Beware the Nawdae

Sometimes, it feel there are too many dogs in D&D.  Big dogs, wild dogs, two-headed dogs, wolves, dogs that transfer from plane to plane ... and dogs that breathe fire.  And like most monsters in the lexicon, these are built as just another pile of things to be killed.  There is very little "adventure" in these things.  We're given six lines telling us where they're from, five lines that tell us they're monsters that kill things, five more lines that tell us they eat and how they puff up in smoke when they die (like none of us have ever seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer) ... and finally, seven lines telling us that hellhounds are evil.

It's not a bad description, if a bit purple and paint-by-numbers.  As I keep saying, with so many monsters in the offing, the publishers don't have much space.  And there is a perception that the purpose of monsters is to stand up like cardboard figures in front of the party to be knocked down.  The quality of each monster is designed so that each can hit the party with a variety of superpowers that have to be gotten past, as a means of providing novelty.

Only, as most of us know, we've fought just about every monster in the books, or run them.  Which lends itself to more and more monsters, slapping together different combinations of existing superpowers, until even this freshness wanes with repetition.  "Oh, what does this monster do?" the party begins to wonder, hardly taking the time to give the monster a name or care what will become of the monster once it has been successfully knocked down.

Those following the wiki will notice that I've stuck to the original, old old monster list, and that I'm not spending any time concocting new and complex power-bags to provide the "unusual" or "originality" of the time-honored habit of inventing a new monster each week.  That's because I don't buy into this process.  I don't think these "new" monsters are all that new.  They feel like hodgepodge kits with names randomly generated by rolling a die to find out what the next letter will be.  Rolling a D20 for consonants and a d6 for vowels, I get:  "Nawdae."  Very well, fear the nawdae; the nawdae are coming; there are many nawdae in this dungeon.  The experience for killing each nawdae is 420.  Etcetera.

When possible, the monster needs to be the adventure.  This needs clear motivations on behalf of the monster, and not just that it's evil to the core or malevolently hungry.  And incidently, it needs to be consistent; we can't describe a monster's motivation in 125 words and say that it is both "lawful and good and following orders," only to add two sentences later that if not fed, it will "quickly" abandon and turn on its master.  It's got to be one or the other.

I can indulge myself because I have space.  Moreover, I do not have a print deadline.  And I have run hellhounds before, exactly as knock-down stick figures, so I have every reason to be bored with that motif.  The goal, as I see it now, is to breathe (excuse me) new fire into these beasts, giving them a mixed set of motives while setting out to deliberately baffle the party as to how they can be killed.

This particular take only works because my experience system does not require for monsters to actually be killed.  If the monster is faced for a few rounds, with damage given and taken, the party still gets the benefit of having that short fight, even if they would probably need to be a higher level (and have access to certain spells) in order to actually defeat the beast.  A gaming system without that level of flexibility would find some aspects of the monster as I've written it to be unplayable.