perhaps fair to point out that the FF was the the very first AD&D monster-book I owned, given to me by Bill, the owner of the game/comic shop where I worked as a tyke. I ran several sessions with only FF monsters, and it gave my early forays into Dungeon Mastering a sparkly and somewhat surreal character that the players (all veteran gamers) spoke favorably of, and it was something I'd keep as a trademark in the years to follow when I decided to start introducing more monsters of my own design. The Monster Manual, when I bought it a month or two later, felt ... functional, by comparison. Good, but ... functional. Even with the cute succubus in it.
The FF laid the template for me; it told me what D&D was about. Everything that followed had to compare to that yardstick. Everything still does; it and certain UK-series modules (and then various solo gamebooks and later WFRP) gave me quite a taste for the British freak-out version of trad-fantasy.
Anyone who wants a slightly pained chuckle and a good fortifying series of eye-rolls: read Ed Greenwood's whiny-bitch-piss-party about the FF he wrote for Dragon magazine (November, 1981). My "favorite" part is his suggestion that the book's lack of seriousness made it unworthy of AD&D but perhaps more suitable to the "kiddie" D&D game (my wording and characterizations; he was - very slightly - more subtly condescending than that).
I'm not knocking Ed, btw ... I think his Ecologies were a great article series in their day. But reading his apparently straight-faced complaint that some FF monsters had "no ecological niche" paints his otherwise fun articles in a stodgy light.