I just took delivery of my latest ebay score. I now have the Dungeon Master Guide for AD&D 2nd edition revised from 1995.
Note the lack of “S” on the end of master. So this one is neither plural “masters” or possessive “master’s.” Thank fuck they sorted this out from 3rd ed onwards.
The first thing I noticed glancing through this after looking through the 1st ed DMG is te text size is bigger and the layout is much easier to skim. All in all much easier on the eyes. There’s some great full page art pieces in here, all with a definite consistent style which is nice. Sadly my beloved weird little guy table from 1st ed doesn’t seem to return, ah well.
I’ll get a full write up of this done at some point, but I have been thinking about the ordering of the Pick Up Pile Pondering posts. I’ve decided to concentrate on newer books first, as they are what people are more likely to be looking for reviews of, then covering older stuff like this when there’s a gap in the newer stuff.
Crap, I just realised the header image I took earlier today is already out of date.
Day 30. I was a bit stuck for something for today as I’d finished my Paranoia characters, but then my Ebay habit came to the rescue. I recently picked up the AD&D 1e DMG and it has an appendix for generating Creatures from the Lower Planes. Why just those planes and no others? I dunno, but there ya go.
So I decided to roll up a monster from that, and then using the D&D 5e DMG and Monster Manual, a few conversion guides I found online and a healthy dose of just guessing, I converted it to a D&D 5e creature/NPC.
As you can see it looks really, really weird. A snake head with one eye and a trunk, an apes body with bird wings and four arms. Yeah, the kind of monster description than makes me I wish I could draw. Though I see the trunk as more of an enlarged elephant seal nose, so it doesn’t get in the way of the insect mandible concealed in the mouth.
For conversion to 5e I say that it had 7 attacks originally and this is more than I can be bothered to roll for a single creature in a round. So I broke it up into a mutliattack with a bite and either hands or feet, or a missile based AOE as he launches spines from his back.
AC was simple as a one guide suggested just subtracting 1e AC from 19 to get a score for 5e. So 19-1= the new AC of 18
Ability drain and life drain reminded me of the Shadow’s Strength Drain. I decided to add this to the bite to represent the poison, but allow a saving throw as this is already a damaging part of a multiattack.
I reverse engineered the Proficiency modifier from strength, where the guidance is to leave 18str as it is), and attack modifier which is 1e Hit Dice halved +2, so 10/2=5 then +2 to get +7 to attack.
An 18 strength would give a bonus of +4, so the remaining 3 of the attack score must be the proficiency modifier.
Acid immunity remained the same with nothing to convert. Magic resistance is a very different system between editions, so I used the version seen on many 5e stat blocks of Advantage on saves against magic or spell attacks.
Comparing what I now had to several existing stats and creature building guides I saw we were at the CR5-6 level and the advice there is to hit around 28-35 points of outgoing damage a round. So each of the possible attack groupings were given dice ranges that average in this area.
Following this the rest was filed in by comparing to existing monsters and adding equivalent scores, and a fair bit of guesswork.
This gave us Abbwaloesh, Demon Soldier of the Acid Pits.
Oh, and his name well it’s Ape Bodied Bird Winged And Legged One Eyed Snake Headed, so I just took the first letter of each word in that.
Tomorrow we have the last Deadland’s character and the last character for this year’s challenge, “Doc” Emmet Green, a Mad Scientist.
Three Kobolds With A Trench Gun 