Templates
So first things first. I’ll pay the sum of 19,200 XP to the first person who can correctly identify that thing’s templates.
Secondly, the dialogue in today’s comic comes from an actual game. It wasn’t a dungeon crawler though. Neither D&D nor Pathfinder nor Tunnels & Trolls: Uncle Ugly’s Underground were the site of this exchange. Rather, it was the Old World of Darkness. I was a werewolf at the time.
We’d decided to run a multi-monster party, meaning that my “pack” featured exactly two werewolves: yours truly and a twitchy young Glass Walker. The rest of the group included a biker gang mage, a promethean dressed up like Superman, and a dapper little changeling entrepreneur. It was the changeling who had to face down the awkward question.
It was the opening scene of the campaign, and we were standing in the foyer of a boarding house. The changeling was the owner, my werewolf was a prospective tenant, and we’d spent the better part of half an hour playing the dramatic irony game. You suspect something is weird about this guy. He doesn’t smell right. He gives off an odd aura. You can hear the sound of tapping Tumnus hooves when he walks up stairs.
“Alright,” I said, eying the apartment. “That answers all my questions but one.” And taking a big, dramatic sniff: “What are you?”
The Mean Girls response was appropriate given the circumstances. But I’ve thought about that move over the years. And compared to dungeon crawlers, what with their monster lore rolls and their deeply-learned wizards, it was nice to find myself struggling with a mystery. The PCs haven’t necessarily heard of every weird thing out there, and some secret knowledge can’t be found at the other end of a die roll. Getting to roleplay that out for once was a refreshing change of pace for me. In much the same way that magic items ought to feel special, I like the idea of making monsters more than common knowledge.
What do the rest of you guys think? Have you ever had to work for your monster lore? Or do you like the process of see monster > roll die > know monster’s powers and abilities? Sound off with your favorite monster ID systems and obscure critter lore down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Well it looks like a Draconic and Fiendish Lamia at least. That doesn’t explain the toadstool, but for all I know that’s just a fashion accessory
If it’s not just an accessory, maybe it’s a fungal creature?
Keep going….
Dammit, Half-Dragon in Pathfinder 1e get wings. And I don’t know anything about 3.5…
in 3.5 Half Dragons got a fly speed with wings if they where Size Large or larger. Smaller half-dragons might or might not have vestigal wings.
Clearly a manticore had sex with a myconid and this is what happened. There might be some beholder or nishruu in there too.
I will refer you to the title of the comic.
Well I can definitely spy tauric and insectoid. I think the eyes are from promethian, not sure though. No idea on the extra arms or mushroom cap.
Tauric? Is that a thing? I had most definitely never heard of it until just this moment. >_>
3.5 savage species iirc
3.0 MM2, I think.
Is it part Kasatha? The 4 arms is the reason I’m asking.
Multi arms can come from classes (alchemist), or a mutant template.
That’s a pretty good guess….
Look Sorc, we all know about your penchant for charming all the ladies, but you might want to sit this one out.
Yeah, leave this to the professionals – like Bard, or the Patreon comic crew.
Though now I am horrified and intrigued by the romance that brought this template-confusion to being.
By the power of CHEMISTRY!
(No joke, in PF 99% of half dragons are artifically made. How this is done in a world w/o indoor plumbing I’ll never know.)
In the immortal words of Seahawk:
https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1304548997.3231/st,small,845×845-pad,1000×1000,f8f8f8.jpg
Hmm, let’s see. The base could be a half-manticore, half-Kobold, or a Lamia-Kobold with beastly chimera features, to explain the lion lower body, scorpion tail, and reptile head. Substitute lizardfolk or reptilian as alternative for the head.
The eyes on the taur body is a fiendish template.
The mushroom head is a fungal infestation or plant template.
Finally, multiple arms can come from being an Alchemist, Kasatha, or simply a mutant template. Mutant template or natural shape shifting can accommodate other details.
Things that seem to be odd is that they have striped arms and a pale white body, which I think we only saw on Swash so far.
The eyes are probably pseudonatural rather than fiendish. Pseudonatural is for weirder outsiders, more Lovecraft than Dante.
I can confirm that at least one of those is right.
