The walls trembled with the impact of every rock against them, threatening to buckle under the assault. As the aftershocks of the last hit ended, a trembling guard poked his head over the barricade, beholding the horrors that lurked beyond the city’s walls. A horde of strange beings roamed, animalistic bodies encased in white metal and accentuated by blinking lights. They prowled and awaited the fall of the defenses. Working towards that endeavor, past the haunting mass were strange beasts resembling stegosaurs whose tails ended not in spikes, but twitching fingers that were loaded with heavy rocks that they launched like catapults. Periodically, fire-propelled cylinders fired from boxes on their hops, scorching and shaking the walls with explosive impact. A shout down the line informed that the unfortunate soldier that part of the line had finally fallen and as it did, the lines among the waiting beasts grew brighter and a terrible, metallic roar emerged from the horde.
This spike-studded cyber-saurian serves sublimely in shaky sieges, sundering shields and stockades with supreme skill to let its swarming sidekicks seize the split in security of the stronghold.
It’s time for another collaboration with the one and only, Cam McLoud! This week features an original threat conceived of by Cam and illustrated by spooky-activity. The spikestriker resembles a stegosaurus and is specifically designed as a living siege engine, intended to serve in machine assaults against settlements and other fortified positions. To that end, it does in fact have an ability named Siege Engine, which allows it to bypass Hardness to that effect. However, before diving into its abilities, I want to talk a bit about its numbers a bit. Defensively, its Armor Class is only moderate due to its lumbering size and with its weaknesses and resistances, it ends up using a high pool of Hit Points. Its Strikes aren’t terribly impressive. Its feet and tail only have a moderate attack bonus and deal at most moderate damage though there’s some extra spice on the rocks that it launches with its tail. When it opts to use its tail as a melee weapon, it has high damage but a low attack bonus since it also comes with the Improved Knockdown ability.
Also, I have made what should hopefully be a final adjustment to how Components work! There’s definitely some issues in just throwing players against a creature unprepared – having the time to research about Components beforehand is going to encourage players to interact with them. Unfortunately, the Monster Mashes don’t exactly facilitate that. The argument has been why bother disabling different parts of the monster when you can just rush down its Hit Points and disable the entire thing, so I’ve adjusted Components to have some of the damage go to the creature itself, increasing the value in doing so as you can see below.
From there, we can get into its actual abilities! I mentioned that rock throws have a little something extra, which comes in the form of its Shatter. This means that rocks erupt in a spray of shatter upon impact, dealing less than unlimited use area damage at a high DC Reflex save, sticking with this lower damage since it can potentially trigger this three times per round. However, this doesn’t happen when the Strike is a critical failure so it likely won’t get to use this on its third Strike unless it gets lucky. It has two other big area attacks – Spike Volley and Rocket Strike. The latter is limited use area damage at a high DC, resembling something along the lines of a fireball and knocking enemies off their feet when they critically fail the save. This slows down enemies trying to close on the spikestriker, letting it rain down more assaults while they struggle to reach it. Once enemies get a bit closer, it can use Spike Volley in a large cone. It deals a tiny bit less than limited use area damage, but comes with bleed damage should characters fail the high DC Reflex save. Based on its design from D&D 5e, this extreme hemorrhaging leaves a creature fatigued until the bleeding is stopped.
If the heroes still manage to close, there’s two things left in the spikestriker’s arsenal. Pulse Stomp is used to knock enemies back at an extreme DC, and thankfully targets Fortitude for a change, but it is limited by a flourish trait. This stops it from getting enemies stuck in a loop where a creature in melee critically fails against this, gets blasted thirty feet and then gets hit by another critical failure against it and launched another thirty feet. That’s more than what I want this thing to do. If that is still not enough, it can use Dorsal Deflection, based off of a reaction that the OG stegosaurus possesses. However, the spikestriker adds some juice to it – missing it leads to a character slicing themselves on its heat absorbing spikes and spurs that deals less than unlimited use area damage.
PATHFINDER 2E:
CAMERON MCLOUD’S D&D 5E:
ENCOUNTER HOOKS
A Spike in Violence: The heroes are defending a city that has been attacked by a swarm of machines, or even a human force, that has command over a squad of spikestrikers. With the spikestrikers bombarding the city, the heroes are sent as a special strike force to steal behind enemy lines and take out the spikestrikers. This could involve some skill challenges to get past the other forces before engaging in combat with the spikestrikers directly.
Open Fire: A spikestriker has claimed dominion over an area that the heroes are passing through. As an innately aggressive creature, it attacks them as soon as it comes across them, but could be explored in a unique way by giving it rocks with extra effects. It may be within a volcanic region and hurls flaming rocks that shatter in burning shrapnel. It attacks from a higher position, forcing the heroes to find a way up to it while it rains down attacks from above.
I've got a video over on YouTube that I'd appreciate you checking out. If you're interested in joining the discussion on what creatures/builds I'm working on or just discussing your own homebrew works, check out our Discord! If you want to get some teasers or help us get to our yet unlisted milestones for extra content, check out the Twitter.
Have a monstrous Monday!
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