(Brief) Overview of Crooked Moon Subclasses

 I realize I'm a bit late to the party here, but having just gotten the Crooked Moon book set on D&D Beyond, I've been reading through it and absorbing the many elements.

Largely, the second book revolves around its adventure campaign, and all the monsters therein are used in that campaign, though it's a broad enough bestiary that I think you could certainly use a lot of its parts in other campaigns.

The first book, though, has a ton of species, backgrounds, feats, spells, and, of course, the most exciting thing: subclasses.

Let's address two things before we get into the specifics:

First, some of the subclasses are fairly setting- (and even campaign-) specific, such as the two Warlock patrons. That being said, the archetypes that the subclasses embody do feel pretty broadly applicable to any setting that shares vibes with Crooked Moon's Drustvald.

Second, I think you could argue that some of the subclasses are a little over-engineered. You often find this with 3rd party content, but I think that's largely because 3rd party content is trying to get at something a little more specific and also different than what you get out of WotC-developed stuff. Indeed, sometimes it feels like official WotC stuff is too conservative in its design, which can make certain options feel either underpowered or just kind of conceptually thin.

I haven't really formed an opinion on the power level of these subclasses. Naturally, we tend to want our characters to be more powerful, but I think the real marks of a good subclass are A: that the mechanics reflect the theme and concept of the subclass and B: you get to regularly do what the subclass does, allowing the subclass to really color your experience in play.

Unlike my WotC subclass reviews, I'm not going to go feature by feature with these. Instead, I'll just go through the subclasses and give a general sense of its vibe.

Barbarian Path of the Experiment:

We're starting off a little off from the broader Dark Americana vibe that seems the most prominent in Crooked Moon. This is a sort of Mr. Hyde-like, Gothic Horror subclass where you're transformed by weird science when you rage. I actually just designed an unarmed Barbarian subclass, which this can be (though it's not designed around it).

Bard College of Whistles:

This is the one that inspired me the most: it is the Hobo Bard subclass. Well, the Haunted Hobo Bard. A little like the Creation Bard, you can give those you give Bardic Inspiration to a helpful spirit, which have the wonderfully evocative names of "Grump," "Sad Sack," and "Scamp." You also get a magic Bindle that acts as a Handy Haversack (or Heward's Handy Haversack if you don't just want the SRD version). Best of all, you can call upon a ghostly train for you and your party to ride the rails and escape from dangerous foes or teleport back to a familiar location.

Cleric Harvest Domain:

Now, I think you could argue that a Harvest/Grain/Farming Deity could be represented by something like the Life or Nature domain, but this has an interesting mechanical idea, which is that you have different seasons that provide different features, including domain spells, and you can pick between Sowing, Growing, and Reaping.

Druid Circle of the Old Ways:

The Old Ways is one of the religious traditions of the Crooked Moon setting (there are I think five major traditions, which kind of take the place of its "gods," but aren't about worshipping a particular anthropomorphic figure). The Old Ways Druid is there for your to focus on Shillelagh and make a real melee combatant Druid who doesn't necessarily turn into animals.

Druid Circle of Wicker:

Ok, now, full disclosure, I'm usually not much of a Druid player, but I've generally thought that if I were to play a Druid, I'd want to go with a scary pagan Wicker Man vibe. While this could pretty explicitly link me to such an aesthetic, it perhaps goes in a different direction (honestly, Circle of Wildfire has tended to be the closest I get to it). Here, you can create effigies that you can place on the battlefield to create certain effects, and definitely has a kind of witchcraft/voodoo doll feel.

Fighter Barrow Guard:

There are elements of Druskenvald that, at least to my eyes, are a bit more dark fantasy than folk horror, much less the kind of Dark Americana that I think is its most distinctive feel. Barrow Guards give you a bit of that Death Knight archetype, and also gives you dice similar to a Battle Master's superiority dice to fuel certain abilities (though there is not some giant list of options for how to use them). A big part of the class is the ability to summon an undead Warhorse in combat to ride around the battlefield on.

Monk Warrior of the Pestilent Haze:

This is the "plague monk." Basically, if you liked all the necrotic and poison theming of the Warrior of Mercy Monk but didn't want to ever be asked by your party to heal anyone, this might be the one for you. You're basically a walking carrier of a deadly plague, and you use that as part of your martial arts.

Paladin Oath of Castigation:

Now, I think you could flavor a lot of Paladin subclasses as a kind of vampire/monster/witch-hunter (Vengeance certainly feels like an option for that) but this one leans in pretty hard to the "burn the witch" aesthetic, with prevalent fire theme. Such characters for sure work in Folk Horror, though it's a different vibe than the "Dark Americana" vibe that I'm kind of fixated on with these books. Mechanically, there are themes of battlefield control and fire damage.

Ranger Grim Harbinger:

This is built around summoning a Grim, basically a black dog that symbolizes and portends death. Mechanically, it works a bit like a cross between the Beast Mastery Hunter and the Xanathar's version of the Shadow Sorcerer's Hound of Ill Omen, summoning the Grim while dooming a particular creature, with the Grim vanishing if the creature is killed. The Grim has, I think, more scaling than the Beast Mastery companions do, but you have limited uses of the ability that summons them per day (though they come back on a short rest and can last up to an hour. Bizarrely, I think it might actually be reasonable to target an ally you don't intend to attack with the Omen of Doom feature that summons the Grim just to keep the pet around).

Rogue Sinner:

Giving a real Wild West vibe, or Riverboat Gambler, if you prefer, this Rogue can use some of its Sneak Attack dice (I think without reducing the damage they deal) to get a randomized additional effect when they deal damage. It is a limited-use feature (though comes back on a short rest).

Sorcerer Crimson Sorcery:

This is kind of your vampire sorcerer, which gives you a Blood Well that can be spent in various ways and regained in various ways. Among other things, you can turn into a pool of blood to creep around. You broadly get various ways to redistribute health, with some healing spells and health-draining spells.

Warlock Great Fool Patron:

Clown Warlock. Ok, specifically, the Great Fool is a fiend that features in the Crooked Moon adventure, but basically this is the creepy carnival warlock. Actually, this would make an excellent subclass for a Rakdos Cultist in Ravnica. Mechanically, the subclass allows you to inflict curses and otherwise punish foes.

Warlock Horned King Patron:

Again, a specific monster from the adventure. The Horned King is very clearly inspired by... er, to avoid spoilers I'll just say the figure who embodies the Devil in Robert Egger's The Witch (or the VVitch, if you prefer). In a lot of ways, this is kind of the classic "scary witchcraft" stuff, placing curses on enemies.

Wizard Occultist:

If you want some of that forbidden magic but want the mechanics of a Wizard, this might be the one for you, with a real kind of Lovecraftian vibe to it. Mechanically, you can Risk Intrusion by otherworldly entities to augment your spellcasting. Intrusions are randomized effects that are largely detrimental, though they can sometimes harm foes as well as you or even just wind up helping you.

