An idea I had would be to have a city that is anti-magic and the guards use mage rippers in little lantern-like cages to detect whether citizens and other people have magical abilities or items.
The party could do the coolest thing and sneak a magical item into the pockets of an NPC they wanna get rid of, then report them on some Dishonored non-lethal route shit
I just love the monsters that seem made to utterly wreck certain character classes. They are both a great way to encourage party cohesion, or to punish that one guy. Now if you really want to be cruel, run these with something like Rust Monsters so the fighter has to worry about losing his gear, and the Wizard has to worry about losing his spells. And with as common as magic is in these settings, it makes sense there would be creatures that eat it.
I'd pair then with the homebrew conversion of " Spellbreakers" from Warcraft (props to pirate Gonzalez) and have these things be a secret weapon/hunting beasts they can let out of a cage and unleash on troublesome mages
Nown I'm imagining a symbiotic horror that's basically a huge rust monster that grows magerippers inside it to spew at it's own leasure, like those wasps that inject viruses with their venom. It pins magical prey down and pumps them full of miniature mage rippers from a big stinger like organ. Maybe it's how they reproduce even; what if these mini symbiote magrippers bud new hybrids instead of more magerippers, giving them a two phase lifecycle like a jellyfish. Uber rust monster grows magrippers inside itself, and those magerippers in turn bud off eggs that will hatch into the uber rust monsters Probably way to overpowered for the actual game, not sure how you'd handle surviving a gut full of magerippers, but a fun creature concept nonetheless
I just got the idea of an underdark explorer used to them, and they guide the party through dark caverns, and you can hear the magerippers just beyond the sight of your darkvision. Maybe the exploring guide uses an antimagic field to cloak your presence, and if you get too close, he just sends a dancing light to distract the swarms away so u can sneak past. Idk I love the atmosphere of them more than the creature themselves
Lore idea: There is a rumor, a whisper drifting through ale and opera houses alike. The Tower is under siege. A mysterious organization hounds the ancient home of magics. Its members are found torn to shreds across the realm, in hotels, alleys, on the roadside, and even among the nobility. At every grisly site is a medallion, and a note. "The Swarm comes for those who trespass on the God's domain." Note: Magerippers can be lured into an appropriately sized container by placing a spelled item within it, before being sealed inside and unleashed on the unsuspecting.
I'm imagining them rampaging around Eberon's Mournlands hunting Living Spells. On that note, have you considered doing a video on the nightmare that is a Living Spell?
We do already have a few living spells in Icewind Dale Rime of the Frostmaiden, but could be interesting to see others of their kind being made using other spells
I like he called the "Light of Azuth" a living spell, that's a video he did awhile ago. But that's a very specific example, I'm sure there's various kinds of living spells
We currently have living spells of burning hands, lightning bolt, and cloudkill. Eberron: Rising of the Last War has a section on customizing and making your own, and that level 5 is the max you can make (and it must be a wizard spell).
So weird question, but do they eat curses. Could be a obscure and dangerous way to try and rid someone of a hag or something trying to mutate them into a monster.
@@DungeonDad is their good darkness theme their pious = overwhelming purifying an their be something in dnd, we seen darkness corrupt the land, what light pious the land like in terraria hollow?
Some curses were spells in 3.x, but not all were. Mummy rot was a curse but also a disease, a sea hag's evil eye curse was a supernatural ability, and so on. However, curses like Undine's Curse and the generic Bestow Curse were spells
If you're open to a little cross edition overlay perchance an immortal warlock from 3.5 keeps a swarm of them as pets (the 3.5 warlock has unlimited spell like ability slots per day so they could definitely feed them) for this reason
I like the idea of a mageripper swarm infestation in a city that starts at the local magical item shop. The rippers are initially drawn there from the high concentration of magic, but, unable to consume it, end up milling about confused about all this food they can't seem to eat. Its low stakes, cause the magerippers aren't going to move on their own any time soon, and are contained, and they aren't doing much damage as long as the shop stays locked up. Perhaps the local law enforcement has sealed the building by order of the king, and the owner has put out a call to adventurers to deal with the problem so he can reopen, with the promise of magical items as a reward. Hell, depending on the party, they might even try to capture a few to keep around as an anti-magic ace-in-the-hole. Just keep one in a jar, and keep it fed just enough to survive. Eventually, at the big bad's lair, you feed it a bunch of magic and set the swarm loose.
My first thought for an encounter is using them in a setting where they've never been seen before. The party is exploring some long forgotten ruin of an ancient and extremely magically advanced lost civilization. Think something like Aeor from Critical Role. Oddly though, Detect Magic finds... nothing. Not even the slightest spark of residual magical energy to be found anywhere despite numerous items and infrastructure that were once clearly magical. Eventually the party finds itself in a weapons research lab where they find a number of broken containers with only one intact and still sealed. Upon translating the label, they find it roughly translates to "Project Mageripper". However, shortly after casting Comprehend Languages, the container starts violently shaking and soon bursts open as a half dozen of these creatures swarm the casting mage. While most of the magerippers are dealt with, a few manage to scurry away into a vent or crack in the wall. Perhaps the party tries to pursue, perhaps they continue exploring. Either way, a few hours later they get a frantic Sending spells from the magical excavation team they came to the ruins with, mentioning some sort attack by a large swarm of creatures, only to be cut off mid sentence as the sender is quickly attacked and devoured. Cue the quest proper: Somehow stopping the quickly growing mageripper swarm before they can escape to the surface and trigger another apocalyptic magic-devouring tide like the one which wiped out the civilization whose ruins the party came to explore. Oh, and I know you said they can't disenchant items, but for this scenario you could easily say they can, it just takes many many decades for them to siphon the magic from even the simplest magic object. Plenty of time to drain the civilization's stuff (after eating the people of course), die off, crumble to dust, and leave the place stripped clean in the millennia between the first outbreak and this new one.
