State of the Star

I say, I say, the Eveningstar, that is...

My Haunted Halls of Eveningstar solo game is sort of back after a long hiatus. Most of that delay is just down to personal and work stuff, plus doing different things with my hobby time. But I think some of it is because the solo game is (for me) in a bit of a lull. It’s the kind that periodically happens to regular RPG games too – I have a lot of interesting ideas for future places the campaign could go, but right now getting there feels like a bit of a slog. I think there are two main elements contributing to that.

1) The Cast Is Very Big

The game’s huge cast has mostly been one of the joys of playing a solo game, because it feels like something that would be hard to pull off in a regular game. On the other hand, managing three separate D&D parties takes a lot of time, and it feels to me like it’s pulling the focus away from the main PCs. It’s time that feels difficult to avoid as well, because everybody is on a separate time scale. With characters in the early middle level range and no magical healing, the main cast can go weeks between delves if they want to enter the dungeon at full HP. The Silver Daggers, on the other hand, are all low level, and 1d3 HP per day can see them back on their feet pretty quickly. Ivy, with two clerical casters and the need to move fast and break things, falls somewhere between the two. Using Errant’s abbreviated NPC dungeon crawling procedure was meant to speed all of this along, but as the situation for the NPC parties has gotten more complex I’ve felt the need to slow down and play out their sessions individually. I thought that Ivy’s plotline would resolve itself fairly quickly with an exciting attack on the town, but after her most recent session that feels like a doomed endeavor. She’d get wiped out pretty quickly by Eveningstar’s defenders, and her options for acquiring more troops are limited. At the same time she’s going to run into supply problems if she doesn’t move soon, and I’m not totally sure how to handle that.

2) The Haunted Halls Is A Boring Dungeon

Don’t get me wrong, I think it has some great touches. Ed Greenwood gives the module a nice French Vanilla fantasy flavor. But it’s big, it’s mostly dull, and the treasure placement gives level advancement a very weird pace (especially since I’m not using AD&D’s experience awards for magic items). My solution of filling in the Halls' many unkeyed rooms with random selections from B1 In Search of the Unknown and B3 Palace of the Silver Princess solved some immediate problems and has created interesting scenarios, but it still leaves the dungeon feeling incomplete, like it doesn't really hang together. There are too many secret doors gating off the cool stuff, too many layers of historical references that don't go anywhere, too many spooky little clues that seem designed to waste the players' time, and to top it off I’m not crazy about a lot of Greenwood’s puzzle and trap designs. I’d like to move the PCs on to more interesting adventures, but it feels wrong to leave the Haunted Halls unfinished and unresolved. It’s in the campaign’s name, after all. Still, as grateful as I am to the module for inspiring the tone and events of what has been a very rewarding experiment in solo gaming, at the moment the thought of clearing the rest of the Halls feels more like an obligation than anything else. 

What’s To Be Done?

With normal, in-person RPG groups, the answer is usually to just keep plowing through it because even bad D&D is still time spent hanging out with your friends. That might still be my solution here too, but I don’t want it to be the only one.

If it becomes clear that Ivy can’t attack the town soon, then I may move her offscreen for a while and use her warband as the basis to populate a dungeon. I could replace the forces in Hommlet’s moathouse or the castle in B12 Queen’s Harvest with her troops, maybe devising some method to simulate attrition and experience gains among the survivors. Having sworn not to return to Eveningstar until she can do so with fire and sword, her only real option besides an attack is heading north into the Stonelands and establishing herself as a bandit queen. That could be a fun campaign in itself, but it would massively balloon the game’s scope at a time when I’d like to narrow it some.

