| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In my Jade Regent AP, my PCs will soon encounter some Taotieh (Bestiary 3) which have the ability to swallow whole creatures and put them in a pocket dimension where they eventually suffocate unless freed.
The Taotieh can hold up to four creatures. Mine will already have several corpses in them, but I want one of them to have a corpse that turned undead from the trauma.
Assuming it originally was an average medium sized humanoid (though not necessarily a nice person), which undead best fits the role?
The PCs are lvl 15, and any PC getting swallowed will be alone against that undead until his comrades free him.
Since it's one PC alone inside the Taotieh, you'll want to account for the fact that their effective APL is going to be below 15. I think a single 15th level PC counts as a 13th level party, if I'm remembering it correctly, at least when it comes to choosing CR.
Since they're also a solo PC and you can't necessarily determine who is going to get swallowed, a single strong undead might evenly match a fighter, but destroy a wizard in the same situation (cramped spaces aren't caster-friendly). Instead you'll probably want to do with a handful of weaker undead who add up to somewhere in the CR 12 to 14 range.
Your best bet in that case might be a trio of CR 9 undead, or of CR 8 undead with the advanced template (CR 9 doesn't have the best list of candidates for this purpose).
...How about a trio of Guecubu (Bestiary 3) with the advanced template. Then take the Guecubu flavour of earth and soil among the bones, and replace all that dirt with grains of rice. Make them the previous intruders that tried to steal from the Taotiehs.
(Also I bet the Spike Stones spell in such an enclosed area would be funny.)
Ooh, I like those ideas. It'll be an undead that curses his own misfortune and takes it out on anyone else.
A single one in close quarters with advanced template will be enough of a surprise for anyone trapped with it. Especially with those earth based spells inside the stone pocket dimension.
I'll even reason that even with it's earth glide ability and earth powers, you have to crack the walls of the pocket dimension to escape the Taotieh, otherwise it's an infinite thickness and changing its shape is meaningless.
For a kicker, I think I'll curse the rice he took with him. The rice is already useless, but if the first Taotieh to fall is the one with the undead, the battle will continue with the rice cursing the ground, and anyone on it, with misfortune (like the Guecubu's ability) in a 20ft area.
The way I read the entry for the Taotieh, each victim gets put into a seperate "stomach", since the extradimensional space is exactly big enough for the victim and it specifically mentions "stomachs" (plural) in the description. So no trapping a character together with an undead in there.
More fun to do the 'trapped inside the Taotieh with someone else' route than separate stomachs.
I buried my PCs in rice-filled construct-stomachs and brought out the drowning rules! 8D
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 4
|
While not official, I strongly recommend the RPG Superstar bestiary entry: the Immured. It occupied the exact design space you are looking at.
They'll only have one "stomach" each. They're not cow constructs after all. :P
I think I'll half fill them with rice after all, just to make it tighter.
This won't kill my PCs, but it will put them in a memorable position.
We also have a strange "One PC swallowed per adventure" meme going on. I've noticed it around book 4, and it's become one of our running gags.
That's sort of a thing in Jade Regent, it seems. Our group got roughly one PC swallowed per adventure as well.
(It was the same PC that got swallowed every time too. Became something of a running gag that the alchemist got eaten a lot.)