13:04 this reminds me of the movie "Cloverfield" where a giant monster shows up from the ocean around NYC, and not only is it mostly unphased by anything that the military throws at it, there are giant crab-spider thing that are all over it and get into the subway system.
😂 My current party includes almost all spellcasters of some kind, and a particularly vindictive current BBEG. I just imagined the BBEG putting a ton of these into a box and having it delivered to the party only to have the swarms come barreling out.
I like the idea of the party dungeon diving, looking for some legendary artifact to help them fight the BBEG. At the edges of the dungeon there are magical monster encounters, but the closer you get to the artifact, the less encounters you have, until you reach a seemingly empty room with the artifact in the centre. However as you reach it, the walls are suddenly covered with hordes of these little fuckers, that have been feeding off the magic of the dungeon for god only knows how long. The party can either fight them off or grab the artifact and run
Them being blind besides their sense for magic gives me the idea of having them be part of a dangerous puzzle. Kinda like A Plague Tale: Innocence, have the party have to move through the Mageripper Swarm using magical baits to keep them distracted so they might make it across them without dying. Really good chance for tension. Or have them be used by Mage Hunters as the hounds of inquisition
Haha, great video, as always! ...I go to sleep at night wracked with the knowledge that there isn't an orange dragon video to complete the trio. Just- think about it.
Had a brutal thought of a lich who made these and w/out realizing it got overwhelmed by them. Now they camp out by the lich's phylactery and jump them whenever they reform, trapping the lich in a cycle. People only know that something is up when some of the swarm got bored of competing in the spawn camping and wandered out to find new prey.
Imagine these things paired with a Disenchanter, which has a swarm of them following it around cause it often provides them with good magic to eat when it finds a magic item.
I imagine a villain would drop a few of these into an important magical place (city, school, vault) to prevent any potential heroes from getting help or an artifact to defeat them.
I love the idea of mage specific weapons or fighting styles like the magehunter feat. It makes so much sense that in a world where magic is widespread and extremely powerful, would have specific counters created and made specifically to combat them. Though it is a little ironic that most creatures made to kill mages are made by magic.
I like to imagine that these things are in some way related to the Phaerimm. They have nearly the same body shape, though the phaerimm are much larger, and they both absorb magic. My home lore would definitely have them created by the phaerimm thousands of years ago. By the way, I don't think you've covered the phaerimm yet, and you definitely should! They have a semi-official 5e stat block in Minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy, so I don't know if that disqualifies them, but they deserve more notoriety in my opinion.
In the Minsc and Boo Journal of Villany, yeah. It IS on the list, but don't know if he'll do a conversion of it. Many have requested a better version though.
You could also make the Magerippers a juvenile variant of the Mage Hunters (Strixhaven setting). Perhaps the process that duplicates the Magerippers has a % chance to trigger a growth instead, shedding its aberrant qualities as it shifts into the monstrous Mage Hunter. Mage Hunters become better magical hunters than their juvenile counterparts, but their absorption ability is changed to spell damage reflection. Any young produced by the Mage Hunters are reverted back to their aberrant Mageripper form. Magerippers and Mage Hunters can often be found occupying the same common breeding grounds.
Can you do a video on Intellect Devourers? They hold a special place in my heart because one of them was the first monster of any threat our party defeated once I joined the group I play in.
I would have an NPC have one in a cage which he uses to sniff out magic items while exploring. The party can hire him but they have to leave their magic items back at the HQ and not cast spells on the adventure. this will scare the crap out of a party of any level. And if the Mageripper leads them towards a magical enemy or it gets loose and multiplies it could be interesting to see how your party reacts.
I’m making a campaign that revolves around the collecting of Homebrew Artifact weapons capable of killing otherwise very difficult Homebrew monsters, and I’m absolutely going to introduce my party to Magerippers. It’ll probably start with a single one of the little guys walking up to whoever’s holding an artifact, and it’d act kinda cute, biting and wrestling at the weapon. They’d likely feed it, and then more would show up. From there, all hell would break loose as they went after the weapon.
Love these little magic devouring demon-kuribos. I do have a couple of potential suggestions from 2e to potentially look into that didn't get a lot of love beyond that edition, but I will settle with your approach on the voadkyn, aka: wood giants, aka: the only one of the four main giant-kin races not given a modern update (the others being verbeeg, firbolg and fomorian).
This reminds me of a monster way back in first or second edition that was pretty much the downfall of an ancient race that was so magically inclined they literally turned one of their people into our God which then caused the first spell plagued ever happen and made it so we can no longer cast spells above 9th level. Forgot what the hell those creatures for call but I swear they were also mage Slayers or something because one of the things they just love to do was eat anything magical
That makes me think of a similar concept in Warhammer 40k. The ancient civilization known as the Old Ones was wiped out by a species from the Immaterium (primordial dimension of psychic energy) called the Enslavers, who were drawn to the material dimension by excessive use of psychic energy/magic in a galactic war. They're described as a horrifying blend between a jellyfish and an arachnid, and are drawn to careless Psykers, whom they turn into portals for more of their kind to emerge from.
