I am running a Halloween D&D game and I need a scary monster. Any suggestions?>Hardmode: no false hydra>in b4 "your mom"
D&D isn't scary.
>>96858067What edition?
>>968582145e, AKA baby's first D&D.
>>96858241Oh boy.I guess some of the 2e Ravenloft books have ideas on how to use regular D&D monsters in a scarier way.Also depends on how scary do you mean, like, on a scale of Goosebumps to Silent Hill.
>>96858307Probably Silent Hill, but without all the sex stuff. We're not coomers.
>>96858067picrel might give you some ideasthis guy's pictures often have cheerfully fucked up scenarios happen to adventures
>>96858333>Lamentations of the Flame PrincessWell, no wonder.
>>96858120D&D can be scary, if you have the GM obscure your hitpoints by rolling damage in secret.It's hard to be concerned about your safety when you take 7 damage to a pool of 30, but the player is vastly more apt to take his enemies seriously when the GM tells them that a goblins rusty scimitar gouged a bloody slice into the side of their thigh, and they don't know their actual mathematical status. It could have been a crit for all they know.The math needs to be obfuscated for the purposes of immersion, or else D&D is too video-gamified to work for horror by default.
>>96858403That is an excellent idea.
>>96858328Sahuagin are stand ins for lovecratian fish men. Harpies can be pretty vicious, same as hags, remember their diet.Golems of most kinds are horror staples.Ghoul packs can be terrifying, specially considering how many opportunities they get to paralyze PCs in a round. Use sparingly if you just wanna scare, I guess.
Russian nesting dolls pregnant woman zombie. They kill a pregnant woman zombie, the baby zombie rips itself out, but it looks oddly like the woman and is itself pregnant. They kill that one, an even smaller one comes out of that one. Each has half the hit points of the one before, til they kill the 2 hit point zombie and the 1 hit point one just kinda crawls along like an ant and they can squish it.
>>96858333Gloranthan Jack-O-Bears.Jack O'Bears are shaggy, bear-like creatures with heads that resemble pumpkins. They are creatures of Chaos, and can paralyze one victim per round in addition to their normal attacks.You need to convert them to D&D or just steal the idea (Bears with pumpkin heads and psychic powers).
>>96858670older depiction (RIP Jaquays).
>>96858067Chair that if you sit in it, turns you into a chair, that if someone else sits on it, turns them into a chair
>>96858067A man with an ass that turns chairs he sits on into people. If those people sit on other chairs, they turn into people too
Have a town filled with mimics, doppledgangers and changelings, the slowly induce your players with paranoia.Then to even shit out to put them even more into edge, have the town have an unusual large amount of twins, with very few of them having small features to tell them appart.Even have a fake copycat party who are going around doing weird shit pretending to be your party.The general adventure is to kill or deal with all mimics, then either kill, deal or reason with the dopplegangers and changelings.All of this shit because a fey thought it would be a funny prank, but shit started to get out of control because he didn't knew mimics can breed and spawn even more mimics, or gain sentience in a short amount of time spawning changelings and dopplegangers.
>>96858067>Hardmode: no false hydra>in b4 "your mom"false mom
>>96858067>uses darkwood imagine There you go anon, you just gave yourself the answer, just use the freaky creeps and savages from darkwood, hell you can also do 'it's all a dream' twist to fuck with your players at the end
>>96858067Do a vampire.No, a real vampire, not some prissy faggot that gets clubbed to death by an alchemical silver coated sword. A real, honest to god vampire, with all his spells, the cunning to use them properly, and the sheer dismissal of human life as cattle that he's capable of. We're talking illusions and charms, charmed beasts and thralls sucked nearly dry of blood, you can have the whole haunted house aesthetic, as a traveling feeding carnival. The kind of vampire who you, as a couple fucking dudes, actually just can't really kill, and need to simply survive.
>>96859628The false hydra that edits your memories of your mother to include every "your mom" joke or comment you have ever heard, as being true. Even if they're contradictory.
