D&D 5E Let's Read: Volo's Monsters

[Leatherhead]

It's worth noting that Neolithids are gargantuan sized, which is the biggest size category in 5e (not like that will stop me from using my Colossal Red Dragon mini any time soon), and CR 13, meaning it's has the second lowest CR out of all of them, only low-balled by the Roc (which isn't anywhere near as interesting). The Low CR and lack of interesting competition, means that the Neolithid may very well be the first, if not only, Gargantuan sized monster your group ever gets to fight. Which is kind of special, even if they did lower the CR from previous editions to make that happen.

As for an alternate use, I'm going to go a bit transmedia for this, so it may be too nerdy, even for some D&D playing people.

If you have played the D&D Starter set, and done the Lost Mines of Phandelver introduction adventure, you may have noticed a location called Icespire Peak on the region map. This location isn't detailed anywhere other than the Neverwinter MMO, so it is likely a shout out to them. But that's not the important part. The important part is a Frost Giant named Lakkar, who absorbed the power from an Artifact called the Winterforge (A portal to the icy bit of the elemental Chaos), grew to Colossal size, and started laying the smack down on everyone. His ego, or perhaps insanity, grew along with the rest of him, causing him to declare his godhood. Angering his patron Thrym (see chapter one of Volos for a bit more info on him) in the process. Thrym then lent his aid to the Icehammer Dwarves (of all peoples) in order to defeat Lakkar, and froze his body into the Icespire.

If you have ever played the MMO, and I have, it's quite an impressive sight to behold. First your travel up his axe, which serves as a bridge, then you see his frozen corpse which is bigger than most of the buildings you have seen up until that point. You can probably find a video of it on youtube if you care to look.

So why am I yammering on about Frost Giants, when we talked about them weeks ago?

Well it's simple, I propose two interesting ideas that can be combined into a higher level plot. Firstly, Lakkar isn't dead, he is just frozen. Secondly, Neolithids can potentially undergo Ceremorphosis, but they haven't found a suitable body to do so with, due to their size. I am sure you can see where this is going, another Illithid experiment, just with larger stakes and an even more terrifying outcome. Something I would like to call the Omegalithid. A being with immense strength, size, tentacles, and a direct connection to the elemental plane of ice that would surely have the potential to extinguish the sun. A fitting end to your mind flayer themed campaign if you don't want to go the Alhoon route.

 

[Charles Rampant]

It's worth noting that Neolithids are gargantuan sized

I meant to mention that, but forgot. Oops!

If you have ever played the MMO, and I have, it's quite an impressive sight to behold. First your travel up his axe, which serves as a bridge, then you see his frozen corpse which is bigger than most of the buildings you have seen up until that point. You can probably find a video of it on youtube if you care to look.

I really liked the terrain in that area, and it was one of the few areas where I finished the quests just when I was getting bored of the area anyway. Riding up that axe was probably the highlight of the game for me. I wonder how you could stat up such a bad guy for 5e?

Anyway, very interesting idea to combine the Neothelids with a non-Mind Flayer race. I think that you could plausibly use the combination of a Storm Giant and a Neothelid to make Cthulhu arrive. You could even have the Mind Flayers trying to bring it about through through some kind of spore that they place on the Giant and which summons all the Neothelids from hundreds of miles around. Could make for a super intense fight, like Tremors with dozens of horrific and huge worms attacking, while the players try to hold them off. I'm away from my book now, so I cannot remember if the Neothelid can burrow or swim, but either way I can see this being a very impressive high-level fight.

 

[DeBasilisk42]

An Illithilich returns to the colony which expelled him decades past and slays the Elder Brain and its minions. The ruins of the colony become the Lichs new lair, inhabited by wights and vampires created from the remains of the Mind flayers, (and maybe a zombie beholder or two) under the control of the Illithilich.

But it's real prize is the Undead Neothelid cultivated from the remnants of the Elder Brains pool...

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well it's simple, I propose two interesting ideas that can be combined into a higher level plot. Firstly, Lakkar isn't dead, he is just frozen. Secondly, Neolithids can potentially undergo Ceremorphosis, but they haven't found a suitable body to do so with, due to their size. I am sure you can see where this is going, another Illithid experiment, just with larger stakes and an even more terrifying outcome. Something I would like to call the Omegalithid. A being with immense strength, size, tentacles, and a direct connection to the elemental plane of ice that would surely have the potential to extinguish the sun. A fitting end to your mind flayer themed campaign if you don't want to go the Alhoon route.

You are an evil, evil man and I love you for it.

