How do you build scary RPG monsters for D&D or Pathfinder? How do you give your players the heebies and the jeebies with fresh monster designs?
Fear comes from building tension. It’s the anticipation of something terrible, like a jump scare, that evokes feelings of dread.
I love birds, and some of my best memories are of bird watching with my family. But put me near a pigeon and I’ll sweat boulders. And it’s not that I’m scared of birds. What scares me is the expectation that they’ll start flapping and swoosh past my head. My ornithophobia only turns on when I expect a bird to launch itself toward me.
We can use the same principle to scare the pants off our players. Metaphorically speaking. Strip D&D isn’t sanctioned by WotC. Yet.
Making Monsters for Science and Fear
To illustrate, let’s build a scary unicorn for Pathfinder Second Edition. The fear of balloons popping (globophobia) will give us a surprising twist, so let’s start there.
I like the idea of a cute unicorn floating aimlessly around, and cute can be scary. When it takes damage, our uni sucks air in with an angry pout. And, as it inflates larger and takes more damage, this air mine becomes more volatile. Fear the boom!
Filling a forest glade with floating unipoofs and then having adjacent unipoofs make horn attacks against each other to set off a chain reaction is a low blow, but I’ll endorse you. Great idea!
For exploration encounters, tweak the Ready to Pop ability so that checks happen every half hour instead of every round. Escorting a unipoof through a trap-filled dungeon now becomes a tense adventure with higher stakes.
It’s Your Turn to Make Scary RPG Monsters
What phobia can you turn into scary RPG monsters? What mechanics will you design to build tension over time?
You can use our D&D monster builder or the great Pathfinder Second Edition monster builder at monster.pf2.tools to make your creatures. Both apps will help you keep the maths solid. Post your monster link and a description in the comments!
RPG players spend way too much time trying to stay alive. Okay, I’ll give it to you that staying alive is an acceptable way to play. But what if we could make RPG death exciting? What if we could add a spin on dying that could make your RPG sessions more challenging and rewarding for your players?
I recently released Just Get Better, which — let’s be honest — was an attempt to shoehorn my sword & sorcery ideas into the GMTK Game Jam’s theme. Surprisingly, it worked. But I didn’t realize how well it had worked until I played Blood West.
The Genius of Blood West
Blood West is pitched as a Wild West survival horror. What makes the game great is that it turns grinding into a fun and repeatable challenge.
You’ve got to work hard for your first kill. You might feel more confident about your second, but eventually, you’ll slip up. You’ll get too close, miss your shot, or fall off a cliff.
When you — inevitably — die, you gain a curse. Your first curse isn’t a big deal, maybe a 2 percent reduction in health, but it feels like you’re up against the wall. You can tell that dying will eat into your meager supplies and make an already challenging game harder. So you dig in, ready to be more cautious and cunning.
Now you kill tactically, thinning out an area from the periphery before plunging in where the monsters are thickest. You save whatever you can scrounge. And headshots become your signature move.
But then you die again.
Now you realize that some of the monsters respawned. You have to clear areas a second time. And you remember how hard you worked to clear them the first go around. However, you notice you’re getting better at anticipating how monsters react. You’ve even got some swanky new weapons to kill ‘em with.
The cycle of death repeats. Old areas become speed runs. You can headshot a zombie at a run and have a few tricks for those wendigo. And man, it’s a helluvalot of fun.
Hard As Hell with a Soft Reset
The genius of Blood West is that it tempers a hard game with soft resets. You have options to soften the impact of curses when you die, and not all your enemies return. You also benefit from experience and skills, both programmed and personal. Die often and quickly though and you’ll still get a hard enough reset.
Likewise, Just Get Better works when you combine a player character’s immortality with deadly difficult, repeatable, and short encounters. The fun happens when the players try something different, and it works. That sense of achievement is priceless.
Effectively, you give the players a deadly puzzle and all the retries they need to solve it.
