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VTT: The Avatar of Hate
🕑 Added 2022-07-01 08:19:19 +0000 UTCHere's something a little different for this month. It's the BBEG from Bob's homebrew undead campaign, the Avatar of Hate.
(painting by Phil Dragash; I cannot overstate how cool he is so please check out his stuff)
So this campaign ended 5 years ago, and admittedly both Bob and I are a little fuzzy on the details behind this encounter. The basic gist of it was that we were tasked with retrieving the soul of some legendary paladin who was trapped in this guy's soul vault or something (I believe that's the "Soul Monger" referred to in his statblock), and he didn't want us to have it because it was pure as hell and he wanted to leech off its power.
I don't think there's enough here to run this bad boy straight out of the box, so you're probably going to have to do some patch-work if you want to run him in your own game. That said, here is the gist of the boss fight that wasn't listed in the statblock:
- It was basically a very long, arduous game of "keep-away" involving the soul. We had to pick it up and move down a looooong corridor toward the exit at a constant speed. If we were too slow, he'd catch us and we'd die, probably. If we moved too quickly, he'd become enraged and go sicko mode on us. Finding a nice middle ground was key. Oh, and teleportation was disabled.
- His arms and head both have a "normal" stage and a "damaged" stage. I think one of his arms cast constant healing on himself, and the other one kept spawning minions. We had the option of attacking his arms directly (which had their own health pools), and if we'd damaged them enough then their healing/spawning functions would cease. The head's normal/damaged stages were just a visual indicator to us when he became bloodied.
- The minion-spawning hand could either summon a tentacle eyeball (there's two visual variants included but we'd only used one) that would shoot lasers in a line, or it would summon skeletons that would pop out of the ground and root a player to its spot. That's what the huggy skeleton ring is for-- it served as sort of a token overlay.
- I only drew one of his arms (albeit in different stages), but you can get his other arm out of it if you just flip it horizontally.
- He also had an innate AOE ability that did a shit-ton of damage and created difficult terrain as an action. It's not listed in the stat block, so I'll just include it in the next bullet point:
- The avatar summons a coagulated mass of souls in a Huge spirit meteor which falls at a space it chooses. All creatures in and within 10 ft. of the space must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw. A creature that fails the saving throw takes 4d6 fire damage, as well as 4d6 necrotic damage, and is knocked prone. On a successful saving throw, the creature can use its reaction to move a distance up to its speed to leave the blast zone; if it uses its reaction to move out of the area, the creature takes half as much damage and isn’t knocked prone. A creature that chooses not to move suffers the consequences of a failed saving throw. The meteor leaves behind a Huge, burning crater that's difficult terrain. For every 5 ft. moved through the area, the creature takes 2d4 fire damage. A creature resistant or immune to fire damage ignores the difficult terrain and fire damage.
- oh also we were a party of 5 at level 15 when we fought this guy. None of us died (during this fight) so hopefully that's helpful as to what level you could introduce him at?
I also want to throw out that this was from Bob's first time DMing, and he'd basically learned how D&D works during this campaign. If it's rough around the edges, it's because none of us really knew what we were doing lmao.
