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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Destrachan
Illustration Copyright 2008 Wizards of the Coast. This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
The first non-demonic monster we’re going to look at in ages is the Destrachan. These aberrant dinosaur things first showed up in the Monster Manual 2 for D&D 3.0, if I’m not mistaken. So, in a way, they’re being promoted. They appear only on the MM.
The Lore
Destrachans are blind sapient predators, roaming dungeons and other underground locations guided by their non-visual senses. When they find something they think they can eat, they kill it dead using bone-shattering bursts of sound. They can learn to mimic sounds they hear often, and will use those to help disguise their approach, which explains why they’re trained in Bluff. I wonder how common it is for a destrachan to mimic the voice of a dying adventurer asking for help.
These creatures have an affinity for other aberrant monsters, and will often team up with them. They’ll also often ally with other underground dwellers and monstrous humanoids such as drow, grimlocks, medusas, trolls… It’s a good bet Eberron’s Droaam has its share of destrachan citizens (if they’re not all daelkyr cultists instead).
The Numbers
We get two varieties of Destrachan here, both Large Aberrant Magical Beasts (blind). They’re also both Evil.
The standard Destrachan is Level 9 Artillery with 80 HP. It has blindsight 10, is immune to gaze attacks and has Resist Thunder 10. It has a ground speed of 6 and a climb speed of 3, so this is yet another Underdark monster who can drop on you from the ceiling.
Its basic melee attack is a weak Reach 1 claw, and its main attack is a Range 10 Sound Pulse that targets Reflex and does thunder damage. It can also go louder and use a Bellowing Blast quite often (recharge 3-6). This targets Fortitude in a Close Blast 5, does the same thunder damage as the pulse, and dazes (save ends).
The monster prefers to stay far away and attack with sound pulses, but it has no reason to not spam Bellowing Blast as often as possible if the PCs manage to close in.
The Destrachan Far Voice is a smarter (Int 10 instead of 7) and stronger variant. It’s Level 15 Artillery with 122 HP. Its blindsight increases to 20, its thunder resistance to 15, and its speed to 8 (climb 4).
It has the same attacks as the classic model, adjusted for the level-up, and a new encounter power named Reverberate. It targets the fortitude of everyone in a Close Burst 2, does a smidge more thunder damage than the Bellowing Blast, and stuns (save ends). On a miss, it still does half damage and dazes for a turn.
Encounters
The entry has two.
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Level 9: 2 destrachans and a trio of assorted foulspawn form an all-aberrant monster team.
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Level 15: 1 destrachan far voice, 2 driders, and a trio of assorted drow.
Final Impressions
Destrachans are another of those weird monsters who kinda come out of left field, but I think their 4e versions at least have a clear mechanical role. Their propensity to ally with other creatures gives you an excellent excuse to add some convenient ranged support to monster teams that would otherwise lack it.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Dretch
Illustration Copyright 2009 Wizards of the Coast. This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
Dretches are the pond scum of the Abyss. The name “dretch” is likely a contraction of “demon wretch”, because these things are weak, stupid and stinky. Everyone bullies them back home, and more powerful demons love throwing hordes of dretches at new opposition both to gauge their abilities and to enjoy the sight of dretches dying in droves.
I think dretches used to be the souls of Chaotic Evil sinners in previous editions, but that is not the case here. Demons in 4e don’t care about souls, and no one who dies goes to the Abyss. These balls of rage and body odor just spontaneously generate from the corruption of that plane.
In this edition, Dretches first show up in the Monster Manual 2, so we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. This is because they’re also present in the Monster Vault. Since we have the space we’ll cover the MM2 and MV versions each in their own entry.
In both cases, they’re Small Elemental Humanoids (demons) with Int 5 and darkvision. They speak Abyssal but have nothing interesting to say.
Dretch (MM2)
Basic dretches are Level 2 Brutes with 44 HP, which very likely makes them the first demon your PCs will ever encounter in a Heroic campaign. They possess the usual variable resistance 10 (1/encounter). A Sickening Miasma emanates from their bodies in an Aura 1 pattern. Each enemy inside the aura takes 1 damage whenever they take a move or standard action. Multiple miasma auras are cumulative, increasing that damage to a maximum of 5. Beware dretch mobs!
Their basic attack uses their claws, and they can also make an at-will Claw Frenzy that allows them to make that attack against up to two creatures. The Monster Manual 2 still had the damage bug, but these monsters are too low-level to be much affected by it.
When a dretch dies it spills its stinky insides all over the floor. This Vile Death creates a zone of poison on a Close Burst 1 pattern centered on the dretch, which lasts for a turn and does 5 poison damage to any non-demons who enter it or start their turns inside.
Do note that while the Vile Death deals poison damage, the Sickening Miasma deals untyped damage. Being resistent to poison will not save you from dretch funk.
The sample encounter in the MM2 is level 7! 1 level 7 bloodseep demon, 2 level 5 gnaw demons, and eight dretches. Whoever designed this really took that line about waves of dretches in the lore seriously.
Dretch Lackey (MV)
Monster Vault demons are strictly paragon tier or above, so it gives us the Dretch Lackey, a Level 12 Minion Brute.
