It’s October, a great time to add a dash of horror and gothic vibes to your tabletop sessions. While there’s plenty of terrors, horrors, and frights in the annals of Kobold Press Monster Vaults (1 and now featuring 2!), there’s always room to surprise your players with a familiar foe given a quick and clean makeover.
Enter monster templates! These handy GM tools were first introduced in the Tales of the Valiant Game Master’s Guide as a simple way to convert one kind monster into something else in a flash.
Let’s say your next villain is a deranged mechanist on a quest for world domination (as you’d expect). They’re trying to keep a low profile and start small, so you decide they start raiding a nearby village under the guise of a goblin attack. Instead of working out the stats for mechanical goblins, hobgoblins, and the other nefarious creatures you’d find in a mecha-goblin raiding party, just pull a regular flesh and blood goblin from the Monster Vault, apply the Clockwork Construct template, and BOOM, you’ve got the first member of a particularly nasty mechanical horde, with a full complement of mechanical abilities, traits, and actions. Monster templates can change the nature of a specific foe, or reinforce the role it serves in a pack (are they a leader? A striker?).
How Does it Work, Spooky Chris?
Monster Vault 2 continues to build out this useful tool for GMs. With the Grim template found in Monster Vault 2, we take a standard critter from the original Monster Vault and turn it into a terrifying undead guardian. Then we set up a rumor your players can run down for a short encounter and an appropriately seasonal magic item!
HOLLOWFIELD HAUNT (Giant Bat Grim)
Large Undead
Armor Class 12
Hit Points 13
Speed 10 ft., fly 60 ft.
Perception 11 Stealth 14
Resistant necrotic, radiant
Immune Frightened | Undead Resilience
Senses keensense 60 ft., darkvision 60 ft.
Languages Understands Common, but can’t speak it.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
| +2 | +2 | +0 | −4 | +0 | −2 |
Rejuvenation. If the Haunt’s mortal remains are within the confines of Hollowfield, it will gain a new body at sundown the next day, regaining all its HP and becoming active again. The new body appears within 5 feet of where the Haunt fell.
Turn Immunity. The Haunt is immune to effects that turn Undead.
Undead Nature. The Haunt doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep.
Undead Resilience. The Haunt is immune to poison damage, to exhaustion, and to the poisoned condition.
ACTIONS
Bite. Melee Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5ft., one creature.
Hit: 5 (1d6 +2) piercing or radiant damage (GM’s choice)
BONUS ACTIONS
Dizzying Screech. The bat releases a dizzying screech at one creature within 10 feet of it. If the target can hear the screech, it must succeed on a DC 12 CON save or be disoriented until the end of its next turn. When a disoriented creature moves, it moves in a random direction.
Haunting Cry. The hollowfield haunt gives a haunting cry that strikes fear in one creature of its choice that it can see within 30 feet of it. The target must succeed on a DC 12 WIS save or be frightened until the end of its next turn. Undead have disadvantage on the save. Undead that are immune to being frightened aren’t immune to this effect, but they have advantage on the save. On its turn, the frightened creature must take the Dash action and move away from the grim by the safest available route, unless there is nowhere to move.
The Rumor
They say Hollowfield is guarded by a winged devil that can’t be killed. You cut it down, and every night it crawls out of the dark again. The crop grows fat, but not on rainwater.
Hollowfield
Dark, twisted vines carpet the gray soil. The scent of rot and mold are carried by a chill wind. An eerie, oppressive silence. Sickly pumpkins split, wrinkle, and collapse on themselves, while others seem to pulse with the rhythm of a beating heart.
Resolution: The Heart of the Patch
The Hollowfield Haunt reforms every night after it is slain until its original remains are destroyed. At the heart of the patch, wrapped in black vines, lies the mummified body of a giant bat, leathery wings held fast like a fly in a web. Burning the body or cutting it to pieces ends the Haunt forever.
Reward: The Lantern of Last Harvest
| d4 | Random Events |
| 1 | The player with the lowest perception must succeed a perception check or step on a rotting gourd. The foul vegetable bursts in a miasmic cloud. Creatures within 5 ft. must succeed on a DC 13 CON save or be poisoned for one minute. Creatures can reroll their CON save each turn. |
| 2 | Rotten vines twist and curl under the moonlight, grasping for the living. A random living creature must make a DC 13 DEX or STR save to avoid the vines or be restrained by them for one minute. |
| 3 | A massive, batlike shadow blots out the moonlight, plunging the field into supernatural darkness for one round of combat. |
| 4 | Some of the pumpkins turn and watch the party as they go by. Their jack-o’-lantern faces flicker to life and their shrill, child-like cries fill your ears. The party must make a DC 12 CHA save or take 1d6 psychic damage. |
A pulsing, faintly warm gourd at the center of the patch can be hollowed out and fixed with a handle or hung by a chain. When a candle is lit inside the pumpkin, it emits a warm, dim light in a 20-foot cone ahead. Once per long rest, the lantern can be used to repel the undead. Undead creatures caught in the light must make a DC 13 WIS save or be frightened as though under the effect of a cleric’s Turn the Profane feature. The pumpkin completely decomposes in 1d4 weeks.
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