Monster Monday: Vampiric Creature Template

For today's Monster Monday, we have the vampiric creature template. No gothic horror campaign is complete without howling wolves and blood-sucking vampires. If you're pressed for time, why not combine the two? With the vampiric creature template, you can grant the most terrible of beasts the abilities of the mighty and mysterious vampires, from vampiric cats to vampiric dragons. The possibilities are nearly endless!

Presented below, along with the vampiric creature template, you will find example stat blocks for a vampiric wolf and a vampiric saber-toothed tiger. Imagine a vampiric chimaera with three fanged maws. Think of the implications of a vampiric elephant - would it suck blood through its tusks? (yes). 

As Halloween approaches, d20 Despot will continue to post seasonally appropriate monsters. You might want to stock up on ammunition and board up your house before next week's monsters arrive en masse to claw at your door.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Yara-Ma-Yha-Who - He Eats You When You're Sleeping

"Get up, young lazybones! Do not sleep under the fig tree! Did I not tell you who lives up there? I didn't? Well, I'm telling you now, so listen up and listen good! You want to grow up big and tall, right? Then don't do what I did. 

   "I used to be tall when I was younger. Taller than your father, in fact. Don't laugh, it's true. But I was lazy, like you, and I often stole away to nap in the shade of the fig tree instead of helping with the work. One day I woke up from my nap and found my skin had grown redder. I thought it was a sunburn, but it could not have been. See, even my back was redder! And when I went home, my mother thought I was shorter. And I had these round wounds on my neck. Father thought they were bug bites, but they were not from any bug we knew.

   "It was a long while before I fell asleep under the fig trees again. The next time I did, I woke up even redder and even shorter than before! I was even shorter than my old mum now! Well, I did not want this to happen again, but I did want to know what had done it to me, so I came up with a plan.

   "One day, when the sun was high in the sky, I went to the fig grove and pretended to sleep. I waited and waited, and sure enough, something came down out of the tree. It wasn't a bug, it was a little man - yea high - and bright red all over. He had a big head like an overripe fig, and a big mouth, and suckers on his fingers and toes like the suckers of the octopi we see at the beach. It came down the tree head-first, and as it opened its mouth to swallow me up, I leapt to grab it. I brought a sack with me, and I tried to wrestle it into the sack so that I could bring it back to the village to show everyone. But it escaped and ran up the tree and out of sight.

   "I think if it had swallowed me one more time, I would be just as short and just as red as it was. Think, I might even have turned into one myself! Do you wonder, now, why an old man like me is always going about his work, even in the hot sun? And why you never catch me napping here in the shade? It could happen to you too, boy! So get off your lazy butt and get back to work!"

Today's Monster Monday is the yara-ma-yha-who, a strange creature from Aboriginal Australian mythology. The yara-ma-yha-who is a short man with bright red skin, a round, oversized head, and sucker-tipped fingers and toes. It preys on victims who fall asleep under its tree, draining blood with its suckers and swallowing its victims whole. It does not eat those whom it swallows, though. It regurgitates them, leaving them redder and shorter than before. If an individual is swallowed and regurgitated enough times by a yara, it becomes one!

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2017 Jonah Bomgaars.

3 Undead Monsters More Deserving of Cultural Ubiquity than Zombies and Vampires

The Walking Dead - AMC, via A Geek Saga; Twilight - Summit Entertainment, via twilightsaga.wikia 

Modern pop culture is obsessed with the undead.  People on the bus are reading books about zombies and vampires.  Cinemas are playing movies about zombies and vampires.  The video game market is flooded with... um... zombies and vampires.  You can see where this is going.  Looking at our pop-culture, you'd think that there were only two types of undead monsters: the shambling, mindless, brain-eating kind and the immortal, blood-sucking, inexplicably effeminate kind.

Don't get me wrong; zombies and vampires can be very cool if used correctly and in moderation.  But what we have in our culture right now is an oversaturation.  Zombies and vampires are getting played out, and I'm pretty tired of them.  This jumbled graph - which I painstakingly assembled with my own two hands, Wikipedia, and Microsoft Excel - shows that, while vampires and zombies still remain popular, they might be on the decline.  I think that the general public may be slowly growing tired of these undead as well.

I tried counting up all the vampire books, too, but soon realized that it would be an impossible task.
Damn Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer.  

So what undead horrors are worthy of stepping into the cultural spotlight and filling the gaps left by vamps and zombs?  I've got a few ideas: