Negative LA-Assignment : Resurrection, but no diamond here

[remetagross]

The stat boosts alone would suggest an ECL 8. But the fact it's Huge is actually very annoying. It makes it troublesome to wander around with the rest of the gang, lowers it AC and to-hit bonus, and doesn't even give it such a big reach...

I'd go for 7 RHD because of that.

[Beni-Kujaku]

The stat boosts alone would suggest an ECL 8. But the fact it's Huge is actually very annoying. It makes it troublesome to wander around with the rest of the gang, lowers it AC and to-hit bonus, and doesn't even give it such a big reach...

I'd go for 7 RHD because of that.

The disenchanter is a grappler at its core, it has +8 racial to grappling and Improved Grab on its tongue. In that context, being Huge is more of an advantage. Also, disenchanting can still have out of combat advantages. I'll keep it at 8 for now.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Ethereal Ooze

Oh, my. This... Is kind of beautiful. No, I'm not talking about the weird polyhedral shape of the Ooze as it stands at the boundary between the Ethereal and the Material planes, though it is quite pretty in a "4-dimensional shape intersecting our three-dimensional space" kind of way. No, I'm talking about these stats. The Ethereal Ooze is both an Ooze, and thus has no intelligence and 1 in Dex, Wis and Cha, and is the equivalent of a ghost, living on the Ethereal Plane and able to manifest as an incorporeal creature on the Material Plane. But since incorporeal creatures have no strength, the stats of a manifested Ethereal Ooze are as such: Str _, Dex 1, Con 22, Int _, Wis 1, Cha 1.
This ooze is the only monster in D&D 3.5 who natively only has a single stat above 1. It is also in a six-way tie for second place as monsters with the lowest sum of ability scores with the Tiny, Small and Medium animated objects, the Ectoplasmic Ooze and the Procupine Cactus^Sand who all have a total of 25 points in stats. The undisputed first place, obviously, goes to the shrieker fungus, with 16 points. It's not even close. However, the Ethereal Ooze has one trick up its sleeve. Let's say the Ooze brings a wizard with it in the Ethereal Plane. The wizard kills it, then casts Create Undead to animate it as a Corpse Creature (a template that can change any corporeal Ooze into an Undead, keeping its abilities and notably reducing its Dex by 2). If it then manifests, it reaches the absolute lowest possible stats in the game:
Str _, Dex 0, Con _, Int _, Wis 1, Cha 1, or a total of 2 points, a score that no other creature can reach with a single template, and below which no creature can ever go, no matter the number of templates you may apply. Except Corpse Creature Dream Element Shrieker Fungus I guess, but it's 3rd party so it doesn't count
Such is the Ethereal Ooze's only claim to fame.

- Huge Ooze, incorporeal when on the Material Plane, 12 RHD
- Str _, Dex 1, Con 22, Int _, Wis 1, Cha 1, no natural armor
- 15ft land speed
- Can go from fully ethereal to the Material Plane and back as a standard action (it still exists on the Ethereal when manifested on the Material). No attack when on the Material, but when it goes fully Ethereal, any Large or smaller creature sharing its space make a Will save DC 20 (the DC is fixed) or are brought with it to the Ethereal and are engulfed.
- When on the Ethereal : Str 28, one slam attack dealing +3d6 acid damage with Improved Grab and Constrict.


The Ethereal Ooze makes for a unique encounter, bringing PCs to the Ethereal Plane and battling them 1-to-1. But as a PC it suffers greatly from the balance of the game. In general, the PCs either fight a boss monster stronger than any one of them or a lot of weak mooks. If the party fights a boss, bringing it to the Ethereal is a sure way for the Ooze to get killed in 1v1 by it on the Ethereal, especially since its best defense (being incorporeal) doesn't work against ethereal creatures. And if the party fights mooks, getting one out of combat is not going to do much good if it means the Ethereal Ooze is out of the combat as well. This means that the Ooze will rarely if ever use its only ability in combat, not that it was ever easy to use, considering it's so slow and must use both a move to go over an opponent and a standard to bring it to the Ethereal. And without it, it's unfortunately awful. No innate attack, no useable mental stats, no hands, abysmal AC, no good save, no item slot, and no ability. Even Surrogate Spellcasting does not allow it to cast invocations since it has no appendages, Ghostly Grasp does not allow it to grab items (you couldn't take the feat anyway), it cannot speak so even Truenamer is out of the question. At least it has a Dexterity score, which means martial classes are not completely out of the question. But since it's incorporeal with no attack, even monk levels or totemist soulmelds only help it against ethereal creatures. There are three things I can see the Ethereal Ooze being good at while staying on the Material Plane. First, it could be a bard (or a dragon shaman). Even with Int 3, Bard gives you 2 skill points per level, and there has to be an instrument that an ooze could play (craft a ghost touch version). We know incorporeal creatures can make noise, so they should be able to hum some tune for bardic music. Now, it still won't be able to cast spells, but a spellless bard can still be a decent support character. Second, it could be a binder. Ronove allows it to manipulate items (including musical instruments) and increases its speed, Amon gives it a fire breath, Dahlver-Nar allows you to actually damage people by throwing yourself against spikes and using your enormous Con bonus, and Malphas makes raven. I like ravens. And finally, the true most important thing to do is being a Spellfire channeler. Even with low Dex, the Ethereal Ooze should be able to hit most of its ranged touch attacks, and its immense Con means that, if it can find a way to recharge (one member of the party with an at-will SLA, or binding the Green Lady if your DM allows Dungeon magazine content), each spellfire discharge will deal massive damage. High Con also means that it will be able to hold up to 4x Con with no problem once it enters Spellfire Channeler. Now, it doesn't mean the monster is good, these stats are still god-awful and its only ability will still harm it more often than not, but I think its incorporeality and affinity with spellfire are enough for 3 RHD, DLA-7. At really low level, when 28 Str and a slam is a good enough payoff that it's worth the hassle to bring someone to the Ethereal and beat them there, it gets carried by Etherealize, then it starts firing spellfire for 28d6 damage twice per fight once it enters Spellfire Channeler, and hope it can actually hit with them.


