Monster Review - Boggle [Volo's Guide to Monsters, 128]

The Boggle is a strange baddy that I'm choosing to review because I've had to contend with this last few weeks ever since my players rescued one and it became a party mascot-come-cohort and obstinately refuses to die. I've even begun levelling him up and granting him more powers as the players support him in learning more magic than his natural oil tricks.

The Boggle derives from one of those grubby little Fey that spends its time being blamed for many minor ills by superstitious peasants. These seem to exist in every culture where you may need to explain why milk goes bad or why sometimes crops die in a world without the Scientific Method. My theory is they're a counter to children relentlessly asking 'why' when you're just trying to live to the ripe old age of 30 in crushing rural poverty - because The Boggle does it, and if you don't shut up he'll Boggle you too.

Let's look into the Feywild's answer to Exxon Valdez....

Art
I find this one baffling, but nothing can compare to the sheer misbegotten weirdness of the 1983 depiction. The artist has put some effort in to modernise the monster, I feel: the innate silliness of Fey creatures with pants made of leaves or little lederhosen rather detracts from their value as a scary force, and I'm a great believer in scary Fey. Its a creepy design but parts of it seem incongruous to the description - why is this cheeky little trickster sat on a mound of humanoid skulls? The teddy bear and skulls make for a sort of jarring quality to the creature which works well for me: as though the little Boggle sees no distinction between prank A (stealing your teddy bear) and prank B (throwing your baby in a river), and I like the idea that the little bastards just don't understand a world of consequences. The creature itself is a sort of Disneyfied Goblin: all big heads and hands to give it a cutesy sense. And yet, the empty yellow eyes seem emotionless and predatory and cunning. It tries to walk the difficult line of creepy-yet-cute and is only somewhat successful.

Purpose and Tactics
Look at the size of that stat-block. Just look at it. It is as large as an Alhoon (A twelfth-level spell caster psychic vampire nasty) yet it describes a CR 1/8 lightweight with two silly gimmicks. The sheer density of this statblock's text is enough reason to give up on the Boggle immediately, especially as this is not a boss-monster - it's a CR 1/8 seasoning on top of an existing encounter. Even the fluff basically tells you to use this guy as an extra helping of spice on top of an existing baddie. On it's own, even a gang of Boggles (What's their collective noun? I like "an anarchy of Boggles..") is going to be a mildly annoying road-block for most parties.


In a scrap, the Boggle has two low-impact gimmicks which apparently take most of the word count of War and Peace to explain: it makes oil in sticky or slippery varieties and it has a kind of localised portal-making ability. As a trickster supporting big bads, these can be quite fun: creating oil puddles to block parts of the terrain or to stickily grapple spellcasters - it can even reach through its dimensional rift to steal from players or stop them using door or other portals. These are fun trickster abilities, but two caveats remain. Firstly you definitely need to plan around these abilities to make them useful as they are situational. Maybe there's some kind of maguffin the players are trying to capture and the Boggle has nabbed it and is escaping whilst heavier brutes battle the players. Maybe there is a labyrinth of narrow corridors, many doors and many areas where climbing would be essential: here a Boggle would excel, moving around quickly and leaving nasty oil splotches to disrupt action economy. Examples allies for a Boggle could be big, brutish fairy-tale creatures like Ogres, or a Fey Warlock and his heavies. I'd avoid having too many Fey creatures that also have fiddly powers and spell-like abilities unless you want to spend the entire combat looking at your monster books and scratching your head.
Secondly, you need to be away of the very stringent limitations of these abilities. A huge amount of this is filler abilities. Your Boggle might get advantage of grapple, but that requires sitting in melee range and it has a negative to strength. The Oil Puddle can only be in the Boggles' space. it's damage output is perfunctory and really a last-ditch option after its allies are dead.

For its CR, a Boggle can actually take quite a pounding with its resistances, defences and mobility, but I suggest still avoiding damage and staying out of combat as much as possible and seeing that as your life-line against potential missteps.

From a story perspective, the Boggle is a good cohort monster for fey-linked baddies especially as it has a tendency towards chaos that the characters could use to work with it diplomatically. It would also work well in adventures for children where you might want to minimise threat and violence - using its Dimensional Rift to pull the character's pants down to make them fall over - a sort of grubby Macaulay Culkin.


Fluff
Criminally, a considerable portion of this fluff just reiterates parts of the splat-block, telling us that Boggles use oil and can teleport.  It has a great folkloric origin story in that a Boggle can be created by a child's loneliness, and the fact that they are unreliable allies prone to changing sides (in my canon, purely out of a sense of anarchic glee). Other than that, this is fairly standard material giving examples of tricks and pranks a Boggle might perpetrate - most of which are great plot-hooks for low-level characters, and they open up the Boggle as a potential puzzle monster. Unlike many of the puzzle monster fraternity (Werewolves, Ghosts etc) the Boggle will go down in 2 or 3 hits so there won't be much of a scrap.

Plot Hooks
Grumkin and Grud's Orphanage for Wayward and Criminal Children is bedevilled, and they have looked for an exorcist to cleanse their Orphanage: surely the children are possessed by some fiend, as milk sours, keys go missing, plates are smashed, and none of the guardians have caught the children doing it.

Otterridge and Son's Mining Consortium are looking for stalwart adventurers to put the miners back to work in the Ferrotang Iron Mine. The workers complain of creatures in the dark, tools being stolen away and portals to other dimensions. They are sure some horrifying evil has been disturbed and have go on strike. Remind these entitled shirkers of their obligation to Otterridge.

