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.

Horror, the Conservation of Ninjutsu, and D&D Combat Math

 There's a trope listed on TVTropes, called "The Conservation of Ninjutsu." The idea is that, dramatically, one ninja is actually a lot scarier than two dozen ninjas. Obviously, in the real world, being attacked by a giant crowd of coordinated foes would be worse than just having to deal with a single adversary, but in a narrative work, big crowds of foes, be they ninjas or enemy soldiers or monsters, can often feel lower-stakes because we don't get to really focus on any given individual threat.

Horror, as a genre, often makes a single monster its focus. Slasher movies are usually about one relentlessly terrifying killer who tends to strike victims when they're isolated. The genre often gives these killers some kind of supernatural resilience - Michael Myers just gets up after seemingly being killed - but their ability to sneak up on their victims and avoid anyone who might be able to stop them is the main thing that makes them so daunting.

Horror does sometimes give you a collective monster - zombie movies are the clearest example. But zombies as individuals are usually not that hard to deal with. As long as you see them coming, you can probably outrun them and maybe even kill them by bashing their skull in, and it's when you're surrounded by a massive crowd and there's no clear path to safety that they become a major threat.

But I think it often works the other way - the singular threat that is faster, stronger, and infinitely malicious.

In D&D, it can be really hard to build a challenging fight with a single monster. There are tools for it in-game - Legendary creatures are given Legendary Resistance in order to avoid being taken out by a single spell (and the changes to the rules for Grappling, Shoving, and even Counterspell let them use this to avoid being shut down by the party this way). They're also given Legendary Actions to allow them to act more frequently during combat. I even think the general move to give them proficiency or even expertise in Initiative rolls is to make sure that they get to do something scary and menacing before players' abilities can come into play and disrupt them.

But even with these tools, it can sometimes feel that a monster doesn't really live up to its potential.

When you look at a creature with 150 HP, for example, that seems like a fairly large amount. But against four characters (and this problem is exacerbated in larger parties) this means that each party member has to do, on average, 37.5 damage to kill it. And that means that you're probably lucky if you get two rounds with the monster once the party is at level 5 or higher.

Now, the 150 number is a little bit arbitrary, though the Relentless Nightmare that I talked about in my previous post has 144 HP, and has a CR that implies the party ought to at least be in high tier 2 to face it.

I will say, it's probably better game design to give both players and monsters higher damage output compared to HP. It makes combat faster and it makes each turn that much more impactful. D&D combat can drag when players have lots of options (I ran my very-occasional backup campaign after our DM cancelled my usual Wednesday game, and boy, going from running combat at level 18 to level 2 was profound. We got through like 5 or 6 rounds of combat in maybe an hour as the geriatric adventurers - they're called The Prune Platoon - faced off against some maddened farm animals).

But it also means that things can swing widely. Part of 5.5's redesign tamped down a bit on the ability for players to land massive nova damage (though designer Mackenzie de Armas pushed back on the notion that this was a broader philosophical goal in an interview with D4) and I think that helps a solo monster to have its impact. (Generally speaking, I've liked using the new monsters.)

However, I think there's a whole other aspect of this discussion I haven't really gotten to yet:

In a horror campaign, like one set in Ravenloft, you probably want some fights against things that aren't the big bad (or a big arc-plot villain). These might not be legendary creatures. But can a non-legendary creature ever work just on its own?

In Van Richten's, the Unspeakable Horror was a somewhat unwieldy monster - more of a framework with varying features that you could roll on tables to determine. This is a design we saw in other places, like the various Horrors from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. And while I like it in theory, I think that it's generally better to give us a bespoke stat block for a given concept of a monster. Similarly, I was happy to get dedicated Dracolich and Shadow Dragon stat blocks in the new Monster Manual (though I'd have liked to get higher-CR versions of both - it feels like there should be a Dracolich that is at least as tough as some of the ancient dragons).

Anyway, 5.5 has moved on from these variable stat blocks, which I think makes the life of a DM easier (we can always just make adjustments we need to tweak the monster). The Unspeakable Horror now has a single stat block.

