A sizable gap between monster CRs

[RJ Dalton 89]

I'm working on writing up a sort of campaign module or adventure path (whichever term applies) and maybe trying to release it in the future. Maybe, if I feel the quality of the final product is something others might find worth reading. I have a pretty solid idea of what I want to do, but I was wondering if some people could offer some suggestions on monsters that might help me fill out a few things.

The basic idea of the campaign is that it takes place in the frozen north. A caravan of scholars are going to explore some old ruins that they believe belong to an old tribe of people who were thought to be extinct, but might actually still be alive (and if they're not, hey, we can still learn from the stuff they left behind right?). The main idea is that the PCs are basically hired as guards to protect the scholars from any dangers they might encounter, though there are other possible hooks.

The culture of the frozen north that I've created is a mix of Inuit and Old Norse (Viking). I've got encounters set up using the qallupilluk, ijiraq and the Jotunn (frost giants), as well as clashes with the tribesman (that hopefully can be solved diplomatically) and I plan on creating a new kind of monster (Tariaksuq, from Inuit mythology) and want to have the presence of the Wendigo be a sort of running danger. The closer it gets to the long night of the far north winter, the more the Wendigo's presence is felt and if the characters linger too long, it moves in as soon as they get trapped by the winter storms.
I'm pleased with the overall scenario, except for one small problem.
The frost giants and Ijiraq (the highest level monsters before the Wendigo) are CR 9. The Wendigo itself is CR 17. That is a hell of a gap. Even assuming that the PCs gain a level or two from their encounters with the Tariaksuq (which I'm still not sure what their CR will be, but I'm aiming for 10 to 12), there's still a large distance between that and the "final boss." I could set it up so that the PCs never actually encounter the wendigo itself and just have to deal with some of the NPCs going insane, but a large bonus in their pay comes from getting all the scholars home alive. If they can't face the wendigo and drive it off, there's a good chance that at least one of the scholars will be lost to its psychosis and the PCs have no chance of doing anything about it, aside from killing him before he can eat anybody, which is, to put it lightly, extremely frustrating. I'm not quite sure what to do about that. I mean, I like the idea of the wendigo being a constant presence. You don't see it, but the tribesman all talk about it, warn against it, tell stories about it, and as it gets closer to winter, you start to hear it howling, though it doesn't attack until there is no chance of escaping it (playing on the cabin fever of the long night). But if the Wendigo is to be an actual encounter, it seems I'm going to need something to bridge the gap. But I'm not really finding any other monsters in the Pathfinder SRD that really fit the mood and setting that fit that range. Or find some other solution to the problem.

Any suggestions?

[Ipslore the Red]

Anti-wendigo consumables with short shelf lives.

[Kelazan]

Add templates or class level to frost giants to increase their CR and create diversity.

[Dasrak]

I've really been meaning to write a lower CR version of the Wendigo. I love the flavor, but CR 17 is so far outside of the levels that I typically play that I've never had the chance to use it. For my part, I want to keep its flavor but radically change its mechanics. However, if you just want to keep the mechanics but have a lower power level then it's actually not too hard to downsize a monster. While you have to be careful of what kinds of powers a monster has when downsizing or upsizing (higher CR monsters are expected to be able to do more, while lower CR monsters tend to have fewer tricks) as a boss monster I think you're fine in this case leaving its abilities as-is.

So let's take as an example dropping the Wendigo from CR 17 to CR 13. Open your bestiaries to page 291 and take a look at table 1-1. Compare the line entry for CR 17 to the stats for the Wendigo; you'll notice it's practically spot-on for each column. We can then pick the line for CR 13 and weaken all the Wendigo's key abilities to those benchmarks. If you don't care for the process you can skip this wall of text to the resulting stat block below.

First of all, we should drop it's hit dice. A quick check of table 1-2 shows us that the baseline Wendigo isn't using those guidelines, and is much lower than a "typical" outsider of its HD, so we should be mindful of dropping it too far. 14 hit dice seems appropriate. We now want to make it have somewhere around 180 hit points. With 14d10 racial hit dice, this gives it 77 hit points to begin with, so we want at least 100 hit points from constitution bonus. A +7 modifier is a bit too low, so we want a +8 modifier; that gives us 26-27 constitution, and sets its hit points at 189 (14d10+112). This is a little above the CR 13 benchmark, but the baseline Wendigo was a little above the CR 17 benchmark too so it's better to be consistent.

Next is AC, which for a CR 13 wendigo should be 28. This isn't a big drop from our CR 17 wendigo, only 4 points. The Wendigo gets its AC entirely from dexterity and natural armor, so we can achieve this reduction by a 2 point drop in each. Its dexterity becomes 25 and its AC becomes 28 (+7 Dex, +12 natural, -1 size).

Next, we need to determine what the Wendigo's attack should be. The table says a CR 13 monster should have a +22 attack. Thanks to our HD reduction, our weaker Wendigo has already been reduced to this point. So, no further changes necessary. Since the wendigo is a strength-based attacker, we may need to revisit this after looking at its damage output.

Damage is up next. We need an average damage total of 60 to be appropriate for CR 13. We can start by reducing the size category of these weapons (which are already significantly oversized for a large-sized creature). We can also drop its cold damage; going from 4d6 to 3d6 should be a good starting point. This isn't quite enough, so let's use some leeway with the strength score and reduce the modifier.

Taken together, we now have the following attack schema: bite +21 (1d8+8/19-20 plus 3d6 cold), 2 claws +21 (1d6+8/19-20 plus 3d6 cold). This gives us an average of 67 damage if everything hits. This is slightly above-average for damage, but slightly below-average for attack for a CR 13 monster, so this looks good.

