The party moved confidently through the forest, the barbarian carrying his great weapon across his shoulders. While the ranger casually scanned the trees, the alchemist at her side fumbled with a heavy tome, calling out the names of flowers and other potential components for her creations. Dawdling further behind was the druid, who seemed content to bask in the splendor of nature, offering greetings to the birds and other critters that wandered by. A cry from the barbarian scattered the animals as he leveled his weapon at a vast, aberrant beast blocking the way before them. It swung down with scythe-like claws as the party circled to face the monster, but only the druid felt the touch of invisible claws closing about him. Before he could call out, he was being hauled back into the darkness of the trees as his inhuman captor chittered hungrily.
Following a request, I put together a build for the wraith from Evolve. For the Pathfinder versions of the creature, I at least wanted it to have a name that wasn't the exact same as a pre-existing creature to avoid some confusion. As such, I labeled it as the warp wraith to reflect its ability to teleport. When it came to designing the warp wraith's abilities, it was made somewhat easier by the fact that the wraith's design is somewhat reminiscent of the builds from Full Build Friday where I have set abilities to work off of. At its baseline, the wraith is a nimble and agile attacker that attacks from the shadows before disappearing back into them, relying on mobility and trickery. While its vision is the same as those of the rest of the monster in its home game, it doesn't have any eyes, which I played into with the blindsight ability.
Warp Blast allows the wraith to dash to an area and unleash a blast that damages and launches foes back in an area, and I combined that idea with a charge from its Dimensional Assault. This allows it to teleport in and blast creatures with force to knock them prone while giving it another way to provoke sneak attack, as that is something the warp wraith lacks on its own otherwise. Its Abduction is already automatically in Pathfinder 1e with the ability to move a creature it has grappled, and Decoy can be achieved with the mislead spell. For its Supernova ability, it mainly just has haste to rely upon increasing its speed. Finally, its warp transversal is represented through the dimension door spell. Feat-wise, it makes use of feats to enhance its ability to move around the battlefield. I gave it bonus feats for Improved Grapple because I hate that it would have to spend a feat on Improved Unarmed Strike to get it in the first place. This allows it to pick up Strangler so it can deal its sneak attack to grappled targets if its struggling escaping with its prey.
Pathfinder 1e:
I built the Pathfinder 2e version first and was originally worried that it wasn't unique enough as a monster. Unlike the 1e version, it uses blink charge to gain the effects of Warp Blast and I gave it tortoise and the hare for its Supernova since that slows the other creature. However, given that it only quickens the warp wraith on a critical failure, I opted to include haste (though I did get a crit fail against tortoise and the hare in the test until a hero point was used). Abductor had to be its own ability in 2e and ended up being highly impactful in its fight as it works with Pounce. So the warp wraith could hit a victim with its talons and grab them as a single action, and then Pounce away from the group and hit their carried victim for a second action while also provoking Sneak Attack. I included Scything Frenzy and Escape Into the Warp as a means of spicing the creature up a bit since many of its abilities could be accomplished with spells. I wanted to capture the feel of the wraith floating above the ground a bit, and so I included the Slither ability, which doesn't preclude it from greater difficult terrain or hazardous terrain. The test was the single most mobile encounter I've run in Pathfinder 2e and was a ton of fun that didn't require a lot of tuning afterwards.
Pathfinder 2e:
Blue's D&D 5e:
I was real behind on putting this monster together, so unfortunately I didn't have the mental juices to come up with any encounter hooks for the wraith. Sorry about that.
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Have a monstrous Monday!
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