Wizard Philosopher:

This is the classical esoteric alchemist subclass (which I'd argue the Transmuter also kind of gestures toward). While the Artificer Alchemist focuses on the protoscientific elements of Alchemy, this is the one that's all about grand, ambitious exploration of alchemy to fundamentally change reality. Mechanically, this means that you get a new resource called Quintessence that can be used to replace spell components or spell-copying materials (hey, are you sick of being constantly broke as a Wizard?) and such. Truly, this one might be really overpowered, because you could theoretically cast a spell at 6th level as early as level 7 (it'd still have to be a natively 4th level spell).

    And there you have it. There's at least one for each class (except for the Artificer, still the non-SRD black sheep of 5E).

Under a Crooked Moon

 Well, I had a bit of a splurge today on 3rd party D&D content.

Having been entranced by the animated trailer, I decided to just grab the Crooked Moon set on D&D Beyond. I've actually been kind of obsessing over Legends of Avantris' next big project (which just broke some crowdfunding records,) Neon Odyssey, which is a huge 5.5e overhaul to go full space opera (something I've really been wanting as a more committed alternative to Spelljammer) but I'm always really into horror elements in D&D, and while I've enjoyed Ravenloft: Horrors Within, the 5.5 update to Ravenloft unfortunately has a huge amount of overlap with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and while the new stuff in the book is great, there's also a lot of stuff that's only tweaked or just fully reprinted.

Crooked Moon provides a new campaign setting - which, honestly, is the part I'm least likely to actually use, as I tend to prefer doing stuff in my own homebrew settings - but also has a ton of new subclasses, species, feats, backgrounds, and monsters.

What has pleasantly surprised me, though, in its focus on Folk Horror, is a particular focus on a kind of Americana. There's for sure plenty here you could use for a more traditional European Folk Horror, but there are elements here that recall the aesthetic of the United States in that 1880s-1930s era that feels oddly homey to me (no, I'm not a hundred years old, but I grew up in a house built in 1896 down the street from a little Main Street-like area that still looks a bit like it did at the turn of the 20th Century).

As a few examples:

There's a Bard subclass themed entirely around Hobo culture from the 1930s, including inscribing things with Hobo Code, the ability to create a magic bindle that works like a Heward's Handy Haversack, and summoning a ghost train to give you and your party a ride across the battlefield.

There's also a Rogue subclass themed around gambling (which I feel gives it a bit of a Wild West vibe) in which you can set two of your Sneak Attack dice aside to roll for extra bonus effects (and you can also fight with a magical deck of cards).

There's also a high-level boss monster (who can also be a Warlock patron) that looks like a big, monstrous clown balloon like something out of Over the Garden Wall.

And, of course, there's a legendary ghost train you can fight (it's only CR 4, but then, the Phantom Train in FFVI comes pretty early on in that game too).

The two volumes aren't cheap even in digital form, but they're also pretty hefty, and I've only really skimmed it so far.

One of the coolest ideas in it is that, at least for the non-legendary monsters, every one of them has a secret weakness. It's sort of up to the DM to determine how easy it is to figure out that weakness, but the weaknesses can really transform a battle. For example, there's an undead ferryman who sails around in a coffin (which can go over land as well as water,) and if you pay his toll, he'll immediately be charmed by you and offer you and others a ride.

In terms of presentation, the art here is just as good if not even more ambitious than stuff WotC publishes. Now, sure, that's superficial, and I haven't delved super deep into how balanced and well-designed everything is.

Still, my initial look over the subclasses and species options leads me to conclude that, while some might lean toward being over-designed a bit, they have really solid concepts, basically without exception. There's a Wizard subclass that lets you play a real (esoteric) alchemist, which would be 100% perfect for members of a specific faction in my homebrew world.

While I'll certainly go through the specifics of its Druskenvald setting, I'm mainly thinking of how I can pillage this all for my own setting. My setting, Sarkon, has a bit of a technologically anachronistic feel to it because of an insane rate of progress (basically compressing the real world's technological developments from, like 1750 to 2000 into the span of forty or fifty years,) but there are regions that really work perfectly with this stuff, particularly one area that is meant to feel like the American West, and while a lot of that Western genre focuses a lot on the initial expansion, I do think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be set in that Dust Bowl-era West as well (I was a big fan of Carnivale way back in the day).

It'll likely be a while before I get to really implement this stuff in a game I run, as my current campaign is super-high-level and has a ton of epic stuff the party needs to get through before we can conclude the story (I'm trying to hold myself to no more than 6 months at level 19 and 6 months at level 20, but we'll see).

But given that I've been itching to get back to my homebrew world, and that I always love spooky vibes, I think I can get a ton out of these books.

(I also have a futuristic version of my setting that the Neon Odyssey books will serve well, so if I like what I use out of this, I'll probably get those if and when they go on D&D Beyond.)

How Much Damage Does a Shield Cost?

 I've always liked playing a tanky character. I don't know why, exactly - maybe just a general anxiety about injury or death, or perhaps it's the sense of heroism at being able to take the hits for your friends. My main character in World of Warcraft for nearly twenty years (dear lord) is a Protection Paladin, and my first really long-term D&D campaign character was an Eldritch Knight Fighter who focused primarily on getting his AC up to absurd levels.

So, given that, I figured I'd talk broadly and try to figure out what the real cost of using a shield rather than going with a more aggressive equipment loadout winds up doing for you.

The Basics:

At the most basic level, a mundane shield gives you an additional 2 AC. That means, in absolute terms, a 10% lower chance of being hit with attacks. It's not really that, though, exactly, because of how statistics can warp depending on the way we're looking at them. For example, if you have Chain Mail on and are fighting a creature with a +4 to hit, they'll have a 45% chance to hit you if you don't have a shield versus a 35% chance to hit you if you do have one, but what that means is that their chance to hit you is actually just about 78% of its previous hit chance, meaning a reduction in hit chance of 22% (See how insane this is? I think that's why we have the adage "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics").

So, obviously, there's better survivability with a Shield than without one. But we're also giving up damage. Again, at the most basic level, barring something like a higher-level Shillelagh cantrip, one-handed melee weapons cap out at a d8 damage die. A two-handed weapon, though, can get up to 2d6 (as usual, we're setting aside modern and futuristic firearms). That's a difference between an average of 4.5 and 7, so about 2.5 damage.

