I’m completely surprised that Toe-Knee wasn’t A tier. Toe-Knee has a lot of Roleplaying Material to work with, I mean, he talks! He has a lot of personality. And he even gives gifts! But in all honesty. I really want to use the Skull Lord even more now.
On the matter of Nightwalkers: back when they were introduced, Nightwalkers were part of larger Nightshade hierarchy, with gargoyle-like Nightwings below them on the totem pole and centipede-like Nightcrawlers above them. Honestly, I never recalled them having much story to them beyond being giant undead leader monsters made of pure entropy and shadow. Pathfinder did two good things to them: first, expanded the list with new different forms, with absolutely colossal, flying shark-like Nightwaves at the very top; and second, gave them a more easily-tied into high-level campaigns backstory: Nightshades are powered by souls of fiends who came to Negative Energy Plane to harness the ultimate entropy but failed and had their corporeal bodies destroyed.
What I like best about undead is the potential they allow for certain sorts of things to become a part of a setting or campaign. For instance, I like the potential for a major historical figure to be a ghost, lich, vampire or death knight type thing. The characters might need to try to contact that creature and get information or it might guard a valuable treasure or important object. On the other hand, the minion type undead like zombies or skeletons of ghouls can tend to suggest a necromancer or something gone awry, like that crazy weird guy in the "Sinbad" movie who throws stuff on the ground and the skeletons come up, or like something from Lovecraft like in the "Charles Dexter Ward" story or something. Like you said in the "beast-men" vid, the ones with the most lore tend to be the best!
{Ring, ring...} Hello, Tim's mortuary, you stab them, we slab them!!! Undead puns are great! Like they say, the morgue the merrier!!! But be careful trusting your skeletal friend, because, like ghosts, you can see right through them!! I do have a bone to pick with you: you should expand Dungeons and Dragons as a whole, not limiting yourself to a single edition. In the 2nd Edition DRAGON magazines, there are Blasting Bones, which blows up when struck by a blunt weapon, spreading deadly bone shards in a 10' radius (like a modern frag grenade). When I was a DM back in the early days of AD&D, I ran a game in which the party encountered a group of Skeletons. Knowing that Skeletons are easy targets to destroy (and the party was seasoned to know edged weapons do only half damage, I surprised them by randomly mixing ordinary walking bones with dangerous bone bombs that explode with deadly AOE bone shards when struck by blunt weapons. That culled they easy target tactics real fast and started their thinking gears as well. Skeletons were treated more differently as a serious threat afterwards. There's a zombie version of that as well, with more damage dealt by nails and shards of glass in their bodies. You can even mix alchemic chemicals like acid, napalm, or toxic gases within the zombie for more dramatic effects. Your party will think twice about messing with "basic" undead in the future. In the Fiend Folio, there's an undead creature from Japanese lore (name escapes me but it starts was "V") that is human by day, but a flying vampiric head with entrails at night. And since skeletons are lesser constructs, why not Bone Golems and Flesh Golems (aka, Frankenstein's monster) joining the undead ranks. There's also Juju Zombies, undead slaves created by voodoo magic. Too bad D&D does have a Jeepers Creeper; of course Jeepers Creeper would be considered as a Demon of Purging instead of undead. Remember: the fundamental principles of D&D at based on one's unique imagination. It's pure and limitless!!! Oh well (how deep?), kudos on a video well done and keep up with the great work you do!!!
The skull lord reminds me of this one boss fight in a game called Salt and Sanctuary (Spoilers, btw), the triple threat of the Knight, the Judge, and the King. The Knight was a warrior that had little to no parallel, the Judge was a Mage of extreme power, and the King was, well, a king that was possibly somewhere in the middle. They were later turned into a religion that you can take as a creed in the game, known as the Three. By the time you fight them, they are sitting near the end, hidden off in a secret area in the Crypt of Dead Gods, as shambling shells of their former selves. I kind of want to put together a stat block of a skull lord that is based on them, with the right arm being the Knight with his sword, the left arm being the Judge with her spellbook, and the King in between, controlling the legs as the one who guides them.
I can understand not giving the Bodak the highest roleplaying potential but rock bottom? The Bodak has two great roleplaying opportunities: #1. The Bodak retains a vague recollection of its former life and is driven to destroy any trace of its former life, you could structure an entire quest around a family or church that saw one of its members turned into a Bodak, and you have to deal with the ramifications of this creatures impact on its former loved one. 2. Bodaks are extremely tied to Orcus, anything heard or seen by a Bodak is known by Orcus, also Orcus can directly communicate through any Bodak. So if Orcus is the main antagonist of your campaign then you can use a Bodak to have Orcus communicate directly with your party without the party having to risk traveling into the abyss.
Those are good points. The 1 roleplaying score comes from the fact that unless a bodak is interacting with Orcus worshippers, its only motivation is to destroy all life. Maybe I should have given it a 2 in roleplaying for the off chance a character impersonates a cultist of Orcus or some other situation. But the vast majority of the time, the bodak will not be conversing and interacting with the characters, only trying to slay them. If it's any consolation, it wouldn't have changed the bodak's place in the ranking at all.
