Which Would You Rather Fight?

Today's Monster Monday tackles that age-old question that has plagued mankind for eons - which would you rather fight: a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? You can finally answer this question in your game thanks to these two brand new monsters: the horse-sized duck and the swarm of 100 duck-sized horses! And feel free to spread the joy with a new spell (for bards, druids, rangers, and shamans) that lets you put the question to a friend or foe and then watch as they face the consequences of their decision.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2019 Jonah Bomgaars.

This massive duck stands on webbed feet the size of platters, preening its glistening wing feathers with its mighty beak. It could reasonably be described as horse-sized.

Duck, Horse-Sized             CR 2

XP 600

N Large animal

Init +6; Senses low-light vision; Perception +9

DEFENSE

AC 13, touch 11, flat-footed 11 (+2 Dex, +2 natural, -1 size)

hp 22 (3d8+9)

Fort +6, Ref +5, Will +3

OFFENSE

Speed 20 ft., fly 40 ft. (average), swim 40 ft.

Melee bite +5 (1d8+6)

Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft.

Special Attacks Mighty Quack (DC 14)

STATISTICS

Str 18, Dex 15, Con 17, Int 2, Wis 14, Cha 6

Base Atk +2; CMB +7; CMD 19

Feats Improved Initiative, Skill Focus (Perception)

Skills Fly +4, Perception +9, Swim +16

SQ hold breath

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Mighty Quack (Ex)

As a free action, the horse-sized duck lets out a booming quack. All creatures within 30 feet who can hear must succeed on a DC 14 Fortitude save or be shaken for 1 round. Once a creature successfully saves against this ability, it cannot be affected by the same horse-sized duck’s mighty quack for 24 hours.

ECOLOGY

Environment any

Organization solitary, pair, flock (3-12)

Treasure none

This tremendous duck is easily the size of a horse. With a bill the size of a tower shield and webbed feet the size of a smaller size of shield, this freakish waterfowl somehow lends itself easily to size comparisons. While it certainly seems to be the size of a horse, its mass is no doubt less, for horses have trouble floating and rarely fly unaided, while this mighty duck can easily do both.

Galloping forward on tiny hooves, these miniscule equines are all roughly duck-sized, though together they probably have the mass of one normal-sized horse.

100 Duck-Sized Horses               CR 2

XP 600

N Tiny animal (swarm)

Init +2; Senses low-light vision; Perception +7

DEFENSE

AC 14, touch 14, flat-footed 12 (+2 Dex, +2 size)

hp 17 (2d8+8)

Fort +7, Ref +5, Will +2

Defensive Abilities swarm traits

OFFENSE

Speed 50 ft.

Melee swarm (1d6)

Space 10 ft.; Reach 0 ft.

Special Attacks distraction (DC 15)

STATISTICS

Str 10, Dex 15, Con 18, Int 2, Wis 14, Cha 11

Base Atk +1; CMB --; CMD --

Feats Endurance, Run^B

Skills Perception +7

ECOLOGY

Environment any land

Organization solitary, herd (2-5 swarms), infestation (6-12 swarms)

Treasure none

What at first appears to be a distant stampede of horses is actually a very close stampede of very small horses, each one approximately 1/100^th the size of a regular horse (in layman’s terms: roughly duck-sized). Still, they gallop with frightening speed for such tiny creatures on such tiny hooves. While clearly duck-sized, each individual horse is much more powerful than a single duck. It would take a duck of roughly horse-size to take them all on in a fair fight.

Horse-Duck Dilemma

School conjuration (summoning); Level bard 2, druid 2, ranger 2, shaman 2

Casting Time 1 round

Components V, S

Range close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)

Target one humanoid creature

Duration 1 minute/level

Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance no

When you cast this spell, the target is telepathically asked a single question: “Which would you rather fight – a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?” The target is compelled to answer immediately (no save), though their answer need not be truthful. Once the choice is made, the monster in question (either a horse-sized duck or a swarm of 100 duck-sized horses) appears at a random point within 30 feet of the target. It acts immediately, on your turn, though you have no control over it. The summoned creature is hostile to the target and attacks it relentlessly, though it will defend itself against other creatures who attack it as well. The summoned duck or horses remain for the spell’s duration, or until either they or the target are slain.

