The Kraken || D&D with Dael Kingsmill

all right let me just try and decode some of these notes from a year ago hello humans my name is dale kingsmill i have another indie video for you today as i'm sure you could guess by the title there's a lot of new people who've joined us here welcome thank you so i should explain for their benefit um about a year ago on twitter i posted a poll no caption no context the the options of the poll were giants or kraken and all the people who follow me on twitter voted without any context and uh they voted for the kraken because they like the kraken better and so i made a video about giants the theory was that people would most naturally vote for the thing they like more as ears so the other option the option that lost needs a little help a little booster to be even cooler than it is so it was actually it was it was trixie reverse psychology but uh some people have been waiting for the kraken video ever since because fool that i am i mentioned in the giants video that i was going to do the kraken soon why did i say that so anyway here i am i'm finally doing the kraken video some people love the monster manual cthulhu version of the kraken that we already have you know the official published kraken and those people probably gonna hate these ideas and that's fine that's fine this is not an advice channel where i tell you how you should be doing things this is monarchs factory where sometimes i make videos that share my ideas and maybe sometimes people take little pieces of those ideas as inspiration and they make it the foundation on which they build their own ideas seeds from which you may grow something of your own did you know that the word kraken comes from swedish and norwegian um the word cracker a word which is used to designate like an unhealthy animal and has connotations of something that is twisted or corrupted i find that fascinating it also might not be true i got that from wikipedia also it's only around the 18th century apparently that the kraken started to be described as having arms and taking on more of that octopussy squiddy appearance that we associate with the kraken now but here's the thing i mean unpopular opinion for an amateur mythographer such as myself but sometimes i just really like the version of a legendary creature that has turned up in people's cultural consciousness you know like we think about a werewolf now and we think oh yeah killed by a silver bullet right i also feel like there's a little bit more wiggle room to to use more modern sort of interpretations of the kraken because the kraken is one of those um creatures that doesn't really show up in many story stories again i could be totally wrong about this my my specialty is the the greek myths not the nordic ones but from what i know and from what i have been able to research the kraken is kind of uh you know it's like how griffins are a mythical creature and we know that they're a mythical creature but there's not that many stories floating around that actually feature griffins i want the kraken to feel more like the modern version of the kraken our modern understanding of what a kraken is then i'm not diving back into the deepest records of krakens for me the terror of the sea and its unknowable depths that's enough this colossal creature of the depths of the freezing dark places in the ocean i don't need the kraken to be an intelligent psychic to be scary to be formidable i also have kind of just a running thing with me and how i run games i like to doll out my magic sparingly not in terms of like items or high fantasy or anything like that but in terms of if a creature doesn't need to be magical in order to achieve what the creature is then to me it shouldn't be magical at all so for me i just want the kraken to be a friggin huge terrifying sea monster i want this to feel like you are up against a force of nature so at the crux of all of this i'm taking the emphasis off the kraken making attacks and turning an encounter with the kraken more into something that is happening you can't stop it from happening so the question becomes can the heroes defend against it can they survive this thing so in relation to that i kind of want the kraken to be the kraken singular there is not a species of krakens to me what were they called in their previous edition on shailen is that a real word i hope that is no i want it to be a singular threat wow dale that's so unusual for you that's so groundbreaking you've never done that before my notes from the past the kraken one and only all right so with that in mind i feel like you've got one chance to really wow your players with a kraken encounter but you know what you can do is you could build up to it with almost encounters there's a quote from one of the um one of the early kraken texts that i was reading one of the first sort of written references to the kraken and it says the real danger to sailors was not the creature itself but rather the whirlpool left in its wake oh yeah so let's think about that for a minute a creature that big so we're talking like like oh like you know you you know what i mean so imagine a creature that huge surfacing what that's going to do to the water around any any ships for miles that water displacement is going to create what are basically stormy seas but with clear skies imagine that terror the waves going crazy you're trying to keep the boat from from capsizing in these huge huge peaking waves having to try and sail as quickly as you can towards the epicenter of it because if those big waves break on you you're done for the waves get big enough you have to go through them i do