To be honest, if your DM isn’t riffing on the sheet notes, they should be, IMHO.
One OG sign it’s well past due: players gettin’ lazy w/ “low-level” challenges, letting IRL statblock fluency drive in-game assumptions, etc. Resistances, key abilities, tendencies, phobias, et al, should all be up for grabs if the party, or any members thereof, haven’t personally encountered said creature before in that biome, region, local area, season, and/or time of day. Who knows what effects to only those parameters brings about in that species? Besides, playing “by the book” doesn’t require playing “from the book”. 🖖🏼
Time to finesse those goblins, kobolds, infernal geese, (normal geese, better name) slimes/jellies, mud crabs, the lot!
It’s Moby Duck.
Hail Honkdra!
I had to search that. Behold! https://www.geeknative.com/131266/honkdra-the-goose-hydra/
Oh, hell yeah! That’s a mz4250 classic, and I’m a longtime supporter of their work!
FYI, this model is flat-out terrifying when upscaled ~250% to a gargantuan 200mm base, (according to my players, at least) —but, in their defense, I admit I’d felt it also called for alligator gar pike mouths and staged in a suitably trampled & bestrewn hunting-ground to seal the deal and dub her Garhonkdra, the Choir of Tantrumax.
Give her a little fluorescent paint accenting and underlight her w/ UV, and they really start to wonder not if, but how the goose statblock’d been changed. 🤣
Oh my word, this person is awesome. And it is super generous to give the whole drive download right off. Just wow. I have a feeling a scaled up Honkdra is in my near future.
Without a doubt! I’ve supported a select few Patreon creators for a while now, and his email updates, etc., have been the most honest, humble, and inspiring among them —to the point that I lowkey look forward to them!
That said, I’d be doing y’all a disservice by failing to mention my other faves that stand alongside him:
- Bite The Bullet Studios — a married pair of amazing creators w/ a years-long line of some of the most unique, quirky, evocative, clever minis available these days;
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- SolGood Creations — Ukraine-based team of designers that not only send a massive amount of their Patron support directly to their local communities, but they share pics, vids, and more of our support helping their neighbors get through their days (they also put out an “unofficial” Ukraine-themed grimdark-future chapter, FWIW.) ;
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- Manuel Boria — an incredibly talented creator whose design work spans decades and it shows in the subtly emotive expressions in his sculpts, his detail invites the eye to wander deeper;
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- Warp Miniatures — truly signature work inspired by oldschool RPG & “euro” fantasy styles, he designs with a mind toward their folktale origins —and slays every time;
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- and not at all least, just Nate! 🙌🏼 — join the journey as Nate takes suggestions and discovers how best to model each target subject for 3D printing, but he’s no newb (it’s informative and without ego every time), and each release is a legend.
edit: sorry, the formatting’s wonky AF. 🙇🏽♂️
imagine hydra affecting every body part.
lose a finger in an accident, 3 more grow. lose a leg, 3 grow.
it would be so hard to buy shirts and trousers.
There are troll mutants with this. Tyranny of Dragons has one in chapter 7, along with details shared below…
FOUR-ARMED TROLL
Sometimes when a troll loses a limb, it regenerates two limbs to replace the one it lost. This can result in trolls with multiple arms. A four-armed troll uses the troll stat block, except that it is a challenge rating 6 monster (2,300 XP) and has the following action instead of the troll’s normal Multiattack action:
Multiattack. The troll attacks five times, once with its bite and four times with its claws. If two or more claws hit the same target, the troll rends the target, dealing an extra 2d6 slashing damage.
such a beast would make a great source of endless meat for a ever growing community! Would be a nightmare to build a cage for though
I’m pretty sure you need to eat more to get the energy and protein to regrow.
the hydra parts grow magically, no story with a hydra states that the beast has a feast to prepare for the regrowth
It can just eat it’s own body parts to never starve.
I know, but if we are going to exploit it we should bring thermodynamics.
My rule of thumb, is that all magic like that breaks thermodynamics. And everything that breaks thermodynamics is like a super tech that can provide infinite energy.
It isn’t just free meat, it is free energy. Imagine a powerplant that just constantly beheads hydras to burnt he heads. burning a head is less efficient than coal, but they are renewable and infinite. Said civilization will eventually lean why it is bad to burn so much energy, and will end up with some serious global warming.
Same thing with magic portals, or basically any superpower. as soon as you break thermodynamics you have infinite power.
Well, magic is usually “Mana” or some equivalent, in many stories you have to build up a mana reserve to use magic, it look like the body produce it or absorb it naturally, i’d lean on the option that mana is absorbed because in many stories the characters are way faster to fill up the mana reserves than fill up the energy reserves and usually they also explain that you can find mana everywhere and in the air so my guess is that we absorb it using our lungs or skin contact
So they have ““infinite energy”” (which is not infinite but it’s so big that we don’t care about it finishing soon, like the heat in the Earth’s crust) Probably there is also a natural process that release new mana like the decay of organic matter or some plant or bacteria that synthesise mana
Yeah it might cause crazy climate change until someone casts atmospheric cleansing and sequesters all the carbon.
Just keep cutting heads until the mass of the hydra-type beast is so big that the ground will collapse under her body and traps her, maybe even so big that she will collapse into a spherical shape under her own weight. Only a helpless heavy mass of moving flesh! The birth of the hydra moon!
trap the hydra. chop off the heads, burn them.
use the heads as fuel in a power plant.
You now have the industrial revolution built on top of infinite power generation
I mean, you could always just cut off the legs and wings instead
Biblically-accurate goose
just milloons of goose heads
🎵 millions of goose heads Goose heads for me
Hunh. Fishheads came to mind, for me. 🤓
The goose mother has born!
