Faux’s Fantastical Fauna

A Fanatics Guide to Fantastic and Formidible Foes

About the Author

I am an IT professional by day, Game Master by night.

I have a passion for documentation, design, and detail. I’ve been living with ADHD for what amounts to near the whole of my life, so I often find myself obsessing over subjects, pouring my heart into them, and then filling in every detail I can until I have nothing more to say.

I love fantacy books, such as “The Sword of Truth”, “Wheel of Time”, “Game of Thrones”, and science fiction shows like “Star Trek”, “Sliders”, and “Quantum Leap.”

I often find myself as wanting to lash out with creativity, but being locked in a small box where I don;t have the time, energy, or resources to succed at doing so. My hope is that this book, being about something I love so very much can help me to finally put the words to the pages and give some amount of joy and excitement to others.

About The Book

Over my many years as a DM I have had the pleasure of observing players as they tackle the many creatures that exist in the worlds of D&D. There has been no greater joy durring these experiences then watching along as players tackle new creatures and new challenges together.

But I, like many who have played the game before have watched as those very same players tackle bosses in predictible ways, use prior knowlege to solve combat scenerios, and in general not get very much out of these amazing creatures.

So I set out to solve these issues for my players, to entice them, push their knowlege, and ask them to think not in terms of what they have seen before, but rather what they must now knowto survive with their very life. this book is the fruits of that labor, the payoff at the end, the hopeful answer to the problem. Is it the answer to everything, no. But it does try and take a bite out of the problem and present DMs with the tools they need to make combat not just fun, but dynamic and fufilling for every player.

Blights

Twig Blights

Twig Blights are concidered to be the least powerful of all the blights. They are small, fragile creatures that are easily destroyed. They are formed by the corruption of small piles of twigs and sticks.

Elder Twig Blights

Elder Twig Blights are Twig Blights that have either been formed by the corruption of small trees, or have survived long enough for their corruption to pull in more materials from the landscape around them.

Rotting Twig Blights

Rotting Twig Blights are elders who have survived long enough for their bodies to begin rotting away. They lurch around slowly, and are often found vommiting putrid material uponunsuspecting victims.

Gulthias Blight

When a Rotting Twig Blight eventually collapses it may occasioally find home in soil containing the remains of many dark and anguished souls. When it does it may find enough purcahse to grow into a full tree, it’s power multiplying several times.

Where they are found

Blights can be present anywhere you might find both trees and a corrupting force. This means they can be found in small numbers almost anywhere, and in large numbers when the plot demands. Graveyards, battlefields, and similar areas are ripe for corruption and thus blights.

Although not nessisarily always true, blights and especially the bigger blights, tend to stay clear of settled areas where they might run into other creatures.

How They Attack

Although it is common for a few blights to attack a lone person on the roads, blights will take every opportunity to attack in large numbers, attempting to overwhelm their victims.

When attacking this way the twigs will pile up onto the creature forcing it onto the ground, they will then begin suffocating the creature by filling its nose and mouth with leaves, limbs, and even small clobs of dirt. The victim is often left immobilized by the weight of the blights and quicky succumbs to suffication.

Improving Blights

Less Health, More Blights

One of the benefits of using weak creatures is that they don’t take very much to take down. It’s very liekly your players can one shot a blight in a single hit, and that their AC is not posing much of an issue at all.

Twig Blights are pretty weak creatures, the basic rules list a health pool of 1d6 + 1, which averages out to only 4 hit points. We can probably simply ignore the amount of damage and say that any player who can deal even a single point of damage to a blight probably kills it.

Now that the blights are even easier to kill, let’s give our players more of them to kill. We can double, triple, or even quadrupal the number of Twig Blights we use, in addition we can give our blights some special abilities to help those numbers really count.

This will quickly force your players to take mitigating steps to secure their personal space. Because the creatures have such low health now, simple spells like magic missle, AoE effects, and even caltrops can help them manage the space and succeed in the battle. At the same time, parties who fail to do this will quickly realize how dangerous these 1 hit point creatures can become.

