FM's Kraken vs the MM's Kraken

 I've never run a Kraken fight, so this is all going to be theoretical. But unlike the Lich, whose MM design really focuses on spellcasting as its primary turn-by-turn action, the Kraken uses more straightforward attacks and beefiness to challenge the party.

Flee, Mortals! gives us its own Kraken, and it's one of the highest-CR monsters in the book, falling only behind Goxomoc and Xogomoc, which are the two phases to its Tarrasque-equivalent. The Kraken is a rare "villain" solo monster that isn't meant to represent a specific individual monster, but much like the Monster Manual's version, this is not just any sea monster, but a Titan from an elder age.

So, before we look at MCDM's take on this creature, let's remind ourselves of the WotC version.

The Kraken is a CR 23 Monstrosity with the special "Titan" subtype that I believe is only shared by a handful of other creatures, such as the Tarrasque, the Empyrean, and I think the Astral Dreadnought. Titans are, in D&D terminology, either the lowest tier of deity or the highest tier of non-divine being, often having some close connection to the gods. They're meant to be a big deal, though I'm unaware of any magic item or spell or whatnot that actually cares if a thing is a Titan.

The MM version has 472 HP, an AC of 18, a walking speed of 20 feet and a swim speed of 60 ft. It has proficiency in every saving throw other than Charisma, immunity to lightning and nonmagical weapon damage, truesight to 120 feet, and immunity to being frightened or paralyzed. Shockingly, it does not actually have Legendary Resistance, but it does have Freedom of Movement, the Ambiphious trait, and the Siege Monster trait.

Its multiattack lets it do three Tentacle attacks, which have an attack bonus of +17 and deals 20 damage and grapples the target, and they can replace any of these with Fling, which lets them throw a grappled creature.

It can also Bite, which has the usual swallow effect that deals 42 damage per round. Finally, it can do a Lightning Storm that can hit up to three targets for around 22 damage on a failed dexterity save, or half as much on a success.

Then, we've got three legendary actions - Tentacle or Fling costs 1, Lightning Storms costs 2, and for 3, they can do an Ink Cloud, which heavily obscures an area and deals poison damage.

    So, honestly, the Kraken's not too complicated to run - it basically hits pretty hard, but probably needs to swallow player characters to really cause any serious panic. It's fast in the water, and thanks to Freedom of Movement, it benefits a lot from using difficult terrain, while its ink cloud is good coupled with its Truesight.

Still, the Kraken's main dangers are pretty mundane - it hits easily, hits hard, and can restrain you. The numbers are big - it's a ton of hit points to get through, and while the damage isn't shockingly high for a likely tier 4 monster, the fact that it has a +17 to hit means that it's going to be very hard to not get hit by it - someone wearing mundane plate is only getting missed on a natural 1.

FM's Kraken is a higher CR - it's CR 26. There's also a rider on it that makes the Kraken effectively immortal - when it drops to 0 HP or dies, all conditions end for it and it teleports back to the place where it slumbers, where it regains all its hit points and falls unconscious. In other words - the Kraken is an eternal part of the world, and can only be repelled, never fully gotten rid of. But I'd also probably say that when it goes unconscious, that's probably something that will last for thousands of years.

This Kraken has Amphibious and Siege Monster, but it also has Supernatural Resistance, as well as Slowed Resistance - a version of Legendary Resistance that, three times a day, lets the Kraken turn failed saves into successes but incurs a 10-ft movement speed penalty that lasts for 24 hours.

This Kraken has an AC of 22, 499 HP, and a land speed of 30 feet with a swim speed of 60. So, if land-bound, using all its Slowed Resistance will lock it in place. It also does not have Freedom of Movement. This Kraken has cold and psychic damage immunity in addition to lightning and mundane weapons. It's also immune to more conditions: blinded, charmed, dazed (a special condition in MCDM stuff,) flanked (which MCDM treats as a condition), frightened, poisoned, paralyzed, petrified, or stunned. Its Truesight isn't quite as long-range at 60 feet, but it has blindsight out to 120 feet.

The Kraken's Multiattack allows it to use its Tentacle attack four times, or it uses its Mental Lance attack three times. Interestingly, it cannot mix and match here. The former is, of course, a melee attack, while the latter is a ranged "Power" attack (MCDM's stuff distinguishes psionic powers from spellcasting beyond simply not needing components - it's a wholly separate thing).

The Tentacle Attack has a slightly lower hit bonus - a mere +16 - but deals a lot more damage: 19 bludgeoning and 11 psychic. Like the MM version, it grapples targets, but unlike it, it does not restrain them. Mental Lance has a 120-foot range and a +18 to hit, dealing 22 psychic damage and frightening the target. In a certain sense, this kind of takes the place of Lightning Storm, reimagined as a psionic thing that does psychic damage (not as good for my Blue Dragonborn EK, but better for my GOO Warlock).

They have an action called Psionic Storm that allows them to restrain a vehicle, and destroy it if they keep it in the storm for three full turns (though they must concentrate on this like a spell - meaning the party will want to interrupt it if they can, though good luck, as the Kraken has a +16 to Con saves).

Once a day, the Kraken can do a Skull-Splitting Howl, which is a true AoE attack that requires a DC 26 Con save against 10d10 psychic damage for every enemy within 120 feet, and on a failure, the creatures can't concentrate on spells (or powers) until the start of the Kraken's next turn (save for half).

The "fling" ability is transformed into a bonus action, dealing a set amount of damage (I think this is meant to be instead of rather than in addition to falling damage, but I might need a ruling). Finally, it has a reaction called Psychic Reprisal, which lets it do some psychic damage against an attacker, with a Wisdom save for half.

So, the FM Kraken is somewhat similar - it's a gargantuan sea Titan that fights with tentacles (though once again, the art for it makes it look more like a sea serpent than a giant cephalopod). Overall, this Kraken feels like it can pose a bigger threat, though that's to be expected with its higher CR. That said, without the Bite attack, player characters are less  likely to be taken fully out of the fight - something that I think is a big aspect to FM's monster design. (There are also, I think, no monsters that stun characters.)

Also, there's a psionic theme here that is absent in the MM version. The Kraken, of course, straddles this line - while most Cosmic Horror monsters are considered Aberrations, much of the Kraken's lore and backstory is built around similar tropes - an ancient being from far beyond the horizon of history, incomprehensibly ancient and often communicating psychically with cultists who might be transformed to serve them (such as Kraken Priests or, from Bigby's, Storm Heralds). In a lot of ways, the Kraken could be used to represent a Cthulhu-like being. But it also rests in that more traditional fantasy realm. (Though let's not forget that they've always mixed a bit - even setting aside Robert E. Howard's friendship with H. P. Lovecraft, even J.R.R. Tolkien included the Watcher in the Water, who is something of an unexplained Lovecraftian horror that is, for all intents and purposes, a Kraken.)

Given that psionics and psychic damage in D&D are often related to cosmic horror entities, that line is drawn even bolder with the MCDM version of the Kraken, while it still retains its Monstrosity creature type.

I find the notion that it can specifically target vehicles - obviously most likely ships - is interesting. While my Triton Wizard is of course very comfortable operating in the ocean, it's actually pretty difficult to grant player characters a Swim Speed (I think the best is if you have a high-level Artificer who can pass around a spell-storing item with Alter Self in it - though this requires concentration, making it tough to use in a serious fight). So, the best option is probably to fight a Kraken from a ship, but this Kraken can destroy that ship if you don't take it out quickly. (Though honestly, I think a Kraken will likely retreat deep beneath the water if a fight isn't going well for them.)

At CR 26, the FM encounter building math basically says you should never face this Kraken before level 18, and it could potentially be a campaign boss fought at level 20 if you have a few fights that lead up to it. I, of course, haven't done extensive testing with FM's encounter-building system yet.

But in terms of true threat, the FM Kraken is hitting harder and with more attacks, and while it can disrupt the party, it's really only taking someone out of the fight by knocking them out (though if it has the range, it can potentially keep melee characters at bay with its Mental Lance).

While the MM version of the Lich runs a serious risk of failing to live up to its reputation through dogged use of counterspell or simply getting focus-fired down, I think the MM Kraken is going to make for a tough, epic encounter (as long as it doesn't get taken out by a spell that can lock it down - though the only real "lockdown" spell with a Charisma save is Banishment, and these monsters typically are native to and stick to the Prime Material Plane - though maybe you've got one from the Plane of Water?)

(Also, as a note, earlier I said the stat block didn't refer to a specific individual, but another reading of the lore actually notes that FM's Kraken is a specific creature from a specific location. Still, I think you're fine using this for any Kraken on any setting, and of course, I think you can very easily just re-skin any named monsters in FM to suit your needs - I was looking at the named Mummy villain and thinking how I'd use her stats for the main "Mummy Lord" in my setting.)

Armored Core VI First Impressions

 Well, I went ahead and got Armored Core VI. Even though I've got a purchased game that I haven't yet been able to play (BG3 - whose actual version is not yet available on the Mac) I found myself itching for the action.

ACVI is made by FromSoft, whose "Souls-like" game series has been a favorite of mine (ironically my two favorite of them I've played are not actually Dark Souls - I prefer Bloodborne and Elden Ring,) and so I came in expecting tight action and a serious challenge.

And... it's not quite what I expected. Not in a bad way, mind you.

ACVI feels in many ways like a throwback to the PS2 era and the kinds of games that were common when I was in high school (among them, some of the Armored Core series, though this is my first). While the level maps are giant, dystopian science-fiction ruins, the game is broken into discrete levels, and finishing a mission is usually pretty quick. One of the missions you get early on has only one simple objective, which is to take out an enemy AC, and while they give you a decent fight, the whole thing is over in a couple minutes.

Combat in ACVI is largely fairly easy - most foes go down in one or two hits from your various weapons, and as long as you keep on the move, you'll avoid most of their fire. However, this ease falls away entirely when you fight one of its bosses - and one of those bosses must be defeated before you can get past the intro level.

The first level of the game sees you landing on the planet Rubicon illegally, with minimal equipment and no ability to customize your mech (even when you go back and replay it). You're basically scrounging through the wreckage of other ACs to try to steal identification documents to allow you to sign into the mercenary coordinating system on the planet. The level is pretty simple - you jet around, learning how to control your mech, and fighting off foes who are not even close to matching your power. But then, after you find an ID that will sactually work for you, a gigantic attack helicopter shows up, and you have your first boss fight.

