Five Deadly Low-Level Monsters in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

a grizzled old adventurer sits in the tavern were canting tales of the ancient dragons demon Lords and even the mighty Tarasque that they have battled over the years but what scares them the most are the monsters they faced as a brand new adventure you're talking about the 5 deadliest low-level monsters in Dungeons and Dragons greetings my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes and today were taking a look at five of the deadliest low-level monsters in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is packed with deadly creatures which can annihilate even the most powerful adventurers demon Lords mighty dragons insane elementals and aberrations from beyond the far realm can decimate player characters and send the others running for their lives and although these are wonderful set-piece battles we're not focusing on those today we're gonna go all the way back down to the very low level monsters of challenge rating 2 or under these are monsters that because of their low challenge rating and the bounded accuracy system in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition they're able to pose as much of a threat to a first level character as they can to a very high level character even as far as 20th level because of this these monsters can also be used in very large groups where their unique abilities can be leveraged to deadly effect these monsters possess abilities that can bypass the defenses of the highest level players or the intelligence to get around them these abilities are often so powerful that they can kill a player character outright which makes them very unique and part of a very small subset of creatures that have the ability to bypass the damage dealing capabilities of other monsters and go right for the kill so let's get rolling the first monster we're going to look at today is the shadow the shadow is a challenge 1/2 undead creature formed of shadow stuff itself it lurks in the darkest depths of the dungeons striking out from within the shadows cast of adventurers themselves as its amorphous form allows it to move almost silently and sneak into very small spaces as it tails behind a party of adventurers waiting for the moment to strike the shadow is immune to a whole slew of different conditions and resistant to weapon damage and various types of elemental damage as well although it is vulnerable to radiant damage and it only has a handful of hit points but these resistances do make it quite tough especially at low levels that said the shadows most iconic and deadly ability is its strength drain melee attack this attack only deals 9 points of necrotic damage which doesn't seem like that much on paper but when you get hit by the strength drain ability your strength score is reduced by one d4 and if you are hit successive times by this ability such that your strength is reduced to zero you die outright there is no saving throw to avoid the strength damage if the attack hits it happens and as the damage is racking up against your strengths core fighters and paladin's and barbarians are losing their ability to attack effectively because they say suffer penalties to their attack and damage characters wearing heavy armor might find that their armor is now weighing them down dramatically so they can't move as effectively so it really causes a bit of a death spiral until eventually your strength is strained completely and you die only to be raised up 1 to 4 hours later as a shadow yourself that's the real kicker your friend goes down in battle and a few hours later you're fighting their shadow so it's it's brutal if you're somebody who stands in the back lines and usually doesn't have a very high strength score to begin with like a spell caster chances are you're not going to last a lot of rounds if you're getting pummeled by shadows we're still since these character like archers rogues Wizards are often in the back ranks of the party where a shadows stealth abilities make it very very easy for them to sneak up behind the party it's relatively easy for a shadow or a pair of shadows to ambush a vulnerable and weak player character drain their strength down to zero and kill them really really quickly the shadows low challenge rating means that even a second or third level party might have to face two three maybe even four shadows at a time and the shadows ability is naturally gravitate them towards kind of all enveloping a single target at once and wizard with eight strengths that gets hit by a strength drain attack for 1.d4 it only takes three maybe four hits for their strengths core to be drained out completely and they're dead outright with a lot of these player characters that do have lower strength scores that also means that as they level up throughout a campaign they may not gain better armor or gain better AC meaning that the shadows can still do a lot of damage to them at very high level play as well and even a mighty character with a very high strength score of eighteen or twenty can really only take a few blows from a shadow before they go down it won't matter that your barbarian has 200 hit points and resistance to all damage when it only takes maybe six to eight hits from a shadow to drain their strength down to zero so how do you fight against shadows well having a paladin you're in your party really helps somebody who can dish out some radiant damage or if you have any spells or any way to create sunlight