Boneyard: The Story Behind D&D's Spookiest Skeleton
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- Опубликовано: 16 июн 2024
- It's time for a monster that will make your Halloween one-shot D&D adventure complete! This week we're talking about the boneyard, a truly horrifying Dungeons and Dragons monster that can and will rip your skeleton out of your body! These guys are extremely cool, and I am stoked to bring this DnD 3rd edition monster (technically 3.5, but whose counting?) to DnD 5E!
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The D&D 5E stat block for this monster - docs.google.com/document/d/1M...
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- Bone Swarm from Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts: koboldpress.com/kpstore/produ...
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- High Lord Wolnir:www.artstation.com/artwork/lx... see also: @bloodexer on twitter
0:00 - INTRO
0:44 - WHAT IS A BONEYARD?
04:37 - COMBAT
08:19 - PLOT HOOKS
Thanks for watching gang!
It would mean the world to me if you wanted to check out my kickstarter, which is going live next week!: www.kickstarter.com/projects/mrtarrasque/the-quintessential-guide-to-monster-encounters
I hope you do some Dark Sun monsters soon love your content keep up the great work
You know what's a crying shame? I had homebrewed a monster called the 'Pandemonium of Bones', basically the Boneyard with a few extra steps, only to find the Boneyard later when I'm looking through personal older D&D books I pulled off Google Drive. I was so disappointed that someone beat me to the punch.
And then I also realized that, after reading the stat block, my Pandemonium of Bones was so much worse (for the party) as an encounter. That definitely made me feel better.
@@demiurgusgodofform8589 The Pathfinder 3.5 bonestorm is also something to look at. It's much worse than the boneyard.
@@KevinVideo
Found that too. It's on my "evolutionary" path for the Boneyard, going from the relatively small Boneyard all the way up to the Armageddon of Bones, which would completely cover the entirety of Vermont.
No burrowing, was surprised it didn't go in and out of the ground like a bone worm. Especially for gathering buried bones and easy food for it. intelligent ambusher would up the lethality too.
"Then she beat Jimmy to death with his own skull."
"What? That doesn't seem physically possible."
"That's exactly what Jimmy kept screaming!"
A fellow man of culture, I see
I’ve got a player who, through Red Wizard rituals and the blessing of the undead dragon god Null, has become a living death knight skeleton.
Gonna throw this thing at him and actually beat him with his own skull.
Now this is the commentary I expected!
Wahhahahahahah HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE "SpongeBob voice"
Idea: A Boneyard has taken up residence in a small town's cemetery generations ago, and over time became something of an 'old wiseman' to the settlement. Presenting itself as the amalgamized spirit of the town's ancestors, it gives general advice on a myriad of mundane topics.
It's just calmly talking about crop rotation, while they throw in some chicken bones.
@@brettwood1351 Heh, and of course it is fine with this arrangement as it likes having a steady supply of new bones, and will protect the town.... (And woe to anyone that attacks the town.... Who needs walls when you have a Boneyard protecting your town because it's smart enough to know that the townsfolk are fine with it eating their dead in exchange for it's protection.... Especially when it can eat the towns enemies too...)
Lives in the town's mausoleum, summons skeletons to handle mundane chore
@@minnion2871 And not only do you have to deal with it and it's skeletal minions, but the town's militia will be plinking away at you with arrows from inside their houses.
I may just use this, if you don't mind...👀
What a great monster that could be used to convince the party that the necromancer that made it is still alive, when the necromancer has more than likely become part of it
That is a very spooky idea
A bone yard with spell casting because of how it's consumed a necromancer.
@@ragemodeonline7778 I was just thinking some clever Necromancer or Boneyard would see a Hydra and go "More Heads=More Bite Attacks Per Turn= More Bones Yanked out!", and we get the Bone Hydra.
@@brettwood1351 I love the Idea of a Boneyard harvesting the regrowing heads of a hydra for bones
@@mrmagmacube6332 Any monsters that can regenerate bones would be a prime target, honestly. Hydra heads, rip the arms off Trolls, etc.
welcome to the b o n e z o n e
Certifiably spooked
This is a no bone zone.
@@BeanoTheElderit’s always a zone of the bone
I want to get off Mr. Bones's Wild Ride.
@@thebastard890you can’t Mr Bones Wild Ride never stops
This is basically the first homebrew monster we ever threw at our players.
