Given that fire is one of the building blocks of the universe, it’s no surprise how many creature have “fire” or “flame” in their name: elementals, giants, mephits, skeletons, snakes, and that’s just off the top of my head. Usually “fire” indicates an escalation from the original creature. Not only does it deal fire damage, usually in addition to its normal attacks, and not only is it resistant to the most popular damage type players have, but a fire creature is often stronger and tougher than their base. This is the case with fire bats, which are basically bats that have a hard time hiding in caves but are a much bigger threat to low-level parties. Bats already have a bit of a reputation among gamers, so hitting them with one that doesn’t go down in one hit is a quick path to a table flip.
But I ran a Zelda campaign, so I had to include their bat equivalent, keese. And since keese were one-hitpoint minions, I could throw them in pretty much at any level as a way to annoy my players whenever they showed up late for game too often. We also had an escalation of that mechanic, which we called super-minions: creatures who became bloodied after one hit and died after a second. It meant they weren’t completely invalidated by any persistent or automatic damage, but never so serious that they were a real threat except in the context of the monsters they accompanied. Fire bats, or here fire keese, were super-minions. If they took damage or hit an opponent, they lost their flame, and almost any damage dealt to a flameless keese killed it. The exception was fire damage, which healed them back up to full hit points (which, to be fair, was 2).
Players usually hate it when enemies heal themselves. Not here. They loved the keese’s mechanic, and they immediately assumed they would have the same problem with cold damage because that’s what happened in the games (“Sure,” I shrugged, “why not?”). The keese themselves were smart enough to hit and run, bonking a player and retreating to the safety of a nearby torch or pool of lava. Even later in the campaign, when they players fought normal keese again, they tried to avoid dealing fire damage to them, and I ran with it. A lot of that campaign was about mimicking the feel of the video games, and you can’t buy that kind of player investment.
The reason I’m reluctant to include fire keese in this month’s festivities is because I made them up whole cloth. They’re not a reskin of anything in D&D, and I don’t even think I looked at the official bat’s statistics when I made mine. They’re just a creature with an interesting concept that challenged the players as much as the characters, especially the party tank who loved setting people and things on fire. The thing that nudged me over the edge is the story of the time two keese were fluttering around, trying to figure out how to attack the party, and one said to the other “let’s set ourselves on fire and double our hit points”. My players and I have a soft spot for that kind of lampshade.
He dubbed the stranger “Señor Risco”, and to be honest I have no idea why. I vaguely recalled that “risco” was Portuguese for “rock”, and earth elementals spoke Portuguese because of some one-off gag from a previous session. A quick check now proves that’s nowhere near the correct translation, but whatever, the name stuck. We got Señor Risco a luchador’s mask, then realized he could not earth glide with the mask on, so he followed the party mostly hidden with only his head sticking out of the ground. From there the jokes kept piling on and he became something like a member of the party, perhaps even more than the cohort who was doing all of our healing. When the campaign ended he was thirty feet tell and he had taken the feats he needed to perform tag team maneuvers, which were mostly picking up the slowest members of the party and throwing them to (at) their enemies.
The Portalator was a shopkeeper who managed portals to various other planes and places within them. I think he was in the Abyss, and he came up when the party wanted to work their way to a demon prince who had been harassing them and give him what for. He was forward, personable, and maybe ever so slightly incredibly camp. From the very first word he uttered, he was clearly not a typical slaad and became unique enough for the players to recognize and dread him from them on. He turned against the party for reasons I honestly don’t fully remember, and at the end of the campaign’s second arc he managed to kill the cleric with a save-or-die right after she used one against his team. They got their revenge against him in the third arc…I think. I’m not sure they ever found the body.
When I was working on the second Zelda campaign, I decided one of the themes was going to be animals, not least because I had found a series of really neat pictures of pseudo-magical creatures I could leverage. The players met spirits, each of which took the form of an animal, and allied with them to gain magical powers. When it came time to design the actual plot of the campaign, I decided they should have a leader the players could help. I didn’t want something simple like “lion, king of beasts”, I wanted something that represented as many animals as possible. I remembered chimera, the word more than the actual creature, and I found a picture that looked like a regal somebody with a motley combination of animal parts so we could have our version of Princess Zelda.
In that context, my players actually have encountered several brains, and some of them occurred outside their enemies. The first birthday session I ever celebrated involved pitting the players against video game villains, and the role of Mother Brain was played by a brain in a jar on the top of a clockwork giant of some type (take a drink). In the Great Tower of Oldechi, the players spent an entire level inside a body, and at one point they tapped into its central nervous system to speak with the brain directly. I once had a campaign villain planned who gained psychic powers because her brain had been replaced by something else, though the players managed to dodge it.
I like angels, but not as angels. I like them more as bundles of generic stats. They’re a pretty good total package for their CR, decent at magic, defense, combat, interaction, and most other things that go into a character. If you trade out a spell or two and convert their protective aura into something more befitting a specific character (like the avatar of a metallic dragon with a bonus against chromatic dragons) you can use them to represent any number of creatures in any number of situations. They’re especially handy if you’re in a bind where your players have something unexpected and you need the stats for a monster right now. Really, the thing most holding back angels is the word “angel”.