Dwiz over at A Knight at the Opera has compiled a list and summary of EVERY Initiative Method!

I started putting together an article like this five or six years ago and gave up on it. So I think it’s really cool to see someone conquer the topic. This is a super valuable resource for RPG designers, but also for GMs who want to expand their thinking about how encounters are initiated and structured.

Check it out!

Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel. Although not a full product in and of itself, The Wizard’s Amulet (W0) provides an excellent preview of what Necromancer Games is bringing to the table with their D20/D&D releases.

Review Originally Published November 15th, 2000

“Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel.”

That’s the tagline that Necromancer Games is using for their line of D&D supplements (developed under the Open Gaming License), and it highlights one of the real strengths of the open gaming philosophy that Ryan Dancey (one of the VPs at WotC) has been championing over the past few months: If you feel there is a segment of the roleplaying fan base which is not having its needs addressed by the current roleplaying industry, there’s no need to go out and publish your own game to remedy the situation.

For example, if what you think is missing in the gaming marketplace are modules that feel and play like those produced for the first edition of AD&D, then publishing an entire roleplaying game so that you have something to supplement is entirely superfluous. And a licensing deal still, ultimately, leaves it up to someone else to determine what is and is not seen on the market.

The Wizard’s Amulet is was a free sample available from the Necromancer Games website.

THE PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Wizard’s Amulet. Players who may end up playing in this module are encouraged to stop reading now. Proceed at your own risk.

Lest there be any confusion, The Wizard’s Amulet is clearly designed to function as a prequel to Necromancer Games’ first series of modules. Taken by itself it feels bit like putting cream cheese on your bagel – it’s an accomplishment, but you haven’t actually eaten anything yet.

Basically the plot plays out like this: Corian, a sorceror fresh out of his apprenticeship, has stumbled across an amulet which once belonged to the wizard Eralion. Corian believes that Eralion attempted to become a lich and failed – and that his keep, to which the amulet will grant access, stands unguarded. So Corian gathers together a group of adventurers (the PCs) to go the keep and unlock its secrets and magical wonders.

Things become complicated, however, because Corian’s fellow student – Vortigern – wants the amulet (and Eralion’s secrets) for himself. Vortigern sets out after the PCs, along with his demonic familiar and a couple of hired thugs.

The Wizard’s Amulet comes to an end after a short, and somewhat indecisive, conflict with Vortigern. It is then directly continued in the first commercial adventure available from Necromancer Games, The Crucible of Freya.

HIGH POINTS & LOW POINTS

I think The Wizard’s Amulet is something D&D players should take a look at. Not so much because its actually playable in and of itself (because it really isn’t), but because it is a good sample of what Necromancer Games is capable of putting out. A number of good features are to be found here:

First, the module aims to introduce new players to roleplaying – and it does this very well. A clear-cut act/scene structure provides the same simplicity as an event-by-location guide, but with a greater emphasis on the narrative. Each scene is carefully handled and presented in a way which makes it easy for newbie DMs to use it with newbie players – good advice, combined with lots of options, makes the whole thing very accessible.

Second, they do a nice job of handling challenge options – addressing not only how two encounters which are identical in terms of challenge can be harder or easier to run during gameplay, but also addressing how to adjust endgame encounters based on the current status of the PCs. This is something which the structure of 3rd Edition makes very easy to do, and the authors have taken advantage of it.

Finally, the overall lay-out of the module is utilitarian without being ugly – a package which is not only pretty, but usable.

I would’ve liked to see a standard Challenge Rating/Encounter Level summary, though. Taking us through the steps for each encounter is fine, but it would have been even easier to modify the adventure if they had given us a clearer peek behind the curtain. I also think The Wizard’s Amulet would have better fulfilled its purpose (as a promo for the game line) if it had actually been a complete adventure (instead of an unfinished prequel) – it could have still led directly into the published adventure, but I would have liked to have seen a fully developed plot here, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

All that being said, I do think that you should take a look at this. It’s a solid package.

Style: 4
Substance: 3

Grade: B

Authors: Clark Peterson and Bill Webb
Company: Necromancer Games
Line: D20
Price: Free!
Page Count: 21
ISBN: n/a
Production Code: NCG1000

Originally Posted: 2000/11/15

From a quarter century later, it can be a little difficult to grok just how exciting and novel and strange the fall of 2000 was. The OGL was transforming D&D, the RPG industry, and our gaming tables in ways that were as clearly monumental as they were also uncertain. With Three Days to Kill, Death in Freeport, and the Creature Collection leading the way, by November, when I wrote this review, it was clear a gold rush was under way.

