The Umpleby's Net

A 2nd Edition Umpleby.

Among the curious, little-used, and often-derided B-list of the AD&D Fiend Folio, there is a monster called the Umpleby that is tall, hairy, friendly up to a point, and can put a real hurting on you with ... static electricity from its shaggy pelt. It appeared in somewhat rough form in the source material, White Dwarf magazine's Fiend Factory (exhibit A below) and got a clearer set of rules and rulings in the Fiend Folio itself, including more detail given to its hair net weapon (exhibit B).

No relation.

The Umpleby is one of the lesser known Fiend Folio contributions that poses a weird, specific challenge, like the Aleax, Meenlocks, and so forth. It has a little bit of the mess-with-you factor from grudge monsters like the Zorbo or Disenchanter. In the editions since then, it has sometimes gotten dragged out of the attic for sheer obscurity cachet, like the Flumph but more underground. A long time ago here, I dragged it out as an example of a bad monster.

And where on earth does that name come from? Is it just a coincidence that one Stuart Umpleby was the co-founder of an early communication network -- NET-work -- in the 1970's, that used an instructional computer system called PLATO? A network that eventually failed to join up with the Internet like like ARPANET did, and almost got canned by Nixon for hosting calls for his impeachment? Is it coincidence that PLATO's terminals glowed orange? If true, this has to be one of the most obscure current events references in all of D&D. If Stephen Wood's not around to comment, perhaps a mystery forevermore.


Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Sharktopus and Piranhaconda

Shark Week on RRR!

Who needs a Fiend Folio or Monster Manual II when you have these man-ennobling, straight-from-Syfy, straight-to-DVD chimerae courtesy of Roger Corman? These, of course, are the two best before you start delving into the slum section of portmanteau hell, with the likes of MANSQUITO and MERMANTULA (would have fit right in to MMII,  aquatic version of the Drider, don'tcha know).

SHARKTOPUS

HD: 11+11
AC: 6 [13]
MV: Swim 15, drag on land (tentacles) 6
Attack: Bite d8+5 with swallow whole, up to 4 tentacles d4 and hold

The ecology of this creature ... oh, who am I fooling. It's the modern equivalent of those "WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH" men's magazine covers from the 1950s. It comes from the id, a shadow-puppet cast to validate extreme measures. Like you, dear two-fisted reader, it attempts to breed with blondes, more or less symbolically.

If a tentacle hits and does 4 damage, it ensnares you and the tentacle has to be attacked separately and killed to let go (4 HP with edged weapon, maximum of 4 damage against tentacle counted against monster's HP). If the bite attack hits and rolls 6+ on d8, Speed/wand/DEX save to avoid being swallowed whole (take d8 acid damage/round, you can do damage each round with sharp weapon, freeing self after doing 1/2 the monster's HP in damage).

PIRANHACONDA

HD: 5+5
AC: 4 [15]; 1 point of armor is defense (AC is 1 worse if attacked unawares)
MV: Swim 12, slither on land 9
Attack: Bite d10, constrict for d6/turn

This fish-headed semi-aquatic snake makes its constrict attack without counting armor bonus, and once constricting will not stop crushing and biting until you or it are dead. It is tragically misunderstood; drinking hard, on the outs with its wife, and three days short of retirement.

Things can go the other way, too. Hey Corman, interested in "OWLBEAR"? "WOLF-IN-SHEEP'S-CLOTHING"?

Don't You Just Want To Slap the 90's ...

in its smug, bard-lovin', Next Generation, Wheel of Time-buyin', Renfairin' face?

Thanks to Internet Archive and its cache of Dragon Magazines, I've been pondering this entirely unremarkable table of contents from #180, where the big big feature is a preview of trading cards, and other articles tell you ...

to have your campaign make sense, to give magic weapons backstory, to intentionally play a low-intelligence character dumb, to haul off your party cleric to perform weddings in his home town, how to raise funds for your gaming club, and please make the acquaintance of this four-horned giant battering ram - get it? - and six-legged earthquake-making dinosaur.

The real posts will resume soon, hopefully with better content than that. I'm back from an extended professional/vacation trip where real gaming took precedence over game posting.

Monsters Rejected by AD&D, Smoking and Bitching in the Back Room

I thought I'd pay homage to a whole month of Monster Mondays in my own way... These guys are known to me via the amazing public domain resource FreeDnDArt.

