Were-poodles? They are lower lvl mooks than Kobolds, and that is saying a lot!
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What's a good low-level mook monster to do up an adventure about? Granted--kobolds and goblins are classic for that sorta bughunt, but I don't want them to get overdone.
I'm thinking xvarts. Any other mooks you'd like to see and/or smackdown???
Elves.
A village of tribal-style elves with 1-3 levels in ranger, sorcerer or monk, whose goals set them violently against the PC's.
'Cause we all love killing elves.
Fiendish cows.
BABY DRAGON!
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Jermaines are cool. With Dire Rats for mounts and pets. or spiders.
Twig blights. Make an evil druid(similar sounding but not like Sunless Citadel) and a huge grove of plant-traps (poison spike shooters, foot lancers, etc.) and maybe an assassin vine or so with a few molds and viola! Outdoor plant destruction! I believe the Advanced Beastiary has a template for turning creatures into plant creatures. Then you could add a bunch of other stuff in.
Fiendish cows.
DONE! In case you want to make hamburgers, here's some sacred cows as well.
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Any other mooks you'd like to see and/or smackdown???
While the fiendish cow would be fun...
Seriously, I would like to see...
Bloodhawks (Fiend Folio or Tome of Horror)
Stirges (are always fun)
Krenshar
Shadow Asp (Fiend Folio)
Mongrelfolk (Fiend Folio)
Tasloi (Shining South or Oriental Adventures)
Forestkith Goblin (Monster Manual III)
Gibberling (Monsters of Faerun)
Raggamoffyn, Tatterdemanimal (Monster Manual II)
That's all I got. Hope that helps.
I see two names here that I recognize from the old Baldur's Gate computer games but have never seen any stats for- what are gibberlings and xvarts?
Xvarts are Greyhawk monstrous humanoids. In another setting you would probably substitute goblins. They like to beat up kobolds.
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I see two names here that I recognize from the old Baldur's Gate computer games but have never seen any stats for- what are gibberlings and xvarts?
Xvarts stats can be found in Dragon 339 (if you have it).
Gibberlings can be found in Monsters of Faerun.
Contributor
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Yellow Musk Zombies. The Yellow musk creeper (FF) is a CR 4 monster that makes plant zombies! Great to base an adeventure around.
One of my favourite mini-adventures I ran involved an "evil necromancer" in a tower. The villain was actually a Yellow Musk Creeper living on the outside of the tower dominating people and making zombies. Plus the look on the cleric's face when they try to turn undead for the first time? Priceless.
I see two names here that I recognize from the old Baldur's Gate computer games but have never seen any stats for- what are gibberlings and xvarts?Xvarts stats can be found in Dragon 339 (if you have it).
Gibberlings can be found in Monsters of Faerun.
I don't (have that Dragon). So, xvarts are dark skinned goblin-y things that hate kobolds, and gibberlings are just intelligence-challenged quasi-anthropomorphs? That's all there is to them?
Commoners, hordes of commoners.
Commoners are awesome. In the second AOW adventure, 1st level commoners can be pretty threatening if they use longspears or other reach weapons, aid another to secure hits. And then your characters will always remember killing hordes and hordes of fifteen year old villagers cut down in their prime before they could marry a buck-toothed farmer's daughter and get that third level feat to specialize in ploughing.
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I have two odd suggestions, and then a question.
Odd suggestion 1: You can "dress up" kobolds and goblins any way you please. Make your kobolds furry, adorable, and various colors. Change the name, change the preferred tactics (group grapple and overbear), and it's a whole new monster without a lot of stat work.
Question: Do you have any idea about who'd be using the mooks, or where you want the campaign to go? Try to stick to that theme, maybe once removed. (I'm not saying anything new here. A lot of the previous posters have given examples of this principle.)
If aboleths are going to be the BBEG a few levels from now, or if the current master villain is a cleric of the god of madness, how about commoners affected with the pseudonatural template?