I think I’ll draw up a roster for total wandering monster populations in the Halls and start marking defeated enemies off of it – X living statues, Y curst, and so on. I’ve had a rough outline for populating the so-called Killing Keep, the kobold fortress that connects to the Halls, for a while now and I think I’ll go ahead and finish that as well, since I’ll need a total kobold population for the Halls and the module makes it seem like they mostly live in the Keep and send guards and patrols down into the Halls. If the PCs start tackling that area, then getting some faction play into the mix could liven up the Halls a bit as well. I may also implement some element of time pressure for clearing them. Emelda is roughly 8 weeks pregnant at this point, so she may know by now. That alone might be enough for Trigg, with a baby on the way and the Sunbold Farm nearly 2,000 gp away from “Functional”. I might do something with Lady Winter as well – maybe if words gets around to her about the magical moving frescoes in the throne room she might want to hire a team of skilled artisans from Molehill to retrieve them for her castle, and would want the Halls cleared out enough for them to work in peace.

If I ever tie up the loose ends around Eveningstar, I’d like to send the PCs into the Stonelands for some Dragon Magazine mini-modules, and maybe B5 Horror on the Hill. I also plotted out a journey for Sassaran and Taravol’s adventures that would take them into O2 Blade of Vengeance, an elf-themed solo module. Maybe get the whole gang back together again for one last job after they’ve each killed a dragon, or send them north for the linked series of Viking-themed Dragonsfoot adventures called Her Dark Majesty (Where the Fallen Jarls Sleep, Beneath Black Towen, Stormcrows Gather, and Mistress of the Ghost City). Of course, I may stop playing long before then, and in-game events could take things off in quite a different direction. We'll see!

Tale of the Black Sword 4 – Blood for the Blood God

August 15, a little after 2pm

Last time, Ivy made an alliance with the newly-exiled gnoll Widestripe and his handful of followers. Widestripe had lost the election to become the clan’s new leader to his brother Horsebiter after Ivy killed their father in a duel. He wanted her help to kill his brother and gain control of the clan. Widestripe has only a fuzzy idea of what swearing fealty means, but does understand that the deal is that if he fights for Ivy she’ll reward him with gold, and if he doesn’t she’ll kill him.

Ivy’s picked fighters assaulted the narrow entryway to the gnoll cave, taking several wounds but managing to kill Horsebiter. The gnoll clan’s elder, Greypelt, attempted to surrender. Ivy would have been happy to add the surviving gnolls to her warband but Heinryk the Hero, overcome with his berserk’s battle-lust, slew Greypelt. The last two gnolls lost a morale check and fled deeper into the cave, where two of their fellows guard a long tunnel with bows at the ready.

That’s where the action resumes. The rest of this session was one long, complicated combat, with the action eventually breaking out across three different fronts.

Cast of Characters

Ivy’s Warband

The warband is split into three groups:

Ivy & Her Champions

• Ivy Blackstar – Fighter 4. Wields Blackstar, her +2 sword, and has sworn to conquer the town of Eveningstar.

• Nogi of Firedeep – Dwarf 2

• Heinryk the Hero – Fighter 4. A berserk.

• Harg – A bugbear

• Widestripe – a gnoll

• Bent-Tail – a gnoll, one of Widestripe’s supporters

• Three-Laughs – another one of Widestripe’s supporters. Killed by arrows in the initial charge

Ivy and the champions lead the van of the assault.

Mothclaw’s Band

• Mothclaw – Orc 1. Ivy’s loyal lieutenant.

• Urskrag & Luggog – orcs

• Rangrop – a goblin

• Dorben – Dwarf 2

• Drunvir & Reedle – Elf 1

Mothclaw’s group formed the second wave of the attack.

Ambrosius’ Band

• Ambrosius – Cleric 3. Former leader of the cult of evil chaos that the main party destroyed. With the help of the cult’s relics (now lost) he reanimated King Rivior’s body as a wight, and knows whose spirit inhabits Ivy’s helm. Plotting to become the power behind the throne as Ivy’s councilor.

• Dedbane, Golgob, & Wolfeye – hobgoblins. Unhappy about taking orders from an orc.

• Robart & Delgert – Fighter 1. Robart is an old bandit and former merchant’s guard. Delgert is his adult daughter.