Isn't D&D 3.5 great? Even when something like this seems completely hopeless, there's always a way to build off of any specific chassis. Spellfire is just a niche mechanic hidden in a Forgotten Realms book and generally considered underpowered, but it becomes optimal in this very specific case. That's what hundreds of book in an 8-years period does to a game like D&D.
Next time, we will review the Fensir Rakka, but in the mean time I encourage you to read the discussion in the original thread about the Ethergaunts. It's great to see these veteran players arguing over these brokenly overpowered monsters, and over how much optimization is too much optimization. It's also an illustration of why I despise the existence of the Shapechange spell as a concept (and, to a lesser extent, that of Polymorph).

[Tzardok]

The zombie ooze would have Dex 1. Templates, just like other racial modifiers, can't reduce a stat below 1 unless they explicitely state it.

Also you should add the Str score it has when corporeal to the calculations, but that would ruin the joke.

[Dualight]

That, is impressively bad. The ability to go to the Ethereal and take something else along might allow for some team plays, if it is possible to leave another creature behind when going back to the Material. could allow for assassinations by dragging one victim to the Ethereal, where the rest of the party waits. Of course, if the Ooze cannot leave the Ethereal without putting anything it brought over from the Material back, even this won't work.
There are probably some other uses that I am not considering since the Ethereal Plane has never come up in any game of DnD I've played, so I'm not clear on what potential shenanigans you could embark on with at-will access to the Ethereal.

[loky1109]

Crypt Spawn Mineral Warrior Shrieker?
1 Wis, 1 Cha and that's all.

[Beni-Kujaku]

The zombie ooze would have Dex 1. Templates, just like other racial modifiers, can't reduce a stat below 1 unless they explicitely state it.

I was wondering that, but never saw that rule in the MM1. Where is it ?

if it is possible to leave another creature behind when going back to the Material. could allow for assassinations by dragging one victim to the Ethereal, where the rest of the party waits.

It is definitely possible to leave people on the Ethereal. Actually, the opposite may not be true, since the statblock never addresses the possibility of bringing people back to the Material. "Creatures freed of the ooze while ethereal remain in that state, and they must find their own way back to the Material Plane." That said, the only other piece of media featuring the Ethereal Ooze (Ascendancy of the Last, by Lisa Smedman) has its main character, stranded on the Ethereal, bully an Ethereal Ooze into bringing her back to the Material, so it's probably intended to be able to do both. Note that that book isn't to be blindly trusted on intent either, since the Ooze seems to be corporeal when manifested in it.

Crypt Spawn Mineral Warrior Shrieker?

That's very true. The shrieker remains the absolute king of weakness in 3.5.

[Tzardok]

I was wondering that, but never saw that rule in the MM1. Where is it ?

Combination of the fact that ability scores of 0 are in the glossaries only mentioned as a result of ability drain/damage, that under Non-Abilities the minimum a creature usually has for any ability is listed at 1, and that no player character can have any starting ability score of 0 (See DMG Monsters as Races).

[remetagross]

Impressive, really. Nice write-up for the ability score record, Beni.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Fensir Rakka

Fensirs and devourers Rakka,
giants who hate jokes 'bout "yo mama!".
All they're about is where they clash,
been around 30 years and their lore's still trash.

Fensirs, or "Ysgardian trolls" because they were supposed to represent the dwarf-like trolls of nordic mythology and Tolkien's works, which is clearly shown by their vulnerability to sunlight that turn them to stone (in 2e and 3e) or because they're literally trolls that were brought to Ysgard by giants and their regeneration coupled with Ysgard's properties of eventual revival of all creatures that die there made the trolls progressively mutate into Fensirs (in 5e). The males are warriors, the females are gatherers (pretty weird on the Plane of endless battles), they are generally born with twins, with singlebirths being considered unlucky, and after a female gives birth (or, in 5e, if she lives for a millenium on Ysgard), she may transform into a rakka ("devourer"), lose most of their intelligence, grow to Huge size, and become completely dependent on her clan to feed her until she dies, which doesn't take long considering her uncontrolled growth and the increased difficulty to feed her (which leads to her clan scouring the surrounding lands and stealing cattle and grain). And once she dies, the clan goes into a frenzy and starts randomly attacking surrounding villages.
This is all well and good, and rampaging fensirs make for decent random encounters, while a rakka makes for an okay boss, but in three editions in which fensirs appeared, one thing was never answered : "Why?" Why are they petrified by sunlight, why are they born as twins, why do their mothers turn into deformed hulks, why do they keep feeding the dumb thing that they know is doomed to die in a few weeks at the risk of putting the whole clan in peril, why do they start rampaging when she eventually dies ? As far as I could find, none of these things (except sunlight) has any basis in Tolkien's work or in nordic mythology (where trolls are so diverse that there's barely any common trait except roughly humanoid shape anyway). It would have taken a single paragraph to say something like "the mental link between fensir twins is exponentially extended to the whole clan when a fensir mutates into a rakka, merging all their minds into the one of the rakka and sharing her hunger to all fensirs in the area, who then feed the rakka like themselves. When the rakka eventually dies, the part of the fensirs' mind merged with her dies as well, confusing them and cursing them with irrational hunger and bloodlust until they die and are resurrected by Ysgard's properties." But there was nothing anywhere to explain any of it, and fensirs feel like a collection of traits with no common theme.

The regular fensir (skirmisher) got a strong LA+2 at the condition that sunlight vulnerability could feasibly be bypassed with an item, a feat or simply adventuring at night, mainly due to their 5th level wizard casting and really good stats, but the rakka having three times as many RHD doomed her to negative LA :

- Huge extraplanar Giant, 12 RHD
- +16 Str, -2 Dex, +10 Con, -8 Int, +4 Wis, -2 Cha, +11 NA, from a strong gish to animal-tier beatstick, becoming a rakka is not kind to the fensir.
- 2 slams, rock throwing, rock catching. A Giant you are, and like a Giant you'll act.
- SLAs: transmute rock to mud/mud to rock at will. When she dies, a rakka can place a Geas on the creature responsible.
- Sunlight Vulnerability: if a fensir is out in the sun, it's petrified as flesh to stone with no save. If a sunbeam or sunburst hits her, same thing if you fail a Fort save. Let's hope you have a big umbrella.