Corrupting Touch

Blights by their very nature are the results of corruption on living material. It makes sense that some fo them would be capable of spreading that corruption between themselves and other living things.

You may choose to have creatures that are damaged by the blights make a CON save to resit the effects of the touch. On a failed save they may suffer various negative effects. A few examples are listed below:

These effects can force players to deal with the blights, wasting valuble attack rolls, spells, and other actions that could be directed at more deserving targets.

Regenration

Gulthias Blight has a form of regeneration but there is no reason why you can not also give a version to the lower tier blights.

I recomend a similar wording to that of trolls, this would allow the blights to sprout back up the turn after theya re taken down, forcing players to find more permenant ways to deal with them such as with torches, fire damage spells, or similar effects.

Necrotic by Nature

Blights are by their very nature corrupted. So it makes sense that their dmage might be of a corruped nature as well. Almost all the attacks that the listed blights can perform are some kind of bludgoning damage, but many adventurers would come prepared for this, and many classes, armors, and features help mitigate damage from these types of attacks.

We can instead use necrotic damage to help reduce the effectvness of these damage reduing effects, making sure our players are taking the full force of the blights damage dealing potential.

We can add addional necrotic damage die.

Or replace all the damage with necrotic damage.

Or we can simply give the lower tier blights access to a low power version of the Life Drain. ability that Gulthias Blight has.

Poision Ivy, Thorns, Needles

Blights are made of many kinds of plant material. This can range from trees and branches to moss and leaves. Your blights don’t just have to be made of a bunch of twigs, even if they are mostly twigs. You can mix in materials that might make fighting them uncomfortable or lead to unfortunate situations later on.

Wild Growth

Blights are made up of various bits of materials. It makes sense that they would be capable of adding additional material to their bodies. You may want to use a system to allow blights to grow orupgrade from one version to another. For example you may allow a Gulthias Blight to upgrade a blight once per turn as bonus action, or you may allow a twig blight to aquire additional amterials as an action to try and become an elder.

Looting Blights

Rare Items

The most common rare item you’ll find on a blight is anything resembling natural materials. Wands, staffs, and anything made of wood or similar materials is very common.

Wands

It’s a pretty common occourance for a wand to get stuck in the body of a twig blight, usually pulled into it’s body as it walks around going about it’s normal business. These items occassionally go off durring it’s day to day activites which can result in some very unexpected situations.

Staffs

Similar to wands, staffs are very common, but mostly limited to larger elder blights.

Potions

Blights tend to collect materials from all the places they have been. This creates a melting pot seen in few other places. for this reason it’s somewhat common to have most of if not all the meterials needed for creating a potion on a single blight. Although the common loot table contains potions of healing any potion with simple, or even uncommon ingredients might be found in the blights body with enough attention and luck.

Junk

By their nature twig blights will collect some miscellaneous materials jumbled in their bodies. Below is a non-exhaustive list of items you might find within the blight.

Rotting Twig Blight

Rotting twig blights bodies are messes of rotting materials and muck. Creatures trying to loot them have disadvantage on the roll unless they pass a DC10 constitution saving throw to resist the smell.

Cleansing Blights

Blights are the result of the corruption of the natural order. Although sometimes it might be simple to walk in, kill everything, and leave; In other cases it might be required to keep the blight alive. You can use these rules for common ways to cleanse blights and remove their corruption without killing them.

Ritual of Cleansing

Your players may decide (or be told) that the best course of action is to try and heal the blight via magic. Players can use a Ritual of Cleansing to try and heal the land, and the blight.

This should put your players in an interesting position against a force of blights. One player will need to focus on trying to heal the blight, while the rest of the players hold back any forces it might be using to try and disrupt that casting. The Gulthias Blight has an effective range of 60 ft, so the 80 ft. range ensures the caster can stay just out of range. This will force the Gulthias Blight to use other means such as spawning blights, or using other forces to locate and stop the casting. The players will have the difficult job of protecting the caster from damage while they cast the spell.