Ambrosius and his troop remain outside the cave, to secure the warband’s retreat or to act as reinforcements as needed.

THE LOG

Tale of the Black Sword 3 – How Ivy Would Have Practiced Her Art Upon the Gnolls

"And they have berserks with them. Such men are hard to kill"

Cast of Characters

Ivy Blackstar – Fighter 4. Ivy is being influenced by the ghost of King Rivior, the pagan ruler of Old Eveningstar, who inhabits her cursed raven-winged helmet. She wields Blackstar, Rivior’s +2 sword, and has sworn to conquer the town of Eveningstar. Unlike a party of adventurers who split loot evenly, Ivy runs her warband like a ruler. All of the treasure belongs to her and then is redistributed on a strict but uneven basis. Her champions and lieutenant receive double shares, while everyone else receives a single share. Additional treasures are distributed as gifts, at Ivy’s discretion.

Ivy’s Warband

• Ambrosius – Cleric 3. Former leader of the cult of evil chaos that the main party destroyed. With the help of the cult’s relics (now lost) he reanimated King Rivior’s body as a wight, and knows whose spirit inhabits Ivy’s helm. Plotting to become the power behind the throne as Ivy’s councilor.

• Nogi of Firedeep – Dwarf 2. An exile who has sworn to seek death in battle, as his missing eye, horrible facial scarring, and refusal to wear armor can attest. One of Ivy’s champions, though terrified of her.

• Heinryk the Hero – Fighter 4. A berserk. One of Ivy’s champions.

• Harg – A bugbear, formerly enslaved by his own kin. One of Ivy’s champions.

• Mothclaw – Orc 1. Ivy’s loyal lieutenant.

• Urskrag & Luggog – orcs of Mothclaw’s band.

• Dedbane, Golgob, & Wolfeye – hobgoblins. Unhappy about taking orders from an orc.

• Rangrop – a goblin. Takes a philosophical approach about changes in leadership.

• Robart & Delgert – Fighter 1. Robart is an old bandit and former merchant’s guard. Delgert is his adult daughter.

• Dorben – Dwarf 2. A Stonelands dwarf who has spent most of his life enslaved by various orc and goblin tribes.

• Drunvir & Reedle – Elf 1. Wild elves from the Stonelands.

August 15th

In the small hours of the morning, a small band of gnolls approaches the cave. They make no attempt at stealth and hail the sentries, seeking audience with the “Black Bitch-Chieftain”. Fortunately Harg the bugbear is on watch duty, and Harg understands the gnoll tongue and their idioms well enough to know that this description is not meant to be insulting – gnolls do not have a word for a female warleader. Ivy is roused, and the gnolls are eventually invited inside the cave. With Harg acting as translator, she holds a parlay with the gnolls' leader.

He turns out to be Widestripe, the younger of Corpse-Eater’s two surviving sons. After Ivy killed his father in the duel in the Starwater, Widestripe and his brother Horsebiter stood election for control of the clan. Most of the clan’s fighters sided with Horsebiter, and Widestripe fled with the two warriors loyal to him, Bent-Tail and Three-Laughs, along with his three wives Redmane, Long-Heat, and Dainty, his full-mother Damsontongue, and his half-mother Birdcatcher. They are also accompanied by three young gnolls: Widestripe’s two younger half-sisters and his son by Redmane. The children either do not have names, or Widestripe does not consider their names worth mentioning (Harg is unclear on which). Widestripe has fled with his household because as the winner of the election Horsebiter would have confiscated his property (including his wives) and killed his son. Widestripe would have had to fight to prevent this, and with only two warriors backing him he would have almost certainly been killed. Widestripe does not appear upset about this exactly – it is customary for clans to split up after an election, and the winners only try to stop the losers from leaving if they try to abscond with property that does not belong to them – but he would prefer to stay in Starwater Gorge. Instead of leaving for the Stonelands, why doesn’t the Black Bitch-Chieftain help him kill his brother? They can go to the gnoll cave, kill Horsebiter and any other males that resist, take the females, and split the goods. Then Ivy can have her side of the valley, and Widestripe will have his. They can work out details about hunting rights and so on later.

