The creature had burst from the underbrush with a deafening roar, descending upon the party in a fury of spines, talons, and a snapping beak. Only the fighter's highly honed instincts saved him from the initial assault, his shield snapping into place at the last instant. However, even the grizzled old soldier had winced at the thunderous roar that erupted from the shovel-like beak of the beast, leaving the party reeling. As it leapt and struck with all the frenzy of a madman, it gave a pump of its powerful wings, performing a flip that ended in a slap from its tail that sent the battle-hardened warrior flying backwards.
For certain monsters, particularly those sourced from other media, I'm not sure I've been doing enough to establish the goals and concepts behind the monster I'm trying to replicate. With that in mind, I want to dive a little bit more into what I was trying to create with the yian garuga here. This is a creature from the Monster Hunter series that I first encountered in Monster Hunter World. It is a bird wyvern that possesses an extremely rough carapace, I actually remember almost all my attacks bouncing off the first time I encountered one, and an aggressive nature. The most immediately notable of its powers are its fire breath, the venomous spines on its tail, and an extremely powerful roar. Roars are a fairly common thing in Monster Hunter but the yian garuga, like the tigrex that I have previously built, seems to make even great use of them and is featured using it in its cinematic scene in MHW. More generally, the yian garuga fights with divebombs and aerial maneuvers where it backflips to smack prey with its tail. Defensively, aside from its tough hide, the yian garuga is immune to both electricity and fire, but is most susceptible to water. Finally, the gear made from a yian garuga has a slight focus on criticals.
With those ideas in mind, I began to build the yian garuga as a CR 13 magical beast, keeping it below the elder dragons I've designed but ahead of the majority of the creatures. As a magical beast, it naturally has darkvision, which the yian garuga is noted to have as well as keen hearing, which I tried to simulate with its blindsense. To give the effects of its extraordinarily thick hide, I gave it DR as well as immunity to electricity and fire damage. As with several cases, rather than just give it a weakness to water, which is occasionally seen but is a little odd, I settled on a vulnerability to cold for the yian garuga. I picked up Improved Critical and several other critical feats for its beak to play into the idea of its critical gear while its venomous tail spines are reflected in its sting natural attack. Its breath weapon is fairly standard, generally being a series of fireballs that have a cone-like shape. Its cacophonous cry is meant to emulate that scream that can force back even deviljho. I was struggling how to work in the backflip it performs with its tail attack, and ultimately just settled on it using the Awesome Blow feat to accomplish it. However, most people would likely look at the yian garuga's attacks and prefer the beak for an awesome blow over the tail thanks to the higher damage and wider crit range, so I tried to make the tail more appealing for that use by adding in the potent poisons ability. Looking at it now, I realized that I actually made a mistake in regards to potent poisons. It is only supposed to apply if the yian garuga makes a sting natural attack as a standard action - it shouldn't be applying whenever the yian garuga makes an attack with it. Finally, I wanted to at least capture the divebomb that a yian garuga performs, so I added powerful dive, which is just powerful charge but flavored to only function during flight.
Pathfinder 1e:
The test for the yian garuga ran into a little bit of trouble and some bad luck on the players' side, but they ultimately pulled through. Flight was a bit of a problem for them and then there were some unfortunate critical failures on some important saves, but once they were able to get a hold of it, they managed to turn things around. The testers liked the Startling Screech, which I specifically based off of its MHW scene in which it drove the deviljho back. The deadly trait on the beak is my inclusion of crit stuff and I was talked down into decreasing its damage because of the 2e yian garuga's version of its Divebomb increasing the to-hit of the attack and thereby the crit chance, akin to a boar's charge ability in 2e. I still wanted an effect akin to its cacophonous cry in 1e, but I changed the name for some reason that I can't remember. The testers talked me down from its initial version, which made a character stunned 5 on a critical failure and essentially took the character, a caster, out of the fight for two rounds. In this instance, I did actually manage to include its backflip into a tail slap! I based Tail Flip somewhat off of the bulette's Leaping Charge in that it has to accomplish a skill action to pull it off. I struggled to pull it off a little bit in the test - I'd succeed at the Acrobatics check but then miss the attack or I'd roll abysmally on the Acrobatics attack in the first place. However, I did finally pull it off and launch the fighter 20 feet backwards, setting him up to get Divebombed. It was pretty fantastic.
Pathfinder 2e:
Blue's D&D 5e:
This weekend was a little busy, so I didn't have time to come up with encounter hooks. Which, admittedly, for these less intelligent creatures, I always kind of struggle to do so. Sorry about that!
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Have a monstrous Monday!
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