Players: That's it? A hoard of skeletons? Why are we still fighting skeletons at our level?
DM: The shattered bones begin to move again, this time joining together into a single monster: a massive spider cobbled together from dozens of human skeletons.
Players: Oh.
Players: Oh.
Veteran player: Oh no.
DM: Oh no is right. Roll for initiative.
@@lordbalthosadinferni4384 1st edition had a skeleton spider...it drained a whole level on a failed con save EVERY BITE.
But then undead were far far scarier in 1st.
, it’s a, wait what!?
Giving the boneyard any form is asking for an innuendo loving necromancer to create "BoneTown".
"The Boner"
Somehow I feel this would affect a lot of Necromancers motivations considerably.
Welcome to the Bone Zone
A DM once misspoke, and ran with it.
We had to fight a giant amalgamation of boners.
@@Kydrou As I learned from that one memetic Batman comic, that can also mean a dumb mistake. Which would also be an interesting monster.
A Boneyard mount could be nicknamed "Mr. Bones wild ride" thus my love for skeletons has grown immensely
I want to get off Mr. Bones' wild ride, said no one as Mr. Bones was fucking wicked to have around
Settle down ok?
my little boney
It either goes by the name Wild Ride or _insists_ on Being refered to as Mr.Bone's Wild Ride.
This is 100% the scene I'd set in my mind: the party tracks down some put upon noble or necromancer they've been pursuing. They arrive to find out they are too late, the ancient scroll crumbles as it is cast and the villain makes their triumphant speech only to be interrupted by the Boneyard biting them, shaking their corpse like a ragdoll, and then demonstrating its horrific absorption ability firsthand. Then combat begins. Fantastic Evil Dead humor to start off a combat encounter.
Dungeon idea: The dungeon *is* the Boneyard, in the form of a large, undead castle of bones, where a powerful necromancer currently resides. Traps set up throughout the dungeon are just places where the Boneyard can get a hold on you to try and steal your bones, and in the necromancer's boss room, he can command the Boneyard to attack the party directly.
I was just thinking of a similar idea, with like a Paris catacombs vibe of people that were killed by disease and the catacombs being their mass grave
Not to mention it's a FLYING bone castle! That somehow always lands over graveyards, hmm...
Question: how would you run that, mechanically? Because I can totally picture a squad of adventurers fighting the section that tried until it stops moving, so you’d need to section off chunks or something?
Would you give each room its own set of HP, or just the parts that attack, or maybe you just have a number of “normal” boneyards that you let phase in and out of the walls and floors and stuff, and it isn’t until they all die that the magic changes?
Literally fighting the necromancers flying undead skeleton castle until it crashes into the ground and collapses sounds like a great penultimate session for an arc about a necromancer. I’ve been approached recently about DMing a group, and I’ll tuck that away for later.
Or maybe first. Solid chase arc when they’re low level and can’t keep up with it yet, fixing problems and leveling up until they can catch it. Trying to fight their way inside, realizing the castles an enemy itself, fighting that, big ol’ Wizard dual on the wreckage. That’s not a bad module.
@@demonzabrak I was actually thinking something along the lines of specific walls and traps being statted out as skeletal Living Walls, perhaps even with the front entrance being blocked by a Living Wall that the party has to defeat before they can get in.
As for the Boneyard itself, I was thinking of it as a second phase or true final boss after defeating the Necromancer. Picture this: After the party has explored the castle, fighting their way through walls and skeletons as they went, they finally take out the big bad Necromancer. However, now the Boneyard is without a master. The party must now escape back through the castle as the rooms are shifting and being closed off around them. Once the party is safely outside, the Boneyard transforms into its serpentine form, and the group must take down this giant skeletal terror to stop it from wreaking havoc across the land.
@@tacoman6697 nice. It’s tough to convince a party to escape, so really sell the walls closing in part.
I imagine you could RP a boneyard acting like a mech suit for a necromancer. Necromechromancer if you will.
From the 3.5e description: “However, unlike a skeleton or similar monster, a boneyard’s form is fluid in the sense that it can appear merely as a pile of bones, or as a serpent composed of bones, or some other form of its choice.”
I’d give it a slam attack it could use in addition to the bite, let the mancer sling spells. Size huge, so there should be bones enough to make a 15 foot tall human shaped mass, guy embedded in the chest, possibly visible. Could work.
