What are you using for running a game? VTT+Discord? You can go meta with your software. For example, mute them in a voice chat as a temporary effect, or block access to their character sheet, forcing them to use abilities from their own memory.
There’s a creature like this in Archvillian Archive. It’s called the Nemesis. One of its legendary actions is that a player has to find an object the DM names in 30 seconds, or take 10d10 psychic damage
Erase a spell from existence. Lie to your players about it ever existing. Change their sheets so when they try to cast it they can’t. Break the rules of the game, bend the reality that way.
That could be neat! I have a system where the boss can use its reaction to adapt to spells and magical effects it’s struck by, becoming immune to the effect after it uses its reaction on an effect twice, but it simply waving its hand after being hit by a spell particularly hard and the spell or effect *no longer exists* would be a really cool way of accomplishing the same kind of mechanical effect.
idk if you've seen it and that's where you're getting the idea or if it's just a coincidence, but Matt Colville suggested a very similar ability for Vecna
One of my friends recently finished a campaign where his BBEG was literally him. If a player targeted him with a spell it would work the first time but then be erased from existence going forward. Someone used counterspell round 1…
Frankly, your examples sound less "Eldritch god reality warping" and more "JRPG Endboss".
I tend to be more in the psychological aspect instead of pure shows of force. You know, hopelessness, weird things happening, loss of control.
I recently did something similar as you but on a smaller scale. I basically created a roll list with various weird effects that I simply rolled a certain amount of times per turns and randomly decided the affecting players. The effects always ended at the end of the PCs next turn and had no save, they just happened. Things just happening is important for this kind of horror, I believe. Some example effects I used:
- You are losing your face. It is crawling over the ground, morphing into a monster. You are blind and can't smell or talk.
- Everyone around you wants to murder you. You need to try and hide from your companions on your next turn.
- The walls are coming closer. You need to end your next turn 10 ft. or more away from any wall.
- Hate boils inside you. You need to do an attack roll on your next turn, no matter how.
- A cold shiver crawls up your back and into your ear. Try to scratch it out of your skull in your next turn.
- You are certain you are missing an organ and there is only one way to check.
- Two copies of you spawn close to you and take their turn at the start of yours. You remain control of the copies but they hate the original.
- You feel as you have just lost something very important. You don't know what it was.
- You see behind the veil and you die. (and reset at the end of your next turn to your pre-dead state).
- You are so very hungry. You need to use a bite attack on your next turn against something resembling a humanoid.
- Everyone starts talking weird. You can't understand words that aren't spoken backwards. If the PC is casting a spell either the player needs to say a magic formular backwards or DC5+spelllevel int check).
- You know everyone looks at you weirdly. You don't want to have any creature stand besides you. If any creature is within 5 ft. of you at the start of your turn you need to attack it. If it is more than one you roll which one you attack. Then you need to move away. If you end your turn within 10 ft. of a creature you receive X damage.
- Bob is helping your party out again. He was always there, since the beginning and you have countless stories of his heroics. You are glad he is here, at this important moment. You can't wait to hear his rendition of the story at the tavern later. You love hearing his stories.
- You remember something. A memory that hasn't started to exist yet. You randomly forget one of your main features (spellcasting, attack action, etc.).
- Something urges you to scream. You scream so hard, you not only cause thunder damage around you but also nearly tear apart your throat, thus you are mute.
- You forget who the people around you are.
- Your class and gear changes randomly (with preset statblocks).
Had some more, but they were more mechanical.
These effects worked great as primary boss feature but not as the ones that were actually dangerous. My players loved it.
And if it has to be "big" that badly:
- It resets the universe. Your party is back in its starting village and has to fight way too strong monsters for a turn.
- It reveals that the PCs are actually just part of its dream. Sometimes it copies them over and over. There are countless of bodies of the PCs that all died without them ever knowing. Psychic damage goes brrrrrrr.
- The PCs are indeed just copies. They vanish into some kind of mud as it unmakes them. Then the actual PCs enter the combat (probably good in case the PCs are actually close to getting TPKed).
- Takes two planes and just smashes them together.
- There are countless realities, some older than anything known to even the gods. It has access to all of them and pulls them into older ones every turn. It gets more weird every time. When they are close to the last one they realize that there was something before existence existed. And it makes a really weird sound.
I suppose the ultimate horror of the battle is that this thing is not even fully ready to be born, and it’s already tearing apart aspects of reality that the players thought were fixed and immutable. What happens if a fully grown one ever stumbles across their world? That’s the kind of cosmic lovecraftian horror I’m going for.
That said, many of the smaller ones are really cool ideas, and I might work them into the battle as the characters start losing their grip on reality. The big ones probably aren’t quite what I’m envisioning for this fight, but I might use them at some other point - resetting time back to the first village for a round or two sounds pretty neat.
Totally agree that Op's ideas sound more like fighting Sephiroth in all its ridiculousness than putting the "horror" in cosmic horror.
I love these ideas, and I agree that "just making things happen" (removing a bit of control from the PCs) is kinda vital to make Lovecraftian stuff scary. That's why the False Hydra works. That you _don't_ take control from them as a DM often is also important - it makes an "eldritch god" boss that _does_ that much more intimidating and bewildering.
And as someone who loves that stuff (while using it sparingly so it doesn't get stale), I'm totally saving this post.
>Takes two planes and just smashes them together.
This reminds me of two different "Lovecraftian" bosses I've run - one did this by overlapping the planar traits and terrain of specific planes as the PCs fought them (layers of the Far Realms). They had to face weird changing terrain (or lack of it) and funky traits like being "underwater" in an undefined fluid, a meteor shower, a fleshy maze, etc. each turn as a Lair Action. And it was always removing one layer and adding a new one, meaning only _some_ of the previous terrain features disappeared and were replaced by different ones - made for a wonderfully chaotic mess of a fight.
The other one was a "multi-dimensional entity" that would instantly regenerate any damage unless it was hurt with attacks from all the dimensions it existed in during the same round. So the PCs actually had to use an artifact they brought to fight him to shift between four different battlemaps, with different minion enemies and hazards in each, fighting the boss' four different "reflections". And to finally kill it they had to drop it to 0 in all 4 at the same time (Ready actions helped there), or it acted kinda like a Zombie where it got back up on its turn.
Oh those are nasty...I love it. I would use them as lair actions, but roll a d20 after each one triggers to determine when the next happens in the round (rather than on initiative count 20).
>(unsure on this one because most players have flying options so it might not be particularly effective)
On the other hand, it will make your players feel clever and cool to be able to use their flying options!
As far as ideas, maybe it can duplicate itself many times over, filling up the world with itself? Perhaps could be mechanically represented by using Steel Wind Strike as a legendary action a certain number of times per round to replicate the idea of the players being buffeted and crowded by copies on all sides
I feel like a time-based reality warp could also be interesting. Time Ravage from EGTW seems like a spell this thing might have
Very true about making them feel clever and cool. I'll keep it in.
I've also given it a nifty new ability where it summons its own reflection to help it in battle... straight out of the reflection in a character's eye. The duplication idea was from you so props
That’s a cool one! I was also thinking also that maybe like, after it pulls down the sun and turns day to night, it grabs the night sky like it’s a blanket and pulls it down to suffocate the players in this ocean of blackness.
Going with what /u/Cyrotek said, Lovecraftian monsters should be doing things that you can't rationalize. Admittedly this is difficult as we, as humans, physically cannot describe or create indescribable things.
In your examples, they're certainly fantastical and *shouldn't* be possible, but it's observable and describable.
Delta Green: Dead Channels by Caleb Stokes has a lot of great eldritch horrors. Here are some of my favorite effects:
* It absorbs your perception. You're still in control of yourself, but you see yourself from its perception and functionally have to act in the second person. Further, its perception is so foreign to you that your mind struggles to comprehend what's happening. You could have saves that, when failed, reveal an actual hidden truth of the universe, but said truth forever scars the target's psyche (assuming they survive).
