Zen and the art of Monster Design, #2

All right, it's been ages since I wrote the first one of these, and I haven't been as regular with blogging as I wanted to be, so I'm going to babble a little about some of the stuff I'm working on right now.

I'm actually working on material for two campaigns -- one heroic (4th level PCs) and one that has just reached paragon (11th level PCs).

I'm offering this walkthrough of my process as a demonstration of the sort of very relaxed, zen process I'm using to create custom opponents for my campaign. It's very, very light on the math -- I mostly just make stuff up and then check it against what's already there to see how it measures up. Let me know what you think . . . .

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For the Heroic campaign, I'm bringing a plotline involving goblin invasion by sea and the gnome effigies that I've mentioned before to a head. The gnome effigies are a new creation for me -- I need to come up with a variety of opponents for the party that are based on these animated gnome dolls. (I play a lot of rogues in WOW, and when you pick pockets there one of the ubiquitous things you loot is a "gnome effigy" -- that has been the inspiration for this collection of opponents)

Gnome Effigy
The gnome effigy is the weakest, most basic instance of the effigy creatures. I want these guys to be annoying, but no more than that. About the weakest single creature I can base them on is the kobold minion, so that's what I'm going to work with. However, I want to give them a slightly different flavor. In a previous post I mentioned these guys and said that I was going to give them the clay scout's limited invisibility, but I've since decided that I don't really like that for them -- it's a frankly a deeply stupid choice on my part if I don't pair them with creatures that can daze opponents, or give them the ability to daze opponents themselves. So, I want to come up with something else. In the end, I think I'm going to go with the gnome's reactive stealth and make sure they're trained in stealth (on top of the Kobold's existing stealth bonus, that would give these little buggers a +9 to stealth).

Gnome Tickleyou
My original plan for these guys was to just use the clay scout, and make them bigger, non-minion versions of the effigies, but I've since decided to throw this idea out entirely.

Effigy Swarm.
This is my replacement idea for the tickleyou. It's a mob of effigies, working together in a tightly packed unit of lilliputian anger and menace. Swarm models for these guys could be the rat swarm, the needlefang drake swarm, and a few other similar swarms in the compendium. Swarms seem to be pretty consistently marked by their resistance to melee and ranged attacks, their vulnerability to area and close attacks, and their auras. Most swarm auras just let them make their basic attack again, so that's all pretty easy to do.

I'm going to go ahead and use the rat swarm as my basis for the effigy swarm. That gets the stats pretty much right, but I'll want to make a couple of changes to create my flavor. I see this as a teeming swarm of stuffed gnomes. They've grabbed small blades, bits of broken glass, etc, for weapons, and the rat swarm's basic attack works just fine for my purposes, but I'm going to remove the ongoing damage. In it's place, I'm going to include a collection of alternate attacks that build on each other.

The Attack will still be 1d6+3 and will grab a target. If the target is grabbed, it will knock the target prone (flavored to pull the target down). If the target is grabbed and prone, it will do 2d6+3 damage.

This is very simliar to the Needlefang Drake swarm, but it's not quite as deadly in pure damage, but it will be harder to escape, which I expect will be scary for the PCs.

Effigy Golem
The fey baddies who have created the gnome effigies that are helping the golins attack the city have created one more monstrosity -- a sort of golem created out of packed-together effigies, bound into a single being through fey sorceries blah blah blah.

I spent a while looking for a construct that made sense as a model for this opponent. I didn't find much in the level range that I'm working in. So, I broadended my hunt, deciding that what I really wanted was a basic brute of some sort, and decided to use the Orc Beserker as my primary model. But, I flipped over to the Golem pages to look at the golems there for something that was a standard golem flavor. Golems have a power called Golem Rampage, which should work well at just about any level, so I'm going to slap that onto the orc beserker in place of the warrior's surge. I will also adjust the attack -- rather than the 1d12+5 (with the high crit) that the orc beserker has, I'm going to go with 2d6+5 and leave off the high crit. This is somewhere between the high damage values for levels 1-3 and 4-6 in the DM (p 185). It'll average out at 12 points of damage, one point lower than the 2d8+4 that is the high damage at 4-6 on that table, so it's just about right.

So, that's my collection of Effigy beasties -- the minion, the swarm, and the golem. In all three cases the design was very quick and dirty, and the whole set was inspired by what I wanted to achieve in story terms. I spent most of my time flipping through books and the compendium looking for models and ideas -- the rest was just copy-paste and a little tweaking. And, really, since I'm going to use these monsters for a session or two, and then they'll never be used again, I don't want to spend hours and hours putting them together.