My Favorite Monster

I first used these (way back in high school) to pop up from under loose floor tiles. Just a small ambush to make the party wary. Then, in the middle of a big room with a high ceiling, the PC ogre who'd been bringing up the rear felt his helmet lift off his head. He turned around. Saw nothing. The rest of the party saw two of these things daisy-chained from the ceiling, holding his helmet, while a third clung to the ogre's back. (And shortly after, to the ogre's face).

The second time I used these (a few years later), the party was looking for lost children to rescue. They'd heard movement or indistinct voices a couple times, and a couple other times they'd opened silent wardrobes or drawers only to have these critters jump out at them. Eventually, the party got strung out down a hallway: a decoy fight at one end, an ambush through an open doorway in the middle, and two kid-sized lumps hiding in a pile of laundry at the other end. One PC defends the laundry pile; he hears voices from it. "Yeah, what is it, kid?" he asks over his shoulder. The response is indistinct, so he glances back, and it isn't kids it's two of these critters with laundry on their heads mimicking kid-sounds with their mandibles.

It worked so well these first two times that I can't resist trying again whenever enough new players cycle in. It's how the the larval tank beetles in my second Pathfinder run were supposed to play.

I think next time, I'll have the players trying to meet or find an NPC, but everybody in the NPC's location has evacuated to certain well-known mines or tunnels. The PCs come alongside a deep shaft, where a small figure in a (blood stained) cloak clings desperately to a chain hanging out of the party's reach, with a heavy metal elevator or slab or something sitting against one of the other walls, too high to be useful. If (when) a PC jumps or falls onto the free hanging chains, weights will shift; the heavy metal will rise, unsealing a tunnel and freeing the swarm of critters therein; and the cloaked figure - another of the critters - will attack the PC as their chains sink into darkness.


Shriekipedes, Centipede Mimics or Jack in the Box Bugs

Never had a good name for these critters.

For D&D5e, I think I'd start with "Giant Spider" as a template, make CON 8, HP 18, AC 15, double its damage when it attacks with surprise, ignore all the web abilities, and bump the poison save high enough to scare the party tough guy.

[Easter Edit: CON 6, HP 12, AC 17? In our homebrew they were agile and strong-shelled, but couldn't survive more than one or two typical hits. Not sure how to translate that to 5e. /Edit]

Lurking: these things are three to seven feet long, can fit through any hole a typical dog can, and tend to trap themselves in chests and cupboards; they're great at pulling lids or doors shut but crap at pushing them open again. They're more likely to chew or dig their way out through a back corner.

Face Grabbing: PCs hate having stuff latched onto their faces, so that's what these things go for. If the attack succeeds, the PC is likely blind and/or suffocating; if the attack is stopped by a helmet, there's a good chance the helmet will be pulled off; if the attack misses, the bug might latch onto a nearby wall or something by accident.

Backwards and Forwards: the head and the tail are difficult to tell apart, and they're both good at grabbing stuff. When one side latches onto something big (like a wall or a medium size creature), the other end gets advantage on strength checks. The bug can't voluntarily let go of something without making a DC 10 INT check.

Shrieking, 3x per long rest to: cast Counterspell or Dispel (with a +3 ability modifier), combo with another bug's bite attack to count as a magic weapon with the sonic damage type, add d8 Bardic Inspiration on the next bug action against a chosen target, inflict d8 Bardic Disinspiration on the target's current action... other sonic effects aren't out of the question.

I don't know what the "challenge rating" for these would be. Low, I imagine; I think I tend to fall back on them where other people would be falling back on  basic skeletons or zombies.

[Easter Edit: I forgot! Because our high school group had so many mages, these were highly resistant to magic. For 5e, I'd give them advantage on spell saves, and if they get 20 or more on the save or counterspell roll, the spell reflects back on the caster.

...their "challenge rating" might be higher than I think.

