Ok so monsters are your usual inhabitants of a dungeon or dangerous place. Most are bestial, just animals of a particularly homicidal kind, but some have distinct desires and actions that shape how they act. Dragons are known for their gathering of treasures, Lichs for the creation of necromantic artifacts like soul wells, Golems for guarding an area or performing a task and so on.
This got me thinking about what the other monsters want and how those desires would shape a dungeon. Realistically, if a vampire decided to live in a dungeon, what would it want to do with its little section of land? What are the amenities of a vampire's dungeon home? Would it have cages to keep captured humans in to drink at its leisure? Non-lethal traps to ensnare prey? A big vault to hide in while asleep?
What does a Gelatinous Cube want? Or a Salamander? Or a Minotaur? Or any dungeon beastie
>What does a Gelatinous Cube want? Food, and it's completely unintelligent and guided by instinct so it's incapable of making intentional changes to the dungeon
>Or a Salamander? They'd prefer to be on the Elemental Plane of Fire so either working to open a portal to that plane, or working to expand that plane to include the dungeon as well
>Or a Minotaur? They can live for years without food and they're placed in the dungeon against their will so they're always ravenously hungry when encountered, which means that they can't leave so they probably can't alter it too much besides chipping the walls a bit
>Or any dungeon beastie If you want this thread to really take off, you should post a chart like this and have people roll to get an assigned monster and then write up a short summary of how they've customized a theoretical "standard dungeon" to their liking.
Roll 2d10 to do it the way the book tells you to, or 1d19+1 to give every encounter an equal chance
Austin Hernandez
Rolled 1 (1d20)
Rolling 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Aaron Parker
>completely unintelligent and guided by instinct so it's incapable of making intentional changes to the dungeon
There are tons of animals like that who make large changes to their environments in order to better capture prey.
Grayson Garcia
Yeah, but the cube was created to continuously patrol a tunnel of worked stone in order to clean the dungeon and also it has no manipulative appendages
Other animals, sure, but the cube is a magical scrubbing sponge Roomba made of magic acid
Noah Ramirez
The Efreet in this dungeon room was placed here after it was discovered that every wish it grants eventually corrupts and destroys the wisher in some horrible flaming incident. Contained inside an ornate colorful blown glass hookah by an ancient powerful sorceror who gave it to a young king in the hopes that it would corrupt him and destroy his empire. It worked and the hookah was eventually lost to time, only to turn up in a smoke house antiquity shop, claimed by the vendor to possess magical power to whoever dares to smoke from it. Purchased by a wealthy Lord who sought power only to succumb to its influence, his son paid an explorer to hide the hookah inside the deadliest dungeon he had ever dared to travail. The explorer simply took the gold coins and paid off a sorceror to banish the stupid thing to whocaresland. It ended up in a deep cavernous natural dungeon once home to a Chimera, now passed away of old age. Anyone who places some smokable herb into the hookah finds that it automatically ignites and fills the chamber with smoke and the Efreet emerges to mess with the user. Several decades have passed since any visitor has travelled there. The Efreet will remain trapped inside the hookah untill exposed to some terrific flame like a dragons fire breath or a volcano or smashed by an artifact of Ice orgins.
Luke Collins
Cubes are not that smart.
Also, G-cubes are gotcha monsters. They're made to dick over small adventuring parties, not to make ecological or physical sense.
Luis Reed
Ok, what about a slime or pudding or something thats more organic and natural?
Bentley Butler
Rolled 1 (1d20)
rollin
Camden Thompson
rerollin
Justin Rodriguez
Rolled 16 (1d20)
Mason Howard
>Ok, what about a slime or pudding or something thats more organic and natural? Probably wears away the floor of the dungeon. A stone-dissolving pudding that got into a dungeon could really make things fun if it ate through the different floors of the dungeon xenomorph-style and exposed different points of the dungeon to each other. You'd have a (more or less) straight tunnel to the bottom of the dungeon, but everything else in the dungeon would have a direct route through the different levels as well.
Anthony Campbell
It's really up to you. You can even use modified G-cube lore where they alter their environment.
Maybe they can dissolve out special dungeon segments to help them more easily trap adventurers or something.
Jack Jackson
This wyvern has its home in a large tower built just for it by the inhabitants of a small fishing village. Prior to the appearance of the wyvern the village had been repeatedly raided by bandits and brigands looking for slaves. A young girl travelling by the river looking for crawfish one day encountered the wyvern as a young creature seemingly just born. But where it came from no one knows. The helpless little thing imprinted on the girl as its mother and she kept it as a pet. Eventually it grew up and larger and too big for her home and during a raid it completely obliterated the bandits to a man when they tried to take her as a slave. Since then the entire village committed to caring for the domesticated wyvern and built a large wooden tower for it to live in and protect them from invaders. It never harms the townspeople as long as it is fed regularily and indeed emerges to slaughter any bandits, brigands, pirates and neer-do-wells who dare to try a raid. Oddly enough, since no raider survives the word never gets out to the other not to raid there and raids still occur nearly every few weeks.
Jose Stewart
Rolled 4 + 1 (1d19 + 1)
I'll roll it. How do we choose which table? I'm thinking post number might work, with 0 being your choice?
Hunter Ramirez
>I'll roll it. How do we choose which table? I'm thinking post number might work, with 0 being your choice?
That seems to be how did it
Chase Brooks
Rolled 4 + 1 (1d17 + 1)
Camden Price
The brown mold in this dungeon is growing over a sheet of ice that was once a pool of water. The mold's heat-draining ability keeps this area frigidly cold, and the new environmental condition has caused other monsters that are immune to the 3d6 cold damage per round to lurk in the area enjoying the ambient effects of the brown mold (or perhaps other dungeon inhabitants like orcs are using the area as a refrigerated storage unit!). The DM is reminded that while these new inhabitants may suffer damage from fire, the brown mold will double in size if a fire is brought within five feet of it.