3:25 about the negative plane, well, you are right, but what with you trie to see the negative plane, not as a place, but more like an event, like a storm or earthquake, something players must survive to rescue someone or retrieve an ancient artifact, maybe a lich keeps his phylactary in the negative plane, and when It Góes to feed Just placed some protectives spell on the poor soul before heading their to perfom the ritual, so the players must find a way to protect themselves from It, so they make deals with many entities, unteaveal many forgotten spells, or they sacrife someone to get a glimpse of what Magic the liches use to protect his subjects, or better yet, fool him into showing you, things like that
So on the topic of the Nightwalker, I will in the near future will be running a modern style campaign and I had plans on creatures such as Oni and Nightwalkers acting as kids storied and monsters from tales parents give their parents so they'll come home after dark, but obviously the catch being they're actually real. I just imagine the party walking through a rundown neighbor hood at night and a Nightwalker slowly turns the corner, clutching the building with its large, gossamer fingers as it stares, eyes devoid of emotion, at them. As for the Oni, I had the idea they'd take up the role of the man with the white van, but Uncle Oni's not here to touch your no-no regions, instead he here to eat them. Literally. What do y'all think of the ideas? Anything I could add? I like the idea of Nightwalkers and wanna make them similar to something like Slender-Man, but scary and without the movie.
for potential modern monsters, i would recommend building a adventure on a big bar that throws the best parties in the city (maybe in the entire country) but the thing is this parties are just giant orgies and the bar owners are succubus. and there are 2 situations that i think you would like that i have used in my shin megami tensei. the first is a normal park or small forest with loots of trees,if you by chance end up doing a certain number of things (in my case it was 3 things,talk to the strange man with no face feeding ducks in the lake,drink the soda that came from the tap that was supossed to run water,and if both conditions are meet following the little girl into the woods) you would be transported to a infinite florest in wich you would end up meeting a old lady in a very peculiar house,that would be cool to you at first but would then try to kill you,just like gretel and hansel,but the house is not made of candy,but living corpses,and the witch is a alchemist that uses the bodies that make the house as blood sacrifice in order to power herself up. since it was an smt game i made her a demon summoner that had a manticore and a nue. it was part of a big quest of twisted demonic fairy tails in order for them to meet alice and be able to use her as a summonable demon(just google alice smt in case of any doubt). the second situation was a rogue jack frost that disguised himself as a toy to murder the kids families frozen, he was hard because it was in the begining of the campaing, but he came back later as black frost and do the same thing,but instead it burned the entire house down, they defeated him sending him to hell,the plan was to make him return as lucifrost but the campaing ended before that :v
Include some zombies and call their attacks "bites." Then if they bite anyone, ask for a Constitution save and pretend to write down the result. Especially with the modern setting, the players will be terrified their characters are going to become zombies, even though the bites don't actually do anything worse than the Monster Manual zombie's attack.
I know I'm late to the party, but here's a scene which could be terrifying: As you walk down the road with the sun long since passed, the bell begins to ring. Against the night sky, a tall slender figure with horns walks by. (For those with superior Darkvision) You watch as a hand grabs the tower, slowly turning to face the party with the faint eerie glow of it's blue eyes, staring at you. (Normal) A low roar emits from the giant shadow, echoing off the land around it. A loud crash is heard as a tower falls hitting the ground. Dread begins to seep into your minds. (Roll initiative.) That's what I saw given the monster and scenario.
I like the massive amount of lore significance behind undead. It makes them fun and allows for a great deal of flexibility, despite being relatively straightforward, and are a good way to let people know they're probably going the right way. Hell, many of classes have specific anti-undead specializations on hand. My favorite character even is a grave cleric, for example.
One type of undead monster I would like to have in a D&D campaign is the Onryo, aka. the stringy-haired Japanese ghost girl. But let me give you a more elaborate description: Onryo are essecially Revenants, but "gone wrong". They are formed of the negative emotions that a highly troubled soul left behind when it passed on, taking shape as a ghastly parody of its living self, surrounded by an aura of heartwrenching sorrow and surreal menace. They have the presistance and general physiology of a Revenant, but an outward appearance and intelligence closer to that of a Ghoul, without a soul of their own and little more than violent hatred on thier minds, although they do indeed retain the memories of their lives and shreds of their personalities; incapable of reasonable thought, but still of very strong emotions. Where Ghouls only want to feed, Onryo only want to torment and kill in blind retaliation for how they have been wronged in life. And rather than haunting specific people like a Revenant does, Onryo tend to haunt places or objects and indiscriminately attack anyone who catches their attention - _except,_ in some cases, the very person responsible for their creation, whom they may actively avoid or even haunt without ever targeting them. In theory, this opens up the option for a cunning and ruthless individual to weaponize them, although that would rarely turn out exactly as planed. The Onryo's most prominent abilities are to quickly shift between a corporeal and incorporeal form in order to pass through solid objects, teleportation spells to compensate for their typically slow and awkward movements, and attacking with their inhumanly strong bare hands, but they may also display a wide variety of special traits linked to their living selves and the circumstances of their initial trauma and demise, which allow them to inflict the same kind of suffering that spawned them upon their victims. Occasionally, one Onryo may even end up creating another. Being soulless spectral abominations, Onryo cannot simply be laid to rest like other undead. Even destroying the object, site or entity they are haunting is no surefire way to get rid of them. Only by disconnecting them from the material plane can they be destroyed permanently.
In my setting, i completely overhauled nagas. Instead of their official lore, i made them an immortal fey creature that regains its youth whenever it returns to where it was born or when it is slain which in turn causes it to regenerate where they were born. This normally works out well for them, unless they get trapped away from their brith place, either physically or via some fey contract, in which case their bodies will gradually rot and turn them into a bone naga. My players encountered one that had been contracted to guard the laboratory of a mad scientist, but the scientist had died of natural causes before being able to release the naga from its contract so it was stuck guarding for hundereds of years. They convinced her to allow them to slay her so that she could be free from the contract and regenerate at her home. Was a good session
Can you do a Pathfinder and Dnd Comparison, pro's and cons of each? All editions in mind (including starfinder), not as a "Which is better", but to help dms figure which system may be better to use for their campaign ideas?
It was around 1992 that Dragon Magazine came out with the assassin skeleton, Bloody Bones. They kept their thieving, assassin skills in the cross over to undeath and made incredible servants to vampires and liches. Completely silent, always in black thieving suits and great murder weapons. You should check them out.
I know this is a late comment to an old video, but i love your Monster Ranking videos. it shows so many different types of monsters, and a brief summary that helps creative juice flow, and i have to sit with a word doc. open to write down the ideas. Thank you for doing this.
