The Map Knows More Than I Do

Doing a bit of random hex-map generation this evening (using a tinkered-with version of Victor Raymond's Wilderness Architect method from Fight On! #2).

Here's the generated terrain in question (just so the following makes at least a little sense).

It's supposed to be the Vorra River Valley, south of Adburg and the ruined City of Nagoh. Yes, I called my adventureburg Adburg. It's easy to remember in the heat of play.

So, yer pretty boggo area of forested hills descending from mountains to a well-watered plain; so far, so fantastic realism. But suddenly the dice decree that there's a 5-mile diameter desert in the middle of this verdant landscape. Wuh?!

Now, to me an out-of-place desert hex that just screams adventure hook. I'd be totally remiss as a GM if I just left this as a blank space on the map. A few quick rolls on the appropriate tables in the ever-handy Ready Reference Sheets reveal the salient feature of this particular hex is a keep, ash-covered, and situated on a rocky outcrop. The environs are crystallised and petrified and the local inhabitants are Giants.

Ashes, crystals, keep and giants says to me the obvious: Fire Giants. Probably digging in to protect/exploit something of use in their forthcoming runt-squishing crusade.* They've likely happened upon (or been sent down by some Big Bad to secure) some form of climate-altering artefact or heat-based weapon that, even inactive, is able to create a microclimate hot and arid enough to bake the land for miles around. All that crystallised, petrified stuff is probably the result of this mini Death Valley effect: roasted trees and dried out ponds and the like. Sounds like a proper nasty place that eats adventurers for lunch. *grin*

 * There's always a runt-squishing crusade in the offing for giants IMG; it's kind of a default state of existence for them in a world which - from their elevated perspective - is over-run with tiny, hyperactive vermin.

And blow me down if that doesn't also explain the sparse settlements and assorted ruins the dice have decreed shall be scattered around what should - in any sane world - be a densely populated area of settlement. Obviously the giants have already made a start on clearing the surrounding areas of its infestation of annoyingly short people. ("You must be THIS tall to continue living. Surtr commands it!")

I picture them rocking up 13th Warrior style (hellhounds, salamanders and fire imps in tow) and setting fire to local villages at night. Or standing on a rise hurling lava bombs (treat as fireball or something) down on unsuspecting bargemen plying their trade. A few instances of that is going to have refugees fleeing the area and will royally screw the economy of everywhere along the river: crops from the farming villages and recovered artefacts from the Vaults can't get down the river to the cities; manufactured and luxury goods can't get up-river to Adburg.

I'm already getting a wacky War of the Triple Alliance meets Against the Giants vibe off the situation...

"We want you to head up-river and dispose of the crazy fanatics blocking river traffic."
"Sure, we'll set out right away. Should have them run off by the end of the week."
"Oh, by the way; they're Fire Giants..."

All that from one hex! Random terrain generation: giving you more than you expected since 1974.

Pic Source:
Me, with a little help from AKS Hexmapper

Hex Mapping the World *mwah hah hah*

I'm sure this is old hat to many of you, but I recently found a thread on boardgamegeek about mapping a sphere with hexes. Post 11 is the real meat of it.

Apparently you use an icosahedron as the base, then divide each triangular face into hexes, dymaxion map style. The points where the three faces meet? They're always going to be pentagons, although that might come in handy if you want particular nodes of power at certain places in the game world.

Of course, no mention of such a project in our circles would be complete without a suitable link to the Tao of D&D (just for the passing few who haven't yet stood stunned at the sight of a man gradually hexmaking an entire fantasy Earth, and then using those maps to model pre-modern systems of trade on a planetary scale).

Related, but less likely to be of interest to anyone other than me. Awww, what a cute little hex map of England. Anyone know how I can blow that up to a useful size without it pixelating horribly?

Cinnabar: Mapping the Infinite City

"Cinnabar? It's no Utopia. There are more options here than you've had before. That's all. There's diversity on an asymptotic curve that never quite touches total breakdown."

Curse you, Tom Fitzgerald! Your mention of extropian science fantasy in the comments to my last post got me thinking about what use one of my favourite New Wave sci-fi novels might be in my game. How could you possibly know that was my Achilles Heel?!

M. John Harrison's Viriconium, China Mieville's Bas-Lag and Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen (one word review: over-rated) seem to get all the love in the esoteric urban fantasy stakes, but Edward Bryant's Cinnabar stories beat them to it by years, and did it with style too. Fine by me, it keeps Cinnabar more of a well-kept secret that I can mine for my own dirty purposes without others calling me on my packrat-ism.