Complicating Things:

The thing is, while 4.5 is only about 64% of 7, it's not in a vacuum. We add a modifier to this damage (likely Strength if we're using melee weapons,) which smooths out the difference a bit. If we have +3 to Strength (likely at level 1 if we're a Strength-focused character) we'll be hitting for 7.5 versus 10 on average with mundane weapons, which means that, say, a Longsword is doing 75% of the damage of a Greatsword. All the various bonuses we might get to these weapons, be it a +2 bonus to damage from a +2 weapon, or maybe 2d6 extra damage from a Vicious Weapon, or even adding 1d6 to each hit with a spell like Hunter's Mark, will further smooth out the damage distinction. If we're a Paladin hitting with a +2 Longsword or Greatsword and doing a 2nd level Divine Smite against a fiend and have +5 to Strength, we're talking about 5d8+7 versus 2d6+4d8+7, or 29.5 versus 32, which gives the Longsword 92% of the damage of the equivalent Greatsword - pretty darn close.

But Also Complicating Things the Other Way:

That being said, there are some other elements that can widen that gap. No one-handed weapon has the Graze mastery, for example, which can (and I think most often) significantly increase the damage-per-attack of a weapon (even with relatively low ACs, though you hit diminishing returns when you start to need to get a Nat 1 to miss). Similarly, there are feats like Great Weapon Master that can add a good chunk of damage to a heavy, two-handed weapon.

In the above example with the +2 weapons, Great Weapon Master might have added an additional 4 (if we're thinking the character is, like, level 10) to the Greatsword's damage. And depending on the hit chance (or, more accurately, the miss chance,) Graze will also effectively add more to the damage-per-attack because of the cases where the Longsword would have done nothing.

But What About Defense?

It's clear that going with something other than a Shield will increase your damage output, but what are the benefits to the Shield?

Well, Shields can also come in +1/+2/+3 varieties. But it's also impossible to evaluate specifically how much damage they prevent unless we have more context. If we've got +2 Plate, the Defensive Fighting Style, and a +3 Shield, giving us an AC of 27, the monster with a +5 to hit is literally no worse at attacking us than someone with +6 or +7 to hit, and no better than someone with +4, because all of these would only ever be able to hit us with a natural 20. (Is it likely we'd face such a foe at a point in a campaign where we had acquired such gear? Probably not.)

A good while ago, I did some math on how AC affects our total damage taken, and I was surprised at how much less effective it was than damage-reduction features like Rage or Deflect Attacks (I didn't do Uncanny Dodge, but presumably that's comparable to the latter, though I'd guess not quite as good in most cases). That said, I didn't investigate how much really big, significant boosts to AC affect things. A magic shield at most is going to give you essentially a permanent Shield spell (minus the immunity to Magic Missile,) though being able to stack it with that spell (as in the case of an Eldritch Knight) can push your AC to the stratosphere. Still, the existence of crits does create a kind of hard cap on how useful high AC can be - you'll never be able to reduce the enemy's hit chance below 5% (ok, technically you can push it to .25% if you can impose disadvantage).

But it's not like it does nothing. If we figure a monster would hit you 55% of the time for 1d6+2, they'll do an average of 5.5 55% of the time and an additional 3.5 5% of the time, giving them an average damage of 3.025 plus .175, or 3.2 damage per attack. Adding a mundane shield to that means they only hit you 45% of the time, so it becomes 2.475 plus that crit bonus (which hasn't changed) so it becomes 2.65 total per attack, which is about 83% of the damage you would have been taking.

And in a higher-level scenario, with a, say, +2 Shield and, say, Plate armor, if a monster with a +10 to hit is going after you, without the shield they'd be hitting you 65% of the time, but the shield reduces that to 45% of the time. If they're doing 4d6+6 damage (we're looking at a Dao in this case,) that's 20 damage on average on a hit and an additional 14 on a crit. So, 65% of 20 is 13 while 45% of 20 is 9, and then crit bonuses are .7 (boy this is easier when it's a nice round number) so the damage goes from 13.7 per attack to 9.7 per attack, which is only about 71% of the damage we had been taking.

Other Elements:

Another thing to consider is that Shields do enable some other things - the Shield Master feat is one example. I think we also need to address the Dueling fighting style.

Dueling adds 2 damage to our one-handed weapons if that's all we are attacking with, which is typically what we'd be doing if we're using a Shield. And while that might not look like a ton, the equivalent damage-boosting Fighting Styles for other weapons might not do as much. Great Weapon Fighting, which changes rolls of 1 or 2 on damage dice to 3s, is actually a minuscule boost in damage (it turns a Greatsword from an average of 7 to an average of 8, and I believe that and the Maul are the weapons that benefit the most from it). This effectively turns a d8 weapon into a d12 weapon in terms of average damage (though not quite, as they do less on a crit).

Thus, in a vacuum, you might think that this is a no-brainer, but again, what we're missing out on are things like the Graze or Cleave masteries that don't show up on one-handed weapons, as well as the Great Weapon Master feat, which will pull these types of weapons ahead.

Another kind of easy-to-forget element here is Somatic spell components. Technically speaking, without something like War Caster, you can't perform the somatic components of spells if you don't have a hand free. This means that an Eldritch Knight who is going either Sword-and-Board or Dual-Wield will really want to pick up that feat, or they have to do what I did, which is just drop your weapon every time you cast Shield, and then either use an item interaction or your bonus action War Bond to get the weapon back. Because you only need both hands during the attack with a two-handed weapon, you'll have the hand free otherwise when wielding it.

Note though that there's also some ambiguity around Spell Focuses - these can replace material components that aren't consumed or expensive, and you can perform the somatic components of a spell in a hand that is holding a material component. But there's this weird little edge case: if a spell doesn't have a material component, can you perform its somatic components while holding a spell focus? I think a very strict reading of the rules would say no, but I also think any DM who isn't an insane sadist would say yes. Thus, an Eldritch Knight who fights with a quarterstaff could theoretically let that staff be a wizard's staff and thus get around the restriction (I wish that the 5.5 EK had been able to treat any simple or martial weapon as a spell focus. Hell, make that what our War Bond does, and make the feature more relevant!)

    But All This Nuance Aside...

Ok, let's say that we want to just get an example of how two characters with similar builds, except for their choice of weapon loadout, will do compared to one another.

I'm going to break from my "level 10 character versus Death Knight" math just because I actually think it winds up being a bit skewed due to the high AC and legendary resistances at play.

Instead, what we're going to look at are two 8th level Eldritch Knight Fighters, both Strength-focused. One has taken the Great Weapon Fighting Style and uses a Greatsword, while the other has taken the Dueling Fighting Style and uses a Rapier (yes, I'm dooming myself to using Vex). The idea here is that, while the sword-and-board character is going for higher armor, they're still trying to output as much damage as possible, and a Vex weapon is probably the best option there for a one-handed weapon (and while we usually think of Rapiers as being used with Dex-based characters, there's nothing preventing you from using Strength with it).