"So the guy convinces me, beagle kneepads, beagle elbowpads, why not go the whole nine and get lamb nipples? You gotta remember, this was 1982 and everyone was sure there was gonna be a Fiend Folio II. Okay, okay, but you'd think there'd be at least a loose leaf page for me in the 90's. Still in the game though, waiting to hear back on my Death Carnival Doom audition."

"You gotta wonder who the Tirapheg had to ... whatever it is they do. But can you believe, this agent I had back then? She actually said I should try out as a Chimerapheg. Hel-lo?"

"I met this guy in Portland at Burning Man, he's Facebook friends with the dude who made that one Mastodon video."

 "I was Beak Dog before all the hipsters got into it."

"OGRE + WALRUS = OGRALRUS? OR WALOGRE? THIS ONE BIG PROBLEM FOR OGRE WALRUS"

"I think we all had high hopes for Planescape."

D&D Unified

In a place

where edition

wars against edition

one thing

can unite us:

the certain knowledge

that this

is going to suck.

Badly.

Reminiscences 2: 11th Grade Campaign Failure

Isle Of The who? A 10th grade creation ...

11th grade and I was ready to go. No more D&D in the science wing lounge under the prying, mocking eyes of the uninitiated. My house was open after school, and the gang was gathering for my campaign twice a week.

I cooked up a new dungeon, a serious dungeon, a ruined castle with a moat and undercrypts and under-undercrypts. Now I had the Fiend Folio, so the place was swarming with annoying jermlaine, bouncing with gorbels, coffer corpses and death dogs, or was it devil dogs? There was a Christian chapel - just one of many religions in the World of Atalona!

I made a punk-style collage homemade DM screen, cut dungeon tiles from manila folders. We'd never had a tactical display last year, but I had my players buy minis for their characters, and used my own small collection augmented with counters from Squad Leader and Citadel of Blood. Every hit in combat I rolled a quick d6 for hit location, just for flavor mind you (that's one habit that's stood the test of time...). I resolved to heed the sage advice of the Great Gygax and play almost entirely by the book. I think my players even rolled chances to have psionics, to no avail, and weapon vs. AC modifiers were definitely a part of play.

Well, eight months later, my players were in revolt, one going so far as to intone the name of Asmodeus repeatedly to see if I would kill the wretched party by rolling the chance for the Devil Lord to appear "by the book." The whole experience left a sour taste on AD&D that explains my current appreciation of the looser spirit of the Basic game I never played.

Who's to blame? Me ... and him. Please turn to page 86 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. There you will find a rule whereby even the character who has played completely true to class and alignment must fork over 1500 gp in training fees to reach second level. Those who are merely "superior" in their adherence must pay 3000 gp and it gets worse from there.

WTF, Gygax? An exemplary thief who has reached 2nd level by earning nothing but treasure has not earned enough treasure to pay the advancement fees. Nor has any merely superior character of whatever class. I think I enforced a flat 1500/level and it still was extremely unpleasant for characters having to take out loans from each other.

It's one thing if you put toxic rules that have clearly not seen playtest, conceived in a fit of hate for "Monty Haul" campaigns, in a book that bills itself as mere guidelines. Another thing entirely if you start and continue the book in the high spirit of ex cathedra pronouncement - this is the One True Ruleset!

Ah, no, I'm not bitter. But I'm also not nostalgic. Good educators eventually come to know that students take everything you say literally and seriously. Yes, the stride made in gaming in the 90's promoted a few cliches that don't necessarily guarantee good fun (see under: heavy-handed board game catch-up mechanisms). But they also brought a huge increase in professionalism to the field, helped along by Magic and its multi-thousand dollar purses resting on arcane interpretations of wording.

Then again, DMG let me roll up this bitchin' random demon.

And my own overenthusiasm and inexperience also doomed the campaign. My dungeon, all three levels, was still a damn monster hotel, with random details obscuring rather than clarifying the sense of discovery. And uh, I think I also bogged down every town visit with random encounters and disease rolls, so help me, and who knows what other foolishness I inflicted on the players. My vague attempt at plotting, involving a Chaotic Neutral conspiracy and a female wizard named Warith Ban who flew around in a cube of force, came too little and too late. Basically, I didn't see that fun was the goal and The Book was not always going to take you there.