I love the idea of using these for the same kind of story beats that the Flood from Halo hit. The party enters this ancient dungeon from an old, magical civilization that nobody understands the collapse of. They're going through, it's dusty, it's dingy, it's just oozing creepy on every level. Corpses everywhere with teeth marks on them. Lead the party to think this is going to be some terrifying undead encounter. Present them with a lone mage ripper. Just one. It ambushes them, jumps onto the wizard or cleric and eats a spell slot. Let them laugh off the threat a bit, the spook was all a ruse! But as they turn to go back, they hear skittering. As they go back through the rooms there's more and more formless scuttling in the dark, chittering and clicking of teeth. The sussurus of thousands of tiny tentacles dragging on floors, ceilings, walls. Until finally the dam bursts and whole swarms of these things issue, forcing the party into multiple tense fights. Eventually more mutated versions begin to appear, aggregations of old human/elvish skeletons and these abberations controlling them from inside to hold and swing weapons. They're clumsy, zombie-like, but not undead. On the way out, one of the party is grabbed by a massive tentacle. This is the Mage-Eater, the culmination of the Mageripper lifecycle. It's like a massive cellar spider, but between it's legs is a massive ring-toothed maw surrounded by long, thin tentacles coated in anti-magical slime. With an intelligence of 20, the Mage-Eater directs the swarm to grow. To feed. To bud. And it intends to let the party go... So that it can follow them to where they hide. Show the mageripper swarm where the magic is. Which civilization to next devour.
When you talked about the giant one it reminded me of the end of the James Gunn version of Suicide Squad, with the blue starfish. A truely horrifying sequence, making it great DND fodder.
Magerippers infesting Waterdeep makes me think of a Darktide-esque scenario where expendable anti-Mageripper squads are sent in to exterminate infestations in small numbers so that if they failed not many more magerippers would bud.
The first idea that came to mind when you mentioned throwing a rock is, city-controlled garbage disposal. Like, a local town or something found a really nice pit to trap the Magerippers in, and then whenever garbage day comes around, the local wizard just lightly enchants everyone's trash with some cheap and useless magic, tosses it into the pit, and the Magerippers just devour it all. Then every few weeks when too many of them are budding in the pit, they just get a big pot of boiling oil or some other non-magic AOE and wipe out most of the swarm so their numbers are more manageable again.
Holy moly, this is great! In my game, I made a country named Akria, based on Ancient Sparta and modern North Kore, and they've cut off from the world because everyone values magic, and they despise it because of all the evil that has happened due to it. This will be a great companion monster to gusrds and city encounters! Thank you so much!
Budding is also used to specifically refer to yeast’s asexual reproduction. Always love giving my monsters a fungal side, so that’s leaving Cert biology
I ran a campaign a couple years back where certain bosses could make magic items temporarily losing their abilities in combat. End game I had one boss tied so deeply into the arcane itself that it could deactivate them until after a long rest. It was a wildly fun time seeing my high level, very well equipped players completely switch up their style and think outside every single box when pieces of gear started dropping out. I think you could 100% do that kind of thing with Mage Rippers, especially with parties that are particularly magic item-rich.
I devised a somewhat similar creature, the Wortklauber. It appears as a horned scarab beetle about the size of a grown man's head, and sports a carapace in all sorts of chromatic or metallic colours, though brown and bronze are the most numerous and a bit smaller, while black ones are bigger and more aggressive. Wortklauber (meaning word collector or or word thief) are also commonly known as 'mage bane'. They don't feed on magic though, they feed on words. They have retractable, feathery antennas, with which they detect intelligent creatures. They then fly at the creatures face/head, and sting them with their probiscous, causing 1d4 psychic damage. Though the thing is, they absorb some of the words that creature knows, so after some such attacks, it'll get harder for that creature to formulate words. Every time a creature suffers this psychic damage from a Wortklauber, the damage is added to a table (like 3 damage + 4 damage = 7 damage), and every time that creature casts a spell with verbal components, they have to roll a d100: is the result equal to or lower than their psychic damage score, the spell fails and the creature can't cast this spell any more (until the creature is cured), due to being unable to produce the verbal components. If the score reaches 100, the creature becomes mute, and can't cast any spells with verbal components. This muteness can be cured by either a killing the Wortklauber, or by being subjected to a _greater restoration_ spell or similar magic. The more words a Wortklauber consumes, the more intelligent it gets, developing the ability to speak and some even develop their own personalities (brown and bronze being especially prone to develop personalities). Therefore it's possible to encounter them in communities they created, or to negotiate with them. Alternatively to words, they can also sustain themself on what they find in nature, prefering sweet things like fruit or honey.
My Dwarf Necromancer Wizard, encountering a group of these: "Plan A" *Casts [Animate Objects] on as many rocks he can, and have those rocks attack the swarm.*
"I heard one too many "Oh arcane magic is soooo much cooler and better than Psionics" and I thought to myself "How best to go &*%# you, yes you specifically", and then I heard about these little cuddlies... And the best part is I can just feed them the junk parts left over from my meals while I wait for wizards!"
These are cool. I need to add them to my character's lore. I current am playing an occult slayer in a 3.5 game. My character is part of an organization of occult slayers and I can see the organization keeping some of these to use against mages they go after.
That's a very cool monster ! I'm in the middle of writing a prison for magic-users in my campaign, and these little fuzzballs seem like a great contingency plan for the wardens in case of a prison break. I do have a question about the stat block though. The trait "Aberrant swarm" reads as such : "The swarm can occupy another creature's space and vice versa, and the swarm can move through any opening large enough for a Tiny creature. When the swarm regains hit points, the creatures split and divide into two, creating more of themselves." How is that supposed to work ? Does a new swarm appear when one regains hp ? How many hp does the new swarm have ? And I'm not sure how this trait is supposed to interract with the rest of the stat block, because there is nothing there that makes the swarm gain hp back. Do the swarms only multiply when they finish a short or a long rest, after having suffered some damage ?
