Creature Incarnations: Duergar

Randy is currently running us through a campaign that thankfully utilizes Palladium Fantasy in geography only. Currently, we’re plundering dwarven ruins oddly brimming with their devil-worshiping, quill-tossing counterparts, duergar. At least in 3rd Edition, duergar were basically evil dwarves–sometimes psionic–that could both enlarge themselves and turn invisible, in addition to few other minor benefits.

Now? They’re resistance to fire and chuck their beards at you. Okay, okay. Technically, they throw quills that just happen to grow out of their beards (or hair in the case of females). It just sounds ridiculous no matter how I try to spin it (and this article has plenty of variations on the theme, which I’ll get to in just a bit). I get the reasoning as to why they dropped invisibility and enlarge person from their repertoire: gnomes already have fade away, and being Large is a *ahem* big deal.

I think that since they associate with devils, that there would have been something better for them besides tossing toxic hair at their enemies. Give them a daily racial that lets them summon a devil. It doesn’t have to be super awesome, just useful and flavorful. What about conjuring a pillar of hellfire? Crib the dragonborn’s breath weapon, just re-flavor it. What about giving them something like the tiefling’s infernal wrath, but instead of fire damage, they grant combat advantage or something like that? Hell, keep the mechanics of the quills, but make it like…a curse, or something. Sorry about the mini-rant, but I just fucking hate the quills. Moving on!

The article actually opens up with about half a page of flavor content on duergar society. As with most evil things, the strong rule, they advance through treachery, and they deal in slaves. Oh, and they constantly fight against basically everything else that lives underground. You know, the usual requirements to be an evil race that dwells in the Underdark. Nothing really special here, but then I’ve been around for a few editions and already know their MO.

The next part is, as mentioned, a power swap for each monster role. They’re still usable as minor actions, but lieu of the typical attack penalty and ongoing damage, let you do other stuff like slow, blind, or immobilize targets. An interesting way to shake things up and keep your players guessing, but it’s still beard quills. 

Speaking of beard quills, there’s also new monster blocks scattered throughout the article. Almost immediately after the part on quill variants is the barbazu-bonded duergar, who has a beard aura. These guys are created when Asmodeus binds a barbazu’s soul to a duergar, giving it the ability to strange enemies with its beard if they get too close. It also swaps out the usual hammer/crossbow rollout for a glaive (but keeping the quills).

Breaking up the crunch, we move on to duergar settlements. The next three or so pages are dedicated to information on duergar lair-building techniques–such as sticking close to volcanoes and managing mushroom farms–and their more impressive structures, towers wreathed in eternal fire. It’s occasionally broken up by adventures hooks and stat blocks for a duergar-mounted-howler and duergar bloodmage, level 13 and 8 threats, respectively.

Despite all the shit I give duergar for their quills, there’s a lot of information here for duergar fans (or player’s stuck in a game with them). If you hate duergar, obviously this isn’t for you. Assuming Randy hasn’t already read this, I’m going to toss him a link. At the least it’ll help break up the quill monotony.

Creature Incarnations: Modrons

Finally, an article that I can get behind.

My favorite campaign setting for 2nd Edition was Planescape, hands down. I loved the look and feel, and the fact that you could journey to exotic and alien worlds without having to be high-level. Sure, many were extremely hostile even if you were high level, but it opened up a lot of possibilities at the start of a campaign. Aside from the Nine Hells and Mount Celestia, there was a world that was like a sandwich (Bytopia, if I recall) and another that was a vast open space with metallic cubes crashing into eachother (along with storms of razor blades).

Still more bizarre however, was Mechanus: a space of gears and cogs constantly grinding and turning for an unknown purpose, though there were several theories, such that if they stopped that the Multiverse would end. In 2nd Edition, this place was inhabited by modrons, equally bizarre creatures whose lesser incarnations adopted the shapes of geometric solids, such as spheres and cubes. Others, well, didn’t, such as the tridrone, which looked like a starfish with a one-eyed face on each arm, walking on five legs.

The article goes over some brief descriptions, such as that monodrones are spherical, and both duodrones and quadrones are like cubes, which in unfortunate because I think that a picture best delivers their alien appearance. There’s a lot more than that, but it serves for the purpose of the article.

