Ice and Steam (a 5e Encounter)

Haven't shared much of my current 5e campaign's content, mainly because my notes consist of random scribblings and d6 tables written on the way to each session. That's about as much as I prep these days.

Last session though, I had occasion to design an Actual Tactical Combat Encounter. Grid map and everything! Again, just something I made up on the fly an hour before the game started, but I like it and I reckon there are bits here you lovely folk might be able to steal.

References to my campaign's setting are for my own amusement, you may obviously adapt them to your liking


Ice and Steam - a 5e Encounter for characters of roughly Level 3

The players can enter the cave from the south on their way through the Ice Path. It would provide a good shelter from bandits or a sudden blizzard, and if they are searching for something on this route then they will likely want to check it anyway.

Heck, they're D&D players. It's a cave. They'll want to go in.

forgive the scribbles, and the photography. i am a Writer

The snowdrift comes into the cave entrance a few feet, then stops. The inside is still bitter cold (creatures not used to cold or dressed appropriately* must save vs exhaustion every hour in this weather). A rocky outcropping part-blocks the path before the cavern opens up.

The ceiling is about 10ft up and covered in icicles. The floor is frosty, except for under the red pipe that emerges from the cave wall, about 3ft off the ground, and continues to the far end, disappearing once more into the rock.

There are patches of ice (difficult terrain) on the floor (that's what those shaded bits are supposed to be).

The pipe is red not through paint or the type of metal, but the superheated steam within. (Travellers from Arcadia Pits will know this, having seen the pipe's origin in the second reservoir.) Contact with the pipe causes 2d4 fire damage per round. It's high enough off the ground that a gnome could walk under, but anyone taller would have to roll acrobatics to duck or roll as they move. There's also enough space above the pipe to move freely over it.

The two northern tunnels lead to eisengor nests. The left one has a further hole at the back that leads up and out of the cave.

The big tunnel opening to the left is an ice slide almost 100ft long that descends into a lower cavern Here is the frozen body of the man the party was tasked with finding, Nabokov.


Eisengor

Inside the main cave are 1d4 eisengor. The rest are nesting in the top-left or top-right caverns, and will come if another eisengor flees to fetch them. (Total no. of monsters is whatever you deem appropriate to the number of party members - I went with 4 apiece which was challenging but very doable.)

Picture the monsters from Attack the Block, but reverse the colours (white fur, black teeth), and scale them up by like 3 times. Big ol' yeti-gorilla boys. Their arms are longer and more muscular than their short legs, and their hands are huge, padded and clawed, with opposable thumbs. They know the pipe is hot and are smart enough to avoid it.

Medium creature
Alignment: is an artefact of a single D&D campaign and has no inherent bearing on the modern game
AC 14, HP 32, Movement 50ft
High Str, decent Wis - use Lion stats from the PHB if you need them for saves etc
CR: is nonsense
XP: not today, Satan

Attacks
Claw: +5 to hit,  melee, 1d6+3 damage
Bite: +5 to hit, melee, 1d8+3 damage
Icicle Throw: +3 to hit, 15ft range, 1d10 damage, DC 13 dex save vs being knocked prone.

Abilities
Multiattack: 2 attacks on its turn
Charge: If an eisengor uses at least 20ft of movement and then attacks, the target makes a DC 13 Strength save on a hit. If they fail they are knocked prone.
Savage: may use a free action to make a Bite attack against a prone enemy once per turn
Grasping Claws: If an eisengor makes two claw attacks against the same target in a turn and they both hit, the target must make a DC 13 Strength save or become restrained. While an eisengor has a target restrained it cannot use its claw attacks, but all Bite attacks are instant criticals and deal d10 damage
Ice Climber: An eisengor can use icicles or other cave features to hang and swing, monkey-like. They ignore terrain and obstacles below them while swinging. (As long as they are about 10ft up or less they're still in melee range because they're so big, but the space right under them is considered usable by other creatures if it's empty.)



*appropriate dress varies... the ogres up-mountain seem to be content with scraps of fur, while if a human came here without a dose of sun oil they'd freeze in an instant. The wrestler Icarus Armageddon, known to his friends as Odeir, doesn't seem to feel the cold either...

The Monster is Three Things

For the sake of example, this monster is old, sad and hungry.

Behind your screen or in your book, note these and nothing else. Beyond this, there is no monster.

Do not describe the monster other than through what it is; if the players ask about its size, for instance, speak only of how it has withered through age or starvation, or grown with its insatiable appetite. If they wonder about its appearance, consider the effects of its mood or its long life on its colour and form.

Your players may ask what it is - you only tell them it is old, sad and hungry. "No", they say, "what, it must be something", and list names of monsters they know, guessing. Their guess is as good as yours. All you know is the truth; it is three things. Anything they guess that does not contradict the truth may as well be treated as accurate, if only for the sake of manufacturing shared understanding.

