How to Make Huntable Monsters
There are many ways to defeat a monster. Here is a list so you can enthusiastically support any mad idea your players want to try.
Note: I’ve used Cairn 2E as an example since it’s the NSR fantasy system I run the most, but all of this works with a lot of different games.
Note 2: There’s a lot of hyperlinks in this one. It’s a common topic that touches on a lot of other areas.
Consider the Black Wyrm
Framing this topic as an OSR/NSR blogpost might seem counterintuitive on the face of it. After all, this is an area of TTRPGs where, famously, we don’t have to kill everything because the XP/growth will come from treasure. Combat is fast, often fought unfairly and/or imbalanced (as war tends to be) so a lot of the time we can Just Use Bears. Moreover, we can:
Play different factions off against each other to avoid dirtying our hands with the messy blood of uncompensated battle.
Treat powerful monsters more as framing devices, environmental hazards or obstacles to be overcome, such as Bonebreaker Tom in The Waking of Willowby Hall (although he still has a stat block and can be killed).
But
It cannot be denied that a cornerstone of D&D and all that has come after is the slaying of Terrible Beasts or Corrupted Men. Even if it’s in pursuit of a bag of gold as a reward or whatever magical artifact corrupted the man (‘I never thought it would imperil MY immortal soul’ etc).
An example of this is the excellent adventure The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford. The titular creature must be defeated (not necessarily killed) and it has a lot of weaknesses… and also a lot of strengths, enough that taking it on without a plan is essentially impossible. The other creatures in the module aren’t as detailed, but that’s the point — this is intended to be a list for creatures that entire quests, entire villages, even entire regions pivot around.
As a checklist, this is intended to be a more specific one than Goblin Punch’s very good Monster Checklist (which you may well want to use to generate the monster in the first instance), but without the complexity of Nested Monster Hit Dice (hence using Cairn 2E as the example system). And of course, any of these can be given layers of complexity by varying how widely available the information is to the players — they should certainly know something even if they need to intuit/investigate further, but you can classify according to Landmark, Hidden, Secret.
So, what might our party try? And what does that mean in terms of the description and mechanics of our monster? I’ve split it into two main categories, then provided an example.
Holistic Solutions
A cartoon of a dragon AI-generated content may be incorrect.
It’s important to consider all the options, as our monster does not exist in a vacuum and the sandbox nature of OSR/NSR gaming means the scope here is incredibly broad. But look to have answers in the following categories:
Satisfy Desire - What does the monster want, and what will happen when they get it? You might be able to defeat the roaming mummy by returning its stolen canopic jars to its tomb (or making some fakes) or kill the guilty person a revenant is pursuing. Desires can easily be used in a more mundane way as lures for ambushes or bring the monster to a more favourable combat setting (see Environmental Weaknesses below).
It’s fine for a desire to only be satisfied temporarily (a dragon will eventually want to add even more gold to their hoard, but you can still use treasure to buy time to try other things) but it should still have a noticeable impact on the situation at hand.
Use a Resource - I’m going to limit this to ‘resources the GM makes available within scope of the monster/adventure’ because there is an infinite array of ‘the party use the reward they got from the last adventure to defeat the monster in this one’. This can be specific (a sword of slaying X is stashed nearby due to the infrequent appearance of X every Y generations), semi-specific (a nearby dangerous plant that will kill any monster provided it has a corporeal digestive tract) or broad (the local monster hunters guild will do your work for you if you can solve their guild licence recently being revoked).
Protect the Victim - Let’s assume that this is a viable choice i.e. the party could take whatever they learned/obtained and engage the monster in some form of combat… but maybe they can simply direct its attentions elsewhere? A warding circle around the village under threat, an ancient guardian roused from their slumber, persuading the local mayor that they don’t need to fly the traditional red flag of victory when the great bull of terror is nearby. The monster is still out there, but those offering up the reward are satisfied that they can go about their lives peacefully (enough that they pay up at least).
Exploit Weaknesses
Here, we move onto an assumption of violence by the party. This still doesn’t mean it’s to the death, and there’s a certain level of inherent OSR tactics that can be applied to anything — but because we’re dealing with a severe power imbalance, we need specific options so that the players feel they are meaningfully stacking the odds in their favour.
Inherent - At its most basic level, this is “it has eyes, why not shoot it in the eyes?” and can go all the way to “every third attack its ribcage opens up to reveal a green glowing heart”. A strength can also be a weakness — a dragon’s ability to fly make it much more dangerous but restrict this in some way and it becomes more vulnerable. A weakness may well still require a specific tool and/or skill to make use of it (see Smaug + Bard + The Black Arrow).
Note a subcategory of the popular “magical object bound to the soul of the monster” — this still implies violence but might involve travelling somewhere entirely different to the monster’s lair and/or a certain level of investigation.
Behavioural - Here we’re interrogating the monster’s routine in pursuit of its goals/daily life. Most monsters need to sleep for example or have specific periods where they’re weaker. This is likely to be secret information, as it’s in the monster’s interest not to broadcast the knowledge.
This can also include aversions/attractions. The cartoon elephant being afraid of a tiny mouse, or Yogi Bear wanting a picnic basket – these are quirks that add character and are something a resourceful party can use to their advantage.
