Creatures similar to a Cockatrice?

[Oryan77]

I'm trying to scale up an adventure that uses Cockatrices. I'm not familiar with advancing monsters, so I'm wondering if there is an alternative creature that is slightly more powerful (maybe 2-4 CRs higher) than a Cockatrice that petrifies victims. Any suggestions?

 

[Jack Simth]

I'm trying to scale up an adventure that uses Cockatrices. I'm not familiar with advancing monsters, so I'm wondering if there is an alternative creature that is slightly more powerful (maybe 2-4 CRs higher) than a Cockatrice that petrifies victims. Any suggestions?

Well, you could always Scale the Cockatrice. As a Magical Beast, +6 hit dice is +2 CR; +9 hit dice is +3 CR, and the size increase at Hit die 9 is +1 CR as well. Oh yes, and do note that the save DC is 10+1/2 hit dice+ability modifier (Con) - so if you add 9 hit dice to a Cockatrice, the save DC goes from 12 (10+1/2*5+0) to 17 (10+1/2 * 14 + 0).

There is, of course, also the Basilisk.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Like Jack said, advancing is a good option. If you want to be lazy , you can use an online generator to create the advanced statblock for you. This one at Dingle's Games lets you select the monster, click "generate", then tinker with the stats (eg, HD, abilities, etc), and tells you the CR of your changes. It also gives you a text version of the stat block for easy cun'n'paste. (Note that I've caught a few mistakes in the generator, but they're pretty rare.)

Or, like Jack said, you could use a basilisk.

 

[Persiflage]

At CR 8, should you wish to go that far (and petrify several characters at once), there's always the Gorgon [1]







[1] On an unrelated note, am I the only one who has always been extremely annoyed at this egregious abuse of well-known mythological monsters? "A Medusa", FFS. You could have called your goddam petrifying-breath-weapon-bull-type-creature anything, Gygax, but noooo: you had to screw with thousands of years of established mythology. What would have been wrong with Khalkotauroi?

 

[frankthedm]

Pyrolisk was an upgraded fire immune cockatrice with a gaze attack that caused fatal spontaneous combustion in the victim. Those who did make the save took 1d12+1 damage and where thereafter immune to that pyrolisk's gaze.

 

[Uder]

If you don't want to do the advancing yourself, the Lazy GM series has several campaigns' worth of advanced and templated creatures, with no frills or heavy-ink borders. Dungeon Beasts in particular has advanced Cockatrices.

 

[kinem]

@ Persiflage: Dragonsfoot • View topic - Q&A with Gary Gygax

 

[Persiflage]

I call shenanigans on Gygax, apart from the "Why not" bit, which I think summed it up. Once you've met a creature and/or you've seen its description in the Monster Manual, you know what it freakin' is; it's no use pretending that you've done some sort of service to role-playing by bastardising legends so people don't know what they're fighting the very first time they encounter it. There was no good reason at all to call every winged horse "a Pegasus", or every snake-haired lady "a Medusa" other than possibly a lack of imagination and publication deadlines. Or watching too many of the cheesy Jason and the [Whatever] movies.

Maybe the lure to the ego of subverting classical mythology in the minds of tens of thousands of teenagers was just too much to pass up. Gygax was to mythology what Hollywood is to World War II...

Leaving aside for a moment the rest of the content of this post, including the plainly ludicrous notion that Gary Gygax may have "lacked imagination", we don't take kindly to circumventing the profanity filter. Knock it off. - Rel

 

[pawsplay]

Two cockatrices.

 

[jonesy]

...bullsh*t...Gygax...bastardising legends...lack of imagination...Gygax was to mythology what Hollywood is to World War II...

Nice.

Gary was influenced by having read a lot of the studies Tolkien did on the formulation of fairytales and mythologies. Are you next going to say that Tolkien didn't know his stuff either?