If the Cult of the Dragon is getting into the business of selling muscle, or if the current boss has ties to the Nine Hells, Whitespawn Hordlings might work.
Odd Suggestion 2: Memorable mook encounters are against foes with one single notable novelty. Use a template, or an unusual weapon, or a simple spell-like ability... (give this set of goblins multi-faceted eyes, vestigal mandables, and the spider climb ability and watch your players get seriously creeped out) and stop there.
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So, xvarts are dark skinned goblin-y things that hate kobolds, and gibberlings are just intelligence-challenged quasi-anthropomorphs? That's all there is to them?
I was looking for CR 1 creatures (or less). Not sure what you were expecting with a CR 1 creature.
Gibberlings have more to do with the story and background than the creature. As I understand it, gibberlings were once humanoids that were transformed into these creatures using foul magic and let loose on the neighboring country. And, yes, there tend to be waves and waves and waves of them once they get loose. (I hear "XP Generator")
I think that creators were initially looking for some creature that was between kobolds and goblins with regard to difficulty and the xvart was the result. Ultimately they end up filling the same kind of roll as goblins do. Keep in mind that (at least I believe) kobolds and goblins were far closer in relation to each other than kobolds were to lizardfolk in early editions of D&D. (For that matter, I think that orcs and goblins were also basically subspecies of each other as well.)
Another option could be to use Norker goblins (Dragon 343). Basically, a rather primitive subspecies of goblins/hobgoblins.
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I like Skeletons. I usually spice them up with the Corpsecrafter feat, or various house-ruled improvements (allowing them to wear armor or use weapons, allowing the craftsmage to use alchemy to strengthen their bones to the hardness of iron, allowing the craftsmage to use better or stronger materials to create 'masterwork' skeletons that are stronger or tougher than normal, having bonus hit points based on size like a Construct, or just above-average hit points).
A pack of Wolves makes for a scary low-level encounter (the trip attacks can be killer at that level!). They don't necessarily have to be rabid or fiendish or otherwise special, they could just be under the guidance of an evil ranger, druid, lycanthrope or bog-standard misanthropic Expert animal trainer!
For one Scarred Lands game, I had an evil priestess / necromancer whip up a bunch of custom undead. She would sacrifice someone to her evil goddess, very carefully draining their blood into a vat, which she would seal with wax for later, then removing their skin and storing it away in preservative oils, and then proceed to remove their muscles and organs, without damaging them, as much as possible and toss that into a seperate ceramic vat, leaving behind only the skeleton, which she'd Animate normally (after some modifications to strengthen the bones). She'd then use a variant spell to 'animate' the blood as an undead ooze she called a Blood Weird, able only to grapple and blind and attempt to suffocate / drown another (unable to strike for damage otherwise), animate the skin into another weak form of undead able to primarily grapple and bind another (a 'Skin-Wight'), and finally the organs and musculature into another form of Ooze called a Viscera, that could strike to damage, secrete acids and drain blood from those it attacked!
Four seperate 1/2 to 1 HD undead from a single humanoid corpse! The little lady was indeed industrious! (She would send the Blood Weirds and Skin-Wights out to capture people in the night, along with the Skeletons to carry the incapacitated / pinned / suffocated bodies back to her lair in the sewers. She kept the Viscera sealed up in vats, because they 'did too much damage to the bodies' and didn't bother to Rebuke them, just letting them flail away until she thought of a use fo them. In the 'big showdown with the party,' her skeletons, blood wierds and skin-wights were getting handily decimated, so she Rebuked the imprisoned Viscera (since she had lost enough HD worth of other undead to have 'free slots') and then opened the vats and used them to cover her escape! The party survived, but so did she, to plague them another day.
