Got any cool monster concepts?

[Pauwel]

Hello, all creatures in the Playground.

I'm going to be GM'ing a game in a few weeks. The setting is homebrew; it's centered around monster hunting and is going to be partly inspired by The Witcher and various vampire hunting movies and games, although most of it is original stuff... at least so far.
It's not really a horror campaign, though. I'm aiming for heroic and cinematic, yet darkly themed gothic fantasy. Much like the movie Van Helsing, though hopefully a lot less campy.

Anyway, I was hoping to having original monsters alongsides horror classics like vampires, werewolves and such things. I was hoping that you Playgrounders might have some suggestions for monsters I could use in the campagin; either typical monsters that I've missed or a cool monster you've come up with on your own.

Here's my list o' monsters so far (besides the ones I've come up with myself):

Vampires (in many varieties)
Werewolves
Zombies
Ghouls
Mummies
Wizards (of many different traditions)
Golems
Demons
Ghosts and other such spirits
Basilisk
Lizardmen

Thanks in advance for any help you might give!

[Collin152]

Wendigos.
The most overlooked folk monster there is.

You must have a Wendigo!

[BRC]

Wendigos.
The most overlooked folk monster there is.

You must have a Wendigo!

Perhaps even Vampire Wendigos


Some more ideas

El Chupacabra
Clowns
Creepy Dolls

[ColonelFuster]

(Agrees with Collin)

Check out the Anthropomorphic Animal concept in savage species to throw your PCs a curveball.

And if you want homebrew monsters, I beleive you're in the wrong section of the forum. Good luck there!

[Zocelot]

Elemental undead.

Take an undead, and give them the appropriate abilities from the elemental entry.

Fire Vampire Wendigos

[Collin152]

Also, hags. Call them Witches if you want, but use Hags.

This sounds like a game I'd want to play in, also... I'm goign to need to drum up some of my buddies for a similar game.

[FoE]

Hags are a good choice for a sort of gothic fantasy. Have them command legions of rats and ravens, and if you're willing to homebrew a monster, develop some kind of scarecrow construct.

Succubi are great. Have your party go after a succubi that's posing as a mortal companion to a lord of some kind; they have to oppose his troops as well as her. Check out Lamias in the 4E Monster Manual; they're pretty good.

Constructs can be useful; flesh golems are an obvious option, but I would also use steam-powered or clockwork monstrosities. There was a book I read one time where the golem was the pieces of a treant that had re-assembled itself into a rough approximation of its former self, and was terrorizing a village where the people who once destroyed it came from.

All kinds of undead are good, especially ghosts and the like. If this is gothic fantasy, feel free to have a quest or two where the heroes are trying to release a ghost from their torment by taking down its killer.

There's a D20 Modern creature called the "charred one" which would be good for a campaign like this. Basically it's a fiery ghost that was murdered through arson and rises to track down its killer. Along the way it randomly starts fires as it pursues its murderer; that's an easy way to get heroes involved.

If you want to use fairy creatures, make them the Pan's Labyrinth type.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Heroes of Horror has quite a few of exactly the type of monsters you're looking for.

[xPANCAKEx]

jellygoat - think gelatenous cube, with a real appetite

[Revanmal]

The Jabberwocky (weakness to Vorpal weapons :P)

Swarms of all kinds

Death Knights would be good for a castle dungeon.

Try some Lovecraftian-horror type monsters if you want some psychological stuff going on.

[Collin152]

Dopplegangers.

Can't fight monsters without a shapechanger flavored mexican standoff.

[TomTheRat]

A Blue Slime Draws Near

[Fhaolan]

Black Dogs are always good, just don't go with the temptation of doing a Hound of the Baskerville knock-off. Think Wild Hunt instead.

[Collin152]

Black Dogs are always good, just don't go with the temptation of doing a Hound of the Baskerville knock-off. Think Wild Hunt instead.

Both Shadow Mastiffs and Yeth Hounds provide stats for these beasties.