Both will be weaving in Booming Blade as their cantrip, but because they don't yet have Tactical Master, they're not going to be doing any shenanigans with the Push mastery to trigger Booming Blade's secondary damage. Given that they have second level spells, both will also use Enlarge/Reduce to give themselves an extra d4 of damage on a hit, and then Action Surge to get an Attack action on the same turn.

The Greatsword build will take Great Weapon Master, Mage Slayer, and War Caster (admittedly less necessary on a two-hander build) while the Rapier build will swap out Great Weapon Master for Shield Master.

For our target, I think a pretty reasonable monster for an 8th level character to be fighting might be a Troll. (Ok, maybe we should be using Green Flame Blade, but this will do the same damage in a single-target situation). At CR 5, we're at a point where an 8th level party might be fighting two or three of them, depending on how hard the fight is, but we'll assume that they're spread out.

And hey, let's even give them +1 weapons, which is pretty reasonable to assume at level 8. This actually effectively simulates being capped at 20 Strength, as with those feats, they'll actually just be at 19 Strength because War Caster will be used to boost Intelligence instead.

So, let's break it down:

Greatsword Build:

After casting Enlarge on ourselves, we action surge to get in our regular attacks, making two swings with the Greatsword. We have a +8 to hit, and the Troll has an AC of 15, meaning we hit on a roll of 7 or higher, or a 70% hit chance.

We'll start off with Green-Flame Blade (thanks to War Magic at level 7, we can cast Green-Flame Blade as one of our attacks,) which will hit for 2d6 (enhanced by our fighting style)+1d8+1d4 (this from Enlarge) + 5 (a mix of Strength and the weapon's magic bonus). The 2d6 is actually 8 in this case thanks to Great Weapon Fighting. Now, admittedly, I think you could interpret this as also boosting the d4 and d8 from Enlarge and GFB, respectively, as the fighting style says "when you roll damage for an attack you make with two hands," and doesn't specifically call out the weapon damage. I don't know if this was errata, because I could have sworn they narrowed that to only the weapon dice, but let's apply it to the other dice as well to make this pretty bad fighting style a little better. Thus, a d4's average goes from 2.5 to 3.25 and a d8 goes from 4.5 to 4.875.

With Great Weapon Master, we'll now be landing our Green-Flame Blade for 8+3.25+4.875+8, or 24.125, and our crits will be adding 16.125. 4 of that damage is guaranteed thanks to Graze, so we'll pull that out and add it in later. Thus, we're looking at 20.125x70%, or about 14.1, plus 16.125x5%, or about .8, for 14.9, then adding back in that guaranteed 4 to give us 18.9 average damage on this first attack.

Next, the second attack loses the d8 from Green-Flame Blade, so we just do 2d6+1d4+8. As before, we cut out the guaranteed 4 from Graze, so it's now 15.25 on a hit and adding 11.25 on a crit. 15.25x70% is about 10.7, and 11.25x5% is about .6, so we're doing 11.3, then adding back in that 4 from Strength to give us 15.3 damage.

Thus, with these two attacks, we're doing 34.2 damage.

Finally, we need to figure out how likely it is we get a Hew attack. With two chances for a crit, there's a 9.75% chance that one or both of them do give us a crit. But unlike the first two attacks, we don't add our Proficiency bonus. Thus, it's just 2d6+1d4+5, or 16.25 on a hit, or 11.25 on a crit, but Graze still applies, so we can cut out that 4 and add it in later, meaning we can use 12.25x70%, or about 8.6, plus 11.25x5%, which we already know is .6, for 9.2 average damage if we get this attack, though that only happens 9.75% of the time, so it's really only adding roughly .9 extra damage per turn.

Thus, our Greatsword build is doing 35.1 damage per turn.

Rapier Build:

Now, I've taken on the Vexing conundrum of the Vex mastery, which is all well and good in play but a pain to calculate. For the purpose of damaging our foe, though, Shield Mastery is kind of irrelevant, as we'll get advantage on our second attack if we hit with our first anyway, thanks to Vex, regardless of whether we knock the Troll prone. It's still worth a shot because it can help our allies get advantage and also potentially slow them down if we need to open up distance, but it won't affect our damage calculations.

Things also get a little complicated if we try to extrapolate this out to subsequent turns - because one hit makes the next more likely, our chance to hit in absolute terms goes up the longer the fight goes on, though in practice, any miss will effectively reset the counter. With only two attacks currently, our first turn will be relatively simple, but we'll touch on what it looks like on later turns even if we don't do the full calculation.

Our attacks, thanks to Enlarge and the Dueling fighting style and our magic weapon, will hit for 1d8+1d4+7, meaning 14 damage on a hit and an extra 7 damage on a crit.

Our first attack will have the same 70% hit chance we had with the Greatsword, so that will be 14x70%, or 9.8 plus 7x5%, or .35 for crits, giving us 10.15 damage on this first attack.

Now, for the second attack, 70% of the time we'll have advantage, but 30% of the time we won't. That 30% will look like the damage of the first attack. But at advantage, 70% becomes 91%, and our crit chance becomes 9.75%. Thus, in those cases, we'll get 14x91%, or 12.74, plus 7x9.75%, or .6825, for an average of about 13.42. Therefore, to get our actual average damage on this second attack, we're talking 13.42x70%, or about 9.4, plus 10.15x30%, or basically 3, giving us 12.4 average damage on this second attack.

Oh duh, I forgot Green-Flame Blade. That's kind of important.

Now, given Vex, we might actually save Green-Flame Blade for our second attack, given that it increases our hit and crit chance if we had hit on our first attack. I think we can just calculate this separately and add it, and because it's pure dice, we can add the hit and crit chances together. 1d8 is 4.5, so for the cases where we don't have advantage, we're talking 70%+5%, or 75%, and that times 4.5 is 3.375. This happens just 30% of the time, so it's giving us roughly 1 extra damage. Then, if we do have advantage, we're adding 91% plus 9.75% (yes, that'll be over 100%, but that's fine) for 100.75%, giving us, well, basically 4.5. That's going to be 70% of the time, though, so it'll come to 3.15, and thus we add to that second attack 4.15, meaning it's doing 16.4 average damage.

We then add both attacks together to give us about 26.6 damage per turn.

    As promised, we'll consider how this pans out in future terms. Our first attack gives us a 70% chance to get advantage on our second attack, but Vex carries over to subsequent turns (and reaction attacks,) so given we have a 70% chance to have advantage on our second attack, that means that there's an absolute chance to hit with our second attack of 91%x70% plus 70%x30%, or about 64% plus 21%, or 85% chance to get advantage on the first attack of the next turn. Then, for attack two on turn two, it becomes 85%x91% plus 15%x70%, or 77% plus about 10%, meaning we're now at an 87% chance to have advantage, and so on and so forth. So, the longer a fight goes, the better your damage is going to be with a Vex weapon, but only in a kind of Schoedinger's superposition of possibilities and absolute probabilities, because if you actually miss, it all resets.

