Black Pudding - Legendary to Relentless #2
Welcome to Legendary to Relentless!
In this series I want to walk through my thought process of converting monsters from the 5E 5.1 SRD into bespoke adversaries for Daggerheart. You can check out the previous installments in the series here:
A few caveats before we begin:
- I love reskinning and I think that's a super valid way to do things. I regularly reskin existing adversaries from the Daggerheart core rulebook for the majority of my sessions and it’s usually my first thought before creating a bespoke monster.
- I will be heavily using the Daggerheart homebrew kit and SRD as reference for this series. I think the best starting point is existing material so you can see the lay of the land that you’re working with.
- The Daggerheart devs have talked about in previous videos that some of the keys to adversary design are deciding on its “one cool thing” and what you decide to put emphasis on. What I decide to focus on, might be different than you and that’s totally okay! You have to pull apart the monster and decide what the most important thing is. For more on this I recommend the dev streams on Darrington Press’ YouTube channel and the videos on adversary design by Daggerheart additional designer Mike Underwood.
Now let's get to our next victim, the Black Pudding!
As we go through this exploration of how I think about creating DH adversaries, I think it’s important to look at the design of the stat blocks themselves. A Daggerheart adversary stat block can be broken into three parts: description, stats, and features.
In the adversary’s description section you get their name, tier, type, a short description of them, and their motives + tactics.
The first thing we need to decide is what tier of adversary we want to make our black pudding. You can choose any tier you like, but for today I’m going to do a rough estimate based on its 5E equivalent. A black pudding is a CR 4 monster, so I’m going to divide that in half because DH has half as many PC levels as 5E, and then I’m going to map it to the DH tiers. This will give us a tier 2 adversary.
Then I want to look at it’s monster type. The DH SRD tells us that, "Standards: representative of their fictional group.", which sounds right for our black pudding as a standard ooze.
Next, is a short description of the creature. This is where it starts to become important to read through the 5E stat block, and the information about the monster, to decide what flavor we want to make our DH version. The things that jump out to me are:
- It's considered a Large monster
- It's corrosive when you touch it
- It splits into multiple smaller oozes when it takes sufficient damage
These descriptors will also help us later when we are designing features for this adversary.
Finally, the last part of this section is the adversary’s motives and tactics. The DH SRD tells us that adversary motives and tactics are, “suggested impulses, actions and goals for the adversary”. This is another spot where the the 5E stat block, and the information about the monster will be useful. This is also where I started flipping through existing DH adversaries to get an idea of the language that they use for their motives and tactics.
With that, here's what we have for our DH black pudding so far.
BLACK PUDDING
Tier 2 Standard
A bubbling pile of corrosive black goo
Motives + Tactics: Consume, erode, split
The next section of the adversary stat block is the stats themselves. This is where we’ll be heavily relying on the guidelines from the Daggerheart homebrew kit, and then making adjustments as needed. I also look at the existing DH adversaries to decide how my new adversary measures up.
This black pudding lines up with Tier 2 Standard stats, but the main thing I wanted to showcase was it's size in the range of its standard attack. Since black puddings are Large creatures in 5E, I gave its standard attack a range of Very Close.
I also gave it the Experience "Stealthy +2". Not all adversaries need Experiences. The DH SRD tells us, “The GM can spend a Fear to add an adversary’s relevant Experience to raise their attack roll or increase the Difficulty of a roll made against them”. I know some DH GMs don’t feel it’s worth the Fear spend, but even if you don’t use it mechanically I think Experiences are a great way to use both the name and the bonus to indicate something about the adversary. In the case of the black pudding, part of the fantasy is its ability to hide and drop its corrosive form on to unsuspecting adventurers.
After consulting the tomes, here's what we have for our DH black pudding so far.
BLACK PUDDING
Tier 2 Standard
A bubbling pile of corrosive black goo
Motives + Tactics: Consume, erode, split
Difficulty: 13 | Thresholds: 12/22 | HP: 6 | Stress: 3
ATK: +1 | Acidic Pseudopod: Very Close 2d6+3 phy
Experience: Stealthy +2
The last section on the adversary stat block are the Features. Adversary features include Passives, Actions, and Reactions in that order. To minimize the cognitive load on the GM we want to avoid overloading our adversary with features. As a Standard adversary, we want to keep our black pudding's Features to a minimum.
First, I felt like the black pudding's corrosive nature was an important Passive ability so I made Corrosive Touch. I decided to have this ability corrode Stress instead of Armor slots to have it be more of a slow progression before it starts hitting HP.
Then, for Reactions I wanted to try something slightly different from the other oozes in the DH SRD. When the black pudding splits instead of becoming two new adversaries it instead gains the Split Condition. This simplifies tracking of the adversaries both in stat blocks and creatures on the battlemap. Since this does weaken the adversary I included a Stress based version of Relentless to allow each Split black pudding to act twice to represent both its tiny counterparts. By using Stress instead of Fear this will significantly limit the amount of times the black pudding can activate it before becoming Vulnerable and hopping on the death spiral.
With that we have our final black pudding stat block!
BLACK PUDDING
Tier 2 Standard
A bubbling pile of corrosive black goo
Motives + Tactics: Consume, erode, split
Difficulty: 13 | Thresholds: 12/22 | HP: 6 | Stress: 3
ATK: +1 | Acidic Pseudopod: Very Close 2d6+3 phy
Experience: Stealthy +2
FEATURES:
Corrosive Touch - Passive: When a creature makes a successful attack against the Black Pudding from within Melee range they must mark a Stress as the acidic exterior eats into them.
Split - Reaction: When the Black Pudding marks half its HP it immediately becomes Split. While Split the Black Pudding has the appearance of two smaller Black Puddings. The GM may mark a Stress to spotlight a Split creature a second time per GM turn.
Let me know what you think about our black pudding in the comments below! Would you change anything about this creature?
Then, let me know what creature from the 5.1 SRD you’d like to see converted next!
Resources
D&D 5E SRD 5.1
Daggerheart SRD 2.0
Daggerheart Homebrew Kit
Daggerheart Additional Designer Mike Underwood’s Youtube Channel
This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 2.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.
This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.