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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

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Other (feel free to post about it)

[Loud Whispers]

What's the best build that shuts down combat for the most possible amount of rounds without dealing damage? Ideally something that also protects the monster from being murderhoboed

[IcyTea31]

Xanathar's Guide has the Paladin of Redemption. Early highlights include the Calm Emotions spell to call a parley (include your murderhobo friends in the blast), and the Compelled Duel + Sanctuary combo to force a creature to attack you but be unable to do so. On the other hand, the oath will be tricky to uphold if the other players aren't into trying to diplomance every encounter.

[delphonso]

Sanctuary is great.

Mantle of Majesty from Glamour Bard let's them throw Command as a bonus action.

[Grim Portent]

So I've been thinking about some monsters as part of a worldbuilding idea I've got, and figured I'd cross post them here from Giantitp, which is where I normally post D&D/rpg related stuff. Generally speaking my ideas are based around a world where humans are the only mortal race that exists, everything else is mystical or folkloric or weird.

First up is a loosely celtic inspired take on orcs, second is an attempt to make Arabic style ghouls fit into the same general themes, with a smidge of Baba Yaga thrown in.

Warning, there's something of a wall of text.

Spoiler: Orcs (click to show/hide)

Orcs don't have much of a folkloric basis, just kind of a generic word for monsters and demons presumed to derive from the gallic god Orcus, so since I was going for a celtic vibe I decided to throw out the entire concept and made up a new idea based on the Pictish word orc, which means boar. I basically mashed together selkies, kelpies, boars and the Tuatha de Danaan. So in Irish folklore as I understand it the fairies used to be a race of magical men who lived aboveground before they got tricked into living underground by the ancestors of the modern Irish, who offered to split Ireland 50/50 as part of a peace treaty between their people. The Irish picked first and chose aboveground, the fairies then all went under the earth. For my purposes I refluffed kelpies, selkies and the new orcs as fairies who rejected this deal and took on animal forms to roam the world where other fairies couldn't.

Orcs became monstrous creatures that live in woodlands and hunt those who enter without offering them a sacrifice first. They look like large wild boar, with humanlike hands where their hooves would be. If they catch an intruder they will throttle them, then drag them into the woods to string their body up on the trees around their home, which is usually a hollow under a tree or a cave. In those hollows and caves they can assume their true form, that of a proud and cruel man/woman, a former warrior of the fairy folk.

Spoiler: Ghouls (click to show/hide)

Ghouls are a monstrous race, kin to witches and evil spirits, though their exact nature is difficult to determine. Ghouls feed on the flesh and blood of humans, are adept at various forms of trickery and covet silver. Nocturnal and solitary, ghouls prefer to dwell in places they are unlikely to be disturbed, but still near human settlements. Graveyards, abandoned buildings, dense woodland, the fringes of deserts and other such locations are perfect places for a ghoul to take residence. Some particularly powerful and cunning ghouls take up active lives among their victims, often as sages, physicians or mystics, leveraging their magical abilities and ancient wisdom to anchor themselves in the community of their prey like a tick.

Most ghouls are capable of some magic, often shapeshifting or illusions, which are used to lure in gullible humans, such as drunks and children to kill and consume. If unable to catch fresh prey ghouls will instead dig up and eat buried humans, but being forced to do so for extended periods weakens the creature and may drive them to temporary madness, becoming detached from reality.

In their true state most ghouls resemble a human, with emaciated limbs and a sagging pot belly, thin lips and teeth similar to those of a canine, some bear canine or hyena-like features with the most grotesque examples being long hairless snouts filled with sharp teeth. As shapeshifters most ghouls can assume the form of any human, canine or hyena. They often turn into the form of lost or deceased people from the community on which they prey, using this guise to lure in victims to devour.

Ghouls cannot truly die, when killed their body dissolves into festering mould and damp sand, the spirit of the creature fleeing to construct a new body elsewhere. Despite their immortality ghouls have an unshakeable aversion to the light of dawn, refusing to go outside until the sun has reached it's zenith and returning indoors hours before the sun rises. They also fear fire, for wounds left by flame persist through any illusion or transformation they can perform. Beasts of burden, horses, donkeys, oxen and camels refuse to bear a ghoul as rider or as a passenger in a drawn vehicle, no punishment or reward can entice them to move the foul creature.

A concerted effort made by those who would end the predations of ghouls has resulted in many scattering from their native lands, spreading thin throughout the world to avoid being trapped or mutilated by those who hunt them. Ghouls can be trapped by various means, being buried alive in coffins, bricked up in rooms, chained and left to rot in cells unable to die. Some of the more mystically inclined hunters crafted leashes with spells of binding scribed upon them that can force a ghoul to stay in canine/hyena form and obey the commands of a master, turning the foul beast into a peerless hunting hound, albeit one that needs human flesh or blood to remain truly healthy, and which will break free if the leash if damaged or removed.

On rare occasions a ghoul will reveal itself to a select few humans, offering them magical tutoring in exchange for sacrifices. The pupils of such ghouls may be asked to offer their blood to their teacher as part of each lesson, or permitting their master to be to consume an eye or a few fingers, or to bring the ghoul humans or fresh human remains to feed on. In general the more extreme the price the less often it will be asked of the pupil.

It is unknown if ghouls reproduce in any way. While they possess gender there are no reports of ghoul children existing, or of ghouls mating. Some scholars theorise that ghouls can be created from the spirits of the dead through a time consuming and costly rite, others that those who learn magic from ghouls may ultimately transform into a new member of the race if given time to mature and grow in power, yet more claim them to be the offspring of humans and wolves conceived at the stroke of midnight. Whatever the answer, ghouls are rare but troubling creatures, their paths littered with the bones of countless victims claimed over centuries or millennia of unwholesome life.

