Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
We had a great lvl 5 playtest last night, where I sent the PCs up against a degenerate elven thieves' guild deep in a tropic jungle. They were warned that an entrance was "under the northern snows, where the sea met the street." Not a lot of that in a jungle city, it turned out, until they were in the marketplace and saw human fishmongers placing teleported-in ocean fish on ice.
Snow. Sea. Street... Check.
They were nosy enough to start a fight. The joy here is that I used the stats for carnivorous apes to represent the fishmongers, and I used the stats for a giant carnivorous ape to represent the huge 7' tall burly fishmonger. Since the apes normally get two attacks each, each fishmonger picked up two huge ocean fish and waded into combat, using the fish as clubs to try and beat the characters senseless. It was a fantastic fight. The visuals were great, what with pike and tuna being used as clubs by angry laborers/thieves, and the PCs were (mostly) loathe to use lethal attacks until the bad guys had.
Better yet, the druid shapeshifted himself into a fish to put himself in a position to spy, only coming out of it (by wildshaping into a huge dire cat and leaping off the display rack) to finish off the last bad guy.
Are other folks doing this sort of thing, reskinning monsters to match your needs? Tell me about it. I'll probably gratuitously and blatantly steal.. err, be inspired by your ideas.
Snow. Sea. Street... Check.
They were nosy enough to start a fight. The joy here is that I used the stats for carnivorous apes to represent the fishmongers, and I used the stats for a giant carnivorous ape to represent the huge 7' tall burly fishmonger. Since the apes normally get two attacks each, each fishmonger picked up two huge ocean fish and waded into combat, using the fish as clubs to try and beat the characters senseless. It was a fantastic fight. The visuals were great, what with pike and tuna being used as clubs by angry laborers/thieves, and the PCs were (mostly) loathe to use lethal attacks until the bad guys had.
Better yet, the druid shapeshifted himself into a fish to put himself in a position to spy, only coming out of it (by wildshaping into a huge dire cat and leaping off the display rack) to finish off the last bad guy.
Are other folks doing this sort of thing, reskinning monsters to match your needs? Tell me about it. I'll probably gratuitously and blatantly steal.. err, be inspired by your ideas.