with all demons having a form or another of telepathy, but not Fiendish Creatures, the Abyss may actually be strangely silent and austere, only troubled by the screams of beasts and the fury of the elements, screams of agony and the talk of the few souls sent there… and demons consider mortal so lowly because they speak, like animals and victims rather than even the lowlier demon. But addresses one by telepathy and without a word, and it will treat you like an equal, reacting to you as with a demon without it even realizing its reaction (like how it has been observed in Iraq and Afghanistan that the people there, when talking with US soldiers, will primarily address not the most graded officer but to the one with facial hairs). Demons think lowly of music and musicians, and consider bards barely above insects. Well, wizards, druids and clerics think the same way about bards, but let’s not digress…

Monsieur Meuble

rhaphazard:

Getting hit by lightning gives you laser powers and auto-tune.

This actually isn’t as new as you think : Courtesy  of Mystara: Lighting Zombie

image

”A lightning zombie looks just like a normal member of its race, except that its skin is a uniform light gray. Otherwise, they appear much as they did when alive; they can speak and are often hyperactive in their mannerisms. In darkness they give off a faint glow.

Lightning zombies have a flair for the dramatic. They prefer flashy clothing and jewelry, the more the better.”

Also: what spell-like abilities should replicate the lasers if I wanted to do an updated of this monster based on this?

Friendly Bugbears

I like the idea of some bugbears friendly to communities they live near them. However I think they would still be obsessed with the concept of fear and mostly solitary.

Basically imagine a bugbear coming down for festivals and acting as a Krampus figure, or going door to door threatening to eat naughty children if not offered wine and food.

(Note that friendly does not mean not mean not an enabler of probably bad parenting technigques. I’m basing this off real life traditions of people in costumes)

1e flind

Okay, Flinds might be worth keeping around if we look for 1e art where it is wearing a headcover that gives it a leonine appearance.

Even the 5e flind (which gnoll lover seem to hate for the return to being an always evil race you can kill without conscience) has a non-hyena look compared to regular gnolls

Flinds being obsessed with non-hyena predators and taking their image is a good take in my opinion. I would argue it might be a good idea to have flinds be something gnolls can turn into with effort and training rather than being born as flinds.

It might even be something you can connect to self loathing, perhaps from demons cruelly mocking gnolls for resembling such a “pathetic animal*.

*their opinion not mine, I think hyenas have an unfair rap.

Salvaging Norkers as a concept

I had some inspiration concerning the old  budgie-nosed caveman goblins

Norkers, oddly enough are most clearly related to hobgoblins. If hobgoblins are an attempt to create a “civilized goblin” by some precursor race , Norkers appear to have been a failed or sabotaged part of that effort, or even possibly created from an attempt to undo the changes. They are claimed to most chaotic of social goblin species, and many misconceptions surrounding them are only recently being corrected.

The typical propaganda that goblinoids “steal everything and make nothing” is more true for norkers than it is compared to other goblinoids, but still not the whole story.The truth is norkers do make crafts, but generally only those a particular Norker take special interests in it.

Norker technological development is hindered due to most of their specialists being self taught and jealously guarding their secrets. Norkers who bother to keep track of which children their own may be more willing to share secrets with offspring. Still most skills in Norker culture are learned by observation and reverse engineering.

Whatever magic they have is generally divine rather than arcane. [proposal: an idea of random divine magic that spell list changes day to day based on who decides to answer their prayers.] Most of it is focused on elemental earth magic though.

In regards to them stealing everything, trade has now  been recently observed with orcs and goblins . What norkers offer tends to be varieties of fungus they cultivate (sometimes deliberately on their own bodies…). Honestly  given that they are generally fluent in the language of these other races, this is embarrassingly obvious in hindsight.  (How the goblins are gaining enough respect from the norkers to engage in trade is something that boggles the mind though…)

Another claimed trait that deserves a disclaimer they are the most violent amongst their kin compared to other golbinoid. While they often show a clear “might makes right mindset” It should be remembered that norkers have armored hides and their frequent quarreling with eachother rarely leads to injuries. In many cases it may actually be play behavior.

Recent studies even show the hatred between different tribes of norkers is less serious than thought as well. Turns out when a norker said “and then I totally killed him” it was often a figure of speech referring to the act of tearing out another norker’s fangs. (which can grow back, but until then the norker’s social status plummets)

Their internal politics is also more complicated than previously thought, with often the self proclaimed leader being humored and real decision making going on elsewhere.

Of course the chief may still be an actual supported leader.  Contrary to belief, Norkers can be devote protectors. Norker bodyguards questioned on loyalty often stated they protected their charge simply because they “liked them”.

Norkers prefer scavenging to hunting, and frequently use their numbers to chase larger predators away from their kills.

