I'm happy to say that Brian has made the first new monsters in Horde Book 4: Tomb of the Mummy available for playtesting!

- Ushtabi Worker, CR 1
- Ushtabi Foreman, CR 2
- Mummy Lord, template (CR +5)
- Canopic Jar Guardians:
Hapy, CR 9
Duamutef, CR 12
Qebekh-Senneuf, CR 11
Imsety, CR 14
- Praenomen of Osiris, template (CR +17)

For this stage of playtesting, we need people who are reasonably fluent in the rules & mechanics contained in the latest edition of the System Reference Document for the world's most popular roleplaying game (e.g., www.swordproject.com). If that's you, here's the kind of input Behemoth3 is looking for. (If that's not you, don't worry: we should be ready to do some more conceptual-level playtesting before too long).

#1) Try applying the new transformational templates for becoming a mummy lord or a praenomen of Osiris to a character. (You'll need at least a 12th level character for the mummy lord and a 21st level or higher character for the praenomen). See if you can figure out the process from what's written & if you run into any problems or inconsistencies.

#2) Do a battle playtest of the new monsters (including, perhaps, the mummy lord and praenomen from #1) according to the standard guidelines on p. 302 of the 3.5 Core Rulebook III: basically, a party of four (ideally fighter, cleric, rogue, wizard) against two creatures whose CR is equal to the party's average level minus 2. Let us know how it turns out, both in terms of the party's resource expenditure (spells expended, hit points lost, item charges used, etc.) and just how the battle went: was it a fun and balanced encounter? Did you have difficulty running any of the monster's abilities or encounter any other problems?

#3) Drop some of these monsters in your regular game to see how they do outside the laboratory. Contact me if you need more descriptive info on them to do this (right now they're mostly statblocks), or you can make it up! Since the CRs haven't been extensively tested by the procedure in #2, be prepared to cheat on dice rolls to avoid a total party kill if the monster turns out to be more powerful than we guesstimated it, or to throw in extra challenges if they're wimpier than I thought.

If you're interested, contact me for the files & guidelines for playtesters; be sure to let me know if you're local to New York, NY, Portland, OR or Durham, NC, so we can invite you to our own playtest groups.

Yours,
Tavis

Tav,

I PM'ed you. Let me know.

Sorry, got tangled up in other work; will send stuff to playtesters today (cross my fingers)!

Sorry to pile on but I also PM you. Just thought you would like to know.

Glad to have anyone who likes pile on! I did get both PMs - in future I'll take the time to respond to PMs right away. Sending out playtest materials now.

Holy Shit.....more crazy dreams ahead.