I'm not talking NPC spellcasters or recurring villains, just monster variants and templated madness you've gotten on the table. In my current homebrew my faves have been 2 types of kobolds modeled in one aspect of their black dragon "deity": a Horned One kobold maxed on str w/a level of barbarian and horns for a natural weapon. Add Improved Bull Rush and a few kobold traps to knock the PC's into and its a party! Secondly we have the Doombringer; Ftr 1/Rog 2, the Thug arch, Befuddling strike, Frightening, Brutal Beating, and for feats Skill Focus (Intimidate) and Precise Strike. Basically they scare the bejeesus outta you then gang up and beat you bloody leaving you wondering what just happened. I have a leveled version to CR 5 that has a Fear power.
What's your most devilish creation?
In my current extended Carrion Crown Campaign, my players need to defeat some classic monsters ( Dr Jekyll, Quasimodo, Hansel and Gretel’s Witch, Pinocchio, boogeyman etc.).
Following their instinct, my players headed to Château Douleur. The city was under strange weather at night: magical sandstorm. After some fight with animated dreams and crazed sleepers, they discovered the cause: Le marchand de sable (Sandman) and le croquemitaine (boogeyman)
- The whispering asked him to bring them a fragment of pure nightmare for the carrion crown elixir.
Le marchand de sable is a unique sandman fey sorcerer. He focused on sleeping enchant, illusion and wind attack. He existed in the material world.
Le croquemitaine was a mix between an Animated Dream, a Sand Kraken and a Soul Eater. He existed in the Dream/Nightmare World.
They were linked together; you need to kill them almost at the same time (1d4 rounds, before the gained Regeneration 10)
Even if Le marchand de sable make you asleep, you could fight them (by fighting the boogeyma in the Dream World). Since the fight was pretty hard, you could wake up someone with a fullround action, or sleep as a fullround action.
That's easy. Bedlam from my custom setting. My players hate them.
They're a 'race' of ghost who kill and stitch different body parts togeather to make 'hosts.' They live in large, crude pack, only seeking more victims to expand their 'tribe.' They don't speak at all and lack culture, yet they formulate clever plans and different tribes will fight each other, despite being the exact same. Or band togeather and literally butcher a town.
A Reskined Troll Vampire ^^ Used it in game as Necromantic Construct composed of powdered bone, that would reassemble itself when it was damaged. Always fun to see the look on the PCs face when they blast an arm of the weird new monster...and then watch all the pieces fly back up and rebuild it.
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For a Scarred Lands game, in addition to a bunch of 1/2 HD undead made from the skin, blood, viscera, etc. of corpses, I refluffed a Vargouille to be a landbound snake-like creature whose head was the head of the person originally infected, and whose snake-body was the spinal cord and internal organs of that person, torn free during the transformation and trailing along behind the head. Same basic mechanics, but many times creepier, particularly after the party had encountered the eviscerated, headless and de-spined corpses of the original victims...
(I was going for a At the Mountains of Madness vibe, with the headless bodies, and trails of blood leading away from them into the forest, foreshadowing the later horror.)
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@ Set: nice! I have one encounter I haven't gotten to try yet along the same vein:
The party is traveling through forested hills when they hear screams echoing from above. The trail leads up toward a stark hilltop of standing stones and weird light can be seen above. Along the way they find the remains of goblins; headless sacks of flesh and gore left discarded like offal from a butcher.
Ascending they spy a Vanedaemon surrounded by armed, headless skeletons wreathed in flames while hovering overhead is a swarm of skulls, their eyes and mouths smoldering with unholy flame. Even as the characters arrive the necromancer outsider is eviscerating the last of his prey.
I suppose if I wanted horror I should change them to zombies though...
Anyway, keep em coming!
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Along the way they find the remains of goblins; headless sacks of flesh and gore left discarded like offal from a butcher.
Ascending they spy a Vanedaemon surrounded by armed, headless skeletons wreathed in flames while hovering overhead is a swarm of skulls, their eyes and mouths smoldering with unholy flame.