Reminds me of the dire rhino, but with hands, and two utility SLAs that will probably be used to destroy the foundations of that one shop that refused to give her discounts on the ground that "I don't care if the world is ending, I still have to feed my family". Strong 7 RHD, DLA-3. Next time, the Fhorge.

[remetagross]

As always, i don't like a PC being Huge, it's very annoying in a lot of adventuring situations. Apart from that, the stat boosts are not that impressive for the RHD. Sure you don't want to make it 6RHD?

[Metastachydium]

As always, i don't like a PC being Huge, it's very annoying in a lot of adventuring situations.

I kind of like it. The synergy with "you better stay in confined places half the time or turn into stone"… Is not really there, on the other hand.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The Crypt Warden (and the whole Deathless type) should never have existed as such, and simply be Undead, powered by other forces than the Negative Energy Plane. Honestly, I feel like it would have opened a design space. A kind of creatures with a dead body, but overflowing with so much Positive Energy that they just can't die. They could be victims (people who died on the Positive Energy Plane, which would actually make some plausible inhabitants for that plane), emissaries of good gods ("You. You don't get to die yet."), or even aberrations (not the creature type, but people who came back from the PEP changed, and could even be infectious, creating tumors and mutations around them the way being on the Positive Plane does). The Deathless type is an idea that was tarnished by a purpose instilled, that of simply being good Undead rather than being interesting creatures.

To be fair, a lot of rules which reference undead were written with the assumption that they were both always powered by negative energy and the only thing powered by negative energy. You'd either need to add some kind of big ruling that these undead don't qualify as undead for most of the effects that reference undead, or just make them non-undead and specify that a few things do affect them like undead. I don't see why Undead (positive) is any better than a Deathless creature type.

That said, the deathless as they exist are very silly. If I was made the king of D&D lore, I'd disentangle alignment from positive and negative energy. Undead can be good, evil clerics can cast cure spells as easily as good ones, cure spells are necromancy again. Yeah, I'd disentangle alignment from a lot of things, but fixing creatures whose personalities are ontologically evil is a lower priority than fixing creatures whose existence is ontologically evil.

Spoiler: Random Thoughts

Show

They're visually completely identical to skeletons, live in graveyards, and are called "Crypt Things". Not making them undead would border on false advertising.

New monster idea: An emaciated aberration that looks like a walking corpse, but feeds on positive energy. More than most living things, I mean.

Or a bone golem with a similar gimmick. I guess. Either way, it's nicer than giving your players a one-in-six chance of ending up in the bottom layers of a megadungeon and an equal chance of falling a few hundred feet on the surface. (At least later editions made it only scatter people horizontally.)

Yeah, he is! The picture is from an episode of the Billy and Mandy show with a really good song from Voltaire, and is basically an alien that eats the brains of an entire city. How cute!

Ah, nostalgia.
It was really weird discovering Voltaire properly, wondering why he sounded familiar, and then discovering he did that brain song from Billy & Mandy.

I mean, this still has a 2d12 Trample and a heavy gore with Augmented Critical. I'd probably give that dubious distinction to the Dire Barracuda^SW with its ability to [drum roll] deliver its single, 1d8 bite attack from 50% farther away than usual when charging!

That's its full attack, so it basically gets Pounce for free. What's not to like?

I personally think the main reason Dire Barracuda are so lame has little to do with its lackluster special ability; lots of dire animals have those. The difference is that big wolves or bears or tigers are, on a fundamental level, cool. Barracuda are mid-sized predatory fish. The largest are barely longer than five feet, and they're not even bulky five-footers. A bigger barracuda isn't even as cool as a mako shark, and mako sharks are far from the coolest sharks.

It's also an illustration of why I despise the existence of the Shapechange spell as a concept (and, to a lesser extent, that of Polymorph).

Shapechange is a cool gimmick for a master transmuter. Being able to freely and fluidly change one's shape into almost any living creature? That's some grand folkloric wizard stuff!

It's not so good as a tool every archmage can use. It should have been, like, a prestige class capstone or something.

Fensir Rakka

The males are warriors, the females are gatherers (pretty weird on the Plane of endless battles), they are generally born with twins, with singlebirths being considered unlucky, and after a female gives birth (or, in 5e, if she lives for a millenium on Ysgard), she may transform into a rakka ("devourer"), lose most of their intelligence, grow to Huge size, and become completely dependent on her clan to feed her until she dies, which doesn't take long considering her uncontrolled growth and the increased difficulty to feed her (which leads to her clan scouring the surrounding lands and stealing cattle and grain). And once she dies, the clan goes into a frenzy and starts randomly attacking surrounding villages.
This is all well and good, and rampaging fensirs make for decent random encounters, while a rakka makes for an okay boss, but in three editions in which fensirs appeared, one thing was never answered : "Why?" Why are they petrified by sunlight, why are they born as twins, why do their mothers turn into deformed hulks, why do they keep feeding the dumb thing that they know is doomed to die in a few weeks at the risk of putting the whole clan in peril, why do they start rampaging when she eventually dies?

IIRC, many folkloric trolls/giants/etc are both enemies and allies of the heroes/gods in different stories. Sometimes the aesir are smashing jotun skulls, sometimes a god falls in love with one of their daughters and tries to court her. Interpreting those stories as a metaphor for or reflection of the actual lives people lived when that folklore was being shaped, the trolls/giants/etc are kind of like neighboring tribes. Sometimes we make war, sometimes we make love, we might raid each others' flocks anyway.