The kaiju mage ripper (Ripper Commander maybe) could have a ranged attack that lets it flick one of it's displacer beast tentacles to shoot a small swarm of Mage Rippers at the party, that once thrown stick around in the area, swarming the players
running a Strixhaven campaign, these critters would be brutal like i'm thinking the Oriq has a few jar full with magerippers and the party breaks one accidentally
An expansion to the Kaiju Mageripper idea: A Tarrasque-esque Mageripper that slumbers for a millenia before awakening to ravage the world and consume magic, before going back to sleep after eating. Where it burrows and slumbers, theres just a several-mile radius where magic just can't work - no magic items, no spells, not even spellcasters. Just a full magic deadzone that it feeds off of. Maybe even instead of gaining temp hitpoints, it gains another hitdice whenever a magical effect is eaten this way.
Well, the Mage Ripper swarm just goes to show, yet again, that Nystul’s Magic Aura is a wizard’s best friend. Make anything you want seem non-magical, and give an overwhelming magical aura to the decoy, or better yet, trap, of your choice.
I can see a Kobold clan under Waterdeep keeping and "Breeding" a small swarm of these for a couple purposes. 1: As part of their warren defenses just as any other small vicious animal. (maybe a dozen or so at the bottom of a pit trap.) 2: Pets. 3: Used as a distraction. Either to get away in the chaos, or to attract attention AWAY from the Kobold's goal. (Let a mid-sized swarm go in the main shopping district just before they intend a theft from a warehouse a few blocks away. Give the guards a few minutes to respond/be drawn away, and things just got a LOT easier. 4: As a weapon. Instead of the "Scorpion on a stick" the Kobold uses a Mageripper on a stick. 5: Guards for magical treasure. While the swarm is attracted to the magical item, it can't drain the item. Store the item in the Mageripper kennel. In a buried chest for example. The Magerippers can't hurt the magic item(s), but also won't wander away because they are still attracted to the items.
As someone who is not nearly smart enough to to use magic, I cant help but want to keep one as a pet. They just remind me of the Chupacabra from Fantastic Beasts and it would just be using a Flametounge dagger like a dog bone
dear god, my mind literally just turned to Mage Rippers into fuzzy little amphitheres. (dragons that look like Wyverns but have only wings and their tail for limbs, essentially think winged snakes.)
Pair these with a bunch of rust monsters and you have a very dynamic duo
A dynamic duo that avoids monks like the plague
Nah just throw a shit ton of em at the monk
and druids
Monk: "why's everyone running? Slowly, I might add."
Thanks satan
@@benjaminholcomb9478 jahhhahahahaw
An idea I had would be to have a city that is anti-magic and the guards use mage rippers in little lantern-like cages to detect whether citizens and other people have magical abilities or items.
The town guard using Mage Hunters in place of hounds would be interesting as well
God what wizard hurt you? Like I love it but dam you must have fucking been hurt.
I thought of the same thing almost immediately, they keep them like attack dogs.
The party could do the coolest thing and sneak a magical item into the pockets of an NPC they wanna get rid of, then report them on some Dishonored non-lethal route shit
mage ripper swarm you say i wonder what it dose
Probably makes coffee
“To shreds, you say?”
@@joshvanderveen5545"and how's the wife holding up? To shreds you say."
"I like plain, simple English. A blender blends, a vacuum vacuums, a mage ripper rips mages"
I'm gonna ask it to go for tea with me
I just love the monsters that seem made to utterly wreck certain character classes. They are both a great way to encourage party cohesion, or to punish that one guy. Now if you really want to be cruel, run these with something like Rust Monsters so the fighter has to worry about losing his gear, and the Wizard has to worry about losing his spells.
And with as common as magic is in these settings, it makes sense there would be creatures that eat it.
I'd pair then with the homebrew conversion of " Spellbreakers" from Warcraft (props to pirate Gonzalez) and have these things be a secret weapon/hunting beasts they can let out of a cage and unleash on troublesome mages
Monks cracking their fists : hey hey hey!!
@@marshalsunrise6582 Bad Guy "Curse you and your ability to just punch stuff!"
Nown I'm imagining a symbiotic horror that's basically a huge rust monster that grows magerippers inside it to spew at it's own leasure, like those wasps that inject viruses with their venom.
It pins magical prey down and pumps them full of miniature mage rippers from a big stinger like organ. Maybe it's how they reproduce even; what if these mini symbiote magrippers bud new hybrids instead of more magerippers, giving them a two phase lifecycle like a jellyfish. Uber rust monster grows magrippers inside itself, and those magerippers in turn bud off eggs that will hatch into the uber rust monsters
Probably way to overpowered for the actual game, not sure how you'd handle surviving a gut full of magerippers, but a fun creature concept nonetheless
Lol angry DM combo
I just got the idea of an underdark explorer used to them, and they guide the party through dark caverns, and you can hear the magerippers just beyond the sight of your darkvision. Maybe the exploring guide uses an antimagic field to cloak your presence, and if you get too close, he just sends a dancing light to distract the swarms away so u can sneak past. Idk I love the atmosphere of them more than the creature themselves
Use faerie fire on an area with a bunch of them and watch the cannibalism commence 😂
@@johntheherbalistg8756XD now that's clever.
Lore idea: There is a rumor, a whisper drifting through ale and opera houses alike. The Tower is under siege. A mysterious organization hounds the ancient home of magics. Its members are found torn to shreds across the realm, in hotels, alleys, on the roadside, and even among the nobility. At every grisly site is a medallion, and a note. "The Swarm comes for those who trespass on the God's domain."
Note: Magerippers can be lured into an appropriately sized container by placing a spelled item within it, before being sealed inside and unleashed on the unsuspecting.
Bless you Dungeon Dad. I have a party that has only one non caster and i have so much trouble challenging them. This... This is good.
Oh, oh no. Oh no no no.
I'd imagine you seeing this idea and being:
😈
🫸🫷
I hope you and the players had fun.
