Mimic
If you’ve never encountered a mimic, this pic should tell you all you need to know. These creepy shapeshifters operate by taking the form of a mundane object—treasure chest, dungeon door, half-pony half-monkey monster corpse—and then waiting around for unwary adventurers to blunder by. From there it’s all pointy teeth and grasping tendrils. But even though mimics are famous for becoming anything, they’re not the only critter capable of the trick. I’m not talking about shapeshifters at large though. I’m talking about getting the most out of any monster.
Let me tell you a story to illustrate the point. Last time my group dealt with mimics, it was in Monte Cook’s Dragon’s Delve. The party had found their way down to a mad science themed level, and so the creatures they encountered were were no normal aberrations. They were the story seeds of an entire mimic plague:
Anyone that touches a disease mimic must make a Fort save (DC 15). Failure means that tiny mimic spores enter the victim’s system and begin to grow. Over the course of the next 1d6+4 weeks, the mimic grows, until it gets big enough to begin feasting on the creature from the inside. This has two effects. First, the victim suffers 1 point of Con drain each day until dead. Second, the victim’s appearance begins to warp and twist beyond their control, causing them to suffer 1d3 points of Cha damage per day and giving them the ability to change their shape for 1d6 rounds once per day like a mimic.
What’s interesting here is that Cook was able to take a well-known monster and give it a little twist, changing the mimic enough to make it a different type of threat. He goes on to explain how the victim eventually becomes a mimic, how a remove curse spell can slow the disease, and how a greater dispel magic can cure it. I decided to ignore those bits of text though. Rather than messing with spell cures I had my players go on a quest to collect and then drink wyvern venom. If they could survive the poison the disease would be killed. It was a nice excuse to get them out of town and make the world feel a little bigger. It was also the moment when I realized that GMs are shapeshifters too.
By creating a variant monster Monte Cook expanded on the existing idea of the mimic, creating a more interesting encounter in the process. By ignoring Cook’s built-in solution of “cast some spells to cure the disease,” I was able to generate an entire side quest. My players left town to go wyvern hunting, and I got to design a fun little slot canyon dungeon. For me the lesson was clear: in the same way that game designers like Monte Cook are allowed to expand upon the existing entries in the monster manual, GMs are allowed to alter the ideas in a module, taking ownership of the story and making it their own.
Question of the day then. Have you ever tinkered with the way a monster works, changing it mechanically and making it your own? How did it work out at the table?
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This is definitely something I’d do if I were a DM… Oh the ideas that run through my head.
On another note, this is something that even a golemancer can can do, no need to be a DM for that. I just need to learn how creating a monster works, and figure out the price for my own unique creation…
Primary authors set the stage for secondary authors set the stage for tertiary authors (read: developers / GMs / players). It’s a fun paradigm to noodle with.
Indeed I have. I’ve mad a bunch of ants (magical and otherwise) based on MM monster stats and I’ve got a bunch of altered kobolds and goblins from various environs worked up as well as a vampiric dragon from the shadowfell ready and waiting. And I plan to work up the stats for a bunch of chimeric creatures (such as a hive mind of ooze hounds, which will be named Bad Dog, inspired by Thrilling Intent) which will of course involve me looking at wolf/dire wolf/etc. and various ooze writeups.
I don’t know if I can say overall the ants were a hit, but I did get the players to interact meaningfully with them in two cases. In one case, psychic ants (made largely for long distance communications from the Queen) allied with the party which they protected thanks to being frail (a whopping 4 HP) and being able to cast spells like Bless and Heroism. The other case is the equally frail acid spraying ants which… well do what they sound like. Despite not actually being the biggest threats they face my players find them so upsetting they’ve declared them number one priority in every fight they’ve shown up in. I think that’s a “win” on both counts.
I also made plans to make fabric and straw golems as well as golems based loosely on Weeping Angels for a campaign that fell apart before it even began. I feel like those would have been a real winning. If I have the opportunity to revisit those ideas some day I certainly will.
So here’s the million dollar question: What gives you the right as a GM to change the way well-established game elements like kobolds and goblins work? Could players implement similar changes in their back stories?
While I understand why you’re asking and know it’s not a serious question… I always felt like it was still a question undeserving of a serious answer. Roleplaying games are at least in part if not in entirety about telling stories. Authors don’t ask permission to make up people, places, or things. GMs don’t need to either.
If the players want to that can be very slightly trickier, but I’d allow it as long as it didn’t work against anything I’d already established about the setting. By all means they’d be allowed to ask if there could be a new type of creature such as…. gold kobold shaped constructs that have a society under the ocean. That doesn’t interfere with anything I’ve established and doesn’t break the tone of the setting so it’s fine. On the other hand if they want to establish that kobolds are very silly kleptomaniac/arsonists and also the rulers of human lands, I’d have to say no since that clashes with the setup. Or if they wanted to have a type that I’d already made but only slightly different for no real good reason.