Ivy counteroffers: Widestripe swears fealty to her. When they take the gnoll cave, *everything* is hers. She’ll reward him with her treasure if he fights well, but he follows her orders and gives up all claims to the valley. Widestripe doesn’t understand the idea of swearing service. The closest term Harg can find in Gnoll is “tribute-gift”, which offends Widestripe. Ivy tries again in simpler terms, and Harg says she is demanding that Widestripe’s gnolls join her clan. Widestripe is confused, and offended again. The leader of a clan is the breeding male. Is she threatening to fuck him? Offering? Nobody fucks Widestripe! He’ll kill anyone who tries! Widestripe reaches for his battle-axe as Bent-Tail and Three-Laughs snarl. Redmane snorts (a vote of approval for the coming fight). Nogi hefts his axe and Mothclaw growls orders to his troops. Ivy does not stir, but her clear voice rings out above the din: “Tell this animal to sit down or he’ll get what his father got.” Harg provides the translation, but Widestripe seems to have gotten the message from her tone alone. The gnolls hunker, and Harg explains the difficulty to Ivy. Eventually she is able to explain the situation to Widestripe in simple terms.

“Fight for me and I will give you gold. Refuse, and I will kill you.” Widestripe accepts the terms.

As proof of her good word, Ivy gives Widestripe 50 gold pieces. The gnolls swear the vow of fealty given to the old Eveningstar kings (reciting the words of the foreign language phonetically as they are given them) and the war-council begins. Damsontongue is able to draw a map of the gnoll cave while Widestripe describes the usual defenses. The cave is always guarded by four sentries with bows. If intruders are spotted, one guard runs to alert the chief while the others shoot arrows at the attackers. In the face of determined assault, the sentries retreat into the cave, where the entire band can hold a chokepoint at a narrow place. If this fails, the survivors retreat down a long tunnel, where they can take cover and shoot arrows at their attackers. The module states that the secret door to the gnoll cave is “unknown to all”, so as far as Widestripe can tell Ivy this is the only way into the cave.

Ivy divides her force into three groups. She, Heinryk, Harg, Nogi, and the gnolls will form the vanguard. They will break the line, seek out Horsebiter, and kill him. The orcs and hobgoblins, led by Mothclaw, will form the second wave. Their job will be to secure the guard room at J47. The rest of the warband will remain outside of the cave under the leadership of Ambrosius to secure their retreat. The hobgoblins complain about the arrangements. Dedbane grumbles about taking orders from an orc, and Wolfeye complains that the orcs will push them to the front and then take all of the good plunder. Drunvir the wild elf, who speaks Goblin, suddenly laughs. If the hobgoblins are too frightened to fight, he says, let them cower outside under the wizard’s protection (meaning Ambrosius). He, Reedle, and Dorben the dwarf will change places. Ivy agrees to the change, cutting off further argument.

It is nearly 2 pm when they march to war.

THE LOG

The gnolls in the cave see the warband coming a long way off. With Widestripe loping along at Ivy’s side in the front rank, the warband’s intentions are clear. The sentries send a runner to alert Horsebiter. The runner has time to deliver the message and return before the warband enters arrow range. Ivy’s party will have to endure three rounds of arrow volleys before they reach the cave mouth (one at each range band).

TURN 1 – Combat

Round 1

Three-Laughs is struck with an arrow for 6 damage (2/8 HP). The warband breaks into a run.

Round 2

Nogi takes an arrow-wound (9/16 HP). The warband continues to run.

Round 3

Four arrows fly at murderously close range now. An arrow nicks Harg’s ear (11/14 HP). Widestripe is struck in the chest (5/10 HP), and Three-Laughs is killed outright. Widestripe and Bent-Tail test Morale, but charge on.

