Hirelings, Mercenaries and Pack Animals

Hirelings, Mercenaries and Pack Animals

When setting out into the depths of The Gloom, a party might need to hire extra help or supplies to aid in their travels, and to bolster their forces. These creatures (referred to as Hirelings from this point on) receive no share of the treasure, do not level up and are not under the control of players directly – if asked to do something dangerous a loyalty check will determine whether they comply. As such, they have their own motivations, fears and limits. They do not receive death saves. They will supply their own equipment but not their own supplies which the party must pay for.  Each PC may only have a single hireling per expedition.

Loyalty Check
Each hireling must make a loyalty check if their resolve or loyalty is tested. This is a D20 roll which must roll below their loyalty score in order to pass. (For example, if a Mercenary has a Loyalty Score of 15, a roll of 14 would pass but 16 would not.) If a loyalty test is failed the character’s loyalty will decrease for that expedition and they will refuse to take that action, or may flee the danger. Success and good treatment will increase a character’s loyalty.

Pack Animals and War-Animals

Pack Animals are used to increase a party’s effective carrying capacity or bolster their forces. They will require one food and one water ration a day just like a player-character. Animals do not eat normal Food Rations but instead eat cheaper Animal Feed (1EU, 1 SP). (Stat blocks at end of article.)

The Animal Handling skill is used to interact with animals and ensure they follow instructions.
Unlike other hirelings, animals are owned by the character once bought.

Animal	Cost	Loyalty
Mule – a surefooted and stubborn pack-mule. (Mule)	30	15
Guard Dog – man’s best friend, even in The Gloom.  (Mastiff)	30	18
Messenger Owl – It can carry your last words through the dark on silent wings. (Owl)	10	8

Hirelings

These are people who will offer their services to adventurers, but they are themselves not accustomed to combat and will be little use in a fight.  For a price, they will venture into The Gloom to aid you but they will avoid being put in harm’s way wherever possible. Use the Commoner stats should they be attacked.

Hireling	Wage per Day	Loyalty
Torchbearer – he will carry your torch and your bags, leaving your hands free.  He will watch over you while you sleep.	10	10
Sage – A wise and learned figure who can offer knowledge at critical junctures.	15	8
Barber-Surgeon – This figure can splint bones and prepare a poultice for your wounds.	20	10
Sherpa – He has knowledge of survival, and many tales of the dangers of the Gloom to offer.	20	10

Mercenaries

Some people fight and kill for money – a well-remunerated skill-set in the wilds of The Gloom.  Mercenaries will fight in the melee for you but will flee if the danger is too great.

For each mercenary hired, your DM will roll on the Random Adventurers table to generate their stats.

Hireling	Wage per Day	Loyalty
Mercenary	30	16

Monster Review - The Flind [Volo's Guide to Monsters, 153]

Flind
Taking the enviable position of ruling over Gnoll warbands is the Flind - a super-Gnoll of greatly enhanced Gnollness. This is all part of Volo's beefing up of the humanoid riff-raff enemies, giving you a boss monster for any campaigns in which Gnolls are a persistent enemy, and the Flind has been structured to work best in this role.

Weirdly, the Flind actually has a pretty distinguished pedigree in Monster Manuals past existing in almost every edition of the game. Like many weird creatures created by ham-fistedly bashing a fist into a keyboard and statting up the result, the 'Flinds' biggest obstacle is an awful name: it sounds like a skin-cream, or an insult form the 1920s, or the inedible organ of a parrot. It certainly does not connote Gnoll aristocracy, but here we are. Let's find our Flind...

Art

I feel a trifle guilty because I moved over this image whenever I flicked through Volo's - perhaps the neighbouring Girallon's gynecomastia made me leap over to the plebian Gnolls on the next page.