Powerful Healing Magic

It’s reasonable that a powerful healing spell might be capable of removing the dark corruption infesting a blight. Spells like Power Word Heal, Aura of Vitality (Over several turns), or Greater Restoration are likely to do the job.

Special Items

You may also decide that an existing or custom magic item is appropriate for rooting out the corrupting energy and healing the blight. Dawnbringer, Holy Avenger, or similar weapons may work. You could also create a small item that holds the hopes and dreams of the local people to deal with the corruption and the blights.

Blight NPCs

Blights are not a common creature type for NPCs, this is due to multiple factors:

• They usually have low charisma, intelligence, and wisdom.
• They can understand common, but can not speak.
• They are often are creatures of corruption and darkness. This means even once a blight has been cleansed they are unlikely to get close enough to a village, town, or city to really interact with the players.
• For the same reasons above players are likely to kill them before getting close enough to ask questions.

However; Blights can make interesting NPCs, with complex motivations, both before and after being cleansed. This guide attempts to cover a few examples of how you might use blights as NPCs within your campaign. Just be prepared for your PCs and other NPCs to not ask too many questions before wacking their heads off with the nearest sharp object.

Twigly

Twigly is a cleansed blight who is rather on the small side, even for twig blights. Players may find him hopping between trees, or among branches searching for new things to play with. He is also small enough players might find him hidden in a town.

Roleplaying Twigly

Twigly can’t speak, but he is full of positive energy. Players will often hear him smacking sticks onto nearby tree trunks to a lively beat. Twigly has higher then normal inteligence and wisdom for his species, which enables him to communicate simple ideas via crude drawings, made by dragging his limbs, or another stick through dry dirt or mud.

Twigly is also very aware of how people feel about him. It’s an almost daily occourance that someone will throw a rock at him, or try and throw him in a fire, he has become very good at slipping away when this happens.

Quests

Twigly desperately wants to grow larger. It’s likely that he has an idea about how to make that happen. For example he might propose one of the following:

Twigly will be very happy if any create can solve his size problem. He will reward whatever creature helps with a wand he has been keeping in his body for quite some time. You may choose to use a flavorful items such as a wand of reduce person (3 charges.)

Wraiths

Common Wraith

Common Wraiths are formed when a soul is twisted by anger, hatred, or jelousy into a form that seeks almost constant revenge against it’s former enemies. Although uncommon compared to other types of creatures they are the most plentiful form wraiths take.

Twisted Wraith

From time to time a wraith goes beyond even the darkest hatred for it’s enemies. When this happens a wraith ceases to be what it once was and takes on a dark shadowy appearance. Twisted wraiths spend their time coing up with new and more innhumane ways to bring pain and suffering upon their victims.

Soul Reaper

Soul Reapers are darkly twisted, horribly powerful, and insanely vengeful in their actions. It is not uncommon for a single soul reaper to flay the flesh off of a hundred men in a single day.

Soul Gorger

Soul Gorgers are immensely powerful wraiths who weild almost limitless ability in their lairs. Adventurers who run into one are almost surely not leaving it’s sight alive.

Soul Gorgers enslave Soul Reapers using dark magics to do their bidding. A single Soul Gorger can have hundreds of reapers feeding it an almost constant stream of souls.

Where they are found

A wraith can form anywhere that a creature experiences immense suffering or hatred as they die. This means you can include wraiths almost anywhere someone is likely to have died, especially in a violent way. Good locations to include wraiths are graveyards, battlefields, mass grave sites, and prisons or areas of execution.

How they attack

Wraiths attack by draining the life from their enemies. Common wraiths can drain the life force from creatures leaving them with long lived scars and black necrotic legions on their victims skin.

More powerful wraiths can flay the skin from their enemies, pulling the very flesh along with their life force. This is common among Twisted Wraiths and Soul Reapers.

Finally, the most powerful of wraiths can violently rip the soul from their enemies, leaving behind unfeeling golems known as soul husks.