I'm just wondering if any of you gentle readers had similarly lousy experiences with by-the-book AD&D. Was I the only insecure 16-year-old with more book larnin' than horse sense out there? And more generally, what have you learned from failed campaigns?

Reminiscences 1: 10th Grade and before

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York comedy writer's shorthand for "old money." It was a nice place to raise a kid. In the 70's the place still had touches of bygone New England charm, like the penny candy store on the corner of our street and the wooden floors in the grocery store on Main Street. All that is gone now, devoured by Whole Foods hell, according to reliable sources. Sic transit ...

In junior high school I was into all kinds of wargames but had nobody to play with. I'd spend a Saturday with myself doing both sides of Richthofen's War, Air Assault on Crete, Third Reich, SPI's Arnhem, or even stranger games I played with the counters from those games and an open atlas page. I did play some Metagaming micro-games with my friend Greg, who'd bought into a couple. And between my own collection - Complete Book of Wargames - and the town library's - Comprehensive Guide - I had learned something about role-playing games in passing. The Complete Book in particular had reviews of D&D, Petal Throne, Tunnels & Trolls, and Runequest ("hacking limbs in loving detail"). Between that and an article in Games Magazine I grew intensely curious about D&D but again, knew nobody who played.

Some time in ninth grade, in the year of our Lord 1981, I also found that the town library, which had battened on the property taxes of the Helmsleys and their ilk, had acquired the AD&D Monster Manual. Wow! I became a monster expert, just in time for the world of geekery to open up for me as I moved on to 10th grade and Greenwich High School.

Principals just gotta play Big Brother, don't they?

It must have been in my first couple of weeks there that I chanced across a bunch of older teens playing Dungeons and Dragons at a table in the student center after school. Eagerly, I sidled up and kibitzed as the DM described a strange encounter.

"Within the magic circle, you see a glowing golden animal. It looks like a shaggy horse, with dragon scales, and a horn growing out of its head..."

"Ooh! Ooh! I know what that is!" Everyone turned to look at me. "A Ki-Rin!"

Undaunted by that DM's twenty-foot restraining order, I soon joined a breakaway faction of the school Chess Club that had moved on from knights and bishops to knights, bishops, magsmen and thaumaturges. The DM was Dave, who actually owned an Apple II and was later to have me over for many late nights of cooperative Infocom adventures, Wizardry and Bard's Tale. The rest of the players made up my steady D&D group through high school and college.

The 10th grade AD&D campaign was fun but kind of vanilla. We were all new to the game. I ran a Neutral Good fighter called Newt Ralgood. I'll never forget the dungeon entrance, which had two carved dragon heads flanking it ... with predictable results (sizzle). Dave ran a pretty standard kind of monster maze for three levels, and we all learned to chant the mantra "Open the door...kill the monsters... take the treasure." Outside the dungeon, there was The Town where we rested, bought and sold stuff, and that was pretty much it.

In the spring Dave started spicing up the game; there was a new dungeon that involved overland travel, Newt acquired his signature flame tongue sword, and I remember an underground lake where sea lions lurked and a climactic fight with a Type I demon that emerged from a fog of darkness. Meanwhile, I had gotten the Players' Handbook for my birthday and the DM Guide for Christmas, and was busy statting up monsters to the tune of about 30 loose-leaf pages - sources ranging from the Bible to John Jakes' Brak novels - and writing dungeons like a fiend. I also got my hands on hex paper which I immediately filled with random terrain from the DMG, using that as the basis for an imaginary world centered on the city of Rhadne in the kingdom of The Hane.

I thought I could do a better job DMing than Dave. I had put more work into my campaign world. My dungeons had cooler stuff and themes. Why, every room had a monster or trap, treasure AND randomly rolled up furnishings and dungeon dressing! There was Drakenhame, the dragon hotel in the desert ("suitable for levels 7 through 9"; one page of notes remains, no map). Yes, high levels meant it was cool to put 67 stirges in one room. And then the lower level dungeon, "Bring Me The Head of Alvereithor Gaharts'yah," (two maps remain, no notes except for NPCs) and the mid-level "Shrine of Techulca" (notes, no map). One room in the Shrine contained this decor rolled up from the deathless Tables of Gygax except for one salient detail:

In the room are 3 beds; a large woolen rug under which is an iron trunk in a recess containing 350 gp, 10 sticks of incense, 200 scruples of rare spice (30 gp) and 2200 s.p.; a stone shrine with two candlesticks and an iron Techulca idol; and Brandamare of Bellocitaunia, a 2nd level female paladin, chained to the wall wearing a torn, revealing dirty white garment, and she is being kept there for sacrifice.