I am now imagining a clever druid messing with the necromancer by spreading seeds during the ritual so that when the boneyard is created the seeds sprout and fills the monster, manipulating and using it as an actual skeleton. As the grasping plants are of the opposite energy of what was used in the ritual the two entities end up stabilizing each other and now they function as one new being that the necromancer has no control over.
🕹️
You now have a unholy abomination of bone and plant, flying around, stealing dragon skeletons
Reminds me of what usop did against bullet in a one piece movie tbh
The Catacombs of Paris contain over six million remains. IMO that provides an awesome inspiration for a setting.
i was just thinking that
a boneyard the size of a kaiju?
i dont think that would be a boneyard anymore, thats a bone mile
Created by Lich King Napoleon, possibly to fight Nazis.
Because "As Above, So Below" didn't already make the Parisian Catacombs terrifying enough...
@@atomicbuttocks Eh, I'd say it's a Bone Acre
The main quest-giver is actually a necromancer outsourcing their bone-drive and just sending some minions/henchmen to collect the trail of bodies the players leave behind.
All I can think about is the Gatherers from Amnesia: The Dark Descent following behind an adventuring party and cleaning up the mess they make to get components XD
"They can f*cking fly" absolutely killed me. This creature is cool as hell. Great work dude!
I'm just saying you could have a chapel made of bones that is also a Bone Yard.
This guy bones
That also has a 60ft fly speed. Now that’s terrifying. Imagine the bone chapel rising into the air and flying after you and then dropping on you?
Hmmm although if it’s that big would you rule it as not being able to fly? Or maybe because of its size instead of flying it sort of hovers/crawls on the ground?
Or rule it as having to detach a part of itself to fly around but that part is restricted from flying to far away from the chapel?
Or even have it detach multiple parts of itself for multiple Bone Yards?
Damn any of those listed above would be horrifying. Put any of them together or all of them and I don’t even think an absolute nightmare can begin to describe the horror.
@@wildstorm3486to build off your idea, wouldn't a boneyard of that size be a guagantun undead? If so, can't you use kaiju video that Dungeon Dad released to make something totally terrifying. I mean a chapel made of bones with a laser attack and other abilities would be horrific.
I think a boneyard of that size would actually have it's summon skeleton ability replaced with summon boneyard.
Edit. Would any extra abilities granted by it's kiaju nature technically add to it's options in terms of natural traps?
Plus, I have to thank you for the one-shot idea of the players being part of a society that has crumbled to ash by a plague, only surviving because of many of it's citizen's became necromancers. Now they are under assault by so called force of good, who wish to destroy them. The boneyard chapel acting like a calse in this sense, and the players needing to act as military commanders, with threat scaling as decided by the DM.
@@encryptkitsune341 oh I totally forgot about the Kiaju video. And your welcome for the idea.
This right here is my favorite part of Dungon Dad’s videos. The comment section where everyone just vibs out and give ideas and build upon each others ideas. Making them bigger and better then before. Fun for everyone.
@@wildstorm3486 tentacles... bone tentacles... that each function as Boneyards. 😆
Slight point I wanted to make you aware of. The brain in a jar, mentioned at 1:35, is already in 5e. It's in Van Richten's guide to Ravenloth.
Reprinted from Icewind Dale Rime of the Frostmaiden
@@KevinVideo Well I never
Why do I feel like a Brain in a Jar, and an Mind Flayer encountering each other would be hilarious?
And before that it was in sandy Petersons 5e mythos
KILL THE DEMON!!!!!
As a possible plot hook, you could optimise on the 18 intelligence. Lets say the necromancer that made it failed to properly bind it. The boneyard killed it. Then the boneyard realized it could extort the local villages into giving it bones. This would provide a decent plot hook and a spin on the tradition "dumb" undead trope.
This is a great creature to use in my campaign.
I can already imagine the fear one of my party member will feel since he is literally just a skeleton named "J"
He might be immune, being a sentient skeleton
So I have actually used this ina 3.5 campaign of my own. The church everyone starts in is "protected" by an angel of decay and the local grocery store, which only has rotted food, has a boneyard in the back protecting the real goods. I plan to use this in my upcoming 5e halloween special. Just dont tell my players.
Is the Boneyard created from the bones from the butcher's shop?
@@brianroberts783 Its up to the dm but mine is
@@JebusKristSuperstar Is it actually interested in protecting the town or is it just exploiting the town?
