Stream Results—February 20th, 2019: Drow Mandrake and Magma Whale (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

I'm here with another round of monsters, fresh from my weekly Twitch monster making stream!

As always, stats and descriptions can be found below, and the GM Binder doc can be found right right here.

Though as always, a huge hearty thanks to everyone who tuned in. Y'all are cool peeps.

Now for some monsters:

Drow Mandrake

This mean looking mother was requested by friend and Patron @ScottyMcScotterson, based on the Dark Eldar unit from Warhammer 40K, with artwork provided by Igor Sid.

Because 40K's Eldar are more or less sci-fi elves, it made sense that the Dark Eldar would then of course be sci-fi drow. Also, the whole theme of mandrakes being banished from the rest of the Eldar had a lot of similarities with D&D's driders, so I decided that these could easily just be a similar, but more extreme version of that same kinda curse.

In D&D's fiction, Drow society is all about using cruelty and subterfuge to get ahead, while maintaining the airs of civility and nobility. For example, while it might be considered "clever" (and implicitly permissible) to covertly assassinate the head of a rival house, doing so openly would be seen as distasteful, and would certainly bring about public punishment.

This concept instantly came to mind when I learned about the mandrake, and it seemed to fit so perfectly that this dark elf that loves violence and pain could be an outcast that was exiled for acting out such crimes publicly, without any attempts at subtlety.

Once I had the premise down, I read that the in-game mechanics allow them to move completely undetected through shadow, so Shadow Stealth sounded like a good fit, but chat actually clued me into the shadow mastiff's Shadow Blend trait, which fits even better. For good measure, I also added the Shadow Step feature from the Way of the Shadow monk subclass, as a way to represent its ability to "deep strike" into shadowy areas.

The Power from Pain ability was the hardest to reproduce, as in the war game, it is basically a number of different buffs that stack on the longer a battle takes. These kinds of "hanging bonuses" and tracking tables are generally frowned upon in 5e, so I instead opted to clean it up by simply taking the theme of the trait, literally "power from pain," and translated it into a way for it to recharge its powerful "Baleblast" ranged attack from the war game for downing enemies or dealing out critical hits.

Magma Whale

This big boi was suggested by our friend, and Discord regular @kleinroux, based on the artwork above which we determined was based on Pathfinder's "Fire Whale," but were unable to find the original source for—if you know, give me a heads up!

The concept is simple enough: a massive fire and earth elemental in the form of a whale. As I worked on it though, I came to realize that this thing doesn't really seem like it would be powerful in the same way as most big bad enemies. Whereas most high-CR enemies rely on action economy to boost their damage numbers, it seems like this guy would, in contrast, have relatively few, infrequent attacks, but each attack would be insanely powerful by comparison.

So I issued myself a challenge: See how high of CR I could make this thing without using any Legendary Actions or Lair Actions.

This gave me a lot of freedom to just crank all the dice and all the modifiers up to maximum: damage dice? d12s. Str/Con scores? At or near 30. In all honesty, I could have gone even more crazy by just piling on more dice, but I felt like 35 piercing plus 21 fire, with an additional 21 fire every turn if swallowed was sufficient—especially since that's only one of its two attacks each round.

After that, I gave it some other full-turn actions that made it feel more "whale-like" such as the Erupt action which is basically like a whale breaching out of the water, or its Sonar Pulse, which was suggested by chat, and ended up being a combination damage/utility action.

Finally, you can't have a Gargantuan beast-elemental without some kind of breath attack, so I added its inferno breath. Now, just a big cone of fire would have worked, but that seemed a little too predictable. So I tweaked it a little bit, and instead made it into just a huge arc of incredible heat. So much heat that it incinerates anything flammable, and even turns the terrain to semi-molten glass—an additional feature of the attack that (understandably) makes getting around a bit difficult too.

And that's all for this week.

Again, huge thanks to everyone tuning in to the stream. I'm having a lot of fun doing it, and I personally think I'm improving it at least a tiny bit every week. So keep on watching, and I'll keep working to make it even better!

'Til next time, cheers!

~IADnDMN