DMing with Charisma

Today’s monster is special because it doesn’t exist. Or, rather, they don’t exist. They’re not in any rulebook, there’s no official mini for them, and as far as I know they aren’t even in a D&D video game. Because of this I can’t give you a second-paragraph description of the monster and how the designers intend it. Instead we go right into story time.

We like miniatures in our local gaming circle. We’re of the opinion that anything can be a miniature as long as it does the job a miniature does, which is to give a visual reference to everybody at the table. During our campaigns we’ve used action figures as giants, an upside-down glass as a Leever, a crab souvenir as a literal giant enemy crab, and an actual My Little Pony toy as the evil homebrew pony Sprinkle Gore. We especially like stealing miniatures from other games as long as they’re of an appropriate size, and at any given time I’m only a few inches away from springing for the Doom board game and convincing somebody to paint the miniatures so I can run some one-shots. We don’t care what an object’s origin is as long as we can use it.

At once point our FLGS owner liquidated the stock from some defunct miniatures games and essentially dropped several handfuls of weird miniatures in my lap. Some are very close to D&D, like the barbarian wielding a bone club, and some are not, like the screaming pillar made of worms or the most perfect mini for a Super Metroid space pirate you will ever see. Among this pile of strange was a set of the Knight of Autumn Gate minis from Dreamblade, large-sized people in dark armor with flaming swords and grinning pumpkin faces. I love Halloween and just about everything that goes with it, so I immediately set to finding a way to use them.

Boy did I. Those pumpkin-head minis have found their way into just about every campaign I’ve run since. Sometimes they’re just an ogre with a flaming sword, but more often they’re actual pumpkins of some variety. The first time was in the Tower Campaign where each floor of the tower was its own demiplane and the whole thing was curated by a set of, essentially, DMs. We often have an abbreviated player roster during summer months in a college town, and I decided to run a gaiden, a side story concurrent with but separate from the proper plot. In it, the pumpkins were rejected creatures from a Halloween-based floor who wanted to get back at the players who no longer had to fight them. The party fought their way through six of them (well, they fought five and befriended a sixth, because my players consider any plan of mine a challenge to them and they knew forcing me to use the same miniature for both an ally and an enemy at once would cause me physical distress) before making it to the arc villain, which meant I got more leverage out of that mini than I have from most.

Most recently they acted as guards in a prison made of glass and agate. I found a good picture of a tower with a strong Halloween motif, and when I showed it to the players, this exchange occurred:

Me: When you come over the hill, you see this.
Player 1: Neat.
Player 2: But it’s not even Halloween.
Player 3: Why is this a pumpkin tower if it’s not Halloween?
Me: Because I wanted to use the pumpkin minis.
Player 3: Yeah that’s fair.

The lesson here is the same as with the kruthik but stronger (take a much larger sip from that same beverage, which I assume you’ve kept handy for a week). Just as reskinning a creature but keeping the stats works, it works to keep just the look and change all the stats. Heck, that’s basically the entire design philosophy behind our Saturday campaign.

I will admit I’m not the first person to have this idea. Almost ten years ago to the day, Wizards posted an article about adapting Dreamblade minis to D&D, including a picture of the exact miniature I have. It should be noted that the article was published about eight months after Dreamblade came out and about six months before Wizards shut the line down, so I have to assume their motives were not entirely creative.

When I was putting together the campaign setting I’m using now, I wanted to give each race a country. I didn’t want the country of elves to have elves, only elves, and all elves, because that’s not just creatively bankrupt, it’s also very boring. But I did want a physical location that served as a historical and cultural center. Basically, I was going for something not unlike Europe, where Germany is the traditional but not exclusive home of Germans. This analogy helped me because it gave me some footholds to design each country and, more importantly, their accents: elves are French, gnomes are Irish, and so on. But I also thought it was ridiculous that only standard PC races could have countries, and you may recall that I love me some monstrous PCs, so a few of the classically “savage” races got promoted to the same level as humans and dwarves. Though I have ideas for micronations for gnolls or kobolds and the like, only two monstrous races have large established countries: goblinoids and orcs.