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d20 Despot began 6 years ago today, and by the gods I will not let that anniversary go un-marked.

-your equine/anatidine d20 despot

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: 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: 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.

Monster Monday: Remipede - Venomous Centipede-like Crustacean

Today's Monster Monday is the remipede, a little-known variety of crustacean that has a long centipede-like body and venom-injecting pincers. In real life, these creatures are only a few centimeters long at most, but the three remipedes statted up below range from about a foot long to over ten feet.

Speleonectes tanumekes, via Wikimedia

Remipedes are so rarely observed that they were known from fossils before any living species were discovered. There are now seventeen known species from around the world. It was only in 2013 that it was discovered that remipedes used their syringe-like foreclaws to inject their prey with a combination of neurotoxin and digestive enzymes, making them the only known class of venomous crustaceans. Remipedes live in saltwater caves and saline aquifers, but of course the larger fantasy versions below roam out into coastal waters and even the open ocean.

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

Monster Monday: Giant Sea Slug, Stinging Mollusk of the Reefs

Today's Monster Monday is the giant sea slug or giant nudibranch. These colorful, poisonous, acid-spitting creatures lurk in reefs or the open sea, feeding on coral and giant jellyfish, occasionally swarming shipwrecks or attacking castaways.

Clockwise from top left: Nembrotha aurea, Berghia coerulescens, Glaucus atlanticus (sea swallow or blue dragon), and Hexabranchus sanguineus (Spanish dancer). Via Wikimedia.

Sea slugs are carnivorous shell-less mollusks, far more varied and colorful than the garden slugs with which we are all familiar. Some crawl along the seafloor, others - like Glaucus atlanticus - cling to the surface tension of the water, and still others - like the Spanish dancer - can ripple and undulate through the water. In nature, sea slugs become poisonous by absorbing the stinging cells of jellyfish and hydrozoans that they eat, thus turning their prey's defenses into their own.

Giant sea slugs, as statted up below, combine elements from many different real species of sea slug, except instead of being tiny they are ten feet long and capable of feeding on giant jellyfish and even humans.

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

Monster Monday: Ammonites - Spiral-Shelled Cephalopods of Prehistoric Seas

Today's Monster Monday is the ammonite, a hard-shelled nautilus-like creature that floated through the prehistoric seas for some 350 million years before being wiped out in the same extinction that ended the age of the dinosaurs.

Ammonites typically had a spiral shell made up of successively smaller chambers that they could flood with gas or water to control their buoyancy. The animal itself was a cephalopod, probably ten-armed, which protruded from the end of the shell. Some ammonites may have been able to withdraw into their shells like a modern nautilus or a snail. Some may have had ink they could release in a cloud like modern squid and octopuses. But when we are talking about ammonites, we are talking about thousands of species across hundreds of millions of years - there was room for plenty of variation. Some - like the nostoceratidae - had irregularly unwound shells and probably floated through the sea like plankton or jellyfish. Some just crawled along the sea floor. Most ammonites were small, with shell spirals reaching no larger than 9 inches in diameter. But the two types of ammonites we will be looking at today were big.

photo by Ghedoghedo, via Wikimedia

Titanites giganteus - Natural History Museum, London

Titanites giganteus did not let the ocean currents decide where it would go, as if it were some kind of overgrown plankton. No, titanites was a swift hunter, jetting through the ocean in search of prey it could wrap its probing tentacles around and gnaw with its sharp beak. Their shells reached 2-3 feet in diameter, much larger than the typical ammonite of its day. But even the bigly named titanites giganteus was dwarfed by:

photo via Wikimedia

German zoologist Hermann Landois sitting next to his fossil of Parapuzosia seppenradensis,
with a wire frame showing the projected size if the specimen were complete. 

Parapuzosia seppenradensis may be a mouthful of a name, but you would be hard pressed to find a predator capable of making this ammonite into a mouthful. The 5.9 foot diameter fossil seen above is broken - with its intact living chamber, estimates put this specimen at 8.4 to 11 feet in diameter, making it by far the largest ammonite species. In life, the creature may have weighed 3,200 pounds, fully half of which comes from its massive shell. If parapuzosia was a hunter like titanites was, it must have been an impressive and terrifying sight to behold.

