Project NEMESIS

For the first ransom after REIGN Enchiridion, I’ve got a mini-setting named “The Kingdom of Nain.” It’s a fantasy setting distinct from Heluso and Milonda. For one thing, it has traditional astronomy and geography. More important, it’s influenced by J.K. Rowling and Fritz Leiber instead of Robert Silverberg or China Miéville.

One of REIGN‘s fans suggested doing One Roll Monsters as a bonus for the ransom on REIGN Enchiridion, and I immediately realized how perfect the idea was for Nain, a kingdom where monsters are supernatural and often symbolic (not just strange animals, as on Heluso or Milonda). The monsters milled out of these charts, then, are more likely  to fit traditional mythology than the pseudo-biology of Milonda. But they’re vague: With enough imagination and descriptive text, they probably fit anywhere. A nice side effect of the charts is that a pile of puzzle-piece monstrous attributes makes it easy to sum up a creature simply by giving the numbers in its roll. Like monstrous DNA, I don’t have to publish a long description for a Nainian unicorn. I can just givethe roll code 2x1, 2x4, 3, 10 and some short text to explain the details.

As with REIGN’s many, many one-roll tools, this one is meant to inspire and not to constrain. The more dice you roll, the tougher and nastier the monster is. (Feel free to set some dice to ensure results you want.) But just copying a set of attacks and defenses from the lists misses the point. That’s just the framework, the blank canvas on whichyou can draw the details that make a creature interesting even before (or after) fighting it.