So on my trek through Fantastic Beasts, making them into D&D monsters, I missed one. Weirdly, the one I missed is a beast that can turn invisible and can avoid being captured because it can see the future.
But I finally caught them.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Demiguise”If you were running a table top adventure in the Potterverse, or a campaign inspired by that world, you would want to include as many of the Fantastic Beasts as possible. But do you really need to include the flobberworm?
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Flobberworm”Should it charge, the results are usually catastrophic.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
In Dungeons & Dragons, there are a few circumstances where a player’s character dies out right. Taking an enormous amount of damage in one go for example. There are some spells and effects that state: ‘if you go to 0 hit points, you are dead now’. The vast majority of the time, characters have a chance to fight for their lives, but every now and then something comes along and stomps the player’s creation into the dirt.
An effect that causes the target to explode is therefore in the realms of possibility, but one that needs to be handled cautiously. Telling a player that they are knocked out by a charging, bulbous rhino-monster is one thing; suddenly revealing that they have been impaled on its huge horn and blown into meaty chunks is another…
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Erumpent”Dungeons & Dragons is high-adventure for a lot of the time. Tolkien-esque heroic tales full of might and magic. Sometimes though, D&D adventures stride out into the horror genre.
Playing horror-based D&D is rarely an intensely scary experience. It’s hard to jumpscare when you’re carefully describing the world. A player can only be as creeped out as their imagination will allow. Yet you can build some pretty unsettling, twisted moments. The campaign book Curse of Strahd is especially effective because it leans into camp-horror; a mixed of sinister and the comical that blends really well together.
The Fantastic Beast known as an Erkling immediately inspires a horrific encounter for any D&D game.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Erkling”Did you know that there are dragons in Dungeons & Dragons? I know, I know, I was surprised as well. Not just a few dragons either. The world of Harry Potter has some dragons to deal with too.
They come in all shapes – from babies the size of a horse to elders thirty feet in length – and all sorts of colours. The ‘good’ dragons are all shiny colours, golds and silvers, whilst the ‘bad’ dudes are standard colours like red and blue. Not only does the colour inform their general behaviour and habits, but different breath weapons.
(I’ll never forget the first time a new player confidentially stated, pre-fight: “Don’t worry guys, I’ve got this. I’m resistant to fire damage!” only to watch in horror as the green dragon unleashed an intense cloud of poison on their fledgling character. Priceless.)
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Dragons”Another easy one this week. A curtain-nibbling, beetle-winged pest of the Potterverse gets the D&D treatment. The Doxy isn’t going to challenge most RPG adventurers, but it’s a fun little nuisance. A Dungeon Master could have some fun telling characters that they see a fairy on a nearby tree, only to discover that it’s this angry blighter.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Doxy”It’s always nice to learn that the human race didn’t wipe out a species. It turns out, the Dodo is still alive. The species is actually a ‘Diricawl’, a magical bird that can teleport. So it’s not extinct, it just learned that humans are unsafe spaces and made themselves scarce. Good for them.
So for today’s converstion from Fantastic Beasts to Dungeons & Dragons, we have a lil’ fluffy bird that can teleport.
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Diricawl”It’s a dog with two tails.
I don’t know what else to tell you. This ‘fantastic beast’ is a dog, and making the D&D stats took two minutes….
Last week it was a lion with goat feet and a crab that eats magic. This week we have a monkey frog. Fantasy monsters are a little basic sometimes. Although the monkey frog has a weird, red wart on its head that lights up, which is definitely unique…
Continue reading “Fantastic Beasts and How to Slay Them: Clabbert”
Gamer Peak 