Physically, orcs have changed a lot over the years, perhaps more than any other monster. Depending on your edition, an orc could look like a moblin, an uruk-hai, a burly green person, or 4E’s off-duty fashion models. But mentally and societally they’re pretty much the same as they’ve always been. They like power, axes, and fighting, and they hate everybody, but mostly elves and dwarves in that order. Their groups are small and usually based around a leader who gained that position by beating the previous leader in a fight, and they subsist on the things they kill and the things they steal from the bodies.

Obviously this doesn’t much work in an advanced society. There’s no sense behind a nation of wandering tribes who want to kill each other. In order to promote orcs to the same level as PC races, I had to come up with a reason they could work together and a reason they could settle down enough to build cities, both notions antithetical to orcs as we traditionally interpret them. I ended up giving them a country replete with natural resources, so harvesting and selling them was a much safer and more direct path to power and wealth than physically fighting over who got to sit on land they couldn’t fully leverage, and I made churches the main source of power in the land. As a rule orcs usually follow whatever the most orc-like deity in the edition is, and converting that from worship of one god to two or three separate churches worshipping similar but different gods wasn’t that much of a stretch. None of those religions has Gruumsh’s “kill everything you can catch” tenets, and they act as a stabilizing influence to keep the country together. Take those changes and apply them for a few hundred years, and you end up with orcs that still mostly look and act and think like you know, but in a culturally elevated way.

I still had to decide what their real-world inspiration was, and it wasn’t long before I settled on Russian. It fit geographically because I didn’t want them to share any borders with human, elven, or dwarven lands. It fit culturally given the importance of religion in historical Russia, as least as far as I researched it. It fit economically with power, wealth, and population focused more in the west, near the other countries, and less in the east. Perhaps most importantly, it was an accent I could do. With that connection we built it up more and more, keeping in mind the orcish base and the needs of our campaign setting, into the hybrid we have today.

My players have graciously indulged these real-world analogies in our campaign setting. When I first told them orcs were Russian, the response was “yeah, okay, that makes sense”. One of the players even jumped on it, declaring that he was involved in a war against orcs so he could hate them with that strange sort of self-righteousness typical of entrenched racism. I rewarded his contribution with a mini-campaign in which an orc stabbed him with a poisonous blade and his interns had to venture into orc country to chase the assassin before he succumbed to his wounds. He loved it.

I have a reason for liking the minotaur: it’s basic and it’s functional. I have a reason for liking kruthiks: they gave me one of the most epic player stories I have. Almost everything I talk about this month had some application in-game that let to my opinion of it. Today’s monster didn’t. I just thought they looked cool.

Nerras are a race of mirror-people from the rarely-used Plane of Mirrors. They’re smooth, glasslike, almost-featureless humanoids with a ludicrous amount of elemental resistances, laughably inflated level adjustments, and spell resistance that reflects spells back on their caster. They can teleport using reflective surfaces, they have glass weapons, and basically everything they do has “mirror” in it somewhere because culture is hard. They’re supposed to be insistently neutral in alignment, but they tend toward voyeurism, kidnapping, arrogance, and sometimes massive interplanar invasions, so take that with a grain of salt.

They’re also not very good as monsters. Almost every power they have is defensive, including their spell-like abilities, so fighting them is a slog. Their mirror jump lets them flee battles, so pinning them down for an actual fight is difficult. They weird shard weapons, special blades that deal Constitution damage except when players wield them, so battling them has long consequences. They work best as hidden foes subtly working in the background of a campaign, but because of everything above, getting your hands on a nerra for the payoff battle isn’t terribly fun or satisfying.

But I didn’t recognize any of this early in my career, and I like metal and glass things aesthetically, so nerras become one of the recurring threats in my first campaign. Luckily the players tended toward physical damage and had a decent healer on staff, so only the sorcerer was really put out by them. All told they were pretty lackluster, and I doubt my players would even remember they were in the campaign given how little they contributed to the plot.

Except for one. Through actions lost to history, the players managed to befriend a kalareem, a nerra front-line fighter who dual-wields longswords, a laughably bad idea at its level only feasible at all because the game designers made a rules error and allowed it to use Weapon Finesse. Suddenly pressed to give a personality to this random encounter, I named him Charlie Sheen, because “sheen” is a word you could use when discussing mirrors and “sheen” and “kalareem” are half-rhymes. He traveled with the party for the rest of the session, fighting alongside them albeit ineffectively. When they group killed some giant shocker lizards and skinned them to make jackets, they gave one to him as a sign of solidarity. That nerra they remember, but only alongside those jackets.

