Tellus: On the Beautiful, 'Gamey' Simplicity

When in D&D 4e first came out, I recall there was at least some discussion on how monster stats had been handled before and after. People knee-jerked on how 'gamey' the new monster blocks were, on how focused on the in-combat actions, effects and special moves each monster had as opposed to having abilities which functioned like, say, spells. There was a certain sense these were monsters being treated less like an individual life form and more of a stat block of some JRPG monster.

There's no need to tell how much this mentality is a good thing in some cases. Especially mine.

Now some people still knee-jerk to monsters being these things built with purely their special combat maneuvers in mind and that's fine. However, when it come to Tellus and many attempts to channel Japanese Videogame RPG this idea and philosophy of monster design, when combined with the less-is-more of many OSR stat block is wonderful especially when using Giffyglyph Monster Maker, which auto-scale monster stat blocks for higher level. Yes, it makes for very 'gamey' monsters but in my case this is exactly what I need.

This is a quick monster statblock I've whipped up with the program. As you can see, it is extremely basic and boring (yet efficient). This might not appear like much at first but this will become the building block of several monsters. I've conceptualized that in a JRPG/TTRPG this would be a fairly basic monster which relies on its decent mobility and damage rate.

This is the creature's main combat role: it move around, close in on the party and inflict as much damage as it can: a very basic combat role one would be expected to find in the early game of any JRPG. These are the monsters a step up from your regular boring mooks like slime but not enough to be a threat so long as you can mitigate its DPS either by out-damaging it or healing yourself. Its a boring monster but it will get the job done....but not like this. Let me spice it up a bit, shall we?

After some tweaks, this creature become a Vile Condor. These are flying (well, hovering because true flying enemies don't quite exist in older JRPG), poisonous bird-monsters who exude a horrific, poisonous cloud of musk around them.  Beyond a slight increase in speed, the core stats are unchanged. The Vile Condor's ability to hover and give Disadvantage on non-reach melee attacks is loosely inspired by mechanics such as those flying bastards in Final Fantasy X which are very hard to hit without resorting to magic or Wakka's ball-throwing base attack.

Meanwhile the Claw Fiend is a fairly generic early mid-level Fiend creature, which is immune to fire but weak to radiant. It lack the defensive douchery of the Condor but compensate with the ability to Cleave as well as gaining an advantage against weakened foes. In particular, the Clawfiend has been tweaked to have even less AC and HP than it should have for its level but it also deal more damage than it should, making it nothing but a DPS brute.