Booty And The Beasts, Part IV
Booty And The Beasts, Part IV: Demons
With Bewbage! (Boobage? B00bage? Someone help me out, here…)
Presenting part IV of my walkthrough of “Booty And The Beasts”, a classic 1979 supplement for “Fantasy Role-Playing Games”, by which we mean, “Dungeons & Dragons”. Prior parts covered Creatures Of The Land, Creatures of the Sea, and Creatures of the Air, so now we get to demons! Not “Baatezu” or any crap like that, but DEEEEMONS. That eat your soul! Nom nom nom!
One of them is the Queen of Lust.
You might be old enough to remember that picture of Loviatar in the original “Deities and Demigods”, or full frontal nudity in “Fineous Fingers” in The Dragon, back when it was “The Dragon” and not “Dragon” and certainly not “Dragon_364.pdf”. Back in the good old days, and this is why they were good, we got actual breastage in our fantasy gaming. And it wasn’t like breasts were commonplace back then, before the Internet.
The head shot, as they like to say in modeling ads. For more…
Piranha Demon
OK, this is one where the picture just doesn’t match the name. Piranhas are not hairy. Piranhas come in swarms. Piranhas will eat every part of a slutty Hollywood actress, except her silicon implants, in 0.02 seconds, at least according to “Piranha 3D“, one of the finest movies about piranhas eating large-breasted trollops I have ever seen. These demons just need to eat 10 times their weight to survive. Continuing the theme of “Screw you and your hit points” we’ve seen before, the piranha demon has no specific damage per attack — if it hits you, it will “devour, digest, and then expell (sic) (you) as waste material”. If you are larger than man size, this will take 1-4 rounds. Stock up on those “enlarge person” spells, if they even existed back then. They also dodge attacks on a roll of 11 or less and can do this four times per round. On the plus side… the +3 side, that is… their teeth can be used as +3 daggers. (Their Dexterity is the greater of either 22 or “1 over fastest opponent”, which sort of implies that it was possible there’d be a PC with a Dexterity higher than 22, and the meme that old school gaming was “heroic, not superheroic”, gets another kick in the nadgers. Which kills it, no save.)
Metal Fiend
It took two monster manuals for Wizards of the Coast to get around to re-releasing the rust monster for Dungeons & Dragons 4e, because it would be very very bad if a PC actually lost one of his special toys, and so the current rust monster, in the very unlikely event it actually rusts anything, contains in its gut enough pixie dust… I mean, residuum… to recreate an item of the same level it destroyed. (However, if the players try to exploit this… by capturing one and using it to recycle unwanted magic items for full value, instead of for the usual 1/5th value, then the rust monster’s stomach apparently goes on strike and starts only returning 1/5th the value of the item. It only gives full value if it eats an item you want, not if it eats an item you don’t. It’s very clever that way. Seriously. Swear to FSM, it’s in Monster Manual 2, under “Rust Monster”. Look it up. Then facepalm.)
Anyway, in the old days, dungeons were filled with monsters whose entire purpose in the ecology was to try to get powerful magic items away from the abusive munchkins, and the Metal Fiend was one such. While rust monsters were limited to rusting by touch, the Metal Fiend had 60 foot eye beams to strip you of your weapons and armor — at least magic items got a saving throw. They also breathe a blob of mercury, which will kill you dead if you don’t save.
(Some people might note I make snide comments about how supplements like Booty And The Beasts veered heavily into a “screw the players”, highly adversarial mode of play, and then note I make snide comments about how 4e goes out of its way to avoid those types of mechanics, and wonder what side I’m on. It’s easy. I’m on the side of “Lizard wants to make snide comments.”.)
Imps Of The Perverse
Small creatures who are so strange and bizarre looking they make you vomit, sort of like that “Snooki” thing from “Jersey Shore”, or so I’ve gathered from reading Fark headlines. The illustration is Erol at his… er… Erolest. The name, by the way, comes from Edgar Allan Poe, who would sooooo have been a gamer if he’d been around today.
Demon Of Pestilence
If you get within 30 feet of this 21 hit dice critter, you must save or immediately succumb to one of 6 randomly rolled and lovingly described diseases, including leprosy, cholera, and spinal meningitis. Oh, and if you’re killed within 15 feet of it, your soul is immediately claimed by Lucifer and you cannot be brought back to life unless you make a literal deal with the Devil. You might note that there’s a common theme in many of these monsters of “You’re not merely really dead, but really most sincerely dead”. This is what happens when people carried around a dozen or more rings of 3 wishes, scrolls of “Resurrection”, and similar — and, yes, we did. Some people have sneered at D&D 4e’s Epic Destinies with their self-resurrection powers, but damned if a TPK wasn’t just a speedbump for some of us, back in the day… of course we all had “contingency wishes” prepared for that, and we’d spend plenty of time arguing over the exact wording and interpretation of them. Wish lawyers FTW! (Of course, not every game back then was munchkinism. Some were more along the lines of “OK, you kill the huge, ancient, red dragon. You find 50 copper pieces and a rusty knife. Roll to see if you get tetanus from handling the rusty knife.”)
Queen Of Lust
Aw, you don’t want to hear about her…
Ow! Ow! Okay! Sheesh…
She appears to male characters as whatever their ideal female is, and you must roll under your Wisdom or less on a D20, or fall totally under her control and obey her every command. If you make your save, you “merely” fall in love with her and will do everything you can to impress her and not harm her in any way. She feeds off “lewd and depraved acts” of all sorts, to the point of draining 1-3 points of Constitution per day. The Queen of Lust despises females, though, and will cause the men under her sway to attack them. She can also fire three rays, three times a day each. The black ray causes a female to fall into a deep sleep from which only the kiss of her true love will awaken her (“not even wishes” can help), the white ray turns females into males, and the red ray is… well, it causes the target to sexually assault the nearest being. Yeah. It’s a rape ray. I can just imagine how that would play out in the unlikely event some actual female human being was somehow dragged into the kind f game likely to feature this particular monster. Remind me to do a review/walkthrough of “Alma Mater” sometime, which included the “Consequences of Rape” chart.
So much for demons. Next time… Parasites. Then I’ll stop discussing Congress, and get back to gaming. Badum bum! No, seriously, get ready for the macrosite, the item imposter, and the neila. (Read that last one backwards. Then remember what year this was published. Get it?)
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