#all for a measly +5 extra missiles

[coldgoldlazarus]

Yanno, Metroid Prime: Federation Force raises an interesting question: How did the Pirates successfully capture Samus for brainwashing in the first place? One of the less dumb points of criticism against the game is, as cool an idea as having her as the final boss sounds on paper, the setup required just doesnt't seem plausible.

The more realistic theory is she was still working through the aftereffects of the Phazon infection and subsequent withdrawl, giving them a chance to ambush and knock her out successfully, while only losing a few dozen soldiers in the process instead of like, a hundred or more.

The sillier answer, that I personally subscribe to, is the Phazon withdrawl thing, but also that in her moment of weakness and loosened judgement, they figured out how to deliberately weaponize her item-collection OCD to lure her into an inescapable trap.

[grailfinders]

Fate and Phantasms Far Side #4: Hisui

That’s the trouble with twins; there’s always another one. That’s right, Magical-Biche is back for another Tsukihime build already, this time they made the more serious maid sister Hisui, She’s even less combat-oriented than her sister, but I’m sure you’ll figure out how to best use her skills. 

Check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here! Take it away, Magical-Biche!

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Even though her sister was quite the easy build, Hisui was pretty hard to figure out. She doesn’t really have any combat abilities except for her weird hypnosis thing. Thankfully, DnD is a game about luck, most of the time, and we can actually build a character which heavily relies on being plain lucky. This build is obviously not as good as Kohaku, I think, but it should prove to be plenty of fun with how much we manipulate the dice. Let’s dive into the build!

Race and Background

Just like our sister, we are a variant human. We might have some psychic abilities, but we’re still mostly human. Being a variant let us have a +1 to dexterity and a +1 to wisdom. We are naturally someone that is used to manual labor, and we have a knack for understanding other people’s feelings. Being a variant human also gives us access to the most powerful feat of them all, lucky. This is going to be great help to mitigate our poor stats and our low combat capabilities. We can also get a free proficiency, and as we are quick to get an overview of our task, we take the proficiency in perception. 

For our background, we are pretty straightforward. We are a simple guild artisan, a master of our craft, that is, cleaning and being an awesome maid. There is sadly no servant background, so that one will have to do. Being a guild artisan makes us quite insightful and persuasive, which fits our personality quite well, even though our bad charisma stat means we won’t be getting a lot of mileage from persuasion. We are also proficient with Tinker’s tools, so we can repair anything broken in the house we serve in. We also get the Guild Membership feature, which isn’t really lore-friendly, but it’ll have to do. We’re definitely members of the Misaki town’s shopping district association or something, after all. 

Ability Scores

Next come our ability scores. And oh boy, we’re quite MAD (Many abilities dependant, if you didn’t know). As a skilled maid, we’re quite agile, and we’re getting our highest score into dexterity. We are also pretty intelligent, having been raised in a noble household with high-class education. We are also pretty crafty, so we should also have decent wisdom. Next, we will need a bit of constitution in order to live through our hard days as a maid. Finally, we sadly have to dump our charisma, even though we’re like the cutest character from the series, as we appear to be quite stern and cold. We also have to dump our strength; we are already agile, we don’t need that gorilla strength. 

Class Levels

Monk 1: Our first monk level gives us our martial arts, giving us the ability to fight efficiently with our trusted broom (a quarterstaff, of course) and to slap as a bonus action. We also get our unarmored defense, which starts quite low, due to our bad stats. With point buy, we start with a measly 15 AC. Starting as a monk also gives us 2 proficiencies, and we’re taking acrobatics, to further increase our cleaning abilities, and stealth, so we can sometimes surprise people with our powerful hypnosis powers. We’re also proficient with strength saving throws and dexterity saving throws, two really useful options. We also get our monk weapons, that is, all simple weapons and shortswords. 

Wizard 1: Yes, another class already! We become a wizard as early as possible so we have access to our spellbook to write spells in earlier. Wizards get the powerful ritual casting, useful to cast spells like alarm or detect magic. We also get arcane recovery, which for now only allows us to recover a single spell slot of first level. Our first spellcaster level gives us three cantrips. We are getting firebolt, a great way to (over)cook meat, and quite high damage while we’re at it. We also take mending, to repair anything our clumsy sister broke while trying to clean stuff. Last, we take shape water, which is overall really useful, but we’ll be getting the most mileage out of it by cleaning. We can also inscribe 6 spells in our brand new spellbook (that we have to buy, sadly): alarm, to protect our encampment and our home, catapult, so we can throw trash at people, color spray, Tasha’s hideous laughter, and sleep, our first hypnosis-like spells that all happen to be of the enchantment school. Last, we get our very own unseen servant, the actual incarnation of our sister, albeit more useful for home-related stuff. 

