The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

The cosmic horror is a massive astral grotesquery—even more massive, in fact, than the higher-rated astral dreadnought. The two creatures have a couple of things in common besides their enormous size: They’re both aberrations (negatory: the astral dreadnought is a monstrosity) with astral origins, and they both have Legendary Resistance. However, while astral dreadnoughts are unaligned creatures, indifferent to other beings except when they’re hungry, and possess animal-level intelligence, cosmic horrors are hyperintelligent and malevolent. An astral dreadnought is a danger, but a cosmic horror is a threat.

With a flying speed of 100 feet, a cosmic horror is faster than most things in Wildspace. It also has a “walking” speed of 50 feet—probably more of a self-dragging speed, like an octopus hauling itself across a beach—but the only instance I can think of in which it might use that speed is pursuit of other creatures through tunnels in a mined-out asteroid. If a cosmic horror is somehow knocked prone while inside the gravity envelope of a spelljamming ship or asteroid, it will simply launch itself airborne again on its turn, and if it’s immobilized, it can’t use any movement speed, flying or walking.

A cosmic horror has extraordinary Strength, Constitution, Intelligence and Charisma, but of these four, Strength and Constitution are the highest, so it’s a melee-oriented brute—but one with a 30-foot reach, so it doesn’t need to get right in its opponents’ faces. A good place for it is 10 or 15 feet in the air above the opposing side, whence it can reach landbound targets roughly 25 feet in every direction. That’s 25 feet from the outer edge of the cosmic horror’s space, which is at least 20 feet across, since it’s a Gargantuan creature; or you can have it uncoil and stretch out horizontally, so that it occupies a rectangle 20 feet across and 100 feet long and reaches out 25 feet in every direction from that. The only safe place on your ship is belowdecks.

A while back I wrote about the reigar, a confusingly designed creature that doesn’t seem equipped to do a whole lot besides create copies of itself and fling Chromatic Bolts, and reader Another DM pointed out to me that reigar ships are living beings, called esthetics, that have actions of their own. Is the reigar-esthetic combo any greater than the sum of its parts?

The esthetic has a 60-foot flying speed, 50 percent faster than the median 40-foot flying speed of the spelljamming ships listed in the Astral Adventurer’s Guide, so it should have no trouble overtaking most of them, the zippy damselfly and shrike being the only exceptions. It’s a melee brute with extraordinary Strength and Constitution (and not much else) and blindsight extending 300 feet. It also has tentacles, which can grapple creatures but unfortunately, as written, can’t grapple other ships. It can, however, yank creatures off the decks of other ships.

Additionally, it has a recharging bonus action, Jammerscream, that can disable another ship for days if the pilot fails a Charisma saving throw; even if the pilot succeeds, the ship is still dead in space for more than enough time to play out a combat encounter. It recharges only on a 6, so the esthetic should count on getting to use it only once per encounter, although a surprise recharge is within the realm of possibility. An esthetic can even nab a damselfly or shrike if it can somehow entice that ship into its 300-foot range by sucker-punching it with Jammerscream. In fact, the flavor text in Boo’s Astral Menagerie explicitly lays this modus operandi out.

The eye monger is yet another head-scratcher in what’s turning into a whole series of head-scratchers in Boo’s Astral Menagerie. A large, durable brute with extraordinary Strength and Constitution (and exceptionally poor Dexterity, Intelligence and Charisma), it’s saddled with a plodding flying speed of only 20 feet. How is it supposed to catch targets in order to bite them?

The intention is clearly to catch them by surprise. Eye mongers have the False Appearance trait—the Monsters of the Multiverse version, which gives them advantage on first-round initiative rolls and can be penetrated in advance by a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check, not the Monster Manual version, which effectively grants an automatic surprise round. Their appearance is that of a 12-foot asteroid. Dear reader, that is what we would normally call a “rock”—or, more charitably, a “boulder”—not an asteroid, whose diameter is typically measured in miles or kilometers. The largest asteroids, and by extension the ones of greatest interest, are several hundred miles or kilometers across. There’s nothing to tempt space travelers to venture near a 12-foot rockball.

Moreover, it is, in fact, shaped like a ball, which is atypical of most asteroids. It takes a lot of mass for rock to be pulled into a sphere under the force of its own gravity, and only the largest possess that much. So not only is the eye monger not disguised as something that would lure anyone near it, if you take a few seconds to think about it, it’s not even a convincing disguise.