As far as monster ID’ing goes, in one game, my wizard had access to super-high knowledge checks and the Linked Legacy spell, effectively allowing him to instantly inform allies of relevant abilities and weaknesses. We called it the wiki-spell, as the DM would pretty much give us the link to the creatures nethys archive page at that point.
Our other DM in Starfinder keeps info minimal/descriptive as whispers to the PC who rolled.
We generally follow the see->roll->inform tactic, as in Pathfinder, knowing that a creature has DR or immunities, or particularly nasty abilities, determines if you live or not, usually, or whether you spend 1-2 rounds being ineffective (or making things worse, in regards to oozes that split or similar).
I had a GMs literally hand me the book as well before. I’m always a little put out with the move.
I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere before, but my house rule is to let them ask me 1 question if they hit the DC, and 1 additional question for every 5 by which they exceed the DC. That might be just a piece of the stat block (weaknesses, special attacks, etc.) but it could also be more general: “What does it want? Is there anything different about this one as opposed to a normal member of its species? etc.”
YMMV, but actually looking at the stat block collapses the fiction for me.
I only hand players the book if I need to show them the monster picture and have no other source. And these days, I usually have a phone/computer on hand for that purpose.
That “house rule” is basically the default 3.5 rule (not sure about Pathfinder), except putting the onus on the player to decide what would be useful rather than the DM.
Which I think is nice—player agency is good, and they know what they want to know more than the DM does. It means the DM can’t feed them information that they wouldn’t know to ask for, but the DM should either find some way to hint that it’s important or just tell the players such critical information, so…
As a player, I get pretty irritated when “useful piece of information” is something like “it’s vulnerable to fire.” I’ll be sitting there like, “No kidding. It’s a troll. I wanted to know about its weird kung fun abilities!”
I’m going to guess that something is centauric with a manticore…and you can get all the eyes on the body from a feat, I think. For the rest of it, a changeling emulating a kobold while binding Girallon Arms and wearing a mushroom hat?
That is not a hat.
So we’ve got draconic and fiendish (I’d say Demonic) ancestry layered onto a manticore based on the leonid body and stinging tail. As for the centaur, 4-armed and mushroom parts I’m at a loss. Using the template-rules what would the CR on that thing which isn’t distinctly more threatening than if it had one template?
Generally speaking I give information with the appropriate intelligence rolls, but if the players know what they’ll be going up against ahead of time they can go to their local library and research/hire a researcher to get information as well.
It’s always nice to have an actual sage on the NPC roster. A little gold and a few days of wait time and you’ve got a nice pamphlet of relevant info.
Early on in my current campaign, I toyed around with the idea of a monster that became stronger when you learned its true name. Succeeding on a Knowledge check to figure out what the heck it was would only make it more powerful. I never ultimately got it to work, but the threat loomed over my players’ heads and it become a running joke of sorts. “Don’t roll Knowledge! You’ll make it stronger!”
That’s very funny. What was the lore like? Some kind of outsider I guess, but from freakin’ where?
I’m flummoxed.
Can I get a No-Prize for guessing that it’s a home-brew adaption of the Andeloid composite template from 2nd edition (Dragon #159, July 1990)?
Ima need you to link the relevant back issue, but I will waste entirely too much time scouring the internet to find out if you just made that up or not.
Oh, I wish this were the product of my own fevered imagination. I did, however, use the template to kit-bash original threats for my 2E games back in the day whenever stats for just the right sort of monster didn’t exist for whatever adventure I’d planned. The Spelljammer beastie in question starts on page 31 of https://www.annarchive.com/files/Drmg159.pdf. (…and I freely acknowledge that this isn’t the correct answer to your original challenge.)
If the point of today’s challenge is to prove your obscure lore knowledge, I think you’re doing just fine.
I sense a heavily-applied Noodle-Armed Template. (CR +1)
In terms of monster knowledge, I tend to not give the players too much in terms of “this is literally what it can do” on their knowledge rolls in favor of some basic lore and maybe a name. Sometimes it’s just unobtainable, though. My party’s Investigator is constantly flummoxed by alien monstrosities that human eyes have literally never seen before defying his mad Knowledge rolls.