Round 4

The gnoll archers win initiative and scramble inside before the warband reaches them. They run past the chokepoint, where six of their waiting fellows close ranks behind them to block the hallway. Two archers will proceed down the long tunnel to J47, preparing the gnolls’ line of retreat, while the other two join the second rank of the defensive line. All told, eight gnolls in two ranks will hold the narrow pass. Burn, Shakes, Smiler, and Halfmouth are in the front line, armed with shield and axe. Horsebiter and his councilor Greypelt stand in the second rank, wielding long-hafted axes. Stinktooth and Gnawbone join them with their bows.

As the warband enters the cave Horsebiter calls out to the brother Widestripe, calling him “beggar-bitch,” “cringer,” and “hand-licker”. Greypelt snarls “Go now!” in Common. Only two fighters can attempt to force the chokepoint at a time, while all seven gnolls can strike back. “Heinryk, with me” says Ivy. The Hero twirls his axe and grins, a cruel light dancing in his mad eyes.

Round 5

Shields boom as the lines meet. Ivy’s blade Blackstar darts past Burn’s shield and into his one good eye, killing him. Heinryk kills Shakes, the most reckless gnoll in the clan, with a single mighty blow of his axe. The gnoll goes down without a sound, gnashing his foam-flecked teeth at Heinryk as he dies. The gnolls test Morale and fight on.

Round 6

Heinryk strikes Smiler for 5 damage, and the wounded gnoll yips with distressed laughter from behind his perpetual rictus snarl. Horsebiter catches Heinryk in the shoulder with his pole-axe (18/24 HP).

Round 7

Ivy kills Halfmouth, Blackstar shearing through his muzzle and scattering his few remaining fangs, and pushes forward into the weakened gnoll line. Nogi moves into the breach, brandishing his great axe.

Round 8

Ivy stabs Horsebiter in the footpaw, ducking under his guard just as she did to his father (5/10 HP). Nogi kills with wounded Smiler, then takes a second arrow to the chest (3/16 HP). Harg pushes into the melee, and the gnoll archers draw their axes as the formal battle lines degenerate into a chaotic melee.

Round 9

Ivy pushes the limping Horsebiter off balance and disembowels him with Blackstar. At the same time, Heinryk deals Greypelt a savage blow (1/9 HP). Greypelt drops his axe. “No more! You win” calls the old gnoll. The other gnolls prepare to surrender, following his lead. Ivy tells the warband to stand down, pleased to have left most of the gnoll clan intact. She could use fighters like this in her march on Eveningstar.

Round 10

Heinryk, laughing, buries his axe in Greypelt’s head. His eyes are red with battle-fever, his teeth shining white behind his bloodstained beard. The surviving gnolls break and run.

Continued in part 2...

Clerical Errors

Tony DiTerlizzi

“Fixing the cleric” is about as common in OSR circles as “fixing the thief”. The cleric is also frequently cut from campaigns, houserules, and heartbreakers, usually because it doesn’t really fit well outside of a eurofantasy setting with a big church or something post-apocalyptic like Canticle of Leibowitz. Many fixes say that they want the cleric to feel more distinct and not just a different type of wizard. I think this is a very Game Designer opinion, in the sense that I don’t think the experience of playing a cleric feels like playing a wizard, but I do take the point. What usually follows, however, is a system of piety points or tracking deity disfavor with a high degree of either tracking stuff, “the DM will decide how this works exactly”, or both, neither of which I’m that crazy about in a class.

Assuming you haven’t found the perfect alternative system to meet your preferences, I think there are several easier options to fit the cleric into an OSE game without overhauling the system. You can mix and match most of these as desired.

1) Clerics can use swords

The ban on edged weapons is a weird D&D-ism that doesn’t port well to many settings (arguably including a eurofantasy one with a big church, funnily enough). If you keep everything else the same and change this, you no longer need a separate paladin class and the cleric fits a more recognizable fantasy archetype. The BX cleric’s missing spell at 1st level now fills the role of the paladin “proving their faith” before getting spells, but you only have to wait one level instead of four.

