Oddities for a Wizard's Tower and BASH Fantasy Monster File Tie-in - The Ant-Lion!

Today, Skirmisher released the latest in our ever expanding Oddities series, in which William T. Thrasher and I, with significant help from other Skirmishers and YOU! put together lists of strange set dressing, unusual items, strange curios and other things to help liven up game sessions.

This latest one, 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Tower is chock full of the weirdnesses that accrue around the eldritch! You can pick it up at Drivethru RPG. If you are unsure of the value [it's under a buck and a half for-cryin-out-loud! you can check out the other titles in the series, and the glowing reviews they have garnered!

But here at Skirmisher we try to improve whenever we can, especially the things we write and offer to gamers everywhere. So we upped the ante on the Wizard's Tower by creating not just the 100 Oddities you expect to find, but a d20 sub-table of themed wizardly rooms, and another table of 1d12 entrances and exits. Between them and a roll or two, you could roll up a magical furnace room, complete with bound fire elemental, as well as a staircase up to the rest of the tower and a secret portal to another place, or plane, entirely! THEN you can roll as often as you want on the d100 Oddities table to spice things up further. 

Essentially, In 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Tower, we have given you everything you need to roll up a home for that recalcitrant spellcaster NPC that has been cursing your negligence. All you need to add is critters.

Which leads me to the other titular subjects of this post.

Our friends over at Basic Action Games just released BASH:Legends of Steel, their fantasy ruleset for roleplaying in the Swords & Sorcery setting of Erisa!

At Skirmisher, we love the BASH system so much that we are hard at work right now on Knights-Marshal of the Commonwealth - our neo-anachronistic, feudal space-fantasy RPG of knight-errantry and border patrol, using the very newest version of the BASH Sci Fi system! So it is only fitting that we tie-in the release of Wizard's Tower with something BASH related.

In 100 Oddities for a Wizard's Tower, one of the rooms you can roll up is the Menagerie, which is populated by many bizarre creatures, natural, and rather less than. One of the latter is the Ant-Lion, which we present to you here, BASHified for BASH: Legends of Steel and our own World of Kos settings.

The Ant-Lion is a terrible magical hybrid of insect and feline, a combination of ant fore-body and leonine hindquarters that stands nearly five feet tall at the shoulders and weighs in at something not too far from half a ton. With the rapid metabolism of the insect, the ant-lion is always hungry, generally perceiving everything through the filter of its ever-present appetite. Its preferred mode of satiating that hunger is to lie in ambush, either by tunneling underground and waiting for passing prey, or by stalking more actively across the deserts and arid plains it prefers. it is not averse to making its home in ruins either, as long as the hunting is good.

Ant-lions have no interest in treasure, but considerable wealth may be found in their lairs or the loose sand and rock of their ambush sites. Indeed, some scholar suggest that ant-lions 'seed' their hunting ground with sparklies to attract the fatally curious.

The origins of the ant-lion are unknown, but some in Kos and elsewhere suggest that they are to be numbered in the plethora of chimaeric creatures that exist in the eastern Mediterranean, such as the better known griffon, centaur or satyr. Others speculate that it, like the bizarre and equally dangerous wolf-spider, are the product of some insane genius who seeks to combine the savagery of great predatory mammals with the brutal efficiency of the insect world. The greater purpose of this supposed unknown madman is unknown, but it cannot bode well for humanity.

The creature and stats are mine. Art is by our very own, the incredibly talented William Thrasher!