That kind of dynamic, despite being pretty common in history (especially in regions without centralized states), is largely absent from D&D and similar fantasy. Elves hate orcs, generation in and generation out; drow hate dwarves equally in every century; if goblins are around, they're either raiding civilized settlements or planning war.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it's possible that the weird rakka life-cycle was an attempt to work a messy, inconsistent political dynamic work without challenging the writers' starting assumption that foriegn relations between different groups of people should remain mostly consistent over time and tied to their...(what's the least insulting way to end this sentence?)...heritage.

Most of the time, the fensir can be peaceful neighbors (disregarding the fact that their home plane is supposed to be an eternal series of Warhammer Fantasy matches). They hunt and gather and trade. But occasionally, one of their women turns into a horrible hungry monster, and the whole clan suddenly turns hostile to their neighbors. But once they calm down from their rampage, they'll probably be nice again.

This could be a neat life cycle for, like, alien kudzu monsters or something. They act like weird-looking but normal animals for a while, then rampage to feed the queen, then scatter when the queen dies, spreading the kudzu around. But the fensir don't reproduce like that, and they're people, at least as much as orcs are, which makes them acting like this weird.

[Beni-Kujaku]

As always, i don't like a PC being Huge, it's very annoying in a lot of adventuring situations. Apart from that, the stat boosts are not that impressive for the RHD. Sure you don't want to make it 6RHD?

Being Huge is only annoying if you have to go through a 5ft space, which is not that often, especially when you can Stone to Mud at will. You can just squeeze in regular corridors. On the other hand, being Huge gives you better grappling and combat maneuvers, better carrying capacity, better damage and especially better reach, which is crucial for warrior-type monsters. I know it has drawbacks (which depend a lot on the kind of campaign), but in general I always consider being size categories away from Medium as an advantage, especially when the creature has good reach. Also, at that point it's also a matter of consistency. The rakka has hands and some SLAs, it's clearly better than the dire rhino, and more relative to the Cloud Giant (though the Int hurts a lot of course) and especially the Gray Render, it would be weird to give it any less than 7 RHD.

To be fair, a lot of rules which reference undead were written with the assumption that they were both always powered by negative energy and the only thing powered by negative energy. You'd either need to add some kind of big ruling that these undead don't qualify as undead for most of the effects that reference undead, or just make them non-undead and specify that a few things do affect them like undead. I don't see why Undead (positive) is any better than a Deathless creature type.

Hey GWG! Welcome back to the forum, it's good to have you back!

On the subject of Deathless, I kinda agree. It's sadly hard to elegantly reconcile mechanics and lore and something that is basically undead but unaffected by undead-based effects is probably better as another type. It's the same thing as the separation between Fiend and Celestial in 5e despite the fact that devils and demons are as separate as demons from archons, which also forced them to make slaads Aberrations and modrons as Constructs despite the fact that they're Outsiders like demons and angels. That doesn't change the fact that Deathless should have some better identity than "Undead but good".

That said, the deathless as they exist are very silly. If I was made the king of D&D lore, I'd disentangle alignment from positive and negative energy.

I guess that a matter of preference. I like the fact that alignment can have mechanical effect and that (for example), evil acts slowly make the world a metaphysically worse place beyond their direct tangible consequences. Actually, having Evil as an alignment be defined by its link with negative energy would be interesting. An Evil act is something that brings negative energy into the material plane or hinders life (positive energy) for the sake of it (killing outside self-defense and causing harm to living creatures), which both can create a conduit to the Negative Plane. But then again, I've always preferred world-building to real-world implications of fantasy worlds, so maybe I'm not the best to ask about that sort of things.

New monster idea: An emaciated aberration that looks like a walking corpse, but feeds on positive energy. More than most living things, I mean.

Or a bone golem with a similar gimmick. I guess. Either way, it's nicer than giving your players a one-in-six chance of ending up in the bottom layers of a megadungeon and an equal chance of falling a few hundred feet on the surface. (At least later editions made it only scatter people horizontally.)

Forced party-splitting is the surest way to complicate the game for everyone while not having too much fun, but yours feel a bit too much like "gotcha" monsters to me. My proposition would be indeed a Construct thing, but that can summon the spirits and/or bodies of the dead to protect the crypt, where every round of combat a new ghost or ghoul is raised, then goes back to the grave at the end of combat.

Shapechange is a cool gimmick for a master transmuter. Being able to freely and fluidly change one's shape into almost any living creature? That's some grand folkloric wizard stuff!

My problem does not lie in the fluid shapechanging. It lies in "You gain all extraordinary and supernatural abilities (both attacks and qualities) of the assumed form". In 3.5, there are monsters that can do anything. When the answer to "how can I do this thing" can be invariably answered by "Polymorph into something that can", it defeats the point of optimization at all. It removes the uniqueness of a monster if any wizard can access its abilities. It constrains game design on WotC's side by forcing them to give too many HD to many monsters to prevent Polymorph from being too free. It makes actual gameplay boring by making it optimal to dive through sourcebooks in the middle of a session. It's basically a mockery of the most unique and innovative parts of 3.5 (the incredible variety of monsters and sourcebooks, and the ability for players to actual play monsters) that changes them into something boring favoring relying on a single spell for everything. There's a reason "a level 17 wizard can become it, so it must be LA-0" has become kind of a meme in the original thread. A single spell should never meaningfully impact the power of an entire full spellcasting class, but Polymorph and Shapechange do. If Assume Supernatural Ability didn't exist, Polymorph acted like Alter Self with more options and Shapechange acted like Polymorph, it might have been bearable, but right now it's just the worst mistake of the edition. When the devs literally create a new subschool of magic to replace that one spell, you know it should never have been created in the first place.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it's possible that the weird rakka life-cycle was an attempt to work a messy, inconsistent political dynamic work without challenging the writers' starting assumption that foreign relations between different groups of people should remain mostly consistent over time.

