Eiliya's page

I'll get to fixing those details once I get back home, Mathius. Thanks for pointing it out.

Let me try to make this clear one more time, then. Please feel free to skip this if you do not care about the lore and reasoning behind why things work as they do.

why I should bother to suggest a value?

Half-hearted comments like those make me feel somewhat sad, to be honest. You clearly want there to be a save for the ability, but you can't even think up a suggestion and blame your inability on my fluff? That's hardcore, man. If you don't want to bother suggesting a value, why should I bother considdering it?

Well, anyways Blackstorm, thank you for at least giving it a try. Luckily for me, someone just showed up with some actual alternate suggestions that could fulfill what I was after without compromising the concept, so I'm good and ready now :-)

Lots of useful, constructive comments.

Wow, someone who understands what I'm after and actually suggests how to solve it. Thanks for that, I'm grateful :-)

I never actually considdered adding an explanation of the weapon-type, but now that I think on it, alot of other creatures with special gear have noted concerning it, so I guess I should do that.

I was actually considdering doing that myself, and adding the ability damage as a property to the weapon instead. Would that make more sense, maybe? If I did, however, it would stop being a poison and the damage would stop self-healing. It would go from ability damage to ability loss, I guess?

The purpose of the dark bolt is that creatures targeted by it can't completely evade it (unless they have evasion or similar stuff), which is why I wanted to use a save rather than an attack roll. A successful save still deals half damage, but a failed touch attack deals no damage.

Well, the Skulks are of the Blackscales, which are created as scouts and assassins, so a swift and easy escape/return to HQ is a natural part of their basic construction. Fluff-wise, all blackscales except the commander of the hivemind always fight to the death, so if the Step frustates players, that's in the hands of their DMs, I think.

I intended to have them start with the Pool full, but it would be cool if they had to fill it through combat. I think I'll go with that. Sure, the creature gets a bit weaker in the start, since it can't use it's powers right from the get-go, but in exchange, they can recharge through out the combat.

Your body recognize it as poisonous.

The point here is that your body actually, in fact, does not recognise the twilight poison as something that is harmful to you and as such does not resist the subject. Although it is true that you might manage to find a few individuals who still have a lingering resistance to ancient diseases, this is by no means the common standard. If the Black Plague from the Dark Ages were to somehow resurface in modern days, the vast majority of the world would still have no means to resist it.

I'm confused. + They shouldn't even do damage to players.

I thought I was clear enough with that, but I suppose not. No, the weapons do not actually deal damage to the players, they deal damage to the divine powers the gods used when they created the multiverse and everything within it. Since there are no actual rules for these powers, much less for how to damage them, I simply used the already existing rules of hit points in the game. The only way this actually influences the game is through the fact that critical hits cannot be scored with these weapons. I also considdered making it so that creatures killed by a twilight weapon vanished from the soul flow, thus becomming impossible to revive or ressurect, but scrapped that idea since it felt somewhat unbalanced.

Pointed and suggested, you didn't like it.

As far as I can remember, you only pointed out that you didn't like the poison because it permitted no save. You didn't actually suggest what to save against, nor what the DC value should be at. You also didn't even considder the possibility of an alternate solution, such as lowering the effect of the poison, except that you suggested me to change the type of effect, which I could, sure, but it would still work in the same way and anyone who reads the lore would go What? Why isn't this a poison?. Well, no matter. I'm altering the weight of the effect and allowing a save to reduce (but not ignore) the effect.

If it is a poison, they can resist it.

Let me try to rephrase my explanation, since I obviously was not clear enough. All living things have something called an immune system that helps the living being protect iself against harmful, foreign objects (usually bacteria or viruses). This immune system is partially born within us, inherited from our parents, but also built up as we live our lives. If generations upon generations are never exposed to a specific subject, then the immune system builds up no resistance against that subject, leaving us utterly helpless incase we do encounter it. In Pathfinder, I have understood that the save against diseases and poison represents the characters immune system. As such, since the twilight poison has not been around for roughly a millenia, any resistance that might have existed against it during the early ages have long since vanished from the normal, playable races, thus resulting in a completely defenseless immune system (which means no save).

