Regular readers will know of my fondness for the moon as a location for campaigns, not envisaged as it really is, but rather in the illustrative and imaginative ways that it was before we had the technology to visit it - an ethereal, distant, sibling-world, silvery and pale, constantly shifting and changing; a place of magic and of strange, inscrutable influences on the hearts and minds of men.
We can all of us imagine (well, I hope so) a D&D campaign taking place on that kind of moon: with moon orcs, moon dwarves, moon elves, and the like. That can be the subject of future posts. For the time being, it is I think worth asking: which existing D&D monsters (let's limit ourselves to the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual) can you imagine living on the moon without any tweaks to appearance, abilities, and so on? Bearing in mind, of course, that this the fantasy moon, which has earth gravity and breathable air.
Here is what I earlier noted down when I was working productively at my desk doing the job I am gainfully employed to do:
List of Monsters Which Might Inhabit the Moon Without Significant Tweaks
Aboleth
Ankheg
Arcane
Argos
Bat - Sinister
Beholder
Broken one
Cave fisher
Derro
Displacer beast
Moon dog (natch)
Dragons - probably silver, amethyst, crystal
Galeb duhr
Gelatinous cube
Giants - formorian, fog, stone?
Githyanki
Gloomwing
Grell
Kirin
Lich
Neogi
Ogre mage
Slaad
Tako
Thri-keen
Umber hulk
Will o'wisp
Xorn, xaren
The advantage of this exercise - what you might call setting-creation-via-monsters - is that this list in itself provides an imaginative framework within which to work. Just to read it is both to taste the flavour of what is intended, and to immediately begin generating ideas. I recommend the method, and it would clearly work well for other types of setting.
Golems, for sure.
ReplyDeleteMOON ROCK GOLEM.
DeleteMystara for the BECMI version of D&D developed a whole Hollow Moon setting, link here, absolute oodles of stuff.
ReplyDeletehttp://pandius.com/hmovervw.html
Yes, I knew vaguely about the Hollow Moon! I love stuff like this - thanks.
DeletePale things. White creatures. White dragons of course, but really just anything pale. - Jason Bradley Thompson
ReplyDeleteBit of an odd tangeant but it relate to this, trust me: one of the few truly great Pathfinder sourcebook for their frankly ever more underwhelming setting, Golarion, was entirely centered about what was up on the other planets in Golarion's system including its moon.
ReplyDeleteGiven it has a not!Jupiter and not!Saturn and explore the idea: one could ABSOLUTELY make a whole campaign in that vein and style centered around, say, Wizards finding some sort of Stargate to a fantasy setting's equivalent to the gas giants and going from moon to moon, as the various moons of these planets are many and some can even potentially approach Earth-like sizes. Others are small rocks. Some may be volcanic. Its basically a miniature solar system, but around a gas giant rather than a star.
You are on my wavelength. Years ago I wrote this series of posts and fully intend to come back to the idea:
Deletehttps://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/01/fantasy-moons-of-jupiter-planetcrawl.html
https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/01/moons-of-jupiter-ring-map.html
https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/01/random-moon-of-jupiter-generator.html
Now I wanna run a lunar game in the background of a war between aboleth and clockwork horrors…
ReplyDelete"the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual"
ReplyDeleteAbsolument degueu. What kind of OSR blog is this even.
With that out of the way, personally I'm not sure I like the whole slaad-and-aboleth angle; I'd advocate either a pale/æsthetic twilight Moon where everything is a sort of attenuated yet sophisticated mirror of Earth: silver carps in silvery ponds, inscrutable court protocol, white tea, white tigers, Earth-viewing parties in the continual night, OR a quasi-scientific technological-horror Moon, dead, lifeless, blasted by cold, radiation and corrosive dust, where leaving the biodomes of past ages to travel between them is a continual battle against the abrading environment and full exposure is swiftly lethal.
In the former case you'd want mostly pale and sinuous or stealthy monsters; a leucistic giant snake is probably the Platonic ideal enemy. (Moon dogs still work very well, of course.) In the latter case, robots and shit-tons of the undead, ruled or controlled by liches that are comparatively all over the place.
I have done some "moon-adjacent" adventuring in my current campaign. The main foes so far have been:
ReplyDeleteMoon-Gnolls - inspired by the Moondog, which is in one of the MMs somewhere if I recall. They are like regular Gnolls but with silvery, black-spotted fur.
Moon Giants - A giant with a big moon for a head. Statted up here: https://terriblesorcery.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-henry-justice-ford-monster-manual.html
Eventually my players will go to the moon if they keep up the current direction of the game. I will read all your moon posts, and come back with more as it develops!
Moon-Gnolls is an excellent concept and I congratulate you for it.
DeleteAll right, here's a comparable Monster List for Venus, as imagined by 19th/early 20th century sci-fi:
ReplyDeleteAssassin vine
Awakened tree
Axe beak
Black dragon
Carrion crawler
Catoblepas
Chuul
Chwinga
Cloaker
Corpse flower
Couatl
Dinosaur (any type)
Displacer beast
Flail snail
Froghemoth
Girallon
Grung
Green dragon
Hydra
Lizardfolk
Myconid
Naga
Otyugh
Shambling mound
Slaad (any type)
Treant
Yuan-ti
(I'm using the 5e monster list here, so there may be some accidental omissions.)
Love it. Mars needs to happen next!
Delete