>>96858067Here's a free one.>Add pond to map>Players need get to bottom of pond to get hidden artifact.OR>Badguys draining pond to get spooky artifact.>Pond drained>Reveals cave and a bunch of skeletons and detritus on pondbed>Have to rappel down a sheer fall into a cave>Dungeon of tunnels>There is nothing dangerous at all until players have gone about halfway through a tunnel, but let good investigating and perception reveal signs of something no bueno>Players get jumped by pale blind grimblies (ghouls, trogs, whatever - all that matters is that they are fast, have at least one good attack, and can inflict at least one debuff)>Players ideally choose to leg it, and have to climb back up the rope while fighting the things offI ran a variation on this in Delta Green and it ended up being one of the most high stakes encounters I've ever done. Some of the players still talk about it and it was two years ago.The most important thing in horror is tone, stakes, and buildup though. You can't blow your load before they get nervous / jumpy and you can't have retards at the table that don't care what happens or it'll ruin it for the others.Good luck, anon. I hope the game's fun.
>>96858067>I need a scary monster. Any suggestions?Thing that bumps the threads in the night.
>>96858067Nothing in the MM or they'll just soijak when you don't play to them reading it mid-session and metagaming.
>>96859439Holy fuck, OP said "scary" not "completely fucking terrifying"
>>96861707>everything you eat feels like popcorn kernel skin slivers between your teeth
>>96858067your dadhe's back from the store with the milk and cigaretteshe also found the belt
>>96858067The monster came and left already. All that's left is the consequences.
>>96858067An IRS agent performing an audit of the parties' finances.
>>96858067Doppelganger
>>96858067Base rule ones and classic horror?Dragon (run properly and given class levels to fill out their CR with utility features per page 283 rules but without hp increase - for most subclasses its 13 levels worth) which can be slapped into any theme or topic to make it scary, from a santa workshop turned into fleshworks to make it food, orphanage with child slaves, etc.Mummy lord in a museum or dead lords estate turned into his lair (abuse the every other or third turn lifesense lair action for chase scene) rising the workers/prior staff as zombies with a disease of choice/that fits the partyMorkoth in swamp or sewers run like IT and given at will on self polymorph that doesnt change its hp and a item in its treasure that lets it control and dire up weak animalsBalhannoth (Warp Terrain and Vanish make for a cooler better OG version of what people seek from a false hydra that isnt instantly defeated by certain animals sleeping, zombies, constructs, earplugs and silence spells) as a solo threatAboleth run like a The Shadow over Innsmouth story with sea mooks of choice.Vampire if party never read Dracula.
>>96858067I'm running a campaign soon where one of the antagonists is a Ghoul with Soulknife powers, but instead of using its own soul it's eating people's insides and making psionic knives out of their tormented, blending souls.You're welcome to go with that, if you like. Just let us know how it goes either way, alright anon?
>>96858067You are doing it wrong.Assuming you are playing any post-ADD edition (ADD 2e included), all you really need to do is running older editions than that and/or OSR, WITHOUT telling your players what are their survivability and hit chances.The game is going to stress the living shit out of them all by itself, even if they are going to face rats in the inn's basement
>>96858328Instead, you are bunch of zoomers, groomed from the earliest moment to be icked by the iffy sexo stuff.Not even sad, just pathetic
permanently invisible man/menstalking the party, pickpocketing them to rob them of tools, attacking them in such a way the party isn't aware they are being attacked, like dropping something from a higher floor on their heads.
>>96858067The Mercy: a vaguely feminine bug-creature that sits in the middle of the dungeon/cave system, droning an ominous humming noise. At her feet and scattered around the room are various humanoid creatures in states of blissful rest. Many more lie still, long dead, having come to rest at the feet of the mercy and having lost the will to live.Prolonged exposure to the droning hum of the Mercy does wisdom damage. In a fight, the mercy does no direct attacks, instead her victims wake up and defend her in a mindless rage. On her turn, instead, the Mercy spreads her wings and shines forth an otherworldly light. Any PC not behind full cover is exposed to the light, and you roll a die based on the level of the player character. You may need to use an electronic dice roller, because your goal is to have the roll result correspond to a level. For the rolled level, the PC forgets all class abilities they gained that level. Spellcasters have it especially bad, because if they gained an additional spell known of a given spell level at that level. they forget all spells of that level. (For example, a Sorcerer who forgets what they learned at level 6 would lose their lvl 6 sorcerous origin feature, and all third level spells. They don't gain a new first or second level spell at level 6, so those are not affected at this time). You can't lose the abilities of a level you already rolled, it instead jumps up to the next highest level.She does this every round. The gimmick of the encounter, then, is that the individual minions she defends hereself with are not especially dangerous, but the fact that the players are continuously *losing powers* every round makes them feel especially vulnerable. And the wisdom damage acts as a ticking clock so losing their strongest abilities that would help them end the fight faster is not a small matter.