Damage Comparison:

As you can see (and if I actually got my math right) the Rapier doing 26.6 damage per turn and the Greatsword doing 35.1 damage per turn means that for your shield, you're doing about 76% of the damage.

And I will say, this is a scenario with a lot of factors that are smoothing out the difference between the two.

Again, there might be reasons that survivability is a bigger concern for you. But I think that you do wind up getting a better return on investment for prioritizing damage over AC.

That's why, if I ever get to return to my Eldritch Knight character (it'd be great to have that party escape the Nine Hells, where the campaign fell off) and get license to rebuild him, I'd probably go with a Great Weapon build instead of his supreme tankiness.

Things That Should Not Be: Elder Things

 We're skipping ahead a little, because I think that while Gugs might be good monsters to use, they're also not that complicated. I might come back and do them and Mi-Gos, but I think this one is potentially a really interesting one to look at.

Elder Things appeared in In the Mountains of Madness, initially found by the antarctic research team in an inert state. Weirdly thought to be plants rather than animals, the explorers eventually find a massive subterranean ruin of a city created by the Elder Things millions of years ago. The Elder Things created the Shoggoths (oh, another thing that I actually skipped) to use for labor, but the Shoggoths rebelled and brought an end to their civilization. If memory serves, the Elder Things are later discovered to have not been dead, and they kill some of the researchers in an apparent attempt to learn about these new "human" creatures, but that's not really the focus of the terror of the story.

The Elder Thing stat block is a Large, CR 14, chaotic evil aberration. While they only have an AC of 16, they also have resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, as well as psychic, and full immunity to lightning damage. They have a little over 200 HP. They aren't legendary monsters, but I also think you probably don't want to use more than one of these in a combat - having them assisted by minions (perhaps Shoggoths, even) would make a lot of sense.

They also have a 90-foot fly speed with hover, so they can dive out of the air and back up pretty easily.

But let's talk about their actions, because that's what I think is really notable:

First off, their standard Soothing Tentacle attack (reach 10 feet) does psychic damage and automatically charms anyone it hits. With a +10 to hit, that's going to hit pretty frequently. They make two of these attacks, and then they can do Psychic Skewer.

Psychic Skewer is one of the two really nasty abilities: a target makes a wisdom saving throw or take a bunch of psychic damage (though save for none,) but if the target is also Charmed (which can be pretty easy to impose with Soothing Tentacle,) failed save also means getting 1 level of Exhaustion and also being Stunned as long as they remain charmed (the tentacle only charms for one round, but repeated tentacles could stun-lock a PC).

Now, I think we need to parse this: the phrasing is "If the target has the Charmed condition, it gains 1 Exhaustion level and has the Stunned condition while Charmed." So: here's the question: does the Exhaustion also only last while the target is charmed? Or is that only the Stunned condition?

I'd be inclined to say that the Exhaustion stays even after the Charm ends, in large part because you're already not really likely to make a lot of D20 tests while you're stunned (though you can still move while stunned in 5.5) but also because Exhaustion is one of those things that really starts to get scarier and scarier as it stacks up, and this monster is supposed to be (and is, I'd say) scary.

This one-two combo is, I think, the most remarkable thing about the monster, but it also has a recharge action, Mind-Scouring Spores. Only recharging on a 6, you'll probably only use this once in a fight. The ability sends out a 20-foot emanation that calls for an Intelligence saving throw. On a failure, you take a pretty massive amount of Psychic damage (half as much on a success). On top of that, for 1 minute, you take 3d6 psychic damage whenever you take the Magic action.

To remind those who haven't quite internalized 5.5 terminology, the Magic action is when you take an action in combat to cast a spell or use a magic item, or any feature that requires one. If you're casting a spell that takes a minute or more to cast, you have to take the Magic Action on each turn while you're casting it.

What's interesting, though, is that if you're casting a bonus action spell, this doesn't actually mean taking the Magic action, nor does a Reaction spell. Thus, a Sorcerer could get past this by using Quickened Spell (and then just, like, Dashing/Dodging/Disengaging with their action). Also, Valor Bards, Eldritch Knight Fighters, and Bladesinger Wizards can also get around this if they're just weaving their cantrips into the Attack action.

But to bring things back: the Elder Thing is already resistant to conventional weapon damage, which will do a fair amount to extend its 200ish HP, but then it also does this thing that can punish spellcasters (probably not with enough damage to be a real threat, but it adds pressure).

Here's what I will say, though: this could be a really frustrating monster to fight - stuns and even being charmed can mean effectively losing your turn in combat (at least if there aren't minions to fight). Loss-of-control stuff in D&D is something that I would really caution against overusing, given that this can mean going for a pretty long time without being able to really do anything in a fight. That, I think, is the main reason not to use more than one of these in a fight.

Lastly, they also have a bonus action they can use 3 times per day to cast Command, Detect Thoughts, Gust of Wind, or Nondetection (no spell components, because of course they're psionic).

So, let's get into how I'd use these.

Notably, they could use their "Eldritch Magic" bonus action to keep themselves under 24 hours of Nondetection. While this can prevent remote location, it can also prevent things like Detect Thoughts, Detect Evil and Good, and other ways for players to simply determine what they are.

And thus, I think we could play with the idea that the party might find one of these just sitting there, inert, like in the story, unclear as to what the thing is.

There's an imperialistic quality to their description - not only did they create Shoggoths as a kind of slave species, but they also have their powerful charming abilities to force others at least into non-aggression. They don't have any kind of Dominate Person-like power, but I'd say they might seek to coerce others into serving their purposes nonetheless.

This is really the classic "what am I even looking at" cosmic horror starfish alien (though notably in the original story, they're not actually alien, just one of several species on earth from a profoundly long time ago, which is true for a lot of the so-called aliens in Lovecraft). I think it would make sense for the party to find this in some large cavern that, actually, isn't a cavern but a long-eroded artificial structure in one of their cities. Maybe it has been in hibernation for millions of years, undisturbed until the party, or perhaps some NPCs who arrived before the party, had stumbled across it.

If you wanted to play a little fast and loose with the stat block (which I always encourage - a Lich doesn't have to cast Animate Dead over and over every day to maintain control of their undead army) you could even make their minions humanoid NPCs who have had their minds taken over by repeated "Soothing." It's up to you if the NPCs are too far gone to have their minds restored, or if you could perhaps gain some allies by Dispelling the charm effect on them.

I suspect that even as a solo monster, they might present a significant challenge simply because they can shut down players so effectively (though if you miss on your two attacks, it'll be pretty sad) though Berserker Barbarians or Devotion Paladins are going to pose a huge threat to them given that they'll be immune to the charming and thus stunning effect.