There's a lot of characterful details in this depiction:the silver-white mane and tied moustaches give our friend the Flind an obvious status and preeminence, and the grisly trophies and blood-stained armour fit perfectly with the idea of a chosen champion of Yeenoghu, wading through gore and carrion in leading their war-band. The eyes are quite horrifyingly predatory, and the Flind's picture really captures what should be scary about Gnolls: the universal taboo of cannibalism and the idea of a bestial horror suddenly getting up and imitating humanity with none of the pretensions to morality - hunger made organised. There's something almost licentious in the Flind's leering facial expression.

Purpose and Tactics

The Flind is the final boss of a low-level campaign arc to cast out invading Gnolls - he'll have been hinted at in previous moments in terms of awe and terror. He possibly has a secondary role as a supporting monster in a high-level encounter.

As every Gnoll and Gnoll-adjacent creature has Rampage ( and you could easily mod it on to anything you like), the leading ability for the Flind it his Aura of Blood Thirst, which enables even 1/4 CR Gnolls to beef up their action economy with extra Bite attacks. These attacks are weak, especially comparatively for the beefier Gnolls in Volo's, but should nicely boost their damage output. To take advantage of this your Flind should move in an honour guard of Gnolls (the ten feet range is very limiting). Whilst aiding and abetting his smorgasbord of Gnolls, he has a series of disruptive abilities with his Flail, all of which have reach. This enables him to stay behind a line of boosted Gnolls still striking at the front line, causing them to become paralysed whilst surrounded or turn their blade against each other. Your Flind can also target several different saves where appropriate, and drop the Flail of Pain late in the combat when simple damage is required to end his foes. Bear in mind that the Flind can drop each of its special attacks, so I would spread the paralysis and madness around before caving someone's head in.

To take the best advantage of the Flind, a tight combat in cramped conditions is ideal: a tense dungeon corridor or mountain pass or fortress battlements will keep the Flind able to disrupt dangerously whilst boosting his subordinates. It should also prevent the Flind and his Gnoll soldiers from relying on their comparatively weaker ranged attacks Should player-characters start to fall, Rampage will trigger and make the fight turn quickly. In a gruelling, action economy focused combat a stalemate could quickly become a rout.

In a high-level combat, a Flind could be a good monster to add to a combat against Demons - he's a sturdy melee fighter whose reach and variety of disruptive moves mean the party cannot simply ignore him.

FluffThere's some interesting stuff here: the Flind not only leads by virtue of strength but recieves prophetic visions: it can give knowledge to a Gnoll warband beyond what is possible. I personally love the idea of the barbaric Flind trying to make sense of visions that are fundamentally confusing, misleading or horrifying (Does Yeenoghu care much for clarity?).Or, the visions being used to evade and strike where the enemy is weakest, confounding the normal military response.

Plot Hooks

Batuhan the Gore-Bringer has lead his war-band through the very heart of the Kingdom of Altanasarai, but in a puzzling, maddening way. His band strikes at seemingly meaningless targets, evades rich market towns to cross mountain ranges, heading ever south. Noone knows where Batuhan's visions are leading him, or why......

Dhzambul and his war-band have come to the very frontier of civilization, and it is know that he is maddened by visions: he rolls on the ground, frothing, tormented by images of burning cities and armies on the march, of gnolls lying slaughtered by the thousand by the hands of prey-races, of abominations wandering desolate plains, of a burning sky - he can make no sense among it, and none of the yipping curs in his war-band can either. Dhzambul demands that the soft prey races send on the their shamans to make sense of his dreams, of he will plunder, slaughter and devours until he finds one.

Khongordzol rots in prison, his war-band defeated. The only bones he can chew are the dusty remnants of ancient prisoners, and his manacles have made his splendid fur matted and receding. In the darkness of the oubliette, though, Yeenoghu still blesses him with visions and portents...

VerdictA solid, dependable boss-monster which fits its theme and have some interesting abilities - and one suited to the role of champion.

Monster Review - Demogorgon [Out of the Abyss, 236]

[The] Demogorgon
Whether this thing qualifies as a 'monster' is probably up for debate - it is certainly monstrous but I doubt any DM is cruel enough to chuck this maniacal mandrill on their random encounter table. This beastie was actually statted up in 1e (Or OGD&D as I like to call it.) In the golden age of 1d4 hit points some people were apparently crazy enough to go toe-to-tentacle with the Prince of Demons himself.

