Making the Bag Man

 In Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, a piece of art that got a lot of players excited was the Bag Man, a creepy boogey-man like figure who crawls out of players' bags to snatch their items or even the characters themselves.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find that there was no stat block for the Bag Man.

However, the truth is that there is one:

In the chapter talking about horror monsters, the book describes not just the new monsters featured in the book, but ways to make monsters more exciting and scary.

In the quest to have players smash through dungeons and soak up XP, it's easy to sometimes forget that a monster ought to be an exciting thing to fight, not just a speed bump on the way to max level. In fact, the very concept of Ravenloft itself is born out of the desire to make monsters matter more. Vampires, prior to the Ravenloft adventure module, were just one of the many things you'd run into in the middle of a dungeon crawl. Strahd von Zarovich was invented, and an adventure/dungeon built around him, to make the ultimate confrontation with a dude that I think was still just a standard "Vampire" stat block feel much more fulfilling.

The Bag Man is meant as an inspiration for Dungeon Masters to take existing monsters and make something exciting out of them. The book starts with the stats, but I'm going to go the other way, paraphrasing the lore:

The story goes that there was once an adventurer who leapt into a Bag of Holding in order to escape the menace that threatened to kill his party. But after he got in, he was stuck there in the extra-dimensional space, unable to escape. Over time, he was warped into something inhuman and monstrous, and gradually, the space in which he had become trapped connected to other Bags of Holding across the multiverse. Now, it's said, parties of adventurers who sleep at night near their Bag of Holding risk that the Bag Man might reach out and grab them, dragging them back into his demiplane, never to be seen again.

I love this so much, because it A: has the cadence and structure of a good urban legend and B: takes an item people are very familiar with and tend to really like having around, and makes them feel paranoid about it.

What is the Bag Man, then, mechanically?

Well, he's a Troll.

"What?" you say? But Trolls are generic monsters that people have been fighting forever! They're a standard, generic fantasy monster and not even a particularly scary one at that (it's not like Fire or Acid damage are hard to come by in D&D, so their defining trait is probably not even going to be an issue!)

Well, first off: that's ok, because it's not about how hard it is to fight, mechanically - it's the impression the monster makes on your party.

But secondly: we're not quite done.

Yes, the Bag Man is a Troll, but we're going to make some tweaks.

First off, we're going to add Amorphous, like a Gray Ooze, so that he can squeeze through tight spaces as narrow as 1 inch easily. That explains how such a big monster can reach through the mouth of a Bag of Holding.

Second, we're going to give it Grappler, like a Mimic, and maybe let him grapple when he hits with his claw or bite attacks.

Finally, we're giving him Ambusher, like a Doppelganger.

Add all that together, and we have a regenerating, monstrous creature that can pop out of a Bag of Holding and grab player characters and then drag them down into the bag, lightning fast.

The Bag Man does a bunch of things: it attacks when the party thinks it's safest, it separates the party, and it leaves the party horrified by one of the most innocuous items in D&D, to the point where they'll probably never trust it again (even if you never again use the Bag Man.)

Hell, I'd really recommend that if you ever have the Bag Man attack, you have it retreat the moment it either misses a party member or they manage to escape its grapple. It's an opportunistic monster, and it can easily slip away so that the party can't pin it down and kill it.

Given what we've learned about Van Richten's Guide, I think it'll be tough to analyze entirely until DMs have had it in hand for a while (players can easily just pick up the lineages and subclasses, which could fit in other kinds of game). While the book spends plenty of its pages on details about various Domains of Dread and their Darklords, it really feels like the emphasis of the book is not so much on "new monster stat blocks that will be way scarier than the existing ones" than it is about using elements in D&D that already exist to amp up the terror.

And honestly, I think that's actually worth more. At this point, between all the campaign setting books, the Monster Manual, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and all the adventure books, there's a lot to work with, monster-wise. Having a book that emphasizes how to make those monsters work in the genre is actually something I'm really excited about.

That being said, the book does also have some fantastic monsters. The Dullahan is great, as is the Loup Garou, and the Star Spawn Emissaries are amazing. The Star Spawn Emissary in particular sets my imagination at work - the "Lesser" is Medium sized and can take on the form of beasts, humanoids, or whatever, and as soon as you kill it, it's immediately replaced by a Huge, amorphous flesh-tower that is the Greater Star Spawn Emissary. I straight up have a figure that would be perfect to use as one of these in my home brew setting - a character named Robert Farron (a reference to Stephen King's Randall Flagg and his various "R.F." aliases) who is the emissary of Malkazod, one of the setting's "Great Others." Having a campaign in which Robert Farron travels around as a disguised Lesser Star Spawn Emissary would be great, and when the party finally gets bold enough to confront him (he's CR 19) the horrible truth of his nature (CR 21, which is a big deal given that it immediately follows a CR 19) would be revealed. Just so good.

Even the monsters in this book invite you to futz with them to make them more terrifying. The Relentless Killer statblocks are, as I suspected, built on Slasher movie tropes, and come in CR 8 and CR 13 versions. They're classified as Fiends, which I think works, though I could see reclassifying them as Undead, Monstrosities, or even Humanoids. The Juggernaut variant (the higher CR) is Large sized, which I think could work, but you could also shrink them to medium. And in both cases, they have weapons that deal additional necrotic damage, so if you can come up with iconic weapons for your slasher character (like, say, a bladed glove or a big machete, to come up with two just off the top of my head and not based on any iconic movie slashers) you can feel free to be creative without affecting the CR by that much.

Actually, speaking of the Juggernaut variant, one of their abilities is that they can bend the environment to assault creatures nearby, like a wrought iron spike sticking out to slash a fleeing would-be victim, or rocks falling and hitting them. Here, flavor is your ally: you could flavor this as purely magical, with a sinister environment reacting to the monster's commands... or you could just flavor it as the horror movie trope of just really bad luck for people who are simultaneously trying to outrun a relentless killer.

I'll confess that my tendency with a lot of these books is to go straight into "plunder" mode, simply pulling spells, monsters, and the like to toss into my own games. But I'm going to try to really learn to use the more subtle and flavorful tools described here. And the Bag Man I think embodies the ethos of this book, which I'm beginning to appreciate more as I find out about the new stuff in it.