[scriver]

Good stuff, Grim! I like the Boarcs a lot.

Orcs became monstrous creatures that live in woodlands and hunt those who enter without offering them a sacrifice first. They look like large wild boar, with humanlike hands where their hooves would be.

Especially the back hooves, right?

[Grim Portent]

Good stuff, Grim! I like the Boarcs a lot.

Thanks. I'm quite proud of the orcs.

Orcs became monstrous creatures that live in woodlands and hunt those who enter without offering them a sacrifice first. They look like large wild boar, with humanlike hands where their hooves would be.

Especially the back hooves, right?

Oh indeed. Human parts on animals, especially parts in the wrong places while being on animals is something I've learned is very unsettling, more so than the usual folktale thing of animal parts on humans.

[Kagus]

I've had a world concept banging around in my head for ages, where the basic gist is that the living and spirit worlds are sort of superimposed on one another, but each one's ability to see the other is generally quite limited.

"Souls" are then the spiritual energy of a living creature that's passed on into the spirit world, where its senses dull and its mind gets reduced, as it's not just free-floating life energy trying to remember what it was. Sometimes they reincarnate, looking to become what they once were, and sometimes they just float around and forget what they were doing, either dwindling down and becoming something smaller or clumping together with others into a larger mass.

The reincarnated souls try to find something that resembles what they think they are, and the closer a fit it is, the more "alive" the creature then becomes. But, again, their perceptions are a bit foggy... So sometimes they flop into things that just look "close enough". This is how we get reanimated dead, as the spirits are either confused or tricked into inhabiting bodies that aren't as intact as the idea they have of themselves, resulting in sluggish, clumsy, mostly-braindead animations (this was supposed to lead into a statue created by a master artisan, which was so perfectly lifelike that a soul inhabited it and attained intelligence).

But the soul clumps are more interesting... Now you have a mass of various spirits, each with its own fading memories of what it used to be, but all of them start wanting to live again. Eventually the mass gets powerful enough that it can just kind of muscle its way through and form its own body (or force change on an existing body, causing it to grow into something different), based on what it thinks it is... Which, considering on where the component souls come from, could be quite the combination. This is how we get monsters, boars with fish fins and bears with goat heads. Chimeras. They also tend to be rather large and powerful, if still chaotic and uncoordinated; because even though the body doesn't really match any of the memories in it spot-on, the mass as a whole has such a large amount of life power that it's basically a supercharged creation.


There's a few holes and gaps in the theme here and there, but it provided a basis for a lot of elements I wanted to include so hah

[Loud Whispers]

Good stuff, Grim! I like the Boarcs a lot.

pOrks

[scriver]

LOOKS LIKE PORK IS BACK ON THE MENU, BOARCS

[Loud Whispers]

Also does anyone here have a decent grasp of chemical hazards? I'm trying to implement a dungeon whose entrance is a lake of mercury the expedition has to sail across, full of occasional mercury oozes that devour gold/silver. Yet I'm trying to think how far I should go when it comes to implementing mercury exposure poisoning, as I assume an underground lake of mercury is also going to have lots of airborne mercury too

I assume I can just handwaive it with protective charms / decontamination showers though

[Kagus]

I didn't think mercury generally *liked* being airborne for very long.

[Egan_BW]

There is that Cody's Lab episode where he eats (drinks?) some metallic mercury and then doesn't die. Maybe it would be different if you had a whole lake of it? I'd recommend not eating any bats or cave monsters you find down there, at least. :p

[Iduno]

Also does anyone here have a decent grasp of chemical hazards? I'm trying to implement a dungeon whose entrance is a lake of mercury the expedition has to sail across, full of occasional mercury oozes that devour gold/silver. Yet I'm trying to think how far I should go when it comes to implementing mercury exposure poisoning, as I assume an underground lake of mercury is also going to have lots of airborne mercury too

I assume I can just handwaive it with protective charms / decontamination showers though

Shouldn't be a lot of vapors, unless someone chucks a fireball.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Elemental mercury = vapors are dangerous, passes skin but very slowly, ingestion actually is not very dangerous because your digestive system won't pick it up.

Ethylmercury = Thimerosal (the vaccine preservative) metabolizes into this, otherwise rare. Neurotoxic, but not overly dangerous because it doesn't bio-accumulate.

Methylmercury = Nightmare chemical. Heavily bio-accumulative, and hence is the kind they warn you about in fish even though it's not much present in the water. Any significant concentration will dissolve your nervous system and kill you horribly, as one scientist infamously found out - it took her two years to die as I recall. Penetrates rubber gloves and skin.

Elemental mercury is so dense that you might not be able to sail across it per se - the ship won't sink and thus could tip over. You could theoretically walk across a sea of it, sinking partially depending on your density and that of your equipment.

Mercury poisoning is cured by chelation therapy - this is not very effective against methylmercury, though. As far as I know it works fine on elemental mercury. Materials used for chelation are liable to kill you if you don't measure it proportionate to what is being removed.

A good summary of chemical hazards can be found by searching for an appropriate Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). Here's one for elemental mercury.

[IcyTea31]

Elemental mercury conducts electricity well, even as a vapour. If the wizard is careless enough to throw a lightning bolt, punish them. On the subject of magic, mercury is important to alchemy as a form of matter easy to transmute into other forms. A wild magic surge or other such miscast might be particularly unpredictable in the presence of a sea of the stuff.

Shouldn't be a lot of vapors, unless someone chucks a fireball.

Random encounter: fire elemental.

Elemental mercury is so dense that you might not be able to sail across it per se - the ship won't sink and thus could tip over.

Build your ship out of tungsten carbide.