@@stingerjohnny9951 it was summoned to help with the whole plan in the adventure so its more of an obstacle
I wonder if a Boneyard could absorb bones from Wolverine, since they're natural but coated in metal. Imagine an encounter with a Boneyard that has gone after people like that and now has metal teeth to add extra damage, or maybe a tail attack that hits like a giant metal hammer.
Yeah. Like a boneyard so old and powerful it started hunting young dragon's. And has almost completed it's new form
A necromancer sets up shop outside the equivalent of a KFC and scuttles away with all the bones in the trash. The Chicken Boneyard.
Breaking the system
Libris Mortis is such a GOATed book. The Corpsecrafter/Destructive Retribution feat chain was pure cheesy goodness
That Ghost Knight idea is killer! My idea would a Boneyard that is in fact the entire Catacombs complex underneath a major city. At first the party might of caught of glimpse of Skeletons walking at night, or have been hired by a seemingly innocent patron to find a friend of theirs they expect went missing, or thought to try looting the tombs below as graverobbers. Should they survive and try to convince the Baron and his Tradesmaster of the existence of the horror beneath the city streets, though, they might uncover the city's dark secret; The founder of the city was a Necromancer and the Boneyard has acted as the city's secret defender for centuries. The Boneyard keeps eyes on suspected spies and saboteurs, who end up disappearing in the night, and invading armies get swallowed into its mass. The Skeletons are dispatched to guard the precious warehouses in secret, as well as drag off the feared spies. Maybe it would be a good thing, but the players might not be able to shake the feeling that maybe not everyone who get taken away to join the Boneyard is really a spy; The players might also be filled with dread at the thought that maybe, just maybe, the Baron and his Tradesmaster wouldn't really care if some innocents are sometimes taken away, and they certainly don't want to find out if someone who finds out their secret like them might end up like the "spies" do.
So the Paris catacombs
“But did you know that they’re eager to be ripped out of your body?” No, and I wish I didn’t now.
The fact that they want to consume more bones gave me the idea that the Boneyard is basically a zombie apocalypse only with skeletons
Fun way to run this monster.
You have your party hunt a necromancer whose a mid level necromancer (level10) that tries to preform the lich ritual. Unbeknownst to the party the necromancer's soul instead gets trapped in their skeleton army turning them into a Boneyard.
One the party enters the necromancer's dungeon the party is working with an NPC when they hear the clicking of bones coming from the walls. For some reason they can't see where it's coming from. They fight some skeletons & solve some puzzles when the necromancer starts toying with them. They here their voice echoing throughout halls laughing & taunt them with every encounter or puzzle.
After getting to a certain point they enter a high sealing room which they can't see the top of even with dark vision & all of a sudden skeletons drop from the above & the npc gets grab by a formless shape that makes a horrendous cacophony of clicking noises that are only heightened by the wales of the npc which disappears back into the darkness. Two rounds later the party hears a sicken wet plop as they look over to find the skin suit of the npc. To their horror they look up to see a shifting formless mass of bones that laughs exactly like the necromancer but soon becomes more then just the necromancer laughing. Thousands of skull cackle at the party all well describing the join the boneyard derives from it's new form & how they failed in killing the quarry.
It here they describe what the Boneyard wants. The party's skeletons! Roll initiative
"they take the form of a serpent with some kind of beast skull"
me a person who is currently running Curse of Strahd and remembers Strahd(a powerful Necromancer) has in his possession the skull of a Silver Dragon: interesting...
imagine a giant boneyard grown over many years fighting a genius loci
Skeleton oooo
Monster skeleton made of skeletons OOOOO
3spooky5me
My players built a chunk of land involving a defunct/abandoned carnival. I was already planning on something creepy... But I think I just found my "roller coaster."
AT LONG LAST!
I'm always psyched to see Libris Mortis content. Such a cool book.
Remember, you just have to add on F, and Undead becomes Fundead!
The thumbnail and that first illustration of the monster with the dragon skull and human bones behind it both remind me of the Japanese gashadokuro - an undead monster consisting of the skeletons of 100 people who died of dehydration forming into a gigantic skeleton.
Because that’s what it’s based off of. It’s a boss from Dark Souls 3
@@SeanHiruki It's a really cool interpretation of the gashadokuro, then. I'm a sucker for skeletal undead, though.
