Monster Monday: Calaca, the Lively Dead

Today's Monster Monday is the calaca - or calavera - a skeletal undead creature that eschews the traditional shambling and menacing of its undead brethren in favor of just, like, living its unlife. A calaca retains most of the personality it had in life and - unlike other undead - doesn't turn evil!

Calacas come from cultures that have a more positive outlook on death, where death is just an excuse to celebrate a life well-lived. These unique undead creatures reside most of the year in the Boneyard - the purgatorial realm of the psychopomps who usher dead souls to their eternal rests. Calacas are sustained by the memories of their living friends and relatives, and as time goes on they become more exaggerated representations of their living selves, sometimes verging on parody. Calacas can be summoned to the material plane at places to which they had strong attachments in life, or by remembrance rituals performed by the living.

© Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Calacas/calaveras are strongly associated with the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos in Mexico, Día de los Muertos in the US), a holiday which blends Catholicism with native Mexican traditions regarding the dead. They have deep roots going back to the gods and ceremonies of pre-conquest Mesoamerica, but the modern calavera can be traced back to José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican engraver whose satirical pictures of skeletons acting like the living poked fun at contemporary Mexican society and politics. His most famous calavera - La Calavera Catrina - was a laughing skeleton dressed in the finery of an upper class Mexican woman, a caricature that Posada used to criticize Mexican women who rejected their indigenous roots by adopting European fashions and whitening their skin. Through subsequent decades of folk art, Catrina evolved and became closely associated with Día de Muertos, but always remained at her core a way for the dead to poke fun at the living.

Calavera de la Catrina - José Guadalupe Posada (c. 1910), via Wikimedia

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

Monster Monday: Skeleton Troop - Bones and Bows

Today's Monster Monday is the skeleton troop, a battalion of fleshless undead fighters armed with bows and bones. Now it's no secret that I'm a huge fan of skeletons. When I put those plot hook and encounter ideas down below each Monster Monday, once of them by default should be "The party encounters a skeletal version of this monster".

Scene from Jason and the Argonauts (1963) Colombia Pictures via Gamers and Grognards

The lowly skeleton archer has been the bane of many a beginning adventurer. It can shoot at you, but your retaliatory arrows are just going to pass through its ribs. Skeleton archers have been an enduring menace through every edition of D&D and similar games, but at high levels it can be hard to threaten the party with them. You either need a lot of them, or you need to stat up some skeletal champions that specialize in ranged combat. But, as we saw last week with the zombie horde, the 'troop' subtype is our friend. Now you can bring a whole bunch of skeletal archers to the table, but they all act as one monster, thus simplifying your job as GM without sacrificing the dangerous combat for your players.
The stat block for the skeleton troop below can fire mass volleys of arrows that deal automatic damage to anyone in their path, and with their troop attack they rip at any enemy that comes within melee range with their bony claws.

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

Monster Monday: Zombie Horde

Today's Monster Monday is the zombie horde, a crushing mob of dozens of shambling undead, their insatiable hunger driving them inexorably onward. Zombies are nothing new in Pathfinder or D&D in general, but if you want to run a fight against a lot of them at once (as I'm sure you do), it can get pretty darn tedious to manage twenty-or-so individual low-level monsters. That's where troops come in.

The troop subtype is one of the best recent(ish) innovation that the Pathfinder RPG brings to the table. It basically functions as a swarm, but of larger and more intelligent creatures - a dozen individual monsters run as one big monster with a shared pool of hit points and an auto-hit swarm-like attack which ensures even low-level fighters can be deadly in large numbers. This allows the GM to run combats against veritable armies of men without getting bogged down keeping track of each individual soldier's attacks and hit points and whatnot, a task which I know from experience soon turns into the GM rolling bucketloads of dice and muttering to themself, robbing the encounter of its momentum and excitement. Currently the selection of available troops is limited to living humanoids organized for battle, but the troop subtype is much more versatile than that.

Night of the Living Dead movie poster, via Wikimedia

This stat block includes a number of special abilities to simulate our cinematic expectations of zombie hordes. Like individual zombies, the horde is staggered - able to take only one action per turn - but once the horde catches up to you it becomes a lot deadlier. The horde's troop attack does an extra d6 of damage to opponents it shares a space with. It also has improved grapple and the constrict special attack, which means it can grab and do ongoing damage to individual opponents that it overwhelms. Finally, once the mob slays an opponent, they take some time to devour them, destroying the body and regaining some health in the process. While D&D and Pathfinder zombies don't by default have the Romero ability to turn the living into more zombies, this 'devour' ability could easily simulate the conversion and addition of the defeated opponent to the zombie lifestyle.