I like how jump-scare monsters can make the players paranoid. I try to prime them before the quest to consider half-heard noises nonthreatening, and by the end have them paranoid enough for friendly fire against already injured NPCs doing their best to hide from the monsters. I sometimes also try to deescalate their paranoia afterwards, but rotating GMs from week to week makes that less of a factor. /Edit]

PS: Happy, hoppy Easter Eve?

Now Playing 5e (Storm King's Thunder)

Last March my Pathfinder group wrapped up our campaign and switched over to D&D 5th Edition. I'm pretty happy with 5e. The rules are a lot less finicky than Pathfinder; there doesn't seem to be a loot treadmill, nor a skill bonus treadmill; and characters are a lot easier to create and level up.

I especially like the background tables (motives, flaws, trinkets, etc). They're enough to hang a persona on without getting too intricate. I mean, I don't normally bother with backstories, yet I made a coherent one simply by drawing arrows from one result to another.

Bonus: I didn't have to make my own character sheet! The official ones even have room to annotate with character creation notes (which is near mandatory for rogues, who're likely to get overlapping skill picks from multiple sources).

Monk: "We all chose wood elves? What a neat coincidence."
Rogue (me): "It's not surprising. Wood elves are the optimal choice."
Monk: "Damn min-maxing. Okay, I'm a gnome now."

It's been a continuing challenge to keep our "elf forest first, other kingdoms can rot" party interested in the welfare of foreign peoples.

Now that I'm thinking to make a second character, I'm less enamored with 5e's chargen. It's designed for you to pick a class and then make a small number of branching choices; doing the process in reverse - having a suite of abilities in mind and then trying to figure out which class fits it best - means leafing through just as many feats and features as I had to in Pathfinder.


Storm King's Thunder is a weird module

Our PCs start as level one nobodies, with a who's who of Faerûn factions falling over themselves to help us on our way; we never stay in one place long enough for the party's personalities or backstories to matter; and we don't get a real reason to be on the quest until halfway in.

The set-piece encounters have been fun, but rarely require real effort; last week's session was the first time in almost a year and eight levels that I've taken damage. Granted, my character type isn't generally in the line of fire; and granted, we may be rushing the plot a bit. (We only play two hours a week on a weekday after work, and the GM only reads one session ahead.) But still: I think the module has been pulling punches. Is that fair for an introductory module to do? I don't know; I'd hope it has guidelines about weaving the plot into an existing campaign, modulating encounter difficulty, and - for groups who are starting at first level - hooking the PCs better, earlier. Haven't read the book to see.

More odd things:

• We keep getting loot, but nary a way (nor need) to spend it. So, now that we've cleaned out the fire lord's fortune, the GM just told us to shop magic items out of the GM's manual. Ironically, this is one of the things we wanted to leave behind with Pathfinder. 
• Apparently, some of the maps don't have scales marked. 
• Our group has trouble communicating the geography/architecture of a space; the vertical layout of the fire lord's forge has been a particular source of confusion. 
• Shouldn't there be multiple adventuring parties from each of our multifarious patrons, pursuing the same goals we are? Why haven't we run into any? There are some temporary PCs early in the book; it could be fun to run across them again near the end.

Final Rat Quest

As the last GM in our Evil Rat cycle, I tried to tie as many plot lines together as possible. The best part was telling the players "Yeah? It gets worse" every time they recognized something and groaned.

Set Up: giant, oompa-loomp-like rabbits stole a magic water gem from an army of fish people and a magic air gem from somebody else, and have used these gems to secretly fly their 400-ft stone tower into foreign lands. They're enchanting the wellwater in towns near Rosebush to turn the townsfolk into giant vegetables for their larder. Nobody on the ground knows what's going on. The fish people have sent scouts to recover the water gem, but they don't know what's going on either, and mistake one group of furry mammal-people for the other.

Villages are empty, which makes a red herring of the psi-rat from last quest, while the weird unknown monsters and magically giant vegetables suggest treachery from Nim. I had stuff ready for anywhere the players could choose to go, progressing from garbled rumors to physical evidence to direct encounters.

