The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

It’s funny, but everyone I know who’s created a warforged player character, including myself, has chosen to make them a cleric, druid or monk. In the lore of their creation, the warforged were purpose-built to be soldiers. Yet it seems to be a universal impulse—at least, among the kind of people I interact with—to have them turn away from that path and toward one of introspection.

If you’re looking for any of that in the stat blocks of the warforged titan and the warforged colossus, you may as well stop looking, because you’re not going to find it. The titan is a barely sentient brute; the colossus, a barely sentient mega-brute. (more…)

Living spells are constructs with no creator except calamity. Produced by a massive magical mishap, they’re hazards, not creatures with intention. They home in on living targets for no obvious reason except that they’re damage-dealing spells that need to deal damage to something.

Owing to this fact of their creation, there isn’t much to say about their tactics. They head toward the nearest living thing, then detonate. Until their Spell Mimicry recharges, they use their Magical Strike attacks against the same target. With their basement-level Intelligence and Wisdom, there’s no discrimination among targets and no self-preservation impulse—the latter reinforced by their being constructs. They cycle mechanistically between these actions until they’re dispersed (to say “killed” doesn’t make much sense in this instance).

However, there are a few interesting things worth noting in their entry in Eberron: Rising From the Last War. (more…)