I do love your monster ratings, and I will not dispute the reasons you had for placing the Boneclaw where you did, as the lore that is presented in the 5e source book is limited at best, however I implore you to go and research the deep and veiled history of the Boneclaw as a whole. It is hands down my favorite undead creature from d&d outside the lich and its variants. Not only are its abilities and roles diverse and effective in the extreme, but the reasons it could be inserted into the party's path are endless. It could be attached to an angry, abused child from the local orphanage, carrying out the twisted will of a widow who blames the town for her husbands death, or even passively wreak havoc in the wake of a party member that has allowed their integrity to become stained by the blood of their countless foes. Boneclaws can sense their master's will and does not ever need to physically interact with their master, making them potentially impossible to track down in a large city. Their shadow and stealth based abilities make them excellent trackers and stalkers and they can push obstacles into or out of the party's way, depending on the motivations of its master. As a potent, nigh-immortal and viciously intelligent creature the Boneclaw is an excellent assassin and a harrowing villain to throw at any group, since the Boneclaw can reconstitute itself and continue harassing the party no matter where they are. It is intelligent so it learns as it fights and can bring new tactics and tools to the table every time it returns. It is an incredibly easy villain to scale as well. A freshly created Boneclaw can be clumsy or inexperienced with attacking powerful or illusive foes, so a low level party can defeat it with effort or clever traps. It can scale with the party over time, learning new tricks or ways of deceiving its prey. Or it can come in as a fully fledged horror after decades or centuries of murder and bloodshed. And if all the negative baggage that undead carry would dissuade a GM from using the Boneclaw, I offer an excellent moral dilemma for any party with the following example of how a Boneclaw can be the ultimate monster to build a campagin around: Picture a typical Kingdom with normal struggles and constraints. Magic and limited technology offer differing and variably expensive means of completing the normal tasks that life are built on. In lean times fights break out and the embers of war fan alive. The problems with corruption and greediness that lay dormant during prosperity become exaggerated. The lack of manpower caused by a draft for soldiers to fight a rival Empire makes tough times tougher and moral fiber begins to stretch thin. A young girl loses her father, the last remaining family she had left to the war. His death was unnecessary and unjust. If the local noble had invested in training a guard before enemy soldiers came to ransack his lands, instead of greedily procrastinating on their cost, then her aging father wouldn't have been made to fight as a peasant levy. This girl, angry at the noble and the other incompetents joins a merchants guild, taking up the job of traveling to sell goods throughout the Kingdom. Unbeknownst to her, during the raid by the Empire on her home town, an aspiring lich, hiding away in a cave, was discovered and killed mid-ritual. This took place just after the news of her father's death reached her and her rage brought the newly created Boneclaw to her. Now she travels from city to city, hating the aristocrats she caters to. All the nobles that allowed their sloth to jeopardize the lives of those they hold office to protect, sipping wine and dining in luxury while she toils alone in the world. The danger she is unaware of, and what the band of intrepid adventurers are hired to resolve, is that her loathing of the corrupt officials in her lands has given unspoken orders to the vile abomination that is her Boneclaw servant. The girl only hates the undeserving and corrupt, ridding the world of their ill influence, and the people are better for it. So what does the party do? The evil in their lands is being killed by a darker force, wielded by a justified girl who is unaware of her impact. Do they destroy the Boneclaw by killing the girl? She is mostly innocent, save her hatred, and the Boneclaw only kills the treacherous and corrupt. I am sure that with little effort most DMs can tweak any of what I just wrote to suit their campaign settings and motivations. A truly interesting story to watch played out. And that is just one of many good-aligned ways to use Boneclaws, despite their inherent evil. Their power not withstanding, I think the lore of how Boneclaws are made, (Yes made, not accidentally spawned), is enriching and interesting. And their potential is vast. Obviously this was long and tedious but I couldn't let my favorite toy be placed into such a low tier just because Wizards decided to be lazy about writing out the lore and history of their monsters.
A little note I want to make with the new eberron book is the undead soldiers who are skeletons plus losing the vulnerability to bludgeons with pack tactics,undead fortitude and parry. And 12 INT it would not be unreasonable to give them a few levels in fighter or barbarian.
Mate, I think that’s the intention with the negative plane. It’s the end. The outer edge where everything becomes horrifying and impossible. The very ragged edge of existence. It’s there more for poetic symmetry. For the positive there is the negative. An important idea for any story I’d say.
the negative energy plan is the source of all if not most necrotic energy in the dnd multiverse, just as the positive energy plane is the source of all healing energy
Love the video and the Death Tyrant I'm DM an undead campaign of my own creation and my party just killed a Death Tyrant and 2 Beholder Zombies, and 4 Flame Skulls but not without loss of a samurai and an evoker but then the Light Cleric used Divine Intervention to ask her deity Leo to reserect them. So all in all it's going to be better when I use more undead
First, thank you for the puns. The FEED ME. Second, there are a few more undead stat blocks, sprinkled throughout other 5e books. I think Tales of the Yawning Portal has ones for Giant Skeletons, Greater Zombies, some generic ghost soldiers, and a Centaur Mummy. I know for a fact I saw all of those somewhere, in one place or another. Third, concerning the entries in the video itself, I toyed with the idea of a variant of the Spawn of Kyuss, wherein those infected rose as undead, but their spirits were trapped inside. Their only autonomy was in their ability to speak, leading to a _VERY_ System Shock situation, where poor, worm-ridden souls prowled the area, shouting at people to run. "Run! RUN! Don't let me touch you! Run away, or you'll end up like MEEEE!"
I think it would be awsome if you presented the pictures of the other monsters in the Tierlist, maybe black and white or something, just to see them and so you can compare the new monsters with them, especially if you use some from the MM. But well, c-tier would be quite full, i know. Maybe there is a solution for that.