Mimics

Mimic

These Mimics, often known as lesser mimics, are the kind most commonly encountered by adventuring parties. They change shape to mimic a valuble items, chest, or common objects then attack when a creature interacts with them. These mimics are of little inteligence, and do not plan beyond their next meal.

Greater Mimics

Greater Mimics unlike their lesser brethren are inteligent, cunning, and excelent strategists and planners. Beyond just physical changes, greater mimics use arcane powers to further the illusions that creature observe.

Superior Mimics

When a greater mimic gains enough arcane power, they enter the realm of superior mimics. Superior mimics are cunning, violent, and usually many moves ahead of their opponents. They have mastered sugestion so much that they can often look like diffrent objects to diffrent people, and maintain the illusion even as they devour their enemies alive.

Despite their increased power, they are much more intelligent then their brethren and thus much easier to negotiate with. Where a lesser mimic would kill you no matter what you said, a superior mimic will take concideration of what you have to offer, then likely eat you anyways unless it’s to it’s benefit.

Objects

A mimics favorite object is the treasure chest. It’s quite common for mimics in the form of treausre chests to suprise unwary adventurers. But mimics can come in many diffrent shapes and sizes.

Where they are found

Mimics are found just about everywhere. That chest? Mimic. That dresser? Mimic. That rogue in the corner looking through your stuff? Alright, that one is probably not a mimic. But the fact remains that mimics are a pretty flexible creature type to use through your campaigns.

They can be found in abandoned fortresses, towns, castles, and pretty much anywhere there are objects for them to mimic. If your looking to add a little danger to your games you might even concider rolling a D100 from time to time to see if an everyday object like a book, scrolls or rope is actually secretly a mimic. Or you may use the table under objects to secretly add a mimic or two to an otherwise normal scene.

Territory

Mimics are very solitary creatures. It’s extremely rare for more then one mimic to be in any particular area. They however very commonly share regions with other predetors. These predetors tend to avoid the mimics, learning their location and giving them a wide berth.

Diet

A single human body can feed an average mimic for several months. If the mimic needs food between encounters with adventurers it may take on a form more appealing to small animals, or position itself in an area with higher wild animal traffic.

Mimics can be picky about the parts of adventurers they eat first, so it’s common for other animals to pick off the left overs when mimics finish feeding sessions.

How they attack

Mimics enjoy the benefits of suprise. They will often wait to attack until their victim is stuck to them and hopeless in any real escape. Once a victim is stuck, the mimic will attempt to use it’s pseudopod to beat the creature unconcious.

Once the creature is unconcious the mimic will often drag it into a corner to slowly consume part of it over several hours. Mimics will normally start with the head first, slowly working their way down the victim until it is fully consumed. This can take a matter of days for smaller creatures, or weeks for larger ones.

Improving Mimics

Use more of them

Mimics are at their best when they add risk to what might be otherwise a pretty bland room or situation. If your only using mimics in the occassional encounter then your missing out on some of their best benefits.

Try inserting mimics throught your campaign, use secret rolls to determine when items might actually be mimics, place mimics in shops or homes as a form of protection against theft, maybe even add a mimic as a pet for an NPC.

One key to making this successful is to make sure when you do use mimics they are easily destroyed. You want your players worrying about a mimic hurting them badly, not actually being hurt badly.

Let them take center stage

An extension of the prior point, but mimics can make an excelent quest line. A little girl’s cat has gone missing, or a few members of the town guard went missing after a night drinking. Even a senile old man who claims he absolutly saw a statue eat a passerby just last night.

Less Sticky

One of the defining qualities of mimics is their adhesive trait. But nothing says that you need to use this, or that it can’t be optional at the creatures discretion. A non-sticky mimic is far more likely to go undetected, and thus more likly to get it’s victim in the exact position it wants.

Improved spell lists

The mimics in the PHB don’t have the ability to cast spells, but the greater and superior mimics in this book do. These spells are from the bard spell list and mostly revolve around utility seplls the mimic can use to hide or trick creatures. You may want to review the spell lists and pick more combat oriented spells.