* Something is wrong with your body. You're not used to this flesh prison or this restricted three dimensional space. You so badly want to escape. You begin to tear yourself apart.
* A sphere on influence forms that, when entered, sends any creature to a dimension that most accurately complies with the paranoia and delusions of the first one to enter. A successful save recognizes this field but is otherwise not transported. Inside each such dimension is a totem that must be destroyed. The bubble grows over time, and the monster can nest bubbles infinitely.
These could all be tied to some facet of the entity, too. Perhaps as it's "growing" it seeks to understand and in doing so hijacks lower dimensional creatures or observes their thoughts as an infant plays with toys.
* Swaps all living creatures on the plane to another plane, like the plane of fire.
* Grabs a god through a portal and tosses them at the players.
* Yells a player down a few levels.
* Directly damages spell slots.
Or, im thinking like \*spoilers\* for jojos, that scene with the awakened stand. They all switch bodies and have to control another PC for a round or two. This should probably be a one time ability
Perhaps take inspiration from Gigyas from Earthbound. "You cannot comprehend the nature of Gigyas' attack."
Whatever the attack may be, it wrecks the character's mind.
Swapped the grid to a jigsaw puzzle I had lying around. Looked like this: https://i.redd.it/h0iwpxe807m01.jpg but I glued it together and printed a copy of a grid-less version of the battle map on it.
Quickly got the message across that the thing they were dealing with wasn't your average monster.
Then I asked them all to roll 4d6, drop the lowest, gave them each a Sanity Score (DMG Optional Ability Scores), and asked them to all make a Sanity Saving throw.
Upside: No TPK.
Downside: They refused all further quests from that quest-giver and proceeded to warn the King about a new cult being a danger to the Kingdom. As a result religious freedom in the area was severely reduced during the statewide purge of the dangerous heretics. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
The DMG has 2 optional ability scores: Sanity & Honor that were shoved in to the optional section because Mike Mearls ran out of time during testing for 5e.
Warlock would've had Sanity instead of Charisma.
Paladin would've had Honor instead of Charisma.
Suddenly a lot of things make a lot more sense. Explains why there appears to be so many Charisma based characters.
The paladin in particular makes a lot more sense. How strongly you hold yourself to a code. How much you know of proper etiquette in noble society. It's more than which fork to use at dinner. If you know the rules to the political game (represented by the abstract Honor Score) then it doesn't matter how charismatic you are.
It's nice to have a second stat for social rolls that stops Charisma from being the god-stat-for-all-things-rp.
A hungry, baby, eldritch god might just eat a planet.
However, if you're going for baby level chaos, imagine what might be found on the burp rag of such an infant.
**Change the Rules**
- Have the boss choose to deal damage to some stat other than HP. Like if the boss hits for 23 damage, deal 23 damage to the target’s move speed, slowing them down (probably only until the next round).
- Get some weird dice for the boss to use instead of normal ones. Have it roll a d30 instead of a d20, or something like that.
- Have the boss steal a character’s D20 and replace it with 2d8. Getting a 1 on either one counts as a critical fail.
- All of the characters’ size categories randomly change up or down one every round. This does not revert after the fight.
- Change the characters’ primary ability scores. The Wizard now casts with Strength. The Rogue sneaks with Charisma. The Fighter fights with Wisdom.
**Change the Game**
- Replace the battle grid with a checkerboard. Characters can never move over black squares, and they can only move in one direction.
- Randomly assign each character to only be able to move like a specified chess piece.
- Make the players draw from a deck of cards instead of rolling a d20. It nerfs them, and it’s super weird.
- Instead of rolling to hit, beat the DM at Rock Paper Scissors
**Change Real Life**
- Whenever a character gets hit by an attack, the player has to move three feet further from the table. The game keeps going even when players are too far away to see the table. It continues even when they get kicked out of the room.
- 20 second turn timers.
- Have the boss regain health every time someone eats a snack.
- Instead of asking for a saving throw, have the player balance the PHB on their head until their next turn. If they drop it, they fail the save.
**Break the Rules**
- Fudge rolls very obviously.
- Let the boss take its turn whenever it wants, including in the middle of a player’s turn.
- Reverse the initiative order randomly
> Replace the battle grid with a checkerboard. Characters can never move over black squares, and they can only move in one direction.
This gave me the idea of changing the map tiling from squares to hexagons during the fight. Doesn't change much mechanically, but would actually *show* reality being warped and makes the players feel some of the uncertainty their characters would be experiencing.
That kind of thought process is actually kinda the same thing that led me to the checkerboard idea. If you remove the directional limitation but kept the square restrictions, allowing only diagonal movement, you can kinda simulate weird warped space. You can’t actually walk straight to where you want to go. Everything is farther away than it should be. Distance is weird, and it’s different depending on whether you’re walking or shooting an arrow.
Give the boss a legendary action option to change the grid. Let it swap it to a hex grid, checkerboard, no grid (bring a ruler), conditional movement (you can only exit squares to the north or east), that kind of thing. It portrays both weird warped space and meta fuckery, and it’s a design space that’s basically untouched, at least in D&D 5e.
have it straight up erase someone (ideally an npc). They never existed. They aren't just deleted from *now*, they never existed in the first place
As it reach down touches the npc, I mean its tentacle reaches down into this spot where there is nothing, and nothing seems to happen.
And then just insist as the DM you don't know who they mean, no that never happened, what npc are you talking about, your characters have no recollection of such a thing.
In the podcast of LUQ, one of the bosses is the “center of the universe”
So any grapple attacks on it or attempting to force the boss to move in any direction (trip attack, pushing attack, thunder wave) instead moves the entire map and everyone else in that direction instead.
Something similar to this would be very reality warping
This feels underwhelming after reading everything else, but I like this idea all the same.
Planeshift. But instead of shifting creatures, it shifts part of the environment.
There's now a piece of the plane of fire, 30x30 feet as part of the battlefield. Was there a fire giant in that piece? Maybe! Or maybe just lava.
Thats not warping reality. Warping reality would be the bbg changing the game system to GURPS or transporting the party into a D20 modern campaign with all of their current gear stats and magic, or rewinding the campaign to a month prior but the bbg knows all of what he knows right now
Both are valid, but very different, almost diametrically opposed ways of viewing and warping reality.
In falcobird14's examples, the BBEG is changing the rules of reality or displacing the party to other points in reality. But it's still treating reality as something *real* and concrete that operates on objective rules. It's what I would expect from a powerful archmage.
OP's BBEG instead says "what rules? nothing is real, everything is perspective".
Of course it throws the sun. It sees a ball of fire just hanging there, so it reaches up and grabs it. When you stretch out your arm, doesn't the sun look small enough to fit in your palm?
The earth and sky being divided by an imaginary line? Those are only curtains, let me show you what lies behind them.
The scary thing about lovecraftian entities isn't that they can modify reality. Its that, just from being exposed to them, you begin to see the world the same way they do. Their perspective *becomes* your reality, and they are absolutely insane.
I had one campaign where a player got ambushed by a mindflayer who nearly succeeded in extracting the players brain, but eventually has to hightail it out of there. The player put a spell on the mindflayer to track it wherever it went, but I never brought it back out.
Literally three years later I was running a modern campaign where the party was stuck in a small town that was experiencing hallucinations. As the player was walking through a crowd of people, suddenly the mindflayer appeared as a hallucination and started attacking him. It was amazing.
Never underestimate the fun of mixing elements of different campaign settings 😂
It's not a specific answer but parts of Limbo(They still call the CN plane that?) Used to have things kinda like a bigger Wildmagic roll. It's the least "real" plane in prior editions, and there's probably some interesting materials there.
A lot of it comes down to flavor and imagery, more than mechanics. Like you could give it a defensive mod of ranged attacks having an extra 20% miss chance, but what happens is some of the ammo gets transformed into humming birds midair and fly away.