One last note on encounter design: spreading out an encounter gives players some breathing room. If one skeleton can see another but would need a turn to enter combat, then the party has a good reason for executing the first with a quick kill. If they botch the attack they have a round to figure out a contingency.
DriveThruRPG medals are an important detail that’ll help you make good buying choices on the Internet’s largest RPG store, DriveThruRPG. Let’s explore how titles earn them and why you should pay attention to these shiny bits of digital metal.
On DriveThruRPG, Platinum (a total of 2,538 titles at the time of writing), Mithral (555 titles), and Adamantine (264 titles) account for 2.22% of all titles with medals. That’s 3,357 titles — the cream of the crop.
We know that major publishing houses, like Penguin Random House, rely on repeat best sellers — such as The Bible, Lord of the Rings, celebrity bios, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, etc. — for their income. The rest of their offering consists of titles that sell less than 1,000 copies, each. That, however, is mainstream publishing. RPG titles, which fall into the tabletop hobby niche, are a minuscule slice of a tiny pie in comparison.
However, this insight indicates that anything under Platinum Seller is still a respectable achievement.
Our Example: Rising Phoenix Games
Selling 51 units is sometimes a small feat for small publishers like us.
Bioheist is our latest Copper Seller. We hit 51 sales thanks to the interest from DriveThruRPG’s Pocket Quest game jam.
Despite releasing multiple titles a year and marketing to an established customer base, many of our titles, like our Apothecary alternate class for D&D, may take years to break the 50-sales mark. Hobby publishers with no social media footprint are in for a harder time. Especially publishing their own game or creating content for less popular systems than Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
We love DriveThruRPG medals. They motivate us. But what do the medals mean for customers?
Why DriveThruRPG Medals Matter
Medals don’t prove quality. Since a publisher earns them from sales, good marketing can conceal problems like poor mechanics, bad art, or fumbled layouts. If enough customers want and pay for the product it’ll earn medals.
But when a product has medals and reviews you’ll start to see a clearer picture of the game’s worth. In my experience, customers won’t leave a review unless they’re angry about something or they’re a reviewer. Does a lack of ratings and reviews indicate a good game? Does it mean customers were generally satisfied if a product has earned medals but customers left no feedback? Maybe.
My advice is to read whatever reviews you can find, either on DriveThruRPG or on other great stores like the Open Gaming Store, Paizo, or Itch. Ultimately, if the game looks good to you, drop some money on it. That way you’re supporting creators and showing them that their creation resonated with you.
Tea! A hot cup of bliss. Writing fuel. Gaming fuel. I can’t GM without it, and now I’ve discovered all sorts of inspiration from the humble beverage. Let’s look at some tea-inspired plot hooks for your game.
Throughout real-world history, the humble tea plant has inspired human determination and greed. Kingdoms have sent men to fight and die to secure their control over the tea trade. Fortunes have been made, and lost, under the hot sun as plantation workers, and slaves, coaxed the tea crop to grow. Add a magical element to the intriguing history of tea and you’ll find plenty of inspiration for your campaign. Below are some ideas.
The Smugglers’ Ring
Tea is a valuable resource. However, tea doesn’t grow naturally in many kingdoms, and some lands don’t have a suitable climate to grow the crop. Consequently, these countries are at the mercy of traders and pay high prices for imported tea. This situation is ripe for enterprising fortune-seekers. The illicit trade of tea supports a vast black market that extends to the highest power in the land. But this shady economy was created by pirates, bandits, and smugglers. Those people daring or desperate enough to risk their lives to capture armed trade ships and caravans, and make off with their cargo. Unsurprisingly, kingdoms with both the climate and a domestic tea plant go to great lengths to protect their tradeable tea harvest. So, it falls to the smuggler to keep the tea flowing.
Teaboys are handy, dayo!
