Help, I need a sea monster for Lv4 party

[On Puget Sound]

My party (6 players, balanced, not particularly optimized, just leveled to 4) is about to take ship for a short coastal journey - one or two days. They'll be aboard a Viking-style longship crewed by dwarves, most of whom are combat capable. The number and strength of dwarves is undefined at present - I can use them to beef up the party if needed, and logically they should fight, but NPC on NPC violence is boring so I would prefer they not do much. Four of the dwarves have traveled with the party and fought a bit (first against them, then alongside them) and are clearly not minions.

Originally this was going to be an uneventful "the next day you arrive", but then one of my players excitedly asked if he could draw up a multi-deck ship map "in case you want to use it".....

The monster manuals are woefully short on water creatures for low to mid heroic levels. Sahuagin are already defined as occuring elsewhere, and pirates or raiders won't really fit, as the dwarves are the raiders in these parts. Anyone know of any monsters out there I can use?

 

[reason]

Mock up a tentacled monster that you never see clearly. Attacks in the fog, say. Steal the stats for a low-level monster for each of the tentacles, then make it a PC versus tentacles fight. We've all seen that movie.

Set the number of tentacles appropriately to challenge the PCs. You have your big burly tentacles trying to flatten people, your sneaky tentacles trying to grapple and haul people overboard, and so forth. The objective is to hurt/cripple enough tentacles that the monster leaves the ship alone.

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[AllisterH]

<snip>


The monster manuals are woefully short on water creatures for low to mid heroic levels. Sahuagin are already defined as occuring elsewhere, and pirates or raiders won't really fit, as the dwarves are the raiders in these parts. Anyone know of any monsters out there I can use?

Oh...good timing...just recently on the 4e house rules, there were a couple of neat solo giant squid monsters that might give you ideas...

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

If you want something big, here's a thread about handling a big monster as an encounter scene rather than a standard statted creature, along the lines of what reason suggested.

Lacedons. And there's the current ghoul thread for more ideas to make them even more creepy. Maybe they're the crew of a longship lost a few seasons ago, known by some among the NPC crew.

A swarm of fiendish octopi swarm up and over the sides of the ship. Maybe something dark and ominous is seen below - controlling them?

A squall blows over, and something attacks from above. The stormcloud is really the site of a skirmish between ice and steam mephits, a few of whom decide to menace the boat.

 

[On Puget Sound]

Thanka all! I think the tentacled horror is a go and I love that thread on monster encounters.