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).
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