It is well known Norkers have a gender discrepancy massively in favor of the females (3 to 1), yet strangely few of the women are full-time raiders. It seems almost as if the concept had not occurred to them rather than actively discouraged, and some suggest it may be from them being descended from earlier populations of hobgolgins who archeological evidence point to as having more gender essentialist societies .  [not sure about this one honestly]

Norkers problems with other races tends to come down to the other races being “soft skins”. This is either seen a sign of weakness to be seized upon, or leads to issues when Norkers forget the lesser durability of other races and try to initiate what should be a non-serious scuffle.

Overall, norkers are a race hindered by a mixture of superiority complex and free-spiritedness.

Halflings

I still love the idea I once read for making some halflings settlements more like Hobbit inspired but with a sneaky hidden dark side to protecting the peace from outsiders

Basically, if a guest (or “guest” ) stays too long in their settlement longer than tolerated, they run them off with a Scooby-Doo style plot. 

Invading/occupying armies get a mix of that along with Home-Alone style traps.

Adventurers are an exception since they aren’t scared away by monsters, but attracted by stories  of them, so unfortunately they grin and bear their presence. (”Nothing worse than an adventurer.”)

Some elven adventurers would of course catch on eventually due to their , and might be asked by their folks back home to try and pressure the halflings to reveal their techniques to them.

prokopetz:

probablyadrpgideas:

butterfly-crackers:

probablyadrpgideas:

probablytabaxirpgideas:

probablyadrpgideas:

probablyfunrpgideas:

Idea: Take a fairly common monster. Say the Rust Monster, or maybe a Chimera. Then imagine what it would be like at CR 20, or some point where it can be the big world-eating menace of a campaign. The Colossal rust monster might have the power to rapidly age any material into dust, or it could spray venom that gives characters Dire Tetanus. Or both! Maybe it even has the backing of an apocalyptic cult that worships it as a living embodiment of entropy.

I guess what I’m saying is your campaign needs more Kaiju, and you can find them anywhere.

Always have kaiju in your campaign.

CR 20 Gelatinous Cube……..

Yes. CR 30 owlbear.

CR 69 Goblin

You. I like the way you think.

The really great thing about this premise is that this is actually where a lot of classic D&D monsters like the rust monster and the owlbear came from.

Back in the early days of D&D, fantasy miniatures were tough to come by, so Gary Gygax and his crew used to buy dime-store bags of plastic dinosaurs to use as dragons. One day he found a pack of dinosaurs that had some Japanese kaiju figurines mixed in – claimed by some sources to have been Ultraman bootlegs, though there’s some dispute on the matter – and decided to stat them up and use them.

So really, making a CR 30 owlbear is just returning the monster to its roots!

Dragons of forests and hills (D&D)

virovac:

(been reading the 2e monster entries lately and had some ideas)

Green Dragons: 

the tyrants of the woods, and evil landowners of dragons. Used in many political cartoons to represent nobles who put unfair hunting restrictions on peasants.

Green dragons are very protective of their forests, not as guardians of nature but in the manner of owner of a prized garden. The fact they can be reluctant to use their chlorine based breath weapon in fear of causing splash damage to their precious vegetation is well known and exploited by their enemies. In fact, many of the spells passed down and learned by green dragons are those concerned with healing plants or encouraging their growth.

Green dragons and bronze dragons are the two chromatic and metallic dragons most likely to interbreed or even very rarely form long-term bonds with each other despite their very different outlooks on life (and on cruelty to animals).

The long term bonds mainly happen when a coastal living green dragon prizes protecting their territory over engaging in cruelty; a task well the bronze dragon is well suited to assisting. The fact that bronze dragons tend to only actively hunt aquatic non-tetrapods also helps the rare arrangements as the two do not compete for game.

The hybrid spawn of bronze dragons and green dragons known are generally not as outright murderous as but their chromatic parents are known to be, but otherwise there is no obvious pattern to

Of the three best known individuals on record,:

One has set up terrifyingly convoluted extortion schemes for ships and travellers passing near its territory, creating bizzare dangers with its magic that only it knows how to get past without harm.

One has set itself up as a cruel avenger of those who abuse wildlife.

The most well known of all however, is a scholar by the the name of Tytrek who has settled in a submegerged forest created as a result of a dam created under a human-dwarf partnership. Tyrtek has used magic to keep the various plants alive under their submersion and is working on a long term project to magically alter the biology of the plants and create a self-sustaining true “underwater forest”. She is known to pay quite handsomely for any writings of magical research that might help her in her endeavors.

More dragons below

Keep reading

reblogging for day crowd.

Stuff about hybrids. the interactions between dragon types, green dragons and their reluctance use their breath weapon, and their m