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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Exen Trik" data-source="post: 3866793" data-attributes="member: 34942">I can think of many... but for the most part, they need to be created or at least highly reinterpreted for the role. Anything particularly large or able to somehow blur the line between battlefield and beast can make a good encounter monster. But in in history, mythology and even classical fiction there aren't many things like that besides the aquatic monsters: giant squids, sea serpents, hydras and whales (I'm looking at you, Moby Dick!). It's not like the Terrasque is a typical size of beast you'd find in those pages, and even creatures such as dragons don't make a habit of, say, landing on a castle and shaking it down. (Hmm...)Anyways, here's a brainstorm of a few different kind of encounter monsters, by theme:Monsters:There's a creature that is really, really, really big, and it has eaten you. Yes, this is basically Monstro from Pinocchio, but he isn't prone to coughing up it's food from a bit of smoke: the only way out is brute force. And it has a very good immune system.Enchantments: Lot's of ways to go with this, here's some fun ones: A castle built with the functionality of a golem, with a great treasure and a stone metal heart held deep within it's deadly walls; a summoning gone awry, having fused an angry and powerful elemental to a dimensional gate, that now is calling forth creatures and imbuing the energy of the Tempest itself into the surrounding area; an arcane spell of ice that somehow became enduring, sentient, enormous, and now animates all it holds within it's icy grasp: only melting every square inch of its effect will stop it.Nature: Rather than facing off against a number of Treants or other plantlike creatures, what if the forest itself were animated, sentient, and hostile? Not just the trees, but also the shrubs, grass, leaves, and the mulch on the ground, with a cursed grove in center of the forest that must be found and destroyed. Or imagine a single living plant having been animated in the matter of a Treant, but it's size is on the scale of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_%28tree%29" target="_blank">Pando</a>. Undead: A powerful sentient necromantic artifact is damaged in the battlefield of a recent long and bloody war, and it's subsequent release of power it not only reanimates every slain soldier, but does so as a single interconnected vile creature, with the bloody ground as its body, and the thousand corpses as it's weapons and armor defending it's artifact heart.In summary: Encounter monsters can be things that are simply huge, things that control the terrain, things that are the terrain, and things that are fusions of so many other things it may as well be terrain. -PS: KM, check your mail</blockquote>

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