Its technical name is the Fleischer template.
Alright. I’m not familiar with any templates that give scorpion tails, so that’s probably a tauric something/manticore, probably with pseudonatural or something along those lines applied to the manticore. As for the something…
My first guess (after some googling) is that it’s a draconic (or half-dragon) fungal chitine, but the DMG 2 has a bunch of unique NPC abilities which I think are technically templates, so it could be almost anything. Maybe an Aberrant-limbed Fungal Spellscale?
I suppose I should ask for some kind of qualifiers. Like, is this 3.5 only, Pathfinder only, both? Are we sticking to major sourcebooks like the Monster Manuals, or do I need to dig around in back issues of Dragon? Does the DMG2 thing count?
It’s 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e.
You’ve got at least two correct so far.
Judging by the fact that you’d never heard of the tauric template before posting the comic, it probably isn’t that one.
I can’t find any other 3.5 or PF1 templates that would turn people into mushrooms*, so that’s one of the two. [Also Alexeara II guessed the same and was encouraged to continue down that path.] There isn’t any overlap between my guesses and Zarhon’s, unless fungal counts as “a fungal infestation or plant template,” so that won’t help. The other could be pseudonatural, draconic/half-dragon, or aberrant-limbed. So I guess I should dig a little deeper for the base creature.
Or base creatures? Some Googling revealed non-tauric templates that would accomplish similar results, the most official-looking being the Amalgam Creature template from Green Ronin’s Advanced Bestiary, but there are others, like the technically-3.0 Half-Creature (quadruped) template. (Honorable mention: The Dichotomous Creature template, which fuses together two opposing outsiders into a gestalt entity driven to kill creatures of either of the originals’ alignments, absorbing their alignments until one side overpowers the other. I swear I’m not making this up.)
Let’s say Amalgam Creature for now.
I can’t find any template that would give a scorpion tail, so that’s probably part of one of the base races. Let’s assume “manticore” is the other thing I got right. Zarhon and Shozurei both got positive feedback for guessing kasatha, so amalgam [something] manticore and [something] fungal kasatha sounds like a good start. That just leaves the draconic head and horns, the eyes on the body, and maybe the stripes on the arms (though Ruvain seems to think that that’s just a Kasatha thing).
The eyes probably aren’t fiendish, and unless I’m wrong about the manticore (or Colin’s being deliberately misleading with “at least”), it probably isn’t pseudonatural. Child of Yog-Sothoth probably fits the bill as well as anything, though—it even grants all-around vision.
The dragon head probably isn’t draconic/half-dragon, with the same caveats as pseudonatural, and it probably isn’t reptilian, unless Zarhon was wrong about kasatha or Colin was being misleading. The Pathfinder Saurian template would make the creature’s humanoid torso and arms scaly, too…but that’s technically true of the other templates mentioned, too. And I can’t find any other scaly templates.
…I think I’ll stick with my half-/draconic guess, since it’s the one that explains the horns the best. Even though no color of dragon I’m familiar with has horns quite like that.
Oh, and the Fleischer template, of course. Which is obviously only applied to the kasatha half, since the manticore legs aren’t also noodly.
So my current guess is an Amalgam [Child of Yog-Sothoth manticore]+[Fleischer fungal half/draconic kasatha].
Am I warmer of colder?
*Though I did find references to an AD&D fungal template, and there’s of course the Yellow Musk Creeper Zombie.
P.S. There’s a lot of wild templates that, while obviously not applicable to this thing, are pretty neat. d20pfsrd has a good list of Pathfinder ones, but sadly I can’t find a centralized list of assorted 3.5 templates. Some of them are very specific and/or redundant, but it’s still neat.
Forgot to mention it, but obviously templates with vague visual descriptions like Mutant and Fleshwarped could also be involved.
You’ve got 2.5 correct.
I was in a oWoD Larp, that had a little of everyone. I was playing a mage, and at the time both in and out of character unfamiliar with all the flavors of vampire and werewolves and the brief run in with the fey was well glad i walked away with yup all things intact.