The very high flying speed does also mean that the Elder Thing can A: get to ranged characters pretty easily and B: escape from combat pretty easily if things aren't going well for them. An Elder Thing who does hit-and-run attack, trying to land some Exhaustion on the party over the course of the day, could be really terrifying (indeed, with Exhaustion, they could even harass a party over the course of multiple days if they can stack up two levels of the debuff in each attack. Then, 90 feet of fly speed and Nondetection will make it pretty dang hard for the party to actually track them down to bring the fight to them while they rest and recover.

Elder Things are the second-highest CR among the Lovecraftian monsters in Horrors Within, with only the Yithians being slightly more powerful (in theory). And I think given the impact of its effects, it'll remain a relevant monster all the way to level 20 (though don't expect a group of 20th-level adventurers to be quaking in their boots against just one of these on its own).

Bladelock vs. Blastlock in 5.5

 While the design has tried to open up other options if you so choose, I really think that a pure-caster Warlock truly ought to go with Eldritch Blast. There's a reason why they make this cantrip so good and give it solely to a class that, for a spellcaster, is much more reliant on cantrips due to the limited nature of Pact Magic.

But they've also taken some steps to make a weapon-focused Warlock more viable in 5.5 (not counting the way that the Hexblade subclass already solved a lot of these issues in Xanathar's). The question, though, that I've always had is this: is going Bladelock actually worth it?

First, I want to touch on raw damage:

Eldritch Blast does a d10 of Force damage, the most reliable damage type in the game, and unlike Fire Bolt, which is also a d10 cantrip, it splits the damage into multiple blasts at each tier of play. In a vacuum, this doesn't actually change anything other than kind of smoothing out hits and misses and crits. But quite early on in a Warlock's career, they can get various things that make this a pretty important element: Agonizing Blast allows you to add your Charisma modifier to the damage of Eldritch Blast, or of a chosen alternative cantrip. But if we were to put this on, say, Mind Sliver, we'd still only be adding that Charisma modifier once even if we've upgraded to 4d6 damage from the cantrip at level 17. Eldritch Blast, though, multiplies this benefit across its multiple beams from level 5 onward. The same is true for the Hex spell, which adds a d6 of Necrotic damage to each individual hit.

The upshot of this is that Eldritch Blast actually winds up working more like a martial character's weapon attacks. I believe the Heavy Crossbow has the Push mastery, so a Fighter using that (and Crossbow Expert to actually benefit from extra attack) is going to be hitting for 1d10+Dex and pushing a target back 10 feet with each hit, while a Warlock with Agonizing Blast and Repelling Blast is going to be doing 1d10+Cha and pushing a target back 10 feet with each hit. At level 5, that's going to be twice, and then at level 11, both will be hitting three times.

Now, a d10 is among the highest native damage dice for a weapon type - only d12 weapons (Muskets and Greataxes) and 2d6 weapons (Greatswords and Mauls) do more (until we get into the Modern/Futuristic Firearms, which are not considered standard equipment).

In other words, at this basic level, Eldritch Blast is quite good. So, what are the advantages of going Pact of the Blade?

Initially, there's a bit of a limitation with Pact of the Blade, because it's limited to melee weapons. That said, if you get your hands on a magical ranged weapon, it will also work with it as well. Thus, a Warlock could use a Repeating Heavy Crossbow just fine.

In 5.0, though, leaning into a Blade Pact presented a challenge, because it didn't change the ability modifier you used with the weapon. Essentially, you were opting into being Multi-Ability-Score-Dependent (or MAD) or just letting Charisma stagnate and just picking spells that weren't reliant on a good spell save DC or attack bonus. There are such spells, to be clear, and I'd generally recommend that with a lot of magic/melee hybrids that you try to pick spells that don't really need a high spellcasting ability (my Eldritch Knight used Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade, and Shield as his primary spells, none of which care what your Intelligence is).

One of the (several) things that made the Hexblade patron (consider Ebonbane or Nepenthe, two evil sword Darklords, as patrons!) so popular especially for Bladelocks was that it allowed you to use Charisma to attack with your Hex Weapon, as well as any weapons you had bonded to with Pact of the Blade, so you could simply worry about having enough Dexterity to max out your Medium Armor (another huge benefit the subclass gave) and then just focus on Charisma.

But this brings us back to the question: is a weapon really better than Eldritch Blast?

The answer is... it can be.

Let's again address raw damage: if you take a Greataxe, Maul, or Greatsword (or a magical Musket), the damage is going to be a little higher than Eldritch Blast. Each hit with a Greataxe is going to do on average 1 higher damage from the dice than Eldritch Blast, and the 2d6 weapons are going to hit for 1.5 higher damage.

Next, there's the issue of magical damage boosts: spellcasters can get Wands of the War Mage, or for Warlocks specifically you can get Rod of the Pact Keeper, which give you a bonus to attack rolls (and for the Rod, also spell save DCs) from 1 to 3. However, these don't add to the damage of your spells. Thus, a Blastlock using a +2 Rod of the Pact Keeper is still only going to hit for 1d10+Cha with their Eldritch Blast hits (again, we're always assuming you get Agonizing Blast, probably right away at level 2). By contrast, a Bladelock with a +2 Greatsword is going to be hitting for 2d6+2+Cha with each hit. At 5 Charisma, that's an average of 10.5 versus 14. Likewise, if you can get your hands on a Vicious or Flametongue weapon, this starts to really take off quite a bit.

Now, concentration spells are, I think, a bit of a wash: if we assume a Bladelock is taking Thirsting Blade at 5 and Devouring Blade at 11, the number of attacks they get to make keeps pace with Eldritch Blast. Also, most spells that increase the damage of Eldritch Blast, like Hex or Spirit Shroud, will also increase the damage done by a Pact Weapon, so that's a wash as well. This does fall off at level 17 - here, Eldritch Blast starts to shoot 4 beams, while there's no Eldritch Invocation to get four attacks with our weapons (which would really step on the toes of Fighters' capstone).

However, we also need to talk about Feats. Martial characters have a number of good feats that they can take to significantly increase the damage they deal. The most powerful of these, according to math I did back when the 2024 PHB came out, is Great Weapon Master, which allows you to add your Proficiency bonus to the damage of heavy weapons when you take the Attack Action, as well as letting you get an extra bonus action attack if you either crit or take an enemy down (the latter of which is harder to calculate because it's very situational). Still, the PB bonus both scales as you level up and also scales with the number of attacks you can do, is pretty great for a Warlock who is eventually going to get 3 attacks per Attack Action.