that can help out as well and of course it's a great reason to bring a restoration spell along with you as these things can be used in the middle of combat if you do need to remove that strength damage you do also recover from the strength damage after only a short rest but it does mean that until you can get a rest and recuperate in some way the shadow leaves a lasting scar even after it's been defeated next up on our list of deadly low-level monsters is the swarm specifically we're look the swarm of rot grubs from Volos guide to monsters but swarms in general are an often overlooked and pretty deadly type of monster in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition and there's a few reasons for this forms are often resistant to piercing slashing and in some cases bludgeoning damage as well and there's not really any way to get around this magic weapons don't help like they do for the resistance possessed by most other creatures like demons and outsiders and interestingly enough swarms and 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons aren't vulnerable to area of effect damage well they take damage normally from elemental effects such as a fireball or burning hands they're not actually susceptible to these things like they were in prior editions where they took double damage from area effect effects so it means that your party does have to chew through all their hit points and while swarms usually have a low AC they often have more hit points than as normal for their challenge ratings yet swarms don't hit very hard but they can hit a lot and they're very hard to kill which can make them a big challenge now when we're looking specifically at the rot grubs these guys have some extra abilities that are super deadly the swarm of rot grubs only has a +0 to hit yeah meaning that it's not going to hit very often but it's only a challenge rating one half creature so it's very easy to encounter several swarms of rot grubs when the swarm of rot grubs does manage to land a hit the target is infected by one D for small rock crumbs which burrow into the target skin and start eating their way towards its heart for every rot grub that then infests the target they take one D 6 points of piercing damage at the start of each of their tons so if you are starting to get infested with rot grubs you have a few options here on the first turn that you have rot grubs burrowing into your skin you can apply fire to it doing at least one fire damage to yourself and killing those rot grubs that are burrowing inside of you however after one round these rot grubs will burrow too far into your skin for the fire damage to do anything it might be possible to do some sort of invasive surgery at this point but the best way to get rid of them is to use some sort of magical effect which cures disease like a paladins lay on hands or the lesser restoration spell because if the rock grubs are in a creature system when that creature ends its turn with zero hit points the rock grubs burrow into their heart and kill them outright so a player a group of player characters that doesn't have a paladin or someone capable of casting less or restoration that finds themselves infested with even one rot grub this can be a death sentence for that character what's interesting to me is as a DM if you're reading the stat block you understand all of this if you're a player and you've never encountered rock grubs before how are you gonna know any of this all that the DM says is that there's worms burrowing into your skin how are you supposed to know to apply fire or that you need to get them out before you die hopefully you've got a knowledgeable wizard or Ranger that is aware of these types of dungeon hazards and that's another thing that can be a little bit deceiving about a swarm of creatures as well is that oftentimes swarms are formed of creatures that we would kind of shrug off to see in a dungeon anyways there's always going to be rats or bats or bugs or insects or snakes but then there's a lot more than you thought there were going to be and almost all of the swarms including the bats and the snakes deal a surprising amount of damage for their challenge rating and are pretty difficult to kill so much like the shadow swarms can be one of these creatures that player characters often underestimate and all of a sudden they're coming it from the woodwork swarming over the player characters and they don't have the resources to survive against the creatures so how do you deal with swarms kill it with fire seriously like as quickly as possible this is the thing that burning hands is there for like get out the flamethrower and destroy them as quickly as you can yeah they can be messy if they get all up in your space here this is the time for the the spell casters and various things like that to really shine at getting rid of these swarms as fast as poss tricky thing though is is that oftentimes the swarm gets into the space of the person like gets inside another creature space and so once it's there now you can't deal the area of effect damage effectively to the swarm without hurting your allies in the process sometimes that's worth it too if your ally is covered in rats maybe they don't mind being burning hands just to get rid of them all from the depths of the Underdark we have the insane creation of the mind flayers and that is the intellect devourer this challenge rating - aberration is rightly feared as one of the deadliest creatures in Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition period and a major contributor to the terrifying reputation of its mind flair overlords the in elective our does something that not a lot of creatures in Dungeons and Dragons do and that's that it attacks your intelligence and Indian d5e if you're not playing a wizard it's very likely that you have a low intelligence score many player characters in Dungeons and Dragons rarely have an intelligence score higher than 12 I find it's very common to see a lot of player characters particularly fighters and barbarians with intelligence scores of eight or lower and this makes them prime prey for the intellect of ours iconic abilities devour intellect and body thief both of which play on the intelligence score of the intellect devours victim so let's start with discussing devour intellects this is the intellect of our most basic ability it targets one creature within ten feet of it so it's a pretty short range that creature has to make only a DC 12 intelligence saving throw or they take some psychic damage that DC 12 intelligence saving throw is really hard to make for a lot of pcs they usually fail it more than half the time because they have no bonuses to it and in many cases they have a penalty all of my player characters somehow end up with an 8 intelligence and that just means that I have a -1 on my dice rolls there and rolling over a 12 can actually be challenging especially if you have a whole bunch of intellect of hours coming at you this can be difficult and it also stuns you yes once you've taken psychic damage from the attack the intellect of our roles 3d6 and if it beats your intelligence score you become stunned until the end of your next turn this is one of the lowest level creatures with a very difficult to resist stun attack because again rolling over an eight or a ten is something that's very easy to do on 3d6 for an elective hour in fact from what I can tell for most adventurers that are facing an intellect adhara that have an int of 10 and no other bonuses they generally have about a 34% chance of getting stunned outright why by an intellect of our which is pretty high if you follow this up with body thief things get even worse for the player characters an intellect of our within 5 feet of a creature can target it with body thief teleporting into the creatures brain if it wins an intelligence contest again the intellect of our has an intelligence of 12 so it's often gonna be up against the common adventurer if the intellect of our wins this contest it teleports inside the targets skull destroying its brain and taking over the creatures body this is brutal because not only are you now down a player but the in elective hours are up a new fighter or some other class but they basically gain the ability to use that player character as a puppet and now you have to fight your former friend a friend who is dead outright and has had their brain devoured in elective hours as only challenge rating to creatures and the insane creations of mind flayers are very easy to use in groups and with their intelligence score an elective hours are smart enough to pick out targets that are vulnerable to their abilities and gang up using devourer intellect in succession against a single target until one intellect of hour gets the opportunity to jump inside that target skull even worse if those intellect of ours are backing up a mind flare who's already stunned a bunch of targets with its mind blast ability then they just go to town and start reporting inside the entire parties brains that's a recipe for a total party kill right there so when you're confronted with a swarm of intellect devour just run yeah just run these abilities are really short ranged this is not the time to send in your barbarian first your barbarian will turn against you and become a puppet for the mind flayer yeah the one saving grace of these abilities is that their range is very very short and the intellect of our only has 21 hit points and a relatively low AC meaning that it is pretty easy to kill them and you better kill them fast because I have seen few monsters that have such a high chance to take out a player character outright PCs in fifth edition are just so vulnerable to intelligence based attacks because the classes don't generally encourage you to have a high intelligence unless you're trying to roleplay a smart character well if you're choosing the career of an adventurer you're probably not the most intelligent person anyway in one campaign we were playing in I was playing a half-orc paladin who was killed by an in elective hour and then turned against the party Montee let me continue to role play the character but I had to play it against the party so of course I blew all of my divine smites and took out two other party members it was it was a mess yeah and thank you intellect of ours for totally ruining our entire party I think that that's kind of the unspoken terror of the intellect of our is it's not so much that it's killed your paladin it's that it's killed your paladin and now taken over your paladin and is turning those player characters abilities against the rest of the party it really creates a losing situation if even one in collective hour is able to get the body thief ability off a lesson for all you adventurers out there dungeons are usually pretty filthy if you come across a clean one you might want to get a little suspicious you might be encountering the gelatinous cube gelatinous cube is an iconic Dungeons and Dragons