One of the things that makes the fight hard is that your most powerful weapon, a melee-only energy blade, requires you to, you know, get up close to the helicopter, which... as you can imagine, is usually flying around. It took me maybe four or five times to take down this boss, and I can see this serving as a bit of a wall that will prevent some players from progressing further in the game.

But that'd be a shame, because the subsequent missions are far, far easier. I don't think I died more than a couple times in any of them (as in, in total - most of them I beat on the first try without much fear of dying). And ACVI is also pretty generous with checkpoints - if you die, you reset to the last checkpoint, and it seems bosses will always have a checkpoint right before them. Once you get the ability to switch out your build, you can even swap builds if you die and come back to the checkpoint.

Now, getting parts for your AC is one of the big systems in the game, and the main way you can get them is by purchasing them in the Parts Shop. But here's the amazing thing: you can replay missions as many times as you want, and you get paid each time you complete them. So, it's not hard to find a quick and easy mission and just blaze through it a few times to earn the credits to buy that new set of missile launchers.

The statistics of each part vary greatly - there are a lot of ways in which they're balanced for different optimal scenarios. As such, getting new ones isn't about becoming strictly more powerful, but more about giving you new options for your situations. I haven't unlocked a ton of options yet, and still have many that I haven't bought yet, but for example, there's a pair of leg parts you can get that make you jump much higher and generally let you dodge out of the way of incoming fire much more easily that made a few missions way easier (like battling that enemy AC).

The world of AC is not a fun one - you're basically being used by a ruthless mercenary and at least in the early missions, you fight on behalf of a number of evil megacorporations, with your foes generally being other corps or the only people who seem like they might be the good guys, the Rubicon Liberation Front.

Only 7 or 8 missions in, I don't think I've got a great handle on the overall story, but I expect that our "mission control," "Handler Walter" (voiced by Travis Willingham in classic 'dark and gritty' mode) has some ulterior motives that he's in no hurry to share with us.

I think my agenda for this early stage of the game is to replay missions until I've been able to buy out the entire Part Shop (which might take a while) so that I can really experiment with my preferred weapons and AC builds.

A bit like the Souls games, the statistics of various weapons is only part of the story - the cadence of their attacks and, for your shoulder-mounted missile launchers, often the angle at which they strike, can make a theoretically more powerful weapon be trickier to use.

Trying to get a higher rank on the AC-duel mission, I put together a build that was all about staggering my foe and then having one weapon (the energy blade) that could make great use of the stagger bonus. (Some weapons will inflict a higher "impact" to stagger foes, and some weapons deal significantly more damage to staggered foes). But while heavy-hitting missiles and a bazooka in the right hand were pretty good for that fight (though given that the enemy AC has an energy blade, it might be best to build for long-distance) but I don't think it would be practical in missions with a lot of weaker enemies.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see how hard the game gets further in, and how good I get at it.

How Flee, Mortals! Presents Devils and Demons

 I think for a lot of people who come to play D&D, it can be surprising that they have a variety of different fiends. In most games, "demon" describes basically any inherently evil monster from whatever nether realm exists in that universe. "Devil" typically refers to "the devil" in a Christian sense, as in the primary, sort of "god of evil" (obviously Christianity is monotheistic, but Satan acts in it as a kind of mockery of the divine).

But even if we set aside the less common Yugoloths, Ghereliths, and oddities, D&D gives us two primary fiend groups - Devils and Demons. And this confuses a lot of new (and experienced) players, especially because demons are from the less recognizable Abyss, while devils play a much more traditional role in the Nine Hells, which resembles Dante's Inferno and the much more "classic" lower plane.

Now, part of the confusion is purely from the novelty of having a distinction where most fantasy universes and fantasy games just group them all together. But I also think a lot of the distinction is from the fact that, design-wise, there's not a huge difference between Devils and Demons on a cosmetic level.

Devils do tend to have the classic cloven hooves, horns, and often tails, but that's not entirely absent from demons. And sometimes things feel a bit backwards - in the 2014 MM, Pit Fiends and Lemures, both devils, look kind of splotchy and misshapen. In contrast, their closest equivalents on the demonic end of things, Balors and Manes (both occupying the highest and lowest CRs for their respective cohorts) look a little more clearly-defined, with Manes being, yes, kind of bloated sacks of fiendish flesh, but with a bit more of a skeletal, sharp look and Balors looking, well, honestly kind of cleaner and clearer-defined. I used to get these confused, and would sometimes think Balors were devils and Pit Fiends were demons based on their art alone - figuring that "messy" was a chaotic trait.

Mechanically, there are a few things that really distinguish Devils and Demons. Devils are typically resistant or immune to mundane "kinetic" damage except from silvered weapons, and they're immune to fire and poison damage and usually resistant to cold damage. Demons are only immune to poison, but get resistance to fire, cold, and lightning damage. Also, Devils typically get to see through magical darkness, while demons, less consistently, sometimes get truesight or blindsight.

That's all well and good, but unless the party is paying very close attention, you can get away with mixing fiend types and they'll seem pretty similar.

Flee, Mortals! goes a bit farther.

FM's Devils are universally humanoid in general form. They're the classic "horns, hooves, tails, and often wings." Tieflings are described in FM as being simply devils who escaped the Seven Cities of Hell (their version of the Nine Hells) and may have chosen not to serve the lawful evil regime of that place.

Devils actually lack Devil's Sight in FM, but all (with the exception of the minions) get a couple-a-day reaction to charm foes that try to attack them, and also have a liability, where if a character discovers the devil's true name and speaks it aloud, they can rob it of this reaction as well as its immunity to fire damage.

Naturally, if you want these names to come up, you'll need to build an adventure around it. But Devils in this case are really built to be able to function in humanoid realms. They're still evil and try to ensnare souls in contracts, but they really have a more human face to present to mortals.

Demons, on the other hand, have a whole different vibe.

Demons in FM, on a cosmetic level, have a couple universal traits: they have a kind of split going down their middle that opens up and reveals a whole bunch of skull-shapes in their core. These shapes represent the souls they have consumed. Because demons in FM are all soul-eaters.

Each demon stat block actually has a line between its HP and its speed that shows how many souls the demon currently has when the fight starts. They then consume souls to fuel various abilities. If they run out of Souls, they go into a state called Lethe, in which they become more aggressive but also more vulnerable, gaining advantage on attack rolls but disadvantage on saving throws, and being forced to attack and try to kill the nearest creature with a soul, and then use their Soul Devourer trait to try to restore their soul count (they also have reduced intelligence in this state).

This does a couple of things: first, it means that demons are always very dangerous monsters, as, written as is, they can perma-kill characters (though as DM you can always reign in that threat).

The art for Demons is anything but human-like. While there's a bit of an animal-like vibe to Aurumvas, the named demon villain (an embodiment of greed,) giving him a snake head, there's something more eldritch and alien to their design, but a consistency that also marks them as being similar - that kind of "layered" look that is peeling back to reveal the trapped souls within.

There will be no mistaking these devils and these demons for one another, even if both are fiends that will both be burned a bit extra by the old divine smite.

Creating an FM-Style Creature Cohort: Part Three - Conceptualizing Taheen Creatures

 In part one, we talked a little bit about shared traits for the Taheen cohort. They're immune to the frightened condition, and they're resistant to poison. But one thing we didn't really go deep into was what a fight against the Taheen should feel like. As we talked about earlier, Goblins are slippery and will probably involve a lot of movement on the battlefield. Kobolds work well with one another, tending to move in coordinated phalanxes. Orcs will close distance with the party and get up in your face, and require committed attacks to take them down.

Our Taheen are fearless, but not brave in the way that an Orc is (as many have pointed out, you can only be brave if you feel fear, and the Taheen are just kind of numb to that kind of emotion). What I think that might represent, though, is that beyond being immune to the frightened condition, they're also cool under pressure - every job is just a job, after all. What is a mechanic that could reflect this?

Well, we also know that a lot of Taheen are going to be using firearms. We could just give them the Gunner-like trait where they don't get disadvantage for attacking with ranged weapons with an enemy in melee range, but what if, perhaps, we gave them a universal trait that let them step out of the way of hostile creatures. Not a full dash, but just enough to get distance and set themselves up for success. Here's my proposal:

Cautious Step: When an enemy ends its turn within 5 feet of the Taheen, the Taheen can use up to 5 feet of its movement without provoking opportunity attacks.

The reason I phrase it "up to 5 feet of its movement" is in case the Taheen's been grappled or otherwise had its speed reduced to 0. Now, we could also have this come as soon as a creature enters melee range, but in that case, I think we would need to make this a reaction. That could easily be our final design, but for now I like the idea that the player can get in, swing their attacks on the Taheen, and then the Taheen slips back far enough to shoot them. It also means they can do this multiple times per round, becoming aggravatingly difficult to pin down, and encouraging players to arrange themselves around a target to avoid giving it a path to escape.

Now, thematically, our Taheen fight with guns. But D&D is also a game that tends to push for melee combat (even if the optimizier community basically thinks anyone who gets into melee is a fool) and even if our Taheen are showing up with anachronistic tactics and weaponry, we probably want some to be powerful in melee. Still, I think we could give all of them guns.

As I said in an earlier post, I homebrewed a melee firearm for my friend's Giff Paladin (it uses Strength, can work with melee abilities like Divine Smite, and has a range of 5/10 and a d12 damage die), and I think we could use that design here. Alternatively, of course, we could just give them combat knives, batons, and such modern melee weapons.

Ok, we've got our universal Taheen traits. Now let's talk about what kind of creatures we might create (this won't produce full stat blocks, but we're going to get a sense of how each of these would work).

It seems pretty easy to simply look at the FM creature categories and just come up with a stat block for each role. Taheen are not terribly ambitious for themselves, so I'd say for our "Villain" creature we're likely looking at a Leader rather than a Solo monster. The Taheen are definitely more coordinated in their efforts than out for personal glory (they probably lean Lawful) and so I think our villain is probably a kind of manager.