Scans or it didn't happen? All right. But next time.

Spawn of Fashan Retro-Clone Project

Now that I've made you look ...

See, since back when I read Lawrence Schick's review in the April 1982 issue of Dragon (p. 76), which ended up explaining this ill-conceived RPG as a parody, I always assumed the review itself was an April Fool's joke on a nonexistent game.

But over the years, Dame Experience has since taught me that there's no satire like reality. Information about SoF is surprisingly light on the net, but it looks like it was a real game.

It's reviewed at length on RPG.net.

Older and wiser, the game's creator reflects on his 15 minutes of fame.

As I noted reviewing bad monsters, there's a difference between "flamboyantly awful" and "just awful." In hindsight, Spawn is just your garden variety, poorly edited, simulationist-preposterous attempt to improve D&D. What's sad is that the championship belt of "worst RPG ever" has since gone to systems that topped  bad design with worse social attitudes. The fate of such should be obscurity, not the notoriety they crave.

PS: Speaking of "just awful," have a gander at the carefully segregated official April Fool's content in that Dragon magazine issue. Um ,wow.

The Next-to-Last Shall Be Worst

My vote for the worst monster in all of AD&D goes to the one they saved for next-to-last in Monster Manual II.

Somehow it survived into 2nd edition.

Let's see ...

Silly Monster Chassis. The Zorbo is a ferocious, flesh-eating .... koala bear. Now Aussies doubtless know that the koala is a nasty little nipper, but for the rest of us, it's not a creature that exudes any kind of menace. Not scary enough for weird fantasy, not medieval enough for medieval fantasy.

Stupid Ability.  The Zorbo's main ability is the ability to absorb the toughness of its surroundings. Yes, its AC and damage get better when it stands on stone, as opposed to say, earth or grass. This leads to the interesting tactical challenge of defeating it by convincing it to stand on a feather mattress. I'm not sure what is dumber, too: absorbing the hardness of stone without looking any different, or turning into a granite-skinned koala.

Player-Hating Ability. Another characteristic of many bad monsters is that they serve the whim of sadistic DMs with a tacked-on ability that screws players over. The zorbo is no different; his absorption extends to opponents and his touch, unoriginally, makes their armor dry up and blow away. For the rare zorbo who treads on soft earth by choice, doing this might actually improve his AC, but the real reason is to throw the exact same "gotcha!" at players who know to run from a rust monster.

None Of It Makes Sense. As far as unrelated concepts go, "a koala bear" and "absorption of Mohs Scale rating" are definitely in the big leagues of non-sequitur-dom.

Stupid Name. Top it all off with the name Zorbo. For lo, he is ab-Zorbent.

Not Even Flamboyantly Bad. Like great trash cinema, the flamboyantly bad monsters celebrated in fandom - the flumph, tirapheg, flail snail and so forth - earn their kudos by showing a crazy, unbounded creativity at the divergent step, setting up for a more spectactular failure at the "what does it all mean" convergent step. None of this applies to the zorbo.

So, little fella, are you worth improving? I'm not sure, but next post I'm going to try.

Bad Monsters: The Urge to Improve

Close behind the temptation to laugh at bad monsters (ha, ha and ha) is the temptation to improve them. It's the same urge that led Neil Gaiman to write a "Prez: The Teen President" story in heroic rather than camp mode in Sandman, or Alan Moore to use Mr. Mxtyplxzwhatever as a very serious villain in one of his DC series. This upgrading from silly to serious is known in TV Tropes land as Cerebus Syndrome, after the Dave Sim comic series that evolved from a funny-animal spoof of Marvel's Conan series to something altogether more profound.