Eldritch Blast is going to basically cap out in damage with four beams that hit for 1d10+5 (again, ignoring spells and such that boost our damage). That's 42 damage on average. A Bladelock using a Greatsword will cap out at three attacks, but those attacks with just a +1 Weapon and Great Weapon Master, will be doing 2d6+1+5+6 at level 17, or 19 damage per hit, meaning 57 damage. Add on, say, a 5th level Spirit Shroud doing 2d8 extra damage on each of those, and you're adding in 36 for the Blastlock (though they have to be pretty close to the target) versus 27 for the Bladelock, which gives Blastlocks 78 versus Bladelocks getting 84.

So, I think we can say pretty confidently that, at least if we're just doing straightforward damage-dealing and damage-boosting, Bladelocks are going to have the edge.

Another thing to note here is that a Bladelock can still pretty easily pick up Eldritch Blast and even fit in Agonizing Blast among the Invocations (they'll have a couple to pick at early levels before they can get Thristing Blade). So a Bladelock can still largely play like a Blastlock as well.

Does that mean everyone should go Bladelock, then?

Naturally, you don't need to play everything perfectly optimized. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if doing math like this is a curse, revealing knowledge that I'd rather not have because I think it's generally best to build a character in this game around the story of the character. I actually appreciate efforts by games like Draw Steel to sort of "auto-optimize" your character so you can just pick the thematic options (though I also have less of a sense of how actually balanced the game is, even if it seems pretty balanced from the outside).

But if you're hoping to maximize your damage output, yeah, probably. But let's talk pitfalls:

One of the big weaknesses that a Warlock has is that you only get Light Armor. If you're a ranged character, this isn't that much of a big deal: threats from range tend to be based on saving throws rather than attack rolls (though not exclusively) and so having a low AC isn't really that much of a problem if you're staying out of melee range. Bladelocks don't have that luxury. Given that you probably don't want to do anything with your Dexterity until you've capped your Charisma, mundane Studded Leather is probably going to keep you at an AC of like 15 max for most of your adventuring career. In my experience, DMs are often hesitant to hand out magic armor, which maybe we should be more generous with - but even +3 Studded Leather is going to get you like 18 AC, which a level 1 Paladin can start out with.)

Next, if we do want to use Great Weapon Master, we're going to need a minimum of 13 Strength, which is just high enough to mean we can't really push Charisma, Dexterity, and Constitution all up to chunky levels. Polearm Master actually allows for you to push Dex, but unless you get that 13 Strength to use heavy melee weapons, you'll be limited to Quarterstaves and Spears, which, even two-handed are going to do less damage than Eldritch Blast (I honestly often forget that this feat works with those types of weapons).

Generally, my solution is to take a single-level of Fighter to start off with. This actually solves a ton of different problems for a Bladelock, giving you access to Heavy and Medium Armor, as well as Weapon Masteries, and even gives you proficiency in Con saves. I've had, for a while, a concept for an Undead Warlock whose patron is an entire chivalric order of Death Knights, and I think that's a concept that works particularly well for a Bladelock. But you pay the Multiclass tax there. It delays features, such as having to wait until level 6 for Thirsting Blade and level 12 for Devouring Blade, as well as delaying your higher-level spells (even if you instead multiclass with Paladin, the separate scaling of Spellcasting and Pact Magic means that you're still not getting those higher level spells or spell slots as soon).

But I think trying to pick up, say Heavily Armored and then Weapon Master on top of Great Weapon Master would be more of a burden than this single-level investment.

Essentially, if you want to straight-class a Warlock, there's very little friction for a Blastlock to go that route, while a Bladelock is going to need to plan things out a bit more carefully.

I will also say that when I did my "vs. Death Knight" simulation, I wasn't terribly impressed with the Bladelock's performance, though I do think it outdamaged my GOO-Blastlock (I also think I should start doing these simulations against creatures without legendary resistances, necrotic immunity, and such high ACs).

Things That Should Not Be: Nightgaunt

 Among the somewhat surprising additions to Ravenloft: Horrors Within are the several monsters taken directly from the fiction of HP Lovecraft. The real codifier of cosmic horror as a genre, Lovecraft's work has always inspired elements of D&D - the Ilithid, for example, are sort of human-sized versions of Cthulhu (well, minus the wings and claws) and more broadly, Aberrations, Elder Evils, the Far Realm, and honestly even some of the demons of the Abyss all borrow ideas from Lovecraft's horror. Cthulhu himself showed up in the AD&D supplement Deities & Demigods, which actually triggered a bit of a licensing snafu, given that Arkham House had already offered Chaosium (makers of the Call of Cthulhu RPG) the exclusive rights to the Cthulhu Mythos before licensing the character to TSR.

I wanted to do a series of posts looking through all of them (I've already covered Cthulhu him/them/itself). As someone who worked a lot of cosmic horror into his homebrew setting, it's nice to have these alien monsters.

Nightgaunts appeared in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in which a man explores the fantastical Dreamlands, which in Lovecraft's mythos are a separate plane of reality. They resemble some kind of demonic or gargoyle-like figure from a distance, but upon closer inspection, their aberrant nature is a little more clear, especially because their heads sort of open up to reveal a gaping maw, ringed with eyes. Indeed, I think the "Demogorgons" from Stranger Things may have been partially inspired by them, with their strange unfolding heads.

The very lowest-CR Lovecraft monster in the book, they're still CR 8, which means that in large numbers they could probably remain relevant even into tier 4 (I've got a planned encounter for my party that involves them standing in for some Phyrexian horrors that the party might face at level 19).

The Nightgaunt is not a terribly complicated stat block, but it does have a clear modus operandi:

Again, looking at least superficially like a classic gothic demon, their wings allow them to fly. They are large, with a flight speed of 40 feet and Flyby. They have some standard Claw attacks that can grapple and a tail with a Barb attack that can poison. But they can replace one attack with Ascend, which is where things get interesting:

Ascend allows them to fly directly upward, and they get to ignore the extra movement cost of dragging a creature if they're grappling (I think given that they're Large, they'd normally be able to ignore this if the target's Medium or smaller, but this means they can fly very high with anything. (Actually, checking things - evidently you have to be two sizes larger than a grappled target to avoid the movement penalty, so unless you're a Gnome, Halfling, or other Small creature, the Nightgaunt needs this carve-out).

Now, that's all Ascend does, but it seems to me that the obvious thing is that this now allows them to just drop the creature they're holding. Especially if they haven't used all their regular movement speed, they can move laterally somewhat to potentially drop a target over an even greater height. If they only do the 40 feet up, that can get you 4d6 damage (unless the creature has a way of avoiding the fall's impact.

But there's one more wrinkle: When grappling a creature, the Nightgaunt can do its "Tickle," which prompts a wisdom saving throw, and on a failure, the creature becomes Incapacitated until the start of the Nightgaunt's next turn - which means that with bad saves, the Nightgaunt can keep a foe incapacitated indefinitely. Even still, they could also just prevent a foe from using Feather Fall or Slow Fall or a Fly speed to avoid the fall damage from dropping them (though note that "Hover" fly speeds can still prevent this).

