Sometimes The Monsters Win ...
Sometimes the monsters win, and two of mine won RPG Superstar medals!
I like to win at things.
Which is why it’s sometimes so hard to sit in the Game Master’s chair, watching my monsters lose encounter after encounter to the heroes. The deck is stacked against me!
“Well, play better,” you say. But trust me: nobody enjoys a TPK. Not even the GM.
So I feel exceedingly pleased to have won something Pathfinder-related last month. In fact, my monsters (finally) won: I placed two winners in Roll For Combat’s RPG Superstar competition!
That’s right: two creatures that I imagined out of the ether will be appearing, along with 135 other community-submitted entries, in the upcoming Battlezoo Bestiary: Strange and Unusual book.
I’m going to be a published RPG author!
I discussed the emperor shark penguin, which won a Copper award, in a previous post. My other submission, the bathtub ooze, won a Silver award. What’s a bathtub ooze, you ask? Well, feast your eyes on this strange and unusual monstrosity:
The competition was judged by some Paizo heavy-hitters who wrote the rulebooks that Pathfinder Second Edition is built on: Vanessa Hoskins, Linda Zayas-Palmer, Patrick Renie, and Mark Seifter, who’ll be editing the Strange and Unusual book which comes out in hardcover sometime in the next year or so (yes, I’ve already signed the publishing contracts). One of the fun parts of entering this competition was seeing the anonymous judging commentary. A few choice nuggets from my bathtub ooze entry:
Judge 2: “Fun monster with a neat (if disgusting) origin story.”
Judge 3: “An arcanist's bathtub scum come to life—what a fun idea! I really love the flavor text for this monster, particularly the first few sentences. I get a clear image of how the monster manifests and what it looks like.”
Judge 4: ”The 'but a wizard did it' origin is its weakness. But good execution on abilities.”
And entrants even get access to comments from the public judging round, which is where I pulled this beauty from:
User 15: “Let baths be sacred, don't attack naked people.”
Are you kidding me? How are my monsters ever going to win if they only attack adventurers wearing all their armor and weapons?!
Adventure!