Monster Menagerie: Gruesome Foes

Gruesome is Good

The most popular fantasy monsters are well understood by players, and that very popularity robs encounters that use them of suspense. Dragons fly, they have breath weapons and spells, and you don’t want to get caught next to one when it full attacks. Giants are big humanoids that hurl rocks. Undead have a specific set of immunities, and often paralyze, drain, or frighten. Once you’ve run into the same classic foes a few times, it stops being frightening and surprising to run into their cousins again and again.

That’s when a GM needs to get gruesome.

The idea behind Gruesome Foes is to offer templates to make well-known monsters more interesting for players and GMs. Rather than face yet another color-coded dragon encounter, the players find themselves facing a plague dragon capable of ending civilizations, or skittering draconic ambush predators obsessed with building the perfect adventurer trap. Gruesome foes of any kind have uncanny appearances, smells, and sounds that makes them more frightening to even veteran characters.

Gruesome Foes presents new templates, feats, and alternative class feature options to add to almost any monster. All of these gruesome templates are designed to play into a specific fearsome idea and provide an extra dose of horror for encounters using them, such as a massive foes wrapped in rotting limbs, or insane walking vivisections sharing glimpses of alien worlds.

All the gruesome templates are designed to play into a specific fearsome idea or fate and provide an extra dose of horror for key foes. Some of the gruesome templates are inspired by the iconic enemies of classic horror fiction, while others are intended to tie into specific background or environmental themes. Each template includes all the game rules needed to run it (including a new mechanic, shock value, explained in detail) and enough descriptive material and suggestions for use to make it easy for a GM to add them to an ongoing adventure or build whole new encounters around them.

Make 'em More Than Monstrous...

Make 'em Gruesome

Includes standard pdf, less-gruesome cover pdf, and printer-friendly pdf.