How It Played: the PCs' political rival took off for the monastery the psion was in, so the PCs teleported there ahead of him. Which is fine, I expected that. Then one of the players began talking with the NPCs there as though he had existing backstory with them--he was improvising, but since I didn't know how much was improv and how much was pre-established, I was off-balance. Something I need to get better at.

This being our last quest with these characters and campaign area, I probably should've asked up front if anybody had loose ends they wanted to tie up. Nicodemus, for instance, was arranging with the monks to have his rival assassinated.

I don't think the players felt lost like they did in my city quest, but it's hard to tell. They leaned pretty heavily on Survival (tracking) rolls and I'm not sure if they considered any other way forward.

The 'boss fight' was good and bad. Bad, in that I again underestimated the PCs capabilities; it was trivially easy to stealth around picking the mob of rabbits off one by one, which means the rabbits never summoned the psychedelic dragons which would've been the real boss fight. Good, in that other members of the party were also bypassing the boss fight with fast talk and sabotage.

I knew the quest would most likely end with the PCs sabotaging the tower--they stranded it in the Elemental Plane of Air, and it can't do planar hops on its own--which I ran by the seat of my pants and it played fine. It very much felt seat-of-the-pants to me, though, and I wish I'd worked the mechanisms out more firmly ahead of time.

Rat Quest #4: Psionic Magnet

This was essentially a test of whether we'd ambush a potential threat before trying to parley with it. Short, just two sessions, run by Osbald (the hairless fighter)'s player.


The Prelude

It's about a month after our last quest, and for the last few weeks, Ratfolk have been vanishing from Rosebush and the surrounding villages. Ch'Dar (dragoon raider) and Barnabosa (my sorcerer) discover this on their own, Nichodemus (wizardly patriarch) is recruited by Rosebush's baffled sheriff, and the three of us eventually rope in Skrac (the plague alchemist). All four PCs resist an unidentified psionic effect during the night.

We figure out that nobody in Rosebush knows anything, except (if I recall correctly) one NPC saw one of the missing rats sleepwalking the night they disappeared. I think Nichodemus scries the surrounding villages to see which ones are empty; from that survey, we decide the disappearances are moving in a generally northern direction, but we don't detect an epicenter or (again, if I remember correctly) a particular path.

The only way forward is to wait for a sleepwalker and follow them. Which we do. Casting "Read Mind" yields only white noise and a slow mantra; spoken questions get simple, flavorful-but-unhelpful answers. I may have spent longer trying to wring useful info out of this guy than the rest of the party cared for.

Not sure how I feel about the prelude.

The DM warned us it would be a short/simple quest, so I shouldn't be disappointed that there was only one path leading to the main encounter, or that there was so little to be achieved on that path; I guess it just feels like we spent too much time spinning our wheels. Probably doesn't help that the PCs spent much of the first session operating separately.


The Encounter

The sleepwalker's path leads to a bonfire surrounded by a few score ratfolk, most of them on the cusp of adventuring age. Our party watches stealthily, invisible or flying as our individual talents permit, from beyond the reach of the firelight, as the much older sleepwalker has a joyful reunion with a young child near the edge of the camp.

We determine that the most magical person is near the fire, flanked by two guards similar skill to ourselves. Nichodemus, pretending to be a sleepwalker himself, approaches the sleepwalker and his kid to question them about this camp and the person running it. I forget how we start talking to the Psion--maybe Nichodemus casts dispell on the sleepwalker and his kid, persuading them to leave. I think the Psion interrupts here telepathically, to ask why we're bothering his people, at which point Barnabosa flies into the middle of camp to speak with him directly, and the other PCs join. (Nichodemus' player tries to inject tension back in by traveling spectacularly--but needlessly--in the form of a whirlwind.)

Turns out the Psion is subconsciously overpowering these people's individual wills, but doesn't know it. He thought they all just really liked the idea of following him into the wilderness to found a new civilization. Him and Nichodemus take turns expositing about how Psions like him were used long ago in the wars between Rosebush and Nimh, and how Rosebush hunted them to extinction. This Psion was apparently in the bunch of refugees we rescued last quest, and whatever suppressant Nimh had been using on him took a while to wear off.

