D&D General Favorite Creepy Monster To Run?

[TheFantasyHistorianYT]

With Halloween right around the corner, I am looking for everyone's favorite scary monster! Whether in looks, mechanical play, or psychological horror, D&D has a wide variety of monsters inspired by history or originally designed. What is your favorite monster to run?!?

 

[aco175]

I recently ran some of the new mummy against the PCs and the auto mummy rot on a hit made them scared.

Wraiths have the cannot heal above the current HP makes for some tougher fights later on.

 

[Seramus]

False Hydra, anything Incorporeal so I can creep through walls and floors, or a level appropriate Sibriex!

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

This thing is horrific. There's a Young and Ancient version of it floating around somewhere but I can't seem to find it

 

[TheFantasyHistorianYT]

This thing is horrific. There's a Young and Ancient version of it floating around somewhere but I can't seem to find it

That is super cool! Picture looks like a homebrew version? Did a little digging and found that a Dragon Spider is found in the Wild Elves (9334) Sourcebook for Dragonlance on page 57 and in Vecna: Eve of Ruin p233 along with some other creepy wolf/spider hybrids. Couldn't find the young or ancient versions either.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Intelligent ghouls are creepy as hell, like a combination of vampires and zombies. They want to eat you -- and will eat you -- but they're not monsters. They can be civilized about it and have a nice conversation first and maybe offer freedom or undeath in return for being given intelligence on large gatherings of food people, or ways to bypass security.

 

[loverdrive]

I love aristocratic, affable, intelligent and unimaginably cruel kind of villains. Ones that will invite you for dinner, show you around their gallery, because where's the thrill in just vaporizing you in a pile of ash and dust? It's undignified. Peasants just kill people for their petty peasant squabbles, aristocrats hunt them for sport.

On a related note: dragons are terrifying! It'd be really interesting to have a dragon as a horror villain. And they also can take humanoid form...

 

[Mannahnin]

I quite like trolls, as long as you describe them horrifically and don't refer to them by name,

I once had a random encounter for a mid-level party be two trolls creeping up and ambushing their camp at night, and the players were all horrified of the nine foot tall, long-limbed, loping, rubbery-skinned, dead-black eyed THINGs which first crept and then leapt upon their camp.

Sadly the effect was diminished when we broke out the battle mat to nail down positioning and I deployed the miniatures.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I quite like trolls, as long as you describe them horrifically and don't refer to them by name,

I once had a random encounter for a mid-level party be two trolls creeping up and ambushing their camp at night, and the players were all horrified of the nine foot tall, long-limbed, loping, rubbery-skinned, dead-black eyed THINGs which first crept and then leapt upon their camp.

That was the very good advice given in the Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium volumes: Describe them, don't name them. Even the most mundane D&D monsters can be terrifying, given this treatment. (I believe TSR used an ogre in their example, and it wasn't even a creepy Pathfinder ogre, but it was still was quite effective.)

 

[Mannahnin]

That was the very good advice given in the Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium volumes: Describe them, don't name them. Even the most mundane D&D monsters can be terrifying, given this treatment. (I believe TSR used an ogre in their example, and it wasn't even a creepy Pathfinder ogre, but it was still was quite effective.)

Yup. I remember reading an OSR DM opining once about how he preferred NOT to paint his miniatures, because it made them more abstractly representational, as opposed to how a nice paint job inclines the players to focus on the miniature rather than their imagination.

Speaking as a longtime wargamer with an extensive miniatures collection, this gave me some consternation, but I've seen some truth to it.

I've started to experiment with looser positioning and use of minis more for relative position and less for exact movement, trying to leverage imagination a bit more without letting me and me players get too un-grounded from each other's mental pictures.