So, let's go down the list:

Ambusher: The Taheen are beings of the Shadowfell, which means that they do have some innate magic. Pulling on more modern, sci-fi ideas, I like the idea that our Ambusher uses Illusion magic to hide in plain sight. We can imagine that they have some kind of device that projects illusions to camouflage themself. I like to think that they can appear as other creatures, though admittedly that's not nearly as powerful in the heat of battle. I like the idea that they can become invisible in a weird way - like, the players need to make a Wisdom saving throw, and on a failure, the Taheen becomes invisible to them - so you could have a situation where the Cleric still sees our Taheen and calls out "he's over there!" but the Fighter (who actually stands a chance of taking them down) is looking right at them and going "where!?"

Artillery: Given the Taheen's use of firearms, Artillery is a natural fit. Artillery creatures aren't just ranged, though - they also need some way to open the distance between themselves and the party. We could give them "concussive rounds" that slow targets they hit, or give them a bonus action that lets them throw a grenade that slow targets (maybe even inflicting a status effect instead of creating difficult terrain). We could also enhance their Cautious Step to let them move farther.

Brute: This one is a little tough, which is funny because I think Brutes are typically the simplest design. We could have some beefy Taheen with big melee-firearms. Brutes often have kind of compounding attacks - hitting once makes them deal more damage with a second strike, such as by dropping a target prone. (Though not always.) I think we probably enhance our Brute's attacks with some kind of "obsessive assault," like if they hit twice with a multiattack, they get to make a third attack.

Controller: This will, of course, probably be a bit more complex. In a previous design, I made a high-CR Taheen that was a kind of "anti-Druid," who used the Taheen's association with pollution (the casual waste of the corporate thoughtlessness they kind of represent) to defile the land. I think a Taheen controller can use poison and call upon bubbling tar to emerge from the ground and drag foes down, restraining them. Actually, I'm pretty happy with that.

Leader: Leaders are, of course, one of the Villain options. We'll revisit this.

Minion: Minions are simple - but they typically have some effect that makes them more powerful when three or more are involved in an attack. What I'm noticing here is that we've got an emerging theme of Taheen slowing down enemies or stopping them in their tracks. I could see something similar to the Rotting Zombie's ability to slow nearby creatures, but in this case, our minions are using ranged attacks and probably need to hit the target to slow it down.

    Now, two things to consider: first, is this theme going to get redundant if we use it too much? Second, is slowing down movement going to make for a fun encounter? We'll keep these questions in mind.

Skirmishers: Honestly, Cautious Step already gives Taheen a bit of Skirmisher-like power. But Skirmishers are typically melee fighters - their mobility a remedy to the danger of getting up close. It might be enough to just give these creatures reach weapons and high speed.

Soldier: A Soldier is like a Brute in that it can typically get up in melee and take a beating, but rather than pumping out damage, a Soldier is more interested in locking down foes. I like the idea that these guys have something a bit like the Ancestral Guardian or Armorer Artificer's "taunt attack," where if they hit you, you get disadvantage on targets other than it. A kind of "hey buddy, you gotta deal with me first." I'd attach a rider that it doesn't give disadvantage on other Taheen Soldiers so you can't just get two of these to screw over a player character.

And given that we're not doing a Solo monster, that kind of fills us out.

I think we're going to save our Villain for the end of this process. Next time, I'm going to start playing around with some actual stat blocks, or at least putting down the actual wording of the traits and abilities we've come up with here.

Building an FM-Style Creature Cohort: Part Two, Targeting Tiers

 So, there's nothing saying you couldn't make Goblins that the party fights at level 18. Ultimately, monster stats shift with level and CR, and you could make a bunch of Goblins who deal massive amounts of damage with their special goblin weapons or cast truly mighty "booyahg" that could rupture the surface of the planet.

But generally speaking, monster cohorts usually come in an expected range of toughness. Goblins and Kobolds are, famously, often the first monsters a party faces (of course, they've also been made popular playable races, and their role as "always bad guys but usually kind of silly because you face them when you're low level" has gotten some nuance and depth) and as such, a lot of their stat blocks exist in the ranges that you can throw at a tier 1 party. There are plenty of these creatures at CRs lower than 1, which more or less means you can throw more than one of these at a party that is level 1 (though for such a low-level party, you probably want to avoid outnumbering them by too much in a single fight).

Now, CR is a tricky thing: the way that basically all encounter-building advice works is that a CR 2 monster could be a serious threat in tier 1, a significant obstacle in tier 2, or a minor nuisance in tier 3, and basically fodder in tier 4. Creatures don't come with a label saying "use this as a boss in tier 1 with a few lower-CR minions, but not as a lackey in a later fight." And the idea is that, well, you can use them for both.

Here, I think, FM's creature categories become important. Some monsters, like Controllers or Support, they advise against using more than one of in a fight. Controllers, for example, tend to have a lot of complexity and ongoing effects to lock down foes, and limiting yourself to one per encounter first makes it easier to keep track of things, but also gives players a tactical question to answer: do we focus-fire the Controller to make fighting all these other things easier when it's dead, or do we need to burn through its minions first?

But you can toss in whatever monsters you want into a fight. If your sole controller is CR 1/2 in a fight for level 7 players, though, the impact that monster will have is probably going to be minimal - they get diminishing returns past tier 1.

Still, if we take FM's encouter-building math, or the math out of Xanathar's, you can always just add monsters to make a fight harder. A fight for 9th level players could, in theory, be made into a fight for 15th level players by just doubling every monster in it (well, at easy difficulty).

So, my rule (one that is pretty new, to be clear) is that I'll generally try to avoid having more than two monsters per player character in a fight (counting a cohort of Minions as a single monster). If you want swarms of bad guys, that's what Minions are for, but it's a little drudgerous (if that's a word) for a party to have to churn their way through CR 1/2 mooks with 14 hit points apiece when their attacks are landing for an average of 24.

So, then, let's define Tiers of Monster. The idea here is that creatures of these CR are ideal for players to face within the tiers we show.

Obviously, there's overlap - a CR 3 monster could be nice and scary for a level 4 party (if the monster has some help,) while 3 would be a good CR for a rank-and-file bad guy in a level 10 fight. But we're going to broadly sort things here, using FM's encounter math.

The idea, I think, will be that a tier range will be from two-per-character at the tier's lowest level to the lowest CR of the next tier. Let's see how that works.

Tier 1 (Levels 1-4) Of course, here, we're obviously starting at CR 0 - the top range is what we're more curious about.

Tier 2 (Levels 5-10) FM lists the amount of CR a level 10 player adds to the budget as 3.5. Rounding down, this means that we could use two CR 1 monsters for every 10th-level player character.

    So, already, this feels a little conservative. We can for sure use CR 1 monsters in a tier 1 fight. Perhaps, though, we should just not worry much about the tiers overlapping.

In this case, we can simply use the tier's highest level's CR cap to define the top range of the tier.

In this case, Tier 1 becomes 0-6. The toughest monster, FM says, that a tier 1 party should ever consider facing, is CR 6.

And yeah, 6 is pretty high - but I think a good party could handle it. Probably only as a solo monster. There's a reason that this is the absolute cap in FM.

So, revising that, we get our new tier ranges:

Tier 1: 0-6

Tier 2: 1/2-15

Tier 3: 2-24

Tier 4: 3-30

    In other words, the key here is that we should be considering these level ranges as the far extent of what you should be throwing at a party of this tier.

With that settled... erm, what about our Taheen? What tier do we expect to see our parties face them?

Well, if we look at tiers of play, the general vibe, in simple terms, is this:

Tier 1, you're local heroes. You fight the day-to-day dangers that a small town or village faces. The enemies you're fighting don't have a lot of profound magic at their disposal, but they're still unambiguous dangers to the common folk. But in most cases, they're "normal" threats. Goblin bandits, orcish raiders, maybe the odd ghost in a haunted house.

    Well, our Taheen are, of course, Punch-Clock Villains, and might, in a lot of cases, really just be kind of amoral office workers. But they're also supernatural beings - these are monstrosities of the Shadowfell who cannot die (meaning that they've been alive... an arbitrarily long time). And given the source material we're taking them from - in which they're some of the most elite minions of a cosmos-destroying evil overlord/eldritch abomination - maybe these guys aren't something a low-level party can mow down.

    I can imagine that the role of the Taheen in tier 1 would be as an occasional presence amidst more mundane threats. Maybe the party is fighting a group of bandits or raiders, and... what's this? There's some weird thing with an animal head who is... paying them? And what's that strange musket that it's aiming at me? What is this thing? What are they doing here? They introduce a mystery that can lead us onward in our adventure.

Tier 2, you become a hero of the larger country - the kingdom, or the republic, or whatever nation-state or city-state. Here, you can start to become a force in something as wide-ranging as a war. Whereas a tier 1 party might be a bit more elite than the local militia, our tier 2 group is an elite force that can take the fight to enemy generals. They start to have things like Fireball, and martials are now attacking twice, making them much more powerful on the battlefield. Spellcasters are no longer forced to be so conservative with spell slots. Basically, at this point you're a veteran adventurer who might have a real name to yourself.

    I think we're looking at a closer fit. The Taheen, with their modern technology and their extraplanar nature mean that they require a more significant response. When the Taheen show up and blast into the royal palace with a bunch of assault rifles, you need people who have proven themselves to take them out.

Tier 3, the idea is that your party has some of the most powerful adventurers on the world. A threat that might have been climactic in tier 2, like an assault on the royal palace, is something you can handle swiftly and with relative ease. If the villain wants to take you down, they need a plan, and powerful monsters. And if they want to evade you, they need to take special care to avoid powerful spells and prevent you from just teleporting into their lairs (the old "Scry & Fry.")

    Here, I think we might still fit, but we're starting to stray outside of the Taheen's power level. The Taheen, after all, are typically working for some other villain, and at this point, that villain might need to step up and use their own forces to oppose us. I don't think you won't see Taheen at this point, but they're likely to be acting as auxiliary forces to our main villain's elites.

Tier 4, you become a hero of the multiverse - obviously, not every campaign goes to other planes, but at this level, you can consider your party legendary in power and status, and people who aren't even from your world might know of you. At this stage, the battles you fight are things that will go down in history as some of the most epic clashes in the history of your world.

    Now that we're multiversal champions, the fact that the Taheen are otherworldly isn't really impressive anymore. So, again, we might see them on occasion, but we're probably frying bigger fish at this stage.

