Monster of the Week #17

 

This week we go to some custom made baddies by DnD 5e Home-brew Tumblr - a phenomenal place to find a host of home-brewed items and NPCs.

One that caught my eye was the Flame Revenant. 

The Flame Revenant offers an interesting and unique encounter for a group of adventurers. Particularly some of the listed special abilities with the additional limbs it can generate. The Flame Revenant is an angry spirit who has come back in the form of a charred body, and not unlike normal D&D Revenants, are fuelled by anger and, uniquely, empowered by other dead spirits who do not have the ability to return as revenants of their own. The flavour text of this character explains how weaker vengeful spirits manifest as extra arms on the Flame Revenant so they can exact their rage on others.

What really stuck out was how these additional arms can increase the AC of the monster, which could be a cool way to ping-pong the encounter's difficulty or handle skilled melees fighters in your party.

In addition, we can see the usual multitrack for this monster, with the arms providing up to 6 extra attacks. Ouch!

One thing that is great with many home-brew monsters, and especially a bunch of them from the DnD 5e Home-brew Tumblr is not just that they often have unique abilities, but also because they can be easily expanded/ modified. In the case of the flame revenant, it could very easily be converted into another element type. Ice could provide elemental damage, but could also affect player movement similar to how Frost touch affectes targets. In addition to this, new abilities could be made with minor adaptations to the Flame Revenant. If it's water earth based, it could earn the ability to make difficult terrain all around it to lock players in. 

This creature also has decent scalability too - instead of just being provided more HP, the max amount of arms could be increased, or it could earn fire based spells. This level of customisation could arguably be used for most creatures, but something like the Flame Revenant provided a simple but robust template to create additional monsters.

So that's it for this week - what did you think of the Flame Revenant? Let us know in the replies below!

Catch you on the next one.

-KJ