In a fit of creativity, I melted wax from a Christmas candle and made 'figures' for the Blood Wierds, little blobs of red wax, warmed up and shaped into splashing wave-like figures and stuck on squares of cardboard. It was something of a fad for a time, to whip up figures. (Another DM had us fight a Hydra he'd made out of plastic tubing, and every time we killed a head, he'd whip out some industrial scissors and cut off that head, handing it to whoever got the death-blow.)
Or you could go with the traditional 'bug hunt.' Somehow, a Giant Ant Queen got herself Awakened, and now has a few levels of Cleric or Sorcerer or Adept, as well as an army of mindless soldiers. She's set up beneath the city / near the village, and her minions are proving to be quite the menace! As an added threat, she's got winged drones, soldiers capable of flight!
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Commoners, hordes of commoners.
I ran an old Ravenloft module once - I think the Walking Dead about a Zombie Lord. The group figured out that someone in a Manor just outside of town was involved in bad things. They broke into the Manor in the middle of the day. Sometime while they were rifling and looting the towns people showed up. The group had two Dwarven (2e) fighter types (some kit as I remember) and they went into a rage as they attacked the peasants. It was a bloody affair.
The townspeople ran and the dwarves could not keep up so stopped raging eventually. I considered the whole thing of attack peasants an evil act and from then on when they raged they slow moved toward a lycanthropic curse. A good time was had by all or at least me.
Commoners, hordes of commoners.
I ran an old Ravenloft module once - I think the Walking Dead about a Zombie Lord. The group figured out that someone in a Manor just outside of town was involved in bad things. They broke into the Manor in the middle of the day. Sometime while they were rifling and looting the towns people showed up. The group had two Dwarven (2e) fighter types (some kit as I remember) and they went into a rage as they attacked the peasants. It was a bloody affair.
The townspeople ran and the dwarves could not keep up so stopped raging eventually. I considered the whole thing of attack peasants an evil act and from then on when they raged they slow moved toward a lycanthropic curse. A good time was had by all or at least me.
Just another example showing that killing commoners is bloody good fun!
I guess everyone has a story about their own little commoner massacre, it's an instant classic.
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I like Skeletons. I usually spice them up with the Corpsecrafter feat, or various house-ruled improvements (allowing them to wear armor or use weapons, allowing the craftsmage to use alchemy to strengthen their bones to the hardness of iron, allowing the craftsmage to use better or stronger materials to create 'masterwork' skeletons that are stronger or tougher than normal, having bonus hit points based on size like a Construct, or just above-average hit points).
A pack of Wolves makes for a scary low-level encounter (the trip attacks can be killer at that level!). They don't necessarily have to be rabid or fiendish or otherwise special, they could just be under the guidance of an evil ranger, druid, lycanthrope or bog-standard misanthropic Expert animal trainer!
For one Scarred Lands game, I had an evil priestess / necromancer whip up a bunch of custom undead. She would sacrifice someone to her evil goddess, very carefully draining their blood into a vat, which she would seal with wax for later, then removing their skin and storing it away in preservative oils, and then proceed to remove their muscles and organs, without damaging them, as much as possible and toss that into a seperate ceramic vat, leaving behind only the skeleton, which she'd Animate normally (after some modifications to strengthen the bones). She'd then use a variant spell to 'animate' the blood as an undead ooze she called a Blood Weird, able only to grapple and blind and attempt to suffocate / drown another (unable to strike for damage otherwise), animate the skin into another weak form of undead able to primarily grapple and bind another (a 'Skin-Wight'), and finally the organs and musculature into another form of Ooze called a Viscera, that could strike to damage, secrete acids and drain blood from those it attacked!
Four seperate 1/2 to 1 HD undead from a single humanoid corpse! The little lady was indeed industrious! (She would send the Blood Weirds and Skin-Wights out to capture people in the night, along with the...
We just fought some wolves in Eberron; worgs or dire or something; maybe templated, maybe not. It was effed up because we had no idea what exactly the hell it was. Druid? Awakened druid? Vampire? Vampire druid? Sheesh!!! It's some kinda damn wolf. Or not.