monster a giant quivering cube of translucent acidic jello that lumbers through the halls of a dungeon like a living room ba sucking up everything in its path whether it's dust particles small rats and bugs or entire adventurers devouring them and dissolving them into nothingness when the gelatinous cube is standing still it's almost impossible to detect as a matter of fact every gelatinous cube that I've encountered I have failed to detect and I've walked right into that might just be my bad playing but they surprise me every single time the gelatinous cube despite its lumbering nature as kelly said is a great ambusher and what an ambush it causes once you're engulfed by a gelatinous cube it's 6 d 6 acid damaged at the start of every turn you're inside that cube and it's pseudopods hit pretty hard too well this isn't a lot of damage it is only a challenge writing to creature and four adventurers with low strength and dexterity scores it can be really difficult to break your way out of a gelatinous cube especially if there's more than one of them or if you're trapped down a hallway with nowhere to go a very canny dungeon builder can build systems in their dungeons which turn the gelatinous cube really into a living trap that is honestly the best use of the gelatinous cube is when you're in that thin narrow hallway and you're up against a locked door or a dead end and there's a gelatinous cube coming at you there's almost nothing more terrifying and with the amount of damage it does it can wreck a party member pretty quickly if you didn't expect it or more than one because the gelatinous cube can run over multiple creatures and I've even seen an entire party of adventures trapped inside the cube being slowly dissolved together the gelatinous cube might seem pretty slow it only has a speed of 15 feet but in fifth edition when it does use its engulfed ability it gets to move again so it can travel forward at a pretty fair clip towards adventures the gelatinous cube isn't very stealthy but it is hard to see so oftentimes I like to park my gelatinous cubes down alcoves or hidden around a 90-degree turn in a hallway so as the party comes around the turn they kind of just walk right into the gelatinous cube or for some extra fun I like to have my gelatinous cubes living at the bottom of a pit trap or drop down from the ceiling as kind of a jelly block on top of an adventurers head there's so many creative ways as a Dungeon Master to use gelatinous cubes as part of a trap and I'm always looking for fun and creative ways to unexpectedly cube my party and it doesn't matter what level your party's at if you fall into a pit trap and wind up stuck in a gelatinous cube you're having a bad day yeah it's relatively easy to escape from a gelatinous cube if you have a good strength score but just as we talked about with the shadow strength and intelligence tend to be these very polarizing ability scores in fifth edition' D&D so often times player characters either are really really good at breaking out of things or really really bad at it and that makes the gelatinous cube pretty deadly against those creatures that again are often in the backline and get sucked up unexpectedly by the gelatinous cube to round out our list of the deadliest low-level monsters in Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition we are bestowing our highest honors and grandest preys upon perhaps one of the lowliest creatures in the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition game and that's the cobalt cobalt have a reputation as feeble cannon fodder but this doesn't need to be so four in all the games that I have run it has often been the simplest most innocuous creatures that have been the most terrifying and we want to talk for a moment if you haven't heard of it already of a famous story that was printed in Dragon magazine many many years ago back in Dragon 127 and that is a story by Roger II more called stalkers Cobalts now what's beautiful about this story is that you can relate it to really any level creature that has some form of intelligence or an ability to work amongst themselves to trap the player characters but in this story of Tucker's Cobalts we take a look at how kobolds can be one of the most deadly encounters for even a high-level party because they love using traps and different sort of gadgets and gear to really make things much more dangerous than you would anticipate when you see them the famous story of Tucker's Cobalts tells the tale of a dungeon master by the name of Tucker who had an exceptionally deadly dungeon but for all the horrors that were packed into this dungeon demons fiery undead creatures unspeakable threats in the depths of the dungeon nothing scared Tucker's players more than the Cobalts that dwelt in level 1 of the dungeon Tucker's players would go to inordinate depths to avoid going through the kobold lorentz for this area of the dungeon had been riddled with traps honeycombed with secret passages and murder holes and the inventive cobol's had found all sorts of ways to use weapons metal armor split move and fire tactics and other dastardly innovations to slay and destroy adventurers who embarked in their domain to this day Tucker's Cobalts is a textbook example of how to take an innocuous low-level enemy and turn them into a deadly threat with smart tactics intelligence and some good use of equipment and the environment the lesson here is less about looking at the stat block of the creature if you look at the