They lack the MM2’s dretch Vile Death and multiattack ability, but the attack bonus and damage on their claws is appropriate for fighting early Paragon PCs. They do keep the Sickening Miasma, which now does 2 untyped damage per dretch up to a maximum of 10.
Having a huge crowd of Dretch Lackeys seems more appropriate than the medium-large crowd of basic dretches from the MM2’s sample encounter.
Final Impression
I guess I can kinda see why dretches were left out of the first Monster Manual. Sure, they’re the classic low-level demons, but they don’t have much more than tradition going for them. Still, the pull of tradition might be enough - I did wonder where they were when I first looked at the MM entries.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Babau
Illustration Copyright 2010 Wizards of the Coast. This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
In fourth edition, the Babau first appears on the Monster Manual 3. We’re viewing them ahead of time because they also appear on the Monster Vault.
The Lore
The general thrust of demons in 4e is that they’re not fond of complex schemes, which are more of a devil thing. Babaus are one of the exceptions to that rule. You see, there’s this demon lord called Graz’zt who is not a former primordial like the other demon lords. Instead, he was an archdevil who got it into his mind to invade the Abyss. Why did he do that? I don’t know. The lore in the MM3 mentions the Blood War, but I didn’t think that was still a thing in this edition. Maybe it’s a vestige of his backstory from Planescape, or maybe the Blood War has a different explanation for its existence here.
Anyway, shortly after getting to the Abyss, Graz’zt was corrupted by the seed of evil and decided to stay around and become a demon lord. Glasya, another archdevil and daughter of Asmodeus, was not pleased by that. She went after him and ran him through with her sword. When the drops of blood from that wound hit the ground of the Abyss, they became babaus, and their number was so great they drove Glasya back to the Hells, and their continued presence helped build Graz’zt’s power base and make his claim to demon lordship stick.
Being the spawn of Graz’zt, babaus are extraordinarily subtle and cunning for demons. This means they like to kidnap people to torture later instead of killing them all right away. They can be found working alongside other demons, even though they’re even less trusted than usual due to their continuing loyalty to their creator.
They look like skeletally thin humanoids with dark gray skin coated in slime, a spine-like tail, and a weird horn that looks like a scorpion stinger growing out of the back of their heads. All of this in addition to the usual demonic claws and fangs.
The Numbers
Since the babau is from the Monster Manual 3, its stats are identical in that book and in the Monster Vault. It’s a Medium Elemental Humanoid (demon), and a Level 13 Skirmisher with 127 HP. They run with Speed 7.
The babau has acid resistance 5, plus variable resistance 20 usable 2/encounter. It’s coated in acidic slime that deals 5 acid damage to anyone who attacks it with a melee attack.
This demon has two basic attacks, a bite and a claw. It can only use one of them per standard action, unless the target is granting combat advantage. Then it can use both. Each attack only does about half the level-appropriate damage for a skirmisher by itself, so the babau should really strive to gain combat advantage when fighting. The bite also does 5 ongoing acid damage, or 10 if the demon is bloodied.
As a minor action, the babau can perform a Murderous Abduction. This teleports an adjacent creature up to 7 squares and then immediately teleports the babau next to it. The victim grants combat advantage to the babau for a turn. This recharges whenever the babau drops someone to 0 HP. I’m guessing it reserves the power for then a PC is close to dropping.
Final Impressions
I’m gonna have to go with “meh” on this one. Their backstory feels kinda shoehorned in. They somehow brought back the Blood War and Graz’zt, both of which I feel are completely unnecessary.
As for the babaus themselves, they seem a bit too hard to use properly, since they absolutely must gain combat advantage to do level-appropriate damage with their attacks. The abduction power makes it seem that they’d be best employed in terrain with obstacles that are hard to overcome without teleportation, but then they can’t teleport back even if they drop the abducted PC. And if the PC doesn’t fall on that first turn, then the demon is now stranded far from its own allies and together with an angry PC.
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On Transhuman Space
The danger of thinking too much about something before putting words to screen is that someone else might end up publishing a piece first that says what you wanted to in a better way.
This just happened to me! There’s this blog called “It Came From the Bookshelf” whose author John Frazer is reading through and reviewing his entire RPG collection, and he recently published posts about the Transhuman Space corebook, Broken Dreams and now Fifth Wave.
Now, the main thing Mr. Frazer noticed in these posts is exactly the thing I wanted to write about when I published that post on the cyberpunk genre. Turns out that post started out as a big blob of text that discussed THS. I decided to split it off into a series, published part 01, and somehow never got around to polishing the rest of it enough. I gotta get my shit together right now, or else there will be nothing left for me to say that Frazer hadn’t said better.
What I Wanted to Say
Transhuman Space always bothered me at a fundamental level and for the longest time I lacked the words to precisely explain how. Now those words are out there!
Transhuman Space markets itself as Big Idea Science Fiction inspired by what were at the time of its writing the very latest Big Ideas. It’s in a way a conscious rejection of the dystopic and apocalyptic tropes of “90’s RPG cyberpunk”, and one of the things that bogged me down was an effort to describe what that genre is all about. I’m still going to do it, but not today.