Less noticed at the time was that PDF e-books were ALSO beginning to transform the industry. It started in the mid-’90, when the internet and faster download speeds allowed every GM with a home system to share it online. (By 2000, I had likely downloaded literally hundreds of these.) The idea of “real” RPG publishers releasing books in the format was novel enough that The Wizard’s Amulet actually prompted a lot of discussion upon its release. Would we see more publishers release e-book adventures as free samples or promos? (Yes. And, of course, much more than that.)

Now, of course, every GM with a home system uploads it on DriveThruRPG, e-book releases vastly outnumber physical releases, and PDFs have even down yeoman’s work in unlocking the once out of print and inaccessible history of RPGs. This review is a little peek back at the cusp of a new world.

The Wizard’s Amulet, Crucible of Freya, and The Tomb of Abysthor are currently available in The Lost Lands: Stoneheart Valley, a collection published by Frog God Games.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

PIECE BY PIECE

In the Daedalus Robotics Lab, a haunted screwdriver curses anyone touching it to begin disassembling the world… starting with people.

Writing out the premise of Piece by Piece in such plain terms might make it sound a little goofy, but in practice this adventure works really well. The Daedalus Lab is a well-structured location crawl stocked with clues that can unravel a decade-old mystery. A well-rounded cast of NPCs fleshes the whole thing out with some nice character moments and emotional stakes (and gives you some raw meat to target when the shit hits the fan).

The only real weakpoint here is the scenario hook, which looks like this:

The Daedalus Robotics Lab is in lockdown after personnel were fatally compromised in a random incident. Reports are linking the events to a work tool found at the scene, now classified as Artifact 21. Further details are undisclosed.

Daedalus Robotics Lab’s parent company, Jensen-Hung, is excited to offer an attractive opportunity to any self-motivated freelancers in the sector! Taking on the important role of Temporary Maintenance Crew, contractees are tasked with retrieving Artifact 21 for analysis. Caution is advised; discretion is enforced.

Your crew must investigate the lab, identify ARTIFACT 21 and retrieve it.

At first glance, this all seems fine. Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem because it will lure you into a false sense of security. In reality, there are multiple layers of problems here:

• Given the facts presented in the rest of the module, Jensen-Hung should know that “Artifact 21” is the screwdriver. So why are they asking the PCs to identify it?
• If Jensen-Hung owns Daedalus, why are the PCs being sent in undercover as a maintenance crew?
• The hook suggests that Jensen-Hung was notified of what happened (by an android named Curtis), resolved to retrieve “Artifact 21,” put up a job posting, waited for the PCs to respond to it, hired the PCs, and then sent the PCs to the lab. But both the current situation at Daedalus Robotics Lab and the timeline of events provided by the adventure makes it clear that Curtis’ call to Jensen-Hung actually happened maybe fifteen minutes ago.

These issues — particularly with the timeline — caused a lot of headaches for me the first time I ran the adventure. The players really struggled to figure out the timeline (and, therefore, the mysteries connected to that timeline) because they immediately realized that it didn’t make any sense.

As written, I give Piece by Piece a C+ (okay, with some nice bits). But it’s a B (recommended) or B+ experience if you make a couple simple tweaks:

• I would avoid telling the PCs that an item is responsible for the incident. It really weakens the sense of enigma about what’s happening onsite. (It will also likely cheapen the ending.)
• The timeline is weird because there’s no meaningful gap between Curtis calling Jensen-Hung and the events that are happening when the PCs show up; but obviously there must be a gap of time in which Jensen-Hung contacts the PCs and hires them. Shorten the latter by having Jensen-Hung reach out to the PCs (instead of posting an open ad). Lean into the former by creating a gap: Curtis called Jensen-Hung and was instructed to download all the research data and then wait for extraction. So he did that and then, as described in the adventure, went to the Lobby and met with Dr. Ojo, who is now repairing the minor injury he received. (I would also skip the bit where Curtis supposedly told Ojo that Martina was brutally murdered, but then Ojo just doesn’t do anything about that… because that’s also weird.)

