Monday, July 30, 2012

The Nothingface: OSR Blogosphere Monsters Project

The Nothingface is a monster for Swords & Wizardry that I did a write-up for over on Google+ a few months back. This is a slightly updated and cleaned up version of that initial posting. The monster was inspired by a song/album by Voivod that I used to listen to a lot, back in college. I decided to clean this up and post it to my blog after reading about the OSR Blogosphere Monsters Project. I figured that a creature this horrid deserved to be inflicted upon others. Converting this monster from Swords & Wizardry to another retroclone like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess should be easy enough for referees of those games.


This particular write-up is for Swords & Wizardry Core.

The Nothingface
Hit Dice: 8
Armor Class: 7 [12]
Attacks: 2 claws (2d6)
Saving Throw: 8
Special: The unnaturalness of the Nothingface requires a saving throw when you first encounter it, failure causes a character to freeze up and be unable to do anything for 1-4 turns. Their extraplanar nature makes them immune to normal weapons.
Move: 10'
Alignment: Chaos
Challenge Level/XP: 10/1,400

The Nothingface is a vaguely humanoid creature with spindly, elongated arms and legs with swollen joints and longer than normal, thin fingers and toes. The nails on their toes make a faint scratching/scraping sound as they walk. Their body hair is sparse and pale and their flesh is, at best, pallid. The remarkable feature of a Nothingface is the void where their face should be. This void is a frightening lack of a face that the observer's mind attempts to fill in but cannot.

A Nothingface is extraplanar and summonable with the right spell. Their resilience and doggedness make them popular as guardians of a dungeon, even if they are likely to turn on their summoner. Typically only one appears when summoned.