What good then is The City at the Centre of Time for an old school D&D game? Well, in accordance with my recently evolved idea that "the right answer is always the wilder and more audacious of those on offer" (didn't Feynman say something similar?), I think the answer is: plenty.

Cinnabar is a city built around a time vortex and governed by an AI going slowly mad from the strain of synchronising itself across helical time. The burg is described as:

"...a flux of glass towers and metal walls perched atop red cliff crumbling down to a narrow strand of beach..."

and is a post-scarcity dream of genteel urbanism filled with Clarkean sufficiently advanced science (bioengineering, time travel and outright weird sh*t), helical time distortions, and an array of characters bored to the edge of madness by the ennui of their immortal lives.

"And this" said Timnath Obregon "is the device I have invented to edit time."
The quartet of faded and blurred ladies from the Craterside Park Circle of Aesthetes made appreciative noises; the sound of a dry wind riffling the plates of a long-out-of-print art folio.

A few of the more memorable/exploitable elements of the setting:

• Parlours filled with generations of embalmed ancestors.
• Giant ravens and revived prehistoric sharks acting as spies and proxies for warring omnidisciplinary scientists (*cough* wizards).
• Memory scrubbing and personality overwriting.
• Factional strife between bio-modified heterogynes and Luddite natural birth fanatics (the Neo-Creelists)
• Intra-city teleportals (known as the Klein Expressway)
• Living animal statues embedded in concrete to stop them from wandering off.
• The Network, a combination public infrastructure/entertainment system, which hosts shows by sex star Tourmaline Hayes and action star Jack Burton (famous for doing all his own stunts).
• Cougar Lou Landis - a deconstruction of the heroic archetype in a city that only looks to heroes to provide some variety in an interminable existence.
• Catmothers - Nanny/bodyguards for the children of the elites. Genetically modified cats with their maternal instincts refocused on human children.

There's no way I'm not going to rip all this off with the greatest of glee!

Perhaps the oddest thing about the city is that it is described as becoming wilder and ever more expansive the further in toward the centre one travels. Birds are described as travelling in widening gyres to avoid the confusion brought on by time distortions, and characters talk about time compression as one approaches the singularity at the heart of Cinnabar:

"Its the same phenomenon that would make Anita and the others in Craterside Park think we'd have been gone only a short while, regardless of whether we've spent several subjective years at City Centre."

This is the exact opposite of the time dilation which supposedly occurs in a singularity in the real world and, combined with all the other elements involved, makes Cinnabar something of a challenge to map.

Whether you want to use the Cinnabar singularity as written, or make a journey to the centre of the city a one way trip into a timelike infinity (as in the Stephen Baxter short story Pilot, reprinted in the Vacuum Diagrams collection) is up to you. I'm torn between the Narnia/Oz conceit of no time having passed at home, or having ancient and long-forgotten things from the distant past erupt from the inner regions of the city at irregular intervals.

Perhaps the simplest way of doing so would be to treat the wild reaches at the centre of Cinnabar as an inverted wilderness map, with the city as centre point for expansive exploration of its TARDIS-like forgotten areas. Given how big a factor the warped nature of space and time in the city is, this isn't as absurd an idea as it might first sound.

Picture your classic hex map (the one here is from turn-based card PC game Armageddon Empires, chosen purely for prettiness):

The centre hex, rather than representing the city itself, represents the entire world beyond Cinnabar. The wider world receives short shrift in the original book, being described as comprising no more than "The desert. The greenbelt. The city. The sea", and a disused elevated railway to a long-unvisited city known only as Els (I'm sure the striking resemblance between this far-future SoCal and the self-absorbed worldview of La-la-land is no coincidence...). As the city acts as the gateway between the two wildernesses ("beyond Cinnabar" and "within Cinnabar") it really makes no odds.

The robot-groomed greenbelt surrounding the city would be the ring of hexes surrounding this solitary central hex. The greenbelt might need to be modified slightly for the chaotic and hostile conditions of a D&D world; perhaps into the kind of active defence/free fire area the Neo-Victorian enclave of New Chusan had in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. After all, one can't have riff-raff turning up uninvited...