SAME! I'm totally gonna use the idea of the rescue mission involving a barricaded wizard!
I wish to learn the fallout.
I'm imagining them rampaging around Eberon's Mournlands hunting Living Spells. On that note, have you considered doing a video on the nightmare that is a Living Spell?
Sounds intreguing to me.
We do already have a few living spells in Icewind Dale Rime of the Frostmaiden, but could be interesting to see others of their kind being made using other spells
@@TheLegoLord100 I've really only heard the term a few times, so I'm just curious in general on them.
I like he called the "Light of Azuth" a living spell, that's a video he did awhile ago. But that's a very specific example, I'm sure there's various kinds of living spells
We currently have living spells of burning hands, lightning bolt, and cloudkill. Eberron: Rising of the Last War has a section on customizing and making your own, and that level 5 is the max you can make (and it must be a wizard spell).
So weird question, but do they eat curses. Could be a obscure and dangerous way to try and rid someone of a hag or something trying to mutate them into a monster.
Holy cow, that is a really awesome idea I didn’t even consider! Absolutely!
@@DungeonDad is their good darkness theme their pious = overwhelming purifying an their be something in dnd, we seen darkness corrupt the land, what light pious the land like in terraria hollow?
Some curses were spells in 3.x, but not all were. Mummy rot was a curse but also a disease, a sea hag's evil eye curse was a supernatural ability, and so on. However, curses like Undine's Curse and the generic Bestow Curse were spells
If you're open to a little cross edition overlay perchance an immortal warlock from 3.5 keeps a swarm of them as pets (the 3.5 warlock has unlimited spell like ability slots per day so they could definitely feed them) for this reason
New magic item, jar of Magerippers. It’s like a grenade that immediately rushes towards the nearest delicious magical buffet.
imagine using catapults to lob cages of these things over city walls so they break on impact... that's a hell of a way to end a siege
That’s absolutely heinous and I’m definitely doing it
I like the idea of a mageripper swarm infestation in a city that starts at the local magical item shop. The rippers are initially drawn there from the high concentration of magic, but, unable to consume it, end up milling about confused about all this food they can't seem to eat. Its low stakes, cause the magerippers aren't going to move on their own any time soon, and are contained, and they aren't doing much damage as long as the shop stays locked up. Perhaps the local law enforcement has sealed the building by order of the king, and the owner has put out a call to adventurers to deal with the problem so he can reopen, with the promise of magical items as a reward. Hell, depending on the party, they might even try to capture a few to keep around as an anti-magic ace-in-the-hole. Just keep one in a jar, and keep it fed just enough to survive. Eventually, at the big bad's lair, you feed it a bunch of magic and set the swarm loose.
My first thought for an encounter is using them in a setting where they've never been seen before.
The party is exploring some long forgotten ruin of an ancient and extremely magically advanced lost civilization. Think something like Aeor from Critical Role. Oddly though, Detect Magic finds... nothing. Not even the slightest spark of residual magical energy to be found anywhere despite numerous items and infrastructure that were once clearly magical. Eventually the party finds itself in a weapons research lab where they find a number of broken containers with only one intact and still sealed. Upon translating the label, they find it roughly translates to "Project Mageripper". However, shortly after casting Comprehend Languages, the container starts violently shaking and soon bursts open as a half dozen of these creatures swarm the casting mage.
While most of the magerippers are dealt with, a few manage to scurry away into a vent or crack in the wall. Perhaps the party tries to pursue, perhaps they continue exploring. Either way, a few hours later they get a frantic Sending spells from the magical excavation team they came to the ruins with, mentioning some sort attack by a large swarm of creatures, only to be cut off mid sentence as the sender is quickly attacked and devoured.
Cue the quest proper: Somehow stopping the quickly growing mageripper swarm before they can escape to the surface and trigger another apocalyptic magic-devouring tide like the one which wiped out the civilization whose ruins the party came to explore.
Oh, and I know you said they can't disenchant items, but for this scenario you could easily say they can, it just takes many many decades for them to siphon the magic from even the simplest magic object. Plenty of time to drain the civilization's stuff (after eating the people of course), die off, crumble to dust, and leave the place stripped clean in the millennia between the first outbreak and this new one.
Not sure if it made it into the dnd module but Strixhaven as a setting has its own "mage hunters" one could use for a similar encounter.
Never underestimate the CR of any swarm. They can quickly mob PC's
13:04 this reminds me of the movie "Cloverfield" where a giant monster shows up from the ocean around NYC, and not only is it mostly unphased by anything that the military throws at it, there are giant crab-spider thing that are all over it and get into the subway system.
In Stephen King's "The Mist" there's a giant monster that has swarms of huge monster flies crawling around it's body
Imo one of the best horror films shot through camera view
@@shearman360 I love that movie, and I personally feel like it would make a great concept for a D&d game.
@@darklordmathias9405 i've seen that movie and it was alright other than the most depressing and terrible ending i've ever seen
😂 My current party includes almost all spellcasters of some kind, and a particularly vindictive current BBEG. I just imagined the BBEG putting a ton of these into a box and having it delivered to the party only to have the swarms come barreling out.
I like the idea of the party dungeon diving, looking for some legendary artifact to help them fight the BBEG. At the edges of the dungeon there are magical monster encounters, but the closer you get to the artifact, the less encounters you have, until you reach a seemingly empty room with the artifact in the centre. However as you reach it, the walls are suddenly covered with hordes of these little fuckers, that have been feeding off the magic of the dungeon for god only knows how long. The party can either fight them off or grab the artifact and run
Them being blind besides their sense for magic gives me the idea of having them be part of a dangerous puzzle. Kinda like A Plague Tale: Innocence, have the party have to move through the Mageripper Swarm using magical baits to keep them distracted so they might make it across them without dying. Really good chance for tension. Or have them be used by Mage Hunters as the hounds of inquisition
Haha, great video, as always!