I've modified my night walkers to be a titan sort of thing that roams at night much like eidolons from warframe. At night they form and will roam killing anything it comes across that isnt in a city as cities are guarded. By doing this I've made night time much more dangerous and my players have to be careful where they sleep
in 5e the negative and positive energy planes are at the outer most parts of the cosmos, the upper planes being with the positive energy plane and the lower planes with the negative energy plane with the positive and negative energy planes seemingly not reachable as planes to explore in 5e
Remember how flesh grafts were a thing in 3.5? Remember how *Beholder eye grafts* were among them? Apply one (or more!) of them to a Lich. (Please forgive me fellow players)
So is it possible to get a quest by a bunch of mind-flayers to hunt down a former member of their society which became Alhoon? (Possibly after sucking the mind of a necromancer)
Oshit I got that innstrad card in one of my vampire decks. I need to get a few more, Ima make me a voltron insidious mist vampire deck. Oh, is that a full damage stack of artifacts making it into a 12/7 mist with vigilance? How about four of them.
I know it is difficult to go through so many D & D monsters but is there an undead version of a centaur that wants to drain life from everything around it and cause all living things terrible pain?
Maybe aberrations next? They can get fucking weird and O.P. when it comes to combat, like the recent version of the Will o' Wisp. I used them in a campaign and, sure as shit, as I look over it's overall bio for CR 6 it's not something to be fucked with especially since there's always multiple and there lore is pretty fucking cool, in my opinion.
Hmm... I have been considering having a go at DnD for a while, but I don't like being just a human or human-but-different when I role play. Can you do a tier list of unusual pc races? Please?
Sean McFadden All player races are technically "human, but different", or *humanoid* . There are, however, some less common races such as the Lizardfolk and Yuan-ti which process thought (and therefore speech) differently than the rest. Aaracokra are also unique in the way they behave and speak. They're also far-sighted, although many don't bother with that game mechanics-wise. Warforged are constructs, and act however you want them to act. Very flexible. That's pretty much it.
@@angeryboi873 yeap. That's pretty much the idea I had. Just not the typical "we're the good guys because we're human/elves/dwarves" . I'm kind of surprised that centaurs and drakkoths aren't options. (Though, I guess some could house rules them in.) A drakkoth paladin that follows Bahamut would be awesome.
Sean McFadden WotC came out with some Unearthed Arcana recently, it had Minotaurs and Centaurs as player character options. Maybe they'll be officially added in their next monster book.
@@seanmcfadden3712 Well, there are the Dragonborn and Lizardfolk. And if you're looking for 5e races outside the human/elf/dwarf paradigm there are: Kenku, Firbolgs, Shadar-kai, Tieflings, Genasi, Tortles, Minotaurs, Aarkocra, Tabaxi, Aasimar, Yuan-Ti, Svirfneblin, Drow, Bugbears, Tritons, Kobolds and Loxodons.
I like your voice during these. Also can you do Demons to finish the demonic tier list or Celestials. On a side note my Imp from my Warlock character is the best. Her name is Giblets and for no reason but sheer luck whenever I tell her to bite someone in the dick she always gets a natural 20. Take that as you will comment reader.
Never go into a pun-duel with Esper. He will rib you apart.
He was quite Pun-tastic this video!
Only Sans stand a chance.
I have an army of pundead under my control, bring it on.
Agamemnon that joke can be taken one of two ways, rib as in the bone or as in a joke. If that was intentional then good job
So. Many. Puns.
these puns keep dealing 1d20 psychic damage per pun can someone throw me some heals
Isimiel agreed my save vs cringe is not very good.
*cackles behind resistance 50/- pun damage*
*OATH OF VENGEANCE PALADIN!* *HEALS VIA BITCH SLAP!*
You would've died before the first encounter.
Yeah sure mass cure wounds
I’m completely surprised that Toe-Knee wasn’t A tier. Toe-Knee has a lot of Roleplaying Material to work with, I mean, he talks! He has a lot of personality. And he even gives gifts! But in all honesty. I really want to use the Skull Lord even more now.
im really surprised tony wasn't a tiger or A tier i mean come on he's grRRREAT!
It’s too bad they live in the shadowfell because why the heck would you ever go there.
The Bodak looks like someone after finals
On the matter of Nightwalkers: back when they were introduced, Nightwalkers were part of larger Nightshade hierarchy, with gargoyle-like Nightwings below them on the totem pole and centipede-like Nightcrawlers above them. Honestly, I never recalled them having much story to them beyond being giant undead leader monsters made of pure entropy and shadow. Pathfinder did two good things to them: first, expanded the list with new different forms, with absolutely colossal, flying shark-like Nightwaves at the very top; and second, gave them a more easily-tied into high-level campaigns backstory: Nightshades are powered by souls of fiends who came to Negative Energy Plane to harness the ultimate entropy but failed and had their corporeal bodies destroyed.
What I like best about undead is the potential they allow for certain sorts of things to become a part of a setting or campaign. For instance, I like the potential for a major historical figure to be a ghost, lich, vampire or death knight type thing. The characters might need to try to contact that creature and get information or it might guard a valuable treasure or important object. On the other hand, the minion type undead like zombies or skeletons of ghouls can tend to suggest a necromancer or something gone awry, like that crazy weird guy in the "Sinbad" movie who throws stuff on the ground and the skeletons come up, or like something from Lovecraft like in the "Charles Dexter Ward" story or something. Like you said in the "beast-men" vid, the ones with the most lore tend to be the best!
Well said, Violet. Storytelling is really at the heart of RPGs, otherwise it's just a dice rolling wargame.
You get a like simply for the puns, those really get to my funny bone.
He makes me wanna beg femur
Was so hoping for the bone naga to get the great pun about having more backbone than his brethren.