not like the deep sea and this is oh conceptually terrifying or imagine in the other direction the kraken is up near the surface and suddenly it decides that it's going to descend it's going to submerge deeper into the depths and now you've got a whirlpool left behind as the water around it is all rushing to fill in that gap that it's left now this is getting a little bit classic charybdis whole encounters or skill challenges could be built around just these moments of almost encountering the kraken great time for your npc sailors to start telling your spooky stories about the kraken and people who've encountered it really build up that uh that anticipation then once you build up to it if you do want to have an actual like face-to-face like near-death experience with the kraken for your players i reckon you got one shot i think because i have conceptualized the kraken as sort of just a beast i don't think my version would fit as a boss necessarily so i would probably have it be late game but not like end game and yeah just just the goal is just surviving and i think there are basically two main ways that you can encounter the kraken that would be fun on a boat at the water's surface or an underwater encounter fully submerged and in order to make them both fun i think you would have to handle them in very different ways so i'm gonna go through both at the water's surface you're on a ship the kraken thinks that the ship is something big it can eat and it's gonna try and grab the ship and pull it down classic classic imagery oh the way i envisage this sort of an encounter working would have to come in a couple of phases i think you would start with the phase where it's just the tentacles that you're dealing with trying to break the ship second phase which we'll get to in a minute is dealing with the bulk the actual like body of the kraken itself and then third phase is what comes after that i like my kraken to be octopussy rather than squid-like and that is because to me i don't think there is anything more alien on this earth than an octopus they are crazy i'm telling you some of the research i did about octopuses for this video the first time around they've got these like enzymes even after an octopuses leg tentacle leg limb whatever gets severed and is you know disembodied it lives for a long time afterwards and even then it it will like reach out it will reach out and grab things automatically and try to feed the body that it isn't even attacked there's nobody there and it's trying to feed a phantom body it's like a phantom limb but in the opposite direction there's a lot going on there but the biggest thing for me that i think is is helpful in really giving a unique feel to this encounter is the way that an octopus moves outside of the water if you've ever watched an octopus move on later i'll put up a bam thank you to an australian marine biologist this is a video taken by lawrence shiel you can find him on instagram at snorkel down under all one word but just just just look at this video for a second the way that an octopus moves see how it's i mean i i've seen videos where it's more obvious because the octopus isn't just you know traveling in a straight line but there's this aspect to an octopus traveling on on solid ground that is the tentacles doing all of the work for themselves it's not like the octopus is looking where it's going it's more like the tentacles are feeling their way sightlessly and and you'll get that ripple effect where it starts from the back and it moves forward as they go and then it has to move it pulls and it moves back in that same rippling manner that's what i want i don't want the uh the tentacles hang like up in the air doing the squiggly things snatching people and throwing them so much i want more of that you know tentacles slowly making their way onto the deck and feeling their way across the deck while the sailors in your party are trying frantically to stop the tentacles from getting to the other side because if the octopus can wrap around the ship it'll be just such a cinch to just snap the hull in half completely crush it tear it in two and pull it down so for me this first phase i want i really want to keep up this pressure of like time is running out i would set a limit of maybe three rounds i think doing the same thing for three rounds is fun doing the same thing for four to five rounds starts to drag so for these first three rounds before we change it up i would like the focus to be these tentacles are making their way around the ship and if you can't stop them in time from getting purchased the kraken will have broken the ship and there's nothing that you can do to stop that now in terms of like combat with these tentacles it is a more straightforward-ish combat scenario when it's just the tentacle phase the tentacles i want to be more about reacting than acting so on their turn they're just gonna move but if they come into contact with something with with a creature or with the mast or you know something like that i like the idea of them being reactive and wrapping around that thing it's like they're sussing it out they're feeling it out but because it is a cracking gigantic ginormous sun made of mussels and just a beastie looking for a feed if one of the tentacles bumps into the mast and reactively wraps around it it could snap that mask if the tentacle bumps into a sailor and wraps around that sailor it could crush that sailor even if one of the tentacles doesn't wrap around a person that it bumps into the suckers kind of automatically stick to anything so there's that idea that even just while stretching across this space