What's that one creature you've always wanted to throw at your players, but so far haven't had the chance to?

My players have passed dozens of Harvester Devils on the street and talked with two of them, but they've missed absolutely EVERY hint and clue I've dropped for them and they think nothing unusual is going on. I've got this massive complicated political plot they're entangled in but it's like they refuse to notice the hooks I've dropped them and are obsessing over a minor thieves guild I hadn't had anything planned for.

Aboleth. They're only CR 7, but if you actually use one against a party of that level and play it intelligently you'll likely have a TPK without the PCs even seeing it. No one actually plays the game at levels where PCs would have a chance.

Something about these guys just seemed nasty, but I never got to use them how I wanted.

Inevitables. Specifically Maruts and Quaruts

Gorillions of what?

I personally have a thing for sonic-based beasties like destrachans and ythrakks.

Ethergaunts.

Once human(oid?) beings that now rule huge sections of the Ethereal plane (which doesn't get nearly enough love) that have innate abilities powerful enough to make an Illithid shit itself.
A multi-planet empire under one rule that hates all things divine, I've wanted to use them as the main antagonists something for a while now. They're just too big though.

Roving Mauler / Buer

...

Put a devil in the thieves guild, you dingus.

Goblins.

I always wanted to use goblins, but every time I would get reminded of bad greentexts at Veeky Forums and I couldn't do it.

Eversor assasin

Wut?

My current party almost got rekt by Hobgoblins during a playthrough of lost mines of phandelver.

The Astral Dreadnaught.
The lore behind this guy is terrifying. You could build an entire game around him.

Astral Dreadnought.

I don't know anything about it, but it featured quite heavily in a really bitching sounding D&D game. Romero couldn't shut the fuck up about it five years after he TPK'd the entire setting

The aborted undead fetus of a God.

Post images you gooses, stop da lazyness

An outsider with meta powers

For something so iconic, with so much lore to it, they're shockingly hard to bring into a game organically. I'd love to use the Beholder Civil War in a Spelljammer game I'm running but I'm struggling to figure out a good way to introduce it, let alone what to actually do with it

Oh god, that thing. When I was in middle school, nearly a decade before I got into RPGs, I remember thumbing through my friend's copy of the 3.5e MM1. The only things that really stuck with me were aboleths (which I really only remember the illustration for) and that. Seriously fucked up.

THERE ARE FOUR!

Ran these guys as my BBEG's in a high-magic campaign. The ability to ignore arcane magic made for some interesting situations, and caused my wizard player to actually play like he was on a team. Fuck wizards.

As for me, owlbears. I'm just too willing to cave when my party gives me the puppydog eyes and asks to level up, so they're always a non-threat after a few sessions and I don't want to put them in the game just to get gibbed in a round or two.

I still want to run one of those as a BBEG. Something about undead god fetuses sits with me just right. Probably too many JRPGS.

Use the Hit Dice progression rules, apply a template to make them dire or undead. Owlbears are great. HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!

Pretty much any of the abominations from the epic levels handbook would be great, but the problem is that epic levels themselves are kind of terrible

That magic/angel/snake/waifu that is so pure that it doesn't even poop, the name escapes me right now

This sounds like what you're describing, but I don't really see why you'd want to fight it in particular

Any of the really high level demon/devils. Not the archfiends, but the pit lords and stuff. Our campaigns never really worked with the abyss or hell, shame really.

Love me some Gray Renders.

No, those aren't it. The ones I remember were VERY fetish-baity but also powerhouses

Impeccable taste.

bumping for cool creatures

oddly enough, mindflayers or anything else resembling that lovcraftian theme. mindflayers, to me, were reduced too much to simply brain eating squidmen. would love to run them, but can't seem to make a reasonable enough backdrop for them. I would totally run them as the precursor to an elder god invasion.

Why haven't you?

It's almost like you had players who were good and didn't deserve bullshit monsters.

It's like deserts and forests are the only places they feel comfortable in

I hadn't noticed an opening and now this. Time to leave the thread.

Gay minotaur.

>muh six gorillion

They just seem so incredibly awesome. I had a plan where the party was sent to an enemy keep on the far, ass-end of some kingdom to scout out the area. Upon finding the keep they see its abandoned and even damaged looking, suspecting that maybe the enemy had seen the keep as logistically unnecessary and have the players go to check (maybe hinting that there could be things to loot if they don't take the bait), only for them to find tons of head-less corpses.

After having them search around a bit, they hear lots of screaming and a swarm of Vargouille's burst from the darkness inside the battlement walls, and a small fight ensues. Assuming they kill the 8 or 9 that appear, they think its over until hearing a shriek 10 times as loud and as deep, only for this abomination to come bounding out in huge, periodic, flaps from its wings, and they discover the creature that caused the collapse of the keep and what spawned all the Vargouille's.

There's some amazing gems in the other 2-5 monster manuals, and in 3.5 in general.

What is that?

Shrieking Terror.

Forgot to say its name. They create vargioulles.

Gelatinous Cube

feather snek

Behirs for sure. Sadly nobody wants to play mid-level D&D as it's too fucking complicated.

The Rust Dragon, most definitely.

It's a problem, because I absolutely LOVE rust monsters, but now that all of my party is using either no metal at all, or entirely magical kits of armor/weapons, I have the problem that Rust Monsters become a pointless nuisance, but the Rust Dragon decimating everyone's magical items they spent months getting just seems cruel.

I had a great encounter with a Behir back when my party was 6 level 3 characters, and it went over so well that one of my players stole it for use in a campaign he ran later.

Proud DM moments right there man.

I have the opposite problem, my campaign has been so focused on hell and the abyss that I have problems finding excuses for creatures *other* than Fiends and Devils

I'd love to just throw in an orcish horde one of these days.

one of my favorite encounters ever has been with an Aboleth

nearly caused a TPK when our CN Wizard turned on the party when it promised to give him some of it's forbidden arcane knowledge.

I didn't even plan that shit, the player was a champ, great end to that character.

Can't you just have a slave village of orcs or something? Have them be cannon fodder for a powerful demon.

Welp. You could always just have the devils' plot go off and now the players are trying to catch up.

That's how I did the mind flayer stuff I had been wanting to run. By the time the players stopped durdling and paid attention, the city was full of cultists, controlled guard captains, missing people, and on and on. It got so bad they abandoned the city and moved on, looking for an answer to the mind flayer problem while the world darkened.

Point is, if you're really trying and they're just not getting it, start to crank things up.

I can't agree with this. My players did something similar with a vampire plot in my last D&D campaign. They literally never got ontop of it. Ended up TPK and bad end for the world.

An Inevitable

Well yeah, you have to adjust and tone it down if your players are truly dense. That's why I had it contained to one city until they finally cottoned on to everything. Realistically, illithids would be infiltrating everywhere, but that's no fun.

If they really fucked up and never found the vampires, you could have just made it a ghost town and let it become the local Transylvania stand-in.