For sake of comparison, the party consisted of Lucien Taylor, a tailor, Rei Halfly, halfling ray specialist, Gary “Smasher” Stubblefeld, who thought the epithet “Smasher” was especially clever, and Meldran Karameikos, who was named after the kingdom of Karameikos in Mystara even though the character and campaign had nothing to do with Mystara. It was not our finest hour in character naming.

I took an atypical path to tabletop gaming, and I’ll probably talk about that in more detail one day. The first D&D book I ever picked up was the 3.0E Monster Manual, and when I opened it the first monster I saw was this one. I don’t know if that’s why I like them so much, but it couldn’t have hurt.

Minotaurs are half-bull, half-human creatures you’ve probably already heard of, if not from Greek mythology then from playing Tauren in World of Warcraft. Given that original capital-M Minotaur lived in a maze, they typically have some resistance to getting lost or some bonus to determining direction. In every edition I can think of they’re also really good at charging enemies, because that’s what bulls do. Beyond that they’re vanilla, low-level beatsticks.

Most editions go out of their way to not talk about minotaur society. After all, monsters only exist as things to punch on the way to a reward. It doesn’t matter whether they have legends or hobbies or religion, only that they like mazes and they generally charge in the first round of combat. But their simplicity is a lot of what made them viable monstrous PCs. As long as you can wrap your head around Effective Character Level as a concept, you already know everything you need to be a minotaur. There are no weird powers, no strange interactions with spell casting classes, no abilities that require three other books to fully understand. Just a few physical buffs and some Hit Dice. It’s like the Lolth-touched template with legs.

The first monstrous PC I ever saw was a minotaur, but that’s not my story to tell. I can tell you about Kulgrim of the Held Fist, the first NPC in the Unnamed Monster Campaign, where the players were all monstrous PCs. The party was tasked with killing a minotaur who had been terrorizing the locals. When they found that minotaur, he was meditating under a waterfall. After a very short period of confusion, he agreed to help the players kill the real culprits, and that set the stage for an entire campaign about being the good guys when you look like the bad guys.

I think the players liked him for the limited amount of time he appeared on screen, though he didn’t leave a strong impression, and that was the point. A minotaur monk wasn’t supposed to be a unique, weird thing. It was supposed to be normal, and to redefine “normal” in the context of the campaign. The players mostly remember him for being a skeleton (he wasn’t, but that was the only minotaur miniature I had at the time), and for this exchange:

DM: You see a minotaur meditating under a waterfall. He opens his eyes as you arrive and greets you.
Player: Spot check for a weapon in the minotaur’s pants!
DM: Um.
Other players: Um
Other people passing by: Um.
Player: No wait stop. I want to see if he’s hiding something. Because the pants are wet, right? So they cling.
DM: Um.
Player: Never mind.

Weirdly, the edition where minotaurs get the most character is the official edition of ignoring fluff text, 4E:

However, many minotaurs are civilized and cultured. These minotaurs are smaller than their savage kin, and they gather in settlements of all sizes.

This is a nod to the appendix at the end of the book, which had minotaurs as a playable race. They wouldn’t really be part of the system until Player’s Handbook 3, but even the Core books said “look, not every monster is…well, monstrous.” I just wish it wasn’t tucked away in the lore section of a monster so common few think to read its lore at all.

I really like monster templates. I love taking a creature the players know and putting a twist on it so they understand part of what’s going on but not all of it, like making a regular gorilla into a savage, ice-breathing yeti. Templates also let you pull multiple monsters into the same theme; if you want to fight shadow enemies, you can use the published ones, or you can use the umbral template to make shadow ogres, dogs, slimes, and things like that. I’m a little sad that Pathfinder doesn’t use templates as much as 3E did, though I think my favorite application of them was in 4E, where you could give a monster a template without changing their CR and often without changing much at all, adding flavor while keeping the core creature intact. It’s basically the game helping you reskin a monster into something fun. I wanted to show off one of those templates, but I think the one out of which I’ve gotten the most mileage is from 3E, so it’s the best story.