Weirdly, despite its truly Lovecraftian appearance in the art, it's still a Monstrosity rather than an Aberration. That's probably fine given how many of the straight-out-of-Lovecraft monsters we got in the book. But we now have a bit more focus on this swirling mass of... protoplasm?

It's a Huge monstrosity, and I think that the concept of it - an... unspeakable horror that defies all comprehension - really suggests that it should be a solo monster. But without legendary actions, does it have the tools to keep up with a party that is fighting it?

The thing is CR 8, so a high-difficulty challenge for a 5th level party of four, in theory. It's got 126 HP, and a very low AC of just 13.

But here are the things that can help it survive:

First off, its Incomprehensible Form trait gives all attacks against it (as long as it's not incapacitated) disadvantage. Still a low AC, but now there's at least some chance that they'll miss it.

Next, it has Regeneration. I'm honestly a little surprised to see this, because in the Monster Manual things like Vampires lost health regen. In practical terms, it basically just adds 10 HP for each round it survives, so you could have just given it 20-30 more HP. Unlike Trolls, all you need to stop this regeneration is to get it to 0 HP.

Lastly, Terrifying Aura is a 15-foot emanation that imposes a Wisdom saving throw on creatures that start their turn in the aura (though not when they enter it) and can inflict Frightened, which then further inflicts Paralyzed (the reason they frame features like this this way is so that someone immune to fear also can't be paralyzed by it). A success on the save gives 24 hours of immunity to the feature.

    Actually, I hate that kind of feature. I'd rather than it be some 1/day ability that the creature can use, especially because it doesn't give blanket immunity to every Unspeakable Horror's aura, which means we need more bookkeeping to track which Horror a character is immune to).

The point of these is that Incomprehensible Form and Terrifying Aura scale up with the number of creatures attacking them. (Well, ok, Incomprehensible Form is more like a bonus to its AC and an absolute Hoser for poor, poor Rogues).

But Regeneration, while it does give the Horror just a little more longevity, does not scale with the number of players. That 10 HP might undo the damage that a Wizard does with a Fire Bolt, but the three other members of the party will overcome it.

    We've gone pretty deep on this one stat block. But I think we need to talk about the role that our monsters are serving.

One of the oddities of D&D as a game is that you're absolutely meant to win the vast majority of challenges. If the party "fails" a combat encounter, it could mean that the campaign is over. The way I play D&D, these are characters that players spend years playing and really grow attached to and identify with them.

Now, sure, I think a good session zero discussion to have is how lethal the players want the game to be. I think A: it's totally valid to say that a horror game might have fights that don't feel fair (and by fair I mean that we expect the players to win) though even in those cases, I think giving genre-appropriate paths to survival is a must, even if those don't mean just killing the monsters and B: I also think it's fine to say that you're playing a horror-themed/toned/aesthetic game of otherwise conventional D&D with the usual expectations of heroic victories.

In the latter case, it's actually fine if a solo, non-legendary monster does wind up being a bit of a pushover because of some lucky rolls (or unlucky on the part of the monsters). Just like normal D&D, encounters are there to risk depleting character resources (including HP,) but luck and good strategy both can lessen the impact of such encounters.

In the former case, though, I think your only real recourse to keep these monsters scary is just to... overtune combat encounters.

Overtune, I will say, is itself somewhat open to interpretation. I actually think that the 2024 DMG's combat encounter-building guidance is actually pretty generous to the DM. A high-difficulty encounter is probably going to feel quite hard. Naturally, as players level up, they get a lot more of a cushion to absorb those particularly dangerous encounters.

But we also need to not look at encounters in a vacuum. It can be tempting, often, to just come up with one big encounter each day. I actually think this does a disservice to your players, as some classes (particularly Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks) get some of their power relative to other classes from the fact that they get so much of their class features back on a short rest. A Warlock, for example, seems really underwhelming with their mere two 5th level spell slots at level 9, compared with a Wizard or Sorcerer of that level who has 14 total spell slots, but if you get one or two short rests in there during the day, that Warlock can have effectively 6 5th level spells, which is insane compared to other full casters. But if all of the action is concentrated into just one encounter, that advantage dries up entirely.

