D&D General Favorite Creepy Monster To Run?

[GM Lent]

Tough one! My initial throught was mind flayers, but honestly I don't use them much because if used to the maximum of their capabilities I don't know how a party could beat them.

So I vote the Living Wall. They're disgusting, tragic, and evocative - equally as useful for intense personal and emotional struggles as they are for puzzles/barriers.

 

[Distracted DM]

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.

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Naming something makes it known- on the other hand if you'd printed out that OD&D art for the troll and put it on a binder clip as a "miniature," I think your players mightve been MORE horrified.
But yes, I often get lazy and name a creature which makes it less scary. But if you just stick to descriptions, and don't state their names, or give them different names.. you can really make some monsters scary. On the other hand if the PCs have dealt with trolls, or if they would know what a troll was, I feel like I'm cheating them of some knowledge by not naming them :'D

 

[Distracted DM]

My creepiest was probably when I (trigger warning for child harm) stole the idea of Neb from Baldur's Gate 1/2 and combined it with the Skinner Murderer from BG2. I was personally horrified and uncomfortable as I described his lair. Not only that, I made his goal to sacrifice this stuff he'd made to some dark entity, so there was an awful dark shadow-ghost haunted basement with an evil portal and the tormented trapped souls of his victims down there tied to their Skinner-Murderer remains all over the walls.
It was definitely "successful" in what it set out to do, but I don't know if I'd do something that dark again; it wasn't even planned, it was just some improv side quest. The players took satisfaction from putting an end to the whole thing, but like I said it was tough for me to actually describe some of the gruesome scenes as I was coming up with it.

 

[TravDoc42]

Unsure if blights have been mentioned, but I find them creepy and fun!! I love how the vine blight can speak short sentences, which is spooky, and I also love that the new MM has more blights to play with, like the Gulthias blight!!

I also keep using vampires as villains, over and over again. I genuinely don't know why I apparently love those bloodsuckers as baddies, but I do!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The living wall. You will not like to know what happens if you die fighting against this.

 

[Marc17]

Doppelgänger. Not in a 'surprise, you are being attacked by somebody you thought was a friend' way, but more of a "if the grandmother has been buried in the basement for at least a week, who was feeding us home cooked meals last night' way. Fighting is a fail mode for a doppelgänger. I'm envisioning a sort of Dracula castle scene where everybody encountered in the creepy castle is the same doppelgänger*. Even better if when it is all over, the PCs never figure out what was going on.

*Including the person that fed them the adventure hook.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Unsure if blights have been mentioned, but I find them creepy and fun!! I love how the vine blight can speak short sentences, which is spooky, and I also love that the new MM has more blights to play with, like the Gulthias blight!!

And there's definitely room for more blights as well. Pumpkin blights, anyone?

 

[Fifinjir]

I’m sad that the campaign fell apart before they could get to the reveal, but I did have fun roleplaying a hag as the villain of the initial plot arc. Making the party think that this grandmotherly forest sage was helping them when really she was the cause of the crisis and using them to further her goals gave me that “everything that has transpired is according to my design!” feeling. As for creepiness, the description for how a hag is born made me assume they’re ontologically the same as the person used, so in my eyes having the hag remember being a human before becoming a hag made it even worse.

 

[Marc17]

I've used hags for effect before. Less as an antagonists, and more in "Sometimes the village faces threats nobody will help us with. Nobody except for the hags of the marsh, but they demand a price." They exist in symbiosis with the villagers and unlike the lords, will usually hold to their deals. In a PF game, one of the characters was a changling. Turns out their father had made a deal with a hag specifically for the child, all to loophole a prophecy which involved the PC (and the end of the campaign).

 

[TravDoc42]

The living wall. You will not like to know what happens if you die fighting against this.

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TERRIFYING.