If your game uses stats for monsters, avoid them, unless they manifest its oldness, sadness or hungriness directly within the rules. You will get by fine without your numbers; you have the truth of the thing.

An image will form. Do not dispel it.

Then, move on. They will never see this monster again.

The Unofficial Bestiary

I haven't done a monster list on here yet, have I? Here are some of the monsters I've made up for my games. You may recognise names or descriptions from previous posts.

There aren't stats because:
- I run them in systems where monsters don't need stat blocks, like Graverobbers
- I run them in systems like T&T where monster stats take about a second to come up with
- I run them in 5e or OSR games where there are great monster manuals I can recycle stats from

Having said that, some of these are statted up for 5th edition with all kinds of cool powers in the Graverobber's Guide to Slimes, which is a free download on my Gumroad store.

the order might seem arbitrary, but it's basically in order of HD/Challenge Rating/fuck-you-up-ness

ne’er-do-wells

Spirits that wear long robes, concealing wicked grins. They disturb resting-places, or anything neatly ordered and organised.

bungles
Animated bags with little feet. They love to steal things and fill themselves up, but the extra weight makes it hard for them to escape unnoticed.

cave crabs
Crustaceans with rocky shells. They inadvertently scratch walls and leave fragments as they clumsily stumble around. Their rock quickly crumbles to mildly explosive sand once removed.

padtrolls
Little bulbous frog-things with two legs, a mouth and not much else. They are the intermediary stage between trollspawn and a fully grown adult troll.

vulture dogs
Hunting hounds with skinless faces and hollow eyes. They can teleport short distances and hunt in packs. They can eat meat or blood, however old or rotten.

pockles
Dwarfish critters, one for every day of the week. They delight in killing, each preferring a different weapon to his brothers. Disarming them causes a tantrum of confusion.

clotlings
Scabby, blobby oozes of blood. They carry the skull from their previous life as a shield. Sometimes they have ribs and organs that they throw, or a brain that makes them weirdly smart.

yammiks
Dark holes in the air; the shapes of tall, robed figures cut out of reality. They fling magic and scream at the living, flitting about at great speed but unable to leave the ground.

dog-headed men
As described. Muscular and determined, they never bark. Often used as thralls by some higher power, they are incapable of interesting ideas themselves.

charnel-boys
Pallid undead halflings, they despise attention and would much prefer to silently burgle sacred sites and loot corpses.

sandbarons
Hollow folks filled with sandstorms that spill out of them below the waist. Fighting them risks freeing yet more sand and strengthening their attacks, but when all the sand is out they die.

sarcophages
Giant stone coffins that open by splitting down the middle. The huge skeleton inside holds each half and uses them as weapons and shields.

nobodies
Humanoid, with blank white masks. Silent, mobile and strong, summoned to exact death. They move like something much quicker has been given a human body and is making the best of it.

moon maidens
Diaphanous figures from the astral sea. They sing in voices like wind from the void, are bitterly cold to the touch, and consume lightning.

ossilisks
Huge and writhing beasts of bone. They turn their foes into the same with eye-beams and then consume them to add to their mass.

hermit slimes
Invertebrates that use discarded armour as their shells. They favour magic armour, and often try to move into a new home before its current occupant is fully deceased.

seahorse cavalry
Little critters whose mounts can hover on land as well as swim. They do everything in groups and corral slimes as underlings.

goo girls
Slimes that assume the appearance of women. They aren’t generally evil.

scorpion women
Skilled infiltrators. Highly venomous, their insatiable greed most often betrays their inhumanity.

the boogeyman
He can eat anything at all, so long as it’s been lost. Crunch, munch, crunch, munch, here comes the boogeyman!

"classic" monsters I like to use fairly often:

skeletons, oozes, mimics, dinosaurs, mermaids

On Mermaids, Hashtag Mermay

So a bunch of artists on Twitter (and, I presume, your social media platform of choice) are doing a thing. It's been a thing for a few years now I think? Anyway, in the month of May, they draw mermaids.

I found all the art in this post from artists I follow and by searching the hashtag. Check em out and hire em for stuff.

Mermaids are also great for fantasy games. Here's the how and why.

Soundtrack for this post.

art by @pkyrachu

There are two types of mermaid; not in historical mythology, just in current fantasy art and media, as observed by me.

The first type is the classic, storybook - even, Disney - mermaid. Top half pretty naked lady or, less commonly, man, and bottom half big ol' fish. (Side note: as far as we can tell, mermen predate mermaids. Huh.)

The second type incorporates the fishiness throughout. Blue scale-like skin, fin-ears, kelp hair, even barracuda teeth or, god forbid, gills.