This is it - the final boss, the biggest of cheeses. In the final battle of your campaign your near-godlike PCs are going to scrap with Demogorgon.

Art
We essentially have two pieces here, as Demogorgon is the cover model for Out of the Abyss and merits a two-page spread inside.

The cover shoot gives a great sense of scale, in a way only a full A4 piece of art really can ( a full-size spread can be found here). I love his thrashing tentacles, his bestial roar - the fact that whole buildings are plummeting into the Underdark as he rampages. I particularaly like the sense that you are underfoot in this image - before Demogorgon your sparkly PC Paladin is little more than a self-righteous beetle with delusions of grandeur. Somehow the goofiness of the Demogorgon design ("it's a big monkey with tentacles") is eclipsed by the energy of this depiction. Not bad at all.

Within is a more personalised image of Big D which I like less. They've add uniformity to his form in contrast to his earlier depictions to try and give some cohesion to Demogorgon. Normally this would make me appreciate a piece more and it would seem less gonzo and silly....but this is Demogorgon! Shouldn't he be jarring and messed up and crazy and silly? Shouldn't he carry on being a giant grumpy squidaboon with the sheer panache and gravitas that comes from being an OG Demon Lord?

Purpose and TacticsWe are going to assume three things here.
1) You're fighting Demogorgon in his 'lair' - the depths of the Gaping Maw - in order to kill him for good. The kid gloves are off, Demogorgon.
2) You're throwing the CR calculation guidelines away for this one.
3) You didn't go for a deus ex machina maguffin or decide your players kill Demogorgon with the power of love or something.

Obviously Demogorgon needs minions - he's the Prince of Demons. I'd err on the side of things with less fiddly effects to track and deal with, so more Mariliths and Hezrou than Nalfeshnee or Glabrezu.
Your party are never going to disable Demogorgon with save versus effects - he has Magical Resistance and very, very high saves, and legendary resistance if they manage all of that, so it may be a case of disabling the minions and focusing fire on Demogorgon. He even has a special ability 'Two Heads' which nixes a number of disabling effects. He also needs an insane arena with which to battle the PCs - some kaleidoscopic panopticon in the depths of the Abyss with a host of environmental effects. A building where gravity changes every round and every reflective surface summons a hostile but illusory Mirror Image would add to the general chaos. There's also call for aquatic elements - a flooding room or underwater aspect to the arena would also complicate the fight significantly, and open the door to some aquatic lackeys of Demogoron like Aboleths or Sauhaugin or Chuul.

This is essentially a DPS race: the players need to get in and nova hard enough on Demogorgon to cut through almost 500 hit points whilst he disrupts them from doing that long enough to finish them off with his (and his minions) attacks.This encounter should take a session, minimum.

Demogorgon has an insane number of disabling effects to disrupt and confuse your party: he can drop numerous Gaze effects which afflict players with damaging effects, often ones with no save and requiring no concentration. I'd read carefully how these abilities interact (You can't use Hypnotic Gaze and then Maddening Gaze as your legendary action) and a number of them are for a single turn. Unless Demogorgon is supporting some minions his action economy is going to be torn between disrupting the PCs and actually taking the time to smack them about with his tentacles. Causing a player to potentially lose their turn for one turn is never worth Demogorgon's actual action because every other character will still be working against him.  I'd ensure you use either the Tail or Tentacle attacks pretty much every round to keep the damage out-put constant. The Tail does significantly more damage but if your high-level party hasn't realised how incredibly inefficient in-combat healing is mashing them with the Tentacle can teach them the error of their ways by reducing the hit point maximum.

Both attacks also have decent Reach, meaning Demogorgon should be focussing fire and hammering weakened or squishy player-characters. You are playing for keeps with Demogorgon to try and ensure you finish off weakened players rather than spreading the damage around.  With his action economy, you will find yourself struggling with which of the vast number of potential actions you should actually do. The Lair Actions are nicely disruptive - one is a version of Mirror Image, and the other lets you plant Darkness around the arena, and help ensure he is disrupting whilst still maintaining damage output with his tentacles and tail.