And that should get you sorted.

It might also be useful to note that, if the PCs realize that the screwdriver is responsible, then the finale of the adventure will likely resolve very easily as they all make a point of not touching it. This works well if it’s earned; less so if that knowledge is just handed to them. You really want the finale to be various people getting possessed by the screwdriver and creating chaos, and it’s even better if that includes the PCs.

(Along these same lines, I encourage you to have a PC who gets stabbed by the screwdriver have it get stuck in their shoulder. This will create a natural vector for someone to grab it and pull it out.)

But I digress!

As noted, I recommend this adventure, particularly with the tweaked hook. DG Chapman provides a very satisfying experience at the table.

GRADE: B-

TERMINAL DELAYS AT ANARENE’S FOLLY

The centerpiece of Terminal Delays at Anarene’s Folly is the Creation Device — a cheap knockoff loving homage to the Genesis Device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, capable of rapidly terraforming an entire planet. (Which is, if you think about it, quite horrific from a certain point of view.)

Unbeknownst to the PCs, the Creation Device is currently in their ship’s hold, concealed in the false bottom of a crate of hydroponics equipment that they’ve been hired to deliver. When they arrive at the space station Anarene’s Folly to refuel, however, the station personnel either know or discover that they have the Creation Device and mount an operation to steal it. It’s time for a reverse heist!

I’ve actually found this to be a tough adventure to review. I like the concept, and Ian Yusem’s execution includes a lot of realty nice material. But for some reason, I just can’t seem to get the whole thing to gel.

Here’s an example of what I mean: The core structure of Anarene’s Folly is the Station Escalation Timeline. This consists of seven numbered steps, and the idea is that you trigger one step for every twenty minutes of real time at the table. But the first two steps are:

1. The PCs are hailed by dock control and told there’s a wait time before they can dock.
2. The PCs are asked to transfer control of their ship to the station AI. (And then the AI begins hacking the ship’s computer, initiating the complementary Systems Hack Timeline.)

On the one hand, this makes sense. On the other hand, what actually happens in the twenty minutes between Step 1 and Step 2?

Anarene’s Folly does give you a roleplaying profile for Simon Wainwright, the Space Traffic Controller, and a Small Talk Table to provide raw fodder for that conversation. I’m looking at that and it just seems interminable.

And it feels like the Station Escalation Timeline, the Systems Hack Timeline, the Gaslighting Table, and the Marine Kill Team Tactical Plan are all modeled as independent, modular components so that they can interface dynamically in actual play…

… but it doesn’t seem like they actually do? The central Station Escalation Timeline is a long slow burn, triggering the Systems Hack Timeline, which has a slow burn of its own until the station AI gets to the point where it can start triggering the Gaslighting Table, which consists of various fake malfunctions and false alarms. These aren’t really independent variables; they’re all linked in chain (although each can be hypothetically disrupted separately).

So you’ve got the PCs running around doing random chores, and maybe at some point they get suspicious and maybe that’s meant to mix things up? But then you start looking at the “flexible” tools that you can use to respond to the PCs, and it seems like they aren’t actually that flexible. If they’re disrupted, the timelines mostly just break. Plus, the PCs don’t seem to have any real options because there’s no clear vector by which they can figure out that the Creation Device is in their hold, plus you’re supposed to kinda railroad them into Anarene’s Folly without enough fuel to reach another station. And then there’s some weird and unexplained stuff. (At one point, for example, Anarene’s Folly abruptly evacuates all nonessential personnel from the station for no discernible reason.)

So, as I say, it feels like Anarene’s Folly is well-stocked with cool tools for running a flexible adventure that responds dynamically to the PCs’ actions. Maybe it is and I’m just missing something. But I just can’t quite seem to grok this one.

GRADE: C

THE HAUNTING OF YPSILON 14

The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is set on an asteroid where miners have accidentally woken up an alien who was resting in suspended animation. The alien is hostile (of course!) and mayhem ensues!

The first thing you’ll note about the adventure is that it presents the mining base as a flowchart, unifying key and map together rather than a more literal depiction. This largely works, although some unkeyed map symbols may leave you scratching your head.

DG Chapman does several things that elevate this above a simple evening of “there’s an invisible alien eating people” affair.

First, the design of the station is very satisfying. There’s a variety of environments and the areas have been spiked with lots of little fun easter eggs and clues that reward exploration.

