Certain monsters always grabbed my attention. I don't know why. I suppose it's because most of them featured prominently in many of the modules I played during my earliest forays into gaming. The yuan-ti, of course, remain the favorite. But I've also always had a soft spot for critters like the xorn, the phanatons from "The Isle of Dread", yellow musk creepers ... and, of course, vegepygmies, who very nearly killed my very first character during "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks".

I've tried - where I can - to incorporate these nasty beasties into the adventures I've written over the years. One of the reasons "Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar" remains my favorite published adventure to date is because it contains a good number of those creatures, such as the executioner's hood, the yellow musk creeper, yellow musk zombies, and vegepygmies. (True story - that almost didn't happen. I submitted the original outline for "Caverns" to Joseph Goodman, who sent back a quick note saying "Nice, but why don't you put a fungal garden somewhere in the caverns?" I thought about what sorts of creatures would live in that garden, and suddenly some vegepygmies and yellow musk critters decided to make their way into the adventure.)

I even went so far as to start writing some additional supplemental material about the vegepygmies in the adventure, but between word court and relevance to the actual story adventure, it didn't really fit. So I cut it out of the final manuscript, and saved it for a project for another day.

Today's that day.

"Behind the Monsters: Vegepygmy", published by the folks at Tricky Owlbear, is now available. It lists me as the writer ... truth be told, it's a collaboration between myself and Bret Boyd. For whatever reason, I could never get my original concepts to mesh in a finished format that I liked. It was mostly there, but certain elements were missing, and I wasn't happy with that. Bret took my ideas and polished them up nicely.

My personal favorite part of the piece is the vegegyant (someone big who's green but decidely not jolly), but overall, I think it came out pretty well.

If you're interested in checking it out, it's available at a bunch of places, like RPGNow, YourGamesNow, and Paizo. It was a neat little project to write, and I hope you enjoy it.