The game likes to name-drop the authors that inspired it, not just in its bibliography but in the text itself. There’s Alvin Toffler who came up with the concept of technological “waves”; there’s Richard Dawkins with his memetics; and there’s Ray Kurzweil with his idea that we’ll be able to become immortal software gods Any Day Now.
However, there’s another person whose influence over the setting is possibly greater than that of the others, whose ideas are so taken for granted that he’s not acknowledged anywhere in the books. I’m talking about Francis Fukuyama, the guy who wrote the infamous “The End of History?” essay. This essay kinda codifies the idea that Western liberal capitalism is the ultimate political and economic model for humanity. You reach that, you win History, and everyone else is just playing catch-up to you.
The essay was written in 1989, and it went from “well-received” to “gospel truth” in the eyes of the developed West when the Soviet Union fell in ‘91. It was expanded into a book in 1992, and influences a lot of terminology even today. A “developing country” is just one that’s on the way to becoming a “developed country” like the US and Western Europe are; if it has trouble making the transition it’s because it has not embraced the tenets of the Ultimate Model with enough gusto.
This same view is at the bedrock of Transhuman Space’s worldbuilding. The nations who were “developed” at the end of the 20th century remain so at the end of the 21st. Those who were “developing” also mostly remain so - they’re better off than they were a century ago, perhaps even better off than the US was a century ago, but they still have some “catching up” to do. The game’s definition of “better off” is directly correlated to technological development. Better toys equals better society. The whole “memetics” thing is part of that, since its main narrative function is to make sociology into a hard science whose development happens in lockstep with the other hard sciences.
Those who deviate from this model are pretty much the setting’s designated bad guys, particularly the TSA. See, they follow this ideology called “nanosocialism”, and you know it’s a dangerous and pernicious mode of thinking because it has socialism in its name. Its core tenet is a rejection of the concept of intellectual property, a concept which the core book asserts is vital to maintaining peace, progress and sanity in a society that doesn’t have to worry about material scarcity. It’s the only way a honest, hard-working corporation can make money these days! And if corporations can’t make money, technological progress stops! That means all progress stops! You don’t want that, do you?
So the TSA are villains because they want to reach that state of technological and social bliss enjoyed by the “proper” Fifth Wave nations by pirating their tech instead of “earning” it. And of course they are all authoritarian dictatorships who make weapons of mass destruction because if you already stoop to Internet piracy no other badness is beneath you. The books try to present some semblance of neutrality and even suggest you could run a campaign where the PCs are working for the TSA or another info/nanosocialist outfit, but it does that with the same perfunctory tone of someone suggesting it’s technically possible to play as stormtroopers in Star Wars D6. Its published example scenarios always show the TSA as antagonists.
Then there’s the nations in the asteroid belt and outer solar system, whose anarcho-capitalism tends to be viewed as the next step in the refinement of the “end of history” model. Everyone knows government regulations are the greatest impediment to progress, so it makes perfect logical sense to do away with them entirely. I mean, no wealthy CEO in their right mind would use unfettered capitalism to exploit their fellow sapients. We’ve won History, that doesn’t happen anymore!
I remember seeing a lot of forum posts by diehard THS fans that insisted it was basically a realistic utopia and totally not cyberpunk, and I was silly for thinking it was or should be. My response to that is simple.
Transhuman Space is absolutely a cyberpunk setting in every detail except for one: it’s told from the perspective of the sinister corporations. If you took almost any William Gibson novel and rewrote the story so it was told from the perspective of its villains, their tone and setting would look a lot like Transhuman Space’s. The gloomy Cristopher Shy art that peppers every book in the line is not dissonant with the tone of the setting: it is, and has always been, spot on.
And now I’m really glad to find out I’m not alone in thinking this.
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Let's Read the 4e Monster Manual/Vault: Abyssal Eviscerator
Illustration Copyright 2009 Wizards of the Coast. This is part of a series! Go here to see the other entries.
Abyssal Eviscerators first show up in 4th Edition in the Monster Manual 2, but since they’re also in the Monster Vault we’re getting to look at them a bit early.
The Lore
The name says it all, really. Abyssal Eviscerators come from the Abyss, and they like to eviscerate. At Int 7, they don’t know how to do much else, but then again they don’t want to. They frequently find themselves under the command of stronger demons, or summoned by mortal demonologists of middling skill and above.
The Numbers
Abyssal Eviscerators are Medium Elemental Humanoids (demons), and Level 14 Brutes with 173 HP. The MM2 and MV versions are identical aside from the fixed math. They have Speed 5, Variable Resistance 15 (2/encounter), and no special senses.
Their basic attack is a claw, and they can also Grab at-will for slightly less damage, an attack which obviously starts a grab if it hits. The MV version specifies the demon can only grab at most two creatures at once, which is sensible because it only has two large hands.
Abyssal Eviscerators can also bite grabbed targets as a minor action, doing 6 automatic damage to them. They can only do this once per round normally, but can do it up to 3 times per round while bloodied.
Final Impression
Nothing special here, really. These guys are basically paragon-tier evistros and should be used in the same way.
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