...I go to sleep at night wracked with the knowledge that there isn't an orange dragon video to complete the trio. Just- think about it.
It'll be out next month before year end. It's the single most requested monster to date with something like over 200 requests.
Had a brutal thought of a lich who made these and w/out realizing it got overwhelmed by them. Now they camp out by the lich's phylactery and jump them whenever they reform, trapping the lich in a cycle. People only know that something is up when some of the swarm got bored of competing in the spawn camping and wandered out to find new prey.
Imagine these things paired with a Disenchanter, which has a swarm of them following it around cause it often provides them with good magic to eat when it finds a magic item.
I imagine a villain would drop a few of these into an important magical place (city, school, vault) to prevent any potential heroes from getting help or an artifact to defeat them.
I love the idea of mage specific weapons or fighting styles like the magehunter feat. It makes so much sense that in a world where magic is widespread and extremely powerful, would have specific counters created and made specifically to combat them. Though it is a little ironic that most creatures made to kill mages are made by magic.
Well I like to look at it the same as most bioweapons. Made by those who just as easily can DIE to the result.
Unusual pets to give to a NPC :3
'he dont bite'
*'Fluffy' trying to tear off the wizards ankle*
5:15 Nadaar, Selfless Paladin. One of my favorite cards in MtG very cool to see him make an appearance
This needs to be added to Elden Ring. Because mages deserve pain.
As a Faith/Int hybrid spellcaster using a medium shield with varying Ashes, I agree.
did you lose one too many duels against ranged builds again? git gud
@@MVCx_xB I am the ranged build two shotting hosts.
I like to imagine that these things are in some way related to the Phaerimm. They have nearly the same body shape, though the phaerimm are much larger, and they both absorb magic. My home lore would definitely have them created by the phaerimm thousands of years ago.
By the way, I don't think you've covered the phaerimm yet, and you definitely should! They have a semi-official 5e stat block in Minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy, so I don't know if that disqualifies them, but they deserve more notoriety in my opinion.
In the Minsc and Boo Journal of Villany, yeah. It IS on the list, but don't know if he'll do a conversion of it. Many have requested a better version though.
You could also make the Magerippers a juvenile variant of the Mage Hunters (Strixhaven setting).
Perhaps the process that duplicates the Magerippers has a % chance to trigger a growth instead, shedding its aberrant qualities as it shifts into the monstrous Mage Hunter.
Mage Hunters become better magical hunters than their juvenile counterparts, but their absorption ability is changed to spell damage reflection.
Any young produced by the Mage Hunters are reverted back to their aberrant Mageripper form. Magerippers and Mage Hunters can often be found occupying the same common breeding grounds.
Can you do a video on Intellect Devourers? They hold a special place in my heart because one of them was the first monster of any threat our party defeated once I joined the group I play in.
I love the swarm subtype from 3/3.5. They were so brutal. And the Mageripper was a personal favorite.
I loved the cinderswarm
I would have an NPC have one in a cage which he uses to sniff out magic items while exploring. The party can hire him but they have to leave their magic items back at the HQ and not cast spells on the adventure. this will scare the crap out of a party of any level. And if the Mageripper leads them towards a magical enemy or it gets loose and multiplies it could be interesting to see how your party reacts.
I’m making a campaign that revolves around the collecting of Homebrew Artifact weapons capable of killing otherwise very difficult Homebrew monsters, and I’m absolutely going to introduce my party to Magerippers.
It’ll probably start with a single one of the little guys walking up to whoever’s holding an artifact, and it’d act kinda cute, biting and wrestling at the weapon. They’d likely feed it, and then more would show up. From there, all hell would break loose as they went after the weapon.
Love these little magic devouring demon-kuribos. I do have a couple of potential suggestions from 2e to potentially look into that didn't get a lot of love beyond that edition, but I will settle with your approach on the voadkyn, aka: wood giants, aka: the only one of the four main giant-kin races not given a modern update (the others being verbeeg, firbolg and fomorian).
This reminds me of a monster way back in first or second edition that was pretty much the downfall of an ancient race that was so magically inclined they literally turned one of their people into our God which then caused the first spell plagued ever happen and made it so we can no longer cast spells above 9th level.
Forgot what the hell those creatures for call but I swear they were also mage Slayers or something because one of the things they just love to do was eat anything magical
That makes me think of a similar concept in Warhammer 40k. The ancient civilization known as the Old Ones was wiped out by a species from the Immaterium (primordial dimension of psychic energy) called the Enslavers, who were drawn to the material dimension by excessive use of psychic energy/magic in a galactic war. They're described as a horrifying blend between a jellyfish and an arachnid, and are drawn to careless Psykers, whom they turn into portals for more of their kind to emerge from.
>Can subsist on meat
>Prefers magic
Jane Goodall would probably call them more human than us.
0:36 Turtles in Time music. Dungeon Dad is a man of culture I see 😉
Mage ripper swarm with a mage ripper alpha and ... Pack tactics.
I could see a spell jammer module mimicking the trouble with Tribble episode from startrek.
I love the idea of using these for the same kind of story beats that the Flood from Halo hit. The party enters this ancient dungeon from an old, magical civilization that nobody understands the collapse of. They're going through, it's dusty, it's dingy, it's just oozing creepy on every level. Corpses everywhere with teeth marks on them. Lead the party to think this is going to be some terrifying undead encounter.
Present them with a lone mage ripper. Just one. It ambushes them, jumps onto the wizard or cleric and eats a spell slot. Let them laugh off the threat a bit, the spook was all a ruse!