Ok, so with that broken down, I think we can aim to have our Taheen show up in tier 2 through early tier 3. They should probably feel like major threats in tier 2, but wind up as more disposable in tier 3. So, I think we should look at CR 2 as the minimum we shoot for, and capping out at around 7 (which is the CR budget for a single character at level 16 in a standard encounter - in other words, our toughest Taheen can go one-to-one with a party at the end of tier 3, but won't individually overwhelm more than one player character).

    So, that allows us to toss in a weaker Taheen into a tier 1 combat with some less-than-1 CR backup, but if we start using them in tier 4, they've got to come in heavy numbers.

Next, we're going to look at what monster roles we want to cover, and start coming up with a concept for our Taheen Villain!

Phew, Prepped Through the End of Tier 3

 With the last battlemap made in Inkarnate and set up in Roll 20, with the final dungeon outlined and written, and with all the steps they need to (or are likely) to take to get there, I have got everything I have left for my players to level up to 17, marking a shift in the campaign and, of course, a big step up in power. Level 17 means 9th level spells for full casters, fully-empowered cantrips, 5th level spells for half-casters, and admittedly less of a profound shift for pure martial classes.

Hey, if you're in this campaign and read this blog, first of all: I didn't know you read this blog! Second, stop reading! Spoilers!

Ok, so the...

Really, guys. If you're in my campaign and reading this, stop right now. There are massive, enormous spoilers in this post. Stuff you'll want to experience in-game.

Brit, I'm talking specifically to you.

For real.

Spoilers after the cut.

Building a FM-Style Creature Cohort - Part One: Conceptualizing the Taheen

 Ok, this post won't necessarily finish the whole project, but I wanted to start off on looking at how we can design my cohort of monsters.

The Taheen are creatures in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which is a Weird West/High Fantasy/Cosmic Horror/Science Fiction series that follows Roland Deschain and his "Ka-Tet" (basically his adventuring party) on their quest to save The Dark Tower, which serves as a lynchpin for all of existence, from the insane Crimson King. It's something of a nexus of a lot of King's shared universe - there are characters from other stories of his that show up in this, like how Randall Flagg from The Stand is actually one of the Crimson King's henchmen.

While there are references to Taheen as early as the revised version of the first book in the series, The Gunslinger (which is the version of it I read in 2002 or 2003,) we don't really see much of them until the later books, particularly in a region known as Thunderclap, where the Taheen are employed running a camp where psychics from across the multiverse have been dragged and forced to apply their powers to wearing away at the last remaining "Beam," one of the ley-lines that supports the Dark Tower.

The Taheen are humanoid, but with animal heads, which range from weasels to ravens to lizards to monkeys and so-on. They are implied to have been the inspiration for the many animal-headed Egyptian deities like Anubis or Thoth.

But what is striking about them is that they are shockingly normal. Even in a stormy, apocalyptic region, they go about their work with a banal casualness, even as they seek to destroy the universe. King has some opinions about evil people and how evil, even at its highest levels, is ultimately kind of pathetic. Thus, the Taheen seem to represent, as monsters, the banality of evil. These are the kinds of guys who act as guards and administrators at a camp where kidnapped people are pushed to bring about the end of the world, but they snipe at each other over office politics and take breaks to play basketball games.

In my interpretation of the D&D multiverse, the Shadowfell and Feywild are kind of fascinating, because they're otherworldly like the Outer Planes, but their nature isn't as locked into alignment (to be fair, Planescape introduces a lot of nuance, like a sect from Mount Celestia that works quite well as lawful good villains). I like to break them down thusly: the Feywild is Manic while the Shadowfell is Depressive. (If you're young, Bi-Polar Disorder used to be called Manic-Depressive Disorder, in case those terms' relationship doesn't jump out at you immediately). Depressive isn't just sad, but there's a kind of torpor associated with it - being stuck in a rut. The Domains of Dread in Ravenloft, which is of course part of the Shadowfell, has villains who are all kind of stuck in their ways, going through the same evil schemes as if out of habit, unable to move on and change.

And so this idea of doing "routine evil" or any kind of thoughtless drudgery, seems to me to work well with my reading of the Taheen and my reading of the Shadowfell. So, I made my D&D Taheen denizens of the Shadowfell.

Now, creatures of a certain type - your goblins, your orcs, etc. - tend to have a shared trait amongst their stat blocks. In FM, Goblins all have "Crafty," which lets them move around without provoking opportunity attacks, and a climb speed. Time Raiders (the MCDM version of Githyanki) all have immunity to being blinded or charmed, psychic damage resistance, and a feature called Psychic Scar, which prevents certain divination magic or similar effects from reading their emotions, thoughts, if they're lying, or their alignment or location.

So, if we want to build a bunch of stat blocks, we should come up with some common traits to share across all Taheen (note here that this concept isn't unique to FM - there's a similar table in the DMG for traits to give to beings of a certain type).

Let's delve into the lore. The Taheen in King's books are kind of mysterious - there's no clear origin for them, and they kind of show up to be weird and dangerous and then the stories move past them. So, I'm going to be inventing (or rather, have invented) a lot of their background.

First things first: these are beings of the Shadowfell. While not strictly the "undead" plane, there's plenty of undead there. But Taheen are not undead. Let's hold onto that idea.

Taheen are unfazed by evil acts - they don't become gleeful cultists, but they are also not badass mercenaries. Taheen do evil as a job, and one that doesn't really do anything to burnish their "cred," but simply because it's something to do. Indeed, I think we don't even need to say that Taheen are inherently evil-aligned. They do the job because, well, it's their job to do it.

Now, why are they so indifferent? What makes them so apathetic to the effects they have?

Here's my first big idea: Taheen don't permanently die.

Sure, you can kill them, and if you do, you've gotten past them as an obstacle. Unlike a Lich or a Vampire, we don't want our players worrying that the Taheen villain they've defeated is going to continue being a problem for them over the remainder of the campaign, so this process could take years, decades, or longer. And for reasons we'll discuss later, Taheen aren't likely to be very vengeance-minded. But the key is, our Taheen, if left lying around in the Shadowfell, will eventually just wake back up, their bodies mending, and maybe have a bad headache like a nasty hangover.

There are ways to get around this: If you kill a Taheen on another plane, its body will sit there and rot like normal. But if its remains, even the dust that it might have decayed into over thousands of years, makes its way back to the Shadowfell, it'll eventually re-incorporate and come back to life. Perhaps there's some way to destroy their souls (though just because the idea of soul destruction is one that I find existentially terrifying, I tend to even have souls that are "consumed" like by a demon to have some remnant left over that still holds/is the consciousness of the person, even if every vestige of memory and identity is wiped away) but Taheen basically don't have to worry about death because they know that, given time, they'll eventually pop up again.

And with that knowledge, they become immune to fear. What is there to fear if you know that, in the long run, you'll be fine?

But also, if you know that you'll always have infinite time to accomplish the things you want, you might start to have your own personal ambitions atrophy.

(This, incidentally, is also why our party doesn't need to fear vengeful Taheen. To them, death is just something that periodically happens to them, and if you take one down, well... fair game, I guess.)

In other words, the banality of the Taheen is born out of their interminable lives. In the drudgery of the Shadowfell, all emotions - the negative, like grief or fear, and the positive, like joy or love, are all muted. And so, the Taheen are happy to live their endless lives like the "Innies" in Severance, doing meaningless work in a corporate labyrinth with no curiosity about why it is they're doing the things they're doing, and having no real life outside of their work.

Now, let me tell you about my relationship with coffee.

My father is an absolute coffee addict. At least when I was a kid, he drank it constantly. And he is also a workaholic. He's a distinguished professor at a world-class university in a prominent field (Computer Science). I, however, basically have never had a cup of normal hot coffee that I've ever liked in the slightest. I like tea - it's not the heat. And I've had cold coffee beverages (and coffee ice cream) that I've enjoyed. But to me, the bitterness of coffee is just too much for me to take, even with sugar and milk/cream.

And I also associate coffee with working in an office. Even if my visits to my dad's office as a kid were kind of fun excursions, seeing some of his friendly colleagues and looking at the (to be clear, very rudimentary) robots that grad students had built in the lab that shared a building with his, there was still a general negative association with the smell and aesthetic of "the office," like the smell of hot printer paper and, well, coffee everywhere. Not to get too deep in my own psychoanalysis, but this was the place that held my dad rather than letting him be home with me and my family, a place of ever-piling-on responsibilities and demands on one's time.

So, in my non-game-related fiction, like Dispatches From Otherworld, coffee became the name for a substance that was actually kind of the liquified, putrified flesh of a god that gave one the ability to see things that were not fully material in nature. It was a black substance one drank, but the taste was all the bitterness and acridness of coffee without any of the pleasant bits.

I imagine that, as creatures whose tastes and emotions are muted by the Shadowfell and their immortality, the Taheen are willing to eat and drink stuff that would absolutely disgust us. But we're not talking about eating sewage or rotten meat. Instead, we're talking about food that has been processed to the point of having no real nutritional value anymore. (Having recently had Covid, I'm on Paxlovid, and the side effect I've felt most from this drug is the gross taste it leaves in your mouth, so I feel like I'm speaking directly from the senses at the moment - imagine chalk that has somehow gone bad.) So, Taheen coffee is just a bitter swill with some kind of stimulant effect that barely works. They probably eat sandwiches with bread that has the consistency of foam rubber, and for desert, astronaut ice cream (apologies to anyone who actually likes that stuff).

And because they put this chemical crap in their bodies, our Taheen are immune to the poisoned condition. They might be immune to poison damage, or perhaps only resistant.

Finally, we come to our third big cross-cohort trait. This one, admittedly, is more of a stylistic thing than something that I think is necessary to make this work, mechanically. But one of the things I really want the Taheen to be is anachronistic for a high-fantasy game. They use modern equipment, which, in combat, means firearms.

Now we run into a design issue. The Modern and Futuristic weapons in the DMG are significantly more powerful than other weapons you can find. The Pistol and Musket, which are going to show up in the PHB next year, are strong for ranged weapons, but are limited in the following ways: they have short ranges, they require a feat (or an artificer infusion) to use with Extra Attack, and they cost a ton of gold. And, as single-die weapons, they aren't that much more powerful than other options. Your Musket is going to do 1d12 to a Longbow's 1d8, but the Longbow can hit much more distant targets without any feats to back it up.

