Isaac Minarik

Nereids

Nereids are the saltwater nymphs. If they like you they'll put racing stripes on your boat, but if they don't they'll be sinking that boat thank you very much. Make sure they like you before getting in a boat.

Naiads

Naiads are the freshwater versions of nymphs. They're often going to be polymorphed because of mythological reasons and might appreciate a hand with that situation, but if you kill them they'll turn your blood clear as vengeance.

Nymphs

There's a lot of infinitesimally different sort of nymphs out there, but in the grand tradition of D&D they all get their own stat block, and the supertype of nymph gets its own stat block too. I don't love the trope of the sexy woman monster, but I tried to do something evocative and unique with this that didn't involve the DM saying "Well you failed your Wisdom save, so now you want to ha...

Pirates 3

It's not a crew without a captain, and it won't be a crew long without a bossun. The captain is the tip of the spear in your swashbuckling advance, but the bossun is the one who keeps everyone moving in the right direction.

Pirates 2

More pirates! We've got a musiker that keeps the rhythm of the fight up, sending actions where they're needed, and a gunner who seesaws back between prepping everybody and firing off an all-hands volley.

Pirates!

We've got pirates! And the fun tumbling swashbuckling kind, not the real slave-trading murderers. 

Zmey

The zmey is a dragon out of Russian folktales with several heads and seven tails, often called Zmey Gorynych (Dragon, the Son of The Mountain). It does all your classic princess kidnapping, livestock eating, and general burnination of the peasantry, but is pretty consistently talkative with its prospective victims. 

Also, somewhat oddly, it has a weakness to Greek hats, which I just ...

Allip and Whisper Demon

Allips and Whisper Demons are an artifact of an era of D&D where suicide monsters seemed cool and edgy. That said, it's a recurring motif through a lot of mythologies, and they definitely have a place in plenty of fantasy worlds. Make sure you know your players and what they're cool with before throwing these at them, though.

Houserules and Homebrew Spells

Here's a doc with the houserules and homebrew spells (mostly adapted from 3.5e and PF2e) I use. I didn't really make it for public consumption so it's fairly unpolished, but I think it's probably still good enough that some of y'all might find value in it for your own games.

Demiliches

The Demilich is a weird monster. It seems to want to be a goofy mindless trap monster and an epic boss all at once. I couldn't really reconcile those two things, so I made a goofy mindless trap version, and a version that became a demilich on purpose and maintained its threat level.

Cultists of the Tyrant

These guys are primarily flavored as devil worshippers, but they work just fine as cultists of some theocratic head of state, or just an aspiring world conquerer. Really anyone that plans on slinging fireballs would like to have a few of these fellas in their corner.

Cultists of the Depths

Cultists are usually present in encounters as cannon fodder, so they need both a reason for you to attack them and a way to contribute to the fight in death. While the cultists are alive, they're going to work together to try to drown you, sinking you deeper and deeper underwater. If you kill one of the fanatics, though, you'll float your ass right out of the fight unless you take a big lung of...

Gau Ding and Cultists of Night

I expanded the cultist of night into two variants as a first step in expanding cultist. Nothing too exciting there. The real juice today is in the Gau Ding, though.

The Gau Ding (Cauldron Dog), is a giant cauldron with three doggish faces that runs around hell boiling people into soup that were mean to dogs. It is the goodest of boys, despite what its alignment might suggest.

2022-04-09 18:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Assassins

The sica is sort of halfway between a dagger and a shortsword, a blade specifically designed to hook around and stab someone hiding behind a shield. The first recorded organized group of assassins were the Sicarii, who were named after the sica they used when killing politicians mid-speech.

Anyways, on to mechanics. The assassin is good at killing exactly one person, making sure they stay...

Copper Dragons 2

Here's the rest of the copper dragons, up through great wyrm. A copper dragon fight is really your opportunity to inflict every terrible pun you can think of on your players, and now you've got a mechanical way to force them to laugh.

Copper Dragons 1

Copper dragons are that guy that talks over you, laughs at his own jokes, then repeats the joke louder because you didn't laugh the first time. So me, in short. They're also a dragon, though, so it might just be a good idea to laugh.

Bebilith and Retriever

The Bebilith is the apex predator of the abyss. It's not the beefiest boy down there, but it's among the nastiest. There's not a single creature in the abyss that is eager to tangle with a bebilith, and that's largely due to it's Final Curse, which makes a creature that kills the bebilith immune to any magic that would resurrect it. Not a lot of demons out there that have Remove Curse prepared,...

