Hey folks! I don’t know if anyone would find this interesting, but I do think it’d be fun for me at least to show off my homebrew monsters that I’ve used against my players and review my thought process in creation, use, and what I would change how ever loosely as I feel appropriate. I make no promise for any kind of regularity to this since I’m liable to lose myself in other things, but for now I hope this is enlightening to some or at least interesting to others in seeing how some people put the meat in the sausage… I’m not sure that’s the right idiom, but I’m not gonna let that stop me!
Today I’m gonna talk about an extremely recent, as of 6 days ago recent, villain for my longest running game, The Fuckening (an inspired name I know). In context, with my party of 4 Level 12 5e players this fight was a purposeful blindside on my part as a bit of a bait and switch on the players, of a fight immediately after healing a PC’s family member. And thus comes Prominence, Blood of the Holy Searing Corpse.
My goal with Prominence (they/them) was twofold:
- Give a lead in to some setting specific lore, involved with both the next adventure, and also for the exact reason for why they needed to heal the NPC in the first place
- Have me actually try having my party fight against an honest to goodness celestial of significant quality
Creation
Starting off, being the lazy type and not wanting to make an enemy from scratch like a fool, I based them off of the Planetar stat block in the 5e SRD and modified from there.
The first thing I did was to change some of the abilities, largely the names and effectively got rid of spellcasting because I didn’t want to be putzing around trying to choose the right spell (though maybe I should’ve stuck with Flame Strike?). I did meaningfully change 1 ability, Magic Resistance, to be Sacrificial Resistance. So rather than just having a flat advantage, I gave them a “Legendary Resistance” type of ability based on the design of stuff from MCDM’s new monster, Xorranox the Tyract (you can find out more here) where he can sacrifice some of his floating eyes, to make a save, BUT he loses eye beams on his next turn. Overall I think that’s better design, though I’m sure Magic Resistance has it’s place looking back on the fight. Sacrificial Resistance was largely made though in relation to Prominence’s 2nd Agent Action (a Action Oriented monster’s Villain Action by another name) Rain of Sulfur, where they summoned 4 other celestials to do some damage if they’re left too long, which was a design mechanic I took from FFXIV. But yes after they did their thing they would stick around and give buffs to Prominence, but if needed they would be sacrificed to keep Prominence from taking a nasty spell or effect. Plus it makes the players feel very cool when they use up an enemies resources.
Other than the modification of Magic Resistance, I added a new ability: Burn Away the Curses of The Enemy. Mildly LotR inspired in naming, I made this ability largely to fend off any long term effects like Slow, or Hold Monster or worse since at the end of the day players like debuffs and I get that, but I also like having my monster actually do things, so they get one turn/round of using their cool stuff, but then it’s gone. I can’t be bothered to be making saves. Plus it leans nicely into the fire = purification theme I was shooting for.
Lastly I added Divine Agent of Rebirth, largely as a personal joke since I made it for a completely different system and just added the word Divine to the front it. It was intended to be a mild danger if things got too bad for the party and it’d be a fun little parting gift, but I never actually expected it to work… but then it did, cuz it got the party wizard and now she’s an egg for 2 days and will spring out Aged 11. Truly my favorite D&D ability that I’ve ever made.
Moving on to Actions, I think I largely made my biggest mistakes here. So for reference, a regular 5e Planetar gets 3 attacks with their Greatsword with 4d6+7 slashing damage and 5d8 radiant on a hit of +12. At first I thought whatever, but then I actually looked at everyone’s HP and the Wizard had 60 HP total!!! A stiff wind from this thing would’ve knocked her out in 1 round! So being a kindhearted DM I toned the damage down some and mistakenly made their multiattack only have 2 attacks instead of 3. That overall lowers Prominence’s damage output too much which I wasn’t fond of in practice. If I were to ever reuse this statblock in particular I would definitely change it back to 3 attacks.
From there I gave Prominence a ranged option in Searing Ray just to have something to deal with the spellcasters or if the PCs decided to keep away for whatever reason, and I think overall it was effective, though for this party I might have added an extra die just to be safe.
I gave them a Bonus Action and Reaction since giving monsters more actions will just let them keep up with players. Scorched Earth was added for some chip damage, and Blast of Heat was there to mitigate the damage oncoming from the melee PCs of the party. I’ll talk about the Agent Actions more later, but I overall I wasn’t super sure what order I was gonna use them in and didn’t decide the last one, Ahk Morn, until the day of based on how the fight was going. I think overall they worked as they were supposed to, just my personal decisions in combat weren’t the best uses in hindsight.
In Combat
In general, as the statblock is right now and how I felt after doing some minor design changes as was appropriate at the time, I think I would give Prominence a solid B-B+. Definitely had a good amount of coverage and a variety of options, but they lacked some bite in places. Their damage on average overall felt a smidge lower than I would’ve liked for the party since outside of the party’s wizard, and a lucky crit on the party’s rogue (that was quickly healed by a hasted paladin) it wasn’t a super intense fight damage wise. Having a paladin with a +4 aura to saves is definitely a boon to them that’s for sure, but I think I also could’ve used better tactics.
For example the first Agent Action I used, Immolate, went on the party’s druid, which at first I thought was a good idea, since it’s not concentration for Prominence and frankly will hinder the driud’s concentration spells. BUT I forgot that the druid was a tiefling so she only ever took half damage if she failed the save, which is completely my own fault. I could’ve been petty and just said “They ignore resistance,” but that didn’t feel right to me. That might be something I do if I were to revise them though.
The second Agent Action, Rain of Sulfur, being just a straight up biblical reference, worked as I wanted. the players got rid of 2 of the spawn Heralds (reskinned Virtues from MCDM’s Strongholds and Followers) with AoE spells and avoided any major damage stacking as a quick mini objective to their fight and kept the casters from attacking Prominence, so an overall win-win for both sides of the table I think.
The last Agent Action, Ahk Morn, had a small bit of foreboding cutscene for the group’s paladin for an upcoming adventure, and served as an effective ultimate ability in both the colloquial and literal uses. When I first wrote it up not even hours before the start of the session, I thought maybe the DC and damage were too low (and I did end up bumping up the damage to 4d6 instead of 3), but I think it worked out in the end since there was a pressure of Prominence getting to just keep hitting players with this 3 times a round for free until either side was dead. Now a lot of the Ahk Morns did end up going to the wizard but largely because she kept using Cone of Cold and I wanted that to stop, but I think psychologically it definitely put pressure on them to get it done quick before someone goes down.
Conclusion
Overall I think there is definitely places for me to take Prominence and I plan to change and shift things since I plan on bringing them back, which the players already have assumed considering their last words, but for my immediate needs my purposes were served well enough, so I’m satisfied with that. But I’ll be curious to see how my party will deal with them next time…
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