Tuesday, 2 October 2018

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

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