I love the visual of a creature that is 'attended' in some way by the remains of his victims, whether they be faces and hands seeming to claw their way from beneath his skin, or they are the ghostly vestiges of their bound souls wailing as they circle him as a protective shield of spiritual energy, or, as with this example, as severed heads (or skulls) retaining some of their power or knowledge, that their killer can call upon.
It creates the need to destroy this creature to free those who continue to be victimized by it, even after their deaths, and to avoid dying to it and facing the same horrible fate.
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I was rather fond of a minotaur NPC I created for a campaign set in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands. He was a tragic creature built from the Conundrum Creature template in Creature Collection II.
Conundrum Creatures are beings cursed to live as animated puzzles. They lose the ability to communicate except to recite the riddle that will set them free. The only thing that will break the curse is for someone to assemble all their pieces and speak the answer to their particular riddle. In the case of this minotaur, the party found his parts scattered throughout a labyrinth and needed to rebuild him in order to escape the maze. They'd been led to believe he had a key for them and eventually found all but one piece that was needed to attach his tail. Without his tail, he could still recite his riddle:
"What force and strength cannot get through, I with a gentle touch can do. And many in the street would stand, were I not a friend in hand."
However, he couldn't be freed from his curse until he was completely rebuilt. Over the course of the next several days, the party explored and fought through the massive, haunted labyrinth and bonded with the minotaur as they searched for his missing piece. His construct traits and other abilities made him a useful and powerful ally but, rather than take advantage of his strengths, the party treated him as they would a good friend. On the final level of the maze, the party discovered his missing piece and the lock that would free them from the labyrinth, a large indentation carved into the floor and shaped like the minotaur, complete with restraints.
The party had figured out the answer to the riddle days ago, but it was only now they realized how terrible a price they would have to pay to be free. The answer to the riddle of course was "A Key" and that is exactly what the minotaur was intended to be, a living key.
If the party had treated the minotaur as nothing more than a tool or been unkind to him, I was prepared to have him fight for his life. However, because they had endeared themselves to him, he willingly sacrificed himself for their freedom. With his tail reattached and the curse lifted, the minotaur spent a few final moments with the only friends he'd ever known and then laid down inside the indentation. The party's sorceress even held his hand as the restraints automatically locked into place and the gears of the lock began to grind to life. A moment later, the minotaur was ripped into quarters as the floor separated revealing a whirlpool that would suck the party out into a bay near the labyrinth's entrance.
That was a good campaign and I think I even made the sorceress' player cry a little during the finale.
I was rather fond of a minotaur NPC I created for a campaign set in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands. He was a tragic creature built from the Conundrum Creature template in Creature Collection II.
Conundrum Creatures are beings cursed to live as animated puzzles. They lose the ability to communicate except to recite the riddle that will set them free. The only thing that will break the curse is for someone to assemble all their pieces and speak the answer to their particular riddle. In the case of this minotaur, the party found his parts scattered throughout a labyrinth and needed to rebuild him in order to escape the maze. They'd been led to believe he had a key for them and eventually found all but one piece that was needed to attach his tail. Without his tail, he could still recite his riddle:
"What force and strength cannot get through, I with a gentle touch can do. And many in the street would stand, were I not a friend in hand."
However, he couldn't be freed from his curse until he was completely rebuilt. Over the course of the next several days, the party explored and fought through the massive, haunted labyrinth and bonded with the minotaur as they searched for his missing piece. His construct traits and other abilities made him a useful and powerful ally but, rather than take advantage of his strengths, the party treated him as they would a good friend. On the final level of the maze, the party discovered his missing piece and the lock that would free them from the labyrinth, a large indentation carved into the floor and shaped like the minotaur, complete with restraints.
The party had figured out the answer to the riddle days ago, but it was only now they realized how terrible a price they would have to pay to be free. The answer to the riddle of course was "A Key" and that is exactly what the minotaur was intended to be, a living key.
If the party had treated the minotaur as nothing more than a tool or been unkind to him, I was prepared to have him fight for his life....
