Some horrors are a bit overplayed during Halloween. Everyone is expecting a vampire, werewolf, or creature from the black lagoon to pop out and snarl so here are a few ways to make a few less scary monsters scarier. Here are d4 critters with a unique spin to make your player’s skin crawl.
- Invisible Stalker. You may feel safe in your room with a guard at the door, but what will you do when a foe calls forth this killer to choke the life from you while you sleep? Who can you trust and when will another come again to try to take your life? It’s not like you can see it coming.
- Black Pudding. Some NPCs are evil through and through and every once in a while their evil literally spills out of them. What is more horrifying than a villain doing some evil act, immediately laugh, and then scream in pain as they sweat black ichor which becomes its own creature which tries to kill the heroes? Not much.
- Trolls. These dumb giants are fairly toothless in 5e since fire and acid is so prevelant and everyone knows that it stops this creature’s regeneration. To fix this annoying oversight have the troll exploit the loathsome limbs rule by having the troll cut off its own limbs to weaponize. Have the troll attach clattering bones to a severed leg to act a distraction as they kidnaps someone in the night. The troll could throw a detached arm through an open window to crawl into the bed of some person to choke in their sleep. If it was feeling truly vile it could throw its own severed head through through a window just to laugh at the dumb expressions of the started heroes.
- Goblins & Bugbears. These monsters are regularly overlooked because they kinda look like teddy bears and are thrown out there to be fodder, but they are terrifying. These creatures have +6 to stealth and darkvision which make them brutal nocturnal ambushers as long as you remember that the player’s darkvision only allows them to make perception checks with disadvantage in true darkness. This fact allows these hunters to quietly sneak up on the heroes in the middle of the night to ambush their (unarmed, unarmored, and surprised) foes.