D&D General The argentvorax and other variant monsters; what are your favorites?

[JEB]

I like pyrolisks, for some reason. Even used an update for a 5E game I ran (it was explicitly designed as an old-school dungeon crawl, so it seemed appropriate). Cryohydras and pyrohydras are also neat. And koalinths. Kopru are also arguably aquatic mind flayers...

4E wasn't my favorite edition, but did have tons and tons of fun variants, like the primordial naga or the rimefire griffon or the various basilisks and skeletons.

 

[Richards]

I like the bloodthirsty zombie variants and vicious skeleton variants from Libris Mortis.

Johnathan

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Thouls are the best! A mix of troll/hobgoblin/ghoul that comes from a typo is just great.

I also like the nosferatu from BECMI (via the Gazeteers) - a vampire that drank blood instead of level draining (and so really couldn't use its bite as an attack - IIRC the bite attack was really weak). I liked that it felt more like a traditional vampire than the ones in the rulebooks.

I think that same nosferatu vampire appeared in Ravenloft, specifically the third monstrous compendium

 

[JEB]

I think that same nosferatu vampire appeared in Ravenloft, specifically the third monstrous compendium

They're similar, and basically riffs on the same idea (a more authentic, blood-drinking vampire), but not identical. Mystara's version is more powerful, most notably (at least as it was updated in the Red Steel setting).

 

[Hexmage-EN]

4E ended up having a surprising number of fomorian variants. Off the top of my head, there was a fomorian that commanded enslaved ghosts, a fomorian portal lord that had developed teleportation magic from studying the erratic portals of a fomorian king's fortress, and a skirmisher fomorian that could change sizes between Medium and Huge.

I'm also oddly fond of a new monster from Baldur's Gate 3 called the hellsboar. It's pretty much just a reskinned boar, but it has a cool design that makes me wish there was a mini for it.

 

[Alzrius]

So, on that note, what would make good variants of the aurumvorax? My feeble guess:

• Argentvorax ("silver gorger" - known for speed)
• Ferrovorax ("iron gorger" - super tough)
• Stannumvorax ("tin gorger" - wing flaps allowing it to fly/glide)
• Cuprumvorax ("copper gorger" - unleashes a charge of lightning in its initial attacks)

My initial thoughts were more conservative, keeping it to common types of D&D coinage. I was imagining the argentvorax as basically being a lower-Hit Dice variant of the aurumvorax, the cuprumvorax as being a smaller, weaker version of the argentvorax, and the platinumvorax as being a bigger, meaner aurumvorax.