Monster of the Week #12

This week we are jumping over to Pathfinder to look at the Doppelgänger. With RPG sales all of last month, I have managed to accrue a big chunk of Pathfinder material, and have been working my way through some of their creatures.

Generally, they seem a little grislier than D&D monsters and the Pathfinder Bestiaries are vast - with the 1st one providing more than 400 monster stats.

The Doppelgänger offers a pretty standard threat to a party - nothing inherently special. However, this week I have picked it because in a one-shot I ran for my normal D&D group, I had one of these infiltrate the group. The party were hunting for a killer, which turned out to be right under their noses the whole time. I've used this type of deception before, but weirdly never ended up using a Doppelgänger type monster before - instead its usually been casted shape changing.

Doppelgängers in Pathfinder also have a handful of decent abilities right out of the box - like mind reading and decent skills, so can be a fun encounter for a low-level Pathfinder group

The Bestiary offers an interesting guidance on how players can be Doppelgängers in disguise - a concept I like, but would be a little hesitant to introduce for our group considering we are all completely new to Pathfinder, but it's certainly an option in the future.Maybe I'll look at adding in a group of adventurers meeting... themselves? 

One thing I quite like aboutt Pathfinder's actions is that is seems a little more flexible than D&D's, but at the cost of more complexity. Doppelgängers can change into their true form and attach as a reaction which can make it's reveal that little bit more dramatic. 

Other than that - Doppelgängers are creatures you have likely faced before in another system or two (or more!), but how they operated in our first game of Pathfinder was a great laugh and offered enough twists and mystery that we'll be looking at running even more. For the party (and myself) the Doppelgänger was a great foe to face in our introductory game of Pathfinder.

-KJ