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

Monster Monday: Poludnitsa - Lady Midday

Today's Monster Monday is the polunitsa, or Lady Midday. She is a malicious fey from Slavic mythology who appears in the heat of midday to deliver heatstroke and madness to those laboring in the fields. She tends to appear as a woman dressed in white peasant clothes and bearing a scythe, and she is usually either young and eerily beautiful or old and wizened.

Faucheuse ('Girl with a Scythe') by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1872), via Wikimedia

There is more I could say, but I am afraid Lady Midday has struck me with heat exhaustion and left me unable to think clearly. Instead, please enjoy this sassy-looking poludnitsa:

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: Drop Bear - Australian Tall Tale

Today's Monster Monday is the drop bear, a big mean koala that plummets out of the trees onto its hapless prey. Unlike regular koalas, these drop bears are carnivorous predators with a taste for human flesh. It's still pretty cute, though.

modified (by me) from a photo by JJ Harrison on Wikimedia

Drop bears were a joke that Australians played on outsiders, building off the fact that Australian fauna is terrifying and deadly. It is unclear whether this is an original Australian settler tall tale, or if it originated from a joke Australian aborigines played on the invading whites, or even if it might come from some Australian aboriginal myth. We know from the yara-ma-ya-who that the Australian aborigines were no stranger to reddish mythical creatures that come down from trees to mess people up.

In combat, this monster has a pretty solid opening move - it drops from above onto its presumably flat-footed prey, and if it hits with any of its three attacks it takes no falling damage and inflicts half of the falling damage it would have taken to its target. If hunting a lone target, this gives the drop bear a solid chance of knocking it out so that it can drag it up the tree to feed at its leisure. If fighting a group of targets (say, an adventuring party), the drop bear might be able to knock out the most dangerous looking one, giving it a chance to drive off the others with its clumsier, less gravity-aided attacks.

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

Monster Monday: Armored Grave - This Armor Shall Serve as My Epitaph

Today's Monster Monday is the armored grave, a knight buried in his armor, its once-gleaming plates now bursting at the seams with hard-packed grave dirt and the putrescence of decay. These are the tanks of the low-level undead world.

Buried in their armor, these ritually-prepared undead take on a new body of hard-packed grave dirt, granting them an additional layer of protection. Compared to ordinary skeletons and zombies, armored graves are invulnerable, unstoppable death machines.

Just to kick things up a notch, an armored epitaph is a slightly stronger armored grave which has Intelligence and feats and which isn't staggered.

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

Monster Monday: Giant Ground Bat - Nocturnal Predator

Today's Monster Monday is the giant ground bat, a wolf-sized nocturnal predator that hunts by echolocation. This is a perfect low-level monster for a campaign with a Gothic horror atmosphere. I mean, a giant vampire bat that runs like a wolf? That is 100% something you would run into after your mysterious coachman lets you off at the foot of a twisting road up a darkly forested mountain, saying "That's as far as I can take you, but I'd suggest you get back in the coach and return to town with me. No good can come from going up to that castle. It's cursed, I tell you! Cursed!"

I would have made an illustration for this creature, but nothing I could have drawn or digitally painted would be as cool or terror-inducing as this mounted vampire bat skeleton:

Photo and mounted skeleton by Mokele, via Wikimedia

The direct inspiration for this monster came from an article I was reading about a new species of fossil bat discovered in New Zealand. Check out that rad ground bat illustration in the article. Yeah, apparently ground bats are a thing. They do actually have wings though, they just also spend a lot of time on the ground. Combine that with the future predators from Primeval and maybe a dash of the Varghulf from Warhammer Fantasy and you've got yourself a giant ground bat.

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

Monster Monday: Xiphactinus, Prehistoric Monster Fish

Today's Monster Monday is xiphactinus, a giant prehistoric monster fish known for swallowing other large fish whole. These ugly fish reached lengths of 15 to 20 feet and swam the seas of the Late Cretaceous, when Tyrannosaurus was roaming the land.

