Review: Garden of Evil (or how to write a good monster)

Review: Garden of Evil (or how to write a good monster)

Not that long ago, Gaming Ballistic held the Nightmare Fuel kickstarter campaign for three bestiaries for DFRPG. So, I would like to review one of them – Garden of Evil. I do not know if or when the books will be available for purchase outside of the backing campaign, but I hope that they will be. Anyway, this is going to be not just a review, but also a rant on how to make a good monster.

There are 17 monster entries in this book – it’s a small one, but a laser-focused one – it only has plant and plant-like monsters. Before the actual monster entries start, we have some plant traits described in more detail. The first one is Bark. For non-DFRPG players, this is obviously just Ablative DR, but there is something that I have never thought about – how does it interact with hit locations? It wouldn’t make sense to, for example, an axe hit against a branch to deplete bark all over the plant’s body. Should it be tracked separately for every hit location? It probably should, unless DR also has Force Field, +20%.

Then we have the Flora meta-trait that among other advantages includes Doesn’t Breathe. I remember many non-DFRPG GURPS using Doesn’t Breathe (Oxygen Combustion) for plants, but I do not even know if it exists in DFRPG – I’m not very familiar with it. Also, what I found interesting is that the Limited Camouflage perk is leveled now. This is something that can be easily backported to GURPS.

Then we have rules for senses – most plants are blind and rely either on Detect (Light) or Vibration Sense (Air), making encounters with them different from any other monsters. We also have some rules for detecting plant monsters among normal plants and, curiously, rules for climbing onto large enemies. The rules are quite simple and intuitive, and definitely are not limited to plant monsters – feel free to use them against other enemies! They should be usable even outside of DFRPG. If you remember, Pyramid #3-77 has the Combat Writ Large article that has more detailed rules for climbing on large monsters, and they are different from the rules in this book – choose one or the other.

I didn’t even get to the monsters themselves, and I already love what I’m seeing. You probably know that I have converted quite a lot of D&D monsters to GURPS, but I find such books invaluable – they give very good examples of what makes a good monster. Think back to D&D – do you remember any plant monsters? In the Monster Manual, we had the assassin vine, the tendriculos, the treant, and the shambling mound. Let’s see how their senses work – the assassin vine has blindsight and low-light vision despite having no visual organs, the others have darkvision and low-light vision. Blindsight in D&D is barely different from vision, but in GURPS Vibration Sense, vision, and Detect (Light) work very differently from one another. So, we replace “yeah, I guess it can still see you” with “it can sense the torch you are carrying and will try to get rid of it or you, but it cannot sense anyone else.” How does bark armor of a D&D treant work? It’s simply an Armor Class bonus. Here, we have a bark layer that can be chipped away gradually to reveal a softer core, which lets characters who aren’t very strong still contribute in the combat by softening up the target. Both of these two examples, in my opinion, show how different are the monster design paradigms in GURPS and D&D. In D&D, most of the monsters feel like generic statblock with randomly allocated resistances or immunities, and an array of spell-like abilities that often feel like they were allocated randomly as well. In GURPS, you have enemies that make sense, monsters that have weaknesses that can be exploited by any prepared character, not just something that requires a specific spell or a magic weapon with a high enough enchantment bonus. If you look at D&D editions before 3.0, you will see that the monsters there are often more interesting, more interactive. In D&D 3.0, you still have some of these “vestigial” fun monsters, but starting with 3.5, you barely have any of them – you just fight more-or-less boring statblocks that might have interesting flavor descriptions that hint at what could’ve been. Books such as Garden of Evil can serve as eye-openers. As I’m writing this, I am experiencing an urge to go through my catalog of converted monsters and make them more interesting and interactive. I’m definitely stealing the Bark armor from this book.

 I will not go over every monster in the book, but I will point out some of the ones that I liked the most.

The first two monsters in the book are animated shrubbery and animated trees, and I really appreciate their inclusion. Plant mages and druids have access to spells that animate plant life, and having example statblocks is very useful. Also, we even have a new spell here – Create Animated Plant! I’m going to convert it to Sorcery in the near future.

Next up, we have the devil-blossom which sounds like a terrifying monster to fight. It can grapple enemy spellcasters and dominate them, while stealing all their spells. Plus, it can summon demons by literally pulling them from their native realm to which its roots extend. We even have an example wizard captured by this plant.

Herecine is a dangerous plant but it promises very useful berries as a reward. This is something that I love about good monsters – they have an integrated reason to interact with them. Gathering berries, mana organs, thick hides to make armor, extracting poisons, etc. There are other examples of that in the book, such as the shocking sallow.

Overall, I highly recommend this book as an example of how to make good monsters – this can be useful both for new players, experienced players, DFRPG players, normal GURPS players, and even those who play other RPG systems.