Most Powerful Small-Medium Humanoid?

[Lateral]

Okay, so I'm going to run this dungeon crawl in a couple of weeks. I told the players to optimize the hell out of their characters, because I was going to pull out all the stops in building the dungeon- for the creatures, by abusing CR rules to pit them against things that, while at a reasonable (or even low) CR, would crush a normal party at that level.

As part of a sort of end-boss battle, I was thinking of building some form of horrible monstrosity through abuse of the Tauric template. The base creature would be a Monstrous Crab of some sort, because... well, it's the iconic over-CR'd creature, and I was going to abuse the template to make it ridiculously powerful by crazy-pumping the humanoid. (LA is based off of the humanoid, so as a player you pump the nonhumanoid, but the CR is based off of the nonhumanoid.) So, of course, I'm looking for the most powerful base humanoid possible.

So, Playground, do you know of any high-powered Small or Medium humanoids that I can use as base creatures?

[Urpriest]

LeShay are Fey for some stupid reason. Glooms are Medium Monstrous Humanoids though.

[hushblade]

What do you want it to do? a water orc is a pretty standard choice for a 0LA melee character.

[Ajadea]

Whatever you pick, add the Natural Lycanthrope (big badass animal) template. This raises the CR of the base humanoid... but the CR of said base humanoid is not in fact taken into consideration when calculating the CR of the tauric monstrosity.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Were-Dire Tiger for extra STR... also it might be worthwhile to look for some hulking hurler builds, I recall one that used tha Tauric template to have a ridiculous carrying capacity (it still had a similarly ridiculous str bonus.)

[Lateral]

LeShay are Fey for some stupid reason. Glooms are Medium Monstrous Humanoids though.
Unfortunately, the base humanoid has to actually be a Humanoid and not a Monstrous Humanoid, which kind of hurts.

What do you want it to do? a water orc is a pretty standard choice for a 0LA melee character.
I just want it to be as powerful as possible, preferably with powerful special attacks or qualities and decent mentals. The level adjustment and hit dice of the creature don't matter.

Whatever you pick, add the Natural Lycanthrope (big badass animal) template. This raises the CR of the base humanoid... but the CR of said base humanoid is not in fact taken into consideration when calculating the CR of the tauric monstrosity.
I was going to stack a bunch of templates on the base humanoid, yeah. I thought about Lycanthroping, but I'm not really sure how that would work on a Tauric creature.

[Ajadea]

Just stack the templates in the right order.

Base Humanoid
Add Natural Lycanthrope(Animal of Choice) (Humanoid [Shapechanger])
Add Tauric (Monstrous Crab). (Monstrous Humanoid [Shapechanger])

It's a naturally tauric creature that can take on aspects of a certain animal or even turn into said animal. If you're asking how a were-dire-tiger tauric bugbear/monstrous crab would look... I got nothing.

[Dusk Eclipse]

From the same twisted mind that brought you the owlbear, the wolfbunny, the ducksnake and the dreaded penguin-lion, ladies and gentlemen I present you the

Dire were-tiger crab!!!

Or in other words, waive your hand and say "A (drunk) wizard did it"

[deuxhero]

Sorcerer, a drunk wizard can't enact the idea thanks to the int penalty of booze.

[dextercorvia]

Unfortunately, the base humanoid has to actually be a Humanoid and not a Monstrous Humanoid, which kind of hurts.


Not according to my copy of SS.


The template can be added to added to any corporeal humanoid or monstrous humanoid of Small or Medium-size (referred to hereafter as the base humanoid)

Edit: Unbodied would be a fairly good choice.

[Lateral]

Not according to my copy of SS.

...Huh. You're right. I totally misread it. Okay, Gloom it is, then.

[dextercorvia]

I mentioned Unbodied above, but that is nowhere near the league of Gloom. I didn't even thing of Epic Creatures. And, I misread my own quote. Corpreal.

[Little Brother]

If CR doesn't matter, Paragon is pro. A paragon Gloom. That's nasty.

[Lateral]

If CR doesn't matter, Paragon is pro. A paragon Gloom. That's nasty.

That's what I'm doing. I was just looking for the most powerful creature possible before templating.

Although I probably shouldn't send that against my PCs.