One reason I haven’t addressed the remorhaz (pronounced rem-o-raz) yet is that I’ve tried to emphasize creatures that are likely to have fighting styles more complex than “Rrrrraaaaahhhhh, stab stab stab” (or “chomp chomp chomp”). Generally, that’s meant skipping over monsters with simple brute profiles—high Strength, high Constitution, low-to-middling everything else, without much in the way of tactics that might modify this—and the remorhaz is one of those. However, a reader asked me to take a look at it, so let’s see what there is in its stat block that might liven it up:
- Burrowing movement. Remorhazes aren’t stealthy, but it doesn’t take proficiency in Stealth to sit in a hole in the ground and wait for prey to stroll by. (I love how the Monster Manual handwaves the combination of their arctic habitat and their Heated Body feature by declaring, “While hidden under the ice and snow, it can lower its body temperature so that it doesn’t melt its cover.” Well, isn’t that convenient!)
- Sixty feet of tremorsense. OK, this I like, because basically it works the same way as the sandworms in Dune. It doesn’t have to see you walking overhead: it can feel you.
- Heated Body. Touch a remorhaz, or hit it with a close-range melee attack, and you take fire damage.
- The Swallow action. This is where the remorhaz gets interesting.