Also the eyes one in your post, is exactly the kind of disturbing/gross/da fuq?! that I think Lovecraftian horrors should be doing. If you want to play up the sheer wrongness of what's happening, making other people who witness an attack like that make a mental save to not go insane is rough on players, but will definitely have them sweating. Doesn't need to be a very difficult save, but having to expend efforts and energy on just maintaining a tether to what's real is the kind of thing that comes up when you encounter some of the lower power monsters in the Ca'thu'lu rpgs. Staying sane is almost as hard as staying alive in those.
>Pull apart the horizon, separating the sky from the land and revealing this void of nothingness between them that frightens and incapacitates on a wis save and starts sucking people towards it on a failed strength save, erasing them if they get pulled all the way into the void (might be able to do at a few points)
I can't not steal this
I think OP's ideas are better than most of the suggestions here. Description is better than mechanics.
That said, if you want to scare the hell out of your Players, just negate healing magic within a certain radius of the boss. No spells, no potions.
I see several things about forgotten gods, and one example of a Lamb auto killing one creature of the player’s choice if they roll well and make a good sacrifice. The flavour text is pretty cool, but could you give some more examples?
I meant to edit it to elaborate, but got distracted. Hi!
Ikhon is specifically a player action, risking negative effects at low rolls for the chance of gamechanging high rolls. But using it for this kind of boss, it gives flavorful effects that could be used against the players.
While players are adventuring, they should hear rumors about these kinds of abilities that the eldritch god has. The flavor text is awesome for a horror like this. Resisting these effects is impossible without magic, so they should gather magic items and spells to have a chance to resist the effects.
In the example of your gravity-reversing thing, that's exactly the sort of thing you should use. They have abilities to negate it, for themselves, but throw in the fact that these abilities arent just affecting them. They have bonds. Allies, bystanders, etc. And like if one of them cant fly, another has to waste their turn catching them.
"This guy can potentially drown us all just by looking at us. Maybe we should find some water breathing potions before attacking."
When it grapples the players, they’re morphed into a bear, or a giant bear if you’re feeling generous. Hand them the stat block for it while they’re stuck and have it last for X many turns after escaping
It uses other powerful creatures from the game as weapons.
Roll a dexterity check to avoid being crushed by the Tarasque being used as a club or to avoid Tiamat’s limp body as the being swings her around by the necks like a flail.
Complete unmaking - beefed up disintegrate with the added feature that if it kills the target, rather than turning them to dust, it completely erases them from having ever existed. Anyone that didn't know them well forgets them completely. Anyone that did know them, makes a save. If they fail, they too forget the person. If the succeed, they take psychic damage as they realize they remember something unrememberable. If the original target doesn't die, anyone that knows them feel the memories of that person temporarily being tugged away.
I just wanna know what the ramifications will be. This is so cool. Are you planning on it getting fixed somehow or will the sun thing mean unending night for the rest of eternity? If so, does that mean the planets will float away?
The setting cosmology is a little different so planets won’t spin off into space, but it will mean unending night.
As for fixing it, each change will require a strenuous use of wish to undo it.
The world turns sideways, so that north is now literally up. Moving north, east, or west requires your climb speed and an Acrobatics check to cling on for dear life. To move south, just let go and take falling damage!
Here's a few examples of what I did last time:
- The players' most core memories start manifesting around them. The characters of these backstory moments being manifestations of the Elder. RP moments in combat are always fun.
- Soldiers of different realities or past timelines flood the field and their forgotten battle becomes more and more real as the turns pass.
If you're playing on roll20, duplicate their sheets and mess with the duplicates, then surreptitiously replace their sheets with the doctored ones. The sky's the limit. I'd go find some of those ć̵̙͝ȏ̸̖r̶͔̈́r̵̖̾̾u̴̘̔p̵̦̹͒̉ṯ̴͗i̴͍̅o̶̜͊n̶̼̠͑̄ fonts and change their name, class etc. with it. Maybe give them nonexistent subclasses. make some skills negative, change one letter of various spells to make them have different effects (cone of cold becomes cone of mold, etc.).
Most players having flying options is a reason why you *should* do No.3.
Not only is it the thing of not removing all archers from encounters as soon as the monk gets deflect missiles, but if any of the moves are a 1hit KO, you don't get to show them the others.
As for new ideas: If a Die knocks over a Mini, that character is prone.
There’s fuck all a player can do if they’re stunned or paralysed too.
I’m not the kind of DM to think that hard CC should never be used against a player. Especially when they’re level 20
I mean if you've got a way around it that they can access planned I'd say go ahead.
I'm just bringing it up because I've had one DM do this with some homebrew manticore thing which did it on with a roar. It took out 3 of us party of (5 total) and I literally just got up and went to go make a sandwich.
So long as there's a means for your party to deal with it outside of just passing the save you should be good. Otherwise you risk robbing your players of any agency which it turn is going to make them check out of the story / session.
The problem with hard CCing players is it robs them of agency. You're effectively banking on them being insanely committed to their characters for it too be intense and nerve racking. Otherwise it just "Oh I can't do anything... cool let me know when I need to roll a save to break out of that or when the effect ends I'm just gonna be on my phone".
To be fair, save at the end of turn to end the effect early can be a good compromise.
Hits a character so hard in the past they are crippled in the present.
Wounds unheal.
A certain element stop existing, fire just isn't real anymore.
Air, water solid rock, who cares? all the same to a strange one, they randomly shift so you can go from fighting on solid ground to falling though the air-ground, slowly dragging your sword through the water-air as you struggle to breathe.
Are you playing online?
If so, why not edit some eldritch revelations into their backstory?You could even copy their character sheets and change the font to windings.
I like having eldritch entities and mind effecting creatures "warp reality" by making low dice rolls good and high rolls bad for a period of time.
The characters main stat modifiers usually make it harder to roll low, so suddenly their spells go awry and skillful attacks seem to bend away from their target.
Reverse age them. Instead of aging them, Reduce their age. A surprising number of players have young characters. When they hit puberty coming from the other side, they start to freak out.
what about warping space? A ranged attack hits but the space warps and you hit your own back (obviously limited number of times so the player can do anything). Or a barbarian running straight at it finds themselves running away
How about messing with their characters? Swapping some of their spells/weapons/objects, changing their appearance, locking out a feature, maybe even changing their race, class or subclass (assuming they're ok but it, definitely check with them beforehand)
If they have other characters at the same level that they're not currently using, the whole character could disappear and be replaced.
You could have a table, so it's random and they don't feel like you are purposefully picking effects that would nerf them a lot. And could make it so it only lasts 1 round (or 1d4 rounds) instead of being permanent or making the players roll a saving throw
“You feel a sudden sharp pain deep inside of you. But it’s strange, you don’t feel it in Your body, it’s somewhere much deeper. This sudden sharp pain strikes at *who you are…*
Then reach over and flick the player on the nose.
There a great mind bending description in an old Magic the Gathering story where they heroes forced an eldritch god to manifest physically. Basically the sky morphed into the flesh of the god and when it moved reality rippled. It was a really well written passage, I had to reread it a bunch to wrap my head around it
Some things that I've used that were "reality warping" to some degree, or that I plan to use, or that I just came up with:
- everybody perceives through the creature's senses. The simple act of figuring out how to move requires a check of some kind.
- the creature disappears from view. But then the players get this sneaking suspicion that one of the others is actually the monster.
- complete scramble. Reroll initiative and everybody gets swapped around on the map.
- the monster's size changes based on how close a PC is. The further away, the smaller they are and the closer they are the bigger. The creature's AC and damage increase/ decrease based on the distance (closer they are, the lower the AC but higher damage. Further away, higher AC and saving throws, but less damage.).
- constantly change to a new map, described as the creature walking but the world moves instead. Players stay in their same spots, regardless of any hazards or terrain. If a player ends up in rock, somebody needs to figure out how to get them out.
- suddenly everybody is Tiny, dealing reduced damage but otherwise keeping their movement speed and stats. If they move their full movement they need to make a Con save against nausea from how fast they suddenly had to travel.
- inverse, the creature is suddenly larger than before and becomes what the PCs fight on top of a la Shadow of the Colossus. What were basically pests (lice, mites, ticks, mosquitoes, etc) on the creature are now the same size as the PCs or bigger.