Befriended a vamp and ended up at a bar ran by a Salubri, I had no idea what it was and when I went to peak(with magic) was warned by the salubri to not do that its rude and to just ask. But was also told the only thing i should believe about him is that he will likly lie. I asked him what he was and he laughed before going onto another patron.
You know what? Having googled for it myself just now, I read about 1,000 words of lore by the time my eyes went cross. Methinks you dodged a bullet by skipping a VERY long backstory.
That thing has at least six different templates attached and I don’t think I can accurate identify more than three.
I wish that it was more common to work for your monster info, but frequently the first time you see the monster is also the last time you’ll see it alive, at least in D&D and Pathfinder. I would love to use research mechanics to make it all the more satisfying to figure out how to beat an enemy.
That sounds like a subsystem waiting to be written. I’m imagining trolls + fire or werewolves + silver, except more obscure. You literally can’t kill the critter until you know its weakness, but you can try to drive it off or escape it. For every round spent fighting it, you get a bonus to try and find XYZ new information. Maybe something like the pf1e research system leading up to a final confrontation.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/intrigue/#Research
In the Witcher RPG there are three kinds of knowledge check about monsters. One is the Common knowledge, the legends and lore of common people that is usually inaccurate. Then there is the Academic and Witcher knowledge. The Witcher one is all about monsters and more accurate than the common one. The academic is the true one about non-monsters of the world, knights, elves, humans, northers.
So if the party lack a Witcher, or a person with academic knowledge the party is stuck with the wisdom of the peasants. Which is more flavor text than actual knowledge.
Like that system because there a real difference between actual knowledge and note of color 🙂
Dig that a lot, actually. It takes a lot of real estate to write up different levels of lore for monsters, but I always appreciate when that kind of copy is included in a stat block.
Flavor text is the best 😀
Like Divine Visitation in Guilds of Ravnica:
The Angels appreciated the offer but politely declined to eat any birdseed
Pretty sure that’s an abomination. Probably should be worth some XP, though.
Rolling initiative? Guys? Gals? Uncommited?
What’s that, bard?
It’s yours? What’s that me-OH. Oh. My apologies.
There are multiple ways to overcome an encounter.
So it’s CR 12
Mannn, this would be so much easier if I knew the base creature or creatures.
Being a combination of Pathfinder and 3.5 makes this particularly hard for me, because I’ve mostly forgotten all solely 3.5 material. :-\
I feel like the base race is Kasatha, but it’s hard to say. Fungal is easy enough, maybe blighted fey?
I feel like one of the templates is just “mix these races” but I can’t figure out what.
Face: kobold / fungal / draconic?
body: kasatha. I feel the skin tone and bands on the arms are the indicator
Waist: Lamia
Tail: Manticore
extra eyes: no clue
it is an enigma wrapped in a mystery stuffed inside a riddle. it’s a turducken of weirdness
The eyes on the body says progeny of Yog Sothoth to me – not sure what template that one would indicate, though.
that would probably be nightmare. if we’re counting.
Cutting the Gordian Knot: Mongrelfolk?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/races/3rd-party-races/ozzykp/mongrelfolk-12-rp/
Unfortunately, that there is a large sized creature.
I’m glad PF2e has done away with templates, “bottom up” NPC building and huge amounts of xp. 19,200 xp would get you level 19 and another 20% of the way to 20.
did they keep the “can’t gain more than one level at a time” rule?
I don’t recall seeing any mention of it. Now it’s just 1000 xp to get from one level to the next regardless of level. I can’t imagine what you’d need to build an encounter worth over 19000. An extreme threat encounter is based on an approximate budget of 160 exp. An extreme difficulty creature would be roughly equal to the party level+4. NPC building is one of the major improvements found in PF2e; I’ve seen comments to the effect of people thinking they’d messed up the rules because the process was so quick and easy.
NPC building is more fun for 1e, TBH because you can pick and choose levels for NPCs.
I like templates. They’re close to my ideal for TRPG mechanics; they’re clear in how they should be used, but still pretty versatile (at least compared to typical monster stat blocks).
I can’t figure out what PF2 does differently with NPCs (since I don’t actually own any PF2 books), so no comment there…
I’ll leave the identification of your creature to people who care. I wanna talk about the question of the day!
