How to fight a smart korred

[Potato_Priest]

My group occasionally does arena battles between monsters where we each pick a different monster to use. In our last such fight, I chose the Korred and won handily. The reason for this was that the korred’s burrow speed combined with tremorsense gave it the ability to end all its turns at east 5 feet underground before popping up for a Boulder attack and then going back down again. Thus, the only thing my enemies could feasibly use against me were ready actions with spells and ranged weapons, missing out on the majority of their powerful monster abilities.

This experience has made me really dread the idea of fighting a korred as a conventional D&D party, since the damage output of martials would be heavily gimped by having to use the ready action to shoot the thing. If you did encounter one as a level 7 party in an area where it could burrow, what strategies would you use to be able to actually hurt the bugger?

[JNAProductions]

Fly would help, since you could just be too high for it to do jack diddly.

Does it leave a tunnel when it burrows?

[Scyrner]

The Earth Elemental can pull a similar trick, using its Earth Glide and Tremorsense to attack from below the ground but within 5ft.

I did it to my players, they had no way to solve the problem. I'd also be interested in solutions.

[nickl_2000]

My group occasionally does arena battles between monsters where we each pick a different monster to use. In our last such fight, I chose the Korred and won handily. The reason for this was that the korred’s burrow speed combined with tremorsense gave it the ability to end all its turns at east 5 feet underground before popping up for a Boulder attack and then going back down again. Thus, the only thing my enemies could feasibly use against me were ready actions with spells and ranged weapons, missing out on the majority of their powerful monster abilities.

This experience has made me really dread the idea of fighting a korred as a conventional D&D party, since the damage output of martials would be heavily gimped by having to use the ready action to shoot the thing. If you did encounter one in an area where it could burrow, what strategies would you use to be able to actually hurt the bugger?

Ready a grapple action to reduce it's speed to 0? Ready an action to throw a net on it to restrain and force it to use it's action to get free? Hit it with a levitate spell and get it off the ground? Have someone cast Mold Earth to pull the ground off of it exposing it to the melee people?

All those could be pretty effective against it.

[Potato_Priest]

Fly would help, since you could just be too high for it to do jack diddly.

Does it leave a tunnel when it burrows?

It does not leave a tunnel.

Flying is a good idea if you need an escape, but I'm hoping there's some strategy you can use that would make you not need to escape.

If you could somehow get it into melee range a grapple would work quite well. Unfortunately, it has tremorsense so it can tell the positioning of land-based opponents and avoid melee range, preferring to use its more devastating rock attacks.

Mold earth, nets, and levitate are all great ideas.

Edit: Ah! here's a way to get a grapple on it: grapple the party's best grappler and have them ready an action to grapple the Korred if it's within 5 feet of them. Then, on your next turn, ready an action to move to within 5 feet of the Korred when it surfaces, dragging your grappler buddy with you.

[nickl_2000]

Mold earth, nets, and levitate are all great ideas.

Really anything to restrain it or get it off the ground.

Entangle, Snare (XGE), Hypnotic Pattern, Tasha's hideous laughter

Or spells to make ranged attacks nearly impossible.
Fog Cloud, any wall spell, darkness, stinking cloud,


Or a readied battlemaster trip attack with a ranged weapon to knock it prone would reduce overall movement and probably keep it from going underground again.



The key to a grapple would be for anyone to reduce movement a get them above ground once. Then multiple please can grapple to reduce damage (I think that is possible)

[Potato_Priest]

Really anything to restrain it or get it off the ground.

Entangle, Snare (XGE), Hypnotic Pattern, Tasha's hideous laughter

Or spells to make ranged attacks nearly impossible.
Fog Cloud, any wall spell, darkness, stinking cloud,


Or a readied battlemaster trip attack with a ranged weapon to knock it prone would reduce overall movement and probably keep it from going underground again.

Fog cloud and darkness probably wouldn't do much against ranged attacks (other than your own) because of that stinking tremorsense again. The rest of that looks good though.

[Unoriginal]

You can move using a Ready action.

Also, having tremorsense doesn't mean your enemies can't use the Hide action to stealth. Like all means of perception, it's not infaillible. A Korred who tries to whack-a-mole the party will likely get suckerpunched sooner or later.

Not to mention that since the Korred needs at minimum 10ft of movement to get out of the ground, attack, and get back in the ground again (an Earth Elemental would need 20ft to do that, due to being Large), it only leave them with 20ft of movement inside the ground. So after a few tries the PCs will definitively be able to determine the perimetwr of the circle in which the Korred can pop out, and position themselves appropriately.

Of course it requires smart characters working together.