Xiphactinus audax life restoration by ДиБгд, via Wikimedia

It's no secret that I am a fan of prehistoric sea life. Xiphactinus may not be as well-known as, say, ichthyosaurus, but its fossils certainly leave an impression. Not only are they big and mean looking, with those upturned, toothy maws, but they often show another pretty big fish trapped within the fossil ribs of the xiphactinus. Of course it can swallow an adventurer whole. And we know they didn't just settle for prey "small" enough to swallow - a 20 ft. xiphactinus fossil found in Canada in 2010 had the flipper of a mosasaur in its jaws.

photo by Spacini, via Wikimedia

Xiphactinus audax with a delicious Gillicus arcuatus in its stomach.
Fossils on display at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas

This also marks d20 Despot's first monster that starts with an 'X'. My patrons on Patreon know that it won't be the last: coming up fairly soon, we have another 'X' monster, this one from Aztec mythology.

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

Monster Monday: Whip Scorpion & Pseudoscorpion

Today's Monster Monday is all about things that are called scorpions but which aren't actually scorpions. Whip scorpions are arachnids that spray acid from their butts, and pseudoscorpions have poisonous claws but no tails. They are both really small, but because this is a fantasy RPG I made them big and threatening.

ARACHNOPHOBIA WARNING

This post contains pictures of arachnids. I know most arachnophobic people are okay with seeing scorpions but not okay with seeing spiders, but these guys fall somewhere in between on the spectrum. Personally, I cannot look at pictures of spiders, but for some reason I can see pictures of spider-like arachnids like harvestmen and solifugids with little discomfort. But still, these non-scorpions might be a little too spidery for some people. For the benefit of people scrolling through the main site, I will be putting the page break here instead of right before the stat blocks as I usually do. Click through for more information on these two rarely-discussed types of arachnids and to see pictures of them.

Monster Monday: Tasmanian Devil & Dire Tasmanian Devil

Today's Monster Monday is the Tasmanian devil and the dire Tasmanian devil. Sometimes called the "marsupial wolverine" by me and at least one other person, Tasmanian devils are fierce little critters from the island of Tasmania off the south coast of Australia. At about 2 feet long, the Tasmanian devil is the largest living marsupial carnivore. They may not be big, but their jaws are so strong that these guys can eat bones. They just munch 'em down like it's no big deal, even though whenever I try to eat a chicken wing bone my dentist yells at me.

photo by Mike Lehmann, via Wikimedia

So cute! Does it really deserve to be called a devil?

The devils got their name because, when they get together at night to feast on a delicious carcass, they let out terrifying screeches. When white settlers in Tasmania heard unearthly howls and crunching bones coming out of the already none-too-friendly Australian night, they thought that was fairly devil-like. They usually eat carrion, but they can take down prey when they need to - they can even take down a small kangaroo if pressed.

What about the dire Tasmanian devil? A lot of dire animals in D&D and fantasy in general are based on actual prehistoric creatures. This started with the dire wolf, canis dirus, which was a slightly bigger than normal wolves. Fantasy game designers ran with the exciting 'dire' descriptor and applied it to a slew of prehistoric animals like the short-faced bear and irish elk. They didn't stop there, though, creating 'dire' versions of animals with no real prehistoric equivalent, like dire weasels and dire badgers. The dire Tasmanian devil is one of the latter. Although there were larger prehistoric devils in Australia, Sarcophilus laniarius, they were only slightly larger than modern devils, not five feet long like the dire Tasmanian devil below. I took some creative license because I like 'dire' animals.

via Wikimedia

Tasmanian devil skull. Nice teeth.

I've been using the name 'Tasmanian devil' a lot in this post, but you won't see it in the stat block below. Why? Let's talk some more about real-world names in fantasy worlds. I mentioned back in my titanosaur post how names that reference real-world places (like the Argentinosaurus from Argentina) don't really work in a fantasy world. The Tasmanian devil finds itself in a very similar situation, given that most fantasy worlds do not have an island called Tasmania, let alone the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman for whom the island was named. Take away 'Tasmanian' and you are left with just 'devil', which is rather broad and pretty confusing, especially in a world where real extraplanar devils exist.