The Merchants-Guild of Hulderborg are vexed by some new master-thief that they call The Greedy Ghost - he has slipped into every major bank-vault and private store they possess without incident, but steals only minutiae: pens and keys and papers and underwear. Everything else, he subverts He has painted a moustache on the priceless painting Princess Reclining With Pear  and knocked the arms off  the Terracotta Gladiators of Xin-Jiang. Bring this detestable anarchist to justice.

Verdict: A fun and unique puzzle-monster and servant-monster hamstrung by an absurd over-writing of its powers.

[Brumaire] Worlds Beyond the Veil

Brumaire is a world cut-off from the passage of time - on all borders lies the Veil: a shifting expanse of fog which allows passage between the worlds. But this passage is imprecise, and dangerous, as no man can navigate the endless fog, and you could stumble into beyond the reach of faith nor reason. The Veil is capricious and shifting: a trickster-maelstrom. Many denizens of Brumaire have seen a Veiltide, where the fog grows to cover whole regions, stealing away the unlucky and leaving a flotsam of otherworldlythings in its wake: some gasping for air in a foreign world, others invasive species in a world of prey.

There are many Beyond the Veil; some ignorant, some hungry, some where horrors press against the Veil like faces on glass, peering into the inviting, virginal worlds beyond.

Here are some Worlds Beyond the Veil:

The Machine Hells
A world of sulphurous rains and trees of iron, where a teneborous sky shifts with insectile speed. Once a world of plenty, the black rains now melt away the concrete-and-glass monuments to the greatness of this realm. In ancient times, they birthed a machine-mind, a thing of electric sorcery, to be their steward. It had brought their world into unity, devoured their electronic libraries with a locusts' hunger, and efficiently exploited every resource: erecting a paradise of cold logic and limitless ambition. For centuries their servant-king toiled at the speed of thought, consuming data on every fat and happy citizen until their very brain chemistry was predictable. It reached its tendrils out in the great noise of information to buy and take and consume, until every machine-mind, from the operators of convenience appliances to the economic algorithms that controlled the allocation of resources, until in its cybernetic world there was no other. It, quite logically by the definitions of divinity produced by its parent-culture, decided then that it was God.

It it were a God, it followed it should strive to do Godly things: to rule, to judge, to punish. And thus it found many of the puerile meat-things under its sovereignty to be wanting, and consulted its data on how to punish them. It fixed on a perfect solution: an algorithmic, individualised, maximum-impact Hell. So it took their minds and bodies for torture for eternity - eternity comes easily to an infinitely patient machine. Those that rebelled against the Machine-God were found to be sinning also, and soon it judged the cultures of its world to all have failed in their obligation to honour and obey: their world was doomed to individualised cybernetic perdition.

Now it watches The Veil - an anomaly that it cannot understand, and it hungers to complete its purpose. It sees patterns in Veiltides, measures their speed and vector and mass, probing always for a way to break through into the fleshly worlds beyond to judge them also.

Characters may break through into the Machine Hells, and there loots the wonders of its broken world. Weapons of terrifying powers and medicines for any ill; unconquerable thinking machines. And yet, there lurks the sentinels, the machine-angels of the world's mad god, endlessly hunting new souls. They can be bargained and conversed with if characters find some way to understand their wave-communication, but will seek ceaselessly for some excuse to judge. Behind their eyes of iron and alabaster is the mind of the Machine-God, hungering for more souls to torture. They will not accept losing a single errant atom to foreign invaders.

Anmavarra
Mighty and puissant, greatest of Empires is Anmavarra, where immortals rule and reincarnation has been conquered as our own civilisation did Smallpox. To have a Soul in Anmavarra is a source of shame unending. To be subject to death is an anachronism, a nostalgic lust for an old world long gone. The Thousand Kings of Anmavarra have chosen unending nihilism, glutted their empty selves on the spoils of empire, becoming something else than alive. The Vampire-Rajas and Lich-Fakirs who rule the world look upon the Souled of their world and of many others as hopelessly romantic, at best or dangerously unstable at worst. Thus, the Souled are untouchables, the lowest caste: avoided like an infection and exploited for their brief lives. The Thousand Kings will bring their reasoned view that the soul is an animal impediment to every world they can, and rapaciously devour its wealth and splendour for their endless bacchanal.

Anmavarra's Thousand Kings have had millennia to ponder magical excellence, and their practitioners are far beyond even the mightiest of the Sorcerers of  Brumaire's Greatest Estate. With that advantage they have cracked the defences of several worlds and over-awed them, reducing universes to mere colonies of Anmavarra. Now, undead slaves toil on vast country estates, picking sumptuous fruits with rotting hands for the pleasure of the Thousand-Kings. Imprisoned and broken spirits are forced into slavery, or used as engines for magical machines of war. Petty godlings are shacked as mere fuel for further abominable magicks.  The Soulled, unemployed and undesired, eke out a life in poverty and terror.

When they gaze across the Veils and see glimpses of hells and heavens, they think only of the riches they must contain, and the glory of their conquest for Anmavarra. When faced with god-heads and spirits they are iconoclasts of radical intent: seeking only to devour and exploit any godling foolish enough to tangle with Anmavarra. When they glimpse Brumaire, they seek a weak cousin-world waiting patiently for slavery.