Monk 2: Back to martial arts, our second monk level gives us our Ki, allowing us to sneak in a few more hits with flurry of blows, to get pretty defensive with patient defense and to get quite mobile for the rest of our turn with step of the wind. We have 2 ki points so far (one for each monk level, and we get them back by taking a short rest. We also get unarmored movement, increasing our movement by 10 feet, for now. Last, we may get the optional feature dedicated weapon, which is absolutely useless for us, since we don’t have any other weapon proficiencies. 

Monk 3: Our third monk level gives us deflect missiles, a great way to mitigate incoming projectile damage and help with our survivability. But more importantly, we are now a drunken master, giving us plenty of luck-based abilities. For now, we only get a proficiency in performance, which can be used to pretend we’re just a harmless maid, and one with the brewer’s supplies… which is bad. We, Hisui, can’t cook anything, and brewing obviously counts as cooking. If possible, we should ask our DM if they are OK with replacing that proficiency with another one, like the carpenter’s tools. Finally, our subclass improves our flurry of blows with drunken technique, allowing us to move faster and to disengage when we use it, perfect for our concept of just evading hits instead of tanking. What’s more, we may get the optional feature Ki-fueled attack, which isn’t tremendously useful for us, since we can pretty much only trigger it with patient defense and step of the wind.

Monk 4: Unlike most classes, monk’s fourth level became quite crowded with TCoE. We, of course, get our first ability score increase, and we’re taking the most travelled road by taking +2 in dexterity. Next, we get slow fall, which is quite nice, but depends on how much our DM likes pitfalls. We also gain yet another optional feature, quickened healing, which greatly helps with our health, but depends one whether our DM allows it. Finally, let’s not forget that our only damaging cantrip gets its second damage die, making it a really great option to fight right now.

Monk 5: Our fifth monk level gives us our ever-important extra attack, which dramatically increases our damage output. Also, our martial art dice is increasing in size, meaning our unarmed strikes now deals 1d6 damage, a small but always welcome upgrade. Stunning strike, while not adding damage, can be used against low-constitution enemies to stun them. It adds another saving throw in our arsenal, as most enchantment spells won’t force constitution saving throws, even if our wisdom is quite low. Finally, we get our last optional feature: focused aim, which helps hitting things, and that’s about it. Great feature, but as with other optional features, it all depends on our DM.

Wizard 2: Now that we have our extra attack, we can finish our wizard training. Second level wizards grant us our school of magic, and we’re obviously an enchantment wizard, which will increase the efficiency of our enchantment spells and give us hypnotic abilities. First, as it is the case with all wizard schools, we are an enchantment savant, which is nice to learn new spells. We also get our main tool, hypnotic gaze. We can charm a creature in our melee range, but we need to use our action to maintain it. However, it gives time to our party members to reorganize and can prove quite useful in many situations. Furthermore, we finally look a bit like our final form, which can evade attacks like now one and hypnotize everyone. We also get two new spells, and we should be taking identify, to help sorting magical objects that may end up in our home or camp, and charm person, for obvious reasons.

Wizard 3: Third level wizards get the optional feature cantrip formula, letting us replace cantrips, which is… useful, but not too much, and optional. More important are the new level 2 spells we get! We’re taking Tasha’s mind whip, an offensive hypnosis of some sort, and Hold person, to further our crowd controlling abilities.

Wizard 4: Obviously, fourth level gives us another ability score increase, and we’re becoming a telekinetic, which gives us the mage hand cantrip and the ability to use it to shove people from afar with a bonus action, and we can forgo every component of the spell, as well as making the hand invisible. This is mostly used to push our opponent away from us, as we’re not exactly a great combatant. The feat also increases our intelligence by one point, which rounds it to 16. We also get a new cantrip, so we’re now able to cast gust, a great way to dust any surface and to shove people. Our two new spells are darkvision, which is kinda necessary as a human, and which allows us to patrol at night with ease, and mirror image, which adds to our already impressive hit-avoiding arsenal.

Wizard 5: Our fifth level in the wizard class gets us our third level spells! We obviously won’t go with fireball, as it cleans just a bit too well, but with counterspell, a great way to fight back when a dangerous artifact laying unattended at home releases it’s magic (it also happen to greatly increase our defensive abilities), and dispel magic, for similar reasons.