Psion: "I hear the 'good' king was killed. Where do you stand on that?"
Barnabosa wordlessly points to the crown on his head, a prize from said king's corpse.

I don't know if the other players keep forgetting that Barnabosa wears the dead king's crown, or if they only pretend to forget; if the latter, then good on them. It's a fun moment to have every few sessions.

Psion: "Part of me wants to go back to Nimh and make them pay for what they did. But I know that would be wrong."
Skrac: "How were you planning to do it? I was going to use a plague."
Barnabosa: "Here's my card; call on us anytime."

I think the DM forgot our party is mostly chaotic or evil. Nichodemus, who I think is neither, suggested that instead of razing Nimh, the Psion go to a monastery in the northern mountains to learn to control his power.

This encounter was pretty fun. Clear dilemma in needing to approach the Psion, but not knowing what will be interpreted as an attack; and when we did get talking to NPCs, getting their cooperation wasn't--at least at first--straightforward.

Third Rat Quest: 'Friendly' Trials in Nimh

TL;DR? Don't procrastinate on evacuations, and make sure to charm the budding villains before they turn on you. Also, as DM, there will come a time when you fail to anticipate the consequences of an NPC's actions.

This quest was DM'd by the guy who plays Teddy and Ch'Dar (and who DM'd the Xanadu quests). He started with an interesting setup: after we killed Nimh's evil king and the key necromancers supporting him, de facto control of that city apparently fell to a coalition of wealthy merchants, one of whom formed a "Commission for the Establishment of Peaceful Relations with Rosebush." That Commission invited a delegation from Rosebush to receive a goodwill gift at a festival in Nimh. News from Nimh is scant (the road from Rosebush to Nimh is neither quick nor safe), so we can't really trust that this invitation is on the up-and-up.

[Now that the jump-breaks work again...]

Second Rat Quest: Mickey Rat's Magical Kingdom

TL;DR? We go to Disney Land, and decide killing Micky Mouse and The Beast is too much trouble. Edit: Or maybe our memories were edited. /Edit

We began in media res with each character having separately pursued petty villains into situations resembling logic puzzles. This was DM'd by Skrac's (the plague alchemist's) player, the same guy who gave us riddles last time.

• Ch'Dar the Dragoon (replacement for Teddy the Bard) was dancing at a village festival when something happened with his pack being stolen and a damsel was calling for help. He ended up trapped in a cell with a cylinder bubbling with amnesiac gas (which made him forget everything whenever he got too close), a candle, an amnesiac damsel, and a straw bed. 
• Osbald the Hairless Fighter had to fill the missing number in the series 16, 06, 68, 88, __, 98. I forget why. He might've been in a crypt with a lock.
• Barnabosa (my sorceror) had his sword stolen, and tracked the thief to a stretch of river with three towns. I could ask the river god a number of yes/no questions to determine which town the thief was in, but one of my NPC companions had comically wasted the questions until I had only one left. 
• Nichodemus, Wizardly Patriarch of the ratfolk, was petitioned by some lesser magic using rat for help in stopping an evil summoning. The summoning requires 5 rows of 4 posts, the evil summoner is creating the posts at a predictable rate, and the ritual can only be sabotaged as the final post is created.

Solutions (and rest of the quest) below the cut.

Pathfinder Transcript: First Rat Quest

[One of the players in our group had been keeping brief transcripts of our sessions. He gave up on it partway into this quest so he could focus more on playing.]

This is the quest I described here, the first in our evil rat cycle.

I was wrong - the other players didn't change characters after this quest, they just made their existing character less evil. (This DM had asked us to make sure our characters weren't so evil or chaotic that he couldn't hook us into the quest by having us repay an important debt.)