Anyway, very interesting idea to combine the Neothelids with a non-Mind Flayer race. I think that you could plausibly use the combination of a Storm Giant and a Neothelid to make Cthulhu arrive. You could even have the Mind Flayers trying to bring it about through through some kind of spore that they place on the Giant and which summons all the Neothelids from hundreds of miles around. Could make for a super intense fight, like Tremors with dozens of horrific and huge worms attacking, while the players try to hold them off. I'm away from my book now, so I cannot remember if the Neothelid can burrow or swim, but either way I can see this being a very impressive high-level fight.

You as well.



Honestly, my currently planned use for them is much less impressive and a little campaign specific. My players are currently hunting a mad wizard, with thousands of years of horrific research on various types of biology, clockwork magic, and creating soul-infused artificial beings. Lots of body horror and other such things on the horizon.

His current magnum opus is a creature utilizing the massive, semi-sentient slime that the city has been using for a garbage and body disposal for centuries. He's taken a portion of this mass, and has been experimenting on it for a long time.

It's going to be a massive boss, with multiple "layers" they deal enough damage, the next layer is revealed. I'm thinking something humanoid, into the Neolithid (yes it will be much larger than the thing it bursts out of, because that makes me happy) and possibly into one final form after that. I'm hoping the party feels it a sufficiently epic way to end out the year.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

Going back to the morkoth, I love this monster in 5E. In fact, it inspired me to write up a reimagined Isle of Dread under the control of a morkoth. The players wreck on the island at 1st level and must become powerful enough to defeat the morkoth in order to escape in a treasure-filled galleon that is part of the morkoth's collection.

 

[Zilong]

Well it's simple, I propose two interesting ideas that can be combined into a higher level plot. Firstly, Lakkar isn't dead, he is just frozen. Secondly, Neolithids can potentially undergo Ceremorphosis, but they haven't found a suitable body to do so with, due to their size. I am sure you can see where this is going, another Illithid experiment, just with larger stakes and an even more terrifying outcome. Something I would like to call the Omegalithid. A being with immense strength, size, tentacles, and a direct connection to the elemental plane of ice that would surely have the potential to extinguish the sun. A fitting end to your mind flayer themed campaign if you don't want to go the Alhoon route.

Omegathilid: AKA how Cthulhu was born into the material world. Let his reign be every glorious and impossible to understand!

 

[Leatherhead]

Riding up that axe was probably the highlight of the game for me. I wonder how you could stat up such a bad guy for 5e?

Well you start with a Legendary CR26+ Gargantuan Siege Monster, make an ability that says it counts as being larger than Gargantuan for any ability that takes size into consideration, give it some mind-flayer powers and tentacle attacks, some kind of trample ability, and in this case some add in some Ice elemental powers one to blot out the sun and probably an aura of Brain-freeze or something like that.

The real trick is figuring out how the mechanics of fighting a creature that is bigger than most towns are. Stabbing it in the toe till it dies is hardly going to be immersive. Though making a separate stat block for every limb might work, that way you could disable the legs, and somehow manage to crawl up the torso, getting rid of the arms and tentacles, to finally assault the thing's brain and kill it.

Or you could just pull out a deus ex machina, that's how they offed him in the first place.

 

[Charles Rampant]

​
Goblins are one of my favourite low-level monsters. I'm just a big fan of the mixture of madcap humour and desperate savagery that they provide. I also play Orks in Warhammer 40,000, so I've got a secret desire for the greenskins to beat my players! Well, we're about to hit a rich seam of Orcish goodness, but first we have the Nilbog to cover, a fairly famous and daft creature.

Mad, prancing, and carrying perhaps the greatest looking staff in the whole game, the art in Volo's is easy to like. It raises some interesting questions - like where the hell did the Goblins find pink wool? - and is so intensely characterful that it cheers me up just looking at it. I think that your players will be extremely taken with this guy upon being shown this picture, right up until the moment at which you explain their rules...

The Nilbog is very interesting to me for one reason in particular: the way that it helps illuminate the race relations between the Goblins, Bugbears, and Hobgoblins. We can imagine such things as Iron Shadows performing low-level eugenics on the leaders of the Goblin tribes, or Bugbear rebellions, but the Nilbog gives us a concrete description of how the Hobgoblins maintain their control over their smaller cousins. The Hobgoblins - whose God shattered the unnamed Trickster God of the Goblins into pieces, causing the spirit of Nilbogism to enter Goblins - have learned to deal with the Nilbog by granting one Goblin in the warhost the position of Jester. I wonder how they ensure that the Nilbog becomes the Jester - presumably just watching for spellcasting and chaos in the ranks - but it is a sweet gig for any Goblin who gets it, Nilbog or not. Between this and the Iron Shadow stuff, we can almost imagine the interior of the command tent for the host, and it is an interestingly varied place.