What reason for that would there be, fluff-wise?

Fluff-wise, all twilight weapons strike at the forces that hold reality together. If we think of it in real terms, then I guess they'd be damaging the bonds that make atoms form into moecules. In game terms, these forces lack any vital areas that can be targeted and as such are immune to critical hits. As such, weapons that target them have no stats for critical factors. This is at least how it works in the campaign where the Twilight Soldiers are used.

A DC 16 save against death is still pretty hard for low lever characters.

I forgot about that part of the CdG. That should still not be an issue, however, since the weapons do not actually hit the character. Any Fortitude save should be made by the force of reality, which like constructs should be immune to effects that require a fortitude save.

Once again, thanks for the comments and critique. I would like to see some actual suggestions on how to solve the unbalanced aspects though, not just people pointing them out, even if that is helpful as well :-)

DR5/good is too powerful for the HD.

Yeah, I got that feeling as well, actually. The monster is supposed to be encased in an exo-skeleton that trongly resembels a scalemail, so I guess bludgeoning works wonders there, right? Thanks for that tip.

The int of 3 on the other hand, is pretty low.

The low intelligence is supposed to represent that the creature is being remote-controlled by something akin to a hivemind. Should I increase it to represent the collective consciousness instead?

BTW, how did you get so many skill points?

I thought undead got 4+Int Mod (min 1) per level. Doesn't this mean that they get, at the very least, 5 points per level? Or does it mean that the result of 4+Int Mod cannot go below 1? If it is the second alternative, the skills will have to be changed, of course.

The poison is too powerful.

I made the poison so strong to represent the fact that it is a cocktail of drugs and hypnogenes that the world has not seen in nearly a thousand years. The beings that live today have no resistance against it, so I figured a saving throw would be strange. Why would your anti-bodies resist something they don't understand is dangerous? Should I lower the actual effect of the poison to compensate for the lack of a save?

If you go unconscious, there's the coup de grace.

A Coup is an automatic critical hit, right..? If you look at the weapons these creatures wield, you'll note that there are no critical values written there. This is not a miss from my side, the Blackscale Skulkers are incapable of scoring critical hits. As such, the fear of a Coup should be unneccessary. This, of course, does not change the fact that falling unconscious would still be horribly bad.

Just use 3 of them-

I wasn't sure if it was important or not, so I didn't mention it in my previous post, but these creatures are designed to either go solo or come in a Twilight Assault Team made up of one Blackscale, one Bluescale, one Redscale and one Whitescale. The other three I haven't constructed yet, but it's basically meant to be one assassin, one brute, one defender and one controller.

Compliment you for creating a very potent monster.

Thank you for the kind words, I will take them to heart.

So, all in all, what people would like to see changed here is the functions of the poison and the Blackscales intelligence value? Once I recieve feedback on this new post, I'll get about remaking the monster and we'll see how it goes. Thanks for your comments and critics, everyone.

Hi there, everyone.

I'm fairly new at DMing and recently tried my hand at making a custom monster. Let it be known that I did this without having read through the monster creation rules written down in the Bestairy, I just sort of wrote what I felt would be a good creation. Now that I'm done with it, I would like some feedback about it (it is a highly specialized creature, by the way, made for a specific campaign I am running) and maybe also some help on balancing it if it is too unbalanced to see play. Thank you for your time, everyone.

All in all, there are seven types of these monsters, whom I group together as Twilight Soldiers, and each type has four different difficulty levels, all of which I plan on constructing. But before I move on with my project, I'd like some constructive critizism and feedback on this monster. I also need help determining the CR of this one (it's supposed to be fairly low, I imagine 1 or 2). Once again, thanks for taking the time to read this far, I really appreciate it.