Bestiary #

Editor’s Notes #

This is a collection of creatures that my co-DMs and I created for our Grim Saints campaign. Because our game is a D&D 5e game set in the Pathfinder universe, a number of these creatures are converted from their Pathfinder origins and given 5e stat blocks and abilities (though some have further customizations). We have also created some whole-cloth for our purposes.

The creatures here have been “playtested” in the sense that we have used them in our campaign and our own characters have fought against them, unless a creature is otherwise labelled.

Game Challenges #

Most of these creatures were designed to overcome the specific challenges that our group makeup has posed. Our players are all experienced as players and most are also experienced DMs, which has resulted in fairly highly optimized and durable characters. With two Barbarians, an evasive Rogue, and an armored-to-the-teeth Fighter at its core, we tend to laugh at so-called “deadly” encounters by the usual challenge calculators. For us, “deadly” typically means “we might have to throw a heal on someone who was particularly unlucky or stupid.”

To add to the challenge, outside of the Barbarians and Fighter, the group is really squishy and can often be one-shot by anything that can even remotely threaten the other three. This makes it very difficult to tune encounters to really feel threatening without making it completely unfair to the squishier members.

As a result, you’ll find that a lot of the creatures in this book have abilities and/or spells that don’t rely so much on breaking through AC – or if they do, they have a high +hit. We also make liberal use of multiattack and other creative tactics to whittle down the party’s defenses. Additionally, their configuration makes it difficult to accurately gauge their Challenge Rating and are likely on the high end for whatever rating they’re listed as, depending on your own group makeup.