Cargo for Coin
Smugglers mainly move captured cargo, but also traffic plants. A rival plantation owner or a kingdom may see a single seedling as the key to their future empire. The powerful are willing to pay handsomely for such opportunities—provided their involvement remains a closely guarded secret.
The party might be involved on either side of a tea-smuggling plot, as smugglers or investigators. Involve the player characters further by binding them to the tea trade. It’s not just a job. Must they carry tea plants across mountains and rivers, through orc lands, to pay the ransom for their village? Does the loss of their village tea harvest — taken by bandits — threaten their livelihood?
A smuggling ring can have many tiers, and dealing with each might take many sessions. Who do the smugglers work for? Is the smuggling ring one of many? Is the tea plot the first incursion of a great war between nations? Add a fantasy twist and you might have a vampire queen building her kingdom’s dominance through the tea trade. Or a lich who uses his smugglers as scouts, probing for an initial invasion of his undead hordes.
It’s hard for us to imagine tea’s value when it’s readily available in our modern economy. In a fantasy world, where growing and moving crops might face other problems, such as dragons or magical catastrophes, tea might be even more valuable and hard to come by than it was in our real-world history. Consider the realities of the tea trade in your fantasy world and you’ll add an authenticity that helps your shared story come alive.
The Magic of Tea
Does lemon and ginger tea really help to cure the common cold? Does tea truly have health benefits? While modern science cannot confirm the miraculous properties attributed to tea, in the realm of fantasy, the possibilities are boundless. Is tea an important component of resurrection magic? Has one of the heroes died? Are tea leaves difficult to obtain? You can control the importance of tea in your campaign by dialing up the usefulness of hot beverages, while making tea rare. If a cup of tea is the only way to restore mana, your players will go to great lengths to secure a personal tea crop.
There are means to tie nonmagical characters to tea. Clerics might incorporate tea into sacred rituals, alchemists may seek to distill its essence for potent brews, and rogues could be hired to pilfer rare tea leaves or exquisite silver tea sets. The infusion of magic into these scenarios adds further depth and intrigue.
Supplement these tea-inspired plot hooks by making tea evocative. The champion’s cup of chai exudes an aroma that evokes faraway lands. It reinvigorates her with power drawn from the very earth. It holds the warmth of life. Then, just maybe, she connects to her god through the deep magic of tea.
The Politics of Tea
Tea grows in the dirt, yet kingdoms, with their centers far from those fields, depend on that crop. As we’ve seen, the business of tea is as important to a king as it is to the muddy worker who sewed and harvests it. The heroes begin their story as modest farm hands, at level 1, and through facing monsters and deadly quests grow to become tea barons and baronesses by level 20. Throughout this progression, the heroes’ progression is indelibly tied to the tea harvest and its trade.
Teahouse leshys consider tea an art form. #DrinkTea
At first level, the party might defend their harvest from goblins, those little fiends who love setting fields ablaze. Goblins never need a good reason for arson. At second level, the harvest is collected and taken to market and will need an escort. At third level, a trader bargains for the entire harvest and stout hearts to accompany it to his ship. Perhaps the trader has a decree from the queen and drafts the party into the kingdom’s service. Can the party navigate the dangerous river voyage to bring their cargo of supplies (including that tea) to the besieged allies of their monarch?
That same tea cargo might cross many more kingdoms and oceans before its journey is done. With the party traveling with it, there will be plenty of opportunity for intrigue and adventure. When the party finally returns to their fields, they do so as champions of the kingdom, with wagon loads of treasure creaking along behind them.
Join Us for a Cup!
The Magic of Tea is our latest supplement for Pathfinder Second Edition, and it contains a bunch of treats for your campaign. It’s a perfect addition to these tea-inspired plot hooks. The book includes:
18 new spells inspired by tea. Another cup, anyone?
Dice. Can you ever own enough? Will they roll high when it matters? These questions might be the greatest mysteries of our wonderful roleplaying hobby. Or it’s “What’s in a pack of Mystery Dice?” I’m here to rip open that mystery like a frenzied goblin oracle tearing apart a loot sack!
