Zed Dev Post: Potential Monsters Ideas - The Queen

It has been quite a long time since my last post, and me, Blank, and JPillz have all been busy doing different things. Blank and JPillz, of course, have been working on Zed. I am no longer working with them, but have been keeping busy, mostly writing about gaming on my blog. I am not technically back to working with them, but have decided to use my new found writing skills to write a few things for them, and likely come up with some new Zed ideas, or flesh out some existing ones, along the way.

Today I would like to introduce a topic I plan of doing a series of posts on; A open discussion on some monster type ideas that we have had. And by open discussion I mean, I am not just here to show you what we are currently thinking about but to also ask you your opinion, so feel free to share it. Nothing has been decided yet about what monsters will be included and we have not even looked at the requirements or adverse effects of any of them.

Queen/Spawner: The basic idea, a zombie that creates swarms of small weak monsters, if given enough time. Additionally, this creature could have an ability to buff the stats of other monsters. When drawing inspiration for this monster type I think of the queen in the Alien series.

Random Thoughts:

• As a weakness the creature could only spawn new monsters while immobile, and would need a little time to setup and start producing spawn-lings and a little time to get back into a mobile stance. The idea being she creates a big egg sack to create spawn-lings and needs time to either grow it or detach from it.
• One of its buff type abilities could be to enrage, and raise the stats of, all monsters in vicinity when damaged. This in effect would give you a lose/lose situation, if you focus on the spawn-lings then they keep coming, if you try to stop the production of spawn-lings then you could add a powerful new monster into the fray, the Queen, and also enrage the existing monsters into a far more powerful frenzy.
• The Queen should be large, slow, heavily armored, and very powerful with a mid ranged melee attack.
• Also she could incite her spawn-lings into suicidal defense of her, literally throwing themselves between her and the intruders in an attempt to take the damage instead of her. This could allow her to keep producing monsters and/or since she it likely to have heavy skin and her spawn-lings to have light skin, have you waste your powerful ammo against a weak foe.
• The spawn-lings, in addition to being small, quick, and lightly armored, should be designed to work will with the queen. For example I would suggest that their main “attack” should be a grapple, where they would jump onto a foe and hold them down preventing them from attacking or moving (allowing the queen to get close and deal the big damage).
• Additionally their “in defense of the queen at all costs” mentality should be stressed. I am thinking that when they have you in a grapple even after they are dead they continue to hold on in a tight death grip. They could no longer dish out damage to you (not that they would necessarily while alive) but would need significantly more damage dealt to them to dislodge them.

Zed Dev Blog: http://www.pawngame.com/beta/zed/
Original Post: http://www.pawngame.com/forum/showthread.php?t=160195