• My sorcerer was lawful evil, and stayed so. 
• I think the hairless fighter is within one step of chaotic evil.
• The alchemist was going to be literal-plague-upon-the-land double evil, but he toned it down to regular evil.
• The bard might be chaotic neutral. Doesn't really matter, because he kept accidentally flirting with every single NPC he interacted with, so he decided to roll with it. He did end up changing characters.
• I don't remember the alignment of the samurai who joined us later; the player changed shifts at work and hasn't joined us again.

The DM pulled out some dungeon tileboards for the warehouse fight and followup explorations. It felt like we didn't need them, but I guess I'd have said the same about the prison fight if we'd had them for that too. They had an extra couple bits of greebly terrain (half flight of stairs, gazebo, and so on) that I don't normally think to add, which was nice.

Pathfinder Transcript: Corpses Are Loot & So Are Their Makers

[One of the players in our group has started keeping brief transcripts of our sessions, partly for the amusement of a third party who isn't playing with us I guess, and partly to help us pick up the following session in medias res.]

TL;DR-  We indulge some backstory for the GM's PC (who is present in an ancillary role) by investigating a light house which has gone dark.

The set-piece battle was interesting: steep waves would frequently lift one ship high above the other, periodically taking them out of sight and reach of each other; and the reanimated pirates all shared a common pool of hit points.

The lighthouse itself was going to be a second set-piece battle, but we confused the NPC villain (or maybe the GM?) by splitting up and entering simultaneously through both the top and bottom of the tower. Also, instead of killing the villain, we recruited him.

Pathfinder Transcript: "Don't Poke the Bear"

[One of the players in our group has started keeping brief transcripts of our sessions, partly for the amusement of a third party who isn't playing with us I guess, and partly to help us pick up the following session in medias res.

The next quest was run by the player who'd been controlling Snake (Ninja). It picks up his Xanadu meta-plot (basically, "go kill the seven mystical god-beasts") six months after our previous adventure there.]

TL;DR-  A temple's sacred gem has been swapped with a fake, and we're asked to investigate.

The first session was a mess. We wanted to examine the fake, but where I wanted a friendly NPC we know to get it for us quietly and legally, other PCs wanted to steal it (one of the island's most sacred objects, guarded by our allies in a TEMPLE DEVOTED TO WRATH). The discussion wasn't going anywhere, and I thought my plan was best, so I just walked out and set about finding the NPC. The other PCs, who also thought their own plans were best, took this as a sign to leap into action. So that all went south. And then, the friendly NPC (who should have been willing and able to fill us in on a few things) kept trying to abandon us.

I'm pretty sure this NPC isn't secretly trying to undermine us- I think he might have been trying to subtly/cryptically hint at our next step, buuuuut I don't think the DM realized we were missing some basic information about the situation and our mission; he mentioned afterwards that he never anticipated that we might consider the gem itself a potential lead.

When the Warg fight broke out in session three, I told a few PCs to guard the wagon & hapless NPC, because of course, right? Unfortunately, that meant they missed almost all of the fight - a substantial chunk of playtime - although the DM did have some Wargs circle around and eventually reach them.

The final encounter, with Acedia the Bear God, was kind of neat- the bear was essentially too lazy to fight, the negotiations we were using to draw the bear into ambush went so well that we canceled the ambush, and when a mind-controlled bandit tried to provoke the bear into attacking us (itself a neat twist) one of the PCs stayed the bear's wrath through sheer honorableness.

Pathfinder Transcript: mountains and dragons can't kill us, only drow clerics can kill us

[One of the players in our group has started keeping brief transcripts of our sessions, partly for the amusement of a third party who isn't playing with us I guess, and partly to help us pick up the following session in medias res. 

The next quest was run by the player who'd been controlling Camlost (Bloodrager / Dragon Disciple). It continues a broad metaplot of politicking between two dwarf cities, with spoiling actions from a drow city.