A single monster on its own can slot in very well as a kind of surprise random encounter, which can just be there to spice up the day. But I really would say that if you're throwing in a single monster, especially a non-legendary one, you should tune the difficulty a bit higher to make sure that it has an impact.

Haunting Dreams with the Relentless Nightmare

 Van Richten's gave us two interesting horror monsters - creatures designed to give you the equivalent of a horror-movie slasher - collectively called the Relentless Killers.

In Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the final major adventure book published for 5.0 (and the last "one big adventure" book we've gotten for D&D in a few years) the chapter that takes the party to Ravenloft has them enter the Death House (famed for its level 1-2 adventure in Curse of Strahd) stalked by a new variant that has an impaling spear.

I don't actually have my copy of Eve of Ruin here, so I don't know to what degree the Relentless Nightmare matches that creature, but we'll look at the Horrors Within version of it on its own terms.

All of these are considered fiends, though not necessarily because they are from the Lower Planes. We can probably assume they're primarily found in the Domains of Dread, and their fiendish nature is just to show that they are not undead, but are totally committed to cruelty and pain, no longer worthy of your sympathy.

The reason why they're inhuman might never be known - like Michael Myers, the evil might just be something inherent to them.

The Relentless Nightmare, I think, vaguely gestures toward another icon of the 1980s slasher movie, Freddy Kreuger. While they're not quite as versatile in the ways they can hunt their victims, Relentless Nightmares assault the mind as well as the body, and notably are very difficult to destroy permanently.

Sitting at CR 11, this puts them at just slightly less of a challenge than the Juggernaut (CR 12) and a bit higher than the Slasher (CR 8). For a 4-player party, they should be a high challenge for an 8th level party, a moderate challenge for a 9th level party, and a low challenge for an 11th-level party.

Given the story of these monsters, I don't think it's appropriate to ever have your party face more than one at a time (well, maybe if you want the "double Pyramid Head" boss fight from near the end of Silent Hill 2 you could have them fight two Juggernauts) but these are legendary creatures and I really think are meant to be solo monsters.

Naturally, it's hard to recreate horror as we see it in movies in D&D because player characters are all designed to be capable monster-hunters. We're generally expecting to run toward monsters rather than away from them.

But I think that the Relentless Nightmare has a combination of abilities that can potentially make them profoundly scary:

Each turn, they can use Exhausting Gaze, which can inflict some psychic damage and a level of Exhaustion on a target that fails a wisdom saving throw. Remember that 5.5's exhaustion reduces a creature's speed by 5 feet per level of exhaustion and also reduces the results of their D20 tests by 2 per exhaustion level. Thus, this penalty can compound as it becomes harder to hit the DC.

However, the second part of this one-two punch is that their Haunter's Spear will automatically curse anyone it hits. In addition to the piercing and psychic damage the spear does, the curse prevents the character from reducing their exhaustion by taking a Long Rest.

Now, unlike a Rakshasa, whose curse just prevents a Short or Long rest entirely (truly one of the nastiest monsters,) you do have some recourse here - taking a rest might not cure exhaustion, but you could still swap in a Remove Curse or Greater Restoration spell.

But there are some other factors at play as well:

First off, the Nightmare has a legendary action that allows it to automatically make a cursed creature within 120 feet fall unconscious and take some (light at the level they'd be facing one of these) psychic damage. There's no save against this - if you're cursed, they can just do this. And given that the curse only needs them to hit a target, this is very likely to be available to them.

I think the best use of this is to deal with a tank-like character. If the Nightmare can land a hit (and their other legendary action option allows them to teleport across any distance to a creature it can see and make its Haunter's Spear attack - which actually might make tanks less of a problem anyway) they can knock someone out.

Lastly, they're also very hard to kill permanently. In 1d10 days after they die, they can revive next to an unconscious creature bearing their curse.

Now, if they've only cursed members of the party, this might not be a factor, given that the players likely have figured out that they have a curse and taken steps to cleanse themselves of it. However, if you want to keep this monster around to torment the party, simply have them curse an NPC and leave them alive. They have an Intelligence of 13, so they're rational enough to plan ahead in this way.

