- This is the Offal Walker.
This patchwork undead monster
is built from leftovers of rotting animals,
stinking of decay
and compiled from horribly mismatched limbs and flesh.
A pulsating mass of hundreds of feet of intestines
is used to grapple and pull its screaming victims
into its nauseating grasp.
And this...
is a Bakery Drake!
It's a lil dragon! Who likes to bake!
(upbeat music) (bells chime)
Today you're gonna come along with me while I design
an entire adventure,
and then I'm gonna give it to you for free!
You can download it at the link in the description.
It's a gross body horror adventure with an ancient crypt
and a mad cultist and a lot of words
like 'congealed' and 'tumorous'.
But before you just download it and close this video,
you can't run it without some key stuff
that I'm about to talk about!
So keep watching.
The Monster Manual is full of great baddies.
But, especially if your players
are really experienced with D&D, there comes
a point where no level of creative description
can make a well-known monster feel fresh.
And when they know
a creature's damage resistances or tactics,
even the most well-meaning player
is gonna metagame at least a little.
Could you reskin 'em, or even homebrew your own monsters?
Sure, if you've got time.
But I have a much easier option for you:
It's the "Tome of Beasts" series from Kobold Press.
Kobold Press, who sponsored this video,
is one of the most well-known and well-loved companies
making third party content for D&D.
They have everything from campaign settings
to whole books of new spells and more.
The third volume of their "Tome of Beasts" monster series
comes out this month.
This volume has over 400 creatures,
including new creations,
creative twists on monsters you already know,
and even some beasts that would make great mounts,
animal companions, and wildshape options.
And as you can see from the juxtaposition
of the Offal Walker and the Bakery Drake,
it covers all kinds of vibes!
There's also a companion book
called "Tome of Beasts III: Lairs,"
which is a collection of 23 standalone adventures
that utilize these monsters.
They're just like the adventure I'm giving you today,
except longer and better and professionally edited!
You can pre-order both books
in print, PDF, or for VTT
at the link in the description,
and you're lookin' at delivery this very month.
Now, let's write an adventure!
(upbeat music)
I have to say, I flipped through every monster in this book,
and could've written like
a dozen very different adventures with them!
There are monsters for all kinds of geographic locations,
like the ocean, the desert,
the frozen tundra, the rainforest,
even a bunch of cute gardening-themed monsters!
There were enough jewel and crystal-themed creatures
that I almost went with an entire adventure
about creatures living in an abandoned dragon hoard.
There are mechs and clockwork creatures,
all kinds of fey, and some real-world animals
that just don't have stat blocks in the D&D canon yet,
like hippos and musk deer.
If you really like dragons or demons or giants or hags,
there are whole sections
where they've just built out new variants
on classic monster types.
I wanted to mention a few creatures I really loved
that I didn't end up being able to fit into my adventure,
like the Nullicorn,
a corrupted unicorn that can spread
an anti-magic blight to its opponents.
Or the Doppelixir, which could make your players
scared of random potions forever.
Or the Catterball, a fey in the shape of a hairless cat
that changes shape and eats rotten food.
Or the Diomedian Horse, a carnivorous clawed equine
that is very difficult to train,
but bonds forever with its rider
if successfully domesticated.
God, that would be a cool mount!
As you can see, getting an idea for an adventure
was not the problem!
Picking one was the problem.
At first, I started working on a nautical adventure,
surprising absolutely no one.
But there are actually three nautical adventures
in the Lairs book already,
so I thought I should try and bring something new
to the table.
Also, I have necromancy body horror brainrot right now
because the third book in the "The Locked Tomb" series
just came out, so I decided, hey!
Let's get gross.
(gentle music)
I know Halloween's over, but I just feel like horror
is still the best.
I picked out about eight undead
and undead-adjacent creatures
that I thought suited the vibes I wanted,
and then I just jotted down their challenge ratings
to figure out what level I wanted to write this for.
That is, of course, a privilege I have when writing
an adventure for publication that DMs writing
for their own parties don't really get.
But I still wanted to stick within a level range
that would be useful for people.
If I were writing for level 18,
this adventure probably wouldn't get much play.
Some of these monsters that I wanted to use,
you would have to have a high-level party,
and we just aren't all that lucky. (laughs)
One of the creatures I loved that I had to nix
for this reason was the Bone Lord,
which is CR 19.
It has its own lair and it's very cool.
Maybe someday I'll get to use it.
I chose my monsters based on a few things.
Of course, I had to make sure they could all
be effectively used against the same party around level 5.
Now, I'm not gonna pretend to be a pro
at encounter balancing or anything,
but there's a very helpful section
in the "Dungeon Master's Guide" on page 82.
It's a table you can use to just get a general idea
of how many creatures and what levels of creatures
it's reasonable for any given party to face.
I did some quick math that made it pretty straightforward
to group the creatures by difficulty.
