Mad Gaming Madness

Many moons ago, in Dragon magazine #39 (July 1980), the article "Good Got You Down? Try This For Evil: The Anti-Paladin NPC," by George Laking and Tim Mesford. It introduced an NPC foil to goodie two-shows PC paladins in the form of their diametrical opposite: a foe who received power by following vices and eschewed virtue. Since it was presented as a class, there were tables that allowed player character anti-paladins, but it was presented as purely an NPC class. Adding to inversions of the paladin's abilities they also added the thief's backstab and the assassin's use of poisons, so they weren't exactly balanced for play. Later, in issue #106 (February 1986), there was an article called "A Plethora of Paladins," by Christopher Wood. To the lawful good Paladin and the chaotic evil Anti-Paladin were introduced 7 more paladin-alikes:  the neutral good Myrikhan, a lightly-armored questing knight of good with a bit of a focus on fire. the chaotic good G...

Back in Dragon magazine issue #156 (April 1990), John M. Maxstadt had an article called "Yet Even More [Gods Forbid] Outrages From the Mages." The name refers to his article in issue #144 (April 1989) called "Still More Outrages from the Mages," but where it 1989 article had joke spells, the 1990 article had joke magic items. While most of the items are pure humor material (such as the ring of spell storing which just spells the word "storing" out loud when activated), some of them had more gamable content. One of these, my personal favorite, was the robe of useless items . The normal robe of useful items is a good low-level reward for adventurers: a magic robe that can produce mundane items that characters might find useful that they frequently forget to buy when shopping. Or, items that can't be bought, like a door that automatically installs itself. To the best of my knowledge, this item first appeared in the AD&D 1st edition  Dungeon Master...

So, I got sidetracked a few months ago, and managed to miss posting for a while. I'd try to remember to post, forget it on the Monday in question, then put it off because, "It's Monstrous Monday! Not Tuesday!" That's a great way to procrastinate yourself into never doing something. So, today's ridiculous monster from the "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" article from Dragon #156 is the paper dragon, which is actually one of my favorites and one that I've used more than once. It's a great critter to put in an abandoned wizards' library, or similar location.

 One of the delightfully-creative things to have come out of the OSR wing of RPGs is legamon, or "legallydistinctémon." Created for the GLOG RPG (Goblin's Laws of Gaming, a minimally-structured ruleset that retains much of the essence of D&D while dropping most of the trappings), legamon are monsters much like the ones from an unnamed popular franchise, yet legally distinct—hence the name. It started on the Numbers Aren't Real blog  with tables to create your own legamon, which was automated in a post on Whose Measure God Could Not Take , and has spun out of control ever since. Good blog posts to see for more can be found here , here , and here , and many more places on the Internet and on Discord than I could link to. It's a fun setting with interesting permutations and repercussions that have a lot of gamability. The one downside was that, of course, the original franchise is very well known for some iconic art pieces depicting their most popular monsters, a...