So, how do we get around this?

Well, we're using FM for inspiration, so let's turn to their own anachronistic monsters, the Time Raiders! The Time Raiders carry weapons that are generally more like out of a pulp sci-fi story. They have Blasters, Golden Scythes, and Serrated Sabers, the latter of which are still physical melee weapons, but are mechanized in a way that we generally assume our longswords and greataxes aren't. (Interestingly, the lore for them explains that they aren't actually time-travelers. They just travel to worlds that are sort of "of different genres" than the MCDM default fantasy world - which... man that's up my alley).

But, the key here is that there's a box text with the title "But I Want a Blaster!" that talks about the challenge of presenting monsters with powerful technology without that technology immediately falling into the party's hands and unbalancing the game.

To allow these items to be looted, the box describes how the three weapons can work for players. Blasters wind up being ranged weapons that deal 1d6 radiant damage and have a range of 30/90. Golden Scythes are heavy, two-handed weapons with can deal an extra 3d8 necrotic damage once per short or long rest. Serrated Sabers are melee weapons that deal 1d8 slashing damage and can be charged up with a bonus action to give a hit target disadvantage on their next attack roll.

So, in other words, the weapons work for players, but the most unbalancing thing - the extra 3d8 necrotic damage a Time Raider Nemesis does with its Scythe - becomes a once-a-rest boon rather than something that transforms this into one of the most powerful weapons in the game.

Now, what about us?

The aesthetic of our Taheen is to use Modern weaponry. Modern weapons use two damage dice, which makes them quite powerful - the weakest of the Modern firearms, the Automatic Pistol, does 2d6 damage, which is the equivalent of the most powerful of the standard weapons found in the PHB.

The easiest solution here is to just fake it - we can flavor the weapons that the Taheen use as assault rifles, automatic pistols, shotguns, and the like, but then simply use the statistics of Pistols, Muskets, and even Longbows (if we're talking about one with a sniper rifle) or Heavy Crossbows (if we want to preserve the loading property).

Now, years ago (I think years?) I came up with another way to balance firearms. Here, I made all firearms use two damage dice, but creatures didn't add any ability modifier to the damage they did. Thus, if you were firing a Longbow with +3 to Dex, you'd deal 1d8+3 on a hit, or about 7.5 If you were firing an Automatic Rifle, you'd roll 2d8 but add nothing (other than other bonuses, like if it's a +1 weapon) and thus you'd be dealing around 9 damage - still more, but not to a profound degree.

This actually created an interesting narrative - firearms, like they did in the real world, made ranged weapon-fighting an easier thing to pick up. Anyone could pick up a handgun and do devastating damage if they hit with it, but a real master archer could possibly outperform someone with a gun, and at the least do so more consistently. A level 1 archer with a longbow is going to usually hit for more than anyone with a handgun (automatic pistol) and by the time they get their Dex to +5, their longbow is going to be landing for 9.5, which is a little better than an Automatic Rifle.

There are some oddities to this design, of course, like how critcal hits become far more powerful with a firearm. (You could solve this by saying you only add one die on a crit.) And also, with firearms going mainstream in 2024, it might be weird to have these Taheen weapons work differently on a fundamental level than the Pistols and Muskets that player characters can use.

So, we'll put a pin in this.

In truth, the bigger ramification of our Taheen liking firearms is that we're sort of suggesting a lot of them will used ranged weapons. And that could be something to explore, design-wise. Might we favor mobile monsters who can get to range and fire even if confronted in melee? (Should that be something in the Skirmisher Taheen's design?) Or should we conceive of melee firearms? (I have already homebrewed a melee shotgun so that my friend's paladin can use his Giff firearm proficiency in our Spelljammer game.)

And that, I think, is where the approach really starts to narrow in on what our design goal should be for these monsters: What does a Taheen fight feel like? If Goblins are meant to feel like a desperate scrap with hard-to-pin-down foes while Kobolds advance on you like a coordinated phalanx, what is your "classic" Taheen fight supposed to look like?

Assuming I actually continue this series (and I think it's likely,) next time we'll talk about the kind of fight we want to throw at our players with the Taheen, and what creature roles we'll want to make with them - expect to see Minions and a Villain (likely a Leader rather than a Solo monster).

Flee, Mortals! Monster Design - Count Rhodar von Glauer and Its Take on Legendary Creatures

Boss fights in D&D are tricky. See, in a video game, you can run so many "combat encounters" that it can be easy to differentiate a boss - this guy takes more than one minute to kill? Must be a boss. Even in difficult, unforgiving games like Dark Souls, where you need to be careful even when fighting the handful of poorly-armed Hollows you face just by the Firelink Shrine, a boss fight stands out.

In D&D, though, every fight tends to take a while to complete. Unless the challenge is totally trivial, you're going to spend probably ten minutes minimum just moving through peoples' turns. And thus, when you get to a climactic fight, you have to figure out how to make it memorable.

Indeed, I think you can build a satisfying dungeon without any true boss fights. If each fight feels special because of its environment, its monsters, and the strategies the players use, that's fine.

But if we want a villain to really feel special, we also want it to feel special when we face them.

FM bosses come in two varieties: Solo monsters and Leaders. The former are designed to be faced truly on their own, and pose a threat to the party (of an appropriate level) even without backup. The latter are meant to have lackeys (I'd say minions, but that has a specific meaning in FM).

Notably, FM sometimes gives us two versions of what, in the Monster Manual, would be a single legendary stat block, with one serving as a named Villain and the other being a generic version that does not necessarily play the role of a legendary creature - the standard Vampire is a CR 13 Skirmisher, which, yes, has a bonus action and reaction that makes it an "action-oriented monster" and a full-page stat block, but could technically play lackey in a high-level fight against some other boss.

In most cases, the "Villain" stat blocks are given specific names and backstories, but you can easily re-skin them. These are meant to make for memorable encounters.

We'll look at Count Rhodar von Glauer, the vampire "villain" character, as our showcase for the way that FM builds these characters.

The Count is a CR 19 Solo monster, which means that he could be a significant challenge on his own for a tier 3 party.

Now, let's talk about the really distinguishing features:

The Count has three "Spears of the Damned," magically summoned and made of darkness. In addition to his blood-drinking sword, Sanguinus (he doesn't actually physically bite people in combat, but gets the usual vampiric attack through his sword,) he hurls these spears at players to deal damage and then pin them down by impaling them.

Now, a Solo monster needs a lot of actions to make up for the fact that they're so outnumbered. The Count thus gets, usually, five attacks with his main Multiattack. He swings Sanguinus twice and then hurls each of his Spears of the Damned. Now, if a spear is currently impaling a player, if he uses it to attack someone, that player is no longer impaled (and thus no longer restrained).

So essentially, he's going to have a big burst of damage at the start, but sacrifices some damage to keep party members locked down.

Like other vampires, the Count has a bonus action that can momentarily Beguile a creature into attacking an ally or falling prone, or he can use a bonus action to move without provoking opportunity attacks. Finally, he has a reaction that can deal some damage to a foe that just hit him with an attack.

So, he hits hard, hits a lot, has a lot of health, and can fly. And he can kind of choose between damage or crowd control to make sure there's a problem for the party five times on his turn.

Now, most Legendary monsters have two factors: Legendary Resistances and Legendary Actions (and often Lair actions, which FM keeps but has its own designs for them).

FM alters both of these.

So, Legendary Resistances are there to ensure that a boss isn't taken out by a single spell - Banishing the Demon Lord who has crashed out of the Abyss in the big climactic fight makes things, well, a bit anticlimactic. Sure, if they're banished only after weakened by three other powerful spells they need to burn their LRs on, that's a bit better. But the problem with Legendary Resistance is that it creates a "null result," which means that whatever you were trying to do, the monster is unaffected. Sure, you moved their meter down a bit toward being unable to get out of a powerful spell effect, but there's a good chance you're just going to kill it before you churn through all of them.

So, FM's take on Legendary Resistance is really cool: Each "villain" has a 3/day way to get out of failing saving throws (there are a couple variations that don't quite work that way) but each comes at a cost. In The Count's case, he needs to sacrifice one of his Spears of the Damned, shattering it to absorb the power of the spell he would have been subjected to. Until the next dusk, the Count cannot re-summon that spear, which means that his action count is reduced to 4, and he can only pin down two characters, not three.

In other words, yes, you're unable to Turn Undead on him and send him fleeing from his ruined castle, but by doing so (and assuming he failed his Wisdom save even with a +9) you've still significantly reduced his power to hurt you.

FM also replaces Legendary Actions with Villain Actions.

Each villain has three Villain Actions, which they can, like with Legendary Actions, use on the end of another creature's turn. But, each of these Villain actions can only be used once per encounter, and they can use a villain action only once per round. The latter is not unlike any "uses three actions" features on existing legendary monsters, like a Lich's Disrupt Life.

But this means that these effects will only happen once during an encounter, and thus should be dramatic and shift the dynamic of the fight.

Villain Actions are also given in a suggested order. In the Count's case, he splatters blood on creatures within a 20-foot radius sphere, potentially giving them a special "bloodstained" status effect, which gives him advantage on attacks against them and gives them disadvantage against his Beguile until the end of his next turn.

The second one is Fire Drake, where he gets to transform into a fiery dragon and blaze across the battlefield up to twice his flying speed, ignoring difficult terrain and causing fire damage to anyone he passes through.

His third allows him to fill the room with mist, heavily obscuring the area (note that he has blindsight) and he gets to teleport around the room making four Sanguinus attacks against targets in the mist, before the mist dissipates.

The structure of these follows a similar pattern: the first is usually a wake-up call: this is a boss, and has serious abilities. The second sort of knocks the board over and rearranges the pieces - either moving players around or moving the boss around. And the third is a final, big burst of damage - by round 3, the fight's getting desperate, and this is the boss's last chance to take the party down.

These actions don't need to be taken in this order, but they're arranged that way as a suggested order, to make things dramatic. But if the fight is going faster than expected, you might jump to the final one (the "ult") immediately, or if the fight is likely to go on for more than three rounds, you might hold off on one of them until the boss goes down to 50% health or something.

So, here's what I really like about these Villain Actions: The boss does less.

