What A Thoul Believes

As promised/threatened, the D&D 4th edition stats for your basic thoul:

THOUL

Thouls resemble bloated hobgoblins, though there is a distinct trollish character to their stooped posture and scowling faces. Their lumpy skin is a deathly pale green, and their fingers are tipped with dirty claws similar to a ghoul's.

Thouls are often found alongside their more disciplined hobgoblin brethren. The mixture of harsh training and torture at the hands of the hobgoblins, combined with the influence of their own trollish and ghoulish heritage, leaves thouls bestial and merciless.

Thoul Level 5 Soldier
Medium natural humanoid XP 200
Initiative +6 Senses Perception +6; darkvision
HP 68; Bloodied 34
Regeneration 5 (if the thoul takes acid or fire damage, regeneration does not function until the end of its next turn)
AC 21; Fortitude 20, Reflex 17, Will 16
Speed 8

Battleaxe (standard; at-will) * Weapon
+12 vs AC; 1d10 + 4 damage

Ghoulish Claws (standard; at-will)
+12 vs AC; 1d6 + 4 damage
and the target is immobilized (save ends).

Staggering Blow (standard; encounter)
+12 vs AC; 3d8 + 4 damage
Target must be immobilized, stunned, or unconscious. If successful, target is stunned.

Alignment Evil Languages Common, goblin
Skills Athletics +11, endurance +11
Str 18 (+6) Dex 15 (+4) Wis 15 (+4)
Con 20 (+7) Int 8 (+1) Cha 12 (+3)
Equipment Scale armor, battleaxe

THOUL TACTICS
A thoul takes advantage of its speed to paralyze vulnerable targets with its ghoulish claws. Once a victim is immobilized, the thoul tries to finish it off with a staggering blow.

THOUL LORE
A character knows the following information with a successful Nature check.

DC 15: Thouls are magical crossbreeds of ghouls, hobgoblins, and trolls that possess the ability to regenerate and cause paralysis.

DC 20: Thouls are not undead, and reproduce naturally. They are often found alongside (and mistreated by) their hobgoblin kin.

DC 25: Thouls were created by twisted arcane experiments centuries ago by parties unknown.

I used the DDI Monster Builder for figuring out the basic math, and it's really little more than a modified ghoul, but I think it came out okay for my first try at 4th edition monster design. The Rules Cyclopedia mentions that "there can be thoul spellcasters", so perhaps I'll try one of those next.

World Of Thoul

Another thing D&D 4th edition needs: thouls.

Thouls: half-troll, half-hobgoblin, half-ghoul. Yes, that is three halves. Thouls don't care about fractions. You wouldn't either, if you looked like a hobgoblin, regenerated like a troll, and paralyzed people like a ghoul.

The story goes that the thoul got its start with a typographical error in "Temple of the Frog", a mini-module contained in the original D&D supplement, Blackmoor. Apparently it was supposed to say "ghoul", but the T is right there next to the G, and just like that, the thoul was born.

The thoul got an official entry in the Moldvay-penned Basic Rules in 1981, and popped up again in Mentzer's 1983 "red box" set and 1991's Rules Cyclopedia hardcover. Thouls graduated to AD&D 2nd edition in the Monstrous Compendium: Mystara Appendix, and most recently showed up in the third-party D&D 3.5 accessory Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the poor thoul has never gotten much love in terms of detail. Gygax never wrote about them, to my knowledge, so we'll never know if their hide is deep russet or burnt umber, or if they prefer tunics of dirty brown or mustard, or how many thouls in a given settlement will be leaders with an extra hit die, or whatever. All we know is that they're a "magical crossbreed" (so I guess they weren't born from a typical troll-hobgoblin-ghoul menage a trois), they're not undead, they "reproduce normally", and that they usually hang out with hobgoblins. (Incidentally, another old favorite of mine, the carnivorous ape, also was usually found with hobgoblins, and also has mysteriously disappeared. Clearly, hanging out with hobgoblins is hazardous.)

Anyway, that's the thoul: 150% monster, 150% awesome. So look out, skanky Clyde Caldwell princess lady. Thouls can paralyze people, they reproduce normally, and they're a-comin' for you.

Now I just need to get to work on statting these guys up.

(Apologies to Scott over at World of Thool for the pun.)

Gloom Of Legend

I've gushed about Dragon Warriors before, but I don't believe I sufficiently emphasized the quality and power of Dave Morris' prose. Here's an excerpt from the rulebook's description of the land of Molasaria:

"Frightened peasants quake under the rule of a hundred local despots. Terror soars aloft on membraneous wings by night and sifts the carrion in lonely churchyards... Black-clad priests trek from valley to valley, but the peasants are always torn between faith and fear. Spend a few days in any of the mountain villages and you will see a funeral procession wending a path down through the narrow streets - old men whose lined faces show the scars of many losses, grim youths with jaws set in sullen defiance, veiled women sending up a shrieking lament, and wailing children who have yet to learn the injustice into which they have been born."

