We begin the Gnoll section today on its most powerful member, the
Flind. This is a boss monster, the natural leader of a band of Gnolls, and his entry is short but impressive.
The Flind in the book is standing in a static pose, but his flailheads are in motion and have black smoke trailing from them; the overall effect draws your attention to the skullheads of the flail and to the red facepaint on the Flind’s face. The image is overall pretty good, but move motion would have helped; it reminds me a lot of those concept art renders you see for computer game characters.
The Flind gets a very short flavour text for such a powerful creature, but then the Gnoll section in chapter one is doing the real lifting here. However, even with that, the Flind is still a brutally simple beast: he turns up to lead a warband, he likes eating humanoids, and he will try and grow his warband and eat everything he comes across. I already did a description of the Gnoll warband back in the
Maw Demon and Shoosuva entry, so we won’t reinvent the wheel by going over it again here.
The Flind is a tough cookie. His defenses are not that impressive, to be honest, and he won’t last forever against your group. However, he has two real tricks to draw on. The first is his
Aura of Blood Thirst, which lets creatures with the
Rampage trait within 10ft do Bite attacks as a Bonus. That is a solid boost in DPS for those creatures - especially the Maw Demon and Shoosuva which have very powerful Bite attacks - and gives you a reason to bunch the Gnolls up, which will please the Wizard in your party. Secondly, the Flind attacks with a three-headed Flail, each head having an interesting effect.
Madness inflicts something akin to the Confused condition, which will be fun if it causes your players to attack each other.
Pain does a whole load of Psychic damage, which is simple but fun.
Paralysis does what it says on the tin, and as always that condition is a horrible one to be hit with.
I really like the monster design here, with the Flind getting a good ‘leadership aura’, as well as a trio of fun and powerful attacks that don’t require a lot of effort to use - not much bookkeeping, no need to look up spell effects - but which ensure that a ‘hit things in melee’ monster actually has something more compelling than just damage output going for it. I think that this guy will definitely feel like a Boss Monster when the players meet him, even if I personally would be tempted to boost his HP by 50 to keep him in the fight a little longer.
The most powerful creature in a Gnoll storyline, with the possible exception of Yeenoghu, the Flind should be an imposing presence, and I think that his statline broadly backs that up. He’ll rip through low level characters like tissue, and his aura will make nearby members of the warband even nastier than they normally are, so I think that an early meeting with him will leave quite the impression on your party. However, he isn’t quite tough enough to suit the Boss Monster role, I think - he’ll go down too fast, like Strahd in
Curse of Strahd commonly does - so be prepared to increase his HP to avoid an anti-climatic ending to the fight.