Demogorgon has some nasty tricks buried in his spell-casting. Most of this is pretty unhelpful in combat (Illusions, for example). One brutal example is that he has Feeblemind, which can essentially take a caster out of the fight. Aside from Wizards, very few characters will have decent Intelligence, so if you're targeting a Bard, Warlock or Sorcerer you can reduce them to using whatever abilities fit the loopholes of Feeblemind or stabbing Demogorgon for 1d6 +trash damage. Adding insult to injury, this player-character will be a drooling moron for at least a month and will probably fail every other save against Demogorgon's disruptive effects too. Fear deserves a mention as it is not single-target like many of Demogorgon's gaze attacks, I personally think Fear  is even better when it doesn't affect the entire party, as some characters uselessly flee and others are left at Demogorgon's mercy. Telekinesis would be a waste of Demogorgon's action unless you have environmental effects that can cause some severe damage.

The biggest downside of this fight is your players are going to spend a fair amount of it disabled, confused or charmed. If your players find this frustrating (as many do) you might prefer to make your Big Bad Orcus or someone more straightfowardly damaging.

Built into his stat-block are variant rules that require you to use some form of sanity mechanic - I personally like this touch but it seems a bit pointless - if you're using a sanity mechanic you probably already have mechanics for everything here described. If you do utilise this, it could make the fight significantly more difficult as it essentially gives the players less ability to move.


Fluff
Much ink has been spilled on Demogorgon over the years and only his general conceptual wackiness keeps him on the rung below Orcus for most recognisable Demon. The tones of hyperbole on Demogorgon are, for once in WOTC's writing career, completely merited - this is the biggest bad of all the bads who wants to bring the bad to every corner of the cosmology. I love that the fluff opens with Demogorgon's nutty titles and end-goal.



Verdict: If you think your gods and demons lords should roll initiative and rumble with the rest of them, this write-up gives you a great starting point for a ruckus.

Monster Review - The Guard Drake [Volo's Guide to Monsters, 158]

Its been a long while since I fell off the bike with my reviews of monsters, which once spawned a fairly vast forum thread at GITP.

 It is a bike I am now leaping back upon - one change to the format is I will no longer be going alphabetically due to the incredible tedium of the 'D' doldrums (Demons, Devils, Dragons...ugh) and will instead be relying on the far more scientific methodology of having my girlfriend semi-randomly pick a monster or taking suggestions from the gallery. Without further ado....

 The Guard Drake. 

The lady of the house chose this with a singular extortion that it is 'pretty'. As a sort of canine dragon it combines the majesty of the dragon with the stolid loyalty of the canine in order to create a design that implies neither, really. The Guard Drake is a creature I've used only once in the same way I utilise rice - I chucked them into a concoction where they didn't really fit to bulk it out a little - the monster equivalent of a few extra calories.

Drakes in general bore me (I am not a fan of the 'little dragons' school of monster design) so the Guard Drake will need to hustle. 

Art

The art for the Guard Drake gives us two specimens to work with, and I like how they work together: one more aggressive, raised, scenting the air - another more cringing and servile. They have a real character to them - especially the blue's baleful and mocking expression. This replicates the dynamics and personality of a pack of guard dogs.  I think the artist has done well with a brief that essentially comes down to 'A rubbish dragon that's also a dog(?)'.  It helps me fit Guard Drakes into a definite mold in the game-world.

Purpose and TacticsA Guard Drake seems unlikely to be the focus of an encounter or quest - they're a disposable threat with little intelligence or capacity to cause much havoc . 

As mentioned above, the Guard Drake is a fairly dull addition to an encounter.  As a low-level boss monster it is totally rubbish - its a bag of hit-points and damage your players will rapidly pinata to death - with fairly weak mental saves and an AC of 14 it will rapidly be disabled and slaughtered by any vaguely competent adventurers. Their damage output maxes out at less than 20 damage a round, so against level 2 characters there's no way they're seriously a party before dying.