Rip open a bag of Mystery Dice!
Mystery Dice? What’s in the Bag?
Mystery Dice, from UK-based Mystery Dice Goblins, are blind bags of 7 RPG dice. They’re perfect for games of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. There’s the caltrop-of-doom D4, the ubiquitous D6, the D8, the pair of D10s (units die and tens die), the D12, and the mighty D20. Each bag’s contents are colour-matched, so you get a complete, colour-coordinated set. However, the transparent purple set I opened has 5 dark purple and 2 light purple dice. I call it my “Berry Blast” set. Although the variation is noticeable, they still look fantastic together. I love them!
The dice are a good, standard size. The set I’m playing with are slightly rough distressed blue dice. The D4 and D6 are slightly bigger than the same dice from the Pathfinder Beginner Box set, which is only noticeable when you carefully compare them.
All the numbers on the dice are clear, and that readability is important to me. We need to see those numbers! In our third set, the gold paint on green and white marbling produces a low contrast, but I’ll take elegance over readability in this case. These are some of our most beautiful dice — the other being a green and black marbled set, which belongs to my wife. She has excellent taste.
Blind Bags are a Party, in a Bag
Skeptical of blind bags? Me too, but I remember being a kid and the fun we had opening those Monster in My Pocket packets. The fun’s still there today. Opening each pack was an exciting rush of endorphins, and I was happy with every dice I got. Several older sets are getting the boot from my collection to make way for the new arrivals.
Grab some bags with your gaming group, then figure out who gets the first pick. You’ll have a blast and get a set you love as part of the deal. Christmas is far off, but Mystery Dice are the perfect stocking filler. They’re also a great gift for gamer friends or prizes for your gaming club.
Do you ever feel alone? Do you feel like the world’s too much, and it’s banging on the door, trying to get you? I sometimes feel that way.
When that happens, it’s a struggle to stop my gloom-and-doom thought train and change my perspective. Recently, it was my RPG publisher friends who helped me see things differently. So, I want to talk about those friends and I want to give you a light to hold onto when things get rough.
When the Going Gets Tough, Collaborate
I reached out to a few indie RPG developers and asked if they’d join me on a bundle. The Hidden Indie RPG Treasures Bundle is available on DriveThruRPG, right now, until the end of February. I’m mentioning it now and again at the end of this post only, so the marketing is clear for you to see. Anyway, I had a great response from those friends and we made a neat little collection of indie RPG games.
I’m mentioning the collaboration because it provided a healthy change of perspective.
Toughen Up, RPG Creator
The perspective I’ve had for a long time is a warped idea of what success in the industry means. You can’t get a true sense of where you stand in the industry without friends to help you gauge it.
It’s important to understand the context here. Many of us do what we do with limited resources. We use our free time, our own money, and our sweat equity to make games. We’re passionate about the hobby, and that drives us. But it’s hard competing against bigger companies like Wizards of the Coast for those RPG dollars. If you don’t have a hit RPG title or a large social media presence, then it’s hard to get eyes on your work. Even professional, high-quality work can be ignored. Burnout is a real threat because of that. We work hard but don’t always see recognition for that effort. It can become a depressing, black hole.
Anybody, no matter what they do, might be a step away from that deep, dark abyss. Watch the news, suffer a string of bad luck, get hit with unexpected financial pressure, and the cracks start to show. Part of the issue is a false sense of the truth. Essentially, thinking we’re not good enough is a result of a foggy perception of reality.
Reaching out is incredibly hard for me to do. I’m a busy introvert. I spend a lot of time chatting with friends online, but these interactions are often superficial. The medium is restrictive. Those conversations seldom touch base with reality. That changes when friends are struggling with the same thing, like how to market an indie RPG bundle. Working together, we challenged our perceptions. We could better perceive the truth, but only together.