That's an interesting reading. I can see it as an inspiration, especially considering the number of "dumb destroyer"-type trolls which could have inspired the rakkas, but wanting to justify plot hooks (yeah, in an RPG world, any sudden behavior change of an important group of people is little more than an excuse for a short quest) doesn't excuse not giving any explanation to the behavior in question. If anything, it makes it even more important, since PCs are likely to ask questions and try to find solutions to prevent the fensir march from happening again, and won't stand for "it is what it is" as the reason for two sessions of combat to calm the fensirs. For example, the quaraphons were also full of obvious plot hooks, but they had explanations (superstitions, traditions, and the big meeting once per decade being a trading hub between quaraphons). The fensirs only have "when she dies, they go on a rampage.", which doesn't give the PCs or DMs anything to work with, and is thus (in my opinion) a failure of a monster description.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I guess that a matter of preference. I like the fact that alignment can have mechanical effect and that (for example), evil acts slowly make the world a metaphysically worse place beyond their direct tangible consequences.

My philosophy is firmly consequentialist. The idea of doing an Evil act which doesn't have tangible negative consequences is a contradiction. I don't care how many gods I anger or how much my evil-ometer goes up; if committing a sin has net positive consequences, it is good by definition.

Beyond that, there's the fact that D&D has historically been pretty messy with how alignment works.
You have humans, who are good or evil if they perform good or evil acts, with both "good" and "evil" (usually) being defined loosely enough that this framework makes sense for everyone.

Then you have demons and devils and so on, which in D&D cosmology are literally made of evil; they perform evil acts because they are ontologically evil. They're not big mindless monsters driven to kill by instinct or whatever, they're just intelligent, free-willed beings whose natures force them to perform evil acts. Making that work is tough, but it's not impossible. I mean, they're literally made out of evil; that kind of thing can be used to hack your way through a lot of quandries.

Then there's everything in between. You have things like chromatic dragons and mohrgs and aboleths, which are not made of evil like fiends but are always evil. You have creatures whose existence is somehow harmful to other creatures, like vampires or mind flayers, and you have other creatures like most other undead and some constructs whose existence isn't harmful in any apparent fashion but whose mere existence is treated as Evil. And of course, at the near end you have ordinary people who are theoretically as free-willed as humans, but who nevertheless are usually Evil.

The idea of alignment having mechanical effects or evil acts having some kind of metaphysical byproduct are not, in and of themselves, bad ideas. The problem is how D&D has traditionally tied those mechanical effects or (implied) metaphyiscal byproducts not simply to actions, but to types of people. This is most egregious with orcs and goblins and kobolds, but just the idea of labeling a free-willed being as Good or Evil—of dividing not just actions but people into black and white categories (and 50% gray) obscures the actual complexities driving people to do good or evil.

To steal an observation from Red Overlysarcastic, Anakin Skywalker dances all around the alignment chart without changing his motivations (or changing his actions much). He's always trying to protect the people he loves, whether that's his love interest or his children, and he's always willing to kill people to do so. He's probably Chaotic Good (or at worst Chaotic Neutral) in his youth, starts drifting towards Chaotic Evil when the Emperor-to-be starts convincing him to view the Jedi as threats to Padme, then to Lawful Evil when he has nobody left except the Emperor he serves, then finally becomes Lawful Neutral (or possibly even good) in time to kill that Emperor to save his son. For the most part, the difference between Good Anakin and Evil Vader is the difference between killing Sith with a blue lightsaber and killing Jedi with a red one.

Yes, it's more evil to murder a tyrant than a nice space wizard, the former is arguably a Good act, but has someone who goes from committing Evil acts for personal reasons to committing a Good act for the same personal reasons really changed their essential character? I don't think so. The only sensible way to classify Anakin in the D&D alignment system is to either say that he changes alignment every movie (which makes him sound less consistent than he is), or to call him Evil (which flattens his character to a ridiculous degree).

And as a reminder, we're talking about a story where one's morality can usually be judged from the color of their clothes and weapons. Star Wars is not, as a rule, morally complex; when your method for describing people's morality can't accurately or meaningfully describe a Star Wars character, it's only useful for the most straightforward stories. Life, Warcraft 1 campaign straightforward.

...I'm getting off-track. The biggest problem with alignment is that it tries to be an universal and absolute system of ethics which is both meaningful and empirically testable (whether with detect evil or by discussing philosophy with friendly outsiders of various alignments).

The simplest solution, in my opinion, would be to make the alignments four overlapping divine factions. You have Good gods and Evil gods, whose philosophical beliefs roughly line up with what mortals think of when they talk about "good" or "evil," and you similarly have Law and Chaos gods. Paladins are warriors following gods in the Law and Good factions; chromatic dragons are always Evil not because they are genetically cruel, but because they are bound to Tiamat, who is an Evil goddess. If you want metaphysical consequences, say that actions in line with a given god's philosophy give them a smidge more power in the mortal realm; charity gives the Good gods more influence over the world, mass murder gives the Evil gods more influence.

That's an interesting reading. I can see it as an inspiration, especially considering the number of "dumb destroyer"-type trolls which could have inspired the rakkas, but wanting to justify plot hooks (yeah, in an RPG world, any sudden behavior change of an important group of people is little more than an excuse for a short quest) doesn't excuse not giving any explanation to the behavior in question. If anything, it makes it even more important, since PCs are likely to ask questions and try to find solutions to prevent the fensir march from happening again, and won't stand for "it is what it is" as the reason for two sessions of combat to calm the fensirs. For example, the quaraphons were also full of obvious plot hooks, but they had explanations (superstitions, traditions, and the big meeting once per decade being a trading hub between quaraphons). The fensirs only have "when she dies, they go on a rampage.", which doesn't give the PCs or DMs anything to work with, and is thus (in my opinion) a failure of a monster description.

To be blunt, I think the core problem is trying not to challenge the writers' starting assumption that foreign relations between different groups of people should remain mostly consistent over time. Coming up with a biological or metaphysical reason why a given race sometimes randomly goes from friendly to enemy, just so you have an excuse to have that race's relationship with other races vary over time, is...dumb. So is the tendency for writers to write every race to live in de facto ethnostates without seeming aware that that's what they've written, simply by reproducing the same familiar tropes used by every other fantasy author.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Fhorge

A boar from the Outlands, so obviously more dangerous, and the posterchild of something that would have been a Beast in early 3.0, but is an animal in Fiend Folio and 3.5.