Barghest and Eye of the Deep

The Barghest is an even goofier thing than the gulvoorg to mount your goblins on, being a demonic weregoblin itself (notably, its true form is the worg form).  It's other distinctive trait is that it's gotta be real careful of fire because it treats any areas of fire as a one-way ticket to its home plane of gehenna.

The Eye of the Deep is a low CR aquatic beholder variant that's got ...

Worgs

And now we come to worgs, which are definitely legally distinct from wargs. Worgs are smart, but they're also sort of goblins, so they use that intelligence primarily to argue with eachother over who gets to eat the party once they catch them. We got a dire worg here too, because sometimes you just need a bigger worg.

When you really need something buckwild, though, you can't do much bett...

Boggles pt. 2

I said we weren't done with boggles and we're not.

The Chase Trickster ties your shoelaces together, than tricks you into running after it, taking attacks of opportunity from its allies then falling on your face.

The Body Snatcher jumps up your nose like Casper and puppeteers you around. Anyone who gets close will find an oily boggle arm reaching out of one of your orifices to slap ...

Master PDF Update 1.3

663 Monsters! Some typo fixes and formatting changes to the Table of Contents as well. If any of y'all got monsters you want to see, shoot me a message.

As a reminder, we've got this in three formats now: the live Homebrewery link, the pdf, and the Conflux-Art landing page with individual links. Use whatever works best for you.

Homebrewery: 2022-04-01 18:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Boggles pt. 1

Everybody loves boggles. They're sticky, slippery fairy ooze goblins that play pranks on you. The only problem with them is that there just aren't enough of them. We're gonna fix that, though. 

Your basic boggle does the doctor strange thing of opening up a bunch of little portals and reaching through them to rob you. It climbs up on you and bites at your neck, then oozes sticky oil ...

Baigujing and Gashadokuru

Baigujing (White Bone Demon) is a character in in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. She doesn't have much in the way of combat chops, but she really wants a bite of Tang Sanzang, the main character, on account of how holy he is, so she tries to break up the gang to get him alone. Sun Wukong can tell she's a secret demon and attacks her, but everyone else is pissed at him for appare...

Annis Hags

Annis hags a real special kind of nasty. Each hag has their own special flavor of misery that they like to cultivate, and the annis wants to see people become afraid of their own children, to exile and abandon them, to see their children come to love the annis and despise them, and finally to find their children's skins hanging in the forest. So basically the plot of Hook (1991), give or take a...

Dolgaunt and Mastiff

A dolgaunt is hobgoblin that's been mutated into a terrible vampiric tentacle monster. Not sure why you'd start with a hobgoblin if vampiric tentacle beast is what you're going for, but aparently the results speak for themselves.

A mastiff is just a good dog. You shouldn't bring your good dog to a fight, but if you do this good dog will help.

Sharks!

Fun fact: sharks have persisted on earth through 5 mass extinctions, dating back before trees were invented by Satan so snakes would have a place to hang out. I tried to give these fellas a sharkier play pattern. Also, Reef sharks are little. Definitely more dog-sized than man-sized.

Gulthias Tree and Zombie Tyrannosaur

Couple of adventure-specific monsters here, but they're both fun if you can slot them in anywhere. The zombie tyrannosaur is a bit self-explanatory, I think. The Gulthias Tree grows from a stake planted in the heart of a vampire, which is a fun backstory for a tree to have.

Wastrilith and Shadow Demon

The wastrilith is a bad thing to be in the water with, and a hard thing to stay out of the water with.

The shadow demon can Frighten even those who don't know it's there, and it can pull your soul out through your throat if you can't get a handle on your fear.

Nobles

In my games, if a noble is rolling initiative it's in the role of Graves from Die Another Day (I think there was a Firefly episode that did basically the same routine). Historically, though, nobles in battle were often the real thing to be won; with a sophisticated market for ransoms fortunes could be made or lost by capturing or killing the right/wrong rich guy.

Invisible Stalker and Boneless

In 5e, the invisible stalker lost one of my favorite traits it had; it's an extremely effective as a summoned assassin, and absolutely HATES being summoned. I tried to lean into both of these elements, giving it a couple ways to covertly murder people, and a penalty for those who set it a task it can't complete in a reasonable time period.

The Boneless is another solid assassin creature; ...