Perspective
I realized that Rising Phoenix wasn’t as insignificant as I thought we were. We could help guys with a handful of titles because we have a bucket-load of titles. We also saw how each effort brought in a few extra sales. Without data (or friends with experience) it’s hard to anticipate what sort of sales we might get, which leads to frustration if those sales seem lower than we hoped for.
There’s a Biblical aspect to this worth considering. In Galatians 6 verse 2 (that’s in the New International Version for this and the rest), Paul says: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” If you draw this back to Jesus’s words of “love one another” (John 13:34) and then further back to the 10 Commandments’ “Love your neighbour” (Leviticus 19:18) then it’s clear: we should help people.
I have no scientific research confirming what we gain from helping others, but my experience has been that it’s good to step into a leaking boat with someone. Struggling together sharpens a person and helps us see the same problem from different sides.
I’m just a dude trying to make great games and figure out this crazy thing called life, and those are my two cents. I hope it’s a useful idea for you to think about.
The Hidden Indie RPG Treasures Bundle
Now, let’s talk about that bundle one last time. Our goal is to make 50 sales. That boosts overall sales since customers are more likely to buy a best-selling title, and 50 sales gives you a Copper Best-Seller badge. With roughly nine days left, we currently need another 31 sales to hit that goal. Please consider telling a friend about the bundle. Ask them to tell their friends about it too. That’ll help us in the greatest way possible.
Here’s a copy of Road to Rhune, at rogue prices (free), to help you get the bundle even cheaper.
Tombstones rip out of the ground, then twist through the air, trailing green flame. Out of the ethereal vortex rises an ectoplasmic elemental that screams through the dislocated skull of a long-dead giant.
Tombstones rip out of the ground, then twist through the air, trailing green flame. Out of the ethereal vortex rises an ectoplasmic hulk that screams through the dislocated skull of a long dead giant.
Ectoplasmic elementals are the focus of powerful necromantic energies that draw in souls, creating a towering avatar of soul-matter, or ectoplasm. Such a creature is the essence of unlife, raw necrotic energy so powerful that it leeches the souls of the living nearby.
Battlefields and mass graves might provide the raw material for an ectoplasmic elemental to materialize, but it requires a dark ritual or grim series of events to initiate the process. This event cuts off the souls’ path to the afterlife, locking the souls on the Material Plane. Forced to manifest in some form, these souls might take on any of a myriad of ghostly forms. However, if the concentration of ectoplasm is strong enough, then an ectoplasmic elemental is likely to form.
Ectoplasmic elementals are brutes, built for close combat. If you’re looking for something to support them, look for good ranged options, or keep the ranged characters in the party busy with some ectoplasmic swarms. Tight dungeons can also cut down on line of sight, and let your avatar of undeath deal with a few characters at a time.
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Bounding on long, scabrous gray limbs, this creature looks like a twisted, reanimated corpse with glowing white eyes.The festrog is a CR 4 Undead that hunts in packs and loves to terrorize its prey.
Over these three weeks, we’ve got three undead creatures, two of which are themed around ectoplasm. The festrog, though, is type of ghoul, making it a perfect addition to encounters with ghasts, ghouls, or other festrogs.
Festrogs: Fast, Festering Hunters
Hundreds of tiny green flames surge forward, each clawing the air with flickering fingers.
Bounding on long, scabrous gray limbs, this creature looks like a twisted, reanimated corpse with glowing white eyes.
Festrogs are bestial ghouls, created when a corpse is desecrated or embued with terrifying amounts of negative energy. Although their basic anatomy is humanoid, festrogs run on all fours, using their elongated limbs to make loping strides. Festrogs are also known as rotdogs and zombie dogs, though they aren’t zombies at all.