I ran through several potential alternative names before settling down on one. 'Devil quoll' sort of works - quolls are a related cat-sized marsupial carnivore that are smaller and less bitey than Tasmanian devils, but if I named it 'devil quoll' I'd have to explain what quolls are. 'Marsupial devil' gets the idea across fairly well, but it also conjures up images of Satan with a pouch full of babies on his tummy. Its genus, sarcophilus, sounds pretty cool but it sounds more like a dinosaur than a fuzzy little guy. Eventually I settled on 'tarrabah', which is one of the Tasmanian Aboriginal names for the creature recorded by early white settlers, along with 'poirinnah' and 'par-loo-mer-rer' - I went with tarrabah because it starts with a 't' like Tasmanian devil. If you incorporate it into your campaign (and boy have I been giving a lot of thought to an Australian-inspired fantasy world), call it by any of those names or none of them.

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

Monster Monday: Bellwether - It Tolls for Thee

Today's Monster Monday is the bellwether, a black ram with a large bronze bell in place of its head. This harbinger of doom delivers blasts of pummeling sonic energy with every toll, leaving its targets shaken. If the bellwether is not stopped before it tolls thirteen times, all who hear its final bell are cursed, and the surrounding land is left blighted.

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

Monster Monday: Creniad, Nymph of Wells and Fountains

Today's Monster Monday is the creniad, a rare urban nymph of wells and fountains. Creniads are guardians of these urban water sources, granting boons to those who respect them and leveling curses against those who defile their purity.

Detail from 'Am Schönen Brunnen' by Anton Ebert, via Wikimedia

Before modern indoor plumbing, public water sources like wells and fountains were very important for city-dwellers, especially since any rivers running through a city would likely be full of human waste and the runoff of industry. Rulers of cities would commission fountains to bring clean water into the city for the public good, often beautifying them with statuary and pools. Urban wells were less dramatic but no less important for supplying clean water. Both water sources would have been features of public squares where people could gather and socialize as they collected their drinking water.

Recently I have been interested in urban environments as habitats, and how wild animals adapt to live in man-made environments. Thinking about this in the context of fantasy RPGs brought up several ideas for urban monsters (one of which was the feral hivemind). The creniad derives from the crinaeae, Greek naiads associated with wells and fountains. There are already some urban fey, mostly household spirits like brownies and domovoi, but the idea of a nymph associated with urban water sources seemed like an interesting idea worth pursuing, since those fairies are usually depicted as being part of unspoiled nature rather than man-made environments.

The resulting monster (see the stat block below) is built around protecting these urban water sources. She has a number of water-based spells and abilities, but she can also curse those who despoil her water source, bless those who make offerings or wishes at her well, and even inhabit fountain statues. When a creniad's water source becomes polluted, she becomes ill, and she might even become corrupted, gaining an altered suite of spells and abilities that turn her into an evil spirit of vengeance!

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

Monster Monday: Giant Woodpecker

Today's Monster Monday is the giant woodpecker, and no this isn't my April Fools Day post. The giant woodpecker is a seven foot tall monster of a bird that uses its powerful beak to crack open the shells of the giant insects that roam nearly every fantasy campaign setting. But just as real, normal sized woodpeckers sometimes get a little too hungry and crack open the skulls of other birds to get at their tasty brains (yes, this is a thing that they do), giant woodpeckers will sometimes pin down and drill into larger prey, including humans.

I cranked that illustration out in about 2.5 hours, so sorry the human victim there looks more like a character from a bad mid-2000s webcomic than an actual human. I promise I can draw humans sometimes. But check out that rad woodpecker, huh? Beautiful plumage.

The inspiration for this monster came from two fronts. One: I was reading The Urban Bestiary by master birder Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and two: I was contemplating playing the Mouse Guard RPG. When those two trains of thought collided, I of course thought of how terrifying it would be to face a giant woodpecker in battle.

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

War for the Plane of the Apes: Man-Ape, Simian Killing Machine

Today's Monster Monday is part IV of our month-long series about apes. Today, we take a look at the creature that kicked off my month-long crusade to re-stat the great apes. The man-ape is a savage creature combining the raw strength of an ape with the upright gait and fighting ability of a human. They look like something halfway between a shaved gorilla and a Silly Putty sculpture of Vin Diesel.