Also, use Gargoyles.

[Breltar]

Cloakers
Random Tentacled creatures in pools/wells/ponds
Undead of non traditional intelligent monsters (undead gnolls/bugbears/etc)
Undead Animals (undead direbear!)
Dire Vampire Bats
Undead Ettins

Door eater - Door that is unlocked and appears to be a normal room like the building it is in. When the characters all enter they are actually in its mouth and get attacked by tentacle-like tongues. It is based on illusions so those that are more resistant would have a chance to figure it out before the rogue goes dashing in etc. Of course the door behind them turns into basically a porticullis of teeth that close. (Think the asteroid worm in star wars vs millennium falcon)

[RTGoodman]

Hags are a good choice for a sort of gothic fantasy. Have them command legions of rats and ravens, and if you're willing to homebrew a monster, develop some kind of scarecrow construct.

I do love me some scarecrow monsters. (But that could just be because I really like scarecrows for some reason. It may or may not be because of a series of terrible movies I watched with some friends one weekend. )

In other news, if you're looking for some scarecrows and have a D&D Insider account thingie (they're still free, so you might as well sign up for now), one of the adventures in one of the last two issues of Dungeon Magazine online is about a scarecrow construct that comes to life to wreak havoc while the PCs are celebrating a harvest festival in a small hamlet.

[mikeejimbo]

Faeries. Old School Faeries, the malevolent kind.

[BRC]

Faeries. Old School Faeries, the malevolent kind.

FEEGLESWARM!

What, your all thinking it.

[Collin152]

Faeries. Old School Faeries, the malevolent kind.

Like a Nymph that kicks your ass before you hit on her?

[chiasaur11]

You know, Hellboy has some good monstrosities.
We've got floating brains with psychic powers, tiny demon servents of one of the first races in the history of life, fat golems, a giant worm that mutates people into frog demons, and giant frankenstinian apes.

Heck, you could even use the heroes. The beast of the apocolypse, fishmen, and ectoplasm in a suit are all good archetypes.

[FoE]

I do love me some scarecrow monsters. (But that could just be because I really like scarecrows for some reason. It may or may not be because of a series of terrible movies I watched with some friends one weekend. )

Ugh. I'm well aware of those films. Pumpkinhead is better.

Yeah, I saw that Insider piece. I also remember the scarecrow from the 1E Fiend Folio. For some reason it put you to sleep when it hit you. Like much in the Fiend Folio (the book that gave us the infamous 'flumph'), it didn't make much sense.

Heh. All this talk of scarecrows has reminded me of a Fighting Fantasy book I read in my misspent youth called "Legend of the Shadow Warriors" that put you up against an army of scarecrows. Except they were called Haggworts, and their pumpkin-like heads contained magic that animated their bodies. They were terrific fighters, but they couldn't withstand even a light wound to their heads, which would explode if they were even nicked by a blade. They were controlled by a resurrected vampire brought back to unlife by a pumpkin-shaped magic furnace, and she was seeking vengeance against the villagers who had staked her a century before. To get rid of her, you had to toss her in the furnace ... just like a witch!

Here's the cover, which features the Haggworts:

That same book, incidentally, had you go up against a circus of plant-people called Mandrakes. The Mandrakes were posing as human performers and were going from village to village, 'replacing' people with plant copies and slowly taking over the country. Their true nature could be discovered with mirrors, and they could only be killed with fire. I thought that was a pretty good idea for an evil circus, if you're looking for one.

[RTGoodman]

Ugh. I'm well aware of those films. Pumpkinhead is better.

Hey, I never said they were particularly GOOD movies. Although, you know, seeing Ken Shamrock fight a devil-scarecrow is pretty cool. And who can forget the best line of in Scarecrow Slayer - "But don't you have to practice for your martial arts competition?" (Note: That might not be the exact line, but the movie's bad enough that I don't really want to pay $1 to rent it again to find out the exact line.)