Tranformational chests

A great way to use mimics is to turn them into transorming chest. Transforming chests are when a chest acts like a normal chest under most circustances, but doing certain actions to it such as forcing it open, using the wrong key, or trying to smash it open, triggers the chest to enter it’s mimic state.

Heliophobia

Mimics hate sunlight, and in fact are not fans of any bright light. This lore seems to have lost its way durring the many years since 1st edition. I say it seems like an excelent time to bring it back. There are several ways that we can break out its heliophobia to make the game more enjoyable.

Looting Mimics

Mimic Death

When a mimic dies it loses its defined shape and becomes a gray or brown amorphous blob. This transformation occours very rapidly durring the creatures death throes and is concidered by many to be one of the most beautifully violent acts of nature they ever witness. You should take this new form, and the previous rapid transformation into concideration when players are looting the body of the mimic. Players are not looking through a treasure chest, they are digging though thick, slimey, disgusting goop that is spread across the ground.

Rare Items

Mimics exist at an odd intersection. They both kill adventurers and use corrosive acid in their digestion of those adventurers. This means that anything that would be disolved in acid will not last very long inside the mimics body. This will result in two things you will need to be concious of. First, your players will usually not find much loot on a mimics body. Second, when those players do find loot it will most often be higher level magical gear that can resist the corrosive nature of the mimic for longer.

Concider items that are both common on the body of adventurers and would be difficult for the acid to disolve. Potions, vials, magic items, and anything magically protected is probably a safe bet. You may also find a few coins scattered around its hunting grounds.

Junk

The mimic is most likely to have a collection of half disolved, badly damaged, and torn apart items that are almost entirely useless to the players. Scattered around its hunting ground your likely to find the remnants of past adventurers equipment such as a tattered backpack, a half eaten spell book, or a single shoe.

Lesser Mimic

Lesser mimics are big, dumb, and hyper agressive. They are the ruthless killers of the species and will jump at any chance for a quick meal. They eat their victims whole, and do not collect trinkets or hoards of items like some higher functioning mimics do.

Greater Mimics

Greater mimics are the smart cousins of lesser mimics. You will often see greater mimics hoarding small troves of items in an attempt to lure adventurers into their territory.

Superior Mimic

Superior mimics are the smallest and most inteligent of all the mimics. They have the required inteligence to carefully plan and execute complex plans, including the use of highly powerful magic items to lure in greedy adventurers. For non-arcana checks, use the list for the greater mimic.

Creating Mimics

Mimics were created by powerful magic, often centuries ago. This means that their numbers would have been dwindeling over this time without some source of new mimics. This section aims to ask the question “How are mimics created?” and also give hints to the question “How do my players create mimics?”

Where are mimics from

Rules as written there does no appear to be any defiend source for where all the mimics in the world have come from. It is hinted in several places that they were created by powerful wizards, but timelines, methods, and details of any kind are not given for the exact spells or source.

This gives you ultimate power in determining how mimics are showing up in your world, or the campaigns you run. It is posible that some powerful wizard has discovered the methods used in the past. It is plausible that a powerful artifact has been set loose and is now creating an army of mimics. Finally iy’s possible the mimics have simply found a way to reproduce either physically or magically and are now popualting the world themselves.

Created by a wizard

One of the simplest ways you can say mimics have been made is by simply stating someone magical made them. It is a common understanding that at least the mimics of old were made by powerful wizards, often with the goal of protecting powerful magical items.

It’s possible these wizards are kidnapping innocent people and running them through vile experiments to create these mimics. All in a hope to protect their powerful treasure from cunning adventurers.

Powerful Artifact

Mimics might be the result of a powerful artifact that is corrupting otherwise peaceful creatures. You could add a story elements about how local pets have gone missing, finally revealing that these common housepts have been corrupted into treasure hoarding monstrocities.

A mimic could also be the result of a powerful portal or gateway pulling these creatures from a dark plane of existence. This lets you add story elements where mimics can show up anywhere, even randomly in the middle of otherwise peaceful settings or ordinary combat encounters.