Lolth-Touched creatures are people and monsters given power by Lolth, goddess of drow and spiders and best friend to every author who couldn’t think of a more interesting villain in Faerûn. Her blessing makes them better in melee (curious for a deity whose favored race hates melee combat, but whatever), gives them a few cute but mostly trivial buffs, and makes them evil. Because it’s a template, there’s not a lot of additional story here. Lolth like thing, thing get stronger.

When I first read the template, my first thought was “this is really useful, but it’s too bad it’s bound to Lolth.” The Monster Manual 4 came out while I was playing World of Warcraft and I’d been looking for a way to make monsters rare or elite*. This seemed to fit the bill, giving monsters more hit points and making them better able to resist ailments and effective save-or-die effects like grappling or fear, but it was tied to a specific god I didn’t much like. But my second thought was “why is this bound to Lolth, again? In fact, why can’t I use it for literally everything?” Take a look at what it does:

• Only works on living, corporeal creatures. Why, though? Is it because there’s a Constitution bonus? Then just say “Creatures with no Constitution don’t get the Constitution bonus”. It’s not like Lolth has a particular hatred for ghosts or golems. We can safely ignore this.
• Only works on nongood, nonlawful creatures; makes the creature chaotic evil. This is tied to Lolth, but it’s largely inconsequential. You could just as easily make it a Moradin-touched template and have it only work on nonevil, nonchaotic creatures. And if you use alignment as little as I do, it’s completely irrelevant. We can safely change it or ignore it altogether.
• +6 Strength. This is the most mechanically impressive part of the template because +3 to attack and +1 to +5 damage is nothing to sneeze at. But it’s not Lolth-specific.
• +6 Constitution. This is the part I like the most because it makes the monster survive longer and has almost no other effect. But it’s not Lolth-specific.
• +4 to Hide and Move Silently checks. You could probably make this any two skills, or any one if you’re in a edition that combines Hide and Move Silently into Stealth. No one skill breaks the game, so it depends on what you want the creature to be. We can safely change this.
• Immune to fear. This has no effect in many parties and little effect in most of the rest. It’s mostly there for flavor. But it’s not Lolth-specific.
• +1 CR. Yeah, okay, that seems fair.

Nothing about this template is meaningfully, irrevocably proprietary to Lolth. I’ve used it several times for Kord-touched, or dragon-touched, or France-touched creatures before, and it works exactly as well (take a drink). It gives the players pause, challenges them, and makes a monster special regardless of the words you use to describe it. Calling it “Lolth-touched” seems as empty as putting “original character, do not steal” on it and has exactly as much weight.

* — I never found a great published solution for this in 3E, so I’ve settled on “give them maximum hit points and up the CR by one.” 4E had the Elite and Solo mechanics, which did this quickly and cleanly, and I like that. Pathfinder’s solution is “Meh, what does CR even mean, anyway? Just use an overpowered monster, you’ll be fine.” I prefer my own.

Monsters work their way into our hearts in tons of ways. Some have art that grabs you immediately, some fill a niche you need in a campaign, some fight players in epic battles, and some have a tiny throwaway line in their monster entry that justifies the whole thing. But even with all that, I think these monsters made it to the list somewhat uniquely.

Kruthiks are reptiles, but you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re insects or weird chitinous dogs with spider legs. They best analogy I have is that they’re low-level Zergs. They happen in swarms, they’re startlingly fast, they can burrow, and the bigger ones even spit acid. I think they were first published in the catch-all Minatures Handbook, which seemed to contain monsters and classes Wizards wanted to make into miniatures but couldn’t because they hadn’t published them yet. They were justifiably forgettable until they were included in the 4E Monster Manual, where they got a little bit of lore that made them acceptable minions for a low-level villain or antagonists in a short adventure.

