D&D 5E [I Can't Believe It's Not In The Monster Manual] - The Achaierai

[ParanoydStyle]

This guys is fifteen feet tall and he will mess you up.
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First off: CONTEXT.

Secondly: I CAN AND DO in fact believe that these monsters did not make it into D&D 5E's bestiaries. In the strictest sense possible, they are far from necessary. D&D includes a ton of built-in redundancy. Just in the category of organized humanoid monsters meant to be fought in groups we have goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, gnolls, lizardfolk, troglodytes, and orcs (off the top of my head). That's enough monsters of that kind that the Dragonlance setting decided not to have orcs AT ALL and essentially it made no difference whatsoever. Likewise, the game loses absolutely nothing by the omission of the Allip. Oh no, we have 14 flavors of life-force-draining incorporeal undead instead of 15. Somebody call the wahmbulance.

HOWEVER: D&D is theoretically a quasi-infinite multiverse, and to provide the illusion of the infinite, there is really no such thing as too many monsters, or anything else.

So, then, alphabetically the first monster from the 3.5 Monster Manual not to make it into 5th Edition: The Achaierai. Enjoy my CR6 stats and fluff for these angry birds from hell. As always please consider "buying me a coffee" on Ko-Fi. I don't actually drink coffee so the money will probably actually be used to feed my adorable service dog.

N.B. Oh, and I had these words on the blog post itself but they...fell out? Anyway if this or any monster I post on a Wizard Wednesday ALREADY HAS OFFICIAL STATS, let me know and let me know where. It'll help me avoid duplicated effort in the future.

 

[Li Shenron]

I really liked this simple but weird monster in 3e, I made it a famous denizen (and hazard) of Arcadia, which I used as an alternate material plane rather than an afterlife. I chose the Achaierai to introduce to the PCs the knowledge that alternate (mortal) realities existed, by having this "previously unseen monster" show up from what eventually was found to be a temporary portal forgotten open by an Arcadian Wizard.

But heh what can you do... there was only a limited number of creatures to fit in the 5e MM and they had to make some cuts.

 

[dave2008]

Interesting, thanks for sharing. A couple of thoughts:

1) Multiattack should be in the Actions section not the traits section.
2) I haven't check the CR but it seems high for the low HP.
3) The language for black cloud is non-standard for 5e
4) black cloud should probably be after talon