Second, Chapman has again included a robust supporting cast. Their details can be a little sketchy, but in practice they develop well in actual play.

Third, in addition to the alien monster, there’s also the Yellow Goo: A medical nanotechnology that heals aliens, but interprets human bodies as being very, very sick and in need of “curing.” This adds a second vector to the scenario’s horror, helping to mix things up and keep it fresh.

Once again, the weak point here is the scenario hook, which is a little shallow and can cause PCs to kind of skim off the surface of the adventure instead of really diving in. (I’ve written a separate article on How to Prep: The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 that you may find useful here.) This is balanced, however, by the supreme ease with which this module can be slid into any Mothership campaign or framed up as the perfect introductory module.

A lot of Mothership GMs will tell you they got started by running The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, and there’s a good reason for that: This is just a rock solid adventure. Easy to run. Easy to enjoy.

GRADE: B

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

These trifold adventures are Mothership’s secret weapon, and in large part their strength is collective: None of them are the greatest adventure you’ve ever seen, but they are consistently good. They also do a good job of showcasing the breadth of what Mothership is capable of.

Individually, therefore, each is pretty good and I recommend all but one of them. As a collection, on the other hand, I find that they demand my attention and insist that I run them as part of a Mothership campaign as soon as possible.

Which I will be more than happy to do.

A guide to grades at the Alexandrian.

The adventure support for Mothership is out of this world.

(Pun intended.)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG, inspired by films like Alien, The Thing, Annihilation, and Event Horizon. It takes a lot of inspiration from the Old School Renaissance, but it also pulls in a lot of new-fangled ideas from games like Apocalypse World.  The result is a fast-paced, high-octane system that can somehow support both high body count slaughterfests and deep, long-term campaign play.

What I want to focus on right now are the plethora of trifold modules available for Mothership. Each of these is just two pages long – printed on two sides of a single sheet of paper and designed to fold up into a trifold pamphlet.

These are similar to One Page Dungeons and Monte Cook Games’ Instant Adventures. The intention is that the GM can grab one of these, read through it in just ten to fifteen minutes, and then immediately run it. They make it so that playing an RPG can be a spur-of-the-moment decision, no different than grabbing a board game.

And Mothership is an ideal game for this type of adventure support because character creation is lightning fast. You can take a group of complete newbies, teach them the rules, and have them roll up their characters in ten minutes or less.

Whether you’re looking for something to on a rainy day; need a pickup session because a player canceled at the last minute; or just burned out on elaborate campaign prep and looking for something simple to run, these trifold adventures are a godsend.

This review is going to cover all of the first-party trifold adventures released by Tuesday Knight Games. Most or all of these exist in two forms: A 0E version designed for use with the original, “pre-release” version of Mothership, and an updated 1E version compatible with the boxed set. (I’m reviewing the current 1E versions.) Each is available in both PDF and physical formats.

Before we get started, let me share a couple of notes on potential biases here.

First, I got my copies of these adventures as a backer of the Mothership Kickstarter campaign. So I paid for them, but they did kind of feel like cool bonus content. With that being said, I will be trying to judge them with an eye towards what it would cost for you to buy them ($5).

Second, I’m planning to run Mothership as an open table. The primary reason for this is because the trifold adventures are so ideal for an open table – just grab one and run it for whatever group shows up each night – but it does mean that as I’m reading, evaluating, prepping, and running them, I’m definitely thinking about how they can fit into that open table.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

CHROMATIC TRANSFERENCE

Our first adventure, Chromatic Transference, is a riff on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” but venue-shifted to an abandoned secret laboratory built inside an asteroid.

I’m a big fan of “The Colour Out of Space” (see my own The Many Colours Out of Space), so this is right up my alley. Reece Carter makes the most of their material, presenting a delightfully creepy nine-room location crawl coupled to an excellent treatment of the strange colour and its mind-rending / body-altering effects. (It’s notably well-integrated with the mechanics of Mothership and also gives the GM excellent support for responding to PCs attempting a scientific inquiry into the colour.)