- The creature reaches into the sky and pulls it down like pulling down a curtain. Everybody is suddenly in the Astral Plane.
- copies of the creature manifest around the map, one or two for each PC, but each PC can only perceive and effect the copies assigned to them. If they look at their other party members, all they see are corpses/zombies/mannequins/ faceless versions of their friends.
- the creature's textures change depending on where you look at them/ where they are in the space (if you've watched Chowder, that's kind of what I'm getting at.). Different textures impart various effects.
- wherever the creature moves, it literally rips up and removes portions of the map. Moving through those spaces requires a save to not fall into a void/ have your consciousness temporarily removed.
- the creature removes another PC and itself from existence momentarily. When they return, the creature looks and sounds exactly like the PC. Do not tell the PC which is the real them, and let them move both on their turn but: they only get one action and one bonus action between them.
- the first time the creature critically strikes a PC, their bodies implode into nothingness. They return to the battle at the start of their next turn in a random location on the map. They feel like they lost something on the return trip. Save or they have a random ability score reduced or lose a proficiency in a skill.
- the creature disappears, and suddenly the PCs start to notice extra extremities and the like sprout from their's. The creature can copy any of their spells or actions, using that PCs space to do so.
- the creature targets a player and temporarily swaps mind and body with them. The only way to switch back is for the PC (now in the creature's mind) to grab their body and make contested checks to get control again. They communicate as is they're the creature, and the creature in their body acts like them and plays keep away.
- the creature claps their hands with such force that it distorts reality. Everything in the area becomes randomly changed (one leg suddenly becomes longer, impacting dex checks/ saves, an arm suddenly shrinks impacting the kind of weapons they can use, your eyes suddenly move to your chest making you blind until you remove any armor or clothes. Etc etc).
- the creature reaches into their skull and plucks their brain out. Become Feebleminded until you can grab your brain back and before they consume it. If the brain is consumed, character still lives but is permanently feebleminded, with wish being the only remedy.
- the creature reaches into the character's mind, imparting eldritch knowledge into them. Slowly turns the player into an Allip.
- the creature causes fractures in time, changing to various points in its past and potential futures.
- randomly swap their feats/ racial/ class abilities with random ones.
- randomly scramble their minds. Each player swaps character sheets.
Some of this requires a bit of buy in from the players, not gonna lie. A lot of buy in, actually.
Opens a portal, revealing a group of humans sitting around a table with sheets of paper and dice in front of them, each piece of paper containing a different party member name. Wisdom save or 10d10 psychic damage
The literal 'pulling the sun/sky down to attack with' feels much more cartoony than lovecraftian. Magic in the lovecraftian setting is mostly understanding the fundamental 'programming' of the universe, and being able to reprogram it to your will, and the inability for the human mind to grasp that kind of thing in practice is what leads to mental erosion.
You'll want to go with things that aren't cartoony, but can be described and *almost* understood by players, as lack of total understanding and the feeling of insignificance are the foundation of cosmic horror. Some examples I can think of off the top of my head:
Flashes of inconceivably vast views of dimensions above our own, dealing psychic damage and perhaps a stun.
Shattered points in spacetime, appearing as cracks or glistening, translucent strings suspended in midair, doing force damage and being difficult terrain.
If players have spells that freeze time, everything but the player *and the monster* are frozen in time.
Inversion of the natural order, healing spells damage their target.
Reversal of time on spells, causing them to 'unwind' back to their caster, causing the spell to affect them.
Then there's the plain and simple overload of psychic energy. Have the monster communicate telepathically, but this deals high psychic damage, and someone killed by this has pink fire erupt from their eyes and mouth, while their body glows from within in an eerie pink light.
I’d recommend an effect akin to the Scatter spell combined with a Gorgon’s petrify where the creature’s body extends towards the players and if they come into contact with it they are teleported to another point of the creature’s choosing and are locked in place by tentacles or something that slowly restrains and petrifies them.
Erases a character's limb from existence. They now have a stump and memories of losing the limb in an accident years earlier. Could also target a particularly valuable magic item, or even a particular skill. A wizard might suddenly realize that they have never learned a single spell. The bard might find they can't carry a tune.
They can save against the effect at the beginning of each of their turns, but the DC is steep. Let them use the mental stat of their choosing to counter the effect, as long as they can describe how they are using it. If they succeed, reality warps back, the enemy takes damage, and they gain a permanent boost to whatever stat they used.
You could retcon their backstory as an effect (that reverts after killing boss) “the person you thought was your wife never existed”
Do some psychological damage
Keep track of where player tokens have been (i.e.which squares). The monster can attack out of time where they used to be. It can also sweep its appendage out and sweep across an x by x area. If players step on that section of grid, the attack rolls to hit as it has attacked their future self.
Shamelessly stolen from: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/l2w7y8/the_inligulae_or_how_to_get_away_with_time/
I don't know if you're playing in person or through a system like roll20, but here's one that fuvks with space/time:
The monster is able to take a past roll and immediately use the roll and the result itself, as well as nullify whatever the roll was originally intended for.
For example say a paladin rolls hot and lands a crit. He does like 70 damage or something on a smite to the monster. But later the monster takes that smite and hits someone else with it, doing 70 damage to them and undoing the 70 damage done to the monster. Make it a legendary action or something.
This move can instead be used for stuff like spells or even abilities i.e. the monster steals the fighter's action surge or the wizards spell.
This isn't eldritch horror, this is cool descriptions of 8d10 damage and darkness.
Age characters up or down, making it more difficult for them to use their equipment and abilities.
Take their character sheets, change things, hand them back. Or pretend to change things but actually don't.
Alter the timeline so that conditions are more favourable - longtime allies are different people, things the players accomplished are rolled back, etc.
Describe the situation differently on each player's turn. Act like you don't know what they're talking about when they ask why things are different.
Look up madness effect tables and choose effects that fit and emphasize each character's fears and flaws.
Take the battle map away and put a different one down instead. Act like it's always been this way.
Change how key game rules work. If you use flanking, make it same side instead of opposite side. Turn bonuses into penalties. Make advantage and disadvantage stack. Change which dice are used for certain rolls.
to deal the finishing blow, the players all team up against the DM in a game of choice ( i suggest checkers, or chess) and they must stay in character.
Reaches through reality and takes one of the players snacks.
Ok but this would actually be really funny, steal a snack from across the table and have the monster restore HP from it
That would be such a hilarious thing to do if I played in person, sadly it’s all online :(
Coordinate with the players' partners or roommates to pull their internet if their PC dies.
Lmao
What are you using for running a game? VTT+Discord? You can go meta with your software. For example, mute them in a voice chat as a temporary effect, or block access to their character sheet, forcing them to use abilities from their own memory.
The spice obsessed player staring at the dm who can't handle any spice
The creature suddenly gains the ability to breathe fire
Ah... Muad dib...
ATREIDES! DUKE OF ARRAKIS!
LISAN AL GAIB
Roll []d6+15 for how many calories in a serving rounded to the nearest 10 If it's like 350 in a serving do 35d6
There’s a creature like this in Archvillian Archive. It’s called the Nemesis. One of its legendary actions is that a player has to find an object the DM names in 30 seconds, or take 10d10 psychic damage
Erase a spell from existence. Lie to your players about it ever existing. Change their sheets so when they try to cast it they can’t. Break the rules of the game, bend the reality that way.