That might be surprising given that one of the biggest challenges in a boss fight is managing to give the boss enough to do to make them a threat to a coordinated party. But the old Legendary Actions aren't actually gone - they've just been incorporated into the boss' main action. You have five attacks (at least to start with) on your turn. And the bonus actions and reaction give you even more wealth in the action economy.

A single Unarmed Strike as a legendary action is... it's not nothing, because it includes a grapple, but it's kind of this low-impact, normal thing the vampire usually gets to do. These three villain actions are all Big Moments.

And it's also less to track. You don't have to remember if you used two or three of your legendary actions in the middle of a round.

So, pretty soon we might start to look at how we want to incorporate these ideas into our own homebrew monsters. The tuning of attack bonuses and damage, though, is something we might want to look at next. I've often used the DMG's "creating monster statistics" table for my own homebrewing, but we'll see how well this matches up with that table.

Flee, Mortals! Monster Design Review - The Hill Giant

 So, in my last post I tried to pick out the "standard" goblin from Flee, Mortals! to compare with the Goblin in the Monster Manual. The Goblin Warrior is relatively similar to the one found in the MM, and I think could be swapped in without making fights too much harder, but if goblins are meant to be mobile on the battlefield, these skirmishers are even better at it.

Now, Giants in the Monster Manual are... pretty boring, for the most part. They have thematic damage immunities, they hit hard, have lots of hit points, and... that's about it. The higher-level ones get some spells, too. Now, not to disparage WotC's Giants - they literally just came out with a book filled with lots of cool giant stat blocks that are far more interesting than the MM ones. But this series is intended to look at the design philosophy in MCDM's Flee, Mortals!, and so we'll be comparing the "base" model with the FM version, given that the book is meant in a lot of ways to let you use it in place of the Monster Manual for most standard monsters.

The Hill Giant is likely the first "true" giant that a party will face (as opposed to ogres and trolls - the 'lesser' giants). The standard MM Hill Giant is a CR 5 creature, and FM gives us its equivalent in the Hill Giant Clobberer, which is a CR 5 Brute.

Brutes are kind of the simplest monsters - their role is to be a damage sponge that does enough damage it can't be ignored. Unlike the Soldier, which usually protects its more vulnerable allies by locking down player characters like a tank, Brutes just come in, smash things, and threaten the party in the traditional way.

The Clobberer has an AC of 12 and 126 HP. That's a very low AC for a CR 5 monster, but if we're expecting this guy to be the main thing a low-level party is fighting (perhaps with some minions or non-giant allies) that's a lot of HP to churn through. Our giant friend gets a +8 to hit with attacks and deals 18 damage with its Greatclub, which then also forces the target to make a DC 16 Strength save or get knocked prone. They can also hurl rocks for 2d10+5 damage, and they get to make two attacks per turn.

There's a little rebalancing here compared to the MM Hill Giant - more HP but lower AC, and the Rock attack does somewhat less.

This one has a climb speed of 20 feet, and a movement speed of 30.

That actually makes this slower than the MM version, at least on land.

But there are also some additional features, and not all of them make it more powerful:

The Clobberer has a bonus action called Hill Quake, which lets it intentionally fall prone damage nearby structures (not creatures) and potentially knock them prone. It also has a trait called Pummel, which gives it a bonus to damage against prone creatures and lets them reduce a creature's movement speed to 0 if it hits them while prone. It's also a Siege Monster, making that Hill Quake thing doubly devastating against structures.

(I think at this point it might be interesting to see if we'll get more prominent environmental destruction rules - for all I know there is a robust system that I just never happen to use.)

Finally, however, there's Distracted - with no check at all, only spending a reaction, a creature within range of one of the Clobberer's attacks who is not the current target can make the Clobberer attack them instead.

And so, the way a fight against one of these comes together seems to go thusly:

If the Clobberer has enough movement, it starts off with a Hill Quake to knock PCs prone, and then stands up with remaining movement. It then tries to smash anyone who is prone with its greatclub, but let's say you're the beefy Barbarian who easily succeeded on the saving throw, and your Sorcerer friend is on the ground following the Quake. Knowing that the Sorcerer is going to be laid out for extra damage and also unable to stand the next turn if their movement is reduced to zero, you use your reaction to make sure that at least one of its attacks comes at you instead, giving your Sorcerer friend a chance to escape.

And I think that's a showcase of the strength of FM's monster design: these stat blocks are built to create a scenario like that that goes well beyond "well, it hits hard." Our Hill Giant Clobberer really needs to be dealt with, because it's smashing our party and refusing to be ignored.

Now, there is one aspect of the design here that I find kind of curious:

Distracted, as a trait, requires the DM to tell the party about it ahead of time. (There's even box text titled "Make Players Aware: Distracted.") While a player might stumble into the idea that they can distract the giant, there's basically nothing in the game rules that would hint to them that this is a genuine mechanical aspect of this creature. Thus, the DM needs to be upfront and say "you would know, as adventurers, that Hill Giants are easily distracted, and you can use your reaction to get them to attack you instead of an ally if you're in range."

You could play coy and lock this information behind a successful History check (and I do highly recommend giving successful "Knowledge" checks like Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion, clear mechanical benefits) but I think this monster doesn't really work unless that information is shared.

This is similar to Minion Rules. Minions are lots of fun (well, lots of fun for martial characters who usually don't get to do AoE damage) but they work so differently from normal enemies that you need to pull things out of the game for a moment to explain how they work.

And so, while I'm still very much on board with FM and am eager to use basically every stat block in it at some point (though call be again when I find a group ready to face the two-phase CR 30 Tarrasque equivalent, which... geez) I do think that the design here is a little more transparently "gamey." That's, honestly, probably a good thing. But it does give you things like having to set aside the idea that every Minion is an individual person rather than a mass to be chunked through (though in an upcoming fight I have five minions that are Brad, Chet, Chad, Brett, and their Buddy, Beefer, which is an inside joke with one of my players).

Designing Monsters Like Flee, Mortals!

 Ok, I'll confess, I'm obsessed. I've barely been able to run much D&D since getting Flee, Mortals! and so I'm of course a little worried that I'm singing the book's praises based on impression alone. But I think it's really good, and I feel relatively confident in that assessment.

FM is a giant book with tons of monsters, but as you might know from reading this blog, I amass monster books like crazy because I tend to prefer weird and unusual monsters to fit with my genre-heresy. One of my favorite adaptations I've done in D&D is to add the Taheen from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. These animal-headed humanoids (actually monstrosities in a more recent re-design) are sort of embodiments of the banality of evil, and so I built a version of them that come from the Shadowfell and are related to the Nagpa. But another key to their aesthetic is their use of modern (as in late 20th/early 21st century) technology, such as automatic weapons, cars and trucks, and they work in office buildings with a kind of 1970s/80s aesthetic, drinking foul "coffee" to keep alert while they doom people on spreadsheets.

They're a kind of intrusion of the real world upon the fantastical, but doing so actually makes them otherworldly to places with wizard towers and dragons and such.

The point is, between their equipment and overall vibe, it's not terribly easy to just use existing stat blocks to represent them. But I long ago became pretty comfortable with homebrewing monsters, so that's what I do.

But I think FM has kind of stepped up to the stage and challenged any monster designer to try to do better - make more dynamic monsters with more interesting abilities, but without the kind of unchecked complexity that some of my earlier homebrew designs have fallen into. FM monsters have a clear role in an encounter and are "action-oriented" to give them options in combat, but they're (theoretically) simple enough to run in combat that the DM doesn't get bogged down.

While I might do a future post in which we look at how to make a "Taheen" chapter similar to the ones in FM for Orcs and Kobolds and Time Raiders, I want instead to look here at some of the basic creatures in classic D&D creature cohorts.

And what's more classic than Goblins?

    The first thing you'll notice when looking at the Goblin chapter in FM is that there is no stat block that is just called "Goblin." None of these creatures is the "basic, no-frills" Goblin that represents the quintessence of their lineage.

There are fourteen stat blocks in the Goblin chapter, though we can set aside three of these, which are Retainers and Companions - designed to join and fight alongside the party rather than for our party to fight against.

One of these is the named Goblin Villain, Queen Bargnot. She is a Leader character (thus designed to be a boss who has lackeys that fight alongside her, with abilities that can make use of or help those lackeys).

We're not ready for her yet, though - at CR 3, and with an expectation of lackeys, a 1st level party isn't going to face her. Probably only a party that has made it to tier 2 is going to be able to fight her without cheesing the battle by isolating her.

There are also some creatures here who are not goblins - little flying beasts called Skitterlings the goblins use as pets, and giant war spiders they ride as mounts.

Ultimately, what do we want to look at as the "equivalent" to the standard Goblin in the Monster Manual? Those guys are CR 1/4, and while they don't do much more damage or have much more health than the CR 1/8 Kobolds, they have higher AC, meaning they're more likely to dodge an attack or two and live to fight another round.

The only CR 1/4 Goblin that isn't a Minion (which have special rules and don't really have equivalents in the MM outside of "send a bunch of low-CR monsters against the party that will probably die without ever hitting anything") is the Goblin Warrior.

So, we'll consider this our "equivalent," that in theory could be used to replace a MM Goblin in any planned combat.

Our Goblin Warrior has an AC of 15 and 9 HP. Most 1st level characters start with an attack bonus of +5, meaning that they should be hitting a creature like this about 55% of the time. Longbows and the most powerful 1-handed weapons use d8s for damage, so weapon-wielders will often hit for 4.5+3 for their ability modifier, or 7.5. Relying on cantrips means less than that - 5.5 for Eldritch Blast or Fire Bolt, 4.5 for Shocking Grasp or Ray of Frost, or 3.5 for Acid Splash or Mind Sliver. So, if our goblin is dodging or getting missed about half the time by a 1st level player, it'll probably take on average about 4 offensive abilities to take one of these down.

That's all very basic, though. What can this guy do to our party?

Well, first off, FM Goblins have "Crafty," which causes them not to provoke opportunity attacks. That makes them very mobile in combat, so they can strike in and then back away. Warriors also get Fleet Foot, which lets them move up to half their speed as a reaction if a creature misses them with a melee attack made within 5 feet.

Also, FM goblins have climb speeds, which isn't quite as powerful as Fly speeds to evade melee, but does make their mobility a little more potent.

