I think it’s intriguing that Sigil, purportedly a neutral hub linking all the aligned Outer Planes, nevertheless has such a fixation on maintaining law and order. I mean, sure, that’s clearly something I would hope for from a crossroads used by powerful entities with views that might be wildly at odds with one another. But when law itself is one of those tenets that are up for dispute … I mean, is there any entity responsible for ensuring that all who pass through Sigil are treated kindly, and that all their needs are met? Or that they all get to engage in violative acts against someone else for their own benefit? Or that they can enjoy freedom from any sort of restriction or imposition whatsoever? I’m not the only one who sees the bias here, right?
Anyway, the Kolyarut is part judge, part detective, part enforcer (as opposed to its cousins, the maruts, which are all enforcer). According to the flavor text in Morte’s Planar Parade, which seems a little confused as to whether there’s just one Kolyarut or many—in the stat block, it’s not even capitalized!—Kolyaruts don’t use their ferocious weaponry to punish, but rather to defend themselves and clear away obstacles to their investigations. Like maruts, they take a very “Don’t start none, won’t be none” attitude.
One thing I find particularly interesting right off the bat is that the Kolyarut has a walking speed and a flying speed, but in an exception to the usual rule, the flying speed is slower than the walking speed. Most flying creatures, of course, are fliers first and foremost, with little reason ever to walk instead. But for the Kolyarut, flying is the exception, not the rule. It’s not likely to be able to catch a flying creature by pursuing it through the air: Its flying speed is just 35 feet. So the more likely application of its flying speed is to grant it access to locations it can’t get to by walking and can’t get to as quickly as it would like by climbing.
The Kolyarut is impressively endowed in all abilities except Dexterity—and even that is modestly above humanoid average—but its standout abilities are Strength and Intelligence. This double peak in its ability contour reflects its dual nature as investigator and clobberer; if it had offensive spells to cast, it would do so as readily as it swings its blades. Its primary defensive ability, naturally, is its extraordinary Constitution, indicating its willingness to get up in any face without hesitation. In other words, a brute, but a brute whose mind is definitely as mighty as its arm. Arms. It has four of them.
It’s proficient in all mental saving throws, and it can’t be charmed, exhausted, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned or knocked unconscious, but I wish its Charisma were just a little bit higher; I feel like something called “an inevitable” should be much harder to banish than the Kolyarut is. It’s also resistant (not immune) to physical damage from nonmagical weapons, along with thunder damage, and fully immune to poison damage, but all other damage types affect it normally. I guess whoever designed it decided that giving it 297 hp would be enough to reflect its durability. In any event, it also has Magic Resistance, along with four uses of Legendary Resistance. The message we should be getting here is that there isn’t much that this thing has any reason to be afraid of when it’s out and about. Only magic weapons and damaging spells of the Dex-save variety can get past its defenses without resistance, so opponents with these are its primary targets.
The Kolyarut’s basic attack is Unerring Blade, which its Multiattack allows it to use four times per turn (once for each arm). On a hit, you can either roll for an effect or simply choose one, and I personally would always choose. Push is for when it’s looking for information and its target is getting in the way. Disarm is for impertinent fools who come at it with weapons. Imbalance doesn’t do anything except suppress reactions, which is all right for avoiding opportunity attacks, I guess, although I don’t see that the Kolyarut has a whole lot to fear from opportunity attacks. It needn’t worry about the Battle Master’s Riposte maneuver, because its own attacks always hit, so they’ll never trigger that reaction. Counterspell? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, because of Plane Shift.
You may remember that the original marut from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes had an ability called Justify, which automatically transported the target to the Hall of Concordance on a failed saving throw. In Monsters of the Multiverse, however, Justify was replaced by Plane Shift, which allows the marut to cast the eponymous spell—and a spell can be counterspelled. The Kolyarut in Morte’s has the same Plane Shift ability as the Multiverse marut. That means that a quick-thinking sorcerer, warlock or wizard with a 7th-level spell slot who’s about to be plane shifted away can dash off a counterspell and avoid their fate. Under 5E24 rules, they don’t even have to have a 7th-level spell slot to do it; a 3rd-level slot is enough. So the Kolyarut might well want to make sure that, before it tries to Plane Shift someone away, it hits them with the Imbalance effect.
It all makes so much sense—until you read Imbalance more closely and note that it says, “The target can’t take reactions until the start of the kolyarut’s next turn” (emphasis mine). So if the Kolyarut hits a target and applies the Imbalance effect to keep them from using their reaction on counterspell, by the time it can cast plane shift on that target, the effect is over already. Forget that, then. I guess Imbalance isn’t good for anything except preventing opportunity attacks after all.
There’s no need to forestall opportunity attacks before using Edict of Blades, a 5–6 recharge ability, because it explicitly exempts the Kolyarut from OAs while using it. This ability, actually, is the one the Kolyarut wants to use before casting plane shift, because any creature hit by it—which is to say, any creature targeted by it, because the Kolyarut’s attacks always hit—is incapacitated until the end of its next turn, and an incapacitated creature can’t take reactions. That’s the stuff.
