some revisionist theories I had... (random stuff)

[Mozenwrathe]

Helmed Horror (II).
checking out a picture of the Helmed Horrors, they are complete creatures of armor, not the floating beings we have now. I wonder if it would be possible to create a secondary set of Helmed Horrors (with the name Helmed Horror, no II beside it) using either humans or half-orcs in full heavy armor builds. Sure, a few adjustments would need to be made, mainly giving them new armor and possibly some effects to show they weren't natural beings. Would have to change the subtype from whatever it was to "Construct." Might try something like this tomorrow or Sunday night - whenever I have time. Weapons would be whatever Ziroc liked at the time, probably longswords mainly. (Easiest things to find when it comes to weapons. Greataxes, bastard swords, and greatswords would follow through next.) Perhaps these new Helmed Horrors could even be seen guarding the entrances to that Metal Magus' lair, not to mention the lairs of other wizards within the Undermountain.


Dread Warrior
use regular models, redo their skin tones to sickly colour schemes, and give them fighter capabilities. change their subtypes to undead with perhaps some specialised equipment to bestow the appropriate immunities. pretty much a similar concept to the Helmed Horror (II) there. Armors and shields would need to be made up to give them more of that undead protection, unless they could be coded in through the system itself. (something I'll look into.)


Meazels
for these creatures, I figure I'd try to use dwarven, halfling and gnome models. all of them would have to be recoloured to something dingy and dank (dark greens, browns, grayish-blacks). as they are about the size of halflings and are swamp based, using those models shouldn't be that much of an issue. would have to give them creature attacks I guess if they weren't armed. monstrous humanoid for a few levels, then a couple more in rogue unless the sneak attacks were piled on artificially. I have no idea as to how to add on that disease attack of theirs.


Myrlochar - Soul Spiders
I could have sworn I saw these in the module already. correct me, however, if I am wrong in that.


Nyths
revised will'o'the-wisps with magic missle (or Issac's Lesser Missle Storm for really power nyths Not sure how to impliment the GAINING HP from fire and lightning damage though. would probably just make them immune to fire, lightning, and magical damage. they'd need a creature attack of some sort along with their missle attacks.


Ghost Dragons
those I would simply love to see. not sure how I myself would go about making one, but I am sure Ziroc could easily find around seven different ways...


Ghaunadans
no idea how to impliment this idea properly, but they'd have to be in human form first. when slain, the body would be replaced with a slime/jelly/ooze model with the same amount of hit points. (similar to an idea proposed concerning the flying dragons)


Song Dragons, Fang Dragons, and Brown Dragons.
I think I should leave those to the experts.

(any other random creature ideas and how to implement them would be cool for this thread. just some stuff I'd like to see in the Undermountain, but first I'd want to see for myself just how hard they would be to create.)


<< found another race here, on June 25th, 2006 >>
Krinth
another reskinning to almost black shades for humans, half-orcs, and dwarves - mainly. weapon proficiencies, ability to cast darkness, outsider race listing (as I believe all demons and demonborn are), and so on and so forth. more and more it almost feels like it would be easier to make a ring for all these humanoid based races to bestow the actual racial characteristics for them. still, I have to learn how to use the toolset or just fiddle with LETO until I get what I want out of them.

[ 06-25-2006, 01:51 AM: Message edited by: Mozenwrathe ]

[robertthebard]

Ghost dragons...really easy, take your dragon, and apply Ghostly Visage effect to the creature. Presto, instant Ghost Dragon.

[Mozenwrathe]

robertthebard, always the man to go to, gave me this: Ghost dragons...really easy, take your dragon, and apply Ghostly Visage effect to the creature. Presto, instant Ghost Dragon.

Okay, so that I should be able to do within the toolset already. Duly noted and I will have to actually open up the toolset tomorrow sometime and actually try it out. I wonder what else I can add to a regular dragon of any model to make them more "ghost-like" when it comes to AD&D itself. Some kind of always on fear aura, maybe something that will only allow weapons of a certain level or higher to hit them. (If direct retooling doesn't work, there's always items set with +3 Soak 50 Damage around for dragons to conveniently wear...)


Next issue was the revised versions of the Helmed Horrors I was thinking of. Is there a way to just revise regular soldiers to have some of the Helmed Horror qualities? If worse comes to worse, I'll just make a few soldiers in LETO and alter them accordingly until they have the properties I approve of. Sure they'd more than likely be stronger in the module than they are in the original game, but given the weapons accessible in the game it is only giving them a fair chance. (Maybe some really high numbers in Tumble and Discipline to go along with their Weapon Specializations.)

Along with the Helmed Horrors, the Dread Warriors I felt could also be constructed in similar fashion. For both the Helmed Horrors and the Dread Warriors, I would have to remember to change their base creature types from whatever they were to Constructs and Undead respectively. The Helmed Horrors I would prefer to have moving at a Hasted rate and the Undead at a Slowed rate. Not sure why I'd want the Helmed Horrors to be moving that fast though, as it doesn't go in concert with most constructs. Still the book says that Helmed Horrors can even airwalk (which I cannot duplicate through regular means) so that means a couple of feats put together to recreate how that might work. As for more on the Dread Warriors, they seem to be relatively "stupid" but smart enough to retain most of their combat abilities. So doing up a few random soldier setups and redoing the statistics in LETO might be faster for me in that case.

[ 06-25-2006, 01:16 AM: Message edited by: Mozenwrathe ]

[Mozenwrathe]

damnation.
looks like I have to do this all through the regular game engine first (meaning build the characters like normal) and then find some way to import them. I can't give creatures the armor and such I wanted inside of the toolset. maybe I am just not looking hard enough, but I'll figure out my own way of doing these all up. results to be posted later.