Surrounding the greenbelt hexes on the map, but within them in terms of topography on the ground, would be the commonly visited, inhabited areas of Cinnabar itself in all their ferment and glory:

"The Tancarae Institute, Craterside Park, the Neontolorium, Serene Village - where the irredeemably elderly live, the Klein Expressway, the Balloonworks-"

Take your favourite fantasy city sourcebook (or better still, a sci-fi one) and crank the whimsy, spectacle and self-indulgence knobs up until they break off. Cinnabar should be thrilling, OTT and always full of the next big thing. The inhabitants crave novelty to the point of mania. Don't forget the dark undercurrent of ennui, despair and casual cruelty though. Citizens may be inviolate under city law, but you do know how they discipline Catmothers, right?

Spoiler: Implanted memories of the litters of kittens these hybrids could never have. At any time their masters can have their mind replay the memories as if the death of their litter was happening all over again.

Beyond the ring (outlying in terms of topography, innermost in terms of cartography) comprising the currently active areas of the city would lie the largely unfrequented centre; interior suburbs inhabited by people tired of the bustle of Cinnabar proper or opposed to the omnipresent panopticon of the Network, or left deserted on human life by the changing tides of ideology and fashion:

"The capacity of Cinnabar is so much greater than its actual population. I assume the inhabitants of Cairngorm grew weary of this austerity millennia ago and simply moved on."

Things would gradually becoming more desolate, outlandish and seemingly impossible as one travelled further in. The Klein Expressway connections would become ever patchier, and things out of their rightful place and time would become more commonplace.

"It appears to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They're presumed extinct."
[...]
"Obregon peered over the lip of the chasm; he could not see the bottom. He looked to the sides and saw that the abyss had no apparent limit in either direction. Directly ahead, the other side of the chasm was about ten metres distant. "This is impossible" he said "There's go geologic feature like this in Cinnabar."

This is where all the post-apoc ape world, transhumanist dystopia and alternate evolutionary history fanfic stuff you feel ashamed to include in an otherwise fine and upstanding D&D game can hang out. Me? I just consider it another vista to be tainted with my own grimdark gonzo vision. ;)

Ultimately, after as much travel, adventure and confusion in the laws of nature as the DM finds entertaining, travellers would (Terminus* willing) reach the singularity which powers Cinnabar and creates the space-time distortions characteristic of the city. This would be the functional and philosophical area beyond the edge of the map; but not, however, the end of the line:

"What you see is the innermost point of the time vortex over Cinnabar. Yet this is not in itself the destination of the time flow; the anomaly is both hole and tunnel, exiting somewhere and somewhen else."

* A ruling singularity AI called Terminus: did the people who designed the city never hear about the power of names? Did they really expect that to end well? Bloody urban planners and their (apparent) failure to understand the importance of mythic resonance...

So, Cinnabar. That (or a decadent, introverted city state so similar as to be its' near-identical twin) is definitely being included as part of the wider Wilds when (if) I ever get around to mapping them. See it while access is cheap, and while it's still there.

"It's a tall mountain."
"Well that can't be helped" said the double helix "Dream quests are known for their arduousness"

edit: feel the power of the grogblog hivemind! Posted at about the same time as my half-formed brainwurble:

• Netherworks on synthecosms in Riskail
• Zak on Weird vs. Noir (interestingly he considers urban fantasy a cousin of noir)
• Trey on hardboiled urban fantasy in a weird world setting

Mandelbulb - One for Telecanter

I'm sure some of you are already familiar with this, but just on the off-chance it slipped by:

Mandelbulb and Mandelbulb2 

These are 3D digital renderings of the Mandelbrot set (and not anything to do with hideous pustular fruiting bodies erupting on the eminence gris of the British Labour Party).

Some cool and evocative stuff going on here, very sculptural.

"Mandelbulb Spine"

"Ice-Cream from Neptune"

Yep. That little lot's going somewhere deep and obscure in the Vaults.

Arthurian Cinematic Orthodoxy, a Dissenting View

(hat-tip to Brian, landlord of The Frothy Friar)

A certain section of the blogoweb consider John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur to be the quintessence of Arthurian cinema. People who misguidedly subscribe to this school of thought have obviously never seen the Richard Thorpe's 1953 epic Knights of the Round Table (starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer, and Stanley Baker (Lt. Chard from "Zulu") as Mordred).



Richard Thorpe's showcasing of Technicolour tabbards and classically trained actors > Boorman's love letter to chrome and Vaselined lenses.