I'm very surprised the Angel of Decay didn't hit the list given that it's an undead celestial.
isn't that 4e/3e these lists only cover 5e
i think that was outside the books he was taking from
{Ring, ring...} Hello, Tim's mortuary, you stab them, we slab them!!! Undead puns are great! Like they say, the morgue the merrier!!! But be careful trusting your skeletal friend, because, like ghosts, you can see right through them!! I do have a bone to pick with you: you should expand Dungeons and Dragons as a whole, not limiting yourself to a single edition. In the 2nd Edition DRAGON magazines, there are Blasting Bones, which blows up when struck by a blunt weapon, spreading deadly bone shards in a 10' radius (like a modern frag grenade). When I was a DM back in the early days of AD&D, I ran a game in which the party encountered a group of Skeletons. Knowing that Skeletons are easy targets to destroy (and the party was seasoned to know edged weapons do only half damage, I surprised them by randomly mixing ordinary walking bones with dangerous bone bombs that explode with deadly AOE bone shards when struck by blunt weapons. That culled they easy target tactics real fast and started their thinking gears as well. Skeletons were treated more differently as a serious threat afterwards. There's a zombie version of that as well, with more damage dealt by nails and shards of glass in their bodies. You can even mix alchemic chemicals like acid, napalm, or toxic gases within the zombie for more dramatic effects. Your party will think twice about messing with "basic" undead in the future. In the Fiend Folio, there's an undead creature from Japanese lore (name escapes me but it starts was "V") that is human by day, but a flying vampiric head with entrails at night. And since skeletons are lesser constructs, why not Bone Golems and Flesh Golems (aka, Frankenstein's monster) joining the undead ranks. There's also Juju Zombies, undead slaves created by voodoo magic. Too bad D&D does have a Jeepers Creeper; of course Jeepers Creeper would be considered as a Demon of Purging instead of undead. Remember: the fundamental principles of D&D at based on one's unique imagination. It's pure and limitless!!! Oh well (how deep?), kudos on a video well done and keep up with the great work you do!!!
The skull lord reminds me of this one boss fight in a game called Salt and Sanctuary (Spoilers, btw), the triple threat of the Knight, the Judge, and the King. The Knight was a warrior that had little to no parallel, the Judge was a Mage of extreme power, and the King was, well, a king that was possibly somewhere in the middle. They were later turned into a religion that you can take as a creed in the game, known as the Three. By the time you fight them, they are sitting near the end, hidden off in a secret area in the Crypt of Dead Gods, as shambling shells of their former selves. I kind of want to put together a stat block of a skull lord that is based on them, with the right arm being the Knight with his sword, the left arm being the Judge with her spellbook, and the King in between, controlling the legs as the one who guides them.
Salt and Sanctuary bossfights are really awesome, the Queen of Smiles is a favorite of mine and became the major villain in one of my DnD games
I can understand not giving the Bodak the highest roleplaying potential but rock bottom? The Bodak has two great roleplaying opportunities:
#1. The Bodak retains a vague recollection of its former life and is driven to destroy any trace of its former life, you could structure an entire quest around a family or church that saw one of its members turned into a Bodak, and you have to deal with the ramifications of this creatures impact on its former loved one.
2. Bodaks are extremely tied to Orcus, anything heard or seen by a Bodak is known by Orcus, also Orcus can directly communicate through any Bodak. So if Orcus is the main antagonist of your campaign then you can use a Bodak to have Orcus communicate directly with your party without the party having to risk traveling into the abyss.
Those are good points. The 1 roleplaying score comes from the fact that unless a bodak is interacting with Orcus worshippers, its only motivation is to destroy all life. Maybe I should have given it a 2 in roleplaying for the off chance a character impersonates a cultist of Orcus or some other situation. But the vast majority of the time, the bodak will not be conversing and interacting with the characters, only trying to slay them. If it's any consolation, it wouldn't have changed the bodak's place in the ranking at all.
This is a wonderful presentation of bodak lore from a great channel ruclips.net/video/nGVIiqIBYN4/видео.html
NO ZOMBIE T-REX!
Atropus doesn’t accept this blasphemy!!
3:25 about the negative plane, well, you are right, but what with you trie to see the negative plane, not as a place, but more like an event, like a storm or earthquake, something players must survive to rescue someone or retrieve an ancient artifact, maybe a lich keeps his phylactary in the negative plane, and when It Góes to feed Just placed some protectives spell on the poor soul before heading their to perfom the ritual, so the players must find a way to protect themselves from It, so they make deals with many entities, unteaveal many forgotten spells, or they sacrife someone to get a glimpse of what Magic the liches use to protect his subjects, or better yet, fool him into showing you, things like that
Dude this video was great and it sounded like you enjoyed making it, nice!
It was a blast! also a chop, a scorch, and a splatter
So on the topic of the Nightwalker, I will in the near future will be running a modern style campaign and I had plans on creatures such as Oni and Nightwalkers acting as kids storied and monsters from tales parents give their parents so they'll come home after dark, but obviously the catch being they're actually real. I just imagine the party walking through a rundown neighbor hood at night and a Nightwalker slowly turns the corner, clutching the building with its large, gossamer fingers as it stares, eyes devoid of emotion, at them. As for the Oni, I had the idea they'd take up the role of the man with the white van, but Uncle Oni's not here to touch your no-no regions, instead he here to eat them. Literally. What do y'all think of the ideas? Anything I could add? I like the idea of Nightwalkers and wanna make them similar to something like Slender-Man, but scary and without the movie.
for potential modern monsters, i would recommend building a adventure on a big bar that throws the best parties in the city (maybe in the entire country) but the thing is this parties are just giant orgies and the bar owners are succubus. and there are 2 situations that i think you would like that i have used in my shin megami tensei. the first is a normal park or small forest with loots of trees,if you by chance end up doing a certain number of things (in my case it was 3 things,talk to the strange man with no face feeding ducks in the lake,drink the soda that came from the tap that was supossed to run water,and if both conditions are meet following the little girl into the woods) you would be transported to a infinite florest in wich you would end up meeting a old lady in a very peculiar house,that would be cool to you at first but would then try to kill you,just like gretel and hansel,but the house is not made of candy,but living corpses,and the witch is a alchemist that uses the bodies that make the house as blood sacrifice in order to power herself up. since it was an smt game i made her a demon summoner that had a manticore and a nue. it was part of a big quest of twisted demonic fairy tails in order for them to meet alice and be able to use her as a summonable demon(just google alice smt in case of any doubt). the second situation was a rogue jack frost that disguised himself as a toy to murder the kids families frozen, he was hard because it was in the begining of the campaing, but he came back later as black frost and do the same thing,but instead it burned the entire house down, they defeated him sending him to hell,the plan was to make him return as lucifrost but the campaing ended before that :v
Include some zombies and call their attacks "bites." Then if they bite anyone, ask for a Constitution save and pretend to write down the result. Especially with the modern setting, the players will be terrified their characters are going to become zombies, even though the bites don't actually do anything worse than the Monster Manual zombie's attack.