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

I love Dragon Warriors.

Brom Got Me In Trouble

Even though I had a well-worn Palladium Fantasy RPG rulebook sitting right there on the bookshelf, complete with graphic descriptions of wizards' cauldrons filled to the brim with the blood of human sacrifices, giant undead centipedes made from dozens of human corpses sewn together, and voluptuous necrophiliac lesbian demon assassins with asphyxiation fetishes (not to mention honest-to-god drawings of devil-summoning circles and the magic words needed to activate them)... it was this module that finally got my parents to sit down and have "the talk" with me about RPGs:


Yep, that's a psychic dominatrix cage fighter any way you slice it.

It just goes to show you - you can write about whatever messed-up stuff you want in the interior of your book, as long as you slap a goofy cover illustration of a knight riding a pegasus on it.

To The Master

It's been a year since Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, passed away.

Thanks for everything, Gary.

Battle-Matic

I have an off-the-wall idea for a D&D campaign. It's pretty half-baked, so I'll just start rambling:

I want to make a campaign based around the AD&D action figure line manufactured by LJN in the 80s. (You know, the one with Strongheart, Warduke, Zarak and the rest - you can read up on it here.)

In the setting, those action figure characters (hereafter abbreviated AFCs) would have turned against each other long ago. The power players of the world would be the relatives and descendants of the AFCs, split into squabbling factions - let's call them Houses - each of them jealously guarding the relics (remains, weapons, armor, etc.) of the old heroes and villains. None of the Houses would have complete sets of any one AFC's relics - centuries of squabbling, betrayal, and theft would have scattered them across the factions. In fact, the years have led to much confusion as to which AFC used which relic. (There could be bizarre religious schisms over whether a particular relic-shield was carried by Drex or Deeth in the olden days.) Furthermore, each House would maintain massive dungeons where the relics were housed and guarded.

If I wanted to get really weird, I could say that dungeons (and maybe even the monsters guarding them) are actually spontaneously generated by the AFC's relics. I like the idea of a dead adventurer's tomb slowly burrowing tunnels into the earth, sprouting monsters and traps like a seed sprouting roots...

Anyway, the player characters could be the official dungeon-delvers of a particular House, or be free agents hired by the different Houses to raid other Houses' AFC reliquaries. There could even be a secret "House" comprised of the descendants of the AFC's disgruntled followers and henchmen, seeking to claim the relics for themselves, or destroy them to spite the Houses. There would be many other "official" delving companies as well as free agents, and these could comprise the primary antagonists of the setting.

So, there you have it. It's sort of metagamey, I guess, but the idea has a certain wacky appeal to me. Any thoughts?

What D&D Does

As much as I often feel like D&D isn't suitable for modelling any kind of fantasy other than itself, I'm starting to move beyond complaining about it. In fact, I'm starting to think that trying to drag D&D too far from its roots in "dungeon-crawling/treasure-grabbing" gaming is probably a mistake.

(Yes, I am aware that there are a lot of people who play entire sessions of high-intrigue, character-driven D&D with nary a single instance of monster-killing or stuff-taking. I think that's admirable, but I don't really think that's what the system was designed for.)

AD&D 2nd edition's greatest strength was in its deeply detailed and unique settings. Unfortunately, the system operating all these settings was a slightly tweaked version of Gygax's convention-focused 1st edition of AD&D. The system was built for "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam"-style gaming, which is fine until you try to use it for psychic dominatrix cage fighters struggling against corrupt life-sucking sorcerers on a desert planet. The ideas were awesome, but the system just couldn't take the strain of trying to be all types of fantasy to all people.

The endless options available for 3rd edition, especially when taking third-party material into account, made it technically possible to tinker with the system pretty heavily to match the feel you wanted. Still, doing so was often kludgy. 3rd edition gave you the transparency and the tools to twist D&D into nearly any shape, but doing it felt like banging a square peg into a round hole.

4th edition, as I've discussed before, really focused its design on kicking ass and taking... well, stuff. The honesty of this iteration of the game has really opened my eyes to the potential strengths of D&D's own idiosyncratic take on fantasy. After all, if I want something grittier, more folkloric, or more story-oriented, there are a number of other RPGs I can pick up and play (well, providing I can find players or game masters, but that's another story).

I wonder if this is part of the reason that some people have gotten miffed about D&D's newly narrowed focus. I think that for a lot of people, D&D is the only RPG they'll consider playing, so when they see that it's difficult to make 4th edition do things other than magic-rich, combat-heavy delving, they feel like the designers have placed constraints on the game. I see it as the game going back to being honest about what it's meant to do.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from wanting to bolt new stuff onto 4th edition...