It borrows abilities from various animals (Powerful Charge, Improved Grab, Worry, Ferocity, Scent) and has better physical stats than most Dire animals (+18 Str, +10 Con, +8 natural armor), but has no hands and no unique ability.

Slightly better than a dire bear, and similar to the dire rhinoceros. Weak 7 RHD, DLA-3. Next time, the flame snakes.

[remetagross]

A boaring one, for sure. Yeah, I like 7 RHD.

I've always been surprised by how few imaginary animals WoTC has created, the Fhorge being one.

[Metastachydium]

Fhorge

A boaring one, for sure.

[G-r-o-a-n-s.]

Yeah, I like 7 RHD.

But yeah, not much to see here.

I've always been surprised by how few imaginary animals WoTC has created, the Fhorge being one.

And the Chordevoc, who's a BIRDY, another! Let's not forget the Chordevoc. (If MM6 runs out over in the other LA thread, I'm so going to push for RotW!)

[GreatWyrmGold]

Also the Sea Tiger, which is just kinda weird.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Flame Snakes

Not to be mistaken for the Fire Snakes, or the Thoqqua, or the Salamanders, or the Firenewt, or the Ignan Yuan-ti...

The Flame Snakes don't have any actual connection with the plane of Fire, they are simply snakes imbued with the fire from an evil mulhorandi deity (Apep in 2e, Set in 3e), which makes them both super hot (no, not that way, I'm not judging, but I care for your well-being) and absolutely eeeeeviiiil! Basically, they act as a serpentine mafia, threatening and making deals with powerful people as mercenaries to gain more wealth. One thing that makes them really cool in my opinion is their venom. On top of dealing Str damage like a regular poison (though not like a snake poison, those deal Con damage), the venom is infused with fire and makes your blood literally boil as it courses through your veins, which deals damage every turn until you roll the second Fortitude save. Basically, you get magma directly injected in your blood vessels. Not only is it pretty metal, it makes each of their bites actually dangerous for PCs. Let's say a flame snake bites you for 1d8+2+2d6=13 damage and you fail your first Fort save, you eventually lose 20 more HP during the next 10 rounds with no save.
They come in three variety, Minor, Lesser, and finally Greater. The Minor Flame Snake, which got LA+0 due to it having only one RHD, is basically a regular snake, but a bit more intelligent and with magma instead of venom. They like to collect gold trinkets, but their long-term memory is bad enough that they often forget where they hid their loot (that is actually pretty adorable. They're just children pretending to be villains). They are bullied by the Lesser Flame Snake, which are just little balls of anger and frustrations, as intelligent as half-orcs, getting persecuted by the Greater Snakes and getting revenge on the smaller ones. They have a bone spike at the end of their tail, have Fast Healing and surprisingly Uncanny Dodge, and can now spit balls of magma. But they're really nothing compared to the Greater Snakes. Absolutely enormous, the Greater Flame Snake is as wide as the Lesser one is long. They are infused with power from the Nine Hells, giving them fire-themed SLAs, negative energy damage on its attacks, and damaging death throes. They want to regain their supposed devilish power, but there's a good chance they're just hyping themselves up, and they never had this kind of power.
The design of the Greater FS is a bit puzzling. Some of its scales are black, painting ankh-shaped symbols all over its body. The ankh is the ancient egyptian ambiguous word for 'life', meaning everything from 'breathing' (and thus 'air') to 'reincarnation' or even 'godhood' in the sense of 'eternal life'. It may be simply a reference to its link to mulhorandi (egyptian) gods, or it may mean that it is indeed the reincarnation of a powerful fiend as they're pretending. Or it's a yakuza-style tattoo and they just use it as a symbol. But the most obvious reference is how the Egyptian underworld is absolutely filled to the brim with snakes. Fire-breathing snakes acting as street lights, poisonous snakes guarding the gates of hell, multi-headed snakes in Osiris's domain, a giant snake acting as a barque for Ra during the night, you name it, they have it! And obviously, the ultimate snakes, Mehen and Apophis (also known as, you guessed it, Apep), fight every night to decide of the fate of the Sun. So of course a snake with Ankh symbols is both an IRL reference to these myths, and explains why in-lore the Greater Snakes think they are reincarnated devils. Most snakes in their religion literally come from the underworld, and their body is marked with the symbol of cyclic life most associated with said underworld.
Anyway, now that the lore is out of the way, what are they worth as PCs?

Lesser Flame Snake, Medium Magical Beast [Fire], 8 RHD :
- +4 Str, +8 Dex, +4 Con, -2 Int, +4 Wis, +2 Cha, +7 natural armor. Not bad stats. Tiger Claw Swordsage?
- One bite, one tail spike, one magma spit (ranged, 3d6 fire. The spike and bite deal +2d6 fire, and the bite injects a 1d4 Str/1d4 Str poison that also deals 2 damage per round
- Fast Healing 3, Uncanny Dodge
- Constrict. One of the very few monsters to have Constrict without Improved Grab or similar ability.

The snake's offense is a bit underwhelming, though I like the bite. It deals decent damage and should make a good base for offensive maneuvers. It also has pretty good, well-rounded stats, and starts every fight with full life thanks to Fast Healing. That looks like a pretty strong 4 RHD, maybe even 5. And of course DLA-2.

Greater Flame Snake, Huge Magical Beast [Fire], 17 RHD :
- +16 Str, +6 Dex, +10 Con, +0 Int, +4 Wis, +6 Cha, +18 natural armor. At that point, all you need is more dakka. Barbarian, Warblade, and prestige classes. Nice natural armor, btw.
- One bite, one crush, one tail spike. All dealing 1d6 fire and 1d6 negative. The bite has Improved Grab (Constrict, Swallow Whole), and poison (1d4 Str/1d4 Str and 4 fire damage per round).
- Breath Weapon (6d6 fire and 6d6 negative, 1d4 rounds cooldown), SLAs 1 or 3/day (fireball, fire shield, firestorm, flamestrike, maximized fireball), fiery aura (1d6 damage/round, 15ft). If you play a greater flame snake, you should call it Hans, because ze Flammenwerfer ist hier.
- Death Throes : 15 fire and 15 negative energy damage in a 50ft radius.
- Fast Healing 5, DR 15/Magic, SR 10+HD, Scent, Uncanny Dodge. Pretty Good.

