The Order of the Stick

I'm stealing that. It's good.

edited 17th Mar '15 10:32:56 AM by TobiasDrake

Speaking of Golems what did the lightning gun do to Crystal? Did it just heal her or is she even stronger now?

Kobolds are... some type of brownie like sprite, I think? And man, you haven't seen weird interpretations of monsters until you've played Castlevania.

Weren't kobolds simply goblins in German?

Tiamat was an Ocean Goddess too instead of a five headed dragon god.

That's what I was saying earlier. Most of the different fantasy races are named things that literally mean the exact same thing.

She was a snake, though, so you can kinda see where they got that.

EDIT: Turns out the snake thing is a little bit of a modern interpretation too.

She was originally just a "chaos beast." So I guess five-headed dragon is as valid as any other.

edited 17th Mar '15 10:47:35 AM by Discar

Kobolds were Fair Folk spirits that spread mischief and could take several forms. They were sprites, basically. There are a lot of shared roots among those creatures, though.

If I remember the SRD correctly, lightning damage gives the flesh golem a temporary haste buff, letting it move faster and attack one extra time per round.

I guess Rich is houseruling that "healing eventual slow effects" as "...and giving an haste effect if the golem wasn't already slowed".

Ah, it's not quite like I remembered, then. Which makes the way the Giant drew it somewhat unusual.

RE golems in folklore, the Frankenstein connection is kind of weird/interesting.

There's a claim about Mary Shelly being influenced by the Golem story, but I don't think that's accurate- although the two are both coming from a "tradition" that knows about hommunculi. The Golem story (the Golem of Prague one) is pretty recent actually, and there were some Golem films made in the the 1900's and remade in the 1930's that influenced James Whale's Frankenstein.

The classic homunculus bears little resemblance to Frankenstein's monster, though. Wasn't the monster a bunch of stitched together body parts Frankenstein stole from morgues? It's been awhile since I read the book, but that's my vague memory of how he made it.

edited 17th Mar '15 1:16:42 PM by Arha

The book doesn't go into detail on how Frankenstein made it. It just says he built it with his own hands.

Body parts is the nearly universal depiction in movies, shows, etc, but I've never read the book.

It's basically Word of Dante. In the book he doesn't go into detail because he's afraid someone will copy what he did.

edit: It is implied that he was inspired by some of the ideas behind Alchemy and Homunculi though.

edited 17th Mar '15 7:32:45 PM by Kostya

I believe bodies was mentioned, but the only other detail was that he was using some chemical process to produce electricity.

This one actually has a good explanation, and it's not D&D's fault. Back in Ancient Greece there was some historian (I wanna say Pliny the Elder) who collected accounts of foreign animals from travelers. This being ancient times, the line between folklore and reality was often blurred, and one of the beasts he wrote about was the vicious gorgon, a kind of cow that could kill with its breath. This is often assumed to be a description of a wildebeest or a hippopotamus or something. Either way though, the idea of a killer cow called a gorgon has been passed down through the ages.

And now you know.

I am now forced to hilariously imagine some traveler keeling over due to the horrible breath of a cow and the legend growing about its mythological powers when it was just suffering from bovine halitosis.

I also believe that's what happened.

The lesson here though is that ancient myths weren't actually as thorough and organized as modern fantasy fiction, so two different creatures separately being called "gorgons" in ancient Greek isn't that unusual. Perhaps the cow was named for the monster in the same way that the ocean hydras are named after the hydra? Pliny thought it was real, after all.

This is similar to the above noted fact that different synonyms for "fairy" get used to mean different creatures despite not originally meaning anything like that. Our modern fantasy instincts to categorize things works against us.

Also, the metal Cobalt comes from the same word as Kobold.

edited 17th Mar '15 10:11:50 PM by Clarste

I thought the cow with the killer bad breath was a catoblepas, not a gorgon.

Then you have a problem. Pliny (both elder and younger) was a Roman.

I too thought that the "death-cow" was the catoblepas, and Wikipedia seems to confirm this (including mention of Pliny the Elder having been one of those to describe it).

That said, Wikipedia's article on "Gorgons" notes that "descriptions of Gorgons vary across Greek literature", and that (emphasis mine) "the term commonly refers to [the familiar three snake-haired sisters]".

Interestingly (to me, at least :P), the latter article mentions that the term "gorgon" means "terrible" or "dreadful", and may have its origin in an onomatopoeia for the growling of a beast.

edited 18th Mar '15 7:18:09 AM by ArsThaumaturgis

The catoblepas was a bull whose gaze killed everything it looked at, like a more hardcore basilisk, but its head was so heavy that it was constantly dragging it through the ground, its eyes covered by fur. When it gets the willpower to look up and brush the hair from its eyes, though, you're fucked.