Wizard 6: Our final wizard level gives us our instinctive charm ability, crystalizing our cuteness into a weapon. We can now divert attacks to other people, provided that they fail on their wisdom saving throw and are not immune to charm. With that, lucky, our improved flurry of blows, deflect missiles and counterspell, we have quite an impressive toolbox to stay alive. Also, our only damaging cantrip gets its second damage upgrade. For spells, we’re taking stinking cloud: we’ve cleaned stuff for so long we can now materialize dirt and bad smells into a powerful spell. We also take  remove curse, for similar reasons to the spells of our previous level.

Monk 6: Back to our final class, we get our Ki-empowered strikes, meaning our unarmed strikes are now magical. A bit late, and we already have magical damage from elsewhere, so it’s not too big of an upgrade. However, we also get a new feature which is actually two: tipsy sway. It allows us to leap to our feet, ending our prone status by using only 5 feet of movement, and to redirect attacks, which works similarly to our instinctive charm, but has different limitations and costs a Ki point.

Monk 7: Our next monk level grants us the ever-powerful evasion, letting us avoid most damaging AOEs without trouble. We also get a better grasp at how to charm people. Our stillness of mind lets us end a charm or a frightening status on ourselves as an action.

Monk 8: The monk’s eighth level gives us our third ability score increase. We will increase our intelligence by two points, giving us a nice bonus to hit and saving throws for our spells.

Monk 9: At ninth level, monks get an improvement to their unarmored movement, allowing them to quite simply walk along walls and on top of water.

Monk 10: Tenth level monks get purity of body, making them immune to poisons and diseases. Poison immunity is quite useful to avoid traps and dangerous beasts, but that’s about it.

Monk 11: That monk level gives us the final drunken master feature we can get, drunkard’s luck. We can quite simply remove a disadvantage on a lot of rolls by spending two Ki points, which helps with both our damage and our survivability. Furthermore, we get two damage upgrades, because our damaging cantrip gets its final upgrade, and we can now use our quarterstaff with only one hand without losing damage.

Monk 12: Twelfth level in any class means ability score increase, and we luckily don’t rely on feats too much, so we are adding another two points to our dexterity score, meaning we now have a perfect dexterity score. A bit late, but it’s not the only ability we use to deal damage, so we can’t really help it.

Monk 13: Next monk level gives us the tongue of sun and moon… which are cool for roleplay purposes, but it doesn’t really fit our build and it doesn’t really help us doing anything. It might help to charm creatures which don’t speak common, so there’s always some use.

Monk 14: This is the reason we left the wizard class while only level 6. With diamond soul, we are now proficient with every saving throw, including constitution, great to keep our concentration. We can also re-roll when we fail a saving throw by spending a ki point. Combined with everything else, we’re now extremely hard to hit, and we’re not likely to lose our focus anytime soon. We also end up with a decent pool of 14 Ki points, and we add 25 feet to our movement while we don’t wear armor. 

Pros: We are, first and foremost, pretty hard to hit, despite our low AC. We can deflect attacks, charm people and bind them. We also force varied saving throws, which is great to overcome some threats. Also, since we take a wizard level early, we can start collecting spells very early, despite being mostly a monk. That gives us access to most of the useful wizard spells, including both high damage ones like fireball and utility ones like all the detection spells. 

Cons: However, we are dependent on way too many abilities and end up dumping two of them, if we use the point buy system. We’re also a melee spellcaster, and only really become good at it once we hit level 20. Being an enchantment wizard also means we have a lot of concentration spells and usually have to choose between mirror image and something else. We also have to hold back our intelligence until quite high level, making our (thankfully varied) saving throws easy to beat, and our attacks easy to avoid. Finally, our wisdom is pretty terrible for a monk and our very few features which use it will usually not be worth it. 

[lichlairs]

Checkout our new post over at https://lichlair.com/monday-monster-60-flameskull

Monday Monster #60: Flameskull

I’m very sorry if you got PTSD just from reading that title; I know many out there have suffered at the figurative hands of this monster, which is why I vow to dig deeply into its lore and statblock to see if we can reach some sort of redemption. Without any further ado, let us discuss the…

Flameskull

The basics

For a floating calcium deposit these things have surprisingly good stats; we’re looking at matching +0 CHA and WIS, a +2 CON, and a single dump stat assigned to STR for a -5 modifier. Today’s monster is both incredibly smart and incredibly dexterous with matching +3 scores to DEX and INT.

The Flameskull gets +5 to Arcana checks as well as a nice +2 to Perception for a total Passive Perception of 12. They also get 60ft of Darkvision and 40ft of hovering movement. Thanks to that big head of theirs they can also communicate in Common despite, you know, not having a tongue or any of the other important bits we use for talking.