What the Kolyarut needs to do, then, is use its superhuman Intelligence and Wisdom to examine the body language (read: character sheets) of all its foes to deduce which of them might be planning on casting counterspell and make sure it includes any such foe in its Edict of Blades attack. Because it’s not the target of plane shift that needs to be incapacitated—it’s whoever might cast counterspell to prevent the target from being plane shifted.
In fact, in the interest of efficiency, a Kolyarut that needs to haul an uncooperative witness back to the Hall of Concordance wastes no time and jumps right in with Edict of Blades. If it hasn’t been provoked, it might even declare all its Unerring Blade attacks to be nonlethal attacks with the Push or Disarm effect, something you can communicate to players (e.g., “The Kolyarut doesn’t seem to be trying to harm you, just to stop you from getting in its way”). In the second round, it casts plane shift on its designated target, and in the third round, it casts plane shift on itself. Bye-bye!
Let’s look at an alternative scenario, one in which a party of player characters encounters a Kolyarut on a factfinding mission and gets in its way, either intentionally or unintentionally. This scenario is one of the rare instances in which it’s not necessarily the right move to default to a 5–6 recharge ability, because the Kolyarut’s Multiattack is extremely strong already—possibly stronger than Edict of Blades, depending on how many foes the Kolyarut has and whether they’re buffing themselves with magic.
This Multiattack comprises four Unerring Blade attacks. Edict of Blades comprises as many attacks as the Kolyarut can make while moving up to 50 feet (which can include up to 35 feet of flying). Since the Kolyarut can attack to either side of itself, we can imagine this as a linear area-effect ability 50 feet long and three times as wide as normal. Dividing 50 feet by 30 and rounding up gives us two targets, and tripling the width gives us six, so we might decide that the Kolyarut holds off on using Edict of Blades unless and until it can strike at least six opponents with it (or all of them, if there are fewer than six).
However, Edict of Blades also comes with a couple of riders: incapacitation and dispelling of magic up to 5th level. I was recently introduced to this blog post, in which the author, Tom E. Dunn, calculates the value of the incapacitated condition as reducing damage from attacks and other effects by the affected creature by 100 percent. That’s effectively the same as what happens when you kill the creature, which is something that normally takes a hit to do. So let’s posit that the incapacitation effect is equivalent to landing an additional hit, one that would either kill the target or at least render it unconscious. Since every target hit by Edict has this condition imposed upon it, that’s like landing two hits per target—in which case it’s a good deal for the Kolyarut even if it can only target three opponents instead of six.
The magic-dispelling rider is sort of incidental … until it’s not. Since it terminates “each spell of 5th level or lower on the creature” (emphasis mine) who gets hit, and since the Kolyarut presumably isn’t attacking creatures on its own side, we can conclude that the spells we’re talking about here are buffs that it would benefit the Kolyarut to remove. What might some of these include? Aura of purity, circle of power, crusader’s mantle, gaseous form, guardian of nature, haste, intellect fortress, invisibility (and greater invisibility), shadow of moil and stoneskin all come to mind. Ending one of these spells is about as good as hitting an additional target.
“Wait, how’s it going to know where an invisible creature is in order to hit it?” Being invisible makes you invisible. It doesn’t make you inaudible, and the Kolyarut has Perception +12. If you didn’t think to Hide, and possibly even if you did, it knows where you are by the sound of your footsteps. And it makes no difference whether or not the Kolyarut has disadvantage on its attack. It always hits.
Batting cleanup in the stat block is the Parry reaction, which grants an extra 6 points to the Kolyarut’s Armor Class. Listen for when a player calls out an attack roll of 18 through 23.
With its Intelligence and Wisdom, the Kolyarut takes the opposition’s measure in an instant; it knows immediately whether or not it’s looking at a winning fight or a losing one. (If a group of PCs are level 12 or below, it’s most likely a winning fight for the Kolyarut. If they’re level 15 or above, it looks better for the PCs. At level 13 or 14, the odds depend on the number of PCs in the party.) It has Charisma 18 and knows all languages, so it’s always willing to take a moment to explain itself and request that other creatures get out of its way so that it can do its job. To the extent it’s able, it will even negotiate deals. But it also knows when its interlocutors aren’t interested in “getting to yes” and it’s going to have to resort to less social and more physical means to accomplish its purposes. It doesn’t have proficiency in any social skill, but that also means it’s not biased toward any particular conversational approach. Most of the time, it favors good-faith persuasion or orders backed by threats. When the opposition is intransigent but the chances of victory for the Kolyarut also don’t look very good, that’s when it resorts to plausible-sounding lies.
If a fight ensues, it follows the guidance above on when to use Edict of Blades, generally blasting past front-line warriors, Disarming those with magic weapons as it goes; arriving in the back line, where it does the same to archers with magic weapons or ammunition; and finally plonking itself down beside the fireball-hurling spellslinger, giving them four sword-wielding arms to think about between the Kolyarut’s turns.
The Kolyarut is mission-driven and determined, but it’s not suicidal. When seriously wounded (reduced to 118 hp or fewer), it plane shifts back to home base to recuperate and try again later.
Next: razorvine blights.
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