Next week's Halloweenish monster will be another troop, but of a different sort of classic undead monster.

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

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: Giant Harvestman - The Daddy of all Longlegs

Today's Monster Monday is the giant harvestman, a gigantic arachnid whose long, spindly legs let it drop down from above without warning. A giant harvestman stalking through the woods on its tree-like legs might go completely unnoticed until its body swoops down to snatch a rider from his horse.

Harvestmen - better known as daddy longlegs (daddies longlegs?) - are common sights for us in our gardens and lawns. If you know any trivia about them, it is probably that they are not actually spiders or that they have very poisonous bites but their mouth parts are too small to be dangerous to humans. It is true that these oddball arachnids are not actually spiders - spiders have a distinct two-part body (the cephalothorax and the abdomen), while the cephalothorax and abdomen of harvestmen are fused into one mass. But their bites are not extremely poisonous; in fact, no species of harvestman has venom glands.

Aside from a ball-like body and a lack of venom, harvestmen also differ from spiders in a couple key ways. They have only two eyes, where spiders have - I think we can agree - far too many. Harvestmen do not spin silk and so can make no webs. Also, they can actually eat solid food. Spiders use poison to paralyze and liquefy their prey, wrap them up in their silk, and then suck the bug smoothie up with their gross mouthparts. Harvestmen are on no such juice cleanse. Their tearing pedipalps can rip off chunks of meat and swallow them whole - a rare ability amongst arachnids, and one that I am sure makes them a hit at parties. A less popular party trick they can do is secrete a stinky fluid from their scent glands to make them unappealing prey.

I have wanted to stat up a giant harvestman for a while, but their strange anatomy made that a challenge. Making them in the Gargantuan size category would be true to their actual size, but so much of that space is just open air because of their trademark long, spindly legs. As a compromise, I settled on a Large-sized body, with their legs not included in their size category but accounted for with special rules. If you are playing out a giant harvestman fight on a battlemap, you might use a Large-sized model as a stand-in for its head and eight coins as counters to represent the position of its legs. It might look something like this:

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

Monster Monday: Arachnocalliope - Musical Doom Construct

Today's Monster Monday is the arachnocalliope, a mad construct that is like a magical cross between a spider and a pipe organ. Piping atonal, demoralizing notes with every movement of its many brass legs and every contraction of its armored bellows-abdomen, the arachnocalliope is a true visual and aural horror.

This eccentric contraption functions as a sort of anti-bard in combat, laying down de-buffs on its enemies with sonic effects. Not that it is helpless on its own, with two sword-like forelegs and a sonic breath weapon (no one is resistant to sonic damage!).

The genesis of this creature lies in my Graverobbers campaign (which I have not posted an update on in about 3 years, but it's still going). In one session, the players were fighting some constructs made by a creative witch whose chosen artistic medium was bone sculpture. Among the odd bone creations they fought was this arachnocalliope. I decided it worked pretty well as its own stand-alone monster, so I re-worked it a bit to be made out of normal materials and here we are. Some of those other bone creations, like the ballistocentaur and the triskeliettin may make an appearance here in the future, but for now you'll just have to use your imagination to wonder what those polysyllabic monstrosities might be.

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

Monster Monday: Moss Folk - Tricky Tree People

Today's Monster Monday is moss folk, a race of fey forest sprites who dwell in deep, ancient woods. Moss folk can step into one tree and out another an instant later, as if by teleportation, making them difficult to track and excellent guerrilla fighters in their forest territories. Wherever they enter a tree, they leave behind a patch of fresh moss, hence their name. Well, they also look pretty mossy in general. I guess moss folk is just an apt name for them all around.

As is the case with the trees they live in, moss folk are lithe and twiggy in their youth, while with old age they become gnarled, hunched, and increasingly bark-covered. It should come as no surprise that these tree-ish fey creatures are great admirers of the mighty treants, to the point where some moss folk tribes adopt a local treant as the living embodiment of the forest they live in and worship. Some treants tolerate this attention and lend their protection to these well-meaning sprites, while others may remain oblivious to the adoration that has fallen unto them.

Moss folk, or Moosleute, are creatures of Germanic folklore, where depictions of them vary widely from place to place and story to story, sometimes beautiful, sometimes shriveled and old, sometimes dwarfish, sometimes giant. In some stories they are plague-bringers, in others  they are healers who guide humans to healing herbs. In some stories they are deathly allergic to caraway bread (don't ask me why). The picture of them left to us through the ages is as fuzzy and indistinct as an old dead tree carpeted in moss. Nevertheless, there is enough there to build on to make a pretty neat creature for your fantasy world!

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