I can imagine a campaign scenario based on the Adventures hearing about an accursed land that was once the site of an ancient battle and the adventures are sent on a quest for one reason or another there. Finding a massive Bone Yard that blankets the very ground waiting on unsuspecting victims, still fighting a battle it was convinced never ended.
Man, you are just too kind. And though it is a day short, no big deal. The Monster is worth it.
If I had a nickel for every D&D monster that was just "a pile of dead stuff", I'd have about $3 total by now.
The variant I made for one of my 3.5 adventures was made of cinders - an amalgam of tortured souls arisen from a huge sacrificial pyre of the BBEG fire giant.
Boneyard rolling towards a party like the Indiana Jones boulder. It appears to just be a thematic trap, when it's actually a monster!
This monster could make a good guard dog. Not only can you give world building exposition on why it is guarding an area, but it also explains why no one has stolen the loot... yet.
I have a Chaotic Neutral Mountain Dwarf Runecarver background Wizard who is planning on School of Necromancy specialization. He primarily plans on reclaiming his family's Ancestral Home that was taken over by an Arch-Lich wearing a strange Crown leading an Army of Undead. So realizes that becoming a Master of Undeath himself is the best way to counter the Arch-Lich.
Anyway this Boneyard thing sounds like could be an interesting way to counter the Army as well.
Additionally, after he reclaims his Ancestral Home he plans on trying to achieve Apotheosis/Immortality (similar to Myrkul from old D&D Lore or the Tribunal from Elder Scrolls lore).
The Boneyard is my all time favorite 3.5 monster, despite me having more experience with 5e. Glad to see it finally converted!
For some reason,when you asked "what's in the tomb", I immediately had an idea that it's a person. This person is either immortal or preserved in some kind of stasis...
Gotta love that ds3 art
Wolnir is just the greatest. The artist who did this one is also the greatest: www.artstation.com/artwork/lxeDak
I was wondering when I would find a comment talking about it
I LOVE Libris Mortis. It contains my favorite prestige class of 3.5e, the Dirgesinger. I'm still sad I've never gotten the chance to play one in a campaign, but I have made Dirgesinger NPCs for campaigns I've DM'd.
This video couldn't have come out at a better time for me. My players are currently sneaking in the secret base of a cult of Atropus, an undead godlike entity found in the Elder Evils book for 3.5. I'm planning on adapting one of the encounters found in Atropu's section of the book and in it, this creature is the main event. Thank you Dungeon Dad for this unexpected Halloween gift
If anyone wants to up the anty with the Boneyard's moveset, I think a bone dust breath attack that blinds/chokes targets would be a good starting point.
I think the best use you overlooked was as a creature to gather treats for the good dogfolk you covered in a previous video. Maybe it fights off the evil Tabaxi 😜
0:41 i really thought he was going to say “because what this character lacks in meat, it makes up for in potassium.”
Awesome video. Keep up the great work man!
Thanks!!
Hopefully you'll see this, I think you'll like the idea. I'm running Curse of Strahd with some long time friends and I've done some homebrewing to what Strahd has been doing over the last 300 years. Namely being necromancy and creating abominations. The campaign is Fresh fresh, they just left the death house and are now in proper Barovia. When the group makes it to the Church in town (no spoilers in this) and explores it a bit, I have Strahd showing up In the graveyard and summoning a Boneyard. Well above their level but they also hit above their weight class. So they have a chance to kill it, but if things go poorly for them I have intentions for the creature to flee with someone from Barovia. A side quest initiated. The party isn't all Good aligned so them stopping this creature and or rescuing the Barovian is a way for them to get in good graces with them.
Imagine how helpful a good alignment nerco could make a boneyard.
I think it would honestly be interesting to have it be built up throughout a campaign by slowly amassing more bones and the party gets glimpses of it. It would just look like a floating clump of bones that occasionally floats by innocently ignoring the party’s existence. Then after killing a hard boss the Boneyard flies in and grabs its skull to use for itself and forces the party to fight it.
I love that idea
I like the idea of having a boneyard and a living wall in a cave;
The boneyard killed the necromancer that created both it and the living wall, and is hiding to body from the wall.
The boneyard captures people who travel the road near the cave, steals their bones, and gives the meat to the wall.
ok now i NEED to have the leader of a bunch of skeletons yell in the voice of skeletor "all right boys, i think its time to form HYPERSKELETRON!" before transforming into one of these
I absolutely love the voice acting for this fellah, feels like I'm back in Glasgow
"D&D's Spookiest Skeleton." Wjolnir on the thumbnail. Love it.