The Warrior has a Shortsword and a Shortbow attack, both of which have a +4 to hit and deal 1d6+2 damage.

This means it's usually going to miss anyone wearing any real armor (even a Rogue with only an AC of 15 is still only getting hit 50% of the time) and the damage is probably not taking down even a 1st level character with one hit.

Now, how is this different from the MM "Goblin?"

AC is the same, HP is 2 higher (from 7). Attacks are the same. The MM Goblin has Nimble Escape, which allows it to Disengage or Hide as a bonus action. The FM ones does not need to disengage because of its Crafty trait, but it will not be able to slip into the shadows and hide. The MM does not have the reaction to slip away after a missed attack.

The FM one has +4 to Acrobatics and Stealth, whereas the MM one has only a +6 to Stealth (evidently getting expertise).

    So, what's the difference in how these play?

Ultimately, and appropriately, not a whole lot. They can both strike equally well in melee or at range, and are good at getting away from players who confront them in melee (playing tactically, they'll prefer range, as there's no real benefit for them to be up in melee).

The FM one will be a little harder to pin down, though: the MM one still only has its normal 30 feet of movement, so even if it disengages, it must dash to get outside of most player characters' movement speed and avoid a melee hit, and if it's dashing, it's not hindering the party much.

The FM one (which is listed as a Skirmisher) gets an extra boost of movement thanks to its reaction, meaning it can potentially move 45 feet on a round - though only gets that extra 15 if something misses it (which, as we established, should happen about half of the time a level 1 player attacks them). If the environment has things to climb, their 20 foot climb speed can also help them get away from melee players.

But none of this seems overpowered - they'll be a pain for melee characters, potentially, but they don't have enough movement to run in, attack, and run out of a character's range.

One thing opportunity attacks do as a rule is encourage static battlefields - you stand your ground because you don't want to give the monsters an extra swing at you, and the monsters don't want to do that for the same reason.

Both of these goblins get around this, and are likely to keep the battlefield flowing - though again, I'd argue that in both cases, if the goblins stick to ranged combat, this won't do much to counteract it.

Here's the scenario I see the difference in design creating different encounters:

If the party and the goblins are ducking behind cover and shooting at one another, it might become something of a stalemate where the only way to fight is to hold actions and attack when a foe pops out of cover. This is, of course, what a charging Barbarian is for, but these Goblin Warriors could also potentially break up a stalemate like this as well - they can run across the gap and get into melee with ranged characters, even if it takes their dash action, but it's a little safer for them because they can potentially get away from an attacker who misses while your Wizard might be forced to use their action to disengage.

I don't think the FM Goblin Warrior is really much more complicated than the MM Goblin to run - really you just need to remember the reaction, but you get to forget about the bonus action.

I think when we look at another creature type, we might go a little higher-CR to get a sense of where the complexity comes in with more dynamic monsters. I think I'd like to look next time at Giants.

How Baldur's Gate 3 Got Me Thinking About Dungeon and Adventure Design

 I still haven't played the full release version of Baldur's Gate 3 - as a Mac user, we're still in Early Access, so while I've just managed to biff on quietly eliminating the Arcane Eye in Grymforge to get a couple of disgruntled duergar to help me take out the cultists there and wound up having to fight basically everyone in the place (which was honestly fun - I had both Wyll and Gale in the party and bottlenecked a bunch of them through a Grease and Hunger of Hadar, and then dropped two fireballs, each hitting four targets apiece - and then kept knocking the villainous barbarian back through the Hunger of Hadar thanks to Repelling Blast... did I mention how much I love Warlocks?) I'm getting to a point where I think most of the quests I can actually do are complete (Grym, the guardian of the forge, was more like a puzzle than an actual boss fight, but my Paladin is now wearing some fancy adamantine splint and a cool helmet).

Still, I have been thinking about the way that the game treats its dungeons.

Early on, the first big conflict you can run into is a group of goblins assaulting a druid grove. The druids (and especially the nasty one who has been left in charge after their normal leader was captured) want a group of tiefling refugees to move on so they can seal the grove away from the attackers. Naturally, one way to resolve the conflict here is to go and take out the goblins.

However, there are also potentially NPCs amongst the goblins you might want to help you.

The "Goblin Camp" is thus a rather sprawling defunct temple. And if you go in guns-a-blazing, you can treat it as a difficult, long-term dungeon crawl where you'll probably be forced to retreat and take long rests in the middle. Alternatively, you can walk right in and talk your way into meeting with the gang's three leaders (one of whom, if you go along with the gang's evil plan, will join your party - I'm a little bummed that that's the paladin companion character).

If you play it really cool, you can even manage to take some of the "bosses" out without giving yourself away, making it easy enough to walk around the temple without anyone giving you any trouble. (Even if you are still ultimately trying to take them down).

I think perhaps because my first introduction to D&D was Acquisitions Incorporated - and specifically the grand PAX one-shots initially run by Chris Perkins (and now apparently run by him once again, switching off with Jeremy Crawford) - my sense of how to run D&D has bene a bit more guided - the DM makes sure the players move along and hit their marks and get to the big set piece battles.

Naturally, I've been running D&D a long time and have seen plenty of other actual-play, like Critical Role and Dimension 20.

There's this tension in D&D - for the players to feel like they have agency, you never want to tell them no - you want them to feel like they can do anything they want their characters to do, or at least attempt to do so. But there's also a need to make for reasonable challenges, and to provide a path for them to walk.

I read something I think from maybe the 3rd Edition PHB (an edition I'm not terribly familiar with) that suggested the Dungeons are actually the ideal way to build adventures - you create a space where the players can let loose, be destructive, creative, and imaginative, and you know that the only thing that will break is the dungeon itself. Get them exploring that dungeon, meeting NPCs within it, and let the consequences of their actions be limitless - but bounded by the dungeon's outer walls.

I don't know that I'd want every D&D game I ran to be so closed-off. I like having things take place in a broader world.

But I think I'm growing an appreciation for the idea of this kind of bounded space of a dungeon, and that a dungeon need not be just a series of combat encounters either.

My tendency is to plan things around the idea that "ok, they're going to have this fight, and then this fight, and then this is going to happen, and then they can probably take a rest here," and I think my goal moving forward as a DM is to build things in a more open-ended manner.

Now, balancing is still important - and combat is fun. And I want to have fights that are appropriately challenging while not murdering the party. I think, then, the key is to have those fights sitting around, justified by the world.

Today I put together a dungeon for 4th level players built around the idea of a Green Hag villain (using Flee, Mortals!' version of the monster). What wound up developing was a kind of Southern Gothic story in which the hag had taken over a wealthy family's plantation and grown a massive, corrupt tree up through the manor house, and was now forcing fairies from the feywild into indentured servitude (note here that if I were to try to publish this, I'd want to get some serious cultural consulting on the premise, given its themes and aesthetic) and holding curses over people in the nearby town.

The first part of the dungeon that the party will interact with is the camp with all the indentured servants (the idea is that she's been ferrying refugees from conflict in the feywild to the material plane but forcing them into a contract they'll likely never pay off to come to this plane.) There's a single big combat encounter that could be had with the goblinoid gang that the hag has hired (actually as part of a similar deal) to prevent any of the fairies from running for it.

If the party approaches as potential customers (the hag sells potions and poisons made from the herbs she has the fairies cultivating and harvesting) they could, potentially, talk their way into the camp and treat the hobgoblins leading the gang as NPCs to negotiate with. But they could also just start attacking, facing off against the many goblins in the gang (and here I use minions to make up 10 of the 14 gang members, allowing it to feel reasonable that this group could keep watch over twenty fairies.)

If the party enters the old manor house, things get a little more universally-hostile. There's one potentially friendly NPC - the bedridden woman who actually owns the house and who has been manipulated and exploited by the hag for thirty years - but then it's basically monsters all the way down.

But I think the approach here is also to just kind of imagine what would actually be there, and let all the "extraneous" details either lie there harmlessly, or get picked up by players and used in ways I couldn't anticipate.

Say Hello to the Adze of Annam, the New Hardest-Hitting Weapon in 5E

 Ever since Mythic Odysseys of Theros came out, I've looked to Akmon, Hammer of Purphuros, as the hardest-hitting weapon in the game. It's an artifact that is best if you're a worshipper of the eponymous deity (Theros' version of Hephaestus, basically) and is a +3 warhammer that does 3d10 additional fire damage on a hit, along with a few other bonuses.

As far as I can tell, it was the weapon in all of (officially published) 5E that hit the hardest, hitting for 1d8/1d10 + 3d10 damage, plus 3, before your own personal bonuses. So, two-handed, that's 25 damage on its own with each swing. Notably, the Sword of Zariel from Descent into Avernus actually keeps pace with it when wielded two-handed (and is also the basis for the artifact my party has acquired in my Ravnica campaign - basically the redeemed sword of a champion of Serra from Dominaria that has a living angel inside - the sword's stats are slightly tweaked, but the damage is the same). But one-handed, Akmon does a little more, as its 3d10 remain the bonus while the Sword of Zariel's radiant damage is downgraded to 2d8.

But Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants has brought us a new king of weapons: the Adze of Annam.

The Adze is a +3 Greataxe that does an additional 3d12 force damage, meaning we're looking at 29 damage on average before we take the wielder's strength into account.

The Adze does have a few other bonuses, namely being able to cast Move Earth or Fabricate once a day (and it seems that using one locks you out of the other for the day) along with a couple minor beneficial, minor detrimental, and one major beneficial traits you can randomly roll. But that's about it.

I'd still say the Sword of Zariel is probably the most powerful weapon they've ever made, due to the massive number of additional features it provides. But if we're talking about pure hard-hittingness, this is it.

Now, I'll note that there's actually a nonmagical weapon that comes close to this. In the DMG, amongst the futuristic weapons, the antimatter rifle deals 6d8 necrotic damage on a hit. That's an average of 27 damage per hit, meaning that if you had a +3 magical version, it would actually out-damage the Adze. The Antimatter Rifle, however, has the reload property, which the Gunner feat notably does not let you ignore. Thus, you get two shots and then must use a bonus action or action to reload the weapon. While other reload weapons often have a clip of several shots - the laser pistol, for example, can fire 50 times before reloading, meaning it's unlikely you'll ever have to do so in the heat of combat - this limitation on the antimatter rifle makes it less ideal for the "max damage scenario" fun of a level 20 fighter. Technically, you could get four shots off in a round, but you wouldn't be able to do so again the next round.