The only real weak point of Chromatic Transference is that it’s lacking any kind of scenario hook. Given the strong, iconic nature of the premise, though, you shouldn’t find it terribly difficult to brainstorm some options:

• The PCs are hired by the Corporation. They recently bought out a smaller company and, while sorting through the assets, discovered records of an abandoned research base. They’d like the PCs to go check it out. (Maybe accompanied by a corporate assessor?)
• The ship’s sensors detect the dormant docking bay of the asteroid base while the PCs are on a cargo run… do they want to go check it out?
• While sorting through a mass of data they pulled out of Aerodyne’s computers, they stumble across references to the asteroid research facility.
• They’re trying to track down Dr. Everton, who’s been missing for several years. They finally find records indicating that he was sent to a top secret research facility built into an asteroid.

However you decide to use it, the quiet horror of Chromatic Transference makes it a perfect pace-change from blood-drenched bug hunts, while the high stakes risks of allowing the colour to escape the facility – which the PCs may only figure out after it’s too late – ensure that the adventure will be a memorable one.

GRADE: B+

CRYONAMBULISM

A microbial parasite has infected the ship’s cryopods, trapping the PCs in a nightmare-infused hypersleep.

Things begin with the PCs “waking up” at the “end” of their journey. The nightmare version of their ship that they end up exploring is very smartly presented in a modular system that makes it easy to swap out rooms on whatever ship the PCs might be traveling on.

The core gimmick of the adventure – by which the PCs “wake up” one sense at a time (so that, for example, their eyes might be seeing the real world while their ears are still hearing the nightmare; or vice versa) – is a brilliant twist, elevating the kaleidoscopic action to a whole new level. (While also proving a very unique challenge to actually run.) The melding of real world and nightmare world also keeps all of the PCs involved in the action.

Ian Yusem also does a good job of considering how android PCs fit into the scenario’s biological threat. (For a game where Android is one of the four core character classes, a surprising number of adventures just kind of blindly assume all of the PCs will be human.)

If you’re running a Mothership campaign, Cryonambulism is the perfect filler episode: Don’t have the next adventure prepped yet? Good news! As the PCs blast off to their next destination, you can just hit the pause button by having the nightmare parasite infect their hypersleep!

On the other hand, I’m a little more skeptical about using this adventure as a stand-alone one-shot. The setup for the adventure seems to work best if the players are a little disoriented and uncertain about what’s happening. (Did we actually arrive at the destination and our ship was bizarrely wrecked in transit? Or is something else going on here?) And a lot of the payoffs feel like they’ll land a lot better if the players are more familiar with (and personally attached to) their ship. As a stand-alone, I think it can still work; but I think it’ll also be a tougher sell.

GRADE: B-

HIDEO’S WORLD

Hideo K designed a video game console that lets you play video games in your dreams. Unable to mass produce it, Hideo hooked himself up to his prototype and put himself into a drug-induced coma where he could live in the game world he’d created forever. To wake Hideo up, the PCs will need to enter the game world themselves!

This adventure doesn’t do it for me.

For starters, the lack of a scenario hook really hurts here: No reason is given for why the PCs might be motivated to seek out a washed-up video game developer. And when you start thinking about the premise to gin up your own scenario hook, you quickly realize that there are a lot of unanswered questions. (For example, where is Hideo’s body?)

Unfortunately, once you’ve entered the game world, it doesn’t get better. Hideo is supposed to have been trapped in this world for years or decades, but, of course, in just two pages you can’t really describe a world with a scope that would sell that idea. Most of the module actually describes the game’s main menu, and the rest is a single tower with eight rooms which is apparently the entirety of the game world.

This also contributes to the game world just not being very interesting, which is kind of a death knell for this sort of adventure. There’s possibly a weak stab in the direction of satire and also a friendly wave in the direction of Inception’s dream world logic, but there’s a lack of a strong, coherent vision.

I should also mention that Hideo’s World also comes with an audio file representing the soundtrack of the virtual world.  This is okay, but has the pretty typical problem of many tabletop soundtracks of being too short: Do you really want to listen to three minutes and thirty seconds of video game menu music on a loop for a couple of hours?

GRADE: F

It occurs to me that you might be able to make a bit more sense of all this if you ditch the idea of Hideo being trapped for years and instead make the machine a prototype device whose code has been corrupted by Hideo’s subconscious mind. Then you could have his investors hire the PCs to go in and pull him out. Or, in a long-running campaign, you could even set things up by having Hideo pitch the idea to the PCs after a big pay day and try to get them to invest. That’s a lot of remixing for a two-page adventure, though.