But as they turn to go back, they hear skittering. As they go back through the rooms there's more and more formless scuttling in the dark, chittering and clicking of teeth. The sussurus of thousands of tiny tentacles dragging on floors, ceilings, walls. Until finally the dam bursts and whole swarms of these things issue, forcing the party into multiple tense fights. Eventually more mutated versions begin to appear, aggregations of old human/elvish skeletons and these abberations controlling them from inside to hold and swing weapons. They're clumsy, zombie-like, but not undead.
On the way out, one of the party is grabbed by a massive tentacle. This is the Mage-Eater, the culmination of the Mageripper lifecycle. It's like a massive cellar spider, but between it's legs is a massive ring-toothed maw surrounded by long, thin tentacles coated in anti-magical slime. With an intelligence of 20, the Mage-Eater directs the swarm to grow. To feed. To bud. And it intends to let the party go... So that it can follow them to where they hide. Show the mageripper swarm where the magic is. Which civilization to next devour.
I could see mind flayers having genetically engineered these things in the first place. They really hate arcane magic, so it feels on-brand.
5:42
Every time I hear that little rip sound, I can't help but also hear Patrick screaming
When you talked about the giant one it reminded me of the end of the James Gunn version of Suicide Squad, with the blue starfish. A truely horrifying sequence, making it great DND fodder.
Just pair the swarm with a colony of Rust Monsters. The mages and the fighty types both dread.
mages take the Rust, meatshields to the swarm!
@@cteal2018
Easier said than done, when both creatures are singlemindedly going after their respective targets.
Every one of these videos makes me wanna add stuff to my urban fantasy game, great video!
I love these including them in my one shot today thank you so much thumbs up ❤
Sounds like a gremlin when they produce new ones
Magerippers infesting Waterdeep makes me think of a Darktide-esque scenario where expendable anti-Mageripper squads are sent in to exterminate infestations in small numbers so that if they failed not many more magerippers would bud.
The first idea that came to mind when you mentioned throwing a rock is, city-controlled garbage disposal. Like, a local town or something found a really nice pit to trap the Magerippers in, and then whenever garbage day comes around, the local wizard just lightly enchants everyone's trash with some cheap and useless magic, tosses it into the pit, and the Magerippers just devour it all. Then every few weeks when too many of them are budding in the pit, they just get a big pot of boiling oil or some other non-magic AOE and wipe out most of the swarm so their numbers are more manageable again.
The music was on point this episode 👍
Holy moly, this is great!
In my game, I made a country named Akria, based on Ancient Sparta and modern North Kore, and they've cut off from the world because everyone values magic, and they despise it because of all the evil that has happened due to it.
This will be a great companion monster to gusrds and city encounters! Thank you so much!
Writing my own mythos, and the mageripper is just the kind of creature that fits with my zealously anti-magic Empire.
Also, excellent video as always. I would actually feel pretty bad hitting my players with these tribbly nightmares.
Budding is also used to specifically refer to yeast’s asexual reproduction. Always love giving my monsters a fungal side, so that’s leaving Cert biology
I ran a campaign a couple years back where certain bosses could make magic items temporarily losing their abilities in combat. End game I had one boss tied so deeply into the arcane itself that it could deactivate them until after a long rest. It was a wildly fun time seeing my high level, very well equipped players completely switch up their style and think outside every single box when pieces of gear started dropping out. I think you could 100% do that kind of thing with Mage Rippers, especially with parties that are particularly magic item-rich.
I devised a somewhat similar creature, the Wortklauber.
It appears as a horned scarab beetle about the size of a grown man's head, and sports a carapace in all sorts of chromatic or metallic colours, though brown and bronze are the most numerous and a bit smaller, while black ones are bigger and more aggressive.
Wortklauber (meaning word collector or or word thief) are also commonly known as 'mage bane'. They don't feed on magic though, they feed on words. They have retractable, feathery antennas, with which they detect intelligent creatures. They then fly at the creatures face/head, and sting them with their probiscous, causing 1d4 psychic damage.
Though the thing is, they absorb some of the words that creature knows, so after some such attacks, it'll get harder for that creature to formulate words.
Every time a creature suffers this psychic damage from a Wortklauber, the damage is added to a table (like 3 damage + 4 damage = 7 damage), and every time that creature casts a spell with verbal components, they have to roll a d100: is the result equal to or lower than their psychic damage score, the spell fails and the creature can't cast this spell any more (until the creature is cured), due to being unable to produce the verbal components. If the score reaches 100, the creature becomes mute, and can't cast any spells with verbal components.
This muteness can be cured by either a killing the Wortklauber, or by being subjected to a _greater restoration_ spell or similar magic.
The more words a Wortklauber consumes, the more intelligent it gets, developing the ability to speak and some even develop their own personalities (brown and bronze being especially prone to develop personalities).
Therefore it's possible to encounter them in communities they created, or to negotiate with them. Alternatively to words, they can also sustain themself on what they find in nature, prefering sweet things like fruit or honey.
Thanks for these! I’ve been thinking about what to throw against an elven army. This might fit the bill~
My Dwarf Necromancer Wizard, encountering a group of these: "Plan A" *Casts [Animate Objects] on as many rocks he can, and have those rocks attack the swarm.*
magician: exists
mageripper: PERSONALLY RAPIDLY APPROACHING YOUR LOCATION
I may just have to take notes on these for my Netheril notes.
I kinda love the Mindlfayer take. That's awesome.
"I heard one too many "Oh arcane magic is soooo much cooler and better than Psionics" and I thought to myself "How best to go &*%# you, yes you specifically", and then I heard about these little cuddlies... And the best part is I can just feed them the junk parts left over from my meals while I wait for wizards!"
Putting a bunch of these inside a treasure box in a dungeon for sure
Advanced mimics!