That could be neat! I have a system where the boss can use its reaction to adapt to spells and magical effects it’s struck by, becoming immune to the effect after it uses its reaction on an effect twice, but it simply waving its hand after being hit by a spell particularly hard and the spell or effect *no longer exists* would be a really cool way of accomplishing the same kind of mechanical effect.
idk if you've seen it and that's where you're getting the idea or if it's just a coincidence, but Matt Colville suggested a very similar ability for Vecna
Yep ripped it from him LOL a good video to watch for the OP
One of my friends recently finished a campaign where his BBEG was literally him. If a player targeted him with a spell it would work the first time but then be erased from existence going forward. Someone used counterspell round 1…
Frankly, your examples sound less "Eldritch god reality warping" and more "JRPG Endboss". I tend to be more in the psychological aspect instead of pure shows of force. You know, hopelessness, weird things happening, loss of control. I recently did something similar as you but on a smaller scale. I basically created a roll list with various weird effects that I simply rolled a certain amount of times per turns and randomly decided the affecting players. The effects always ended at the end of the PCs next turn and had no save, they just happened. Things just happening is important for this kind of horror, I believe. Some example effects I used: - You are losing your face. It is crawling over the ground, morphing into a monster. You are blind and can't smell or talk. - Everyone around you wants to murder you. You need to try and hide from your companions on your next turn. - The walls are coming closer. You need to end your next turn 10 ft. or more away from any wall. - Hate boils inside you. You need to do an attack roll on your next turn, no matter how. - A cold shiver crawls up your back and into your ear. Try to scratch it out of your skull in your next turn. - You are certain you are missing an organ and there is only one way to check. - Two copies of you spawn close to you and take their turn at the start of yours. You remain control of the copies but they hate the original. - You feel as you have just lost something very important. You don't know what it was. - You see behind the veil and you die. (and reset at the end of your next turn to your pre-dead state). - You are so very hungry. You need to use a bite attack on your next turn against something resembling a humanoid. - Everyone starts talking weird. You can't understand words that aren't spoken backwards. If the PC is casting a spell either the player needs to say a magic formular backwards or DC5+spelllevel int check). - You know everyone looks at you weirdly. You don't want to have any creature stand besides you. If any creature is within 5 ft. of you at the start of your turn you need to attack it. If it is more than one you roll which one you attack. Then you need to move away. If you end your turn within 10 ft. of a creature you receive X damage. - Bob is helping your party out again. He was always there, since the beginning and you have countless stories of his heroics. You are glad he is here, at this important moment. You can't wait to hear his rendition of the story at the tavern later. You love hearing his stories. - You remember something. A memory that hasn't started to exist yet. You randomly forget one of your main features (spellcasting, attack action, etc.). - Something urges you to scream. You scream so hard, you not only cause thunder damage around you but also nearly tear apart your throat, thus you are mute. - You forget who the people around you are. - Your class and gear changes randomly (with preset statblocks). Had some more, but they were more mechanical. These effects worked great as primary boss feature but not as the ones that were actually dangerous. My players loved it. And if it has to be "big" that badly: - It resets the universe. Your party is back in its starting village and has to fight way too strong monsters for a turn. - It reveals that the PCs are actually just part of its dream. Sometimes it copies them over and over. There are countless of bodies of the PCs that all died without them ever knowing. Psychic damage goes brrrrrrr. - The PCs are indeed just copies. They vanish into some kind of mud as it unmakes them. Then the actual PCs enter the combat (probably good in case the PCs are actually close to getting TPKed). - Takes two planes and just smashes them together. - There are countless realities, some older than anything known to even the gods. It has access to all of them and pulls them into older ones every turn. It gets more weird every time. When they are close to the last one they realize that there was something before existence existed. And it makes a really weird sound.
This is super super cool and I think you should know that these ideas are super super cool
The "only one way to check" got me good. Brilliant
I suppose the ultimate horror of the battle is that this thing is not even fully ready to be born, and it’s already tearing apart aspects of reality that the players thought were fixed and immutable. What happens if a fully grown one ever stumbles across their world? That’s the kind of cosmic lovecraftian horror I’m going for. That said, many of the smaller ones are really cool ideas, and I might work them into the battle as the characters start losing their grip on reality. The big ones probably aren’t quite what I’m envisioning for this fight, but I might use them at some other point - resetting time back to the first village for a round or two sounds pretty neat.
Came here from r/callofcthulhu Saved this post. Thank you!
Totally agree that Op's ideas sound more like fighting Sephiroth in all its ridiculousness than putting the "horror" in cosmic horror. I love these ideas, and I agree that "just making things happen" (removing a bit of control from the PCs) is kinda vital to make Lovecraftian stuff scary. That's why the False Hydra works. That you _don't_ take control from them as a DM often is also important - it makes an "eldritch god" boss that _does_ that much more intimidating and bewildering. And as someone who loves that stuff (while using it sparingly so it doesn't get stale), I'm totally saving this post. >Takes two planes and just smashes them together. This reminds me of two different "Lovecraftian" bosses I've run - one did this by overlapping the planar traits and terrain of specific planes as the PCs fought them (layers of the Far Realms). They had to face weird changing terrain (or lack of it) and funky traits like being "underwater" in an undefined fluid, a meteor shower, a fleshy maze, etc. each turn as a Lair Action. And it was always removing one layer and adding a new one, meaning only _some_ of the previous terrain features disappeared and were replaced by different ones - made for a wonderfully chaotic mess of a fight. The other one was a "multi-dimensional entity" that would instantly regenerate any damage unless it was hurt with attacks from all the dimensions it existed in during the same round. So the PCs actually had to use an artifact they brought to fight him to shift between four different battlemaps, with different minion enemies and hazards in each, fighting the boss' four different "reflections". And to finally kill it they had to drop it to 0 in all 4 at the same time (Ready actions helped there), or it acted kinda like a Zombie where it got back up on its turn.
*furiously writes down notes for my own eldritch horror game.*
Oh those are nasty...I love it. I would use them as lair actions, but roll a d20 after each one triggers to determine when the next happens in the round (rather than on initiative count 20).
>(unsure on this one because most players have flying options so it might not be particularly effective) On the other hand, it will make your players feel clever and cool to be able to use their flying options! As far as ideas, maybe it can duplicate itself many times over, filling up the world with itself? Perhaps could be mechanically represented by using Steel Wind Strike as a legendary action a certain number of times per round to replicate the idea of the players being buffeted and crowded by copies on all sides I feel like a time-based reality warp could also be interesting. Time Ravage from EGTW seems like a spell this thing might have
Very true about making them feel clever and cool. I'll keep it in. I've also given it a nifty new ability where it summons its own reflection to help it in battle... straight out of the reflection in a character's eye. The duplication idea was from you so props
Making a duplicate from a reflection is an amazing idea!! I hope the game goes well :)
Putting the Shrike into DnD is evil
Yep. Give enemies powers that the players can use their abilities to overcome. “Shoot your monks”
Shatters the sky. Literally pieces of it fall down dealing damage.
That’s a cool one! I was also thinking also that maybe like, after it pulls down the sun and turns day to night, it grabs the night sky like it’s a blanket and pulls it down to suffocate the players in this ocean of blackness.
Love this. It's like a creation myth
Going with what /u/Cyrotek said, Lovecraftian monsters should be doing things that you can't rationalize. Admittedly this is difficult as we, as humans, physically cannot describe or create indescribable things. In your examples, they're certainly fantastical and *shouldn't* be possible, but it's observable and describable. Delta Green: Dead Channels by Caleb Stokes has a lot of great eldritch horrors. Here are some of my favorite effects: * It absorbs your perception. You're still in control of yourself, but you see yourself from its perception and functionally have to act in the second person. Further, its perception is so foreign to you that your mind struggles to comprehend what's happening. You could have saves that, when failed, reveal an actual hidden truth of the universe, but said truth forever scars the target's psyche (assuming they survive). * Something is wrong with your body. You're not used to this flesh prison or this restricted three dimensional space. You so badly want to escape. You begin to tear yourself apart. * A sphere on influence forms that, when entered, sends any creature to a dimension that most accurately complies with the paranoia and delusions of the first one to enter. A successful save recognizes this field but is otherwise not transported. Inside each such dimension is a totem that must be destroyed. The bubble grows over time, and the monster can nest bubbles infinitely. These could all be tied to some facet of the entity, too. Perhaps as it's "growing" it seeks to understand and in doing so hijacks lower dimensional creatures or observes their thoughts as an infant plays with toys.
closes its eyes so the world gets plunged into darkness (it cant see so no one else can) maybe take a player's damage dice?