Even the variants do not add very much - Resistances are circumstantial (and less likely to be relevant in low-level play) and the movement advantages require you to set the terrain against the players. If you're using a Guard Drake, give it an advantage in mobility and surprise with the variants. Having a White Guard Drake ambush from burrowing or a Black one use a body of swamp-water to target the softer Player Characters make them a more engaging foe.

Guard Drakes work best, as their name implies, as an extra body in a more complicated encounter. In this instance, a bag of hitpoints and multiattack can be useful to bulk out an encounter without adding complexity -  a Red Drake climbing on a a cliff face with a Hobgoblin Devastator and some Hobgoblins can give them some extra muscle without any abilities you need to track or aim in particular. Like the Demon Hezrou, some simple muscle can be an excellent addition to an encounter where you're already remembering spell lists, rider effects and environmental complication. They are solid carbohydrates for your players to chew on whilst all the other nutrients do more exciting things.

I can only assume they gave the +2 Perception so that the Guard Drake has a good chance of catching adventurer's sneaking into some wizard's tower or necromancer lair and summoning the big guns - I do rather like the idea of a Red Guard Drake coiled up in the fire at its masters' side. They've even given them Darkvision despite the fact Dragons and Drakes don't possess it presumably so that the Guard Drake can perform that role.

The fluff makes them fairly easy to insert anywhere in that it is rather vanilla (fear not, I will not further burden you with food metaphors at this point) magic ritual that produces them - you could easily throw this out and make them breedable and subsequently sellable.

Fluff

Most of the fluff simply establishes that these are fairly useful guard-animals that learn quickly and imprint on a master - it is workaday prose which doesn't inspire me to use the Guard Drake and also another example of the quintessential 'made by an evil god' D&D trope.  The best relationship in terms of hooks is the presumably complex and idiosyncratic one with a real big bad and plot relevant monster, the titular Dragons. Do dragons approve? Are they repulsed by this mockeries of Dragonkind? Are they engaged in the business of creating them? How do dragon cults view these creatures?

Unique among monsters is the idea that Guard Drakes are essentially a controllable resource - whilst Manticores and Basilisks are rampaging threats the Guard Drake has been tamed and created - a sort of scaly construct. This means quests and plot hooks probably revolve around controlling, trading and propagating Guard Drakes, rather than just giving one a kicking.

Plot Hooks

Kauldrvist, Death on Wings, Sovereign of Scales, Dragon-King of the Blood-Red Mountain has noted with horror and rage the proliferation of mockeries of dragon-kind to be used as  beasts of burden by mere fleeting mortals. This transgression must be answered in blood - you must find the location from whence these beasts are constructed and excise this sin.

The Hobgoblin Legions have a secret weapon in their Guard Drakes: they greatly multiply their forces and sniff out anyone who tries to break into their fortresses by stealth. In the difficult terrain of the Wastes, they can climb bare cliff faces and plunge through toxic swamps - they burrow out of sight and strike with deadly efficiency. The Dwarves of Kuldunigrut would love to have the secret of breeding their own force of Guard Drakes, and would pay handsomely for it.

The Sorceror Montpellerien has a great menagerie of Guard Drakes in his harem, but has not been seen in many years and is broadly considered to be a mouldering corpse, still waited on by elemental servitors and guard by a force of scaly sentinels. Will you brave their jaws to plunder his wealth?




Verdict
An honest, serviceable, blue collar sort of monster. No-one's going to remember the Guard Drakes as the highlight of your campaign, but they are a perfect no-frilled roadbump - and what use are frills on a road-bump?

More Inspiration for The Gloom

Here's some recent sources of inspiration for the strange world of perpetual darkness which is The Gloom:

William Beebe's Bathysphere

This great podcast touches on two Gloom-adjacent themes: exploration in a place of complete darkness and the strangeness of distant biology. Not only that, but the quotes of Beebe are a kind of taxonomic Lovecraft - a verifiable horror story of what lurks beyond. This podcast has inspired a number of Gloom creatures  I shall post later.