The sponsorship is extra funny as I'm watching on December 2nd.
I'm picturing Cloverfield where the kaiju Mageripper spawns new ones that infect mages as chest bursters.
Set up an encounter with an oodopi jailer and it’s pet mage rippers
Big bad evil guy approaches party. From bag of holding throws a swarm of mage rippers and rust monsters. Watch as chaos insues.
A giant, mutated Mageripper....like a Supreme Mageripper??
Mage Ripper Over mind:
Barbarian Tassidar: HERE COMES THE GANTRITHOR!
Added these to my random table for magic beans since they've had an incredible run of luck with a sack i handed out to early.
A monster based off the Langoliers. Neat.
These are cool. I need to add them to my character's lore. I current am playing an occult slayer in a 3.5 game. My character is part of an organization of occult slayers and I can see the organization keeping some of these to use against mages they go after.
Well I guess the inhabitants of the "Dark Sun" setting would have nothing to fear from these things.
Tribbles from Hell! I love it!
That's a very cool monster ! I'm in the middle of writing a prison for magic-users in my campaign, and these little fuzzballs seem like a great contingency plan for the wardens in case of a prison break.
I do have a question about the stat block though. The trait "Aberrant swarm" reads as such : "The swarm can occupy another creature's space and vice versa, and the swarm can move through any opening large enough for a Tiny creature. When the swarm regains hit points, the creatures split and divide into two, creating more of themselves."
How is that supposed to work ? Does a new swarm appear when one regains hp ? How many hp does the new swarm have ? And I'm not sure how this trait is supposed to interract with the rest of the stat block, because there is nothing there that makes the swarm gain hp back. Do the swarms only multiply when they finish a short or a long rest, after having suffered some damage ?
I think it’s just a way for them to be healed by spells, though I guess you could probably feed them enough healing magic to make a few more swarms.
@@williamwontiam3166 Oh, ok, it's just a bit of fluff, that makes sense.
I thought they multiplied when they ate magic
Rip and Tear
Until it’s done
Kaiju Mage Ripper would be a good band name
a very cool monster that my player will fear
One more video with killer usage of vg music! Tmnt 4 music got me hyped for the video
New item: Jar of Magerippers
The kaiju mage ripper (Ripper Commander maybe) could have a ranged attack that lets it flick one of it's displacer beast tentacles to shoot a small swarm of Mage Rippers at the party, that once thrown stick around in the area, swarming the players
Wow these things are like an aunty magic wmd gray grow scenario
Mageripper swarms: *exist*
Martials: Allow me to handle this.
To take the edge off, I'd rule that the Save made to determine if a Slot is gone is done with the spell casting ability.
running a Strixhaven campaign, these critters would be brutal
like i'm thinking the Oriq has a few jar full with magerippers and the party breaks one accidentally
It’s like the old bags little Caesars used to come in but spellcasters
Your casting Light on a rock as a lure makes me wonder if the cantrip Bonfire would lure them to their death
An expansion to the Kaiju Mageripper idea:
A Tarrasque-esque Mageripper that slumbers for a millenia before awakening to ravage the world and consume magic, before going back to sleep after eating. Where it burrows and slumbers, theres just a several-mile radius where magic just can't work - no magic items, no spells, not even spellcasters. Just a full magic deadzone that it feeds off of. Maybe even instead of gaining temp hitpoints, it gains another hitdice whenever a magical effect is eaten this way.
strixhaven or they, they're spoken about like chupacabras or the boogieman, if you go out after dark you could run into them
Well, the Mage Ripper swarm just goes to show, yet again, that Nystul’s Magic Aura is a wizard’s best friend. Make anything you want seem non-magical, and give an overwhelming magical aura to the decoy, or better yet, trap, of your choice.
Gawd I wish I could attend Pax Unplugged this year. Great vid btw.
I can see a Kobold clan under Waterdeep keeping and "Breeding" a small swarm of these for a couple purposes.
1: As part of their warren defenses just as any other small vicious animal. (maybe a dozen or so at the bottom of a pit trap.)
2: Pets.
3: Used as a distraction. Either to get away in the chaos, or to attract attention AWAY from the Kobold's goal. (Let a mid-sized swarm go in the main shopping district just before they intend a theft from a warehouse a few blocks away. Give the guards a few minutes to respond/be drawn away, and things just got a LOT easier.
4: As a weapon. Instead of the "Scorpion on a stick" the Kobold uses a Mageripper on a stick.
5: Guards for magical treasure. While the swarm is attracted to the magical item, it can't drain the item. Store the item in the Mageripper kennel. In a buried chest for example. The Magerippers can't hurt the magic item(s), but also won't wander away because they are still attracted to the items.
A kaiju, but like Cloverfield so it drops the smaller versions from it's body as it storms through the city.
Thank you, dungeon daddy, for covering the weirdest monsters
Gonna need to use these in my horror themed spell jammed game.
As someone who is not nearly smart enough to to use magic, I cant help but want to keep one as a pet. They just remind me of the Chupacabra from Fantastic Beasts and it would just be using a Flametounge dagger like a dog bone
Now all I see is a general in the theme of Thrawn that has some of these as pets as an insurance if anyone comes after him that has magic. I love it.
They grow new members of their species through budding on their backs? Jesus they're magic eating gremlins!
These are awesome! Wish I’d known earlier, half arsed a swarm of magic eating moths to pester my party instead
dear god, my mind literally just turned to Mage Rippers into fuzzy little amphitheres. (dragons that look like Wyverns but have only wings and their tail for limbs, essentially think winged snakes.)
Me thinking immediately my barb now needs a pet...
Just stumbled across this bideo, and now I *need* these in my Spelljammer campaign.
Mind flayer lair with a mage ripper sward sounds like someone really pissed off the dm