Soon to be released, if not already out, is a fine example in the D&D canon: Paizo's Misfit Monsters Redeemed. How successful have Messrs. McComb, McCreary, and Sutter been? Hard to judge from just the blurb. Some of their "misfits," like the dire corby and flail snail, I never thought were that bad to begin with. With others, like the disenchanter, I'm highly skeptical about their chances for redemption at all. And others show real inventiveness and promise, like the adherer rethought as a horrible spider-silk mutant, and the flumph as a Derlethian herald of the fight against the Great Old Ones.

For some monsters, as for film star Frances Ethel Gumm or pop star Stefani Germanotta, a change of name is going to be a necessary part of any serious rebranding. There's no room for a "flumph" in the Cthulhu Mythos, and I'm guessing most people hate the flail snail because of its silly rhyming name. This point was grasped by Max, of the currently inactive blog Malevolent and Benign, in his great series of Tirapheg Week posts. Five differently named variants on the classic half-baked, purposeless weirdo monster from the Fiend Folio - living statue, alien wizard, mutant mishap, limb-collecting pirate, and three-headed lounge singer - for five different game systems, all brilliantly executed.

What drives people to upgrade the classic old stinkers of monsterland? The urge is greatest, it seems, for the "failure to converge" monsters. These collections of haphazard bits, pieces and abilities form a kind of Rorschach test, an irresistible challenge to create meaning out of meaninglessness. I'm sure there are other improvements out there that I haven't come across, and it would be interesting to know of them.

Next: my own tirapheg variation.

Bad Monsters: Failure to Converge

The most spectacular failed monsters are those that bring together elements never yet joined before - the head of a rabbit! the body of a lemur! tentacles that smear you with liquid cement! - but without apparent thought as to how all these elements make a viable whole. In problem-solving terms, the bad monster represents a lot of playing around with the puzzle pieces, but not hitting on a solution that works.

This raises the question, "what works for a monster?" The answers are many, explaining why bad monsters are so hotly debated, as you can see if you even get two flumph haters and two flumph lovers (or at least flumph toleraters) in a chatroom together.

 
Because of this, I am forced to conclude that no monster is bad in and of itself. Even the Fiend Folio's umpleby - yes, the umpleby, my friends, that hairy master of static electricity discharge - would make a great goofy character in a children's book. Or a cool Pokemon. It's just completely out of place in a dungeon.

(Well, all right, there is one exception that wins the crown of the intrinsically worst monster in all of AD&D. It doesn't have a cult of awfulness, it doesn't inspire mockery or jokes. It is not imaginative or interesting enough to even be magnificently bad. I will reveal and explain in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile, guesses are welcome.)

Now, some of the things that go into a working monster are ...

Problem-solving challenge. A monster's habits or abilities can make it a particularly memorable or versatile adversary. Trying to find its vulnerability (it's hideously ugly, was once human and has smashed every mirror in the mansion ... hmmm ...); being surprised by the classic "gotcha" monsters (whoever would have thought that ten foot pole was a giant stick insect?), or just marveling at its strange tactics (it's using the vines on the ceiling to get away!), are all things that make a monster interesting.

The surprise factor, of course, drops dramatically once the monster is published and becomes generally known. And a DM who relies too heavily on "gotchas" like the mimic ... goldbug ... um, cloaker anyone? ... will end up with a paranoid, slow-moving, and generally disillusioned party, and a silly dungeon. Which, indeed, might be the point.

Resonance with setting. The number one cause of disagreement on bad monsters is their fit to the setting. One DM may play the game as a gritty, boils-and-billhooks medieval affair. Another might prefer a backdrop of vaguely Renaissance, vaguely Orientalist weird fantasy. Still another might run a gonzo campaign where just about anything goes. They will all have different ideas about what monsters are appropriate. Some examples:

• Dark Ages or Ancient World epic: Pretty much only the monsters of that epoch's folklore, or plausible variants on the same, fit in. Satyrs and aegipans, not orcs.

• Medieval romance: This is the middle and dark ages as glimpsed and fantasized through the rear-view mirror, for 500 years of European history - from the Renaissance chivalry novelists (Ariosto, Spenser, Tasso) to Tolkien. Mythical, legendary, and wholly allegorical figures abound. Orcs rub elbows with hippogriffs and dragons. Stick with combinations of people, heraldic animals, and the occasional plant and you are on safe ground here.