crawling across this space to the other side if this tentacle runs over someone it's gonna be taking them with it they might not be killed immediately if it's not specifically squeezing them but it can't be good for them and they're stuck and them suckers is strong do you take the time to try and rescue the sailor wrestle them out from under this arm or do you have to dedicate all of your time and energy to trying to stop the kraken from destroying the ship i'm not going to be on camera for the next bit but um but i'm dressed like this while filming the next bit and i just the absurdity wasn't lost on me and i needed you to know about it alright so here's just a really quick sketched battle map so this is just gonna be a really quick example of how i envisaged this sort of setup working if you were to use a battle map for my money a a chain would work best for this you know like a necklace chain to me a chain has the right sort of um ratio of weight to flexibility i mean ideally it would be one of those chains you know the ones that they're more like those wooden snake toys that are like ones that are like really tightly linked just because those ones you know they they kind of have a curve to them by necessity so if you have some of those around that that would be perfect but um any change should do the job now what we're trying to do with this we're trying to replicate that that motion that we just saw in the video the way that when an octopus arm is moving across solid ground it doesn't lead from the end it's not like it's searching from from eyes it's feeling and it's got more of that movement from the bass and then rippling outward the chain can help with some of that uh but you know a lot of this will rely on you using words like i don't know slick and undulating get ready to squick your players out with your choice of adjectives when you're setting things up you're going to want to start with a with a nice little curly kind of a shape and imagine more of these instead of having a movement speed and starting from the tip and it just crawls around because that doesn't look like how an octopus moves and i really want to emphasize the the weird alien way that an octopus moves instead of that what we're going to be doing is alternating between two movement patterns what you're going to do and make sure that you if your chain is too long like mine is you're you know keeping it pinned you're gonna pick a point sort of roughly in the middle of the chain and it's gonna move three squares one two three all right see how that unfolds there now the tip you actually get to control where it goes much more directly but to me i think it's probably a good idea if to encourage this impression of sightless feeling around trying to understand its environment if the tip has come in contact with something like a mast then i recommend that you take the turn one two three squares to make the tentacle wrap around whatever that is you get back there all right so see now it's wrapping around this mast on its next round you're going to move from the base instead and this isn't going to look like movement but it's going to give that impression of of movement originating from the base and slowly rippling outwards so you're going to pick the point at the base and then you're going to move three squares as well take a little bit of a you know roundabout route with this this tentacle because it's wrapped around the mast will probably focus on that and probably snap the mast but then what about what would have happened if the tip hadn't been right next to the mast hadn't reached out for it somewhere roughly in the middle three squares two three the tip gets to decide where it goes it's gonna reach around here one two three and up about there on this next turn we're going one two three and the tip one two three reaches to the other side it's gonna start trying to snap the ship in half let's check some sailors on here these are these are gonna be my sailors these are party poppers from my backpack alright great now we got some sailors roughly in the middle one two three tentacle tip one two three oh look where you are and two starting to wrap around this sailor oh no turn three one two three gonna start to take the sailor with it oh no now the sailor's like trapped against the side of the ship and he's being crushed basically what we're going for here is just bizarre alien movement that fluctuates between curved and angular these alternating rounds where you come from the base and then from the middle you kind of get this weird vibe of there is movement but where is it going all it is is a rough approximation of such alien movement that just reinforces the concept of this is something different to what we typically deal with i think each individual tentacle would be a weak point for the kraken but by no means weak i would during this phase give each individual tentacle its own kind of uh hit points probably a ton of resistances and really during this section just let the players kind of go nova trying to hack away as many of these tentacles as they can but make sure that the hit points are hefty and even though i think the tentacles are reactive i think that that encapsulates you know once one of them starts getting hacked at with a big old battle axe it's probably gonna start swinging trying to hit back so i want this to be difficult remember it's a force of nature this is the kraken if your players are successful if they manage to hack away i would say like two tentacles i think at that point the kraken is gonna start pulling back and being like ah why i thought you were just a whale or something