If you want to play very strictly, you might say that they had to target a creature with at least 25 HP so that a single hit of their spear wouldn't outright kill them, but this is an area where I think some cutscene magic and a pulled punch could allow them to have struck, like, a child without dealing any damage, using the innocent to keep coming back. Maybe they've cursed tons of people.

I think the numbers we're looking at, and the real necessity to have at least Remove Curse in the party's arsenal, means that we'd for sure not want to deploy these until tier 2 - unless you want a fake-out TPK against a tier 1 party (even then I'd lean toward the later levels of tier 1 just to make sure that the spear attacks don't take people down outright).

But to keep the nightmare factor at play, I wouldn't wait too long to menace the party with one of these guys. Even fudging it a little to send them against a 6th- or 7th-level party (which technically puts it beyond the High Difficulty XP cap for a 4-player party) might be ok to really make them feel like an overwhelming threat. However, this first appearance might simply be to curse a target and then vanish (especially in Ravenloft I think you can feel free to pull some "invisible teleporting" BS to up the spooky factor). The curse might not even be apparent, especially if the characters don't have any levels of exhaustion left.

Indeed, this might be a good monster to deploy suddenly and briefly in a non-combat scene. Maybe the party is doing some general business in town (if it is Ravenloft, that might not necessarily be a place of safety and comfort, but even horror needs some moments of calm to reset the tension) and this thing emerges from some impossible space to jab at the character with their spear before vanishing (they could even use Dreamwalk to teleport to a passing crow or something if you wanted to strictly play by the book). Maybe they jab the target and then use the Narcotize legendary action to immediately cause the character to collapse unconscious, so their escape isn't witnessed.

I do think that probably all of the Relentless Killers are good options for disrupting Pursuer-type monsters, like Mr. X from Resident Evil 2 - if the party is in the middle of some slow dungeon crawl, having an over-leveled Relentless Killer show up can suddenly turn what had been a bunch of gradual exploration-focused rooms into a deadly obstacle course. The Relentless Nightmare can easily catch up with any PCs, so the players really cannot outpace them without blocking line of sight, meaning they're more likely to stand their ground.

If you are deploying the Nightmare against a lower-level party (again, probably not any lower than 6. Maybe, maybe 5 if you want to stretch it) I think you should think about the monster's motivation. Are they going there just to kill people? They certainly have the tools to do so, and the party will probably just fight back and stands a good chance of actually killing it as long as there are some folks with high ACs (it has a +9 to hit, so even with a high AC, the party might just get unlucky.

However, I think the monster might be more interesting if their motives are not to just immediately kill the party, but to disrupt them and separate them. A Relentless Nightmare can pretty quickly and with relative ease knock an entire party unconscious - they can literally do two PCs per round if they use Narcotize with two of their legendary actions, and can even set up to do more of them on a subsequent turn.

The strange thing in horror is that if you just slaughter everyone, it's not really scary anymore, because once all the PCs are irrevocably dead, there's no agency anymore and the player has to separate their feelings from their characters' fates. But if you use this to put them into new and more dangerous positions, that can up the terror.

Perhaps the Nightmare's goal is not to directly kill the party, but instead to knock everyone out and then drag their bodies to some deeper chamber of a dungeon, putting them in the way of other monsters or traps. The panic and desperation of a fight against a Nightmare should probably be built around watching your allies fall unconscious one by one, and forcing you to use your action to wake up an ally rather than put more damage on the monster.

The Nightmarish Restoration element here can make this a recurring threat - I'd be inclined to have them show up a little too early in an unrelated dungeon - maybe the party is going to some dilapidated hunting lodge in the woods, and it's a dungeon that's mostly just about exploration with maybe a few minor threats in it, but then, about halfway through, they look back to some room that they'd already explored, and this thing appears. There's zero explanation for what they are or why they are hunting the party, but after a desperate fight, either the Nightmare is slain or the party is all knocked out and mysteriously finds themselves in some earthen basement below the lodge.