• Weird fantasy and horror: Looking to far-past and far-future decadence and barbarism, this genre is much more forgiving of tentacles, blobs, giant insects, psionics, human-animal hybrids, and other quasi-science-fictional elements as long as they are eerie and frightening - just being weird is not enough, Mr. Umpleby. Prehistoric creatures are also fair game.

• Sword and planet: Alien worlds from the first half of the 20th century abounded in life forms bearing suspicious resemblance to earth creatures with dye jobs, extra limbs, horns, etc. Humanoids "evolved" from terran-analogue creatures are also common among writers less rigorous in their xenoanthropology than Burroughs. Weird fantasy critters can also be worked in; the main difference between the two genres is more in the equipment of the heroes than the nature of what they're fighting.

• Science fiction: And in this genre, the weirder the more believable. If it looks too much like an Earth-whatever, it's suspect.

Natural or symbolic coherence: The really great monsters have parts that go together, and abilities that go with those parts; symbolically, if not literally. The griffin, for example, combines the nobility of the mammal and bird monarchs, for an ultimate symbol of ultimate nobility. The necrophidius, praised previously, combines two classic symbols of fear, and adds abilities in keeping with those of a snake - poison and swaying charm. It doesn't hurt that it would also be at home in either a medieval or weird fantasy setting, and many people's conception of "proper D&D" combines the two of those elements to various degrees.

The opposite of this is ability-platform syndrome. You come up with a great ability ... let's say, draining magic items. You then ruin that ability by taking about 2 seconds to decide it should go on a glowing blue camel with a prehensile trunk. Or jumble syndrome, where you jumble two or three critters together, add and subtract parts, and voila! The dread one-eyed gorilla shark of Planet Mongo. Again, great for gonzo or heavily sci-fi campaigns, but not so great for the fantasy genre most people are used to.

Next time: The fine art of redeeming monsters; or, Captain Save-A-Flumph.

Bad Monsters: Failure to Diverge

Allow me to resurrect this article on creativity that came to my attention via Trollsmyth several months ago.

I'm passingly familiar with the psych literature on creativity, but the short review in the article reminded me that creativity is not just about making up crazy stuff (divergent skills), but also vetting the crazy ideas to make sure they serve your purpose (convergent skills). The convergent skills in particular are what makes the difference between "Yeah, she's very 'creative' (eyeroll)" and "Wow, she's really creative!"

Now that we're ready to move from the good side of the Fiend Folio to the bad, this theory can help explain bad monsters - in AD&D or anywhere else. Monsters can either fail to diverge, or converge. Converging is the more spectacular kind of failure, so let's cover failure to diverge first, AKA basic lack of creativity.

The prime example of this is where you take an existing monster, jack it up by a hit die or two, and pretty much call it a day. I'm not saying the Fiend Folio didn't have its flinds and what not, and even the Monster Manual needlessly promoted the otyugh to the, er, neo-otyugh. But the real champion of the phoned-in monster upgrade was Monster Manual II - greater basilisk, greater lammasu, annis, xaren, margoyle, storoper, thessalhydra, different colored slimes, jellies, puddings and oozes for Pete's sake ...

Mmm. White pudding.

Then you have the even more wrongheaded monster downgrade - the moral equivalent of letting your players feel important in the Star Wars universe by having them meet Dark Helmet. Thus, you have FF's mini-red dragon, the firedrake. And then MM2 goes hog-wild with a mini-beholder, mini-stone golem, and hey, if you want to say you bagged an elephant too, we'll give you one the size of a Jack Russell terrier.

Let's not forget the gratuitous monster breeding program, the kind that dares to envision the offspring of two critters already in the same niche - kind of like those towns where a Norwegian dating a German is considered "interracial." Thus, the FF's ogrillon, giant troll, two-headed troll (oh, they forgot the ogg-roll, which is what you get when you cross an ogre and a troll, right) ... yeah, and the gorilla bear.

Look, either you need a gorilla, or you need a bear. You are never going to need a gorilla bear.

What's sad about all these monsters is that they show so little faith in you, the DM, and your ability to add, subtract, or average basic numbers. If you want a super-tough ... let's call it a russet ... hulk, you should really be able to gin it up on the fly, adding some hit dice here, subtracting some AC there. AD&D is simple enough that you don't have to worry about his Spot skill or Charisma.

Next: The convergently challenged ... source of the truly legendary WTF's.