Among the somewhat surprising additions to Ravenloft: Horrors Within are the several monsters taken directly from the fiction of HP Lovecraft. The real codifier of cosmic horror as a genre, Lovecraft's work has always inspired elements of D&D - the Ilithid, for example, are sort of human-sized versions of Cthulhu (well, minus the wings and claws) and more broadly, Aberrations, Elder Evils, the Far Realm, and honestly even some of the demons of the Abyss all borrow ideas from Lovecraft's horror. Cthulhu himself showed up in the AD&D supplement Deities & Demigods, which actually triggered a bit of a licensing snafu, given that Arkham House had already offered Chaosium (makers of the Call of Cthulhu RPG) the exclusive rights to the Cthulhu Mythos before licensing the character to TSR.
I wanted to do a series of posts looking through all of them (I've already covered Cthulhu him/them/itself). As someone who worked a lot of cosmic horror into his homebrew setting, it's nice to have these alien monsters.
Nightgaunts appeared in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, in which a man explores the fantastical Dreamlands, which in Lovecraft's mythos are a separate plane of reality. They resemble some kind of demonic or gargoyle-like figure from a distance, but upon closer inspection, their aberrant nature is a little more clear, especially because their heads sort of open up to reveal a gaping maw, ringed with eyes. Indeed, I think the "Demogorgons" from Stranger Things may have been partially inspired by them, with their strange unfolding heads.
The very lowest-CR Lovecraft monster in the book, they're still CR 8, which means that in large numbers they could probably remain relevant even into tier 4 (I've got a planned encounter for my party that involves them standing in for some Phyrexian horrors that the party might face at level 19).
The Nightgaunt is not a terribly complicated stat block, but it does have a clear modus operandi:
Again, looking at least superficially like a classic gothic demon, their wings allow them to fly. They are large, with a flight speed of 40 feet and Flyby. They have some standard Claw attacks that can grapple and a tail with a Barb attack that can poison. But they can replace one attack with Ascend, which is where things get interesting:
Ascend allows them to fly directly upward, and they get to ignore the extra movement cost of dragging a creature if they're grappling (I think given that they're Large, they'd normally be able to ignore this if the target's Medium or smaller, but this means they can fly very high with anything. (Actually, checking things - evidently you have to be two sizes larger than a grappled target to avoid the movement penalty, so unless you're a Gnome, Halfling, or other Small creature, the Nightgaunt needs this carve-out).
Now, that's all Ascend does, but it seems to me that the obvious thing is that this now allows them to just drop the creature they're holding. Especially if they haven't used all their regular movement speed, they can move laterally somewhat to potentially drop a target over an even greater height. If they only do the 40 feet up, that can get you 4d6 damage (unless the creature has a way of avoiding the fall's impact.
But there's one more wrinkle: When grappling a creature, the Nightgaunt can do its "Tickle," which prompts a wisdom saving throw, and on a failure, the creature becomes Incapacitated until the start of the Nightgaunt's next turn - which means that with bad saves, the Nightgaunt can keep a foe incapacitated indefinitely. Even still, they could also just prevent a foe from using Feather Fall or Slow Fall or a Fly speed to avoid the fall damage from dropping them (though note that "Hover" fly speeds can still prevent this).
Being incapacitated is nasty - it automatically drops spell concentration, prevents all actions (you only have your movement, which isn't helpful when you're also grappled) and speech. So that makes them already pretty tough to deal with.
Still, that's mostly it for their mechanics.
What I find really compelling about these as monsters is the fact that they could be mistaken for something else. I think a lot of cosmic horror can come from an image revealing itself to be something else on closer inspection. I think that these could be mistaken for gargoyles in some gothic graveyard - and this is a game where Gargoyles are, you know, a real potential threat and monster. But then, as they begin to move, their movement is just wrong and off, and once those horrible maws oepn up, it becomes clear that any cosmic framework you started with, even if you were preparing to use magic that would deal with fiends, is not actually going to help you here.
And then people get snatched and tossed up into the air.
For high-level parties, an individual Nightgaunt isn't going to be that scary. Their attack bonus and the DC for their Wisdom saves isn't that high, but it is enough that it shouldn't feel trivial to overcome even for the most powerful characters. Still: for high levels, it's a numbers game. When the eldritch stuff is an incursion into familiar reality, which likely happens at lower levels, one of these things is going to be a real terror. But at higher levels, if the party has come to a truly alien world, these things might fill the skies. It definitely means that they are diminished as a threat narratively to go along with how they're diminished simply by the party being higher-level, but even if they're less likely to pull off their nasty tricks with a higher-level party, if you throw a whole bunch of them at the party, it might still be a big problem.
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