In terms of combat durability, this thing can probably rival creatures of much higher CR. Its measly AC of 13 and average hit point pool of 9d4+18 might not look like much but today’s monster is immune or at the very least resistant to a wide variety of damages. We’re looking at Immunity to Cold, Poison, and Fire damage… you know, only the most widely used type of damage in the game, but as if that weren’t enough, they also have resistance to Lightning, Necrotic, and Piercing damages and cannot be charmed, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned, or prone.

But even now we’re not quite done yet; Flameskulls also have Magic Resistance for some nice advantage on saving throws, not to mention their Rejuvenation feature that will have them regain all their hit points back after being destroyed unless their magic is dispelled, or they get sprinkled with some of that good holy water. That’s a thing, yeah.

On the bright (ha!) side of things, your party of adventures won’t have to carry torches while they fight this thing because today’s monster does give off 15ft of dim light at a minimum (though it can choose to increase the range and brightness for a further 15ft).

As promised for ranger week, the Flameskull is fully reliant on range spell attacks, its main attack action being a Fire Ray that works with its Multiattack feature. Chances are though, that, before this creature goes down, you’ll want to use up the spells that it gets access to:

Cantrip (at will): mage hand

1st level (3 slots): magic missile, shield

2nd level (2 slots): blur, flaming sphere

3rd level (1 slot): fireball

That’s right, this thing has a goddamned Fireball waiting to go off. Not to mention the fact that it gets the option to use shield on top of all the crazy resistance it already gets. Actual bananas.

Last but not least, today’s monster is considered a tiny undead ans is usually of neutral evil alignment. Although this bit might be a little debatable, it is also technically a CR 4 creature.

The lore

The Flameskull was first introduced in volume one of the Monstrous Compendium for 2nd edition. As a monster that has been part of the game for most of its history, today’s monster has been through a handful of changes (mostly to do with the list of spells available to them) but remains the same when it comes to its lore. Speaking of older editions though, despite their very bright presentation, these monsters somehow managed to qualify as stealthy back in 4th edition, don’t ask me how though.

The first thing you should know about these creatures is that they aren’t born and have no way of reproducing amongst themselves. Flame skulls can only be fashioned from the skulls of recently deceased spellcasters or cultists, human wizards in particular, through a dark ritual performed by a powerful necromancer. The skulls themselves are often carved with esoteric runes and symbols.

After being summoned and bound to their master, Flameskulls will listen follow instructions to the letter until their purpose has been fulfilled. Oftentimes they will be used as guardians of particularly important places or treasure, but it’s not completely unheard of for them to be assigned to guarding a living being instead.

While Flamekulls will follow their master’s instructions unlike they can no longer follow them, they do retain a few aspects from their previous life; most notably their intelligence. It is also common for Flameskulls to have a similar spell list to the one they had while alive. The only way for Flameskulls to regain a semblance of autonomy is to complete their task. Of course by the time that happens most of them will have been driven mad by their long years of isolation safeguarding treasure.

Once freed, these creatures would show a curiosity for the world after years of duty. In fact, Flameskulls have been observed to follow adventurers around in search for excitement. In return, Flameskulls might choose to share some of the more obscure knowledge and lore they might have come across in their time as wizards.

The execution

Okay, hear me out. I think a lot of the reasons why people dislike this creature so much has to do with CR and level. Yes, fighting a Flameskull should be challenging, but there is a very steep curve for Fireball danger at this level. Which is why I want to put forward the idea that your party should not fight a Flameskull, but instead fight three of them.

If you have a higher level party!

My stance on this is this: Flameskulls should be used as minions against higher level adventurers. Take for example this encounter:

The party finally reaches the top of the evil necromancer’s spire, they trade snarky comments with our heroes, and bam! Our villain smirks and snaps their finger only to have three Flameskulls appear. Heck, it could even be an interesting premise for a villain: a powerful necromancer who is going around killing wizards only to raise them in servitude as Flameskulls.

Keep in mind Flameskulls aren’t only fun in combat situations either! Got a big bad you were fond of only to have your party of aventurers make quick work of them? Why not have them come back as an extra powerful Flameskull under the influence of your next big bad? You could even give them some especial armor or a particularly nasty spell list to toughen them up depending on your party level.

But even if you don’t have a big bad to bring back, Flameskulls can still be plenty fun in social encounters. The idea of luring the party into what appears to be a difficult encounter with a Flameskull only to have the creature start jabbering ridiculous riddles or pestering the party for the rest of the dungeon is extremely fun to me. If done right this creature would very well turn a would be mediocre dungeon into something memorable. Don’t believe me? Give it a try yourself!

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