Another granddaddy of the d100 dungeon genre is the amazing Call of Cthulhu. Though this is not a dungeon game, it is technically a horror game, there are moments when haunted houses, lost crypts, caves used by cultists, abandoned estates, trails through a twisting gorge, and wandering through the woods seeking a missing person all quality as a "dungeon" in a sense.
I love that this game keeps the traditional "monsters of folklore" in the game, with a warning against mixing genres, allowing us to tell classic horror stories from the original comics of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the issues before the Comics Code that got creepy. These are non-Lovecraft monsters like vampires, mummies, werewolves, ghosts, and other things that go bump in the night. They aren't the gentrified D&D versions meant to sit in a room on top of a treasure chest of 5,000gp, but terrible reflections of humankind's fears and weaknesses.
I love the game has such a large tent and includes these classic creatures, as this post-Lovecraft era is just as important to the horror genre as Lovecraft's works. They are not as great as the classic mythos, but their influence on the genre is just as important. Also, I feel these comics and stories are forgotten these days, and it is important to revisit them to rekindle our imaginations and place these monsters in proper context.
D&D has this tendency to make us culturally stupid.
Let's head to the 5.1 SRD. Oh, werewolves are not a threat, CR 3, 58 hp, AC 12, bite attack (+4, d8+2) or claw (+4, 2d4+2), and DC 12 CON save versus lycanthropy. Lycanthropy can be cured with a remove curse spell, a 3rd level spell both wizards and clerics get. By the time you encounter lycanthropes, you likely have this "required spell" and it is never a threat. Weak. Werewolves suck.
That block of stats is fake. All of D&D's monster stats reduce the primal myth into a "video game sprite" to rub against you in a rogue-like video game and reduce your character's health bar. Our fears, the ones embedded in our DNA, are reduced to a few numbers that trivialize them and make them jokes.
I keep telling people the D&D monster stats are garbage and should never be put on a golden pedestal. I take a lot of heat for this. People love using these stats and converting them into other games, like they are some sort of authoritative source.
They are not.
They are just one game's "video game-like" view of these folklore monsters. They are reductive, multiple generations removed from the original source, and put the monsters somewhere on a "monster challenge list" that players progress through in the video game to reach maximum level.
D&D is not an authoritative source on anything, and this goes from zero-edition all the way to five-point-five. It reflects a specific video game played on the tabletop. It is not a great source of information on folklore or some book of rules for how to live your life. D&D is one game, nothing more.
Go back to the original sources and make up your own mind. Read the classics, instead of these modern-day fifth-generation muddled and confused reflections.
A mummy in a classic comic or movie from the 1950s could take dozens of bullets from a group of gangsters with tommyguns, pistols, rifles, and pistols and keep on walking towards them.
In the Call of Cthulhu rules, bullets only do one damage (maximum) to a mummy, and the referee could rule no damage at all for smaller calibers. The folklore is intact. Somebody at Chaosium understood this, and we also can rule zero this.
The mummy is something to fear. The cops walk in and find a dozen dead gangsters and tons of shell casings, and nobody knows what happened.
That is my mummy. That is the real lore. That is true horror and fear.
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