Hey, welcome back to the podcast Evil Dungeon Master Podcast AD and D Universe.

That is right.

I keep calling it the wrong name since I changed it up a little bit.

Since this is going to be an ADD Focus podcast for the foreseeable future, what everybody likes, I wanted to change the name up to just that.

Obviously, I have other podcasts out there that I do one for DC Heroes, the Gotham and Beyond podcast.

I talk about DC Heroes 3rd Edition on that one because I love that game and I have my other podcast, I haven't put it up yet, that's going to be just talking about general stuff that doesn't fit on this particular podcast.

Sphere, Sphere, whatever you want to call it.

Anyway, ask the DM at the evil dm.com is my e-mail address.

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Anyway, it's Friday, so we're going to talk a little bit about creating random monsters.

And I'm not talking about wandering monsters, I'm talking about becoming a mad scientist and creating your own unique, crazy, wacky monster.

Yeah, you heard me.

There is an article in Dragon magazine #10 and we're going back here in the Wayback Machine 1977 October.

So this was a couple months before the Advanced the AD and D Monster Manual was even released.

They wrote an article in the Dragon Magazine by Paul Montgomery Kraba and he goes over ways to create your own monster from scratch using all the charts here.

Now the article starts off with talking about one of the major problems that a lot of Dungeons and Dragon players had experienced at the table of your players basically knowing too much or metagaming so to speak, because they knew the weakness of one of the monsters in the original supplement books.

Yeah, this was kind of designed for the original supplements, but hear me out.

You could use this for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons very easily.

It we all know that all the editions prior to basically second or second still works prior to the third edition at least all kind of interchangeably work with some minor modifications to it.

So this is not going to be too much off the chart here for you.

So he suggests in the article, well, if you're running into this problem with your group, well, here's an answer to solve that issue that your players will not know what monster they're facing because this box is going to be so unique.

They've never going to seen they've never seen it before, never encountered it.

So they basically can't metagame, which the term I don't think metagaming term was the thing in 1977 because the game was still fresh out there in people's minds.

So I don't think they ran into this issue as far as come labeling it as anything.

And there was no like like rule so to speak of how you shouldn't know this and what you should know.

There wasn't too much deep diving into characters versus player playing and knowledge wise.

So they would have issues like this.

So they talk a little bit about how this chart is arranged.

Basically, you would arrange it from what level the dungeon is because everything was dungeon wise.

Now there's a bunch of tables here.

It starts with intelligence and you can roll the intelligence of the creature going from highly intelligent to unintelligent, and obviously you can modify that how you want.

Then it would go to what type of creature and it was mammal, reptile or undead, and those were the three major things that they had in the original supplements and how they classified things.

Now you can go through the Monster Manual these days and you could change that die roll to include all different types based on what they have there.

In the Monster Manual.

You don't have to just use mammal, reptile, or undead.

And then you have another chart that goes over armor class and it gives you a random armor class for mammals and reptiles or even just mammals and reptiles for undead.

They did one D 8 + 1 is the armor class for undead.

So you roll your your your dice for that and get that.

And then you would go over to its alignment.

And unless it was undead, it was law, neutrality, and chaos.

Obviously for advanced stars and Dragons we have the 9 alignment so you can split that up however you want.

If you want to randomly do it or just have evil creatures it's up to you.

And then lists here undead are always chaotic.

Well they were always chaotic back then.

So the next chart has a speed modifier or the speed of the creature which you could just you could pick or you could just roll your 1D12 and get what you wanted there.

Next we have Hitdice.

Now what they how they did hitdice for this and you can change it how you want based on your campaign.

They do it level plus and level references the level of the dungeon on this only on this table only.

And it's possible to get negative hit dice creatures which they tell you treat that as 1/2 hit dice creature.

So if you roll on just this chart and say you're doing a level 1 dungeon for your group and you roll A2 out of the 12, you get a level +2, which means it would be 1/3.

I'm sorry, a three hit dice creature.

Now if you think that's too powerful, you can obviously change that to what you want, but this chart is based on the level of the dungeon.

Now if you're doing a dungeon, you could probably follow this process, or you could take it and change it to something else that you want.

Maybe put random hit dice numbers in there, creatures that you want up to a certain point.

That's probably what I would do.

Then there's hit dice modification.

When you roll AD 6 and it tells you you can do a + 2 + 1 or just 0 or -1 so you can modify the creature that way as well.

Undead are turned by clerics as if they were clerics of level.

Well it doesn't really apply so you just you can ignore that.

Basically they were talking about how you undead or turned with 1977 rules special characteristics.

So the hit dice of the creature is listed on the left and there is a chance of a number of special characteristics the creature would have.

So you can roll and if you hit that number or higher, you would have that many number of special characteristics.

It has 1-2 and three columns.

So you can under hit that creature of ero to two.

There's an 80%, well, only 20% if you look at it that way, that it'll have one characteristic or two characteristic, 90%, three characteristics.