So obviously challenge rating is part of figuring this out,
but I also want to think about monster strategy,
and explanations of why these certain things
are in these places.
Animated Offal, Offal Walkers, and Vampire Blossoms
are all able to be created by necromancers.
Between challenge rating and theme,
I was able to narrow down my list to three monsters
and an antagonistic NPC
that I thought would work well together.
Then, I just put 'em in order from easiest to hardest.
I have a general plot idea, and a very loose outline.
So, let's put it together!
Content warning: body horror.
We're gonna start with the adventure background,
and adventure hooks.
I can always go back and tweak 'em if things change
while I'm fleshing out the rest of the adventure,
but I find that this is a good place to start
to orient myself around the story.
I know "we would like to pay you to do this thing"
isn't like, the most creative adventure hook,
but I also feel like it's the easiest one
to target at all parties.
It's a lot harder to publish an adventure that's like,
this NPC that you love has gone missing.
Not everybody even has an a NPC that they love.
When writing for your own party,
I think it's a really baller DM move to tie
an adventure hook to at least one player character
in a personal way.
But when writing for publication,
you gotta make sure your hooks are fairly universal.
I went with one option where the party
hears about the job and travels to the town,
and one where they're passing through the town
and learn about the problem there.
I did end up going back and editing in an option
where a player character could receive a letter
from a family member or friend living in the town,
just in case a DM happened to feel like
that fit their circumstances.
Entering the crypt.
For this one I wanna use an enemy
that is pretty lightweight.
I feel it'll be easy for them to defeat,
but it'll be a surprise, and I think swarms are fun.
There are a few swarms in this book and I like 'em.
I feel like they demand
a different kind of combat strategy from players
than one or even a handful of enemies usually calls for.
What I like about this swarm
is that it looks like it's just flower petals at first.
And what more reasonable place to find strewn petals
than in a tomb, right?
This is more to set the tone
for the adventure than to actually present
a credible threat.
Sometimes people say, "not every combat in D&D
needs to be deadly," but if you remove the threat
and there's no other compelling element, you can end up
with something really boring.
I think this is a great example of an encounter
that isn't necessarily threatening,
but still serves a purpose:
It quickly turns investigation into action,
it establishes a mood and heightens tension,
plus this creature actually has a meaningful role
to play in the plot.
The swarms store excess blood in their mask,
causing their white petals to turn pink and red.
Creatures that feed on blood such as vampires
cultivate the blossoms, allowing them to drink
the stored blood without alerting others
to their presence.
This is very key to my plot here.
I really wanted to include an NPC in this adventure,
'cause there's a whole section
with little NPC templates,
and there's an NPC template called atavist,
which is a cultist.
They do blood magic,
and it says here, many of them can't
survive without regular transfusions of blood.
Sounds to me like the kind of creature
that would benefit from some Vampire Blossoms, huh?
I will also say,
in an adventure that's meant to function
as a one-shot and has multiple combat encounters,
I want at least one of them to be pretty quick and easy.
I've planned three possible encounters,
and I definitely don't want characters,
or players, for that matter,
going into the final encounter
already worn out from several long, drawn-out fights.
Okay, so that's the Vampire Blossoms.
The catacombs.
So I gotta figure this out here.
There's some information that needs to be communicated
from the NPC, and it's possible that
they will just kill him.
Personally I find it pretty disappointing
when you complete a quest or something,
and you never actually find out why any of it was happening.
This is a classic problem, right?
You give important information to an antagonistic character
and you run the risk that your party
will just stomp them and never learn what they knew.
At first, I wrote this section as combat with the option
for players to choose to talk instead of fight.
Leaps from the shadows, yells, "I opened it!
I have rights to what lies within!"
And attacks. (laughs)
A little cheesy, but that's okay.
But once I started writing down all the stuff
the characters might learn from him,
a problem started to take shape.
Alright, what do they need to learn from him?
They need to learn, alright, he opened the tomb,
and we'll say why.
There is a creature in the catacombs.
He plans to capture the creature.
He's in over his head.
That's a lot of information.
And since no other creatures in the tomb use language,
this is pretty much their only opportunity
to learn the whole story of why the tomb was opened
in the first place.
And Atavist is not particularly dangerous
to a party of five level fives.
There is a very good chance
they would just kill him on the first round,
and never get the opportunity to talk with him.
So maybe I shouldn't have them fight at all.
That probably makes the most sense.
Like, they can choose to fight him
if they want to, but I shouldn't have him attack them.
Pretty simple lesson there.
Don't want players to kill somebody?
Don't have that somebody attack first.
Okay, so now they come down the stairs,
he leaps out, I mean, they might attack him right then.
It's kind of up to them.
If they wanna talk to him, they can,
and he provides information.
But if they wanna move past him into the catacombs,
which of course, they do, he won't let them,
so he will either fight them,
or they can roll a charisma check of some kind
to try and get him out of the way.
That's a lot cleaner, I think.
Of course, once they have the information,
they can totally kill him.