Before we get into things, it would be remiss of me to not mention the fantastic Kiel Chenier's upcoming Weird on the Waves pirate setting kit, in which mermaids are a playable race. He's teased the variants: top half fish, or left half fish, or one where the fish bits are all inside. Can't wait for that.

(I guess I'll tag him here so people can find his stuff? I still have zero idea how or why Google Plus is a thing, but I think this'll do it? +KielChenier )

Let's talk about the first one first.

art by @anamericanghost

These mermaids are perfect for your fantasy game. If you describe a skeleton floating blobbily in a square mass, that one player who's read the monster manual or been playing for 30 years is gonna go "Oh! It's a gelatinous cube!", to dumbfounded expressions from the rest of your group.

If you describe a naked woman coming out of the water, her lower half hidden beneath the waves, everyone's gonna be thinking the same thing. And when you describe her long, elegant tail flipping lazily in and out of the water, everyone's gonna be on the same page. Everyone knows what mermaids are. They share a prized place with dragons and unicorns as being seeped into the cultural consciousness of not just modern western civilisation, but pretty much the whole dang planet.

But while dragons are for killing, or avoiding, or maybe talking to but then at some point killing, and unicorns are for... I dunno, riding? Unicorns are boring. Anyway, these "type one" mermaids send out a pretty clear signal, unlike almost every other fantasy monster, that you can just talk to them. For us running our OSR games, this is a godsend. Yeah, it's a monster on a random encounter, but this monster is... nice. She's smiling, she's happy to help. Anyone's first port of call is going to be at least attempting communication.

And from there, mermaids can open up your world in other ways. Half of her's up here, sure, but half of here is very much from... down there. What you get is instant worldbuilding, the implication that at the very least there's a coral castle or a sunken fortress or a clan of merrily singing fishladies on a rock somewhere nearby.

An interaction with a monster that everyone instantly understands, that encourages communication and that, even in passing, fleshes out your world? As far as OSR play goes, that's a fucking win.

And sure, maybe they drown sailors for fun, that bit's up to you.

art by @andrewkmar

The "type two" mermaids then. The monsters.

Under the sea is weird. We know this. There are things down there that are more otherworldly than any sci fi movie's alien imaginings. These mermaids generally do a crappy-to-passable job of translating that otherness, but there's certainly untapped potential in the depths.

The problem here is, that if you want to go weird, there are better options than mermaids. The recognisable factor that makes the type-ones work so well puts you at a disadvantage here. It's like Cthulu: once a cosmic nightmare, vast and potent beyond our primate understanding, now a plushie you can get on a million Etsy stores, and the mascot for every other nerd-culture card game Kickstarter.

What these mermaids do best is in translating as animals, as beasts. I haven't played The Witcher III, but I've watched my girlfriend play it enough to know it's pretty great, and very Dungeons and Dragons. I once saw her rowing a little boat around the game's Viking-world analogue, when sirens attacked. I think that's what they're called in the game; in any case, sirens and mermaids have been conflated into mostly the same thing since forever.

These were no seashell bra-clad maidens, nor were they deep sea aliens. These were proper monsters. They were big, like sharks, and they tore into the boat as much as they did lovably gruff protagonist Geralt (I call him Jerry). We weren't knights on a quest, hearing the perilous siren's call, and we hadn't stumbled into anyone's non-euclidean eldritch domain. They were predators, and we were in their territory.

They weren't unknowable creatures from depths hitherto untravelled, or beautiful yet deadly temptresses. There are talking monsters in the Witcher, and fairytale stuff, but these just kinda... screamed. It was awesome. Sure they were vaguely human shaped, but the uncanny valley didn't even factor into it.

That's how you make type two mermaids work. Wait until the players are splashing around Amity Beach, and then let em loose. I'm not generally a fan of the whole "this monster is just an animal in its ecosystem, here's how it functions biologically" vibe, but as with my previous foray into trolls, sometimes it just works.

art by @hairytentacles

So there you go, some thoughts on mermaids. I think they're often overlooked, but worth your time.

They also feature in the setting of my current home game, and I'm trying to collate my notes into something playable so that I can share it. I'll likely slap on some art and a hexmap and call it a module. Stay tuned for news on when and how you can get it, probably in a couple of months.

There's a whole lot more than mermaids going on in my little setting, and you could certainly run a campaign without bumping into one. All I'll say is that I've managed to work both the "type one" and "type two" mermaids in there, and it's working very nicely.

It's pretty simple actually. Freshwater and saltwater.

The Wyrmling Hive (a Level One adventure)

There has been an outbreak of thefts in town since winter ended. Victims report only gold coins and other gilt objects stolen.