And that's all I have to say on the matter... other than:



(second-best Arthur film ever)

What I'm Geeking Over

Proof positive that the British book-buying public are philistines with no taste. Found reduced to clear in a remaindered bookstore in Newcastle:

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun
by J.J.R. Tolkien

Here's a random, flip-the-pages-poke-a-quotation sampling from Tolker's retelling of the Elder Edda:

Dread shapes arose
from the dim spaces
over sheer mountains
by the Shoreless Sea,
friends of darkness,
foes immortal,
old, unbegotten,
out of ancient void.
-- Upphaf, Stz. 3

Tell me that is not pure game fodder?! No? Ok, here's another:

Dark hung the doors
on deep timbers;
gold piled on gold
there glittered wanly.
The hoard was plundered,
helm was lifted,
and Grani greyfell
grevious burdened.
-- VII Gudrun, Stz. 17

This book is so rich with evocative imagery and wordplay, you could probably use the flip-and-poke method as a random plot generator or alternative to "Say yes, or roll" for your game.

Erm. Did I just go a bit Everway/Forgey there for a second? Oh dear. I'd better commit some sort of Old Schooliban penance... (*has teh shames*)

Swirly Brain-proddling Fun

This here be a simple link dump post. I'm sure some of these are re-posts...

The Brainstormer - good for shifting mental blocks. Combine with The Forge and your preferred random tables for great braincustard justice.

Writers and their Accoutrements (@ A Journey Round My Skull) - quite apart from the Inspiratron, the Muse-o-matic, and the skull-shaped All Weather Field Scriptorium, there's got to be gaming fodder in the image of Kerouac writing "On the Road" in scroll form...

Suffocating at the Villa des Charmes ( @ A Journey Round My Skull, again) - smoky, dreamlike art by Alexander Alexeieff. Performs the minor miracle of making me actually appreciate impressionistic imagery.

Yokai Illustrations ( @ Monster Brains) - ghost whales, king-sized Kappa and Umi-bōzu ("To survive an umi-bōzu encounter at sea, one should remain quiet and look in the opposite direction. Speaking or looking at the creature may send it into a rage — and that usually ends in tragedy.").
How exactly does one pron. "ō" anyway?

Monster Manual Comix: Owlbear (by Lore of Bad Gods) - features insanowiz and Christolump Rabismall.

Almost-Skyscrapers of Britain ( @ "sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy") - What we could have had on our skylines, if only we'd kept the insane Victorian levels of drugs in our national diet. Good-to-excellent in the ruin fodder stakes.

The Ants NEVER STOP. They form a long red line anchoring nightmares to the core of the Earth. - Yep. That's going in the Vaults.

Geometric Sculptures by George W. Hart - an accompaniment to Telecanter's post on Chinese puzzle balls.

Dungeon inhabitant should be pack-rats (@ mises.org) - Before you *hork* at it, even the musings of plutolatrous nutters can be useful gaming fodder.

More on packrat-ism ( @ No Tech Magazine) - includes a link to:

Floating Citadels ( @ No Tech Magazine) - in which Johnny Frog tries to invade Britain with a (wind/tread)mill-powered monster warbarge.

The whacky victoriana of J.J.Grandville (hat tip: Monster Brains, IIRC)

Oldest temple EVAR

This is the north. We do what we like.

Durham, really ruled by priest-kings

Funny thing. I always intended the Wilds of Nagoh (the overland area around the Vaults) to be a dry and desolate region, such as you might see in spaghetti westerns or in cheesy 80s fantasy films like Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster, etc. Despite my desired intent it seems to have gradually morphed into a fantasy version of the north of England; specifically the kind of stark, sunless terrain you might see in films like Dragonslayer or Eric the Viking. Oh well. Thur go the proud galleys, reeking temple cities, and dusty Ozymandian statues (at least for now).

Instead of scrub-covered SoCal hills, or the endless high plains and Monument Valleys of John Ford westerns, or even the bizarre fungus forests and amoebic seas of Carcosa, Athanor, Algol, or lost, lamented Thool, I seem to have ended up with a default scenery of wind-whipped moorlands, hills and bogs.

In my pointy little bullet head adventurers traverse a land of skies as grey as Grimnir's eye, rich with layered cloudscapes and long twilights; a land of dour locals tending hardy livestock in the shadow of smoke-blackened peel towers and lowering crag-top fortresses; a land of bright gold and ancient bones turned up by the harrow's iron bite. Brontë country, had the Brontës but followed a vocation as cold-eyed killers.