If you have read some of the original Conan stories, you have probably encountered a man-ape of some sort. Take, for example, this totally rad Frank Frazetta painting of Conan fighting one:

painting by the late Frank Frazetta

It is worth talking about why Conan occasionally encountered and fought these evolutionary dead ends. Robert E. Howard's worldview was very anti-civilization. He believed that civilization made men soft, weak, and corrupt, while the savage life of the barbarian kept men virile, strong, and true. He was also convinced that mankind was trapped in a cycle of civilization and destruction. His Conan stories are set in the fictional Hyborean Age that existed after the collapse of the Atlantean civilization and before the rise of historical civilizations like Egypt and Sumeria. At the same time, Howard lived in a time when evolution was not well understood, and racist pseudo-sciences like eugenics were popular (along with regular old unvarnished racism). In his description of the Hyborean Age, Howard essentially describes how each of the earth's races evolved from different types of apes at various points in prehistory (including Northern European white people, who he hilariously describes as having evolved from 'snow apes' north of the Arctic Circle).

This is problematic for a number of reasons - mostly that it is wrong and also racist. What it means for the world of Conan is that the races of mankind are: 1) different enough from each other that their closest common ancestors are not humans, and 2) that people of the Hyborean Age are barely removed from savage apes. Conan himself, as Howard's ideal man, is so powerful and brutish that he can face off against one of these gorilla-like proto-humans one-on-one and defeat it. They represent the true, sub-human savagery that Conan comes from, and that he is separated from only by his sharp wits and Cimmerian good looks.

Now you know some of the weird, racist backstory of man-apes in the world of Conan. But I trust you can come up with a decidedly non-racist reason for them to exist in your own campaign setting. It's actually way easier to do that than to follow Howard's tortuous path. Like, you can just say a wizard did it. That always works.

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

Return to the Plane of the Apes: Gorilla & Silverback

Today's Monster Monday is part II of our month-long series about apes. This week, we're presenting the gorilla and the silverback. Gorillas are the largest of the apes, though our imaginations often inflate their size. Although gorillas are gentle, intelligent, social animals, they are also territorial. When angered or threatened, they can put their incredible strength to good use, slamming their rivals with their massive arms gouging enemies with their strong, sharp teeth.

Each troop of gorillas is led by a dominant male called a silverback, who is always the largest and strongest of the troop. Most of the time, the silverback is the only male in the troop, though sometimes he has a cadre of adult male warriors at his command, called blackbacks. Because the silverback is so important to gorilla society, and because they are physically more powerful and more dangerous than other gorillas, I thought they deserved their own stat block.

Silverback gorilla. Photo by Pierre Fidenci, via Wikimedia

You may know that the scientific name for the western gorilla is Gorilla gorilla, but do you know where the word gorilla comes from? It is a Greek translation of a Carthaginian Phoenician interpretation of an unknown West African word that may not have even referred to gorillas. According to Herodotus, around 500 BC the Carthaginian explorer Hanno the Navigator sailed down the coast of West Africa, encountering tribes of people, exploring strange islands and lakes, and founding settlements. After passing by a country devastated by forest fires or a volcano, he encountered gorillas:

On the third day after our departure thence, having sailed by those streams of fire, we arrived at a bay called the Southern Horn; at the bottom of which lay an island like the former, having a lake, and in this lake another island, full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae. Though we pursued the men we could not seize any of them; but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices, and defending themselves with stones. Three women were however taken; but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed upon to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage. 

It is open to debate whether the apes Hanno and his men encountered were gorillas or chimpanzees, or if this incident even occurred, but that is ultimately where we get the name 'gorilla'.

From our first recorded encounter with gorillas (though Hanno's was obviously far from the first encounter), our two species have had a troubled co-existance. Today we recognize the importance of protecting these gentle giants, but past humans - especially past Europeans - haven't been so charitable. In that light, gorillas can certainly serve as a formidable foe in any campaign where they are encountered.

via Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Wikimedia

Pictured: Almost certainly not how this encounter happened

I should point out that both gorillas and chimpanzees are quadrupedal, rising to their hind legs only rarely. Chimpanzees can move a bit on their hind legs, but gorillas can only rear up. As such, I have given these apes the +4 to CMD vs trip attempts that quadrupedal creatures are entitled to, and that they were not given when they were originally statted up for Pathfinder.

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