One thing that I like a lot about the new modrons is that they are pieced together from lesser ones. Before, each type had a specific number. When a ranking modron died, lesser forms were promoted and created as necessary to fill the gap, ensuring a static number of modrons Now, it seems that lesser ranking modrons combine in order to, ahem, transform into the next rank, and dissemble into lesser ranking modrons when killed: in combat, every modron except for a monodrone separates into others that keep the fight going.

I also like their new niche: searching for planar rifts and either protecting them or sealing them. In this way, they help create stability across the planes, which is a far cry more direct that whatever nebulous purpose they had before. Honestly? If there was one aside from maintaining Mechanus, I don’t recall it. This seems as a fairly easy way to throw them at the players, especially if they are trying to find a way into the Shadowfell or Feywild.

The only thing the article is missing is a racial writeup for rogue modrons. How would you do it?

Creature Incarnations: Fomorians

Its been awhile since I’ve posted between finals and God of War 3, but it seems that every time I’m about to need a shitload of variant monsters, something crops up to make my life a lot easier. Creature Incarnations: Fomorians adds eight fomorians and a spriggan minion to the roster with a level range of 14-20, which is handy in filling out the existing level gap. Its just too bad that almost half of them are also controllers.

Its not a large article, focusing almost entirely on the stat blocks and fluff relating to each entry, but it does manage to provide a few paragraphs of exposition about fomorian kingdoms and how they are “relatively” safe compared to the untamed regions of the Feydark. There’s a sidebar that explains how they sometimes get along with Vistani, making them a viable way to locate and navigate fomorian lairs. Also, a few of the new fomorians make it easy to justify the inclusion of angelic and/or infernal allies, adding to the flexibility of creating fomorian-themed encounters.

Creature Incarnations: Fell Taints

I’ve…never heard of fell taints until now, but from the sounds of a few Wizards.com threads I guess they existed before, and were possibly really annoying/dangerous? Fell taints are like psychic jellyfish that make claims to having no mouths, though the art says otherwise. They dont ingest solid matter, instead just draining psychic energy from their victims.

Since all fell taints can fly, this can make it a bitch to run in combat. The article recommends ensuring that they are always 1 square above ground to make it difficult to get flanked, but if they like ranged attacks to stick to cover when they can. I might have to pick up some of those elevation indicators.

There are six monsters to be had here, all clumped within a similar level range to make sure you can build a few very thematic adventures. They are aberrants, which works for me since I was kicking around a Songs of Erui adventure that relies heavily on that origin. This should tide me over nicely for the first few levels, yes indeedy.

A darter is a basic level 1 skirmisher that deals lots of psychic damage and can prone you. Its really fast and hard to peg with opportunity attacks, and enjoys using a coup de grace on unconscious targets. To make things worse, it regains all its hp if it manages to actually kill kill a target.
Drones, on the other hand, are level 1 minion lurkers that have an “extra life” mechanic, so might end up taking two hits to bring down. They can feed on unconscious targets as well, but only gain temp hp and dont auto-crit them.
Defiants are level 3 soldiers that generate an aura that makes it hard to hit anything but defiants, but otherwise function in a very identical manner as the darter.
Now, the ripper is a really twisted bastard. Each time it successfully hits you, you take an increasingly larger amount of damage. The damage resets on a miss, so I’m glad its a brute. Oh, it also has the auto-crit-hp-healing ability.
Thought scourges manage to add quite a bit of complexity, which makes sense since its a level 5 solo controller. Its got threatening reach, a melee attack that it can reduce the damage on in order to auto-hit an ally close by, a close blast that deals ongoing psychic damage, and a non-damaging slide attack that it can use whenever you miss it with a melee/ranged attack. Very nice.
Void callers, on the other hand, do the controlling bit differently than their solo counterparts. They are level 6 elite controllers that can take damage in order to summon fell taint drones. They also have a recharging encounter power that lets them summon any fell taint of level 4 or lower. Otherwise, they have a lot of slowing attacks.
And finally we have the wisp. Its a level 2 lurker leader that deals extra damage with combat advantage and can burn its insubstantial feature to deal psychic damage to anything that hits it, while at the same time healing all of its allies within 5.

I went into this article expecting to be fairly underwhelmed, though at the end I was really satisfied with the mechanics and theme. I’m a fan of Lovecraftian stuff so color me biased, but overall its very interesting, concise, and (most importantly) useful.

Kudos to N. Eric Heath.