This is an evil, soul wrenching, sickening idea, and i will promptly be using something like it in my campaign. :D
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I was rather fond of a minotaur NPC I created for a campaign set in H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands. He was a tragic creature built from the Conundrum Creature template in Creature Collection II.
Conundrum Creatures are beings cursed to live as animated puzzles. They lose the ability to communicate except to recite the riddle that will set them free. The only thing that will break the curse is for someone to assemble all their pieces and speak the answer to their particular riddle. In the case of this minotaur, the party found his parts scattered throughout a labyrinth and needed to rebuild him in order to escape the maze. They'd been led to believe he had a key for them and eventually found all but one piece that was needed to attach his tail. Without his tail, he could still recite his riddle:
"What force and strength cannot get through, I with a gentle touch can do. And many in the street would stand, were I not a friend in hand."
However, he couldn't be freed from his curse until he was completely rebuilt. Over the course of the next several days, the party explored and fought through the massive, haunted labyrinth and bonded with the minotaur as they searched for his missing piece. His construct traits and other abilities made him a useful and powerful ally but, rather than take advantage of his strengths, the party treated him as they would a good friend. On the final level of the maze, the party discovered his missing piece and the lock that would free them from the labyrinth, a large indentation carved into the floor and shaped like the minotaur, complete with restraints.
The party had figured out the answer to the riddle days ago, but it was only now they realized how terrible a price they would have to pay to be free. The answer to the riddle of course was "A Key" and that is exactly what the minotaur was intended to be, a living key.
If the party had treated the minotaur as nothing more than a tool or been unkind to him, I was prepared to have him fight for his life....
That's terrible. I hope to one day achieve such heights. I had a campaign where my one NPC stayed with the characters through the entire campaign in 3.5 and she went on to become an ice elemental. We ended the campaign and didn't play together for a while, til we re-started with new characters. Part of the plot took the new game up through a haunted ravine of perpeutually wintery forest in the mountains. Thre they needed to find a witch who lived in a castle made of ice, attended by elementals and constructs and who held prisoner all those who wandered into the valley.
The players, now captured, made their way there and fought through only to find the ice-elemental lady from the previous game. She'd fought side by side with the previous party after the campaign wrapped; two characters died in her arms and the third fled to this valley. She tended to him, watching him grow old and feeble since he was mortal and a LG cleric. Since he was a cleric of the sun god she took out her rage by staging a mini-ragnarok over the valley; the sun still rose and set but it's purest rays NEVER pierced the veil of snow and ice. Then she shut off all further emotion and wouldn't let anyone leave so they wouldn't age or die.
The characters figured out the only way to get this to end was to make her FEEL something again. They went out in search of the cleric's grave, ventured in, and of course found the tomb laden with traps, constructs, elementals and such. They returned with the dude's mace, which was also his holy symbol and his most memorable relic. The party's wizard pulled off an amazing couple of knowledge checks and, since he had been IN the same game, let loose a eulogy of all the good the cleric had done in his life, constantly reminding the ice queen of her own involvement. At first she honestly couldn't remember what they were talking about but the guy doing the talking really got into it; he held up his pencil and used it to represent the mace, then he got to his feet, raised his voice. I in turn kept acting more and more evasive and confused, refusing to even look at the mace.
Then the coup de gras; he hands me the pencil. Puts it in my hand and closes my hand around it. "...and now, thanks to your love for him, Thelvan rests in the light of his god and knows true peace. YOU did this for him My Queen."
It was really nice. Not nearly as poetic as the minotaur but as close as I'm likely to get.
@Velcro Zipper: That really sounds amazing :) You almost brought a tear to my eye, just by me reading it! :)
And Mark: I liked that one too - very nice and a cool plot idea :)
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ok...back to the monsters
My players recently shocked a flesh golem into sentience and it fled the fight in typical cartoon fashion, leaving a flailing flesh-golem shaped hole in the wall of a hut as it ran. I'm toying with bringing it back in a future game with levels in bard, specializing in Performance: Dance. Just something about a flesh golem in tights seems fitting for some reason.
Anyone have any others they want to add to the mix?