Becoming a Nilbog would seem like nightmare fuel - your mind and body become a plaything for a mad trickster spirit that will happily get you killed for a laugh - but apparently the Goblins love it. As well they might, for it strikes fear into the hearts of their Bugbear and Hobgoblin cousins, and causing chaos is presumably always welcomed by the Goblins. It could be an interesting story hook for a Goblinoid player group: being deputised by the Host’s Warlord to follow the Nilbog around and do whatever it wants, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with the siege of a Dwarven city that the Host is currently engaged in. Cue lots of strange and “hilarious” adventures. Man, that sounds like a lot of fun, actually!

I have heard that Nilbogs are totally terrifying for a party of level 1 characters to face, and I can believe it. They do limited damage - Vicious Mockery or a 1d6+2 club is about as good as it gets - but they do have the benefit of being amazingly hard to hurt, with a Reversal of Fortune ability that lets them heal when taking damage. I believe that Nilbogs used to require you to use healing spells to kill them, but the game has dropped that idea (just like the Positive/Negative thing on Cure/Harm spells for the Cleric and Undead), so instead they can only do Reversal of Fortune once a turn, and cannot gain health any other way. In other words, these guys will be an unholy terror for a group that can only land one solid blow a turn, and with most characters having +4 or +5 to hit AC of 13, at level one or so that might be a very tall order. But with 7 hit points, a group that gets two solid hits - or has a spare Magic Missile - is going to find this guy relatively easy to kill. Or, at least, its host; for then it can try to possess another Goblin, with a sidebar explaining how to handle that. One amusing way to boost the difficulty of a Goblin Cave dungeon is to have a Nilbog encounter the players at the start, and then spend the rest of the dungeon harassing them in various forms, mocking and cackling the whole time. Usefully, the sidebar also explains which traits the new host gets, so you can sling this onto a Goblin Chieftain for a more formidable version. That would probably be the most powerful Goblin that your players will encounter, unless you make use of the suggested alterations to the Mage statblock to create the Booyagh Booyagh Booyagh from Chapter one.

I like Goblins. They’re great. The Nilbog is also great, and likely to be entirely enraging for your players, good for adding a recurring annoyance to any Goblinoid dungeon. In addition, it gives us a welcome comic relief element for a Goblinoid storyline, either for evil PCs or whenever your party meets and negotiates with a Host. Overall, this guy gets a solid thumbs up from me.

 

[Leatherhead]

I'm totally going to strip the Nilbogism power set, append it to a normal ghost, and have it haunt the clowns of my Carnival. Combined with an obvious tell for possession (white skin and a giant red nose should do the trick), it should create something more horrifying than comedic. But hey, dark humor is a thing too, and I am mostly sure that my group doesn't have Coulrophobia.

However, between the Barghest and the Nilbog, you honestly have to wonder why Hobgoblins even bother with having a host of Goblins, it seems like a liability even with the best case scenario. And because there won't be many other opportunities, if any, left to do so, I suppose now is a good time to mention a few things about the gobliniods:

Firstly, they have Monsterous PC race write ups in chapter two, all three of them. Some of them are better than others (Goblins quite possibly make the best PC monster race. Bugbears have some interesting synergies due to being long-limbed and having extra damage on an ambush. But hobgoblins are comparatively boring, and get a lackluster racial accuracy power instead of that sweet bonus damage that NPCs get), but there is more than enough there to run a goblinoid campaign if you should wish to do so.

And secondly, goblins are really the wildcards of a host. Bugbears serve sometimes as assassin/snipers but mostly as Shock Troops specializing in a really big weapon. Hobgoblins have quite a bit of contrast, with a full warrior cast including cavalry and warlords, priests, war-wizards, and assassin/spy monks, which cover all of the basic adventuring occupations. But Goblins have warriors, mind-controlling leaders, wolf-riding hunters, wild mage sorcerers with the chaos turned up to 11, warlocks (fay fiend and undying preferred), wizards, nilbogs, barghests, and even an unit devoted to using any bizarre magical item it managed to get it's little paws on. So I can see why some would consider them a favorite.





But I still like kobolds better.

 

[Bitbrain]

Yeah, the Nilbog is fun, and the NPC possibilities are almost endless.

One idea for the Nilbog would be to use it in a low-level murder mystery adventure.
Think something along the lines of a comic book storyline featuring the Batman Family versus the Joker, with the Nilbog being a stand-in for the Clown Prince of Crime.