that i could eat if they're not successful if they don't manage that then the kraken starts to split the ship in two and then we reach phase two of the encounter what i like to refer to as the sarlacc pit phase give me some good sarlacc pit style shenanigans this phase is exciting and i think it's easy enough to get to whether your players have succeeded or not succeeded whether it comes in the form of the kraken starting to pull away and the ship tipping to one side as that happens or in the form of the ship splitting into and starting to to tip down inwards i want this next phase to basically be here's the kraken's mouth try not to fall into it so now this becomes a whole separate sort of survival skill challenge where you're just trying not to slide down deck into the kraken's waiting mouth now oh this is where it starts getting exciting i would love to do something like to emphasize the idea that this skin of the kraken is just so tough it's so hard to get through and see if enough movies and tv shows have imprinted in one of your players minds the idea don't give it to him but wait to see one of them might think if i can get at it from the inside where it doesn't have this tough thick outer skin maybe i can hurt it from there maybe from the inside i'll be able to do some damage the kraken that we get in the monster manual if you are eaten by it um you take a bunch of like acid damage and i think probably bludgeoning damage as well and it's like really tough to hurt it from the inside and i understand i understand why they've done that and it's fine but you know what octopuses have craws why not take advantage and give me some jonah in the whale business up in here yes come on who doesn't want to get swallowed by the big alien and then make a heroic explosive exit awesome so for me instead of having anyone who falls in or deliberately throws themselves into the kraken's mouth i would not have them end up in the stomach getting slowly digested by acid because that doesn't sound fun to me what does sound fun is being in the kraken's craw and you and anyone else who's there having to work together to try and like force your way out by just causing as much damage as you possibly can some fireballs if you got them i mean what how many things have we seen this moment here men in black the first avengers movie definitely a dragon in something but i i i can't think of what i could just see the dragon's expression oh it's hercules i'm thinking of disney's hercules no thank you no yes i do i do want some popcorn i feel like we've had that moment that that thrilling heroic moment baked into our minds why not let it be a thing that your players can enjoy thank you i got popcorn i'm just saying we've seen this in so many of the texts that we consume why not let your players live that thing so i may be disappointed by this next bit but to me this singular legendary kraken not just a formidable foe but an insurmountable one i wouldn't give it hit points if it has hit points you can kill it i don't think that you should be able to kill the kraken i think you should be able to do enough damage that it gives up and goes away but that's like the maximum i think for me that i would want to see happen you know unless um similar to the giants actually unless you want to build a whole campaign around you know we specifically are here hunting the kraken we're going to kill it in that case i mean you know build up to it over a whole campaign and then let him kill it at the end but for me for this you know it's a beasty it's not a bus this whole angle i'm going for for me i don't think i would have it be possible to kill just by a party who happened to chance upon it on the high seas of adventure then the final phase phase three if the players did well during that first tentacle phase and the ship only took minor damage hasn't actually been like destroyed then phase three probably isn't even really gonna be a phase of the encounter it's just gonna be you know your your post-cracking uh maintenance trying to put things together rebuild the sale if the master's been taken down things like this so you will have to deal with it but it's not going to be like high stakes [Music] but if your ship's been torn apart then even if you manage to do enough damage to the kraken to send it or running even that circumstance your ship is still torn apart you are gonna be stuck in the water with the rubble people just trying to find things to float on and you're out at sea what in hell are you gonna do in that scenario ooh maybe there's such a thing as like ocean scavenger animals who who follow in the wake of the kraken trying to pick off anything that didn't get eaten now you gotta face off with them phase three of that is just trying to survive not to mention potentially trying to survive the whirlpool maybe that's phase three for the for the you did good version is now you've got to deal with the whirlpool because the kraken's just sunk itself down to the bottom of the ocean so that's kind of how i think that uh the ship the classic ship encounter should work phases a little bit video gaming all in the pursuit of it kind of feeling like like this is not something that you can fight and kill necessarily but something you have to fight in order to barely scrape by and survive now an underwater encounter i think has to work entirely differently right so if you're if you're swallowed by a kraken swallowed by a crack and then swallowed by a kraken thrown up by a crack and then swallowed by a crack and you swallowed by cracking above ground uh gravity is in play it's the sarlacc pit thrills are bound lots of