@@Jpteryx That is absolutely evil and deceptive. Now I'm definitely gonna do that lol
Floaty_Boi And then when nothing happens and they let their guard down, the next player to split off from the group is ambushed by Vargouilles.
I know I'm late to the party, but here's a scene which could be terrifying:
As you walk down the road with the sun long since passed, the bell begins to ring. Against the night sky, a tall slender figure with horns walks by.
(For those with superior Darkvision)
You watch as a hand grabs the tower, slowly turning to face the party with the faint eerie glow of it's blue eyes, staring at you.
(Normal)
A low roar emits from the giant shadow, echoing off the land around it. A loud crash is heard as a tower falls hitting the ground.
Dread begins to seep into your minds.
(Roll initiative.)
That's what I saw given the monster and scenario.
Agh, the puns! It's like I'm listening to Svengoolie.
I like the massive amount of lore significance behind undead. It makes them fun and allows for a great deal of flexibility, despite being relatively straightforward, and are a good way to let people know they're probably going the right way.
Hell, many of classes have specific anti-undead specializations on hand.
My favorite character even is a grave cleric, for example.
One type of undead monster I would like to have in a D&D campaign is the Onryo, aka. the stringy-haired Japanese ghost girl. But let me give you a more elaborate description:
Onryo are essecially Revenants, but "gone wrong". They are formed of the negative emotions that a highly troubled soul left behind when it passed on, taking shape as a ghastly parody of its living self, surrounded by an aura of heartwrenching sorrow and surreal menace. They have the presistance and general physiology of a Revenant, but an outward appearance and intelligence closer to that of a Ghoul, without a soul of their own and little more than violent hatred on thier minds, although they do indeed retain the memories of their lives and shreds of their personalities; incapable of reasonable thought, but still of very strong emotions. Where Ghouls only want to feed, Onryo only want to torment and kill in blind retaliation for how they have been wronged in life. And rather than haunting specific people like a Revenant does, Onryo tend to haunt places or objects and indiscriminately attack anyone who catches their attention - _except,_ in some cases, the very person responsible for their creation, whom they may actively avoid or even haunt without ever targeting them. In theory, this opens up the option for a cunning and ruthless individual to weaponize them, although that would rarely turn out exactly as planed.
The Onryo's most prominent abilities are to quickly shift between a corporeal and incorporeal form in order to pass through solid objects, teleportation spells to compensate for their typically slow and awkward movements, and attacking with their inhumanly strong bare hands, but they may also display a wide variety of special traits linked to their living selves and the circumstances of their initial trauma and demise, which allow them to inflict the same kind of suffering that spawned them upon their victims. Occasionally, one Onryo may even end up creating another.
Being soulless spectral abominations, Onryo cannot simply be laid to rest like other undead. Even destroying the object, site or entity they are haunting is no surefire way to get rid of them. Only by disconnecting them from the material plane can they be destroyed permanently.
The amount of undead puns in this video was just downright bone chilling.
Love the rankings. Could you do one about the fae? I always feel that they are never represented enough, well, besides the elven races. Thanks!
In my setting, i completely overhauled nagas. Instead of their official lore, i made them an immortal fey creature that regains its youth whenever it returns to where it was born or when it is slain which in turn causes it to regenerate where they were born.
This normally works out well for them, unless they get trapped away from their brith place, either physically or via some fey contract, in which case their bodies will gradually rot and turn them into a bone naga.
My players encountered one that had been contracted to guard the laboratory of a mad scientist, but the scientist had died of natural causes before being able to release the naga from its contract so it was stuck guarding for hundereds of years.
They convinced her to allow them to slay her so that she could be free from the contract and regenerate at her home.
Was a good session
Can you do a Pathfinder and Dnd Comparison, pro's and cons of each? All editions in mind (including starfinder), not as a "Which is better", but to help dms figure which system may be better to use for their campaign ideas?
I physically recoiled from these puns.
It was around 1992 that Dragon Magazine came out with the assassin skeleton, Bloody Bones. They kept their thieving, assassin skills in the cross over to undeath and made incredible servants to vampires and liches. Completely silent, always in black thieving suits and great murder weapons. You should check them out.
I dont see why we cant have a fully realized dnd game with complete choice and amazing exploration
I know this is a late comment to an old video, but i love your Monster Ranking videos. it shows so many different types of monsters, and a brief summary that helps creative juice flow, and i have to sit with a word doc. open to write down the ideas. Thank you for doing this.
I do love your monster ratings, and I will not dispute the reasons you had for placing the Boneclaw where you did, as the lore that is presented in the 5e source book is limited at best, however I implore you to go and research the deep and veiled history of the Boneclaw as a whole.
It is hands down my favorite undead creature from d&d outside the lich and its variants. Not only are its abilities and roles diverse and effective in the extreme, but the reasons it could be inserted into the party's path are endless. It could be attached to an angry, abused child from the local orphanage, carrying out the twisted will of a widow who blames the town for her husbands death, or even passively wreak havoc in the wake of a party member that has allowed their integrity to become stained by the blood of their countless foes.
Boneclaws can sense their master's will and does not ever need to physically interact with their master, making them potentially impossible to track down in a large city. Their shadow and stealth based abilities make them excellent trackers and stalkers and they can push obstacles into or out of the party's way, depending on the motivations of its master.
