I somehow had not realised that ferrets, weasels, badgers, otters, wolverines, and all the others are in fact members of the Mustelidae family. They vary in size somewhat, but in terms of D&D and our need for megafauna, it doesn’t really matter if the monster is a giant ferret or a giant weasel. As weasel is the name for the whole family, I decided at the last moment to use my picture of a ferret as the picture for the giant weasel and just write a giant weasel entry.
I also wondered about the 4+4 HD: That means it’s basically a HD 5 creature, except that the last hit die is guaranteed to be a tiny bit above average. So I made them HD 5 creatures, of course.
Do you use the various species as separate monsters in your game? I think I only ever used weasels. In fact, a ranger wanting to adopt and train a giant weasel and a different character wanting to kill the young weasel, and the inter-party fight and the subsequent losing of two players made a strong impression on me, years ago… Yuck!
Wikipedia: Mustelidae
How the game went: 2007-09-10 It’s called “Entertainment”.
2007-09-10 It’s called “Entertainment”
#Monsters #Old School #RPG
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If you go from 4+4 HD to 5 HD doesn’t that mean its now immune to the sleep spell?
– Florian Hübner 2016-11-04
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No, because the *sleep* limit is 4+1. But your idea is good. With 5HD it will be able to cross a *wall of fire*. I don’t think that is a problem, though.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-11-04
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I wonder what I’ll do when we get to the troll entry. Same thing, right?
– Alex Schroeder 2016-11-04
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I suspect that the Giant Weasels of D&D may have originated with Philip José Farmer. They were one of the more dangerous predators on the Amerind/Centaur level of his famous *World of Tiers*, where they were somewhat akin to stealth-enabled lions, making very quick kills and dragging the body off into the tall grass to eat at their leisure.
I don’t know if I ever had an actual giant weasel in my campaign. I had a lot of giant weasel skulls though, as one of the bigger orc tribes was the Weasel Clan (sort of modelled after Harry Harrison’s *Deathworld 3*), and the giant weasel was their totem (and pretty rare because of the high demand for weasel skulls). If they ever would have been encountered no doubt they would have been much like their World of Tiers ancestors.
[Actually they were probably the weakest of the great tribes, possibly because they had far more half-orcs than most (in my game a half-orc was a human raised by orcs). This made them relatively untrusted by the other major tribes because they were smarter and more cunning than an orc tribe should be. They were tricksy, which is what allowed them to survive in the badlands. Most unorcish. They were the first of the major tribes of the wastelands to acknowledge the Rise of the Orc Queen (the human daughter of the Solar Emperor).]
– Ian Borchardt 2016-11-04
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Just yesterday, almost exactly 24 hours ago, I read about the mustelidae in one of the books I have lying on my bed. Did you know, that the fur of an Iltis is almost as fine as that of an Zobel, weren’t it for the stench that is impossible to remove, at least according to Eigener’s “Enzyklopädie der Tiere Band 2”? 😉 (Sorry for the German names, too lazy to check)
– Christian Sturke 2016-11-04
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No i did not. But one no longer wonders why the giant weasels were not hunted to extinction in my campaign world, haha.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-11-05