I’ve mentioned I homebrew everything. One of the challenges of this is that I can’t tell my players “oh, it’s a on page of the<wiki/monster manual/jimbo’s monster website/etc>.”
So instead, we’ve defaulted to what I feel is a more ‘natural’ method of play. I’m using tokens that best represent the creatures I come up with, but I give them a run down of what they are seeing. I also try to role play my creatures in combat, at least a little bit. If my players want to make a monster lore check, I allow them to roll dice as normal, and give them results as the book describes under the skill check.
Here’s the thing, though. I use that element of mystery as to what a given monster is in my game. Without going into detail too much, one of the monsters they were fighting in my game were actually brainwashed, force converted townspeople. They realized this after cutting their way through 2/3’s of the dungeon, and only managed to figure it out by chance when on of the PC’s used one of their very unusual abilities and accidentally broke the ‘control’ portion of the enchantment.
The horror surprise moment was worth it.
Were the people physically transformed somehow? Or were they just “normal townsfolk with zombie personalities?”
It’s a dark druidic cult that’s transforming people into animal people. Those who were forcibly turned had only proto personalities and intelligence as a result. While known colloquially amongst the cult as ‘Dear Ones,’ most of them are variations of deer and stag, with the occasional werewolf in the mix for those that veered more instantly combative.
Essentially… a transformation, a personality/intelligence alteration, and a compulsion to do the things they were told to do by the dark druids. They were reduced below comprehensible language, so it took a pretty serious effect to break the effects holding them.
Wasn’t this an episode of Batman: The Animated Series?
Honestly, I ought to go back an watch more of that show. Seems like a good source for plots now that I think about it.
Okay, this time I’m gonna take an actual crack at this challenge:
This PC has a manticore father and a lamia (or even lamia/wemic) mother, as per the Pathfinder manticore+lamia rules and “tauric” subtype rules from 3E MM vol.2.
She then became a “Dragonblood Chymist” subclass of the Pathfinder Alchemist (draconic facial features) and took the Vestigial Arms discovery twice. While the Agarican subtype could explain the non-hat mushroom cap, that’s a homebrew 3.5 subtype and off-limits, so I’ll guess that the alchemist cast the spell countless eyes (explaining the eye-spots) for extra visibility and used the spell merge with familiar to make a dweomer cap mushroom a part of herself—“Spellcasters sometimes adopt dweomer caps as familiars.”
Am I close? I’m out of ideas, so my next guess suggests a tragic backstory, optional potion immiscibility rules, and a homebrew Pathfinder revision of the Legacies from the Red Steel boxed set (1995).
Wow. I don’t believe somebody figured out the base creature. I thought for sure it was too obscure.
There is another explanation for the base creature though, and I’d have accepted either.
My word! Is that a fiendish half-dragon fungal tauric(manticore base) pseudonatural kasatha?
Oh… wait, no… I’m told it’s just some deranged psychic’s tulpa relfecton of a centaur. Carry on.
+19,200 XP to Doge Archon!
Yiss! It took many knowledge checks, but I somehow made it!
Uuughh, I have a player who insists on rolling Knowledge before every single fight and if his Witch spells aren’t useful, just stands there watching. I’m the kind of GM who likes to insert bits of lore into Knowledge checks and he literally told me he didn’t care about all that, just tell him strengths and weaknesses so he knows how to kill it.
Oh, that sounds like a potentially interesting character.
Oh, he’s not playing a character, he’s just refusing to do anything until he knows the perfect solution.
Sounds frustrating. Seems like the type of player that is playing for very different reasons than his GM.
Ah, someone already got it. I was actually going to guess that it was a phasm. Confusing people by turning into a mashup of a half-dozen creatures seems like something a more mischievous one would do.
See, part of my problem with this is that I don’t have the obscure 3.5e/pathfinder rules background, but the other part is that 5e includes a lot of room to take the existing mechanics and flavor them in pretty much any manner that still fits the mechanics, so something could LOOK like that, and still fundamentally just be a regular centaur.
Heck, I flavored a simple transportation illusion spell “Phantom Steed” into roughly 20-100+ variants that look anywhere from comical to horrifying.