The earth trembled, its surface cracking to give way to the bubbling, earthen blood. The crimson oozed across the surface and with it came a mighty, rock-covered hand. It was followed by another hand which in turn was followed by a looming beast of wafting mane and scarlet scales. Horns of molten stone curled from its head and wisps of flame flickered from its fanged maw as it rose into a bipedal stance, looming over the party. They jumped back as it shook its great body, scattering the surrounding area with flecks of lava it had emerged alongside before it reared back to unleash a deafening roar.
I wanted to try tapping into a new series of monsters this week with the blazamut, a creature from PalWorld. I'm not sure if I'm going to do anymore Pals. The blazamut just seems to have a ton of area effects, lacking the unique abilities and non-damage dealing sort of abilities that make them a more interesting design. Nevertheless, I wanted to at least make the blazamut and pushed through with it!
It is built somewhat in the spirit of the brute, but I couldn't go full-tilt on it because of its vast array of area effects. Since it possesses the fire typing in PalWorld, I brought that into its traits, which in turn led to it having a weakness to water effects as well as an immunity to fire damage. Its attack bonus is merely moderate and because it has agile on its fists, those deal moderate damage with some fire damage while its jaws have high damage. Taking up more of its design space are its various abilities, which starts with some innate spells. It has fireball to resemble the ability of its same name whereas impaling spike is meant to resemble its Rock Lance though it loses its metal trait with Stoney Spike to instead make it the rock and stone that it is supposed to be. These spells utilize a high DC, which is repeated in its other abilities.
The blazamut's big ability in this design is Ignis Rage, designed after the blazamut's ability of the same name. It takes up three actions and deals limited use area damage split between bludgeoning and fire damage. Given the flavor of the effect, it blows up the ground around it, which converts the area around it into hazardous terrain before it swiftly cools. This is a three-action effect and that can be a little hard to work in sometimes, so to give the blazamut something to mix in with its Strikes, it has Scorching Breath. This is a variable action activity that starts out at less than unlimited use area damage, becomes just above unlimited use area damage at two actions, and then gets just below limited use area damage if it spends all three actions on it - while also increasing its area. It does also have the opportunity to set a creature on fire if they critically fail their save, fitting the Ignis Breath that is is based off of. I simply swapped the name to make it stand out more from Ignis Rage.
Pathfinder 2e:
Coming into the Pathfinder First Edition version of the blazamut, it has its standard breath weapon, a burn ability on its fists to inflict that fire damage, and then its ignis rage and stone lance. These are all pretty easy effects - I drew a bit on ice spears for its design though had it inflict the entangled condition to resemble the impaling effect of impaling spike. Outside of these abilities, the blazamut is armed with Power Attack, which leads into Improved Bull Rush and Awesome Blow to allow it to launch enemies about the battlefield. With water having much less of a presence in PF1e, it swaps out the weakness there for a weakness to cold while retaining that immunity to fire damage. His AC lags behind a little bit while his health is a tiny bit higher than average though not really enough to be of note.
Pathfinder 1e:
Blue's D&D 5e:
ENCOUNTER HOOKS
The blazamut can be used easily in a couple different types of encounters. It can obviously be utilized as a solo creature - perhaps the heroes are trespassing on a blazamut's terrain, causing it to attack until they leave - or alongside another creature, playing into the idea of it being a Pal to others. Of note, using the blazamut as a mount in PalWorld enhances fire attacks, so having it aligned with a kineticist or a fire-based caster could be interesting and have some unique interactions.
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Have a monstrous Monday!
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