Reproduction

It is very possible that over time mimics have learned how to reproduce, either by themselves through a system of mitosis, or with other mimics.

Mimics by their nature can change shape and take on forms that are not their own. Although they can not normally take on a form of another living object, this is not always the case. There have been types of mimics in the past that can take on the form of simple creatures such as animated statues, or even pets.

A mimic would not need to fully transoform for breeding to occour, as they could simply transition parts of their body to allow the exchanging of meterials. Once material has been exchanged, both mimics could begin the process of meiosis to produce children of the combined mimics DNA. Below you will find a brief table listing dominant and recessive genes for mimics:

Player created mimics

It is very possible that your players may have intrest in creating mimics, or that you may have intrest in giving them a means to create an army to protect their treasure or other intrests. This brief guide aims to give you basic rules for player created mimics.

Materials

The first thing players will need in an ordinary everyday object. This can be a treasure chest but it can also be a chair, vase, or any other simple every day object (See above for examples.)

Once players have the simple object they wish to convert they will need several items to complete the spell or brewing process, you can randomly roll for the items in the following list to determine the items your players will need.

Mimic ritual

Players with a focus on the arcane can use their abilities to combine the ingredients and create the mimic. Creating the mimic will take some level of magical proficiency and you’ll want to apply a moderate cost to the attempt. You may wish to have the player make an arcana check and expend a spell slot to make the attempt at combining the ingredients.

Once the ingredients have been formed together it takes 1d4 days for the mimic to form. Previous to that the mimic is simply a ball of goo with no true form and no signs of life beyond occasional movement.

Mimic Brewer

Not every party will have someone dedicated to the arcane arts. If your players have chosen a more martial, or support oriented style for their characters you can provide them access to the Mimic Brewer so they can still join in on the fun.

The Mimic Brewer is unique item that might be found in a lost foretress or deep in a forgotten dungeon. Your players may also find schematics for it in an old tome or be taught it by a wise NPC.

In either case players can use the Mimic Brewer to make the required arcana checks for them even if they do not have the prowess to normally make them on their own. The mimic brewer however has no arcane experience and makes straight D20 rolls with no additional bonuses. You can use the below table to express what happens each day when the brewer rolls for itself.

Mimic NPCs

Mimics are not often used for NPCs, probably because of their association with brutal killings of adventurers. But these types of attacks are only really encountered when dealing with larger lesser mimics, most superior, and even many greater mimics are much more cautious and reserved. For this reason your players may encounter intelligent mimics in the world who may be a little more willing to help.

Limric

Limric is the star of the show at a local tavern. He has been traveling the area disguised as a large piano, and using his charm person spell to maintain control of a vagrant he found left for dead.

Interaction with the law

It is likely that the head of the local law (captain of the guard, sherrif, etc) has already discovered several missing people and determined the cause is Limric. It’s very possible that they have made a deal with Limric to dispose of “undesirables” such as criminals and the enemies of the law. This arrangment seems to work out well for Limric and they would rather it not change.

Music

Limric has previously used their enchanting melodies to put drunken listeners to sleep, often disgusing them from other listeners and consuming them following the tavern closing.

Roleplaying Limric

Limric is a little bit of an oddity. He is intelligent and cunning, which would put him into the superior category of mimics. Despite his intelligence however he is much more similar in size to a lesser mimic.

Limric is far more likely to use his cunning and spellcasting to handle situations then his size. Given the chance between making a bite attack and putting his victim to sleep he almost always will choose to put them to sleep.

However Limric is not directly opposed to using his physical size when absolutly nessisary. You may see him lash out at an attacker, or pin a victim down while he deals with another threat.

Quests

Limric has recently discovered that their ability to put victims to sleep has been getting less and less effective. In reality the citizens of the town are becoming desensitized to their lullaby. Limric will send the party on varying missions attempting to either discover the source of, or obtain proposed solutions to the problem.