I recently realized that this would make for a great analog to a Borderlands 2 boss.
Those that have gotten to Handsome Jack's Bunker know what I'm talking about.
The line in my head that inspired this is the following:
"My Boneyard isn't a place. It's a creature."
You know what would pair very well with the Boneyard?
The Boneless-undead bodies that had their bones ripped out of them and seek to have skeletons of their own again. These could be victims of its own bone-collecting, or entities it's allowed to stay with it in exchange for skeletal forms they can cling to-likely skeletons that are too damaged otherwise for it to want to keep within its form, like a houndmaster giving their pets scraps to keep them loyal.
Afterall, a Boneless only wants what it lost, and will go to incredible lengths to obtain it-even wrapping itself around other undead so that you get two enemies in one. It's a curious compliment to them-and one could suppose that if a large enough creature became a boneless, you could see an alien sort of symbiosis where the massive boneless has covered the Boneyard, pretending to be a living creature. Not only does this protect the Boneyard's precious bones, it gains protection...and a means to slightly avoid someone detecting what it really is.
Allright this is great, I used this is a Dark Sun style campaign I'm running, where the party has traveled for about 7 sessions across the desert to track down their abducted tribe, only to find the tribe eventually within a mass grave, in the form of this beautiful boneyard.
Oh the things a DM does to set up a revenge arc for his players.
Im actually really happy for this conversion. I've been trying to convert the bone yard into my campaign, but I was gonna reflavore it into a Scrap Yard.
Instead of stealing skeleton it steals anything metal. Even the armor off your back.
And it drops a bunch of broken and twisted up constructs.
Now I am just imagining partnering this up with the Wheep - the Wheep rides the Boneyard to give a warning of doom coming to a city. Flying over the city wailing and crying while the Boneyard drops skeletons as a forward fighting force for the necromancer/lich.
I got an idea for a oneshot from this at least. Inept necromancer breaks the first rule of necromancy(dont raise what you cant put down) and performs the ritual to create a boneyard... which promptly incorporates the necromancer and their minions into itself and begins a search for more and more bones to add to itself. The boneyard interrogates victims it comes across about the whereabouts of battlefields, graveyards, or whatever would have corpses laying around... and one poor fool tells it about some lost necropolis or catacomb(think paris catacombs) built out of thousands upon thousands of skeletons. The party has to beat the boneyard there and destroy the bones, or face the mountain sized bone colossus it would become if it reaches it first.
Loved this episode!!! and I always loved your content! Cannot wait to see the kickstarter opened, keep it up with your amazing work!
Your videos just keep getting better and better. Definetively one of my favorite channels.
I think i'll use this in my campaing with a necromancer creating a dragon skeleton out of many smaller skeletons
Im loving all of these rarer creatures your videos talk about. Its definitely giving me more and more ideas for a puzzle tower one-shot im brewing up
Man, you're editing just ramped up to 100 man, for such a small channel the quality is very high. I love these videos so much!
Idea: A Boneyard has managed to find itself the cache of corpses a dracolich has secreted away, and now has a bunch of draconic powers.
Lets take that even further:
What if a Boneyard stumbled upon a graveyard that contained the bones of a deceased dragon?
Perfect! My players are lvl 13 so the cr is around what I could use + that is one cute boney thing.
The weird illithalich might ask them to return to him an experiment that went loos, being smarter then he expexted. The Boneyard already destroying a whole town by the time they get there only to find all the people who lived there to be sacks of violated meat on the geound, without any bones
Damn this channel is absolutely SPARKING ideas for my campaign. Been in a slump. Thanks bro
Bone yard acting as a sort of bone mimic would be neat
This is my new favorite channel thanks dude.
Idea: Scrapyard
Pretty much the same thing, but instead of bones, it's broken machinery parts. Imagine what would happen if it was created in the remains of an abandoned clockwork city...
Overly sentient Bone Yard that apologizes and feels bad for having to take bones.
Favorite DnD monster by far, and I was thrilled to find a video talking about it. Thank you, sir.
I've always wanted to do a mini campaign against the Hecatoncheires because I think he's a cool monster (someday you should make a video of him) but he's got CR 60 so there's no chance. And you just gave me the perfect monster that fits in as a replacement instead of using Tiamat or the Tarrasque like I was thinking of doing.
