Fungasaur

Sorry, if anything, mossy anklyosaurus is inspired by the thorn thallids, not fungasaur. Never owned a fungasaur. Really, though, I've been meaning to throw an anklyosaurus at the party for a while now, and when I couldn't think of what could be stomping around, breaking glass in the greenhouse, I went for it. Being the 'Garden World' level of the dungeon, I gave it a 'mossy' adjective to make it fit in better with the theme.

The anklyosaurus was my favorite dinosaur from ages 4 to 5, and as the monster manual has an amazing amount of space devoted to different dinosaurs, I feel responsible to provide some dinosaurs in the adventures.

That's 100% exactly how my brain was working here, and is pretty much how the whole game's gone.

Incidentally, here's the inspiration for the rest of the castle. Some of my favorite adventures I took these guys on, on table top, were 'theme' dungeons, where each level was very short- one minor encounter, one 'boss', about six to ten levels total, where each level had something different going on about it. (The Crystal G guy is based off The Crystal Mage, one such 'boss' who cast a spell at both the beginning and end of each round. Took the party about eight tries and different strategies to bring him down, and it was good fun all around.) I like museums, libraries, and astronomical observatories for dungeons... same for gardens and kitchens. I've thrown a ton of 'crazy chefs with butcher knives' at the party in table top games of the past. The specific castle design is loosely based on different Hindu chakras (e.g., different body parts, weaknessses and strengths), with the top three levels based on a really fucked up movie called Salo, that I can't at all recommend to anyone despite being #17 in the Criterion Collection. Please do not watch this movie. It's a Mind Flayer kind of movie. It will psionic blast you.

Also, there was a real module called 'Castle Greyhawk', which would've been perfect for DiD if I still had a copy, because the entire thing was tongue-in-cheek and over the top. Each level of the castle was written by a different author, and rumor has it that this module was designed to discredit Gary Gygax and the world of Greyhawk, as it came out right when he was leaving TSR. As you can imagine, being gamer humor, a lot of it is retarded, but there's some funny shit in there too, and serious mockery of a lot of Gygax's pet NPCs like Mordenkainen.

Now ya know.

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Glad to hear that the cat is okay. You wouldn't believe the volume of cat drama going on in California these days... both breath and depth. Loooong story. I think I'm responsible for people thinking you're from Madison, because your initial email, I thought, came from uwm.edu, which I read as U Wisc-Madison, even though probably that school's suffix is .madison.edu.