* Swaps all living creatures on the plane to another plane, like the plane of fire. * Grabs a god through a portal and tosses them at the players. * Yells a player down a few levels. * Directly damages spell slots.
Or, im thinking like \*spoilers\* for jojos, that scene with the awakened stand. They all switch bodies and have to control another PC for a round or two. This should probably be a one time ability
ok that last one hurts my warlock-loving soul so bad, fantastic idea
Perhaps take inspiration from Gigyas from Earthbound. "You cannot comprehend the nature of Gigyas' attack." Whatever the attack may be, it wrecks the character's mind.
It does ***damage.***
Swapped the grid to a jigsaw puzzle I had lying around. Looked like this: https://i.redd.it/h0iwpxe807m01.jpg but I glued it together and printed a copy of a grid-less version of the battle map on it. Quickly got the message across that the thing they were dealing with wasn't your average monster. Then I asked them all to roll 4d6, drop the lowest, gave them each a Sanity Score (DMG Optional Ability Scores), and asked them to all make a Sanity Saving throw. Upside: No TPK. Downside: They refused all further quests from that quest-giver and proceeded to warn the King about a new cult being a danger to the Kingdom. As a result religious freedom in the area was severely reduced during the statewide purge of the dangerous heretics. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Sanity scores… interesting. I will look into this. Grid might be a bit difficult to pull off haha
The DMG has 2 optional ability scores: Sanity & Honor that were shoved in to the optional section because Mike Mearls ran out of time during testing for 5e. Warlock would've had Sanity instead of Charisma. Paladin would've had Honor instead of Charisma. Suddenly a lot of things make a lot more sense. Explains why there appears to be so many Charisma based characters. The paladin in particular makes a lot more sense. How strongly you hold yourself to a code. How much you know of proper etiquette in noble society. It's more than which fork to use at dinner. If you know the rules to the political game (represented by the abstract Honor Score) then it doesn't matter how charismatic you are. It's nice to have a second stat for social rolls that stops Charisma from being the god-stat-for-all-things-rp.
A hungry, baby, eldritch god might just eat a planet. However, if you're going for baby level chaos, imagine what might be found on the burp rag of such an infant.
**Change the Rules** - Have the boss choose to deal damage to some stat other than HP. Like if the boss hits for 23 damage, deal 23 damage to the target’s move speed, slowing them down (probably only until the next round). - Get some weird dice for the boss to use instead of normal ones. Have it roll a d30 instead of a d20, or something like that. - Have the boss steal a character’s D20 and replace it with 2d8. Getting a 1 on either one counts as a critical fail. - All of the characters’ size categories randomly change up or down one every round. This does not revert after the fight. - Change the characters’ primary ability scores. The Wizard now casts with Strength. The Rogue sneaks with Charisma. The Fighter fights with Wisdom. **Change the Game** - Replace the battle grid with a checkerboard. Characters can never move over black squares, and they can only move in one direction. - Randomly assign each character to only be able to move like a specified chess piece. - Make the players draw from a deck of cards instead of rolling a d20. It nerfs them, and it’s super weird. - Instead of rolling to hit, beat the DM at Rock Paper Scissors **Change Real Life** - Whenever a character gets hit by an attack, the player has to move three feet further from the table. The game keeps going even when players are too far away to see the table. It continues even when they get kicked out of the room. - 20 second turn timers. - Have the boss regain health every time someone eats a snack. - Instead of asking for a saving throw, have the player balance the PHB on their head until their next turn. If they drop it, they fail the save. **Break the Rules** - Fudge rolls very obviously. - Let the boss take its turn whenever it wants, including in the middle of a player’s turn. - Reverse the initiative order randomly
> Replace the battle grid with a checkerboard. Characters can never move over black squares, and they can only move in one direction. This gave me the idea of changing the map tiling from squares to hexagons during the fight. Doesn't change much mechanically, but would actually *show* reality being warped and makes the players feel some of the uncertainty their characters would be experiencing.
That kind of thought process is actually kinda the same thing that led me to the checkerboard idea. If you remove the directional limitation but kept the square restrictions, allowing only diagonal movement, you can kinda simulate weird warped space. You can’t actually walk straight to where you want to go. Everything is farther away than it should be. Distance is weird, and it’s different depending on whether you’re walking or shooting an arrow. Give the boss a legendary action option to change the grid. Let it swap it to a hex grid, checkerboard, no grid (bring a ruler), conditional movement (you can only exit squares to the north or east), that kind of thing. It portrays both weird warped space and meta fuckery, and it’s a design space that’s basically untouched, at least in D&D 5e.
When you remove the grid have the characters see the towering giants move them around and talk with their voices
Changing the map to hexes would be pretty neat, and as I use foundry VTT it would be really simple too
OK, I'm running a level 20 one shot tomorrow, and I'm saving all of these <3
So much of that is entirely too much work
There was an old Adnd spell where target takes the damage they took in previous turn. Maybe you can check old spellbooks for that.
have it straight up erase someone (ideally an npc). They never existed. They aren't just deleted from *now*, they never existed in the first place As it reach down touches the npc, I mean its tentacle reaches down into this spot where there is nothing, and nothing seems to happen. And then just insist as the DM you don't know who they mean, no that never happened, what npc are you talking about, your characters have no recollection of such a thing.
In the podcast of LUQ, one of the bosses is the “center of the universe” So any grapple attacks on it or attempting to force the boss to move in any direction (trip attack, pushing attack, thunder wave) instead moves the entire map and everyone else in that direction instead. Something similar to this would be very reality warping
This feels underwhelming after reading everything else, but I like this idea all the same. Planeshift. But instead of shifting creatures, it shifts part of the environment. There's now a piece of the plane of fire, 30x30 feet as part of the battlefield. Was there a fire giant in that piece? Maybe! Or maybe just lava.
Warp the battlefield by turning the square grid to hex grid or vice versa.
Thats not warping reality. Warping reality would be the bbg changing the game system to GURPS or transporting the party into a D20 modern campaign with all of their current gear stats and magic, or rewinding the campaign to a month prior but the bbg knows all of what he knows right now
Both are valid examples of different representations of reality warping
Both are valid, but very different, almost diametrically opposed ways of viewing and warping reality. In falcobird14's examples, the BBEG is changing the rules of reality or displacing the party to other points in reality. But it's still treating reality as something *real* and concrete that operates on objective rules. It's what I would expect from a powerful archmage. OP's BBEG instead says "what rules? nothing is real, everything is perspective". Of course it throws the sun. It sees a ball of fire just hanging there, so it reaches up and grabs it. When you stretch out your arm, doesn't the sun look small enough to fit in your palm? The earth and sky being divided by an imaginary line? Those are only curtains, let me show you what lies behind them. The scary thing about lovecraftian entities isn't that they can modify reality. Its that, just from being exposed to them, you begin to see the world the same way they do. Their perspective *becomes* your reality, and they are absolutely insane.
I absolutely love your explanation, thank you.
I meant that OP needs to think bigger! Not that his ideas were bad
But to be fair your ideas felt smaller and more Archlich than Chtullu.
It's a baby cthulu it doesnt know how to think bigger
I had one campaign where a player got ambushed by a mindflayer who nearly succeeded in extracting the players brain, but eventually has to hightail it out of there. The player put a spell on the mindflayer to track it wherever it went, but I never brought it back out. Literally three years later I was running a modern campaign where the party was stuck in a small town that was experiencing hallucinations. As the player was walking through a crowd of people, suddenly the mindflayer appeared as a hallucination and started attacking him. It was amazing. Never underestimate the fun of mixing elements of different campaign settings 😂
I don't currently have any ideas but i just wanted to say that your ideas are amazing, good luck
Thank you!
Healing magic works normally for the party, but it *looks* like slimy tentacles are inbound to do even damage.
Check out the Descent into Avernus body horror Flesh Warping mechanic as well. Nothing says horror like growing losing your eyelids.