So it makes way more sense for me to have this NPC
threaten the party after they've talked.
Easy fix!
This is the final encounter!
In the flesh!
I started off the final encounter with a few options
for how the players could find the creatures,
or how the creatures might find them.
Ultimately, the catacombs I've designed
are really straightforward
and it would be hard to miss the final encounter
unless you just turn around and leave,
but I still want players to feel like they have agency
and navigate the space in whatever way they choose,
be that using stealth, detailed investigation,
tracking, or something else.
Which brings us to the encounter itself.
I picked out two of my favorite body horror monsters
from "Tome of Beasts III",
which I think complement each other really well.
So I really like the combination of
Animated Offal and Offal Walkers,
because obviously, they are both made of just like,
gross masses of rotting flesh,
which is great thematic parallel.
But also, Offal Walkers are not really a threat
on their own.
They're not very strong, but they have the ability
to basically lasso and pull opponents towards them
Meanwhile, the Animated Offal is pretty strong
and has some really cool capabilities,
like subsume, where it basically just
absorbs a creature, but there's just one of it.
So if fire is focused on the Animated Offal,
it can go down pretty fast.
Combining them together is great, because then,
the Offal Walkers can distract the party,
separate them, draw them apart, and basically capture prey
for the Animated Offal.
Since the first combat is trivial and the second
is both optional and easy,
this final encounter is really the meat of the adventure
when it comes to fighting.
So I wanted it to be genuinely difficult,
and hopefully scary!
Considering it's supposed to be deadly for a party
of this size and level,
I think ultimately, it'll be good for them
to go into it relatively fresh.
Now, is it possible that they will use up
some high level spells and waste wildshapes
and and rages and stuff on early encounters?
Absolutely, and that will
make the final encounter more challenging.
The DM's Guide is very intent on randomizing loot;
it has a bunch of tables that you roll on
just based on the monster's challenge rating.
But the only allowance it makes for the rationale
of this loot is that if a monster wouldn't hoard treasure,
the treasure can just be leftover
from the monster's other victims,
and that if a monster wouldn't rationally carry coin,
just make it carry gems or art objects instead.
Which doesn't really make any sense.
I'd rather pick loot that makes sense for the creature
and the story, and in this case, it's a perfect set-up
for picking powerful magic items
off some long-dead necromancer's body.
Players were promised
maybe some ancient magical item in here.
I thought about the ring of necrotic resistance,
but Animated Offal deals a ton of necrotic damage,
and it's like,
ooh, maybe that's good though.
Maybe the necromancer's wearing
the ring of necrotic resistance
and that's the only reason why there's still a corpse.
I scrolled back and made some quick edits to specify
that the other coffins in the catacombs were cleaned out
of organic matter but still had metal bits floatin' around.
That way, seeing the necromancer's desiccated corpse
could actually be a clue to the ring's power.
I think that's pretty neat.
Now all we need is Concluding the Adventure!
The adventurers are given their 1500 gold pieces
Lathar has fled.
That's the bones!
I'd call something like that a first draft.
It took me about two hours, working from a loose outline.
I then added flavor text, ran it past some friends,
made edits based on their feedback,
and then put it all together into a nice PDF
with composite graphics
that I spent way too long making with media
from like seven different stock image sites,
because I am just incapable of doing something lowkey.
I know undead and underground catacombs
are pretty common themes in D&D,
but what really spoke to me about these creatures
was how unexpected they were.
This isn't just like a zombie or a lich,
it's something that I think any party would be
really surprised and honestly, disgusted to encounter.
And if you like tricksy classic monsters like mimics
and gelatinous cubes,
but your players are just too savvy for those,
something like the swarm of Vampire Blossoms is perfect.
Even though there are so many different tones
and concepts in this book,
I found it really easy to group together monsters
that felt similar
and even add an NPC that was really well-suited,
and that would be equally possible
for pretty much any theme.
And that was with me operating under the restriction
of only using monsters from this book,
which isn't what anyone else would be doing.
You'd be adding these 400 creatures
to the existing "Monster Manual,"
so could use the monsters from "Tome of Beasts"
as extra special flavor.
Maybe the minions are a creature your players
are already familiar with,
but the boss is something they've never seen before.
Maybe a mount or familiar form in this book
is a cool reward for players at the end of an important arc
or a big quest.
Maybe your players travel to a new continent or a new plane
and you want to use all unfamiliar monsters
to really make them feel like they're not in Kansas anymore.
How you use the book is entirely up to you.
If you want to download the adventure I wrote
for this video, "Flesh and Blood,"
you can get it at the link in the description.
But remember that you need "Tome of Beasts III"
in order to run it, and you can pre-order
that at the Kobold Press website,
also linked in the description.
And if my adventure isn't your style,
you need something for a different party level,
or you just want more, make sure to also
pick up "Tome of Beasts III: Lairs",
which is full of awesome adventures using these monsters!