D&D 5E Great Monster Combos

[BookTenTiger]

The other week I had my players find an abandoned gallery of weapons and armor. It turns out, of course, all the weapons and armor were mimics. That didn't shock the players. But when a bunch of rust monsters came crawling out of the empty hearth, that's when the fun really began!

Mimics are grappling machines, and the stuck characters started getting rusted to bits. It was a great monster combo.

I also thought it worked narratively: the rust monsters had eaten all the real weapons and armor, so the mimics had moved in. The mimics attract adventurers, which provided a reliable food source for the rust monsters!

What are some other combinations of creatures that are fun for either mechanical or narrative reasons?

 

[aco175]

I had a fun time throwing goblins and cockatrices together. The goblins carried the cockatrices in covered baskets and threw them into the party lines once the encounter started. I had extra goblins in the encounter so some of them could get turned to stone as well as the PCs. The encounter is better optimized with a blind creature and turn to stone creature, but the goblins panicking once one was turned added to the fight and confusion, giving the players more fun.

 

[Quickleaf]

I had a nice monster combo a few sessions back: 2 flesh golems (quadrupeds made from animal parts so it wasn't immediately obvious what they were), and water laced with contact poison along with 2 NPC casters - one a priest with control water, and the other a mage with lightning bolt. Made for a tense scenario.

 

[Richards]

I'm setting up an encounter with a pair of shambling mounds and a small group of volts sharing a lair near an underground supply of water. The shamblers have no interest in the volts and as plants they have no blood so the volts aren't interested in them as a food source, but the volts have learned their electrical attacks only make the shambling mounds that much tougher, so it's in their own best interests to "buff up" the shamblers any time there's a threat to their lair - like, say, wandering PCs.

I'm making a conscious decision in my new campaign to dust off some monsters the players haven't seen yet in our previous campaigns and volts - not really that much of a thing since the AD&D 1E days - were on my list.

Johnathan

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I had a nice monster combo a few sessions back: 2 flesh golems (quadrupeds made from animal parts so it wasn't immediately obvious what they were), and water laced with contact poison along with 2 NPC casters - one a priest with control water, and the other a mage with lightning bolt. Made for a tense scenario.

I did similar with a flesh golem plus blue dragon. There are other dragon plus golem combos that are great: red with iron, and clay with black, since those get healed by the breath weapons.

 

[J.Quondam]

Maybe grimlocks and darkmantles could work well together.
The ambush: When the party enters the location, a couple darkmantles concentrate on their darkness ability to turn out the lights. Then the rest of the darkmantles target as many PCs as they can with their head-crush attacks. As the PCs are distracted and blinded by the darkmantles, the grimlocks move in for the kill, unhindered by the magical darkness. (The encounter might be cranked up a bit by using grimlock racial traits on an NPC chassis like the thug or spy.)

 

[TheSword]

Grimlocks and Basilisks is a nasty one too. The grimlocks are immune to the basilisks gaze while the PCs have to avert their eyes.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Maybe grimlocks and darkmantles could work well together.
The ambush: When the party enters the location, a couple darkmantles concentrate on their darkness ability to turn out the lights. Then the rest of the darkmantles target as many PCs as they can with their head-crush attacks. As the PCs are distracted and blinded by the darkmantles, the grimlocks move in for the kill, unhindered by the magical darkness. (The encounter might be cranked up a bit by using grimlock racial traits on an NPC chassis like the thug or spy.)

I did this a couple of weeks ago. The grimlocks carried darkmantles in wicker cages on their backs. When a fight breaks out the darkmantles panic and produce puddles of magical darkness.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I'm setting up an encounter with a pair of shambling mounds and a small group of volts sharing a lair near an underground supply of water. The shamblers have no interest in the volts and as plants they have no blood so the volts aren't interested in them as a food source, but the volts have learned their electrical attacks only make the shambling mounds that much tougher, so it's in their own best interests to "buff up" the shamblers any time there's a threat to their lair - like, say, wandering PCs.

I'm making a conscious decision in my new campaign to dust off some monsters the players haven't seen yet in our previous campaigns and volts - not really that much of a thing since the AD&D 1E days - were on my list.

Johnathan

I've done something similar with shambling mounds and shocker lizards - it's a pretty nasty combo.

And I wrote an adventure once that featured a hedge maze full of lightning arc traps that had attracted a bunch of shamblers, who had learned to intentionally set off the traps to heal themselves. The shamblers reacted strongly to any foolish adventurers who tried to wander in and/or disarm the traps.

 

[GuyBoy]

I can’t remember where it was from, but a flesh golem with a hellwasp swarm inside it. Pretty scary.