There's quite a lot going on, but definitely not enough for the extremely competitive ECL 17 environment. The Greater Flame Snake deals a lot of damage, through many means, but it still is almost completely helpless against the very common immunity to fire. Still, decent SR and other defenses, good bite, decent grappling capacity, high Str. 10 RHD, DLA-5


I love the little details sprinkled here and there. The Minor snakes are forgetful and sometimes lose their hoard, the Greater bully the Lesser, who bully the Minor, they work both as mercenaries and mafia bosses, they brag that they're reincarnated devils among themselves, but it has no real verifiable basis. It just gives so much character to something that, at its core, is just "snake, but with fire". It's actually impressive how much more enjoyable this entry is compared to something that is more intricate but does not give personality to the monster, such as the fensir. Bravo.
Next time, we will review the Formians from Mechanus, so if Durant is your favorite Pokémon, stay tuned!

[Tzardok]

And I am very curious and can't wait to see what you come up with! I'd like to see a Deathless composed of several souls acting like a council for actions to take, or a sad Deathless originating from a good Druid that gathers animals the way Undead push them away, but hurts them if they come too close with an aura of uncontrolled healing, which makes it isolate itself.

Hey Beni. I made my first deathless. Check it out and see if it's interesting enough.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Hey Beni. I made my first deathless. Check it out and see if it's interesting enough.

Wow! I love this guy. Really, we don't have enough support monsters, nor do we have enough monsters that could actually be helpful to the party and could remain with them for several sessions, and you did it while adding an element of mystery that can serve as a plot hook for later adventures. Great design, congratulations!

[GreatWyrmGold]

Not to be mistaken for the Fire Snakes, or the Thoqqua, or the Salamanders, or the Firenewt, or the Ignan Yuan-ti...

Hey, at least a third of those have qualities that meaningfully distinguish them from the other flaming serpents!

Basically, they act as a serpentine mafia, threatening and making deals with powerful people as mercenaries to gain more wealth.

That actually sounds like a fun worldbuilding concept. The leading crime syndicate is a bunch of talking snakes.

The Minor Flame Snake...like to collect gold trinkets, but their long-term memory is bad enough that they often forget where they hid their loot (that is actually pretty adorable. They're just children pretending to be villains).

I'm starting to like the Flamenewts, from a worldbuilding perspective.

They are bullied by the Lesser Flame Snake, which are just little balls of anger and frustrations, as intelligent as half-orcs, getting persecuted by the Greater Snakes and getting revenge on the smaller ones.

the Greater Flame Snake...want to regain their supposed devilish power, but there's a good chance they're just hyping themselves up, and they never had this kind of power.

Less fun, but it wouldn't take that much to work this into a theme about the nature of power.

Absolutely enormous, the Greater Flame Snake is as wide as the Lesser one is long.

That can't be right.
(google noises)
Okay, from the art it looks like the Greater Ignan Snake is as thick as the Minor one is long. And the Lesser is probably about as long as the Greater's circumference. But in any case, I find it odd that one jumps from Small to Medium and the next just skips Large. Though the Lesser snake can become large with just one HD of advancement.

Or it's a yakuza-style tattoo and they just use it as a symbol.

The ancient Egyptian equivalent of Chinese restaurant menu tattoos.
But however poorly they reflect the historical legacies the fire snakes claim for legitimacy, they fulfill their purpose. Authenticity doesn't matter, just the appearance of authenticity, and it's not like the average fire snake is that familiar with ancien Egyptian esoterica.

[Metastachydium]

The design of the Greater FS is a bit puzzling. Some of its scales are black, painting ankh-shaped symbols all over its body. The ankh is the ancient egyptian ambiguous word for 'life', meaning everything from 'breathing' (and thus 'air') to 'reincarnation' or even 'godhood' in the sense of 'eternal life'.

Which is eleven kinds of hilarious for something that deals hefty amounts of negative energy through breathing at things, by the by.

- Death Throes : 15 fire and 15 negative energy damage in a 50ft radius.

Now, that's underwhelming on a HD 17 killing machine wannabe, on the other hand.

I love the little details sprinkled here and there. The Minor snakes are forgetful and sometimes lose their hoard, the Greater bully the Lesser, who bully the Minor, they work both as mercenaries and mafia bosses, they brag that they're reincarnated devils among themselves, but it has no real verifiable basis. It just gives so much character to something that, at its core, is just "snake, but with fire". It's actually impressive how much more enjoyable this entry is compared to something that is more intricate but does not give personality to the monster, such as the fensir. Bravo.

As the resident flower who keeps not adding enough fluff to things, I must admit there's a very good point there. It's a bit like the Gray Render, really, if with a less forgettable chassis to go with the lovely lore.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Now, that's underwhelming on a HD 17 killing machine wannabe.

There are two kinds of Death Throes. Some are designed to make every victory into a pyrrhic victory, if the PCs don't prepare for it. Others are basically celebratory fireworks that some idiot set off right on the battlefield.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Formian observer

You picked the wrong day to mess around with my tight crew, oh, ooh!
There's no escaping it, I can perceive you,
So here's what we gonna do....
Me and my boys gonna mess you up!

The ant-like formians are, with the modrons and the inevitables, one of the three exemplar races populating Mechanus, the Plane of Law, and arguably the most numerous of the three. They are extremely expansionists and create many hive-cities wherever they go, and thus wage an endless war against any who stand in their way, though they know better than to mess with modrons or inevitables. To help in said war, a few formians are born with extreme specialization in a single role. That's what an observer is: a four-eyed drone acting as both a spy and a communication tower, coordinating the attack of other formians to great effectiveness and negating any possibility of ambush. Sadly, this means that some of its abilities are only useful when other formians are around.

