One for the Homes aficionados - skeletons and zombies as written in Holmes:
Zombies, by nature, are slow and only get an attack every other round. But zombies move at 120 feet per turn, while skeletons move only half that, 60 feet per turn, even though there is nothing in the description to indicate they are unusually slow.
Has this ever struck any of you as odd? Have you house-ruled it? I tend to try to make these Holmes quirks work, so how would you justify it in-game?
Maybe not foot slow but goal slow: they can get to you fast enough, but they have to reset the wrist bones before they make a second attack. Skeletons don't move fast because they lack padding on the foot.
ReplyDeleteI would reverse it; NotLD or White Zombie vs Jason and the Argonauts.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Per Zach's reading of the MS, that line—"By nature they are slow, getting only one attack every other melee round"—was added by TSR. If the 120'/turn movement was in the MS, then this suggests that Holmes himself sped up the Zombies, as they had had the same movement as Skeletons in Monsters & Treasure (60'/move), with no slowing of their attacks. For reference, the Monster Manual reverses the Skeleton and Zombie movement rates used in Holmes, while Moldvay went on to follow Holmes’s rates. I prefer to follow OD&D for monsters, now known to be in keeping with the Holmes MS. This especially seems like a good time to invoke the (thanks-to-Zach) Holmes MS card.
ReplyDeleteI'm coming around to the idea of skeletons skittering around the place, unable to get decent traction because of their shiny toe bones and lack of weight. Zombies are a bit more of a stretch, but in line with modern speeded-up zombies I'm willing to give them faster movement but terrible coordination in a fight.
ReplyDeleteIn a "zero-edition" Holmes game, I would of course go by the manuscript.
If we look at them based on the cinema of the period - I would flip flop the movement rates. Some good responses here and on Facebook on this topic... 8^)
ReplyDeleteThis was something I missed when going thru the manuscript, until Peter Fröhlich mentioned it in a blog post:
ReplyDeletehttp://nilisnotnull.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-trouble-with-movement-rates.html
Here's my response to Michael's question, which I first saw on K&KA:
ReplyDeletehttp://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=216519#p216519
I updated my blog post covering Zombies to reflect this, as well new info regarding their HD situation in OD&D:
ReplyDeletehttp://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2014/07/part-33-their-appearance-is-as-spectral.html