The initial encounter being seemingly at random, the party might not see the thing for a while, until it shows up at some other location to attack them. Eventually, the party might start to learn more about the Nightmare, the folklore surrounding it and the rumors about how it works.

I actually don't think I'd build an entire campaign around one of these monsters, but instead have it be a major recurring threat - a kind of secondary plotline woven through a campaign. If you like to have elements of your campaigns based on your PCs' backstories, this could work very well as a throughline for such a plot.

As a note: while the Narcotize legendary action simply says that it gives the Unconscious condition, I'd interpret that as magically-induced sleep. Thus, if you have an Elf, Reborn, or Warforged member of the party (or any other character that doesn't sleep), you might consider granting them immunity at least to the unconsciousness. This will change the way the encounter works, but remember that you can always knock such characters unconscious simply through damage. Likewise, if you have a Kalashtar, who do sleep but don't dream, I might make it harder for the Nightmare to use its Nightmarish Restoration feature if they're forced to use a Kalshtar character to resurrect.

Inner Shadow Barbarian vs. Death Knight

 Yes, I'm doing a build/damage calculation for a homebrewed subclass!

As a note, I think that I'm already altering the design slightly: I love the flavor of Raging Hurl, the 6th level feature (see the previous post for a breakdown of the subclass as a whole,) but it's a little over-designed and fiddly.

Thus, I think I'm going to go with the alternative that I proposed in that previous post and switch it to something simpler:

Level 6: Enraged Manipulation:

While you are in a Rage, creatures have disadvantage on their saving throws against your attempts to Grapple or Shove them with an Unarmed Strike.

Now, that could make my life calculating damage a little harder, given that the Grappler feat gives us advantage on attacks against grappled targets, and so we would need to figure out how likely it is that the Death Knight gets grappled by us. Luckily, we have an out: we just use Reckless Attack every turn so that everything has advantage, whether we are grappling the Death Knight or not. Grappling would still have great utility, allowing us to keep the DK from our allies and even maybe drag them off of a steed, assuming they don't Legendary Resistance out of our grapples.

Still, we'll just assume we're hitting it with our unarmed strikes, and maybe making a grapple attempt one one attack each turn with the Grappler feat, but focusing more on damage.

    Stats:

This is simple: we start off with 17 in Strength and then whatever we need for good Dex and Con. We can even kind of dump Wisdom a bit if we just want to rely on Primal Knowledge for the big Wisdom checks.

    Feats:

Here's where we're going to need to be creative. Typical Barbarian feats like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and even Dual Wielding don't work with this build. Now, the obvious one to take is Grappler. We could just cap Strength at level 8, and thus be able to boost our Dex and Con more at levels 12 and 16 if we go up that high later on, but I might instead take something like Mage Slayer and then figure out whether to split an ASI at 12 or find one last Strength-boosting feat. For the purposes of this white-room test, it'd be better to just cap things, but I'm going to say we go Mage Slayer as a more realistic choice in a long campaign. Sentinel could also be a good option as further control. That means only a +4 to Strength.

    Gameplan:

Very simple: we're going to rage and then we're going to do our best to pummel this Death Knight into next week. We'll use Reckless Attack, and I'm going to assume that we're taking at least a little damage each round and benefit from Shadow Manifestation. Notably, on round one, we aren't going to get our off-hand punch or that bonus because we A: need the bonus action to activate our rage and B: don't get the damage boost from taking damage until we are raging. If we can rage prior to combat, that's great, but we'll assume we can't.

So, turn one, it's rage-punch-punch, then turns two onward is punch-punch-punch.

    Damage:

Ok, let's get that first turn. Our attacks at this level deal 2d6+7, or 14 average damage on a hit (naturally something like Wraps of Unarmed Prowess would be good to have, but we have done all of these sans magic items unless we're an artificer who can make our own). We have a +8 to hit, which would normally give us a 45% chance to hit, but we're recklessly attacking, so it's actually a 69.75% chance, and a 9.75% chance to crit. Our bonus crit damage is 7 on average. So, we're looking at 9.765 plus .6825, or roughly 10.4 damage per attack, giving us 20.8 damage on average for our first turn.

