yuan-ti Archives - The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Volo’s Guide to Monsters’ treatment of the yuan-ti is heavily lore-focused, with a section, useful to dungeon masters, on how to design a yuan-ti temple-city. From a tactical standpoint, the only additions are five new variants (!) and a brief subsection headed “Unusual Abilities.”

Unusual Abilities offers four traits that DMs can use to customize an individual yuan-ti or a group of them:

Acid Slime gives the yuan-ti a corrosive coating, lasting one minute, that inflicts 1d10 acid damage against a grappled opponent or one who strikes it with a close-range melee attack. It’s a bonus action, and yuan-ti don’t get any other bonus actions, so this is a free supplement to the yuan-ti’s action economy. It’s all benefit and no downside, so the yuan-ti will use this feature on its first turn.
Chameleon Skin is also a freebie: it’s a passive ability that grants advantage on Stealth Checks. No tactical implication; it just makes the yuan-ti better at what it already does.
Shapechanger, for the yuan-ti pureblood, comes with the same disadvantages as it has for the yuan-ti malison and yuan-ti abomination. Skip it.
Shed Skin is another all-benefit, no-downside feature, letting a grappled or restrained yuan-ti slip free without a skill or ability check. It costs only a bonus action, which is no cost at all, since the yuan-ti has no other bonus action to give up. A yuan-ti with this trait will use it anytime it applies.

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Yuan-ti are snake-human hybrids, created in the earliest days of civilization, whose culture fell from an advanced, enlightened state into fanaticism and cruelty. They live in a caste-bound society in which those who most closely resemble humans make up the lowest stratum, while the most snakelike constitute the highest and most powerful. One distinctive characteristic they all share is the innate ability to cast suggestion: like Kaa in The Jungle Book, they try to win your trust before they mess you up. Another is that they all have magic resistance, so they have no reason to fear spellcasters more than anyone else.

The most common and least powerful caste are the yuan-ti purebloods. (Counterintuitively, “pure” is a pejorative to the yuan-ti; the more adulterated by reptilian essence they are, the more they’re esteemed.) Their physical abilities are average-ish, with a slightly elevated Dexterity; their Intelligence and, particularly, Charisma are higher, implying a species that approaches combat from a mental angle first. This implication is emphasized further by their proficiency in Deception and Stealth. They have darkvision, suggesting that they’re most at home in dim places and/or most active at night. Along with suggestion, they can cast the cantrip poison spray three times per day (presumably only at its base damage level of 1d12—although they have 9 hit dice, there’s no mention of their spellcasting level). They can also cast animal friendship on snakes, for whatever that’s worth.

According to the Monster Manual flavor text, yuan-ti purebloods often put on cloaks and try to pass for human in order to “kidnap prisoners for interrogation and sacrifice,” so let’s start with that: The yuan-ti wants to kill you, but it doesn’t want to kill you right here and now. Instead, it wants to get you someplace where it can kill you in a way that makes its gods happy.

Continue reading Yuan-ti Tactics