(note to self: herd of Brontësaurs half-seen in the mists, totally works)

Sure, there are places of breath-taking beauty and prodigious fertility; veritable edens abounding in all good things, and all the more keenly contested for it. But the general impression whenever I think of the Wilds of Nagoh seems to be of a place where the weather and terrain - let alone the inhabitants - will capriciously shift in mood and kill you as soon as look at you.

What can I say? Maybe it's my upbringing in the littoral areas of the North Sea, but I've always had an unconscious prejudice about exposure being a swifter and surer killer than lack of water. It appears that, for all the mythology of dehydration that runs through so much adventure literature, the widow-making nor'easter, the rain-borne blight, and the icy breath of the loping wolf have a stronger hold on my imagination than the fate of Cambyses lost army or the ill-fated Donner expedition.

That might be a suitable post for another day: a quick and simple death by exposure rule, perhaps in the style of James Raggi's embryonic (embyronic?) LotFP Wierd Fantasy RPG. Then again, I imagine adventurers in the wind-swept wilds have sense enough to pack warm clothes. No sense in getting bogged down in minutiae that doesn't advance the game... (Preferences Y/N re. this? Please comment.)

Apropos of nothing, here are some Wilds of Nagoh bullshots for you (please excuse the wonky formatting, blogger isn't playing nice for me):

High Force falls

Some big wall or other, I dunno.

Rocks, a traditional staple food of northerners

Bamburgh Castle

Smailholm Tower (an example of a Peel Tower)

Arkengarthdale, probably the most Tolkienian place name ever!

Write what you know, I suppose. At least I get to use all that juicy Danelaw/Border Reiver local colour. A land infused with the aroma of Mimir's brew, rather than Bacchus'. Pure Tolkien territory, or possibly Gemmell country. Yep. That smacks of high adventure to me.

PS: all this aside, my starting town of Adburg is still a mash-up of Deadwood, Lankhmar and diamond rush-era Kimberley.

Death Frost Doom - Losing is Fun!

"You will die, but first, you will suffer."

Bleak, stark, unforgiving - this module is very, very much the product of a particular personal vision of what old school adventure is about. Death Frost Doom has some lighter moments, but it maintains an air of 'damned-if-you-do; damned-if-you-don't' pessimism that borders on the nihilistic.

DFD is absolutely and unapologetically not a 4E module: James E. Raggi's world is not a place in which 'status effects' disappear on a successful save or at the end of the encounter. This is a module where anything your players do will have consequences. Many of these consequences will be permanent, most of them will be negative. Remember, this was produced by the man who brought us the Green Devil Face collections: anything you touch can kill you... and your buddies... and everyone else in the area... DFD is old school as horror; it's D&D as Fantasy Feckin' Vietnam.

That caveat given, I have to say that this is one of the most immersive, thematically unified modules I've read in a long time. Many of the descriptions are richly evocative of the sort of creeping, 'in over our heads' horror that is rarely seen in D&D. The descriptions of the crypts had me almost smelling the musty scent of earth and corruption which would break lose as the PCs looted the sepulchres. The situations and some of the trappings would be right at home in a "Call of Cthulhu scenario".

Certain tropes of classic fantasy adventure make an appearence, either used straight (bottomless pit? check!) or with a particular twist (purple lotus powder random effects table), but the absence of other expected cliché elements can be used to disorient players and put them on their guard. JER helpfully makes a point of explicitly calling these aspects of the scenario out in what is almost a mini-masterclass in horror.

What? The loot? Yeah, there's loot. Some of it has strings attached, other parts are just uncanny in a cool way. Although, in a module with at least two ways of catastrophically reformating your campaign, and a number of other lesser (but still substantial) horrors on offer, I honestly think that even the most profit-motive driven players will be less interested in Greyhawking the place than they will be in just getting out alive.

The impressionistic monochrome artwork by artist Laura Jalo meshes well with the bleakness of the module. The cartography is clear and workmanlike. The writing clear and entertaining throughout. Heck, there's even an Elder Futhark easter egg for you to play with!

My one petty quibble is that some details - like the activity cycle of weird hermit Zeke - are overstated. Perhaps a simple table would have laid the information out more clearly than a couple of paragraphs of prose?

