The Cheshire cat is a wonderful agent of confusion in The Alice in Wonderland stories, and
when I say stories I mean all of the ones that’ve been written, and filmed,
animated, and played via video game. All those stories are based on the
original story Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll is a pen name for the author
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Why he wrote under a pen name I don’t know. Although
his name is a pain to say. Anyway, we seem to be straying from the topic.
I’ve touched on the Cheshire cat, for a few moments at least. Now, I’ll
discuss the dire.
Dire: means extremely serious or urgent, and Dungeons and Dragons takes
this word and creates Dire Animals. Take a wolf, for example. It’s a pretty big
threat as it stands, but take that wolf and make it the size of a horse… Yeah,
now you’ve got a dire situation caused by an animal of unusual size.
And, D&D didn’t stop with just a dire wolf; they went and made a
whole slew of animals dire, from bears and boars to dire rats and dire bats.
They’ve gone and made the whole damn forest full of squirrels that could send
men running and screaming out of the woods. And, that’s not that I’ve seen a
dire squirrel in any of the rule books, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out
there.
Fear the Dire Squirrel.
Anyway, back to the Cheshire cat. The cat according to D&D rules
wouldn’t be so much and animal as it would be a magical beast. (Magical Beast
is the type of animal that has features that can’t quite be explained by
nature, such as an animal that can talk and disappear on command. Just because
it’s a magical beast doesn’t mean it can’t be dire. I found a dire template
somewhere, I just don’t remember where.
Anyway, to make a dire creature you increase its size. A Cheshire cat
is a tiny creature, and I want to make it into a large animal. So, starting at
Tiny our Cheshire cat has a strength of 3, moving it up to a small size would
increase its strength by 4. So, at a small size Cheshire has a 7 in strength. Then
we do it again. Moving Cheshire from small to medium adds another 4 points to
str, for a total of 11, but that’s not the end of it. We want our Cheshire cat
to be a large creature, and to get from medium to large she gains 8 more points
in str, leaving her with a total of 19 points in str. This change also reduces
her dexterity.
This makes our Cheshire cat unhappy, and quite ready to rend the flesh
off of someone’s face. And, she can do it without ever having to worry about
anybody seeing her doing it. Why? Because the Cheshire cat can make good use of
the greater invisibility spell, and attack actions don’t cause her to lose her
concealment.
And, I’m back to not understanding what my brain is trying to tell me.
So, I’m gonna stop this here.
G’nite kids.
Ryan
3-9-14
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