As a potent, nigh-immortal and viciously intelligent creature the Boneclaw is an excellent assassin and a harrowing villain to throw at any group, since the Boneclaw can reconstitute itself and continue harassing the party no matter where they are. It is intelligent so it learns as it fights and can bring new tactics and tools to the table every time it returns. It is an incredibly easy villain to scale as well. A freshly created Boneclaw can be clumsy or inexperienced with attacking powerful or illusive foes, so a low level party can defeat it with effort or clever traps. It can scale with the party over time, learning new tricks or ways of deceiving its prey. Or it can come in as a fully fledged horror after decades or centuries of murder and bloodshed.
And if all the negative baggage that undead carry would dissuade a GM from using the Boneclaw, I offer an excellent moral dilemma for any party with the following example of how a Boneclaw can be the ultimate monster to build a campagin around:
Picture a typical Kingdom with normal struggles and constraints. Magic and limited technology offer differing and variably expensive means of completing the normal tasks that life are built on. In lean times fights break out and the embers of war fan alive. The problems with corruption and greediness that lay dormant during prosperity become exaggerated. The lack of manpower caused by a draft for soldiers to fight a rival Empire makes tough times tougher and moral fiber begins to stretch thin.
A young girl loses her father, the last remaining family she had left to the war. His death was unnecessary and unjust. If the local noble had invested in training a guard before enemy soldiers came to ransack his lands, instead of greedily procrastinating on their cost, then her aging father wouldn't have been made to fight as a peasant levy. This girl, angry at the noble and the other incompetents joins a merchants guild, taking up the job of traveling to sell goods throughout the Kingdom. Unbeknownst to her, during the raid by the Empire on her home town, an aspiring lich, hiding away in a cave, was discovered and killed mid-ritual. This took place just after the news of her father's death reached her and her rage brought the newly created Boneclaw to her.
Now she travels from city to city, hating the aristocrats she caters to. All the nobles that allowed their sloth to jeopardize the lives of those they hold office to protect, sipping wine and dining in luxury while she toils alone in the world. The danger she is unaware of, and what the band of intrepid adventurers are hired to resolve, is that her loathing of the corrupt officials in her lands has given unspoken orders to the vile abomination that is her Boneclaw servant.
The girl only hates the undeserving and corrupt, ridding the world of their ill influence, and the people are better for it. So what does the party do? The evil in their lands is being killed by a darker force, wielded by a justified girl who is unaware of her impact. Do they destroy the Boneclaw by killing the girl? She is mostly innocent, save her hatred, and the Boneclaw only kills the treacherous and corrupt.
I am sure that with little effort most DMs can tweak any of what I just wrote to suit their campaign settings and motivations. A truly interesting story to watch played out. And that is just one of many good-aligned ways to use Boneclaws, despite their inherent evil. Their power not withstanding, I think the lore of how Boneclaws are made, (Yes made, not accidentally spawned), is enriching and interesting. And their potential is vast.
Obviously this was long and tedious but I couldn't let my favorite toy be placed into such a low tier just because Wizards decided to be lazy about writing out the lore and history of their monsters.
Love these videos, please keep making them
A little note I want to make with the new eberron book is the undead soldiers who are skeletons plus losing the vulnerability to bludgeons with pack tactics,undead fortitude and parry.
And 12 INT it would not be unreasonable to give them a few levels in fighter or barbarian.
Bodaks are the kind of monster you find in the “just for fun” section of the DM’s encounter list.
I love how you named the Tiers after Megadeth songs.... it's a relief to see a fellow Metalhead into D&D, Hail!
Divine Undead Spirit.... nice! Thanks again for your help.
You and Tony definitely put your backbones into this one.
we really churned out the material once we got crackin'
Notice the Eidolon is missing its right eye. The one that was being chiseled out on the cover of the Players' Handbook.
Yes! From the oldschool AD&D PHB, it's a great detail.
Those puns... and this video... it was a skullduggery.
But seriously, it was awesome!
Mate, I think that’s the intention with the negative plane. It’s the end. The outer edge where everything becomes horrifying and impossible. The very ragged edge of existence. It’s there more for poetic symmetry. For the positive there is the negative. An important idea for any story I’d say.
It’s fucken nuts that Esper just straight up called the Necrichor 3 years before its publication.
All these Puns SLAYED ME
the negative energy plan is the source of all if not most necrotic energy in the dnd multiverse, just as the positive energy plane is the source of all healing energy
12:03 looks like they're about to drop the dopest death metal album of 2019
you forgot the ogre zombie, but other than that great video
Dude you should totally do a dragon based ranking. Throw in drakes, hellfire wyrms, and other crazy ass dragonic monsters.
The Crypt Keeper called. He wants his puns back.
More undead in other editions and dragon magazine. Old editions. Check them out
I have been waiting for this video Esper! Thank you!
Also! The Puns! Sans would be pleased!
I’m gonna use these puns when I play death domain,grave domain,undead patron,dark magic, or school of necromancy
Love the video and the Death Tyrant
I'm DM an undead campaign of my own creation and my party just killed a Death Tyrant and 2 Beholder Zombies, and 4 Flame Skulls but not without loss of a samurai and an evoker but then the Light Cleric used Divine Intervention to ask her deity Leo to reserect them.
So all in all it's going to be better when I use more undead
Skeleton puns gold... Ivory.
First, thank you for the puns. The FEED ME.
Second, there are a few more undead stat blocks, sprinkled throughout other 5e books. I think Tales of the Yawning Portal has ones for Giant Skeletons, Greater Zombies, some generic ghost soldiers, and a Centaur Mummy. I know for a fact I saw all of those somewhere, in one place or another.
Third, concerning the entries in the video itself, I toyed with the idea of a variant of the Spawn of Kyuss, wherein those infected rose as undead, but their spirits were trapped inside. Their only autonomy was in their ability to speak, leading to a _VERY_ System Shock situation, where poor, worm-ridden souls prowled the area, shouting at people to run.
"Run! RUN! Don't let me touch you! Run away, or you'll end up like MEEEE!"
Okay first of all
Your pun game is ON POINT
As a new sub I appreciate this video a lot.
