About a month and a half ago I posted an article that said that I expected it to be tricky to implement dragons in my ‘monster reconstruction’ scheme. That may still be so, but I realized recently that they may actually be quite easy in Echelon. It was a fair …
I’ve been working on an examination and analysis of outsiders (brought about by trying to describe Babau in Echelon), and frankly it’s going to take more time than I have tonight. Instead, I thought I’d present a few templates that basically fell out of that analysis. Templates in Echelon Templates, …
A few weeks ago I described how to reconstruct a demon, specifically a Babau, to better fit its textual description as a sneak. This was in part to make a creature that could be more easily adapted to other roles as well. Now that Echelon’s a little more developed, I …
Polymorph and wildshape (limited target form polymorph) have long had problems in D&D. I don’t remember what the problems were in AD&D, but I remember that in D&D 3.x there were problems with the choice of target form, how exactly to apply the polymorph, and the escalation caused by ever-increasing …
Yesterday’s post about the Kobold Kommandos reminded me I haven’t really written much about non-human characters. It seems this would be a good time to do that. Okay, maybe not. I expected to spend about an hour jotting down some notes, I ended up spending about four hours doing analysis …
The first monster I tried updating, Frost Giant, seemed to do well with this scheme. Let’s try something a little more ambitious. The babau is described as being a sneaky, sly being, and it is suggested that it likes working from ambush (with the sneak attacks and multiple attacks, I …
Years ago a friend summarized some hero design guidelines for me. Three of the key ones were There is also an implicit ‘have a reason to be involved’, but that is perhaps more looking to campaign setting or background rather than the mechanical implementation. In this context it might be …
In looking at the current monster types, I see a number of cases where the differences between types are fairly small. I think several of these may be merged, reducing the number of monster types in the game. Current Monster Types We start with fifteen monster types. Monster Type Hit …
I’ve never been really happy with how undead work in D&D. I’ve got some changes below that I think will improve them in play and make them better fit my image of them. Note that much of this article has since been folded into my article on Revising Monster Types, …