The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

There’s a lot of fun to be found in mashing up creature types: crossing dragons and undead to create the dracolich, or fiends and constructs to create the hellfire engine, or—as Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons did—dragons and aberrations to create the eyedrake and the elder brain dragon. Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft gives us a few of these, including today’s featured creature, the vampiric mind flayer.

Comparing and contrasting the vampiric mind flayer with the stat blocks of the stock vampire and the stock mind flayer is the obvious exercise. However, when you look at the flavor text and see how these beasties are created (summary: not vampirism-infected adult mind flayers, but vampirism-infected mind flayer larvae), vampire spawn seem like a better analogue than full-fledged vampires, so we need to throw them into the mix as well.

The results of the comparison are … interesting. And a little odd. The result isn’t a simple average of the vampire (or vampire spawn) and the mind flayer, nor is it the sum of its parts. It’s both a little more and a little less than either.

The brain in a jar—literally, exactly what it is—poses several interesting problems, along with a few unanswered questions.

For one thing, is the “natural armor” that gives it an Armor Class of 11 supposed to be the glass of the jar? We have to assume so, because a naked brain with a −4 Dexterity modifier would have to have some ankylosaurus-grade armor plating to give it AC 11. However, according to the Object Armor Class table in chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, a glass jar ought to have AC 13. At the same time, 55 hp is absurdly durable for even a resilient object of Small size.

The Monster Manual zombie isn’t a complicated or sophisticated attacker, but it possesses one trait that makes it memorable: Undead Fortitude, which allows it to pop back up and keep fighting even after it’s reduced to 0 hp. You never know how many hits it will ultimately take to stop a zombie. Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft additionally (and accurately) notes, “The horror of the shambling dead lies not in their individual menace … but [in] their numbers, their persistence, and their disregard for their own well-being.” One zombie, in the right circumstances, can be played for laughs; many zombies are legitimately unnerving, regardless of context.

Even so, after a while, zombie fights can become ho-hum affairs—especially past level 5, when clerics’ Destroy Undead feature can clear them out en masse. How can a Dungeon Master keep the thrill alive?

We can find part of the answer by looking to an unrelated monster: the troll. A troll, out of the box, is nothing but a hard-to-kill brute. However, the Loathsome Limbs variant, which allows the troll’s severed limbs to keep fighting independently, turns a troll encounter into something special. In a similar vein, suppose that a town’s response to an invading zombie horde was to make absolutely sure they didn’t get up again by hacking the corpses to pieces—and even that didn’t work. That’s one way you might end up with a swarm of zombie limbs.

Remember when I said, “There are a lot of cool things in Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. I don’t count gem dragons among them”?

Hollow dragons are cool.

Take a metallic dragon with a responsibility so important that it can’t chance failing to uphold it by dying. Replace its life force with an imperishable aurora of otherworldly radiance—but keep it contained in the former dragon’s metallic hide. Send it back to work.

This new entity is tireless and unwavering, incapable of shirking its duty even if it wanted to. Destroy it, and its parts self-reassemble like the limbs of a troll (at least, the cooler sort of troll). Plus, the visuals, man, the visuals.

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