Environmental - Jaws is a lot less threatening if you can somehow get him 100ft out of the water. 5e notably has ‘lair actions’ which are meant to drive dramatic lair-based encounters but also encourage lair destruction or luring from lairs to somewhere else. This can elevate the simple ambush into something more complex — combat as war means channelling Sun Tzu to fight on terrain that suits you and probably building some traps as well. Just hiding and benefiting from surprise isn’t necessarily enough, mechanically speaking, against monsters in this category.
An Example
First, we write some general fiction about the monster, why it’s a threat and who is asking the party to take care of it.
Note, we can assume all of this is Landmark (told to the party when they arrive in the area) or at most Hidden (they get it from asking in the tavern for stories, talking to survivors of attacks etc).
The Towering Snatcher of the Beanstalk Forest - Once there were four of them; Fee, Fi, Fo and Fum. They had a farm with many large beasts, in keeping with their tremendous size. Stories tell of four giant brides for four giant brothers.
Now only Fum is left.
He farms no longer. Instead, he prowls the forest with a grace that belies his twelve-foot height and muscular body. He seeks meat and does not care if it is human or animal, only that it is fresh. Into the sack it goes.
He crafted a coat of bone to protect against attackers, but there are fewer of those now, since so many have been struck down by his axe. The inhabitants of Jackbury fear the night, when a crash of splintering timber means a barn (or worse, a home) has been struck.
Fum must be stopped. The villagers will pay in coin and vacant farms. There are several of those available now.
Then, we turn it into a meaningful stat block, in this case based on the Cairn 2E Warden’s Guide:
Fum - 8 HP, 2 Armour, 16 STR, 12 DEX, 12 WIL, Stomping Feet (d8), Huge Iron Axe (d10)
A brooding, bitter woodland hunter. Armour made of the bones of his victims.
Stalks targets at night carrying his axe and sack before inflicting brutal violence.
Critical Damage: Target is thrown into the sack, to be eaten later that night.
And finally, how does it stack up against the checklist above? What do we add to change or add?
Satisfy Desire - It’s unlikely the party will feel too much sympathy for Fum, but there’s a whole tragic thread for them to pull on here that the GM can put more effort into the players respond to it. Playing giant matchmaker is a nice change from stabbing things and it has the option of making a lure by building a literal strawman/woman of a sexy giant.
Nothing more required for now, but we could add some additional hidden or secret information with greater detail about Fum’s backstory and/or the wider giant community. This might include directions to a giant village, at which point the challenge becomes persuading Fum that it’s real and that he should go there.
Use a Resource — We might define the Village of Jackbury as a resource but it feels like if forming an angry mob to take on Fum had a chance of working they would have tried that by now. We also don’t have much supernatural or magical at play here — Fum’s just a big hungry guy, so let’s add:
To the West (away from the Beanstalk Forest) there is a smoking hole in the ground. This is all that remains of an ancient evil temple, where worshippers would sacrifice victims by burning a special, magical incense that fills a whole room with smoke and removes breathable air.
This could be an entire dungeon or simply a puzzle to extract unburned incense from a hazardous environment. It’s a useful magic item, but it can’t readily be used in a pitched battle, so we can also add.
Fum has a log cabin deep in the forest. It is all that remains of his family farm. Although on a larger scale, it is not really that different from the villager’s homes — aside from the large cooking pot and pile of bones in a midden outside.
This gives us a closed space where the item could be used — although the party could easily lure him elsewhere.
Protect the Victim - We’ve already added something magical, so let’s not introduce a ‘Ward of Giant Protection’. Something Fum is scared of is a possibility, but there isn’t anything obvious in the fiction for that. Let’s try something else:
Hilda Brennigan is campaigning to be elected leader of Jackbury. Her proposal is simple, the entire village packs up and moves South — paying the party for protection along the way if necessary.
This gives us a way to completely flip the quest on its head. Whether the party are onboard will probably depend on how sympathetic Hilda is – a cautious, defeated widow? Or a wild-eyed populist?
Inherent Weaknesses - Since Fum is a big human, I don’t think there’s much to add here — his biology will be familiar to the players. They might go for the eyes or the Achilles tendon. Similarly his prodigious appetite is inherent, but specific ways to utilise it fall more into behaviour (see below).
Behavioural Weaknesses - A bone coat sounds awfully awkward to sleep in. And I’ll draw from reality when it comes to eating a large meal:
Those that are able to observe Fum in his home will see his post-hunt routine is always the same. First, he removes his bone coat before cooking (though his axe remains on his back). Then, after boiling up his most recent victims and eating them, he falls into a deep sleep.
If we want to make it harder for the players, we can also add a pet or noise trap here — Fum isn’t stupid after all. We also have “food as a lure” being an obvious option, but since it has to be meat the party will either need to persuade some villagers to give up valuable animals or go hunting themselves.
Environmental Weaknesses - All of Fum’s attacks are melee, giving the option for some classic homo sapien vs. mammoth tactics.
To the South, the banks of the River Bean form a thick marsh. Deep enough to drown a human, and severely slow a taller creature like Fum. The villagers say a family lives here, and has built a series of log bridges (which would surely snap under Fum’s weight) to navigate via secret paths. But they are insular and do not trust the villagers, let alone outsiders like the party members…
And that’s it. By looking at a simple situation we’ve already fleshed out the wider world and made it more gameable as well — you can then add in other opportunities and places to raid (perhaps whilst having to watch out for Fum in the forest, or not having much in the way of supplies because Jackbury is so desperate).