[Crazy book cover]

Is that Steve Jackson of, you know, "Steve Jackson Games" fame? Or someone else with the same name? Either way, I've never seen this book (and I'm not sure what a "Fighting Fantasy" book is - I'm just going to assume it's an awesome version of "Choose Your Own Adventure"), but I have an odd urge to go find it cheap on Amazon and purchase it...

[Xuincherguixe]

A tree that one can't quite place it, but gives the impression of somehow being wrong. In actuality it's alive. And it's a being possessed of a tremendous malevolent power.

It keeps a low profile for the most part, but it needs to feed on human (or any of the things close enough to human) bodies. There are several ways this can be done.

It could lure people close to it, at which point it suddenly lashes out and drags the person underground. It could dominate people to accomplish much of the same, opening up at it's base so they could walk towards their doom. Perhaps it has others that gather food for it. Perhaps people simply "vanish". Within a certain distance, it would forcibly teleport people underneath it.

My thought is that this evil tree from underneath would be a tentacled monstrosity, with a horrible mouth.

You're minding your own business when suddenly everything goes dark. And then something grabs you, and your dragged up, where it proceeds to devour you. Seems like a pretty good monster to me ^_^


No idea how to start something like that mind you.

[FoE]

Different Steve Jackson, actually, though the Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games did write a couple of Fighting Fantasy books.

Fighting Fantasy was a rather simple rules system and RPG setting used for a series of single-player gamebooks published in the 1980s; the difference between the typical Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books were you had to roll dice to resolve combat and other situations, and you keep track of stamina (hit points) and your possessions. I used to read them voraciously when I was a wee lad. Some of them were great, some were atrocious. They died out when video games got more advanced than Pong.

Here's the Wikipedia file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_Fantasy

[Baxbart]

Quite surprised noone has mentioned these yet... A personal favourite of mine - Kythons, from the Book of Vile Darkness (3.5, or alternatively I've been working on homebrewing them in 4th Ed).

[GlordFunkelhand]

I second gargoyles.
If you're not only after the "murdering monster" type, etheral filchers are a nice addition to the mix. I mean, come on, a monster that likes stealing is just so much fun.

Shadow Mastiff is a nice beast as well, make sure to add some "hound of baskerville" elements.

Monstrous spiders. Arachnids and/or insects in either large variants or in the "eek! everything is crawling with" type.

Also, keep in mind that you can change the flavor of pretty much every monster without any need to adjust the stats.

[Hadessniper]

Sounds like a great campaign, I may just have to steal it for my self. I would do a sort of Hellboy/league of extraordinary gentlemen thing, A world where magic and monsters are underground and a mysterious man recruits a rag tag group of "experts" to deal with the growing threat of the things that go bump in the night.

You could start with having them take down a few seemingly random monsters then slowly work in how they are all connected and have a main person of group that is trying to trigger ether an apocalypse or a hell on earth sort of thing. Have your pc's be earths only defense against the coming storm.

Or you could go a whole other direction and have them be killing the monsters for this mysterious man and find out things aren't all they seem to be and that the "monsters" they have been hunting aren't all bad and that they have become unwilling pawns for the forces they thought they where fighting.

[Talic]

Zombies that can actually transmit disease by bite, and, upon dying from the disease, turn you into one. Keep it a template, beef it up, and it puts a bit more horror into the chill moan of the freshly-dead.

[Dhavaer]

Zombies that can actually transmit disease by bite, and, upon dying from the disease, turn you into one. Keep it a template, beef it up, and it puts a bit more horror into the chill moan of the freshly-dead.

d20 Apocalypse has these. Don't recall what they're called, though.

[hamishspence]

I think in 3.5 ed those zombies are called Ghouls: diseased bite, transformation. Not that big a change to have your ghouls look particularly decayed.

Charred Corpse had a ghostly version in MM2: Effigy. Dragon Mag had some details on how they rise from the vengeful who die by fie.

Spawn of Kyuss is another infector. different mechanic though.