All-in-all, money well spent. Howls of anguish and curses will rain down on the name of James E. Raggi IV, and his laughter will echo about the icy northern wastes.

But wait! There's more!

DFD includes, as bonus feature and further evidence of the unrelenting blackness of JER's cold and twisted heart, the very Green Devil Face-ish trick/trap/locale The Tower (previously seen in Fight On! #4). This is a masterful deconstruction in three pages of the Arthurian/Disneyesque rescue the sleeping princess trope. It may not be to all tastes, having more in common with the bleaker Metal Hurlant strips than a traditional fairy tale, but it is an interesting exercise in 'give them enough rope' DMing.

So, Death Frost Doom. You get to support a hobbyist creator. Your players will whine and bitch. You will remember why you love this game all over again. Totally worth the money.

Talent Borrows; Genius Steals

Aaron of Like Being Read to From Dictionaries brainstorms an 80s fantasy cartoon setting for his OD&D/S+W game:

"I want you to imagine Snarf, a Robear-Berbil, and Deputy Fuzz, out of their gourds on spin, arguing about who gets to keep the Lavender Death Laser they found behind the bureau of the evil sorceress queen."

My inner geek roars in exultation. I would play in that game in an instant! :)

Also, Fight On! #5 is here to drink all the booze, goose your Mom, and wreck your house. If you're here you already know...

Understatement of the Day

"The sun is for an unknown reason, a black hole. To prevent all life on earth from freezing to death, wizards lit the moon on fire. It works as the sun basically, but now I've complicated things."
-- seen on Rich Burlew's GITP forums

I have no idea where to even start with this. A singularity for an orbital primary, with a burning moon as energy source, and probably some screwy axial tilt too. It's either the single greatest setting idea in history, or the all-time daftest...or possibly both.

My Ten Favourite Monsters

"Hmmmm. Many bandwagon pass this way kimosabe."

10: Goblins
I have killed more characters with these screeching little maniacs than I've had hot dinners. Heck, I've killed characters in sci-fi games with goblins. WFRP. WowCraft. Rokugani. Pathfinder. Whatever your flavour, everthing's better with added goblins!

9: Blue Dragons
What's scarier than a dragon breathing fire on your poor sorry earthbound monkey butt? A dragon that shoots lightning from its mouth (and probably fireballs out its' erse). Blue dragons are living thunderstorms. Consult your inner geek: you know they're cool.

8: Winter Wolves
I always loved the Norse myths, and there's just something primal about these guys. A slavering pack of giant wolves that hunt you down across foggy moors and then literally freeze your breath in your throat.

7: Fire Giants
Another favourite from Norse myth. The sons of Surtr. They spend their days in volcano forges crafting the weapons they will use to crush the world of men. They sound like the Isengard music from the LOTR movies, and they want to burn the world.

6: Iron Golem
As animated by Ray Harryhausen. Breathes poison gas and crushes all in its path. Yeah, it's just that awesome.

5: Kraken
The Dragger Down. The dweller in the depths. The stuff of nightmares. If you're being all "MM1 only!" pedantic about it then substitute Giant Squid/Octopus. Either way, malicious giant cephalopods ftw.

4: Mummy
Vampires? Too Bela Lugosi for my tastes. Liches? If I wanted deathly, foul-smelling bibliophiles I'd go to the FLGS. Zombies? Dialogue is too limited. The ancient dead were first and are still the best. Plus they have the best aesthetic. All hail King Tut!

3: Type III Demon
It's a giant dog-headed demon with pincer arms sprouting from its chest. I thought it was cool when I was 13, I still think it's cool now. The Type III is what every blood-soaked idol in a smoky cult temple should look like.
(The DiTerlizzi illustration in the "Planescape" monster book did the beast no justice and does. not. exist. Got it?)

2: Aboleth
I first read about these guys in the 1E Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. I was hooked. Then I read their monster write-up in the MM2. I had a new favourite ancient evil from the depth. Illithids? Kuo-Toa? Sorry, who?

1: Sahuagin
Pick out your 1E Monster Manual. Open to the Sahuagin entry. Read it. There are highly-intelligent evil devil-worshipping mutant Atlanteans living in the oceans, and they like to farm the coast dwellers like humans do fish. They have whole kingdoms down there, and they're smarter than us.
Read China Mieville's "The Scar". His grindylow <==> my sahuagin.