Now, turn two, things accelerate:

First off, assuming we take some damage from the Death Knight (which feels likely but not guaranteed - though more likely if we can grapple them or lock them down if we take Sentinel) we'll be adding an additional 3 damage to each attacks, so it becomes 2d6+10, or 17 on a hit. The crit bonus is the same and just as likely, so we just find 69.75% of 17, or 11.8575, and then add in the .6825 extra damage for crits, and we get 12.54 damage for our main action attacks, or 25.08 damage.

However, we then get our "off-hand" attack, which lands for 2d6+6, or 13 on average, so, 69.75% of 13 is 9.0675, and adding the crit bonus gives us 9.75 damage.

Thus, we get a total damage of 34.83, which is very respectable but not insanely outside of the range of damage outputs we've seen before (I'm pretty sure it's behind our Wizard and Sorcerer builds).

However, I realized something: we forgot Brutal Strike.

So, going back, if we assume our first attack is going for a Brutal Strike, we need to drop one of our attacks. Given that our bonus action attack hits for less than our other strikes, it's actually probably ideal for that to be the one we risk having a lower hit chance for. We can't do that on turn one, though.

So, turn one, we drop the 10.4 damage from one of our action attacks and then find what we get without advantage but an additional d10. We have a 45% chance to hit with this and a 5% chance to crit. A hit deals 2d6+1d10+7 damage, which becomes 19.5 on a hit and an extra 9 damage on a crit. So, 19.5x45% is 8.775 and then 9x5% is .45, so that attack now deals 9.225 - which is a damage loss, actually. We might still want to do it for the chance at a Hamstring Blow.

On turn two, though, we can do this with our off-hand attack. Thus, we lose the 9.75 damage to do 2d6+1d10+6 damage without advantage, or 18.5. Given that that's less than the attack on turn one, I think losing advantage really does wind up being a damage loss even with the extra d10. Against a lower-AC target, I think that would change.

But thus, we can expect to deal 25.08 damage on average on our first turn and then a very healthy 34.83 damage on subsequent turns. I'm actually quite pleased with this result, which feels in-line with what other characters can do.

The Berserker build I did does better, and even winds up getting into the 40s if they can reliably get a Retaliation attack, so perhaps there are ways I could even soup this subclass up.

EDIT: Oh duh. I forgot Graze.

Now, I realize that there's a flaw here: our "off-hand" attack doesn't add our Strength, typically, but Graze is a mastery that allows us to do our Strength modifier in damage on a miss. Perhaps there's a reason that they don't put it on light weapons!

Turn one that issue shouldn't matter: we have a 30.25% chance to miss when we're attacking with advantage, so we can add 4x30.25% to each of those attacks, giving turn one's 10.4 damage per attack an extra 1.21 damage, bringing them up to 11.61, and thus the total damage on the first turn ought to be 23.22.

That extra 1.21 can be added as well to the two regular attacks on turn 2. But how do we square the off-hand attack?

Well, here's a place where we might just buff the subclass. Maybe our bonus action attack also gets to add the Strength modifier? After all, I think this is true for the d6 option for the Beast Barbarian (who kind of presaged the Nick property). Given that we dropped it in our earlier calculation, we can very easily just add a flat 4 to the damage of our off-hand unarmed strike. (Essentially, the other 69.75% of the damage is already accounted for in our Attack action attacks, adding up to 4 with that extra 1.21). So, now we're going to basically add 2.42+4 to the total damage done on turn 2+, or 6.42.

Thus, it becomes 41.25 damage on those subsequent turns, which is quite good. Is it too good? ...Maybe, but I also think that martial characters could stand to do more damage. And this is still contingent on taking damage each round.

Naturally, you might decide to take other Masteries than Graze, but for damage output, especially against a high-AC target like a Death Knight, it's the clear winner.

And yeah, I think I will drop the "don't add your Strength modifier" thing on the bonus action attacks, because not only does it make the subclass feel cooler, it's also simplifies it!