The simple fact is that almost every monster can be scary if you present it right, and almost none of them are if handled badly.A bit of dramatic presentation, a nasty environment which favours the enemy, a few NPCs meeting horrible fates, and a decent understanding of the themes of horror you want to explore will serve you well.Most of Robert E. Howard's monsters are fairly mundane: apes, ape-men, sabre-toothed tigers, dinosaurs; it's all in how they are presented. The 'Worms of the Earth' and similar subterranean degenerates are basically just goblins with a creepy backstory. He manages to make them a threat to sword-and-sorcery ubermench heroes too.
Here's a monster from my game, Mordhark. I used ChatGPT to translate it from my system to 5E.It did a pretty decent job at translating most of its abilities, although I had to go in and edit some of them.Here's some abridged lore on the creature from my game, in my setting:Invisible to most, Mowgai appear in their purest form as 8-foot-tall beings with long, vertical, pointed horns and deep red faces framed by dark, shaggy hair. Their bodies are obscured beneath a worn, dirty sack, from which pale bluish-grey arms emerge to sap will, positivity, and joy from those they touch.Mowgai are peculiar fairies who believe themselves trapped on the demiplane of emotion, forever opposed by sprites who bind them there. Incapable of passing through foliage, they instead crave mortal cities—places of stone, metal, and dead wood—where they feed on potent emotions like hatred, envy, and despair, draining away hope and serenity.Vine circlets, once ancient wards against Mowgai, are still worn in impoverished cities, though now regarded merely as charms for luck or goodwill. Knowledge of the creatures themselves survives only among the wisest shamans, learned mages, and high clergy.
>>96858328see >>96858430 if you want a lot of monsters. Otherwise I'd go for some of the most fucked up things from the AbyssI'm partial to the particularly horrid fey, but that's just personal taste
>>96858067I'm also doing a halloween game, of Beyond the Veil. My players are going up against Wendigos. The town serial killer/cannibal ate one too many people and went feral, But why are there two of them... Weird. He always brought chili to help feed the town, when they went on searches for the missing kids... People are starting to jones for that chili though...If any of you commies are reading this, don't fucking spoil it. I don't think any of them should be in here.
>>96858067Picrel, or the merely Adult version for a CR 5. But mainly a monster that eats your neighbors, friends and loved ones, makes evil copies and can mind control you is pretty good for a horror scenario.
>>96858067Instead of a monster, big paranoia scenario. Solar eclipse on the autumn solstice is coming up, and the villagers are getting antsy with their superstitions and how unfortunate things have gone recently. Eventually someone kills someone else and the village slowly descends into a bloodbath as people lose it from the apparently supernatural phenomena and their neighbors dying, while others try to placate the god/demon/spirit by performing increasingly arcane and terrible rituals to hopefully divert its attention. All this attracts the attention of/was the design of a devil, who's using the event to rake in tainted souls and find mortal allies who've already spilled enough blood to willingly serve evil like him.
>>96858067Well, to piss off that one guy. Play ACKS. *Makes spooky sounds*But, would suggest False Hydra or some like a Lich or Vampire. OR that one Make a Wish Monster they made years back. That little fucker was cooking when he got his wish.
>>96858067your momop cant inb4 btw
>>96858067>Hardmode: no false hydraUse his ogres instead, then.https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/01/ogres-and-their-hungry-kin.html
>>96864108>that isnt instantly defeated by certain animals sleeping, zombies, constructs, earplugs and silence spellsyou know the point is to come up with solutions like that, right? it's a puzzle monster. you beat the puzzle. congratulations!
>>96870518Relentlessly stupid.
>>96867178The ape-man, the primary story in which one appears, is alongside black ebon statues that come alive at night and kill a band of pirates in their sleep. So they are not at all just "fairly mundane".
>>96873152That's Shadows in the Moonlight.
>>96858067
>>96858067>hardmode: no false hydraWell that's not really a "Hardmode" then, is it? Kind of just..."Default normal mode" since it's a garbage monster.
>>96858067I've historically given my party Dullahans, but I'm switching it up tomorrow with crabs.
