What's your favorite monster I've never heard of?

[Ry]

Is the gambado the weird muscle thing that uses other creatures skulls for its own head?

 

[demiurge1138]

More!

From Denizens of Avandu, the best monster book that nobody's read...

Argill: A Creature of the Black Lagoon type aquatic humanoid that drinks the breath out of its prey.
Dark Wanderer: The females of the race are beautiful, Gypsy-esque wanderers with enchantment powers. The males are nine feet high and have four clawed arms. They can change sexes at will.
Epicurian: Decadent gluttons that can sense creatures by taste alone.
Kulumar: Sinister creatures that enslave their victim's shadow.
Necromercer: Outsiders that travel from town to town, delivering messages and trinkets to and from the dead.
Teo-selerai: Boogeymen that bleed rats, bats and spiders.
Vacuous Engulfer: A living portable hole, it sucks its victims into a pocket dimension.
Xxyth: Lovecraftian horrors done dragon-style, with multiple sizes and ages and a lot of flexibility.

I also have to shout out to my favorite monster from any of S&S Studio's Creature Collection line: the grim puppeteer. It's a giant spider that lures in prey by using ventriloquism and the drained corpses of former victims as grisly marionnettes.

Demiurge out.

 

[Nifft]

Toadlock
Thurn
Arrakith
Gelatenous Tessaract

These are things from my campaign setting, and I'm certain you haven't heard of them until just now.

-- N

PS: I'll post the GT if anyone's interested.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Aurgon (gorgon variant that breathes gold mist that petrifies victims into golden statues)
Gorgotaur (Gorgon-Minotaur hybrid from Encyclopaedia Arcane: Crossbreeding)

PS: I'll post the GT if anyone's interested.

I'd be interested in taking a gander at said creature.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

#337.
As for being under-CR'd, my first version added the victim's Constitution bonus to the number of rounds that the dragon needed to extract the brain. We decided to turn it into the flat five rounds for ease of use, and more importantly, to avoid having the dragon nibble at high-Constitution fighters for hours (Yes, the mind blast is a bit stronger than that of a mind flayer, which was a reason not to go with instant extraction, along with the huge grapple bonus a dragon will have). Would that have helped?

Nibbling brains? Nah, it didn't get close enough to do that. The danger of it is the wide area of the mind blast coupled with the duration (and the DC).

I threw the Great Wyrm version (CR 25) against my party of 12 18th level PCs (adjusted APL of 20, but they were extremely optimized and kitted out a bit above wealth by level guidelines). Technically, I expected them to avoid the fight, but it wasn't beyond the CR they'd defeated before; this same group of players took down the aforementioned (CR 21) Deathjack at 12th level and an Iron Kingdoms dragon of about CR 25 at 14th level, albeit in a previous campaign - but they'd killed a CR 21 demon at 12th level in this one, so I wasn't too worried.

Let's just say they didn't avoid the fight.

I knew there was a problem when the dragon mind blasted the party... and they all needed at least 18s to make their saves. Well, not to worry, I thought; they may get stunned, but what's the worst that could happen? Trouble was, the dragon could use its stun an average of every 2.5 rounds, with a duration of 13.5 rounds - meaning once it stun-locked the PCs, it never had to let any of them get un-stunned, and it could re-use its mind blast often enough to ensure they all got stunned.

Part of the problem was that the PCs had had an extremely powerful save buffer character among their number for the previous 10 or so sessions, who had been killed the session before. So I was expecting their Will saves to be about 10 higher than they were. I ended up stopping the session and we agreed not to use the blast, and it was an interesting fight from then on.

It's just one of those creatures you can't really use against a lower-level party, no matter how numerous or well built; if I'd used, say, the very old version, it still would have been an impressive and deadly monster, but more in line with what the PCs could handle.

 

[Kem]

The Enveloper from 1st ed's Fiend Folio.

Kills a creature, absorbs it, gains power (or abilities) and moves onto the next target. Worked best as something that was killing just random things, letting the PCs figure out what it had killed so they could think of a way to kill it when they found it.

 

[Thurbane]

Aurgon (gorgon variant that breathes gold mist that petrifies victims into golden statues)

I think they were exterminated by the local moneylenders guilds, werent they?

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

Vlasta (from HârnMaster) my players hate those nasty little buggers, and with good reason.

 

[Hand of Evil]

The Doom Guard from All The World's Monsters vol 2.

 

[jinx crossbow]

TheBiggestFishInTheWorldThatEatsPaper
from the Kid's Colouring Book o Critters

JinX