stat block of the Cobalts other than their pack tactics ability they don't have really anything that's going to stand out but cobol's love working together and they love using traps to foil their enemies and they're smart about it so when the player characters walk into a room and the kobold x-bar' the door and set the entire room on fire suddenly that is probably the most dangerous encounter and then all of a sudden they're poking out of holes in the ceiling to fire their slings at the players while they're in a room on fire there's no longer as a battle against some simple Cobalts this is a deadly encounter not bad for a bunch of challenge rating 1:8 weaklings with less than 5 hit points each of course over the years Cobalts have evolved a little bit more and we now have creatures like the earth or the winged cobalt cobalt sorcerers cobalt inventors and all sorts of variants on the basic monster manual cobalt but nevertheless it doesn't take a lot of changes to the statistics of a cobalt to make them into an interesting and memorable enemy I myself haven't drawn inspiration from the tales of Tucker's cobalt and head dragons use cobalt as their outward defence network for their lair combining the low-level cobalt and their dastardly tactics with the deadliness of a Dragon's Lair - wonderful effect creating some truly memorable encounters for my players and you can apply these ideas to any other sort of mundane monster like orcs or bandits or cultists or Noel's finding out what that creatures intelligent niche is and how you can turn it up to 11 is a great creative way to create an unexpected and deadly challenge for your player characters so we've taken a look at some really deadly monsters and we've talked about how to use them in the most deadly way as a DM you may want to be careful throwing these at very low level or new players because they may not be ready for this sort of danger to be presented to them and you could wipe out an entire party just by using some of these monsters so be cautious when using them but also keep in mind how powerful low-level monsters can be we want to use deadly low-level monsters to pose an interesting challenge to the players and get them to think about their strategies and tactics in different ways and often times using deadly monsters like this is best done in a way that Telugu their presence having a colony of mind flayers and intellect of ours suddenly spring out of nowhere on your player characters is actually pretty unfair and probably not gonna be a lot of fun for them but finding ways to foreshadow this threat to build into it in an interesting and creative way it's gonna a make your player characters way more scared and terrified because a little foreshadowing goes a long way and also add a little bit more fairness into the scenario because the player characters can start thinking about how they're gonna survive a little bit in advance rather than suddenly being ambushed by a billion shadows that drain their shrimp strength down to zero and they die with no chance that's just not a fun scenario and don't do that especially to new players because it's really easy to wipe a party out there's no skill involved in that there's no skill really in making a deadly combat encounter that wipes out your player characters what makes a deadly encounter fun and memorable is placing it in an interesting way that provokes creative thought and good survival strategies from your player characters rather than just a slaughterhouse when you foreshadow these deadly monsters it then becomes fun even if the player characters don't notice the foreshadowing for example they're in a dungeon and the dungeon master is describing how all the floors are spotless and clean and they just go wandering right into a gelatinous cube they're gonna look back at that and say oh man all the clues were there and I was just too blind to see it this still means that when they run into the deadly encounter they realized that it had been foreshadowed rather than just being dropped on them unexpectedly and that's really what makes these standout is having an environment having a place and setting that when the player characters start to examine it and look at what's around them they realized that they might be in for something that's a little more dangerous of a little more deadly than they had previously anticipated and this can make for a really exciting combat encounter so this has been a look at five of the deadliest low-level monsters in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition you you see them run and we would love to hear about your favorite low-level deadly threats or stories of using these monsters in your campaigns in the comments below if you want to see us dealing with some of these deadly monsters check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. on twitch TV slash dungeon underscore dudes and is loaded onto our youtube every Friday if you enjoy the show and want to help support the channel you can check us out on patreon you can follow the links below to learn how you can help us out or check out patreon calm down trees we have a video on that right up over here and if you want to learn how monster stats work in Dungeons & Dragons Fivey check out our video right up over here please subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 763,636

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: -NwtOixkD0g

Length: 29min 53sec (1793 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019