Developer Musings: Adventure Zines for System Neutral vs 5E - Part 2
Designing a 5E creature.
Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A weekly blog-letter exploring topics in the tabletop gaming arena. We explore design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop. If you find this post useful, please share. Find part 1 here.
Introduction
We’re looking at design considerations for creature and adventure design for 5E and System Neutral. In part 1, we laid out bullet points for the overall concepts of focus in both situations and now we will expand on those concepts using the example of the our creature the Vorklokus from the coinciding versions of it within our zine - The Almanac of Abominations. The primary focus of the zine is to provide game masters interesting creatures to put up against their players and provide them with insights and accessories to reduce the GM bandwidth required for a fun night at the table.
In this part we explore the 5E version of the Vorlokus, an insidious and mobile magic user that is beholden to a demigod of death.
Design
One of the reasons designing stat blocks for 5E can be tough is the specificness of the verbiage, this requires a lot of real-estate on the page to communicate effectively with the audience. In 5E you can tell when a creature is supposed to be important or powerful because there’s just alot going on on the page:
So what did we set out to achieve with this stat block? We are looking to create a thematic and dangerous encounter for a lower level party. In order for a 5E block to be complete it must have the stat line with all of the numbers and modifiers, any saving throw modifiers, what skills the creature might have (even though these almost never come up in practice), damage resistance and immunities, conditional immunities, sensing options, languages and any other features you come up with to try to customize the creature. This last bit is usually where you’ve got your interesting abilities.
Let’s start at the higher level design choices though. This creature is intended to be highly mobile and using that to stay alive, while being able to serve a lot of punishment from range - a glass cannon. AC will be low, but we’ll give the Vorlokus 15 if it gets to cast Mage Armor ahead of time (DM Discretion). By design, we want this creature to have low hit points even for the challenge rating so we achieve this by giving low constitution.
If you’ve never seen behind the scenes on a 5E stat block, a rule of thumb is the HP of a creature is a number of hit dice (which is better explained in OSR games than 5E) but in 5E it is based on the size of the creature. So this creature has 10 D8’s and then because we used 10 dice, we subtract 10*(CON MOD) to get -20. For D8’s in 5E you can assume average 4.5 per D8 which brings us to 10*4.5 or 45 - 20 = 25 hit points. This will come up again when we compare with hit point pools for the System Neutral version, you’ll see it is much simpler.
To give the Vorlokus every chance it can to survive being alpha blasted by the PCs, we will use one of the “benchmark” resistance/immunities 5E has in creature designs, silvered weapons. Basically any damage must be either magical or coming from a silvered weapon in order to actually apply damage to the creature. I’m not a big fan of the way 5E has a couple of these benchmark defenses, but that is what’s in the system. In this vein of thinking we will also give the Vorlokus a single legendary resistance (which official blocks usually have zero or three) and Turn Resistance - so it can’t just be made afraid by the first Cleric to come into the room.
We’ve got actions, bonus actions, lair actions, and legendary actions. The full retinue is not usually seen on a CR 3 creatures, but the intention is to give as much thematic ammunition to the game master as possible.
Most creatures that are intended to be “boss” creatures will have some saving throws they get to add their proficiency modifiers to like the player characters, so we picked intelligence and charisma as this is a charisma caster - which is most easily understood by looking at the spell/attack modifier used (+4) which matches the charisma modifier.
All of this can be confusing, and in my opinion can muddle what we want to communicate to the gamemaster which is “Give this guy mage armor, have him teleport around the room throwing black bolts, and if you can get UNDEAD ICHOR applied to the PC’s it will give you bonus damage.” This is why part of the design of the Almanac of Abominations includes what we like to call “Piloting Insights”
The piloting insights give a couple postures after a first round of combat that spell out what actions to take with the monster, highlighting directly what the design intent is. The postures are the active turn of the creature, and the second page is info to keep in mind between the Vorlokus turns. Use those legendary actions! Lair action! summon zombies and them blow them up to cover the PCs in UNDEAD ICHOR and then blast them with Black Bolts of death!
When I am running games of 5E, I use a ton of battle maps. The focus on the combat pillar of play and the XP being housed within creatures by the rules as written, means there’s always need for more battle maps. So we provided one that serves as the lair of the Vorlokus and gives him both an altar to perform terrible deeds and alot of room to teleport around and rain down death!
The above image showcases most of the map, and the digital version is available included in the digital assets and PDF pack.
The last things to note about the Vorlokus design is that it has a companion stat block by way of a very feeble zombie it summons, and a magic item in the form of its spell book that can be taken from it corpse if it is defeated!
Next Issue
Next time, we will explore the system neutral design of the Vorlokus in the Almanac of Abomination System Neutral!
What I Am Up To
TTRPG Reading: Crown and Skull
TTRPG Production: Almanac of Abomination System Neutral TTRPG Zine is on sale now!
Other Learning: Skillshare - The Rhetoric of Story - Damien Walter
Audiobook: The Graveyard Book, So You Want To Be A Dungeon Master
Useful Things For Your Games
Spotify Playlist Add - Role: Forest and Fae