Keep the good job please.
This could be the form of a mythical necromancer who uses one last necromantic ritual as the party defeats him to become the Keeper of Bones. Same action ability, but with necromancy spells as well and the ability to be indistinguishable from a pile of bones. Put this in a laif filled with hundreds of skeletons and allow it to 'burrow' through the bone ground.
Hell yes I suggested this along with a bunch of other really cool undead. hope to see those this month tool, really hoping you do the Hullathoin as well. This alongside the boneyard are some of my fav big boss undead.
An Elephant graveyard being controlled by a necromatic poacher that looks like an elephant hydra, flavor the summoned 1d6 minotaur skeletons as elephant skeletons.
Your welcome
I've never played DnD and never DMd but i LOVE the idea of the party somehow starting with a boneyard thats taken the form of something small and they get it is a companion. Then they have to make sure it stays happy or itll go in a huff and turn on them.
"we've come for your calcium"- the boneyard
Totally using this in my modern game. The party hears about a break in at the museum. All the skeletons are gone and in a room there are strange graffiti all over. Then while they are looking around they hear a scream. By a little used exit they find the remains of a human that has had its skeleton tore out. (The one who did the spell, just poorly). Then drop little things throughout the games. Starting out with more skeletons being stolen from various places. Remains of homeless people and other disadvantaged peoples. All leading up to the mystery. Maybe even have it take over a local crime organization. It lives in a meat packing facility that the organization owned and collects bones there but still wants to hunt at night.
And when ze patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and zen ze doktor vas never heard from again!
doing a halloween campain tomorow for my party, thank you for the idea as i kinda needed a second encounter
Damn lil homie got his fall set. You look warm but still icy king 🥶 more vids my man.
8:40 : Friendliest necromancer ever. I kind of like the idea of a smiling, sunny necromancer complete with cute black cat familiar... then they summon a looming monstrosity that rips out your bones.
Ooooh that hunger for bones combined with intelligence could be a very fun base for a campaign storyline. Imagine an army in service to a cult that worships what they *think* is an avatar of a god of war but is actually a boneyard that's assumed a convincing form, and perhaps even accompanies favoured champions for backup. Aside from battlefields being a good source of bones, maybe they like to sacrifice living captives to be de-skeletoned by their boneyard benefactor.
The party could start out as a group of sacrificial captives that somehow escape and then are given a chance at revenge.
how about a boneyard being summoned by a lich. party only knows of the lich and finds the phylactery taking it out easily. now the boneyard has nothing to control it and goes on devouring any and all it runs across. the party learns of boneless husks being discovered and has to take out before its collection of skeletons becomes too much to stop.
love it. great video!
I was sold on the first skeleton pun and then you hit me with the banger spooky scary skeletons.
You likely learned this, but the brain in the jar exists in Van Richtens Guide.
Friendly boneyard just de-boning all the meat at the local butcher's shop.
notification gang
finally some spooktober vibes
I can imagine a boneyard being sommoned and the. Immediately killing the sommoner
My favorite spooky monster is the Hullathoin from the 3e fiend folio. It's a rotting dragon corpse that serves as a colony of demonic locusts that raise the fallen as vampire spawn, can cow undead to its service as an evil cleric , and spew acidic pus from its sores in a ring around itself.
It's like a walking living zombie apocalypse except the zombies are smart enough to follow orders and use tactics.
You could've said "what it lacks in meat, it makes up for it with BONEfide potential
Thus monster makes me think of skeleton computer.
The idea that you could cobble enough dumb undead together to make a computer or even make an artificial intelligence through the dark ones and zeros
Welcome to Monster of the Week, where Dungeon Dad brings to you proof that previous Editions of D&D had more content built into 1 book that 3 or 4 of the 5th Ed Books.
Fact
10:33 you cant keep doing this to me with this Shadow of the Ninja OST...
The nostalgia... IT BURNS
I used this one a few sessions ago, my party loved the challenge it represented
A cool scenario i could think of would be a boneyard binded to some powerful entity and is in the form of a castle. Imagine having a party going to kill a necromancer and they storm a castle, getting inside for skeletons to spawn from the walls. Jaws spawning from the floor and ceiling attempting to grapple the party. Then they attack dealing damage but no kill, realizing the entire thing they're in is 'alive'
As a sapient and pretty intelligent creature, this monster could work as a quest giver