On the contrary. It’s a very serious question. Tradition dictates that GMs have the right to shape the game world in a way that players do not. I’m not suggesting that this somehow wrong, but I do believe it’s worth thinking about.
What is the difference between you–the GM–altering a higher-order author’s setting information at the service of your own creative vision and a player doing the same thing to the GM’s setting information? Your phrase “I’d allow it as long as” shows that you’re assuming more authority in the collaborative narrative of the game than the rest of the authors of that narrative. We know from experience that that works (you’ve got to resolve differences of opinion somehow, after all) but is this the best of all possible worlds?
Not arguing just to argue or trying to be obnoxiuos here. This is the stuff I’m doing my academic work on, and it’s very much on my mind these days. That’s why a silly gag about a mimic biting Fighter’s ass got me going on game design.
Ah well… in my view there is no “best” (though there are things which may qualify for “worst” out there). In theory one could design the perfect system for X type of groups and it still wouldn’t be the best for all the others. And even if you had the perfect system for what X group wants…. they wouldn’t want to just do that forever.
Afterall, even if you have the perfect pizza recipe nobody wants to eat only pizza forever. You’ll just grow to hate something you love eventually. (This actually happened for me with pumpkin pies for a while. It was the only sweet thing I had to eat for a few months solid and for about a year and a half afterwards I couldn’t stand it.)
I do fully accept that games where the players have a lot more agency are fine and probably fun to play. Then again, you’re not likely to be able to combine that with intricately mechanically designed monsters either. Both of these things are fun, but you can’t do all the fun things at once. Sometimes things are just mutually exclusive or there’s some other kind of opportunity cost.
Uh… I’m the GM, I’m GOD. I can do whatever I want. However I want. Whenever I want to whomever I want.
IF want to give Kobolds wings, aviator shades, alcoholism, and a cocky atittude… I do that. Right now, I have a Shambling Mound in love with a Druid – she doesn’t know that yet, she just knows the SM is following them around. I have TWO player characters with orders to assassinate another player character. The healing spells or our lawful evil cleric cause heal just fine, but cause massive amounts of pain resulting in pscyhological distress.
I’m a monster…. that’s how I can change things.
That’s how.
On the plus side for Fighter, that is one incredibly portable porta-potty. =P
HPwise, it might not work out so well for Wizard and Rogue. Cleric might be ok if he does his business quickly.
“Look, Rogue is the property of Marvel and 20th Century Fox. No way am I getting mixed up in a Hollywood custody battle. Way too many gp in the hands of lawyers for my blood.”
–Thief
Thief probably has similar issues to Rogue, then. mymistake.jpg
I heard that. But you try explaining the intricacies of intellectual property law to a a purple chick from a fantasy universe.
I do need to get Thief her own account though. Posting on the party’s behalf is going to get old in a hurry.
Easy enough, Marvel can copyright the character, but not the name. Rogue is a common language term and as long as there is no confusion about what is being discussed, we can call ourselves Rogues all we want
The character’s name is Thief.
I messed around with stats a bit. In my old Homegame, I had the party taking out a new tribe of Goblins that were starting to infest an area that wasn’t able to handle them. They eventually made it to an underground pit where to Goblin Broodmothers made their home, with some Yellow Musk Creepers as a ‘natural’ defense against intruders.
The Gobbos were just Sea Hags that I reskinned for the purpose, along with some flavor text to describe the kind of monsters they were up against.
And once those were defeated, there was the defenseless brood to deal with. The classic Goblin Baby problem, though I had no intent on penalizing/dictating the party’s alignment based on what they did. I was more interested in watching the characters react and hearing their personal reasoning for exterminating the whole lot.
Now that’s interesting. You didn’t mess with the mechanics so much as the fluff. Sea hags were already a part of the game, but you changed the presentation enough to make them something original. I’m guessing none of your players were like, “Wait a minute, that’s just a sea hag! You’re a phony!”
Sea Hags are pretty simple, mechanics wise. Claw attacks and Hideous Appearance. Nothing signature like a Medusa’s Stare or a Harpy’s Song. Plus, the players haven’t done much GMing so they’re not so familiar with the intricacies of the Bestiary.
Reskinning is a pretty great tool. More home GMs should look into it.
^ Truth. It’s also a the gateway drug of game design.
I once put a “treasure chest” inside a Gelatinous Cube, and when they killed the Cube the rogue went to open the chest.
It bit him.
Immune to acid, eh? Clever monkey…
I was quite proud of a similar trick in my second module:
http://paizo.com/products/btpy99dg?B20-For-Rent-Lease-or-Conquest
At one point the party fights a moldy bathroom full of gray oozes. Once they defeat the oozes and raid the medicine cabinet, they find a number of healing potions. One of them contains a larval gray ooze that attacks when it’s uncorked.
https://www.deviantart.com/travisjhanson/art/The-return-of-the-mimic-724127377
https://www.deviantart.com/travisjhanson/art/Lotp-709-790506667
What’s really sad is that the mimic has to deal with its own adhesive. Good luck getting clean like that!