TL;DR- we were hired to recover a magic box which had been stolen a week ago from dwarves somewhere on secret mountain roads several days to the north. I think we surprised the GM by:

• Choosing to Magic Steed a direct route through the mountains instead of an easier route through the plains; we might've missed an important encounter by doing this. 
• Demolishing a Frost Worm so quickly; the party was strung out due to terrain, so it was able to ambush a single (I think random) character in isolation. I liked the set up. If it had gotten one of the spellcasters instead of a melee type, things might've ended differently.
• Driving a White Dragon from its lair and teleporting away with its loot; this was accomplished almost entirely by the wizards player. This showed how powerful his character build is relative to the rest of us, but also exposed weaknesses.
• Being essentially immune to falling off a mountain; we're getting into higher levels, where there's a bunch of magic and special abilities which negate most normal threats. It makes adventure design a little more difficult. 
• Attempting a non-violent resolution to being ambushed by trolls; unfortunately, we had no leverage or clever tricks, so we fell back on violence.
• Being bad at finding things; probably related to the first bullet point. He might also have expected us to have different skills or spells, or to leverage what we did have differently, or to hire an NPC tracker. 
• Almost TPK'ing in the boss fight; our characters are all pretty capable individually, but our squad tactics are nonexistent. I suspect we survived mainly because the boss decided to leave instead of finishing us off.

Deciding where to go and how to find the magic box occupied most of our play. The GM did a fair job of making the combats interesting and not letting them drag on.

Pathfinder Transcript: Pirates

[One of the players in our group has started keeping brief transcripts of our sessions, partly for the amusement of a third party who isn't playing with us I guess, and partly to help us pick up the following session in medias res. 

I've updated this post to include the other two transcripts from that quest, and the death of my metaplot.

The next quest was run by the player who'd been controlling the wizards Cal and Darmos.

Pathfinder: player transcript of my quest

[One of the players in our group has started keeping brief transcripts of our sessions, partly for the amusement of a third party who isn't playing with us I guess, and partly to help us pick up the following session in medias res. 

Edit, July 21: I've updated this post with two more transcripts to finish out the quest.

The first transcript picks up a session or two into my previous post.]

Pathfinder Run #4: The Rat King

I no longer prepare NPC stats. I just key everything off class and level.

• Level*1.5 for good attacks and primary skill
• Level*1.0 for medium attacks and good saves
• Level*0.5 for weak attacks, bad saves, minor skills and initiative

For weaklings/mobs/mooks I don't even determine hit points until a player strikes them. No point tracking it if they'll be killed in one blow. For level-appropriate foes, I assign AC based on caprice, player stats, and how long I want the fight to last; and since I tend to retreat NPCs when the tide turns against them, I counted HP upwards from zero (ie, damage taken instead of health remaining) to save the trouble of working out exact HP and reduction effects.

I should select some interesting spells to use in each encounter, but I don't because reading an encyclopedia of spells is my least favorite part of anything.

Pathfinder Run #3: A Tale of Two Islands

The threat of invasion from an undersea army has loomed over our campaign since before I joined the group. However, as sometimes happens, the person who was running that plotline has gone on indefinite leave, and we haven't decided whether to wait or to have another DM take it over. (It's been long enough that we've averted a second unrelated war in the meantime.)

I ran my third scenario in December. Its main elements were a long-missing sorcerer, a maze, a warren of giant communist rabbits, and a phantasmagoric chameleon-dragon.

Pathfinder Run #2: Amazon Runaway

My second scenario has long since come and gone. The main elements were a merchant, an unlucky town, some Amazon bandits, and an Amazon runaway; the main clues were a matching set of jewelry and a regionally popular bard duo.

probably inspired by this  (found via Zak)

The Amazons:

• could deflect arrows and magic rays using their bracers 
• had all been kidnapped and brainwashed as children
• rode three apiece (one hidden) on tank-sized rhinoceros beetles
• had spears which drained constitution, spells & spell slots

Pathfinder Run #1: Space Loop

Our primary Pathfinder GM currently misses most sessions, so we've been rotating that duty for a while. The last adventure I ran started with the party trying to leave a small adventurer's/crossroads town, only to discover the town was trapped in a space loop. High skill rolls revealed that the space loop was centered on the town alchemist shop and had been initiated by some sort of blood rite.

Quest below the cut.