Credit: Prem (aka Coool Brain)
Been quite a while since the last one of these, huh? Sorry about that, for the three people who found this series interesting. The purpose of this series was to help keep me regularly blogging, but as you may have noticed, I've been busy blogging for the last year. But hey, that's no excuse to leave something unfinished.
Intellect Devourer
I know most of you reading this don't play 5E D&D, so you probably don't know that this monster has the single most bonkers stat block in the game.
It’s only CR 2, meaning that one of these is supposed to be a "medium difficulty" fight for a party of level 2 adventurers. And its HP, AC, Saves, etc. all align with that math well enough. But here’s the catch. They have two special actions: Devour Intellect and Body Thief.
With Body Thief, it initiates a regular Intelligence check contest with a target. It has a +1. Okay, so against anyone at 2nd level (except maybe a wizard) that’s probably a 50/50. If the target fails, their brain is instantly and permanently replaced by the devourer, and the original brain has been eaten. It bypasses your HP completely. Any way of driving out the devourer will also kill the host. There’s literally no way to save the person short of a Resurrection or Wish spell. Because it’s been established that healing spells don’t restore body parts except for Regeneration (not learned by clerics until they’re 13th level), and Raise Dead won’t work if the body is missing a part that it needs to survive... Alright, well that sucks.
Okay, so clearly the answer is to simply not allow the devourer to get anywhere near you. Body Thief has a range of 5 feet, so just keep your distance. Ah, but that's what the other action is for.
Devour Intellect, a ranged attack, forces the target to make a DC 12 Intelligence Save. Again, pretty easy to fail for a Level 2 non-wizard. On a failure they have a terrifyingly high chance to have their Intelligence score reduced to 0, while also being stunned. You know how you restore ability score loss? In 5th Edition, the only ways are Wish and Greater Restoration (not learned by clerics until they’re 9th level).
So here’s how it goes: the devourer first uses Devour Intellect, reduces the Intelligence score to 0 (a -5 modifier, if you’re being generous. Technically the book doesn’t account for a score of 0 to my knowledge, so the DM could plausibly rule that you just automatically fail the check). While you're stunned and can’t get away, it runs up and uses Body Thief, guaranteed to win. Instant, irreversible death. Whoever said 5E isn't old school?
This is how you know the Challenge Rating system is bullshit.
And yet... my own DM has thrown, conservatively, dozens of intellect devourers at my group. Most of those times there were a minimum of 6 attacking all at once. Oh, and he also made them the brains of illithids, so any time we killed a mind flayer in a way that left the head mostly intact, we immediately had to fight one of these next. It's a pretty killer one-two combo.
The last thing I have to say about this monster is that the art is almost always weirdly bad. I don't understand why so many artists draw them with big, bulky limbs resembling, like, a dog or a big cat or something. It's a creepy, sneaky, little brain creature. It should be skittering. The image I used as the post header is the closest I've seen to something that gets it right.
Invisible Stalker
As I mentioned in the post on E monsters, I think that elementals are one of the worst monster categories in D&D. Any time you try to assign a type to a monster, there's always a more interesting option than to make it an elemental.
Case in point: you know where the "invisible stalker" shows up in other media? Evil Dead. Is it an elemental? No, it's a demon. You know where else? Predator. Is that an elemental? Nope, he's an alien. How about Nemesis from Castlevania? Formally classified as a ghost, but when they explain the Greek mythology thing, they characterize her as an "angel." Waaay more interesting than just "air elemental."
As for the monster itself, running invisible adversaries is always tricky. Here's 5E's rules for it:
When you attack a target that you can't see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you're guessing the target's location or you're targeting a creature you can hear but not see. If the target isn't in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the DM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target's location correctly. When a creature can't see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it.
The thing is, being only unseen doesn't actually prevent its location from being known. The DM still has to place a token on the map to represent the invisible stalker, since it's still making noise as it moves around. Disadvantage to hit it, sure, but you still know which square it's in.
If you want the proper "invisible enemy" experience, it has to make an additional stealth check to cover its sound. Only then do you get the joy of attacking your players without them knowing where the attack is coming from, so they have to guess which square to attack. And even then, they attack at a disadvantage, making them even less likely to confirm the monster's location. I find this kind of challenge fun, but maybe only once or twice.
By the way, if you ever want to be reminded of how awful 5E crunch arguments are, look up the difference between being "unseen" vs "hidden."
Iron Cobra
Ben: "I like gorgons better." Pretty damning, coming from him. He is much more interested in monsters taken from mythology, so this doesn't do much for him. I must confess, it's never gripped me.
Y'know, I'll admit I haven't had enough monsters guarding my treasure piles. They're usually in the rooms near the treasure rooms, but not in the treasure rooms. Ben says it's a good thing to spring on the party once they're already in the process of plundering the treasure, as an ambush. You're greedily shoveling piles of gold coins into a sack when BOOM, robo-snake pops its head out of the hoard and gets ya.
The Fiend Folio has an interesting detail: "It is believed that there are only a dozen or so of these creatures in existence and they are quite valuable" On second thought, maybe the cobra itself is worth more than the treasure it's guarding...
-Dwiz
"You know how you restore ability score loss? In 5th Edition, the only ways are Wish and Greater Restoration (not learned by clerics until they’re 9th level). "
ReplyDeleteAs of Xanathar's downtime rules, one week of rest will also restore all damage to one ability score. Those rules are one of the things that I see most frequently called out as improved by the 2014 non-core supplements, and it does seem like an improvement - I had to hunt through the original Player's Handbook and do a close reading to realise it wasn't there.