2) Spontaneous Spellcasting

Clerics don’t memorize their spells. Instead, they can use a spell slot to cast any spell from the cleric spell list. Now it feels like praying for a miracle in response to a specific situation, cleanly differentiating it from the wizard's prepared spells without needing to do a lot of work.

The OSE cleric’s spell list is tiny, which makes it easy to keep track of. You could probably fit the whole thing comfortably onto a little player handout, and the spells largely do what they say on the tin (in the sense that a player probably doesn’t need to know the full text of Remove Fear in advance to figure out what it does). You can easily vary it up for different gods by swapping out a couple of spells, and clerics won’t be punished for preparing the more interesting spells over Cure Light Wounds.

Rebecca Guay

3) Open the Schools

Why shouldn’t the cleric just be another kind of wizard? Merge the spell lists (with 12 MU spells and 8 cleric spells per level, they fit comfortably onto a d20 list for determining random spells, although the occasional repeated spell may break this pleasant symmetry). You can give Magic-Users turn undead too if you like, either as a 1st-level spell or as a class ability. It’s certainly genre-appropriate – for Gandalf and Ged of Earthsea, banishing evil spirits comes right after the Light spell in a wizard’s bag of tricks. The school on Roke has a whole section devoted to healing magic, and Ged can cast Raise Dead. Witches are magic-users, and they love cooking up healing potions in their big soup pots. D&D might be the only time where A) healing magic exists, but B) wizards can't use it, so removing this strange distinction is a slam dunk. Fill in any repeat spells with your favorites from the Druid and Illusionist spell lists and you're off to the races.

If you’d like to draw a distinction between scholarly wizards and spell-casting fighters, the OSE Half-Elf provides a good template (base 3,000 XP, HD, attacks, and spell-progression as Clerics).

If you use this variant where the d4 HD Mage gets the full range of spells and you drop the cleric, I’d recommend giving the now-absent d6 HD to the Thief. You are in absolutely no danger of making the Thief too strong.

Angus McBride

4) Clerics are Elves

In Tolkien, anyway. Elrond can cast Remove Curse and is a master of healing – he’s even able to produce healing potions (or possibly it’s a member of his household who makes the miruvor, but either way the point stands). Glorfindel can turn away undead and evil spirits with the power that is in him. Carcass Crawler Issue 2 has a nice implementation of this (basically mash the base OSE Halfling and Elf classes together, use the Cleric or Druid spell list, 3,000 XP to reach level 2). I’ve been playing with a slight variant of this class and I like it a lot, but if I was removing the cleric class I’d add turn undead and use the elf’s normal XP track.

Trolls! Obviously Trolls

There’s an often-repeated bit of DMing advice that says you should never say a monster’s name. I don’t get this. I mean that in two ways:

1) I find this idea aesthetically unsatisfying.

A lot of monsters have great names! Goblin. Elf. Troll. Dragon. They’re good words, loaded with resonance. The fact that they conjure immediate associations in the listener is a good thing.

2) I have tried this and it didn’t work.

In my most memorable attempt, I ran an encounter with a gold-chased, gem-encrusted minotaur skeleton without ever saying the word “minotaur” and my players thought the fact that I scrupulously avoided saying it was a joke. Maybe this is a bad example because skeletons and minotaurs are such identifiable monsters compared to the various shades of goblin/hobgoblin/ghoul/orc that people typically use as examples for this principle, but I ended up using a lot of words to zero benefit. That same dungeon also had undead monks who had had the first joint of each finger cut off and replaced with pen nibs, fought in a ruined library that was knee-deep in foul water. That encounter had a much bigger impact on the players and it didn’t seem to be lessened by the fact that I mostly said “zombie” instead of “dead men, rotting yet still animated by a hideous spark of unlife” when one of them made an attack roll.

