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).