Being incapacitated is nasty - it automatically drops spell concentration, prevents all actions (you only have your movement, which isn't helpful when you're also grappled) and speech. So that makes them already pretty tough to deal with.

Still, that's mostly it for their mechanics.

What I find really compelling about these as monsters is the fact that they could be mistaken for something else. I think a lot of cosmic horror can come from an image revealing itself to be something else on closer inspection. I think that these could be mistaken for gargoyles in some gothic graveyard - and this is a game where Gargoyles are, you know, a real potential threat and monster. But then, as they begin to move, their movement is just wrong and off, and once those horrible maws oepn up, it becomes clear that any cosmic framework you started with, even if you were preparing to use magic that would deal with fiends, is not actually going to help you here.

And then people get snatched and tossed up into the air.

For high-level parties, an individual Nightgaunt isn't going to be that scary. Their attack bonus and the DC for their Wisdom saves isn't that high, but it is enough that it shouldn't feel trivial to overcome even for the most powerful characters. Still: for high levels, it's a numbers game. When the eldritch stuff is an incursion into familiar reality, which likely happens at lower levels, one of these things is going to be a real terror. But at higher levels, if the party has come to a truly alien world, these things might fill the skies. It definitely means that they are diminished as a threat narratively to go along with how they're diminished simply by the party being higher-level, but even if they're less likely to pull off their nasty tricks with a higher-level party, if you throw a whole bunch of them at the party, it might still be a big problem.

The Flesh Golem Enhanced: Mordenheim's Monster

 It's a cliche at this point for people to point out the confusion over who the monster is in Frankenstein. People refer to "a Frankenstein" as what in D&D is called a Flesh Golem - a being constructed from body parts sourced from multiple corpses - but then some will say "no, it's the Doctor who is named Frankenstein." And then, one might say, well, yes, but the Flesh Golem isn't the real monster of that story, it's the callous scientist who created him. And then, my response to all of this, in my most pedantic mode, is that "well, yes, but also the creation can be referred to as Adam Frankenstein, Victor's son, so technically they're both Frankensteins."

All that aside:

Mordenheim's Monster is the stat block designed primarily for Elise, Viktra Mordenheim's lover who died and was resurrected when Mordenheim invented the Unbreakable Heart. Interestingly, it's not clear if Elise actually has that much in the way of other peoples' body parts. Unlike Adam from the original novel (yes, it's more of a metaphorical reference to him being a "new Adam" than an actual given name, but it's what I prefer to use,) who is a wholly new person independent of his source materials (his brain is that of Victor's favorite professor, but at no point does he seem to have any of the professor's memories), Elise seems to mostly be herself.

Now, Elise is also sort of a "model" for other constructs. I believe that Horrors Within also adds another named creation called Adam (bridging, to an extent, the pre-5E lore where it was Viktor Mordenheim and a story much closer to the Shelley novel) who also uses this stat block.

In other words, Mordenheim's Monsters can effectively be considered "elite Flesh Golems."

So, how do they differ?

First off, they're a big step up in CR: CR 12 rather than CR 5. They're also far more intelligent and capable of speech. With a healthy AC of 18, 161 HP, and resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage (recalling the immunity that the 5.0 Golems had) they can actually take a bit of a beating. They're fast, too, with a 40-foot movement speed (and more, which we'll get to).

Basically, this is more like the Jacob Elordi version for Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein - smart, fast, and brutally strong (Strength is 22) and capable of carrying on a conversation.

Like their CR 5 predecessors, these are immune to lightning and will actually heal from it when they take lightning damage, but even beyond that, their speed gets super-charged, doubling for a turn if they take any lightning damage.

Indeed, given their neutral alignment (which is also a catch-all for "depends on the individual,") I can actually very easily see a party allying with one of these. Maybe the Sorcerer hits them with a Sorcerous Burst that does Lightning Damage to power them up.

I know it takes a long time for these books to be published, so the design might have been locked before Del Toro's Frankenstein movie came out, but it feels like the overwhelming brutality of the creature in that movie might have inspired the mechanics of this. Even without that lightning-boost, here's what the Mordenheim's Monster can do:

As a bonus action, it can spend 10 feet of movement to jump 40 feet - meaning that it effectively has a speed of 70 - and then creatures it lands on have to make a Dex save or take bludgeoning damage and get knocked prone, as well as shoved 5 feet.

Then, the monster's slam will deal a mix of bludgeoning and lightning (given the immunities and resistances at play, the Monster could theoretically heal itself by just punching itself over and over, but I think that's probably not how I'd have it work). The slam attack also grapples, which is great because the monster can then either crush them or throw them.

Crushing (which I assume is like they're being held up by the neck and strangled) will inflict more damage and cause them to start suffocating. Throwing sends them up to 30 feet, forcing a Dex save for the thrown creature and anyone in their way to take bludgeoning damage and be knocked prone, saving for half.

In other words, this is a monster that will absolutely break up formations. Throwing a target can put them prone and 30 feet away, giving the monster space and time to get to a different target.

I think that a Mordenheim's Monster's turn should feel flashy and panic-inducing. Using its bonus action Violent Leap to get past the higher-AC party members (though with a +10 to hit, they will often be able to hit them as well) and then tossing the Bard or Druid back at the Barbarian or Paladin to knock them all down will make your players go "ok, what the hell just happened?"

The damage output isn't enormous - if they hit twice with Slam and then get failed saves on Crush, that's only like 60 damage, which isn't that much for a CR 12 monster. But they have extreme mobility and battlefield control (on top of their resilience).

Thus, I think that Mordenheim's Monster is best used for hit-and-run tactics. If the party has their hands on a MacGuffin, or perhaps an NPC that they're protecting, one of these could race over to them (maybe sneak up on them, though they'd only have a +3 to Stealth checks,) knock a bunch of people prone with their various attacks, grab what they're looking for, and then race away.

A chase could be fun too - maybe they grab the MacGuffin and are racing along city streets. The party chases them down a narrow alley, only for this figure to suddenly launch 30 feet into the air and continue running along the rooftops.

The Monster is also Medium-sized, and while I'd still be tempted to make them big and bulky, they could potentially be in disguise as just a humanoid.

The nice thing, as well, about having their objective not be the slaughter of the party is that you could pretty safely send one of these against a party that has no business trying to fight one. Any given attack does about 20 damage, so taking even a level 3 character and hitting them with just one Slam attack and then a Throw is probably going to at worst just knock them out, with plenty of time to stabilize or heal them if the party doesn't give chase (which could certainly be a strategic choice on the part of the Monster).

Boy, I really want to do that now.