His sword-grip slick with sweat, Perseus crept through the dank cavern. Sibilant whispers echoed softly around him, their source maddeningly unknown. She was here, somewhere, waiting. Despite Hades’ cap hiding him from sight, he could feel her watching him, that tingling anticipation of a blow between his shoulder blades, the incessant urge to whirl round and confront the lurking shadows.

The attack, when it came, was a relief. The cavern wall to his left shifted, cunningly-dyed cloth flung aside to reveal a womanly figure. With a scream of triumph, the Medusa flung back her hood, her terrible, petrifying countenance revealed as she leaped towards Perseus, vipers lashing her shoulders.

Luckily, Perseus made his saving throw versus petrification.

Grinning savagely at the look of surprise on the fiend’s face, Perseus drew back his blade for a powerful, two-handed blow. He’d thought about taking the mirrored shield with him but had decided to trust in the resistance granted by the arcane knick-knacks stored about his person. Besides, he did more damage with a two-handed sword.

A single cleaving strike and it was done, the beast’s head spinning away into darkness. Flicking his blade to clear it of black blood, Perseus prepared to search the cavern for the Medusa’s treasure. Had to be somewhere…

The terrible shriek behind him sent ice running through his veins. Spinning, Perseus saw his doom surge towards him. An Ultra-Medusa, similar to a normal medusa but green-tinged, a beast whose terrible curse is much harder to resist. Even as he lifted his sword, Perseus felt lethargy spread through his chest, his limbs refusing to answer his need. The world went dim, then very bright, then…nothing.

Has anyone every run into this problem, when playing Game Master? You setup some cool encounter with a clever twist required to solve it, like using a mirrored shield to target the enemy indirectly, only to have the player’s “brute force” the problem? And while you do want to encourage players to think of alternate solutions to your challenges, brute force is not particularly imaginative, is it?

The problem is one of quantification. By quantifying everything, you rob things of their mystery, make them less “special”. The legendary Medusa’s gaze isn’t universally deadly, it’s only deadly if you’re under level 10, otherwise it’s simply a minor inconvenience.

And sure, you could simply set the numbers higher. But any level you set them to implies that it is possible to achieve a protection that renders that insignificant. Some things shouldn’t have numeric values attached to them. They should be boolean, true or false. You look the Medusa in the eye and it’s garden ornament time for you, mate.

One of the joys of running low powered campaigns is that you can put in monsters like a Medusa and have their powers be effectively deadly, due to the low level of the player character’s “numbers”. With brute force not an option, cunning and roleplay comes to the fore. But, when the higher levels open up to players, what would have been an instant death encounter becomes a speed bump. So what happens? Design escalation. Since the Medusa wasn’t challenging, let’s introduce the Ultra-Medusa! Essentially the same beastie, just more potent and with some superficial variation to make it distinguishable.

But this simply compounds the problem with quantifying the Medusa’s power in the first place. By introducing Medusa v2.0, you rob Medusa of a feeling of uniqueness, that sense that this is a “special” or legendary creature. Now it’s just another monster.

And these days, most designers have a “more is better!” approach to design. More creatures, more spells, more magic items. If game A has 20 monster types, the sequel needs to have 50! Designers brag that their games have hundreds of thousands of magical items! That’s not something to brag about.

These designers fail to grasp their mistake. By adding more, they subtract value from the existing pool or enemies and items. Nothing is special or epic or legendary anymore, none of those buzzwords that people like to throw around.

In SoW, I am taking a different approach. Monsters are rare, special, and I hope interesting. And legendary creatures/items are legendary. Which, generally, translates into highly lethal. If people for a league around a cave talk about how dangerous the creature that lives there is, listen to them. I will warn players before instant death encounters, but it’s a warning you can miss or ignore if you want to. So pay attention

I’ll end with the introduction of one such item (and a hint of the legendary creature that spawned it). I’ve mentioned it before, some of you will recall.

The Black Spear of Anados : A legendary artifact, even the slightest scratch from the Spear poisons the blood of it’s victim with the tainted essence of the Imaarian Lion. Short of direct intervention by a Power, the victim’s fate is sealed, death claims them within an hour.

I’m really not joking in that description. If you choose to go head-to-head with Kayd, best make sure he doesn’t hit you with the Spear somehow. Nothing short of divine intervention or the rarest of magical artifacts can save you once the taint is in your blood. Then again, it might be worth it to own such a power, yes?