exciting things trying to avoid falling when you do fall getting to maybe do something cool on the way it's it's big and it's dramatic when you're underwater you don't have gravity in play it's slow it's simple it's frustrating so i think in order to maintain the fun of a kraken encounter if you're dealing with it in an underwater scenario which is already tricky right because underwater combat is a bit of a slog let's let's be real we gotta change things um the idea of sort of slam weight based damage that sort of stuff doesn't work as well so i want to emphasize some different elements of what octopuses are like just like before i want it to feel more like an environmental hazard so the ideas i like for this are you know if your players are under water they're probably looking for something the players are always looking for something give the kraken a crevice that it can squeeze into i know the kraken is huge the crevice will need to be big but think about how octopuses scrunch themselves up into these tiny little spaces so that they can hide in reefs or what have you so i don't know say you're you're in an underwater temple looking for the entrance to atlantis and in these temple ruins somewhere the kraken has has tucked itself away and it's just sort of hanging out there waiting between meals and in you come all bhajan in oh ugly card again i want the kraken to actually get this moment of surprise it's it's hidden away it's blending in you've got that camouflage aspect of octopuses now to play with where's up the top of the ocean when it's when it's surfaced it doesn't care about blending in that's not what it's doing but down the bottom of the ocean give me a camouflage kraken i'm i'm gonna be terrified of that i want to emphasize things like octopus ink imagine you're at the bottom of the ocean and you're you're traversing this sunken temple and suddenly all around you this cloud of inky blackness blots out your vision and something rushes out towards you it is important for me that this encounter be in an enclosed space or at least quite a restricted space even though it is underwater it might sound a little counterintuitive because one of the fun things about a water combat scenario should be the fact that you can go up and down it's very three-dimensional you don't need to be able to fly to go up however have you ever noticed that players don't do that anyway so i'm not that stressed about uh making it more enclosed and what i like about making more enclosed is that that's where you start to get that environmental hazard again right because once the kraken comes out of its hidey hole and starts pressing into that space the players have to find somewhere to go because if they don't they will be crushed or they will be captured and devoured and they're in the crore and they have to blast their way out again with this limited room as well it could start the it could start to break the ceiling the ceiling starts crashing in that way you might get a little bit of a sort of a lord of the ringsy watcher in the water sort of a vibe now there's a cave in the stuck on that side you could play up the poisonous aspect of octopuses you could play up the way that octopuses have you ever seen them blanket they see their prey and in order to try and catch them because their prey is so fast they just like spread out and their their skin becomes like webbing between their tentacles and they blanket around it and catch it and then eat it so that idea of not necessarily being grabbed by a tentacle and shoved into its mouth but it blanketing over as many of your party as it can and trying to devour them there so that's much more of a oh no you've ended up in its den you gotta get out in time and worst case scenario if they do try to fight it and kill it you know that same old thing if they're inside and they do enough damage it'll try to get away a few players don't quite take the hint that they should probably run so those are my ideas about krakens and how i would run them in my game yes in particular i think that idea of the tentacles in a surface scenario being the focus of what makes it feel like unusual and different and like it's standing out from just any other combat you know it's brute strength lots of damage underwater more playing up that that sort of sneaky aspect of octopuses that that sort of sly and underhanded quality apart from that i do believe that's it i'm done email this to your grandma and i'll see you some other time i will practically be at the movies right now it's like cover never happened

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 32,010

Rating: 4.9792514 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek and Sundry, Geek, nerd, australian, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, funny, dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dungeons, dragons, pathfinder, 5e, rpg, ttrpg, fairytales, grimm, dungeon master, dm, kraken, monster

Id: J_rfbxNJAig

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NecromanceIfUwantTo]

God that chain part was perfect.

Anyone know a good chain closer to what she hoped, that's still made of metal? That's so amazing I want to use the kraken just because of it.

[u/JeffEpp]

The video thumb is peak Dael.

[u/TheOtherEvilMatt]

This is such a fantastic video, my party is definitely going to be taking a trip by boat in the near future - this is too cool not to use!

[u/ShineyChicken]

What creature has a skull big enough for a Kraken to sqeeze into?

[u/NecromanceIfUwantTo]

Did she say the kraken's "craw"? jaw? What's the part you can be inside that's not the stomach she described??