- Medium Outsider (Extraplanar, Law), 9 RHD
- +2 Str, +4 Dex, +4 Con, +8 Int, +8 Wis, +6 Cha, +5 natural armor. Decent bonus, but weirdly distributed.
- One Sting attack with poison (1d6 Int/1d6 Int). Int-damaging poison is really rare, but that doesn't make this sting good, especially since it is its only attack.
- 250ft telepathy, all-around vision, lots of at-will SLAs : Detect Chaos/magic/thoughts, Clairvoyance, Charm Monster, True Seeing. It can perceive you. And your mom. And your embarassing secrets from highschool. And the heartbeat of that mouse under your hat, if it takes the Mindsight feat. Basically, the observer is a spy, very obviously.
- Immunity to cold, resistance 20 to fire, sonic and lightning, SR 14+HD. That's some gooood defenses, especially with Outsider saves. Now, if only it could fly...
- Hive Mind with other formians if a queen is at less than 50 miles, and if it looks at an opponent for multiple rounds in a row, all formians in the Hive Mind gain +1 to hit per round. Broken in a formian war, useless in a party when no queen's around.

So, the observer is definitely an out-of-combat monster. Unlimited clairvoyance is impressively good to keep tab on visited locations, it can give permanent true seeing to the whole party, can charm NPCs relentlessly, can communicate with any creature through telepathy, and has a crap-TON of skill points. An observer with 16 Int pre-racial adjustment has 15 skill points per level, enough to keep more than half of the rogue's skill list maxed out (less than 75% of its skill points are listed in its statblock, though). However, in combat, though its defenses are good, its offense is very much lacking. No flight, a single attack, and Charm Monster with a -4 to the DC won't make it a worthwhile ally. I guess Factotum, or Exemplar, or justice of weald and woe, or simply rogue are decent choices. The observer gets a bit carried by its Outsider type, but I cannot see it below 7, and probably 8 RHD, DLA-1.

It's interesting that actual ants also have ultra-specialized individuals whose entire existence are dedicated to a single role. My favorites are the door-ant whose heads are literally doors to the colony's entrance, and honeypot ants, who have a bloated abdomen keeping large quantities of honey that they regurgitate to feed their sisters, acting as living larders. You can read about them before we next cover the Fossergrim.

[remetagross]

It's not the worst monster out there. I'd go with 8 RHD though. Not only does this match the LA=stat adjustement / 4 rule, but Outsider HDs are way better than the norm. The ability modifiers are really good, as well, with no penalty. You could go Psychic Rogue and get some good mileage out of that Int stat, or gish Ardent and exploit their weird power selection system to still be up do date with regard to power level.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

♫...My private eyes, they're watching you. They see your every move...♫

[Metastachydium]

The ant-like formians are, with the modrons and the inevitables, one of the three exemplar races populating Mechanus

Wait, Formians are actual, official exemplars?

They are extremely expansionists and create many hive-cities wherever they go, and thus wage an endless war against any who stand in their way, though they know better than to mess with modrons or inevitables.

Yeah, they are a far better fit for Acheron than Mechanus.

To help in said war, a few formians are born with extreme specialization in a single role. That's what an observer is: a four-eyed drone acting as both a spy and a communication tower, coordinating the attack of other formians to great effectiveness and negating any possibility of ambush. Sadly, this means that some of its abilities are only useful when other formians are around.

- Medium Outsider (Extraplanar, Law), 9 RHD
- +2 Str, +4 Dex, +4 Con, +8 Int, +8 Wis, +6 Cha, +5 natural armor. Decent bonus, but weirdly distributed.
- One Sting attack with poison (1d6 Int/1d6 Int). Int-damaging poison is really rare, but that doesn't make this sting good, especially since it is its only attack.

An intelligence officer running a (wait for it) counter-Intelligence operation is still funny, nevertheless.

So, the observer is definitely an out-of-combat monster. Unlimited clairvoyance is impressively good to keep tab on visited locations, it can give permanent true seeing to the whole party, can charm NPCs relentlessly, can communicate with any creature through telepathy, and has a crap-TON of skill points. An observer with 16 Int pre-racial adjustment has 15 skill points per level, enough to keep more than half of the rogue's skill list maxed out (less than 75% of its skill points are listed in its statblock, though).

Hey, I actually like that a lot!

However, in combat, though its defenses are good, its offense is very much lacking.

Well, that makes it the perfect buffer/debuffer! You can't even smash the glass cannon, because it's not made of glass (nor is it a cannon, but hey)! There was this game on this forum where I played a Spirit Shaman; the whole build was all about stupid perception skills and telling Marshals to go cry in the corner via distributing extra attacks by way of the Snake's Swiftness line. I had fun.

I guess Factotum, or Exemplar, or justice of weald and woe, or simply rogue are decent choices.

Swashbuckler? That's quite some INT to damage! And at a high enough level, Daring Outlaw muight make it even better.

It's interesting that actual ants also have ultra-specialized individuals whose entire existence are dedicated to a single role. My favorites are the door-ant whose heads are literally doors to the colony's entrance, and honeypot ants, who have a bloated abdomen keeping large quantities of honey that they regurgitate to feed their sisters, acting as living larders.

Termites are the same. Did you know one of their species has suicide bomber modified workers whose job is to wade into melee and explode into a shower of sticky, caustic goo when grabbed?

[Tzardok]

Wait, Formians are actual, official exemplars?

3.0 tried to push hard on making them the embodiments of Lawful Neutral, and when that didn't pan out they tried the same with the newly invented inevitables (who aren't even outsiders, but who cares?). The designers of 3.x seemingly did their best to just forget that modrons exist.
(Also, the term exemplar in that meaning technically originated on this forum in afroakuma's Planar Questions Thread and never appeared in official 3.x works. But no, by that definition they aren't exemplars (they don't use petitioners to make more of them or evolve into higher caste-species).)

Yeah, they are a far better fit for Acheron than Mechanus.

Fun fact: formians originally hail from Arcadia and only appeared in Mechanus after the fall of Nemausus. They are an invasive (in both meanings of the word) species.