The great corpse of some squid-like entity sprawled across the beach, seemingly dead save for the odd twitch. As the party of adventurers cautiously approached, the movement became more obvious – and decidedly not from the creature itself. Slowly, a gaunt almost skeletal figure dragged itself out from under the pale body. It was draped in tatters of flesh and carried a gruesome cudgel that appeared to be made from pulpy flesh and was tethered to the abomination by a grisly cord. Slack-jawed, it regarded the crimson moon for a moment before regarding the intruders and unleashing a soul-shaking howl.
I hope that everybody had a merry Christmas and welcome back to Monster Monday! Sorry for the skip last week, I was really struggling with the build of this creature. Choosing to build the grafted scion was a personal decision, but this here ol’ Orphan of Kos came across my desk as a request and one that I had a little trouble filling. Overall, the Orphan seems a fairly simple creature – it’s the spawn of a Great One, so it’s an aberration. It’s highly mobile, so it has a higher base movement speed along with abilities such as pounce, Mobility, and Spring Attack. In combat, it primarily wields its own placenta as a weapon somewhere between a cudgel and an axe, but it can tear pieces off of this cudgel and hurl them as bombs. Respectively, it has cudgel and pulp bomb to represent these abilities, with the second to last sentence of the latter referencing its use of pulp bombs once it enters into it classical FromSoft second phase. Speaking of which, I sought to actually represent this aspect of the creature with the dreadful return ability. Defensively, it is balanced around this concept – it is notably lacking in defenses for its level but has relatively high HP. Once this HP is exhausted, it gets to refill that HP pool, enhance its defenses (which is true to the game as I learned from testing), and in general become deadlier.
A more notable increase to players once the orphan enters its second phase is its enhanced speed. I thought it was very simple to represent this with the haste spell in 1e, which does everything to bump up its speed, let it make more attacks on a full action, and increase its AC slightly. When hasted, the orphan also unlocks its blood explosion and heavenly thunder. These abilities are a bit different from the traditional form in their home game in part because Orphan of Kos is a set encounter in Bloodborne. He is always fought next to the corpse of his mother, which is what the lightning comes from during heavenly thunder. However, to encourage GMs to fit the monster into whatever environments they want to use it in, I altered it to emanate from the Orphan. I didn't want the blood explosion to be too similar to heavenly thunder and so I altered it to be a shorter action that it can use to knock foes down. Finally, to represent the wide swings that the Orphan makes with its club, it picks up Whirlwind Attack so that it can attack everybody in range.
Pathfinder 1e:
As is the usual these days, I built the 2e version of the Orphan first. It was a bit easier setting up its defensive abilities in accordance with Dreadful Return - it simply has half of the HP that I would otherwise give it. Its placental club is a high attack modifier with high damage until it makes its Dreadful Return, at which point its damage increases to extreme for its club and high for its pulp bombs. Its speed is a little higher than normal, and it makes use of this with its Leaping Slam, an ability based off of the bulette - same as the Powerful Jump. Furious Smash also helps with its speed, allowing it to make two Strikes for a single action so it can use its other actions to reposition or do something similar. Other than that, much of the Orphan of Kos was already described in the 1e Orphan.
Pathfinder 2e:
Blue's D&D 5e:
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Have a monstrous Monday!
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