Monstrous Mondays: The Noble Rotter

Monstrous Mondays



An experiment

Recently, I ran a dungeon for my players underneath a small town where a crocodilian mummy lord named Mazebek held court. The creature was inspired by egyptian myths and the wonderful Bloat adventure written for Mork Borg by Greg Saunders (Which you should check out it's pretty cool). Like the vagabond Silas in that adventure Mazebek had a certain appetite for mortal flesh and possessed a menagerie of automatons who prepared his meals for him. In an effort to make this cannibalistic feasting more exciting I decided it could be more interesting for Mazebek's servants to innovate on the idea of creating pleasing meals for their lord. So, after reading an article on Auto-Brewery Syndrome, my course was set and the Noble Rotter was unborn. 

La Mort Vivant: The Noble Rotter

The Noble Rotter is a zombie who has been used much like a wine cask or oak barrel with legs. A walking, eating, storage unit for fermented things like beer, wine, or veggies, which to the discerning taste of Mazebek and it's minions adds to their flavor. 

Now, lets talk stats.

Noble Rotter

Medium Undead, Neutral Evil

AC: 10 (Barrel Planks)

Hit Points: 23 (3d8+9)

Speed: 25-ft

STR     DEX     CON     INT     WIS     CHA

16 (+3)  8 (-2) 16 (+3)  3 (-4)  7 (-2)  6 (-2)

Damage Immunities poison

Condition Immunities poisoned

Senses darkvision 60ft., passive Perception 8

Languages understands the languages it knew in life

but can’t speak 

Challenge: 1 (200 XP)

Undead Fortitude. If damage reduces the zombie to 0 hit points, it must make a Constitution saving throw with a DC of 5 + the damage taken, unless the damage is radiant or from a critical hit. On a success, the zombie drops to 1 hit point instead.

Claw N Grab. Melee Weapon Attack (+5) reach 5ft one target. Hit 1d6+3. A creature hit by this attack is also grappled by the zombie (Escape DC 12).

Not much right? Well that's because we haven't added in the spice that makes them more than just another zombie. Each Noble Rotter is, of course, host to a particular DIY brewery project. Roll the table for each Rotter separately or as a group and grant them a new ability suited to the horrors stored within. (Or just choose. You're the boss, boss.)

1-2 Royal wine. The zombies have an acid spit attack. The zombie spews overripe offal.

Vinegar Vomit (Recharge 5-6). The Rotter spews bile in 15-ft long 5-ft wide line covering anyone in the way in a sticky acidic sickly-sweet goop for 1 minute unless they succeed at a DC 13 Dexterity saving throw. While soaked in bile their movement speed is halved and they cannot use reactions. A creature covered in bile can use an action on their turn to clean themselves off ending the effect early.  

3-4 Beer. The zombies bite is intoxicating and makes the victim drunk. 

Intoxicating Bite. Melee Weapon Attack (+5), reach 5ft, one creature. Hit 7 1d8+3 piercing damage +1d6 poison damage. The target must succeed on a DC 12 Constitution saving throw or become Poisoned for 1 minute. The target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of their turns.

5-6 Vegetables. The zombies unbearable stench causes those nearby to experience powerful nausea and light-headedness.

Astringent Bouquet. Any living creature that starts its turn within 20 feet of the zombie or enters the affected area for the first time on a turn must succeed a DC 13 Constitution saving throw or they cannot concentrate on spells and have disadvantage on attack rolls until the start of their next turn.

Conclusion

And that's that. I'm sure if you put some thought into it you create a hundred of these deaders each with something interesting inside whether your necromancer plans on eating them or just grossing people out. My players especially enjoyed the Intoxicating Bite of the three as getting drunk while being eaten by zombies leads to some unintentional comedy. 

Do you have any weird zombies you've created to stave off the normal hum drum nature of the dead? Share them in the comments below! Please! I need more ideas!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nemesis Systems Do(n't) Matter

Image
A weekly blog post?! Egad! Don’t look now but I may have actually beaten the rut. From my previous musings on adding modifications to the Underclock you may have seen my interest in the Stalker type enemy endemic to a lot of modern Survival Horror and how that type of foe seems like an obvious fit to way of handling random encounters. So I tried it and it felt a bit…crowded. I wanted lesser creatures that roamed between the buildings, environmental traps, and other dungeon delving horrors which took up quite a bit of space. Somehow I was also supposed to find a way to resurrect locality effects that I had missed from the overloaded encounter die. It was all just a bit much to also add in a chase sequence as an option on the list so I went back to the drawing board. I needed to separate the Nemesis (My big bad unstoppable beasty) from the Underclock without vastly increasing the cognitive load in running a complex hunter creature amidst all the other workings of my dungeon. Then I reme...
Read more

Liminal Blues: The Trouble(’s) With Fallout

Image
Today we’re going to be talking about Fallout in Liminal Horror arguably THE mechanic that makes the game what it is. For those not in the know Liminal Horror is a horror tabletop RPG based on the wide wonderful ruleset of Cairn which is also based on the NSR Ur-Text Into The Odd. It’s light but with enough tricks up its sleeve to make it both fun and spooky enough for The Thing in a Mall or Control: The Megadungeon. I’ve been running Liminal Horror for years now through campaigns, one-shots, dungeon crawls, and city wide investigations. I’ve run every one of the official adventures at least twice and just wrapped up the Parthogenesis of Hungry Hollow so you could say I’m a bit of a fan. What keeps me coming back to Liminal Horror over Call of Cthulhu, Kult Divinity Lost or World of Darkness which I have immensely enjoyed in the past is the game’s defining feature, Fallout. Fallout is how the game dodges problematic tropes of “mental illness bad” found in the games above by drawing in...
Read more

Liminal Survival Horror (Or Putting Resident Evil Anywhere I Can LH Edition) Part 1

Image
It will be no secret to anyone who’s played in my games or spared the slightest glance at my musings here that I’m a big fan of Survival Horror as a genre. So inevitably regardless of what system I’m currently playing we tend to inject some Resident Evil flavor at some point. Inspired by a blog post I saw a while ago (That I cannot find) I decided to take the old school Prima Strategy Guide for the original Resident Evil and use it as a framework to run it as an adventure using Liminal Horror. Now, I love Liminal Horror, its simple but extremely receptive to modification somehow able to hold strong regardless of how many layers of absurdity I add from whatever I’m reading that week. But, if I want to go full Resident Evil, and I do, I had need of a few extra widgets that the baseline lacks. Keep in mind this will be using the Investigator Edition of Liminal Horror you can find here and making liberal use of Luck, Item Tags, Wounds, and Time Procedures. I’ll be getting more in depth w...
Read more