((edited for failure))
spent half a day working on these only to find out just the physical statistics went through. when I tried to transfer them over (armor chosen and everything), all I got were naked humans and half-orcs. what gives? how the hell do I give these characters actual armor to wear for them to LOOK like helmed horrors? ARGH!! *smacks head to desk*

[ 06-26-2006, 11:15 PM: Message edited by: Mozenwrathe ]

[robertthebard]

Ok, it's a really simple process, even though it seems like it should be easier. You have to make custom creatures, be they human, what have you. To do this, right click on the desired race of NPC you want to use, or monster, what ever, and select the new option. This will take you through a lot of prompts, but the end result is a creature that can look any way you want. Including going as far as to change appearance type to anything you desire. Want a swarm of angry, really tough practice dummies, make a dragon, and make it look like a practice dummy...

[Mozenwrathe]

Helmed Horrors

Okay, did that. (the right clicking process and all that.)

Now, I tried to build the module, but it insists there is a ton of stuff missing. If/when you have some time, could you take a look at it? I have only finished six of the twenty different versions of Helmed Horrors I wanted to try out. I wanted to make four to six really good ones (greatsword, longsword, greataxe, other) as a final selection. I may even have to do up customized armor for them, but the way this is going, I may have to delete everything and start over. At least this time if I do, I will have some ideas as to where to start from. The customized armor idea would be solely to give all of the helmed horrors the exact same benefits each and every time, without having to alter them inside of the toolset (creature-wise). The same process I can duplicate for the Dread Warriors, the Meazels, and the Krinth. (perhaps a singular ring instead of the armor would be more suited.) in any case, I figured I should make all of them not leave anything behind until I figure out exactly how I am going to impliment their racial characteristics.

And here I thought making creatures from regular models was going to be easy. Boy was I wrong. I think I will have to start off with one of the numerous construct models and work my way around like how you just described. Perhaps even just use the Helmed Horror as a starter, change the model to human/half-orc/elf and then work the rest of the characteristics into the creature. I was going with extra fighter levels to keep it accurate, but I may have to stay with more construct levels instead.

[robertthebard]

As you build these custom creatures, you need to add them to the palette, so that the resources you assign, armor and such, will be there. It adds the model you make, and creates a blueprint for the creature. When you do that, it's going to prompt you to add the stuff you gave the creature, not to mention the stuff it already had, if any. As for specific, non armor based qualities, you can give the creature a custom skin that will accomplish all you want to do.

Edit: After reading through this, you can name all the creatures the same, but you will have to change the tag/res refs for different models. I'd go something like:
Name: Helmed Horror
Tag: RB_HelmHorror_GA (for the great axe)
resref: rb_hh_ga
Note that the res ref will always be all lower case, and that the ga is still the Great Axe version. So, for longsword, you might go MW_HelmHorror_LS for the tag, and mw_hh_ls for the resref. I use RB, but that's for Robert the Bard...

[ 06-27-2006, 05:50 AM: Message edited by: robertthebard ]

[Mozenwrathe]

Helmed Horror

So I can actually change the ResRef then? I didn't think I could. I know as a fact I will have to do a huge cut and paste job in order to redo all of these Helmed Horrors I am working on. I don't want to have to type out all that flavour text again if I don't have to. I may simply nuke the module (highly likely) and start from scratch with the method you described. From that point, I am going to use LETO to transfer the flavour text I created into the module so each of the new Helmed Horrors has proper flavour text. After all, I can't just submit this all to Ziroc for perusal if they are half-complete. Weapons can go without an explanation, creatures cannot.

If you want, I will send you what I have thus far and you can see why I want to start over. Since the Helmed Horrors are not supposed to leave anything behind beyond the armor they were made from, I may go with a base set of characteristics from the original Helmed Horror in the game, and then expand upon them for the advanced versions of the creature. I ended up having at least one with a CR of 48. I found that personally amusing. I had to chop down the hit points from what I originally wanted (800) to something more reasonable (200). As well for the nomenclature(sp?), I believe I will go with Helmed Horror (II) for the lot of them. If this line is successful, then I will move on to the Dread Warrors and the Krinth. The Meazels I will wait on a little longer. So far, my thoughts are:

Helmed Horror (II) ==>> base creature: Helmed Horror
Dread Warrior ==>> base creature: Zombie
Krinth ==>> base creature: Human/Elf/Dwarf/Half-orc **for them, I may use the Bandit archetype for the starting figure
Meazel ==>> base creature: Halfling/Gnome/Dwarf ** For these, I may use the Bandit archetype again

[ 06-27-2006, 07:57 AM: Message edited by: Mozenwrathe ]

[robertthebard]

You can't change the resref on pregenerated archetype NPC's/Monsters. You have to create your own, and the resref will automatically filter to the name, which is cool, if you're only doing one, but, if you are planning to do many different types of similar creatures, read same name, then you can alter the tag/resref accordingly, and the engine won't get confused, although I can't say the same thing for the builder. You'll have to look at each one to find the particular one you are looking for.

[Mozenwrathe]

Okay, should I then create one original creature first and put that in the module (e.g. make one helmed horror according to the book statistics) and then create the rest of the creatures using duplicates? I just hope this works because I never thought it would be this hard just to make creatures within the module.

<< edited because I am too tired to do more of this tonight AND I am working tomorrow: >>

redid them.
from the ground up.
so far so good. have eight versions of them (basic with seven more).
may redo them again with revised armor which will possess all the book-based immunities, customized greatswords or rings to give anything else major.

[ 06-28-2006, 02:13 AM: Message edited by: Mozenwrathe ]