Ixalan was one of my favorite recent sets of Magic the Gathering - dinosaurs, pirates, vampire conquistadors are all just so much fun! The set was a blast and only slightly bogged down in the awful story they'd been taking years to tell, which was easy enough to ignore. With how much I loved it, I've been working on statblocks for a couple of monsters from that set, most notably the elder dinosaurs. So, get your sunglasses on so that you can gaze upon Zetalpa, the Primal Dawn!
I did the easy elder dinosaurs first and now we're getting into some of the harder ones. Flying was easy to come up with and I sought to emulate Vigilance with the Combat Reflexes feat. For Indestructible, I decided to use regeneration similar to the Tarrasque's regeneration, which left me with Double Strike and Trample. For the former, I took the Multiattack feat, to make it easier to make a multitude of strikes. Then for Trample, I built the sundering beak ability to represent an attack piercing through defenses. By the end of that, Zetalpa felt a little plane to me so I dipped into the lore a little bit to give it its radiant dawn ability. I made the blinding permanent as the blindness/deafness spell is permanent and only a 2nd-level spell.
Pathfinder 1e Version:
For the PF2e version, I managed a pretty direct translation of the 1e version with the a few fun additions. Unfortunately, I ran into some issues and my document didn't save properly. Radiant Dawn is DC 38 while its Hover is DC 40. Since Attack of Opportunity is rare enough as a reaction, I used that as a stand-in for Vigilance while Primal Frenzy is meant to represent Double Strike. Snatch felt like an appropriate ability for Zetalpa, allowing it to simply fly away with victims.
Pathfinder 2e Version:
Blue's D&D5e Version:
ENCOUNTERS
Wings of Change: The heroes are riding in a passenger airship that comes across a recently awoken Zetalpa. The ship cannot outfly the immense beast and has minimal defenses, but the primal behemoth is fortunately befuddled by the strange flying apparatus. Aside from a few basic cannons and a crew meant to deal with more mundane threats, the airship has no chance of defending itself and the captain pleads with the heroes to help save them. After overcoming its confusion, Zetalpa attacks the airship, enraged that something else would invade its aerial domain. The heroes have to deal with the airship as it is being tossed about before they can finally confront Zetalpa.
Terror-Dactyl: Zetalpa’s flight across a sea has stirred up a vast tsunami that is threatening to devastate a coastal city. The heroes must find a way to save the city before Zetalpa arrives and save what defenses they can to use against the behemoth. The aerial monstrosity sets about razing the city as soon as it arrives and the heroes must navigate through the collapsing city as they battle the vast beast.
We've got a Discord for Monster Monday now, so if you're interested in building, discussing, and sharing monsters and other homebrew content, come check us out: https://discord.gg/W4THAs5
Have a Monstrous Monday!
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