I didn’t care about kruthiks, at all. They didn’t seem fun, they didn’t seem unique, and I played Protoss anyway. I did collect D&D’s randomized miniatures, and while I didn’t want kruthiks I could use them as stand-ins for other things. One day I looked at my collection and realized I had six small kruthiks, three medium ones, and a large. I figured I might as well do something with them. At that time my campaign was already nearing epic levels, so the bottom-tier kruthiks didn’t appeal to me. But I could take how they looked, strip out the stat block, and use them an inspiration for something decent (so take a drink of a different beverage, I guess).

Scientivores were creatures that ate knowledge, in the same way that herbivores eat herbs and carnivores eat carnivals meat. I don’t know why I settled on scientivore instead of cognotivores or librivores, but that’s not important. The players met them in a demiplane made entirely of library, and the scientivores were slowly consuming the entire dimension. Unlike most monsters they weren’t a threat to the players or their allies directly, but defeating them was the mission the party had to accomplish, and nobody wanted to find out what would happen if they ate all the books and realized there was information in brains too.

They worked well, not least because of 4E’s excellent minion mechanic. They could swarm the party while still being a threat in a way monsters normally can’t. The first time they attacked, the players got a map of the area and five rounds’ warning so they could shore up and build their defense. The scientivores smashed open doors, burrowed through walls, and worked the party into a corner before reinforcements arrived (which, in retrospect, may have included Eligio). After the party fought them off, they developed a plan to destroy the entire hive at once, and that’s how we got this story.

The way they fell is still one of our favorite stories, but that only worked because they were viable enemies even before they first came onto camera. I still didn’t run a kruthik proper, and I probably never will, but without the creature and its miniatures we might not have had a library at all, and I’m pretty sure that ended up being one of my players’ favorite floors in that campaign.

Let’s compliment a story about a creature I made from scratch with a story about a creature I used exactly from the book. Exactly.

The grodair has a few similarities to the death slaad. They’re both owned by their respective companies, they’re both weirdly extraplanar but tend to hang out on the Material Plane, and my spellcheck hates both with a burning passion. But the grodair is significantly lower-level. It’s a tentacle-fish that can absorb water and release it at some opportune later time, allowing it to make a small home wherever it wants or slightly inconvenience opponents by making the ground muddy. It’s not actually that interesting in combat, but it does have this gem in its creature description:

A grodair is intelligent, but extremely absentminded and careless. Its memory is poor, and it has difficulty remembering things it was told even 5 minutes prior—though it can recall some events of the distant past with perfect (and often frustrating) clarity.

I introduced a grodair named Pechora to my players during their ocean-traveling campaign, where an NPC warily described it as a fish he knew who could act as a guide. The players assumed it was going to be like the map fish from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Instead they got conversations like this:

Player: Alright, we need to find the cave where the monster is hiding. Pechora, do you know about the cave?
Grodair: What cave?
Player: The one where the monster is.
Grodair: What monster?
Player: The demon we’re tracking.
Grodair: What about it?
Player: Where is it hiding?
Grodair: Where is what hiding?
Player: Pechora. Do you know about the cave at which we can find the monster who has been attacking boats?
Grodair: Yes. We had a conversation at his cave one hundred twenty years ago, on a sunny Thursday.
Player: Great, finally. Where is it?
Grodair: Where’s what?

I’d like to say this taught my players a valuable lesson about asking the questions to which they want answers instead of asking something similar and assuming other people understand their meaning, but that’s not even a little true. It also did not teach the players not to go to the grodair for help. Because they spent the campaign apart from any sort of information network and without a means to call for help, I gave them an NPC sage who could answer questions about monsters for them. Because the NPC was helpful, they immediately assumed it was an enemy plant, even though they didn’t assume that about anybody else who was assisting them. Instead they opted to deal with the insufferable fish rather than the NPC who wanted to help because the fish was exactly frustrating enough to be trustworthy.

I mean, at the time, they were right, and the sage was an enemy plant. But the myth arc has since changed, and I retconned the NPC into a decent and upstanding guy, so who’s unreasonable now?

The moral of the story is that any one element of a monster, taken up to eleven, can make it memorable. It’s kind of the inverse of the death slaad, where one trait turned down to zero does the same thing. The grodair’s combat stats were completely irrelevant, and it could have been literally any person or creature with the same trait (take a drink). All that mattered was the little seed of “long-lived, absent-minded eidetic” to give the players an ally they regretted for years to come.