Terrible circumstances spawn every festrog, and the hurt and horror that birthed them fuels their unlife. This is best seen in how Festrogs, which are skilled pack hunters, toy with their prey. Often they will separate one creature from its group, injure it, then harry it for days until it finally dies of exhaustion. The pack then mutilates the corpse too, a torment that is often enough to raise the unfortunate creature as a festrog itself.
Festrogs are not natural swimmers, but their doggedness means they’ll pursue prey even through the darkest depths. Sometimes merfolk corpses become festrogs, and these are powerful swimmers with tails lines with protruding bone.
Hundreds of tiny green flames surge forward, each clawing the air with flickering fingers. Add this CR 3 undead incorporeal ectoplasmic swarm to your next adventure to challenge your players.
Over the next three weeks, we’ve got three undead creatures, two of which are themed around ectoplasm. Ectoplasm might be described as life-essence, a residue left by creatures that have crossed between the Mortal Realm and the Realm of Death. Slimer from Ghostbusters is the best example of an ectoplasmic creature from popular culture. That slime is pure ectoplasm.
Eery Ectoplasmic Swarm Fiends
Hundreds of tiny green flames surge forward, each clawing the air with flickering fingers.
Ectoplasmic swarms appear as green flames, with darker flames within that seem to function as eyes and mouths. Their shape is roughly humanoid, with legs and arms ending in flickering claws. Besides these features, they are otherwise featureless and transparent.
Necromancy is usually at the root of an ectoplasmic swarm’s appearance, though they can form wherever a large concentration of departed souls is present. Although tiny, swarms of these flamelike creatures can quickly suck the life out of the living.
Animated ectoplasm seeks to devour souls, which sustain it and gives it a collective memory drawn from all the lives it has consumed. Drawing information out of the ectoplasm, usually through a seance, is difficult because of the mob of souls present. However, if the paranormalist can bring order to the discord, the souls can provide many insights from their collective memory.
Ectoplasmic swarms are tough to kill because they’re incorporeal and have the normal resistances of a swarm. Give your players access to holy water and a chance to figure out the swarm’s weakness, otherwise this could be a tough slog.
If you enjoyed this monster, consider buying one of our bestselling books. We appreciate the support!
A chunk of stone shakes, then flips over. Flames of green arcane energy burst forth from the enchanted stone, forming legs, arms holding spectral weapons, and a flickering head.The arcanshard is ready to do battle with those who dare disturb the sanctity of the dungeon.
At the start of the month, we introduced the Awakened Arcane Obelisk. Then, last week, we added the Crackling Column. Today we meet their smallest relative, the Arcanshard. All of these monsters are formed from the corruption or destruction of an Arcane Obelisk, a monument of magic!
An Arcanchip off the Old Block
A chunk of stone shakes, then flips over. Flames of green arcane energy burst forth from the enchanted stone, forming legs, spectral weapons held in flaming hands, and a flickering head.
Arcanshards are chunks of stone animated by arcane energy. This same energy protects them, though destroying their stone bodies dissipates the energy held within. Most arcanshards are the fractured remains of Arcane Obelisks, though other monuments and large rocks can also become arcanshards, under the right magical conditions.
Arcanshards are notably communal creatures, though they possess no obvious means of communication. On the battlefield, this is seen in their collaborative tactics, while during times of peace they go to great lengths to help each other. They are overly fond of stacking blocks, and if left alone build elaborate walls that may have little defensive value.
Of all the animated forms derived from an Arcane Obelisk, the arcanshard is the most mutable. The easily meld together, their broken stonework flowing together to form a larger stone. This has led scholars to believe that arcanshards are the most useful form for reforming a damaged Arcane Obelisk. Strangely, arcanshards have never been known to attempt such a reforming on their own.
The arcanshard has an irritating ability to prolong combat: meld. Use this to replace two damaged arcanshards with a fresh new one. You might even rule that this allows it to overcome persistent magical effects and conditions. Yes, wizards, we’re making things tough for you.
If you enjoyed this monster, consider buying one of our bestselling books. We appreciate the support!