Angel Murphy
Rolled 2 + 1 (1d17 + 1)
Liam Edwards
Sounds good to me!
>Purple Worm Not a proper room per-se, the Purple Worm dwells instead in a series of caved in ruins beneath the city and this room in the dungeon is an entrance to that maze of collapsed rooms and winding passageways. The ruins are suffuse with relics and treasures from the time before, but are filled with small colonies of Trappers who lie motionless on the wals or floors waiting for prey. Throughout it all, the Purple Worm slinks, occasionally burrowing into other areas of the dungeon and rarely into the city proper in search of food. Some of these forays have led to an urban legend of some form of Dragon living within the sewers that bursts from the walls to devour the unwary, but investigations into it have yielded nothing, unknowing that the source of these rumors lives farther below.
Thomas Stewart
Bump, I'm gonna do another one later
Isaac Brooks
Let's see it
Jeremiah Murphy
Rolled 103 (1d171)
Grayson Ross
>Ancient Red Dragon
The Ancient Red Dragon swears that the sun was a lot brighter and the earth was a lot warmer back in her day, but the reality is she's just getting old. You know the problem with getting old? The problem with getting old is that you always feel like you're freezing all the goddamned time.
She made her lair in a massive Dwarven furnace in the bowels of an active volcano because it's the only place where she can lie down without shivering and feeling like her bones are about to crack. What was once a thriving mountainhome is now the seat of a mighty empire of slaves, dedicated to feeding as much powerful kindling as possible into the enchanted magma forges that heat her white hot tungsten throne.
Pyromancy, magical artifacts, portals to the elemental plane of fire, none of it works for long. She's actually considering relocating her lair to a barren moonlet closely orbiting the sun, but isn't sure how to do it safely. The only people powerful enough to effect that kind of teleportation magic (she's got a big hoard) can't exactly be kidnapped and threatened into doing it. The only people who can reliably move things through space are the Illithids, and dealing with the squids is always its own special fucking headache.
Bentley Bell
Rolled 134 (1d171)
Daniel Cox
>Lernean Hydra
I thought this one might be a little boring, but when I cracked open the 5E monster manual I found this gem
At the dawn of time, Tiamat, the Queen of Evil Dragons, slew a rival dragon god named Lernaea and cast her blood across the multiverse. Each drop that fell upon a world spawned a multi-headed hydra consumed by a hunger as great as the fallen god's hatred. Great champions are known to test their mettle against these fearsome creatures.
So Hydras can show up in any random location. Polar wasteland? Hydra. Asteroid field? Hydra. Bottom of the ocean? Hydra. Illithid Colony? Nine headed Lernithirid
Oliver Cruz
Bump while I write this
John Foster
Pyrohydras, while able to breathe in unison a fearsome gout of flame and heat, have but a spark of intelligence that sets them barely above the level of a beast. But a spark nonetheless. This particular pyrohydra has survived by finding a lair for itself in a corner of the dungeon where the walls to the Underdark are broken open and numerous lesser monsters crawl from the cracks only to find the pyrohydra waiting hungrily. It especially likes eating the megalocentipiedes that live on the fringe of its territory. Most of the equipment carried into the dungeon melts or burns when its owner meets its demise at the heads of this 8-headed pyrohydra, so the floor of the creature's lair is coated in droplets and pools of hardened metal. The only treasure to be found here are fireproof objects like gems or possibly enchanted items. There is a magical ring which grants protection against the heat of a fire such as the pyrohydra's hidden in a charred pile of megalocentipede leavings; its unfortunate owner was caught unaware and unable to slip the ring on before being reduced to cinders.
Parker Thompson
I'm going to write one about the umber hulk just for the hell of it
Levi Mitchell
The Umber Hulk's burrow is beneath the city, connected to the same tunnel system the Zantarim use. This is a deliberate choice, as the Black Network often make's use of the Hulk's unique abilities. In any criminal enterprise, there are inevitably people who see or hear things they shouldn't. When those people can't simply be disposed of, it's extremely helpful to have someone on the payroll who can "adjust" their memories. In exchange for a generous payment, the Umber Hulk gladly scrambles the mind of anyone the Zents haul down there, erasing the offending incident.
Austin Richardson
Xorvintaal was a pretty good idea for bored, immortal dragons
It's a great game of chess like strategy between dragons, the rules of which are unfathomable to mortals, where the dragons put their hoards and strongholds at risk and use adventurers and other mortal creatures as the pieces to achieve their objective and take their opponents treasures
Sounds like a cool concept that would be useless in actual play. Like the Jyhad in V:tM.
"Everything is part of an ancient game of chess, taking place far beyond the comprehension of mortal minds" is fine if you're writing a story, but it falls apart when you drop it into a game. If everything is part of an ancient scheme and all the players' actions are already predetermined, you've robbed the players of all their agency. If the players can disrupt the scheme then it isn't actually the centuries old machinations of superintelligent beings, it's just another half baked BBEG plan
Adam Rodriguez
...
William Davis
Rolled 8 + 1 (1d19 + 1)
You know what, I'll give it another roll, see what I get.
Ethan Cox
Rolled 19 + 1 (1d19 + 1)
ugh, NPC party? That's both too open ended and kind of boring. I'm gonna roll again.
David Reyes
NPC adventurers are great my dude. They bring the game world to life by showing the players that there are other people besides themselves acting and reacting to events
Wyatt Robinson
Oh totally, the problem is for the purpose of this particular thing it's hard to write a motivation/lore thing for an NPC party because there are so many possibilities. An NPC party can be so many different things that it's difficult to work off of it in a vacuum.