Welcome to the channel!
I think this may be your most pun-filled video
Love the band based tier naming.
The puns! THE PUNS!!! They never stop!!!!!
I like to think of the Negative Plane as what was before existence. Expecting anything from a void is pretty pointless.
Oh now i so want a undead melted ooze wizard
Wow, Esper! Great serie, keep it up, proud of you!
I think it would be awsome if you presented the pictures of the other monsters in the Tierlist, maybe black and white or something, just to see them and so you can compare the new monsters with them, especially if you use some from the MM. But well, c-tier would be quite full, i know. Maybe there is a solution for that.
I've modified my night walkers to be a titan sort of thing that roams at night much like eidolons from warframe. At night they form and will roam killing anything it comes across that isnt in a city as cities are guarded. By doing this I've made night time much more dangerous and my players have to be careful where they sleep
a crypt thing in the middle of a multi level labrinth is a serious pain the ass
*scrolls past video*
*realises*
WAIT HECK CLICK IT
It's awesome that the eidolon is missing the eye they were screwing with in the 1e book.
The puns make the video worth watching even if i wasn't interesting in the ranking as well
great esper. cheers!
in 5e the negative and positive energy planes are at the outer most parts of the cosmos, the upper planes being with the positive energy plane and the lower planes with the negative energy plane with the positive and negative energy planes seemingly not reachable as planes to explore in 5e
my god man, thats like 7 times too many puns, i love it anyway
I never knew there were so many body/undead puns but here we are
New sub here. Diggin' the monster videos. I love how you use the tune names from some of my favorite metal bands, good tunes too!, for your ranks.
You overlooked the necropolitant
Drinking game: take a shot for every undead pun ... then replay undertale
I'm looking forward to your video on fey
Remember how flesh grafts were a thing in 3.5?
Remember how *Beholder eye grafts* were among them?
Apply one (or more!) of them to a Lich.
(Please forgive me fellow players)
Stop with the puns!!! Just kidding. I love these videos.
i love these puns
Love the Megadeth reference ;)
I really like the puns
When you said Mordenkainen's Tome, you sounded like a Kajiit to me. Am I the only one who wants to hear Esper sing the song Kajiit like to sneak?
Beware spoilers of A- and B- Tier!
B Tier: Eidolon, Deathlock,
A Tier: Death Tyrant, Skull Lord, Alhoon,
I failed my wisdom saving throw. And I am force to take cringe damage from the dad jokes. XD
if you want to make your necromancer really powerful make an encounter just one nightwalker
So is it possible to get a quest by a bunch of mind-flayers to hunt down a former member of their society which became Alhoon? (Possibly after sucking the mind of a necromancer)
Your the dm, anything is possible!
Oshit I got that innstrad card in one of my vampire decks. I need to get a few more, Ima make me a voltron insidious mist vampire deck. Oh, is that a full damage stack of artifacts making it into a 12/7 mist with vigilance? How about four of them.
No giant zombie space foetus. :(
I know it is difficult to go through so many D & D monsters but is there an undead version of a centaur that wants to drain life from everything around it and cause all living things terrible pain?
Spawn used to be called Son of Kyuss back in older editions.
Could we please get a Demon ranking video ? Ever since the devil ranking i have been dying for it !!!
Maybe aberrations next? They can get fucking weird and O.P. when it comes to combat, like the recent version of the Will o' Wisp.
I used them in a campaign and, sure as shit, as I look over it's overall bio for CR 6 it's not something to be fucked with especially since there's always multiple and there lore is pretty fucking cool, in my opinion.
Hmm... I have been considering having a go at DnD for a while, but I don't like being just a human or human-but-different when I role play. Can you do a tier list of unusual pc races? Please?
Sean McFadden
All player races are technically "human, but different", or *humanoid* .
There are, however, some less common races such as the Lizardfolk and Yuan-ti which process thought (and therefore speech) differently than the rest.
Aaracokra are also unique in the way they behave and speak. They're also far-sighted, although many don't bother with that game mechanics-wise.
Warforged are constructs, and act however you want them to act. Very flexible.
That's pretty much it.
@@angeryboi873 yeap. That's pretty much the idea I had. Just not the typical "we're the good guys because we're human/elves/dwarves" . I'm kind of surprised that centaurs and drakkoths aren't options. (Though, I guess some could house rules them in.) A drakkoth paladin that follows Bahamut would be awesome.
Sean McFadden
WotC came out with some Unearthed Arcana recently, it had Minotaurs and Centaurs as player character options.
Maybe they'll be officially added in their next monster book.
@@seanmcfadden3712 Well, there are the Dragonborn and Lizardfolk. And if you're looking for 5e races outside the human/elf/dwarf paradigm there are: Kenku, Firbolgs, Shadar-kai, Tieflings, Genasi, Tortles, Minotaurs, Aarkocra, Tabaxi, Aasimar, Yuan-Ti, Svirfneblin, Drow, Bugbears, Tritons, Kobolds and Loxodons.
Nice. My main back in my WoW days was a Tauren. Minotaur, lizardfolk or dragonkin definitely sounds my style. I'll have to think about it.
What about Dread Warriors? I can see them being similar to Sword Wraiths, but the former is physical while the latter is spectral
Geez those puns...
Wow the bodak sounds like my job
Spawn of Kyuss? Heh, even necromancers get PC. They used to be 'Sons of Kyuss'.
What of the Deathlock Wight? It too was in Mordenkainen's Tome.
all these puns.....
I love puns but this is KILLING me
Puns? I got one.
What happened to my facial hair when I shaved this morning?
It all DissaBEARD
Those PUNS
what about undead like the corpse gatherer or the brain in a jar? they seem pretty cool.
I like your voice during these. Also can you do Demons to finish the demonic tier list or Celestials. On a side note my Imp from my Warlock character is the best. Her name is Giblets and for no reason but sheer luck whenever I tell her to bite someone in the dick she always gets a natural 20. Take that as you will comment reader.