Dungeon Master Forum

It has been stated here that in order to create a monster that appears friendly but then attacks if you attack it first, you should create a monster with no attack methods which drops a nasty version of itself when killed. Obviously someone must have this working to suggest it, but I can't get it to work:

I've created a monster in the editor with no attack methods. I also created the same monster that is ferocious.

I gave the friendly monster 20 hit points so it is easy to kill, and put a beholder into it's "convert on death" method. This doesn't work as the compiler complains "monster converts to invalid object type - expecting monster cloud".

So I read the posts a bit closer and it seems to suggest removing the death cloud and making the monster "drop" the other monster. So I put "null" into the "convert on death" method and went to put the beholder into a body part so it got dropped on death - but monsters don't appear as a tab for putting in a body part.

So it seems physically impossible to make a monster drop a monster on death, and yet it has been said here that it works, so what am I doing wrong?

Underneath the Death conversion there should be an option for "additional action".

If you choose Action: Create New On Floor
Then Object 1: The New Monster

That should work, you'll have to play around if you want to get rid of the monster cloud when you kill the first one though, but that should help I hope.

Fantastic.
Thanks mate, I'll get right on it...

Lots of ways to do this.

Another way is simply to change the convert object on death to be your new monster rather than a cloud.

I just checked it myself, and it always comes up with a warning message that it expects the monster to always convert into a cloud when it dies, no matter what you set it to do.

Would this be a bug?

Yep - and already fixed :lol:

Ignore it for now (the convert will work, it's just the warning that's incorrect), the warning will be gone in V0.39.

So doing both methods mentioned here, you can make a monster spawn two new monsters when it dies?

But I just tried it and it works (two Screamers created when one "Cabbage" is killed) but I can't save the game due to 'compile errors'.

Yes, ignore that for now - it'll save properly in V0.39 (which will be out in a few days I reckon).