Cultist of Night and Shadow Mastiff
Added 2022-01-26 19:00:05 +0000 UTCThe Cultist of Night was based on a challenge to create a cultist of Shar that was relevant into T2 and T3, but still felt like a cultist, and I think I mostly succeeded here. They're good at two things: teamwork and dying. They're not gonna be able to take down your demigod PCs on their own, but they'll provide enough nuisance that your players will want to prioritize killing them, and they've got enough meat on them that it'll take a little bit of focus and effort to chew through them.
The Shadow Mastiff keeps with my tradition of shadow creatures changing movesets depending on light level. I really like the image of this big old pupper making a scary bark, causing you to drop your torch, then your torch goes out and the spooky doggo disappears with it. Also, while in the dark this mfer has a 50 ft climb speed, so you can bet if he gets you grappled he's gonna start dragging you up the walls like Nightmare on Elm St.
Comments
Thanks for the quick response, that makes a lot of sense. Excited to pair a couple of these with the Painbearer's Chain Sickle or Gloomblade's Gloom Cage!
Alex Gillies
2022-01-31 22:50:35 +0000 UTCHaha, good catch, thank you! I'll get that fixed :D
Isaac Minarik
2022-01-31 21:30:33 +0000 UTCMinor thing here, but the Mastiff actually doesn't have Darkvision or Devil's Sight listed in its stat block. Would be kinda entertaining to have them need to be in darkness but be totally blind in that darkness though.
Altanius
2022-01-31 21:00:19 +0000 UTCSorry for the confusion! The target is the only one who needs to make the save; the "grappled by the shadow mastiff and at least one of its allies" is the condition for targeting a creature. The "it" pronoun seems to be a bit widgy here, I'll probably switch that to "grappled by both the shadow mastiff and at least one of the shadow mastiff's allies". Narratively, the idea is that the shadow mastiffs are playing tug-of-war with you. Edit: Updated the wording to clarify it. Will go back over other monsters with similar abilities in the next master PDF update.
Isaac Minarik
2022-01-31 20:01:07 +0000 UTCThanks for these (and all the rest) - really excited to run them! Can you clarify a bit of the Mastiff's Worry action? I can't recall seeing another example of an ally of the target needing to make a save in addition to the target. What is the narrative justification there? I'm trying to understand what I'd describe to the players when asking allies to make saves.
Alex Gillies
2022-01-31 19:50:31 +0000 UTCNo problem, thanks for the consistently great work :) ps, would love to see a Dao done
sean
2022-01-26 22:56:19 +0000 UTCOh geez, whoops. Should be up now
Isaac (Conflux Creatures)
2022-01-26 22:51:41 +0000 UTCIs there supposed to be a file attached to this post?
sean
2022-01-26 22:49:51 +0000 UTC