Go to Part 2

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Chaos Lorebook: The Bloated Lords

Some among the zaug were transformed by the Galchutt and “turned to a new purpose”. As the zaug were made living receptacles for manifest corruption, the zaug soulharvesters became living prisoners for captured and tormented souls.

“Their very flesh burned with the fire of the souls which screamed within them.”

“Their hunger was without end, fed eternally by the torment of those who seared their flesh.”

This week’s campaign journal is The Bloated Lords, a lengthy chaos lorebook describing the zaug, one of the Servitors of the Galchutt.

In the Ptolus campaign setting, the Galchutt are lords of chaos and the Servitors of the Galchutt are demon-like creatures who, as their name suggests, serve them. Along with the strange arts of chaositech which are inimically tied to these entities, you can point to a goulash of antecedents Monte Cook is drawing from — Lovecraft, Moorcock, Warhammer, cenobites, etc. — but the result, particularly when blended into traditional D&D fantasy, is very distinct.

When I brought Ptolus into my own campaign world, however, the Galchutt posed a conundrum: I already had my own pantheon of Mythos-adjacent strange gods.

I thought about replacing the Galchutt with my own pantheon, but then I’d lose a lot of cool stuff. It would be a bunch of extra work for, at best, a neutral result.

Another option would have been to simply add the Galchutt to my pantheon: The more strange gods the merrier! For various reasons, though, they didn’t really sync. I’m a big fan of adaptation and reincorporation, but it’s not always a boon. Sometimes you shove stuff together and you’re left with less than what you started.

So what I eventually ended up doing was nestling the Galchutt into a lower echelon, as “Dukes” in the Demon Court. They brought with them the Dukes (powerful, demon-like entities) and the Elder Brood (demonic monsters who serve the Dukes). This worked really well, creating an unexpected bridge (Elder Brood → Dukes → Galchutt → Demon Court → even stranger depths of the pantheon) between the inexplicable and the mortal world. It’s a good example of how you can pull in influences from a lot of different places and gestalt them into something cool.

Another example of this was the Elder Brood: In the Chaositech sourcebook, only two examples of the Elder Brood are given (the obaan and the sscree). I knew I wanted more than that, so I hit up one of my favorite monster manuals: The Book of Fiends from Green Ronin. (Which also played a major role in my remix of Descent Into Avernus.) I pulled all the cool devils and demons from that book that had the right flavor for the Elder Brood and added them to the roster.

Along similar lines, the zaug — one of the Servitors and described in The Bloated Lords lorebook — were expanded in my campaign to include the Soulharvesters. These were adapted from solamiths, a monster described in Monster Manual V.

If I recall correctly, the specific sequence here was:

• I was looking for a miniature I could use for the zaug (since I knew that one would appear in the Mrathrach Machine).
• I found the solamith miniature and realized it belonged to a monster from Monster Manual V.
• I checked out the solamith write-up and realized thar it could be folded into the mythology of the zaug.

It’s been a while, though, so my sequencing on this may not be correct. (I may have found the solamith write-up first while scavenging monsters for the campaign and then tracked down the miniature from there.) In any case, it’s a technique I’ve used with monster manuals for a long time. It’s similar to The Campaign Stitch, but rather than melding adventures it takes monsters and asks: What if these are the same monster?

It’s kind of like palette shifting, but rather than taking one stat block and using it to model a multitude of creatures, this technique — let’s call it monster melding — takes a bunch of different stat blocks and brings them together.

Another example is that, in my personal campaign world, goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres are all the same species. (Which, conveniently, gives me access to a much larger variety of stat blocks to plug-‘n-play with while stocking goblin villages.)

What I like about this technique — in addition to utilitarian stocking adventages — is that, much like gods and ventures, the melded monsters can often be more interesting than using the two separately. (For example, the implications of hypertrophic dimorphism in goblins raises all kinds of interesting worldbuilding questions and the soulharvesters, in my opinion, make zaug society much more interesting to explore.)

So ask yourself:

• What if these are the same creature with slightly divergent careers, abilities, etc.?
• What if these are the same creature at different stages of its life cycle?
• What if they live in some kind of symbiosis or parasitic relationship?

Bring these creatures together and see what you get!

Campaign Journal: Session 40C – Running the Campaign: Moral Dilemmas of Magic
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index