Stream Results—March 13th, 2019: Ash Titan and Abyss Watchers (Patreon)

Hey there everyone,

I've got more monsters for you today, getting me back on track to posting the most recent updates from my weekly Twitch monster making streams on time.

Anyway, as always, you'll find the stats and descriptions below, as well as in the full GM Binder doc right here.

And of course, thanks so much to everyone tuning in—really. <3

Now for the monsters:

Ash Titan

This big boi was suggested by our good friend @whistlehunter, based on the roaming boss enemy from the game Anthem.

I've been informed that there are actually multiple versions of these guys featured in the game, a fact I at least acknowledged in the GM Binder doc, but I haven't played the game myself, and nearly all of the information I could find out there was based on the "ancient" version, which is also the most iconic to the game's media and branding, so I figured that this would have to do—at least for now.

In any event, the hardest part about making this creature was taking stock of all the attacks it can do in game, and parsing out how each would work. The melee attacks were obviously easy enough to do, and even the scorch beam ended up simply being a line AoE on a Recharge 6. However the Flame Volley, Heat Burst and Flame Wall ended up being a little more of a decision to make.

In the end, you can see that I opted to make the Flame Wall a Legendary Action, since Legendary actions are often used as between-turn reactions to what the opposition is doing, which makes sense for a close-range AoE. I then made the other two into full actions, with only the Heat Burst on a recharge, since spamming it would get very annoying for the players, and because the Flame Volley is the titan's only real (semi-)direct way to attack from range.

Abyss Watchers

The Abyss Watchers are a group boss fight in Dark Souls 3, and they were suggested by Twitch viewer and Discord regular @Siravia.

These guys are pretty interesting: not only because their lore is pretty compelling, but also mechanically-speaking. In the game, they function as a group boss fight, with one stronger individual fighting alongside a few slightly weaker support adds. In fact, the strongest individual is actually hostile to the rest, and will fight them by itself if you manage to give them enough space—some possible reasons for this are hinted at in the lore, but never outright explained—but I digress!

Anyway, I started out statting this as a single undead monster with essentially a decent but finite number of uses of the a trait similar to the Rejuvenation trait possessed by revenants. After being reminded by chat and watching a clip though, I realized that the main individual actually doesn't keep reanimating multiple times, and in fact just becomes more powerful after being downed once.

Once I had this key mechanic down, it was pretty much just a matter of making a highly-skilled martial fighter that uses a solid combination of Strength and Dexterity to execute a number of fancy (yet still powerful) maneuvers on its opponents. From there, all that was needed was to copy this stat block and tone it down to create a marginally weaker ally (or enemy! or frienemy!) of the main boss character.

And that's all this time.

Once again, thanks A TON to all the nice people who are tuning in every week. I've said it before, and will again: the stream simply would not exist without your support.

'Til next time, cheers!

~IADnDMN