Next up is a tough one: ability DC. The baseline Wendigo has DC 28 on its howl and DC 26 on its Wendigo Psychosis. Meanwhile, wind walk and nightmare have DC 23 and 22. The guidelines for a CR 17 monster is DC 24 for primary abilities and DC 18 for secondary abilities, so this monster does not follow guidelines. We'll need to make some logical inferences to find new appropriate values for our weaker Wendigo. A CR 17 monster is supposed to have ability DC's around 24, while a CR 13 monster should have DC's around 21. This means we should probably aim for a 3 point DC reduction.

The formula for abilities DC is 10 + 1/2 hit dice + charisma modifier. The formula for spell-like abiltiies is 10 + spell level + charisma. Reverse-engineering the CR 17 Wendigo shows that it's using spell level 6 for wind walk and 5 for nightmare. Because of our HD drop, the Wendigo has already lost 2 points to its save DC's of its abilities. The question becomes, do we want to reduce its charisma modifier by 1, 2, or even 3 points to bring it down to the new guideline levels? I'm going to go with a 1 point reduction to the modifier. That gives us a DC of 25 for its howl and 23 for its wendigo psychosis, but leaves wind walk and nightmare at DC 22 and 21 respectively. If you want to take them down lower, just drop its charisma a bit.

Finally, we have saving throws. A quick look at the Wendigo's stat block reveals trivially that fortitude and reflex are its strong saves, while will is its weak save. Because we've already pinned down its hit dice, constitution, and dexterity scores we can determine what those new saves are: +17 fortitude and +16 reflex (not counting feats yet - I'm aware the regular Wendigo has lightning reflexes). This is perfect for the CR 13 guideline of +16 for a strong save. However, will save is a bit tricky. The CR 17 version is well below guidelines (has +11 save, should be closer to +15 for a weak save). At CR 13, a weak save should be around +12, but we want to aim a bit low to keep in par with the baseline Wendigo so around +8 is more appropraite. A 2 point wisdom drop, in conjunction with our lower HD cap, does this.

Next, we have skills and feats. Because we dropped from 18 HD to 14 HD, this creature has 2 fewer feats than it would have otherwise. Similarly, its skills are going to be much lower. I'm not going to go through and reverse engineer and recalculate its skills (it looks like it's just got 14 maxed skills, so it should just be a matter of dropping 4 ranks and adjusting for its lower attributes), but for feats we can probably just drop the two most superfluous: persuasive and lightning reflexes.

Finally, we have a sanity check. Does anything here stand out as too strong for CR 13 and need to be toned down? The regeneration and SR stick out like sore thumbs I'm going to slash the regeneration down to 10 from 15, which is roughly the proportion its HP was slashed. For SR, I'm going to bring it down by 4 (the same as we dropped its HD/CR) to 24. Otherwise, this looks like a reasonable monster. Final results:

Wendigo - CR 13
CE large outsider (cold, native)
Init +11; Senses blindisght 60 ft, darkvision 60 ft, low-light vision; perception +21 (presuming max ranks are maintained)

AC 28, touch 16, flat-footed 21 (+7 dex, +12 natural, -1 size)
HP 189(14d10+112); regeneration 10 (fire)
Fort +17, Ref +16, Will +8
DR 15/cold iron and magic; Immune Cold, Fear; SR 24
Weaknesses vulnerability to fire

Speed fly 120 ft. (perfect)
Melee bite +21 (1d8+8/19-20 plus 3d6 cold and grab), 2 claws +21 (1d6+8/19-20 plus 3d6 cold)
Space 10 ft, Reach 10 ft
Special Attacks dream haunting, howl (DC 25), rend (2 claws, 1d6+12 plus 3d6 cold plus 1d4 cha damage), wendigo psychosis (DC 23)
Spell-like Abilities (CL 13th; concentration +19)
At will - wind walk (DC 22)
1/day - control weather (as druid), nightmare (DC 21)

Str 27, Dex 25, Con 27, Int 16, Wis 18, Cha 22
Base Atk +14; CMB +23 (+27 grapple); CMD 40
Feats ability focus (howl), critical focus, flyby attack, improved critical (bite, claws), improved initiative, tiring critical
Skills to do

[Alaryth]

Kelazan wrote:

Add templates or class level to frost giants to increase their CR and create diversity.

You even have a bit of that work done for you on the Monster Codex, with Frost Giant NPCs with CR between 11 and 14, and one with 18.

[RJ Dalton 89]

Huh. Leveling it down. It's funny to think that for as long as I've been playing D&D, I've never actually leveled a monster down. I usually level them up (it's amazing just how much a few class levels extends the relevance of kobolds and goblins). It never occurred to me to level it down.

Anyway, thanks for all the work on that. It will save me a lot of time (and what with me going back to college now, time is not something I have nearly as much of as I used to).

[Cuup]

You can also apply the Young Creature template to the Wendigo to close the gap from the other end.

[The Dragon]

Hmm. If you wind up with a party of 4 ninth-level characters, a CR +6ish is probably appropriate for a single monster final boss encounter where they have all their daily resources up, so you'd be going for 15 there.

If they were level 11 and fully rested, I'd say a party of four people should be able to take it on as a final boss just fine, and might in fact blow through it a little too quickly.

It seems to me that its ability to create multiple wendigos is the biggest challenge involved.

On his own, he's basically just a closet troll. Which can be scary, but, well, if the players have dealt with trolls before while they were level 3, they know how to deal with one of these, no trouble.

[Arturus Caeldhon]

The Baby Wendigo is an interesting idea. Lots of story fodder there, and should bring it closer to your CR.