Ohannes Quent, local scholar of magical creatures, or any player character knowledgeable in such matters, will suspect this to be the work of kobolds.

Kobolds

The kobold life cycle is an odd one. A single female dragon makes a lair in a cave, and lays a thousand eggs without the need for a mate. These do not hatch into dragons, but rather wyrmlings, the larval stage of the kobold. Only one egg will produce an heiress, and that solid gold egg will be lain only when the dragon has eaten her weight in gold.

Kobolds - all male, except for the stronger, winged females - are sterile worker drones. They are weak and cowardly but incredibly cunning, and are tasked with bringing gold back to the lair for their queen to consume. They also nibble the odd coin themselves and vomit up an ambergris that feeds the wyrmling young.

The Caves

The lair is in a hillside cavern beyond the town border. Hexagonal cave rooms have been hewn out and are maintained by the kobolds. In the depths, the fat dragon queen slowly makes her way through a pile of treasure.

There is an armoury of scavenged weapons, a few sleeping chambers, a mess hall littered with the bones of livestock, and a small stash of non-golden spoils. Deeper still is a nursery with hexagonal nooks carved all up the walls, each containing a single pale, larval wyrmling. They will wail if disturbed and can be placated only with kobold vomit.

The dragon's lair is a natural cave strewn with golden coins and trinkets. The dragon lays eggs and eats. One month from now she will have eaten enough gold to lay her dragon egg, and she and the winged kobolds will fly out in search of a lair to place it in. She nurses the baby dragon with royal jelly that she excretes when brooding. Kobolds bottle it up for when baby gets hungry - it also functions as a healing potion.

More Adventure Hooks (1d6):

1: The kobolds took a holy relic from the town temple, the priests want it back.
2: The kobolds stole a baby, her fathers want her back.
3: The dragon just left her egg in a nearby cave, get in there and steal it while she’s away.
4: One of the kobolds stole a cursed helmet possessed by a lich’s spirit, he will incite uprising.
5: The town is small and defenceless; the kobolds feel no need to be sneaky. A siege!
6: The players play kobolds for this session.

Variant Kobolds:

The males each have a stinger – they can use it once but then they die. They’re really scared about that part, so they probably won’t do it unless the queen is in danger. 2d6 poison damage and a minute of crazed hallucinations.

On the Life Cycle of Trolls

D&D trolls are odd. They have a lot of specific powers and weaknesses, distinct from what most people call “trolls” in modern fantasy stories or folklore. To me, all that weirdness makes a lot more sense when you think of them as amphibians.

(I’m normally against weirdness making sense, but this fits too well in my world not to use it.)

Here’s how trolls work in my game.

trollspawn

Around springtime, standing pools of water, from swamps to bogs to forest pools, become host to the larval stage of the troll. Hundreds of tiny hatchling trolls are held together in a blobby, gelatinous mass, lain by the female and then fertilised at a later date by a wandering male (breeding pairs of trolls seldom meet, and such meetings often end in the male being eaten).

Adventurers who may have business in swamps and fens should avoid these spawning grounds, as mother trolls return to the site intermittently to check on their young and dispatch intruders. The more still and stagnant a pool, the more likely it is to be habitable to trollspawn. Also look for the presence of paddlescum, a rank-smelling algae that provides nutrition for troll hatchlings.

padtrolls

Invariably, as they grow, troll hatchlings will exhaust their immediate food sources and turn on their fellow offspring. By this point in the life cycle the mother has abandoned the nest and left the young to fend for themselves. The most aggressive are able to consume the rest and begin the next stage of their life cycle.

Padtrolls grow two small legs to support their swollen, frog-like bodies, and sharp teeth to aid in taking down and eating prey. They can leave the pool in search of food, but must return regularly to keep their skin moist. A padtroll can seemingly stay in this state for many years, until they eat enough to spur the next growth stage.

trolls

Trolls occur when a padtroll consumes an amount exceeding their body weight in a small space of time. There is also thought to be a necessity for ambient magic to spur this process, as a grown troll adult gains a more humanoid appearance and the capacity for speech. Bridges are common troll territory, as they provide a wet climate, shelter, and the natural mana concentration found in crossing-places.

Adult trolls retain many amphibian traits, such as the ability to regrow lost appendages, and an aversion to heat and dryness. These are even more prominent in the adult stage, with reports of troll heads staying alive when fully detached from their bodies, and a seemingly innate fear of fire.

grandtrolls

The fact that trolls still have the ability to regenerate their limbs has led some scholars to believe that their form is still unsettled and thus immature, meaning that the troll is not the final growth stage.

Sightings of the supposed mature troll, or “grandtroll”, remain unconfirmed, though this may be due to the fact that adventurers sent to find it and retrieve a sample wind up dead.