This admonition, I think, comes from DMs who love running gonzo horror games, where it is genuinely a great piece of advice. It is a little deflating to learn that the braying horror that Cletus Clanghorn just fired his last shotgun shell into was actually a cleverly-disguised bear. But not every palate is so jaded, and in a more classic fantasy milieu you can easily find yourself obfuscating to no benefit. 

Can you imagine trying to describe what a dragon looks like without using the word “dragon”? Do you think your description would be enhanced by that omission? If you spend a lot of time describing a “lizard-like creature with four legs and vast bat wings, with smoke curling from its nostrils” your players will probably go “...so is it a dragon?” Whereas if you say “a delicate pale-blue dragon with silvery wings” (or indeed "There he lay! A vast red-gold dragon, fast asleep") the word “dragon” is doing a lot of heavy lifting that opens up more space in your descriptive budget. By not hiding the ball on what it is, you can spend more time on what makes it interesting.

3) Metagaming Concerns

Dungeon of Signs says “...the specific mechanical aspects of a potential foe is the last thing one wants players to be thinking about when they start an encounter.”

This is, in my experience at least, wildly untrue. Players love thinking about the specific mechanical aspects of a potential foe! It’s part of how they assess the risks of an encounter. This isn’t to say you should just hand your players the relevant monster manual page for each fight, but informed decisions do lead to good gameplay. Many of my formative D&D memories involve one of us kids eagerly sharing some monster facts and discussing strategies for how to deal with them. Some of these schemes were good and some were terrible, but they were all engaging. You can decry this type of out-of-game discussion as metagaming, but I think the sense of shared adventurer knowledge is a lot of fun.

Por Que No Los Dos

Outside of gonzo-horror reskins, I think there is a useful nugget at the core of a lot of the Never Speak The Monster’s Name advice, which is just that monster descriptions should be evocative, and that your players should have reasons to care about them. I think it’s perfectly fine, even good, to use monster names paired with a good description. For example, Against The Wicked City’s ogre description reads “An eight-foot giant who comes clambering from her cannibal larder, her hot breath reeking of carrion, her long hair matted with human gore”. In a setting where ogres aren’t a discrete category of monster and you’re just using the stats to describe some kind of human mutant, great. In a more typical D&D Fantasy setting, I don’t think it would be at all lessened by changing it to “The ogre comes clambering from her cannibal larder, etc.,”. You get the associations of the word “ogre,” and have now tied it to the specificity of what this ogre is like. It’s notably a different kind of ogre than an oafish, fur-clad, treebranch-club-wielding ogre, emphasizing different qualities of the name’s common associations. That sort of thing builds the space of the imagined world: if I meet a goblin in the same setting as the cannibal ogress, I’m not likely to assume that it’s the silly Labyrinth variety. Finally, some of this is mechanical. If goblins are a worthless chaff enemy, then your players are unlikely to care for a long description of what is essentially useless information. If on the other hand the arrival of 2d6 goblins is a meaningful encounter, then I suspect that they will!

If you're a bad enough dude, you can give a monster plenty of impact with no description at all.

"Thus he came alone to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat.

And Morgoth came."

Postscript: The Wisdom of Solomon

If you’re really bothered by D&D taxonomy of humanoids, however, and are determined not to tell your players which Monster Manual entry you’re referencing, I recommend a compromise: lump your categories. Kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and bugbears can all be “goblins”. “A huge goblin, almost man-high”. “Shaggy-furred beasts with long arms and horrible goblin faces”. “Squealing goblin imps with beetle-black eyes in their spoiled-milk faces”. Ogres, trolls, giants, and so forth can all be uh… one of those things. A huge range of creatures can fall under “fairies” or “elves”. Basically every corporeal undead can be a “revenant,” “wight” or even “ghoul”, and the incorporeal ones can equally all be “spirits,” “ghosts,” or “wraiths”. Each of these choices will skew the flavor of the monsters and setting in a certain direction, which you can use to your advantage – see the shift from “goblins” in The Hobbit to “orcs” in The Lord of the Rings when describing the same creature.