No, because it says 100%.

So no then we do damage done.

Damage done by intelligent monsters is by weapon type, by unintelligent monsters is by a bite and semi intelligent monsters is a 5050 chance of either or so.

This one goes by hit dice of creature that goes one to six and then it goes the level of the monster, which would be what level of the actual level the dungeon.

And then you could just roll on that and just to see what it is and you get out of very out of there.

You just pick your or just pick it, it's up to you.

Special characteristics #2 These special characteristics are organized by type mammal, reptile, undead.

If given, if a given number has several characteristics group thusly like it'll be all like slashes around it.

It means the exact It means that the exact characteristics is determined by the level of monster.

So if you have like, you know, breeze fire turns invisible with slashes in between can run through walls.

You know, it would be like hit dice 1 to 4, then it'd be 5 to 8, then 9:00 to 12:00.

And that determines which characteristic you do.

So it starts with mammals up until no it.

It's a weird number though because it's 1 to 24 So what is roll?

We'd have 24 sided dice.

So I don't understand that at all, but you could change that up to how you want.

It Has things like hostile to dwarves, hospital paladins, regenerate certain amount of damage, Only is hit by silver or magical weapons.

Reptiles have you know, paralyzation, stone gaze, poison bite, add 1 hittice to the creature, think basic things like that.

Undead only missiles are ineffective.

Well they were pretty much uneffective through skeletons so well I mean half but still destroyed only by fire.

Things like that.

Other characteristics.

Now this is talking about the description of how it looks and this is where it gets a little bit fun.

And then you have to roll AD 100 to see how many characteristics are you get between 1:00 and

3:00.

And then you roll on the next chart and you roll AD 8.

You could possibly get a no headed creature or a creature with three eyes, four eyes, stock eyes, long fangs, long claws, and you can roll however many times you want or use the chart that they have.

More on the physical description, we talked about the size of the creature.

The larger the hit dice of the creature, the less a chance it's going to be a small creature and be a larger creature.

Let's see here.

And it goes by hit dice as well.

Then we get number of limbs.

Depending how you want to handle that, you can do as many as 4 limbs by rolling AD eight in a little chart here.

How many arms does it have?

It has two what, 2 tentacles?

Oh geez.

And then exterior cover if it's a mammal can have hair, skin or feathers in their reptiles.

Skin, scales, skin or hair really depends coloring which is mammals and reptiles only.

They just assume that skeleton.

There's a note here that let's see where it is.

Undead do not have a physical description.

Just assume a figure under a cloak if you wish.

So all undead pretty much are under a cloak in the original.

Whatever.

Funny coloring, 1 to 20 sided dye and you can get anything from like Gray to striped and spotted reptiles all the way from green to striped and spotted.

And if you get striped and spotted you got to roll twice ignoring.

You can ignore further striped spotting results unless you really want to, and then you got to do a base color and then becomes a secondary color.

And you can get it as many times as you want or you can.

Only you can ignore it or not.

It's really up to you.

And that's the end of it.

It's not that big, so it's just two pages on page 9 and page 10.

But this should give you enough inspiration to create your own creatures and call it whatever you want and throw it at your party just to see what happens.

You can have an excellent time revamping this.

If you're Adm like me, who really enjoys creating and, you know, tinkering with rules and just designing up your own crazy stuff, This is right up your alley because this is giving you what you need and giving you the, I guess the tool kit, so to speak, to modify and create whatever you want and however you want using whatever rule set here or whatever book you want.

You can modify these charts to your liking until your heart's content.

And you can have awesome monsters that you can roll up, spend an entire, I don't know, a couple hours during your prep, just rolling on these charts, having these wacky monsters because it's, it's interesting.

I, I did a little bit of this before the podcast because I want to see how it worked.

And it just, it, it really is interesting.

I wish I, I, you know, they had more articles like this.

They probably did and I probably didn't realize it.

And people were like, yeah, there was like 75 articles, man.

You know, you missed them all.

Wow.

OK.

I mean, I don't remember anything like this in Polyhedron Magazine.

That's probably one of the ones I had.

Because they delivered it to your house.

We didn't get Dragon Magazine, but Polyhedron actually snuck under the radar coming to my house because my parents didn't know what Polyhedron Magazine was.

They just thought it was a role-playing magazine.

They never looked at it.

But when it came to, like, Dragon or Dungeon Magazine.

Oh, absolutely not.

That has the Dungeons and Dragons on it.

So, you know, the dungeons and the Dragons you can't have in the house.

But Polyhedron, Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, that's just about.

That's just a die, right?

You know, a dice or something.

Anyway, tell me what you think about the random monsters here by Paul from Dragon Magazine, number 10/19/77.

You can grab it off of Internet Archive.

All of them are on their Internet Archive, so feel free to pick them up.

With that said, I'm going to head out.

Keep it original, keep it old school tonight, and God bless everybody.