Monster Mash (MM2 Review Part 2)

The second part of my Monster Manual 2 Monster-By-Monster in-depth behind-the-scenes that’s-a-lot-of-connecting-words review. Wherein it is decided how many parts this might actually take.

When Last We Left Our Hero…

Are they gone?

Okay.

Worthless eye-batting meat-spheres, I’ll get them someday.

Moving on to other business, today we begin with Bullywugs. Bullywugs have either the stupidest-worded or just plain stupidest consistent racial power I’ve ever seen. Nature’s Release means that whoever scores a critical hit against a Bullywug regains some hit points. So if your party’s in a pinch, you could consider going to the nearest bullywug village and beginning a racial genocide of all bullywugs until you’ve recovered enough HP to circumvent the use of a healing surge or two.

Bullywugs are strictly small time, being low level and fairly squishy since they have only a brute, minion brute, a skirmisher and an artillery to their name, from levels 1-3. You could have them replace Kobolds as the bearers of all the universe’s negative karma at the low level spectrum, even more because killing them violently nets you free hit points! You could say Bullywugs have few extra lives in the game of life, and also no continues, and a fairly short health bar.

Wait a minute.

That videogame analogy…

I’ve seen these guys somewhere before…

…

OH MY GOD. It’s the frickin’ battletoads again! What the hell is with 4th Edition and battletoads? I mean yeah, the last battletoad race was by Alluria, a third party publisher, but really, is there someone out there who’s really wishing they had oversized frogmen that their players could fight, or who is looking forward to playing a massive oily muscular frogman when their full racial writeup comes out in the PHB5?

Jeez.

Centaurs make a triumphant return to D&D 4th Edition as Elves who did things with horses. They’re strictly paragon tier. They were also kinda boring. I would take this joke about eladrin being too ritzy to ride the wild mustang, as it were, but seriously, they’re Centaurs. Somebody’s happy, I guess.

Centipedes don’t have a lot to show for being in the manual. They have a swarm and a skirmisher, both focusing on rather odd “we are eating you now” attacks.

Chaos Shards are the true blood diamonds, which is to say they’re jewelry that tries to kill you. Big jewelry. The lower level shards are actually pretty low-key, then you get to the Prismatic Shard, which is the one that took all the the craps the other shards could’ve taken on you. At-Will Blind, minor action close burst 3 daze that a save ends, which is thankfully a recharge power, and when it dies, it blinds everything within a close burst 2 (save ends).

It also gives a -2 penalty to saving throws and continuous low radiant damage as an aura, and it’s a standard critter, so clearly these guys play second fiddle to other things – demons and slaad as suggested by the encounters. I can only imagine having a Glabrezu hanging around with however many of these you can stuff nearby.

The Cockatrice (and I say “The” because there’s only one presented, oddly enough, no Cockatrice Marauder or Raging Cockatrice or whatever) is a one-trick pony with a really hard trick to pull off. First, he has to bite you, for mediocre damage. Then, it has to make a secondary attack against Fortitude, with a weaker bonus than before. Next, you have to fail two saving throws in a row, and then you become petrified.

Okay, being petrified sucks. This is acknowledged. But this completely, humorously roundabout way of petrifying is just pathetic, you might as well not even use the Cockatrice, unless you throw five of them at once, and even then they could all be curbstomped before you see that insanely slow petrification effect that gives you upteen million chances to survive actually work.

So as a player I like the cockatrice. It’s like free XP.

The Colossus looks ungodly dumb in the artwork. It is a troublesome brute though, with massive HP for an elite, and lots of pretty high damage area attacks, though it has to hit twice to deal the full six dice it is throwing at you.

Couatls make a return. I like the Couatls because of their looks and also because of their construction. Unlike other creatures in the manual, they look like they’d make a fun fight without creating artificial challenge by constantly dazing or stunning you and beating on you while you can’t fight back. It is not fun for a creature to be able to daze you whenever it feels like, that kind of thing should be done sparingly. However, the Couatl Star Serpent has an ungodly long stat block. It takes up almost 2/3 of the page it’s on, and has some really wordy abilities that seem like they’d be annoying to read in the middle of a fight. Still, good.

Cyclops are completely bland, “here’s this big guy with a weapon” critters. I can’t even crack a joke about them.

Darkmantles are hentai rape monsters that I was sort of happy to see back. There’s only one of them, with the ability to basically, I guess, become a fleshy version of Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat in order to blind you.

Oh lord, this next one. Oh lord.

You remember that Baboon from the Lion King who knew martial arts? Well, he went on a quest for enlightenment and along the way, he really went astray. He picked up a bad drug habit, knocked up some baboons he shouldn’t have, tripped into some nuclear waste, and sold his soul to Satan. That’s basically how you explain Demogorgon, a giant two-headed orange monkey with tentacled arms and bird feet. This is another one of those fights where you will have control of your character half the time, the other half you’re either dazed, dominated or in the process of being dominated, both in a metaphorical and a concrete sense.

Demogorgon’s attacks are nearly all At-Will, which are meant to mesh with his dual attack gimmick where he act on two initiatives, so he doesn’t blow all his recharges. The worst ones are his tail (a close blast 5 that damages and weakens until you save) and the gazes, minor actions that will seriously cramp your style. But the most insulting attack though is Dual Aspects of Demogorgon – a recharge attack that KNOCKS EVERYBODY IN A CLOSE BLAST 10 UNCONSCIOUS (and does some fat psychic damage). Unconscious? Just like that? Close Blast 10 might as well say “the whole party falls down.”

Man, you go through an entire campaign leading up to this epic showdown with a demon prince. Then it’s DEMOGORGON, KIDS, GOOFY TIME NOW. WHEN YOU’RE NOT DOMINATED YOU’LL BE WEAKENED, AND YOU’LL ALSO BE DAZED!

And guess what the suggested encounter for Demogorgon is? Two Balors. Yeah, I guess somebody has to hang out streaming your guts across the floor while you’re unconscious.

Though being fair, Orcus was also a giant whore, but at least his cheap attack had the decency of just outright knocking you to 0, not prolonging the fight a century. As a player, this thing is terrible. As a DM, I wouldn’t use this unless I was playing in a tight-assed group that didn’t want anything but monster manual junk to fight against.

Demogorgon has loads of minions, including Dagon. Poor Dagon, how low you’ve sunk man. Honestly I don’t even want to read them after this thing. I’ll assume they’re uninteresting, cut here and continue next time with Demons.