Grues perhaps?

Quote: Original post by Wavinator
I'd go straight to the AD&D Monster Manuals and Fiend Folios on this one, depending on how allergic you are to *ahem* borrowing. ("Talent borrows, genius steals" goes the old quote...[smile]). From there you get walking graveyards, walking piles of leeches, floating brains that scan levels using poison gas filled eyes gouged from their dismembered victims.

Or, you could take a completely different and totally unexpected tack: The town that's supposed to be abandoned is, after plenty of foreshadowing, inhabited by normal people who are unusually nice to the player... until you notice that the walls keep moving and reorganizing, and later learn that some of those walls have become ravenous undead things which move into position to keep the player forever trapped. If the engine supports it, you could have a fiendishly difficult block moving puzzle as the player tries to escape.

I forget exactly what it's called, but your post reminded me of one of the 'creatures' in the AD&D Monstrous Manuals... I think it was called a 'living wall' or something like that. Creatures trapped inside can stick their arms out and call for help, but if you grab hold of one of them, they pull you inside and you get amalgamated into the wall as well. The AD&D Ravenloft setting was all about this sort of thing.

I'd also recommend looking at some HP Lovecraft books, if you want some really freaky stuff. There's a Lovecraft RPG which has a description of most the creatures from the books.

Very large packs of rats. Everyone hates rats, unless they are feeding them to their pet snake. Hay, what about packs of snakes.

Giant spiders. In Thief 2 the hairs on the back of my neck went up every time I ran into them.

Leper/diseased apes. They are 8 times stronger the average person and leave a trail of body parts. I.e. an ape missing one arm picks up an arm from ground and puts it in his shoulder socket and now has a function arm.

Demonic skunks. Not hard to kill but after they spray you (their first action), any monsters can smell you coming a mile away so there is no "getting the jump" on other monsters. May be it even attracts monsters.

Mana tendrils. The poisoned manna gets particularly potent in some places and forms black clouds which slowly chance any leaving creature and kills it on contact.

Zombie Gerbils *cough*. Would inspire fear in me......

Giant roaches. These things scare the hell out of me.

Also, giant centipedes and other creepy crawly things.

Go watch Indiana Jones and you will get some ideas. :-)

cb

I presume this "mana poisoning" affect still exists in this villa? In that case, using magic might be a challenge in and of itself. Either outright failure or bizarre, unintended affects as a product of trying to cast something might be appropriate.

Mutants are always applicable in this sort of situation, humanoid or otherwise. Maybe they use a form of magic based on the plague that works for them. Maybe normal magic no longer works on them. Maybe they're unimposing and slow and small...but there are thousands of them and they just keep coming (like zombies =) but when they touch you, you're done. (Think Tonberry.)

Maybe some crazy mage moved in to the city and figured out how to control the poisoned magic and runs the city now. That would give you a boss who doesn't necessarily have to be tied into the overall plotline. (Evil is not monolithic! There should be unrelated evil in your game!!)

Hope that helps, guys. =)

How about a range of characters sorta like the Morloks of the X-men series fame(The Time Machine...)?

The mana poisoning could account for a wide range of "mutations" and abilitites in this "race" and it would give you freedom to stay away from a single type of enemy. In otherwords if you have multiple races in your game the mana poisoning had driven a rather mixed lot of them together underground (they now have mutual interests\concerns and put aside whatever differences they might have had before). Then you could use whatever attributes or abilities are common to each race and mold them all together (their strengths) into a very formidable force, plus spice it up with some good old "mutated" abilities that normal members of each race would not have.

J

druids.

evil druids.

I like the idea of having mutated people that have been affected by the poisoned mana. Each mutation would take on exagerated and uncontrollable magic properties, so you'll have some people that randomly burst out in flames, others that can control the flames more and shoot fireballs, etc. This way you could get a range of different creatures with the same type of attributes, but posess different behaviours depending on the extremity of their mutations and how well they are able to control them.

Thanks for the incredible response. These are some great ideas, much better than the standard fare for sure. The concept of building the enemies based on mutations has jump started my thinking. Having the mana poisoning effect spell casting in general is also an intriguing idea, with unexpected results and sometimes random results.