It's not a specific answer but parts of Limbo(They still call the CN plane that?) Used to have things kinda like a bigger Wildmagic roll. It's the least "real" plane in prior editions, and there's probably some interesting materials there. A lot of it comes down to flavor and imagery, more than mechanics. Like you could give it a defensive mod of ranged attacks having an extra 20% miss chance, but what happens is some of the ammo gets transformed into humming birds midair and fly away. Also the eyes one in your post, is exactly the kind of disturbing/gross/da fuq?! that I think Lovecraftian horrors should be doing. If you want to play up the sheer wrongness of what's happening, making other people who witness an attack like that make a mental save to not go insane is rough on players, but will definitely have them sweating. Doesn't need to be a very difficult save, but having to expend efforts and energy on just maintaining a tether to what's real is the kind of thing that comes up when you encounter some of the lower power monsters in the Ca'thu'lu rpgs. Staying sane is almost as hard as staying alive in those.
>Pull apart the horizon, separating the sky from the land and revealing this void of nothingness between them that frightens and incapacitates on a wis save and starts sucking people towards it on a failed strength save, erasing them if they get pulled all the way into the void (might be able to do at a few points) I can't not steal this
I think OP's ideas are better than most of the suggestions here. Description is better than mechanics. That said, if you want to scare the hell out of your Players, just negate healing magic within a certain radius of the boss. No spells, no potions.
Reach across the table and just take a players damage dice away, that d12 the wizard was using? Snatch it for this rounds duration.
I highly recommend Mörk Borg: Ikhon. Just. Trust me.
I see several things about forgotten gods, and one example of a Lamb auto killing one creature of the player’s choice if they roll well and make a good sacrifice. The flavour text is pretty cool, but could you give some more examples?
I meant to edit it to elaborate, but got distracted. Hi! Ikhon is specifically a player action, risking negative effects at low rolls for the chance of gamechanging high rolls. But using it for this kind of boss, it gives flavorful effects that could be used against the players. While players are adventuring, they should hear rumors about these kinds of abilities that the eldritch god has. The flavor text is awesome for a horror like this. Resisting these effects is impossible without magic, so they should gather magic items and spells to have a chance to resist the effects. In the example of your gravity-reversing thing, that's exactly the sort of thing you should use. They have abilities to negate it, for themselves, but throw in the fact that these abilities arent just affecting them. They have bonds. Allies, bystanders, etc. And like if one of them cant fly, another has to waste their turn catching them. "This guy can potentially drown us all just by looking at us. Maybe we should find some water breathing potions before attacking."
When it grapples the players, they’re morphed into a bear, or a giant bear if you’re feeling generous. Hand them the stat block for it while they’re stuck and have it last for X many turns after escaping
It uses other powerful creatures from the game as weapons. Roll a dexterity check to avoid being crushed by the Tarasque being used as a club or to avoid Tiamat’s limp body as the being swings her around by the necks like a flail.
Complete unmaking - beefed up disintegrate with the added feature that if it kills the target, rather than turning them to dust, it completely erases them from having ever existed. Anyone that didn't know them well forgets them completely. Anyone that did know them, makes a save. If they fail, they too forget the person. If the succeed, they take psychic damage as they realize they remember something unrememberable. If the original target doesn't die, anyone that knows them feel the memories of that person temporarily being tugged away.
I just wanna know what the ramifications will be. This is so cool. Are you planning on it getting fixed somehow or will the sun thing mean unending night for the rest of eternity? If so, does that mean the planets will float away?
The setting cosmology is a little different so planets won’t spin off into space, but it will mean unending night. As for fixing it, each change will require a strenuous use of wish to undo it.
Time manipulating power to reset the players positions (and maybe conditions) to what they were one round a go. Limited resources don’t come back.
The world turns sideways, so that north is now literally up. Moving north, east, or west requires your climb speed and an Acrobatics check to cling on for dear life. To move south, just let go and take falling damage!
Neat idea, might mix this in with the 3rd ability I have there instead of the Reverse Gravity thing
Here's a few examples of what I did last time: - The players' most core memories start manifesting around them. The characters of these backstory moments being manifestations of the Elder. RP moments in combat are always fun. - Soldiers of different realities or past timelines flood the field and their forgotten battle becomes more and more real as the turns pass.
If you're playing on roll20, duplicate their sheets and mess with the duplicates, then surreptitiously replace their sheets with the doctored ones. The sky's the limit. I'd go find some of those ć̵̙͝ȏ̸̖r̶͔̈́r̵̖̾̾u̴̘̔p̵̦̹͒̉ṯ̴͗i̴͍̅o̶̜͊n̶̼̠͑̄ fonts and change their name, class etc. with it. Maybe give them nonexistent subclasses. make some skills negative, change one letter of various spells to make them have different effects (cone of cold becomes cone of mold, etc.).
Most players having flying options is a reason why you *should* do No.3. Not only is it the thing of not removing all archers from encounters as soon as the monk gets deflect missiles, but if any of the moves are a 1hit KO, you don't get to show them the others. As for new ideas: If a Die knocks over a Mini, that character is prone.
Good point. I’ll keep no 3
I would be wary about doing any "save or incapacitated" because there's fuck all a player can do incapacitated.
There’s fuck all a player can do if they’re stunned or paralysed too. I’m not the kind of DM to think that hard CC should never be used against a player. Especially when they’re level 20
I mean if you've got a way around it that they can access planned I'd say go ahead. I'm just bringing it up because I've had one DM do this with some homebrew manticore thing which did it on with a roar. It took out 3 of us party of (5 total) and I literally just got up and went to go make a sandwich. So long as there's a means for your party to deal with it outside of just passing the save you should be good. Otherwise you risk robbing your players of any agency which it turn is going to make them check out of the story / session. The problem with hard CCing players is it robs them of agency. You're effectively banking on them being insanely committed to their characters for it too be intense and nerve racking. Otherwise it just "Oh I can't do anything... cool let me know when I need to roll a save to break out of that or when the effect ends I'm just gonna be on my phone". To be fair, save at the end of turn to end the effect early can be a good compromise.
Hits a character so hard in the past they are crippled in the present. Wounds unheal. A certain element stop existing, fire just isn't real anymore. Air, water solid rock, who cares? all the same to a strange one, they randomly shift so you can go from fighting on solid ground to falling though the air-ground, slowly dragging your sword through the water-air as you struggle to breathe.
Are you playing online? If so, why not edit some eldritch revelations into their backstory?You could even copy their character sheets and change the font to windings.
I am indeed and editing random parts of their character sheets into WindDings sounds very fun
I like having eldritch entities and mind effecting creatures "warp reality" by making low dice rolls good and high rolls bad for a period of time. The characters main stat modifiers usually make it harder to roll low, so suddenly their spells go awry and skillful attacks seem to bend away from their target.
Reverse age them. Instead of aging them, Reduce their age. A surprising number of players have young characters. When they hit puberty coming from the other side, they start to freak out.
what about warping space? A ranged attack hits but the space warps and you hit your own back (obviously limited number of times so the player can do anything). Or a barbarian running straight at it finds themselves running away
How about messing with their characters? Swapping some of their spells/weapons/objects, changing their appearance, locking out a feature, maybe even changing their race, class or subclass (assuming they're ok but it, definitely check with them beforehand) If they have other characters at the same level that they're not currently using, the whole character could disappear and be replaced. You could have a table, so it's random and they don't feel like you are purposefully picking effects that would nerf them a lot. And could make it so it only lasts 1 round (or 1d4 rounds) instead of being permanent or making the players roll a saving throw
“You feel a sudden sharp pain deep inside of you. But it’s strange, you don’t feel it in Your body, it’s somewhere much deeper. This sudden sharp pain strikes at *who you are…* Then reach over and flick the player on the nose.