Here's an appetiser of Beebe's prose:

"These descents of mine beneath the sea seemed to partake of a real cosmic character. First of all there was the complete and utter loneliness and isolation, a feeling wholly unlike the isolation felt when removed from fellow men by mere distance … . It was a loneliness more akin to a first venture upon the moon or Venus than that from a plane in mid-ocean or a stance on Mount Everest: no whit more wonderful than these feats, but different."

John Carpenter's The Thing
Oh man but I love this movie and I doubt a single reader of mine is not intimately familiar with it. It's gore, its protean horror of a monster, its gruff fatalism - all are Gloom in the extreme. A recent rewatch has inspired me to try and capture that same sense of terror and isolation and paranoia in The Gloom.
It's a difficult atmosphere to capture in an essentially D&Dish game, but I am considering systems for betrayal and in our pre-game discussion we discussed a soft tolerance for PvP - provided it did not dominate sessions and result in an overall bad experience. Introducing some 'Thing-like creature which could imitate and replace players would require considerable buy-in and an incentive for players to keep playing. Its definitely something to consider, perhaps for some kind of Gloom Halloween one-shot.

A History of the World in 100 Objects
A truly great series. Much of the treasure players find is from the 'Preumbral' civilisation that predates the Gloom, and much of the exposition and story-telling they're going to receive about the continent is going to come from that source. To that end, I need each treasure-artefact to tell a story. Each of these objects is layered with incredible depth and nuance and meaning, and says so much about the civilisation to which they belong. Some are almost mythic in their story-telling potential (the Harappan Dancing Girl, for example.)

Random Adventurers - A Gothic grab-bag of stat-blocks for 5e.

Here are some of the original Random Adventurers from the Random Adventurer Table for The Gloom. I think they are appropriately Gloom.

 D20 Roll
 1 A Penitent Soul. A lowly and elderly Mendicant in sackcloth and a hairshirt, clutching a religious icon.

 2 A Knife Dancer. A faded beauty dressed in a once grand but now tatterdemalion coat., concealing knives in her many pockets and petticoats.

 3 A Fallen Knight. His armour is rusted and has darkened to a blood-soaked shade. He hefts his dented sword with reluctance.

 4 A Thug. A quiet giant in battered leathers wields a blackjack and hatchet with a stoic commitment to his purpose.

5 A Heretic. He clutches his forbidden texts close to his heart and wears a much-weathered robe. His bright, passionate eyes glint.

 6 An Occultist. This bookish, bespectacled youth moves with a manic energy.

 7 A Scion of Salt. Every inch of this old sailor is covered in tattoos, many of which are sexually explicit. He grins in a mouth missing many teeth and wields an old cutlass.

 8 A Grizzled Veteran. Missing an eye, this old solider project a sturdy confidence from beneath his wide-brimmed helmet. He trudges, despite the weight of his armour, with the studied nonchalance of a veteran campaigner.

 9 A Fallen Woman. This old matron was perhaps a fair sight in her youth, and she still wears a face masked in extensive make-up. Beneath her torn dress bulge a brace of pistols and a knife-belt.

 10 A Flagellant Dervish. This exhausted man with circles on his eyes is bare-chested – his back covered in thick, blood-red welts.

 11 A Drunkard Priest. In one hand a rosary hangs, in the other a hip-flask. This portly priest’s soiled robe and red face depict a life spent in indolence, not prayer.

 12 A Hobgoblin Legionary. Stiff-backed and formal, this heavily-armour Hobgoblin carries a large blunderbuss over his back.

 13 A Charlatan. In faded motley, his clownish make-up seeping from his face, this street-entertained has turned his skills to violence.

 14 A Duellist. With the grace and poise of a panther, this exiled noble plies his deadly trade far from home. He wears a masquerade mask and a pistol and rapier slung nonchalantly into a fine belt.