If we had a Champion Fighter with maxed out Strength using this agains the Tarrasque, we'd do the following damage on average:

We have a +14 to hit, meaning we hit on an 11 or higher, so 50% we're hitting overall.

Hit damage is 34

With a 15% chance to crit for an additional 26 damage.

So, per attack, we're looking at 17 plus 3.9 for crits, giving us 20.9 damage per attack, and thus doing 83.6 damage per round. (And unlike with Akmon, all our damage actually affects the Tarrasque).

Solo Monsters that Aren't Solo Monsters

 So, while I haven't yet had a chance to toss its monsters against my players a lot (basically two sessions, and I had to cancel tonight's because I'm sick and don't want to strain my throat) the monster design in Flee, Mortals! tickles me profoundly on a theoretical level. That being said, I suspect that these monsters will be generally tougher than what we get in the Monster Manual.

Take your standard Orc from the Monster Manual. These guys have a +5 to hit with their Greataxe and Javelin attacks, with a +3 to Strength. They have an AC of 13, and 15 hit points. The main thing that makes them distinct as monsters is that they can dash toward a target as a bonus action (this "aggressive" trait being kind of the defining Orc feature).

There are two CR 1/2 Orcs in FM - the Fury, which is a Brute, and the Bloodrunner, which is a skirmisher.

FM's Orcs have Relentless as their shared trait, which functions like the playable Orc and Half-Orc's Relentless Endurance, allowing them to drop to 1 instead of 0 HP when their HP is depleted once a day.

The Bloodrunner already has a speed of 60 feet, meaning that it can move the speed a MM Orc would be able to without a bonus action, and it has a number of other features, along with having a higher AC. Its Spiked Shield attack does less than a Greataxe, but its Unimpeded passive feature can potentially make up for that if it runs through a prone creature's space - something its shield attack can cause.

The Fury is perhaps closer to the "standard" Orc, in that it just strikes with a Greataxe or Javelin. It is not going to be moving as quickly, (though still has 35 feet, over the standard 30) and gets to deal a little extra damage against a prone target, and can knock a target prone if they aren't already. And they can heal themselves a little once a day.

So, yeah, these are, I think, both more powerful than the Monster Manual version.

They're more dynamic, to be sure, and I think experienced players will enjoy the greater challenge of the fight.

But that's not really what I'm looking to explore here.

FM has a number of "Solo" monsters that are designed to be a challenging fight without any additional monsters. If you face down its version of the Kraken, that's meant to be a serious encounter even if the party is composed of six level 19 characters. The Kraken has 499 HP, its standard "multiattack" involves seven different attacks (four tentacles and three mental lances) along with a bonus action that can hurl grappled creatures up to 60 feet and a reaction that will deal an AoE burst of psychic damage to the attacker and anyone nearby. And then, on top of all of this, it has three "villain actions," which are one-use-only-per-round and once-per-encounter legendary actions that have pretty big effects.

So, naturally, these guys are built to put a party through their paces without any help from other monsters. And, indeed, encounter-building uses a different sort of math for them: A solo monster against a group of 4-5 level, say, 10 characters, should have a CR of 11-12 if you're building a Standard encounter, or 13-15 if you want the fight to be hard.

Normally, using FM's encounter-building system, each player accounts for a certain "budget" of CR, depending on their level and the encounter difficulty. There's also, then, a CR cap, where the fight shouldn't involve creatures that go above it. The solo encounter building system uses this cap as a maximum as well, and then lowers it depending on how much you want to tune the difficulty down from its maximum.

So, for example, the CR cap at level 20 is 30, which means you should never throw the Titan Goxomoc (kind of FM's version of the Tarrasque, with a whole second phase as a powerful elemental) against any party that's not level 20, and even then it should, in theory, be a difficult fight.

But what about less powerful monsters? Can we build a solo monster encounter that doesn't use a, well, solo monster?

So, right from the start, I think we've got an issue: the CR cap for solo monsters is already a pretty hard limit - they recommend never going over it even when you've got a big, climactic boss fight. So, really, can we put a single monster in there that fills out our CR budget without hitting the cap?

The answer is, well, yes. But it'll be an easy encounter.

Level 10 players are each worth 3.5 CR's worth. So, if we have a four-player party, that puts us at a CR budget of 14 - just shy of our cap at 15. There are a couple CR 14 monsters in FM, though a couple of them are Leaders or Support, neither of which seem like they will lend themselves well to a single-monster fight. There's also a solo monster, but we're looking specifically outside of that for this case. (Though it might be a point of comparison). So, we're left with the Devil Adjudicator - a Controller, which seems like the sort of monster that might pose a challenge on its own.

The Adjudicator has a three-part multiattack, with two uses of its main spell attack (dealing 27 fire damage on a hit and either charming or frightening the target) and a recharge ability (5-6) that can significantly reduce a character's power with a fairly high Charisma save.  It also flies, which is not unbeatable at this level, but will make things tougher for melee characters.

The key here, though, is that unlike a Solo or Leader monster, there's no remedy if a player uses a powerful spell like Banishment and the creature fails. The Adjudicator has a +10 to charisma saving throws, which means there's a good chance it will succeed against such a spell, but once they fail, the fight is over - the party needs to only wait around for the full minute and let the guy be banished permanently back to the Nine Hells (or Seven Cities of Hell, in MCDM's multiverse).

That being said, I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. If this is not meant to be a climactic encounter, and is only something that might emerge in a dungeon room as a sudden threat, perhaps getting lucky and taking it out with a single spell is all right. At level 10, whittling down 204 HP is not going to be super easy, so this devil will in most cases pose a fair challenge. But even if he's pumping out 54 damage per round (assuming he's always hitting) a level 10 group can probably manage it, especially if they're smart.

Now, as a point of comparison, Xorannox, the named "Overmind" villain (MCDM's version of the Beholder) is also CR 14. They have the same AC, while Xorannox has a little more HP (228 to the adjudicator's 204). As a Beholder-like creature, most of its eye beams (which it chooses, rather than rolling randomly) impose status effects. That said, if it goes in for maximum damage, using its Lightning Bolt, Explosion, and Necrosis beams will do a lot more than the 54 the devil is doing.

So, truly, CR is not everything here - Solo monsters are really built differently.

Still, I think using the normal encounter-building rules and sometimes having the party fight a single monster is not totally infeasible. But as any experienced DM will note, it's generally better for your standard fights to involve multiple monsters.

Runic Items on Bigby's Rune-Wielding Giants

 Many of the giant statblocks (ok, some are giant and some are elementals and fiends) are sort of grouped in thematic cohorts, or "cycles" to borrow a term from Magic the Gathering. For example, there's a demon-corrupted version of almost every one of the main giant types (the Fire Giant is an exception, in that its fiendish version is a devil, while I believe the closest equivalent for the Storm Giant is the Storm Herald - basically what happens when a Storm Giant becomes a Kraken Priest. There's also a Demogorgon-corrupted Ettin.)

One of these cycles is a version of each giant type that has a powerful rune-based item on them. What makes this interesting is that they typically get two special abilities that they can use while bearing this rune, but the runic object is destroyable - if you can smash it, you reduce the number of things that giant can do.

Now, the trick here is that these runes aren't terribly easy to destroy. The Hill Giant Avalancher, for example, carries a rock with the Hill rune on it, giving it access a Stone Avalance ability (an AoE cylinder that does a fireball's worth of damage and creates difficult terrain) and a reaction in Hill Rebuff, which can damage and push back foes who strike them.

The rock, however, has its own HP and AC - 20 and 15, respectively. However, if you want to destroy it, you had better do it quickly, because the rune stone regains all of its HP at the end of each turn - not just the Giant's, but every turn. So one character needs to put out 20 damage in a single turn. The giant is CR 12, so at this point we can expect characters to have things like extra attack and other damage-boosts, but it becomes very clear that they need to invest some resource unless they get lucky (given the relatively low AC, something like Great Weapon Master or Sharpshooter would likely be a good call for this). (It's also immune to psychic, poison, and necrotic damage, the latter being less usual an immunity for objects.)

The giant still has some powerful attacks, but it's not nearly as much of a threat when its rune is destroyed.

Now, damaging objects is one of those things I don't see come up a ton in my own D&D sessions. One thing to bear in mind is that a lot of spells don't actually harm objects. A Fireball would seem like a good option to take out a stone like this, but while Fireballs ignite flammable objects in their area of effect, they only directly damage creatures. And since this rock is definitely not flammable, I don't think it would succeed in destroying it.

Notably, this is one of the often ignored benefits of the Fire Bolt cantrip. Eldritch Blast, Ray of Frost, and most damage cantrips can only target creatures, but Fire Bolt specifically calls out that it can target objects. That said, unless you have some damage boost, a Fire Bolt's average damage will remain under 20 until you hit tier 4.

Of course, weapons can target objects just fine, and I think this is going to probably be the primary way you can get rid of a rune item like this.

Now, as a DM, you might be tempted to put these objects out of reach of the party. These creatures are all giants, and so it stands to reason that they might be holding their runic object high enough that, without reach, a creature won't be able to target it in melee. I would say... don't do that. Have the giants wear it on a belt or something, putting it in range, as long as the characters is willing to get up within reach of the thing.

Now, the next question is how open you want to be with the players about the rules surrounding the rune. I'd err on the side of making it clear that they can destroy it, giving them the tactical option to attempt it. Given that they won't necessarily be able to do so, it becomes something of a risk vs. reward decision. Do you forgo damaging the monster itself in order to make it less of a threat, with the risk that if you can't put out enough damage (such as if you roll low on one of your attacks) the turn becomes a waste?

This, incidentally, is an area where I think the game can reward characters with the various Intelligence proficiencies. If you have a strong History bonus, letting you make a History check to know about the way this runic magic works - and how it is reflected mechanically - would make such a proficiency feel like it's pulling its weight.

Barring that, you could describe how the rune flares whenever the runic abilities are being used, and call attention to the fact that the giant is invoking these magical abilities through the rune, letting the players get a strong sense that without that object, the creature would be unable to use them.