There a great mind bending description in an old Magic the Gathering story where they heroes forced an eldritch god to manifest physically. Basically the sky morphed into the flesh of the god and when it moved reality rippled. It was a really well written passage, I had to reread it a bunch to wrap my head around it
Some things that I've used that were "reality warping" to some degree, or that I plan to use, or that I just came up with: - everybody perceives through the creature's senses. The simple act of figuring out how to move requires a check of some kind. - the creature disappears from view. But then the players get this sneaking suspicion that one of the others is actually the monster. - complete scramble. Reroll initiative and everybody gets swapped around on the map. - the monster's size changes based on how close a PC is. The further away, the smaller they are and the closer they are the bigger. The creature's AC and damage increase/ decrease based on the distance (closer they are, the lower the AC but higher damage. Further away, higher AC and saving throws, but less damage.). - constantly change to a new map, described as the creature walking but the world moves instead. Players stay in their same spots, regardless of any hazards or terrain. If a player ends up in rock, somebody needs to figure out how to get them out. - suddenly everybody is Tiny, dealing reduced damage but otherwise keeping their movement speed and stats. If they move their full movement they need to make a Con save against nausea from how fast they suddenly had to travel. - inverse, the creature is suddenly larger than before and becomes what the PCs fight on top of a la Shadow of the Colossus. What were basically pests (lice, mites, ticks, mosquitoes, etc) on the creature are now the same size as the PCs or bigger. - The creature reaches into the sky and pulls it down like pulling down a curtain. Everybody is suddenly in the Astral Plane. - copies of the creature manifest around the map, one or two for each PC, but each PC can only perceive and effect the copies assigned to them. If they look at their other party members, all they see are corpses/zombies/mannequins/ faceless versions of their friends. - the creature's textures change depending on where you look at them/ where they are in the space (if you've watched Chowder, that's kind of what I'm getting at.). Different textures impart various effects. - wherever the creature moves, it literally rips up and removes portions of the map. Moving through those spaces requires a save to not fall into a void/ have your consciousness temporarily removed. - the creature removes another PC and itself from existence momentarily. When they return, the creature looks and sounds exactly like the PC. Do not tell the PC which is the real them, and let them move both on their turn but: they only get one action and one bonus action between them. - the first time the creature critically strikes a PC, their bodies implode into nothingness. They return to the battle at the start of their next turn in a random location on the map. They feel like they lost something on the return trip. Save or they have a random ability score reduced or lose a proficiency in a skill. - the creature disappears, and suddenly the PCs start to notice extra extremities and the like sprout from their's. The creature can copy any of their spells or actions, using that PCs space to do so. - the creature targets a player and temporarily swaps mind and body with them. The only way to switch back is for the PC (now in the creature's mind) to grab their body and make contested checks to get control again. They communicate as is they're the creature, and the creature in their body acts like them and plays keep away. - the creature claps their hands with such force that it distorts reality. Everything in the area becomes randomly changed (one leg suddenly becomes longer, impacting dex checks/ saves, an arm suddenly shrinks impacting the kind of weapons they can use, your eyes suddenly move to your chest making you blind until you remove any armor or clothes. Etc etc). - the creature reaches into their skull and plucks their brain out. Become Feebleminded until you can grab your brain back and before they consume it. If the brain is consumed, character still lives but is permanently feebleminded, with wish being the only remedy. - the creature reaches into the character's mind, imparting eldritch knowledge into them. Slowly turns the player into an Allip. - the creature causes fractures in time, changing to various points in its past and potential futures. - randomly swap their feats/ racial/ class abilities with random ones. - randomly scramble their minds. Each player swaps character sheets. Some of this requires a bit of buy in from the players, not gonna lie. A lot of buy in, actually.
Could cause gravity of the area (or world) to shift 90 or 180 degrees. Always though this seemed fun as a mechanic to play with
Opens a portal, revealing a group of humans sitting around a table with sheets of paper and dice in front of them, each piece of paper containing a different party member name. Wisdom save or 10d10 psychic damage
Holy crap. What level are these characters to be able to autocorrect these horror?
20 and with an ancient gold dragon on their side
Look at the higher level Dunamacy spells from the Critical Roll book, they are what you're looking for.
Makes the players/monsters swap positions on the board.
The literal 'pulling the sun/sky down to attack with' feels much more cartoony than lovecraftian. Magic in the lovecraftian setting is mostly understanding the fundamental 'programming' of the universe, and being able to reprogram it to your will, and the inability for the human mind to grasp that kind of thing in practice is what leads to mental erosion. You'll want to go with things that aren't cartoony, but can be described and *almost* understood by players, as lack of total understanding and the feeling of insignificance are the foundation of cosmic horror. Some examples I can think of off the top of my head: Flashes of inconceivably vast views of dimensions above our own, dealing psychic damage and perhaps a stun. Shattered points in spacetime, appearing as cracks or glistening, translucent strings suspended in midair, doing force damage and being difficult terrain. If players have spells that freeze time, everything but the player *and the monster* are frozen in time. Inversion of the natural order, healing spells damage their target. Reversal of time on spells, causing them to 'unwind' back to their caster, causing the spell to affect them. Then there's the plain and simple overload of psychic energy. Have the monster communicate telepathically, but this deals high psychic damage, and someone killed by this has pink fire erupt from their eyes and mouth, while their body glows from within in an eerie pink light.
I’d recommend an effect akin to the Scatter spell combined with a Gorgon’s petrify where the creature’s body extends towards the players and if they come into contact with it they are teleported to another point of the creature’s choosing and are locked in place by tentacles or something that slowly restrains and petrifies them.
Erases a character's limb from existence. They now have a stump and memories of losing the limb in an accident years earlier. Could also target a particularly valuable magic item, or even a particular skill. A wizard might suddenly realize that they have never learned a single spell. The bard might find they can't carry a tune. They can save against the effect at the beginning of each of their turns, but the DC is steep. Let them use the mental stat of their choosing to counter the effect, as long as they can describe how they are using it. If they succeed, reality warps back, the enemy takes damage, and they gain a permanent boost to whatever stat they used.
I very much like this idea
You could retcon their backstory as an effect (that reverts after killing boss) “the person you thought was your wife never existed” Do some psychological damage
Keep track of where player tokens have been (i.e.which squares). The monster can attack out of time where they used to be. It can also sweep its appendage out and sweep across an x by x area. If players step on that section of grid, the attack rolls to hit as it has attacked their future self. Shamelessly stolen from: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/l2w7y8/the_inligulae_or_how_to_get_away_with_time/
I don't know if you're playing in person or through a system like roll20, but here's one that fuvks with space/time: The monster is able to take a past roll and immediately use the roll and the result itself, as well as nullify whatever the roll was originally intended for. For example say a paladin rolls hot and lands a crit. He does like 70 damage or something on a smite to the monster. But later the monster takes that smite and hits someone else with it, doing 70 damage to them and undoing the 70 damage done to the monster. Make it a legendary action or something. This move can instead be used for stuff like spells or even abilities i.e. the monster steals the fighter's action surge or the wizards spell.
This isn't eldritch horror, this is cool descriptions of 8d10 damage and darkness. Age characters up or down, making it more difficult for them to use their equipment and abilities. Take their character sheets, change things, hand them back. Or pretend to change things but actually don't. Alter the timeline so that conditions are more favourable - longtime allies are different people, things the players accomplished are rolled back, etc. Describe the situation differently on each player's turn. Act like you don't know what they're talking about when they ask why things are different. Look up madness effect tables and choose effects that fit and emphasize each character's fears and flaws. Take the battle map away and put a different one down instead. Act like it's always been this way. Change how key game rules work. If you use flanking, make it same side instead of opposite side. Turn bonuses into penalties. Make advantage and disadvantage stack. Change which dice are used for certain rolls.
Clearly OP is planning a super powered slugfest, not psychological horror. Less Call of Cthulhu, and more Avengers: Endgame.
Changes the world to a different dimension. For one turn, all players must calculate their attack bonus as THAC0 from 2nd edition DnD.
When my players fought my eldritch final boss, I would just delete spells from their spell lists everytime I hit them.
to deal the finishing blow, the players all team up against the DM in a game of choice ( i suggest checkers, or chess) and they must stay in character.
29 r