Announcement - Semi Hiatus

Real life caught up to me, and I am going to be on an indefinite hiatus on this blog for the next couple of months. Really don't have time to review and catch up to new shows, nor do I have time to write too many long-form articles.

At the very least, though, I have written a fair amount of things that have been scheduled to be uploaded. The following review series will still be going on:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes has more or less been completed, and will still be uploaded every weekend. That, I think, will be the bulk of the content you guys get to see in the upcoming months. I may get some additional stuff written for D&D's AD&D Monstrous Manual or other collections of adventures finalized and edited as well. 
• Marvel's Wonder Man has been reviewed to the last episode, as is Marvel Zombies, and have also been scheduled.
• I also have three 'reviewing monsters' articles, one for the Genshin Impact's Nod-Krai and another two for Undertale, ready to be released at some point. 

In addition, I have a full playthrough of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX that's been scribbled but not properly edited or formatted, and those might be published in June or July. 

There's also the less-exciting CW superhero show season reviews and 'reviewing Pokemon attacks' -- some of which have been sitting in my drafts since last year -- some of which I just need to spellcheck and edit (which GPT is good at, but I don't like shoving my work into GPT... but it will be helpful with a 'fix only spelling and grammar, do not change a single piece of the content' prompt).

Other than that, content in this blog will be very dry -- especially for 'new' and 'live' series, like the One Piece manga, or anything that I haven't watched (Daredevil: Born Again, the One Piece live-action, the new Bleach or JoJo...) and however those reviews will look like will depend on how I feel when I get to actually watching them. 

(I did read One Piece 1181, it sure is a cool action chapter!)

TL;DR, there will be a buffer of posts coming up in the next couple of months, but that's mostly about it from me until August. Bit of a bummer, but life gets in the way and I'll see you guys then!

Pokopia!

 
So I think I need to write a bit about Pokopia, the new sensation hitting all of your Switch 2's, and one of the few reasons to actually even buy a Switch 2 at the time of writing. 

I wasn't planning to play Pokopia, not until Pokemon Winds and Waves forces me to get a Switch 2 and maybe I'll play it along the side. But things happened, my family is awesome, and I was gifted a Switch 2 and Pokopia. And I've been playing it for quite a bit. On and off. I don't plan to be a completionist about it, since these kinds of 'Animal Crossing' style games are... dangerous for me to be completionist about. But I had so much fun. It was so relaxing, so calming, and the fact that you can just pop in, do some harvesting and building and log off was really nice. 

It's a very charming world where you play as a Ditto masquerading as the cutest little fake-human ever, and I found that to be such a brilliant concept. Making new Pokemon arriving in new habitats as the 'villagers' and certain pokemon teaching you certain moves to help harvest items or transverse the terrain is done extremely well too. The story is... all right, with enough 'main story' questlines going around to hold your attention without deviating from the theme of the game and its chiller tone. 

Again, I'm not the biggest fan of the 'blocks' world popularized by Minecraft, but I feel like it's pretty important to do that for this game's playstyle specifically. Really adore the playerable Ditto's "human" form, and how charming the rubber-hose-arm animations are. 

I think it was obvious and not that much of a spoiler that Pokopia takes place in a post-apocalyptic Kanto. It gets a bit more obvious as you start building Pokemon Centers and travel from the first area to the second one, but I thought that coming in without expectations and only minimal spoilers, the build-up to this mystery is done quite well, and the Planet of the Apes style 'oh, this isn't just any post-apocalyptic world, it's Kanto' is a neat little nod to the players without actually being super relevant for the in-universe Pokemon characters. 

There are a fair bit of nice notes scattered all over the land to showcase this plot progression, but that's just collectibles! The main aspect of the game is to solve the problems of your Pokemon friends, make good habitats, scavenge or craft nice little decorations and give them to your Pokemon tenants. That's nice. That's simple. And Pokemon's quite great for the 'gotta catch em all' mentality of the tenants as well. Love that Ditto just carries around a Pokedex, too, which doesn't just record Pokemon data but also habitat data. So much of Ditto's mannerisms is just adorable and well done, and... and I don't think a let's play would be particularly entertaining with me going 'oh god that's cute' and 'oh god that's funny' over and over again. 

Dialogue is simple -- but very fun. Just like Mystery Dungeon, it's always great to see Pokemon have personalities and voices of their own. Vespiquen is more regal, Slowpoke is slow, Timburr is excited about building, Magikarp is a surprisingly peppy dudebro... there are certain unique NPCs as well, like 'Professor Tangrowth' and I do know that a 'Peakychu', a 'Mosslax' and a bunch of other not-quite-alternate-forms-but-visually-they-are-different characters will show up.  I'm sure they'll be fun, too. 

I was planning to do a let's play to follow up Legends Arceus, but... it's just a bit stressful to try and jot down everything about the game and that is against the spirit of the game, really. I do also want to take it very chill and very on my own pace! But on the flipside, I just wanted to acknowledge that this game exists, that I'm very slowly playing through it, and that it is probably one of the better gaming experiences I've had in a while. It's a great Animal-Crossing-meets-Minecraft game on its own, but it actually feels like a game that's properly built and exists in the Pokemon lore and universe. And that's pretty great. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to being a little happy morph-blob and go around vacuuming up sticks and rocks and spitting water to make grass grow. 

Reviewing 5E D&D Monsters - Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, Pt 1 (Allip to Derro)

And after we have finished up with Volo's Guide to Monsters, we're now covering Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, one half of the two 'splatbook' bestiaries for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition that would be released together as Monsters of the Multiverse.

As with Volo's Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes has around half of the book discuss in-depth ore about certain parts of the lore, focusing on several aspects of D&D's multiverse setting, and the second half are the monsters. Instead of focusing purely on several spotlight monsters, however, we get five chapters. Two of these chapters are fun, while the other three are quite bland and honestly quite setting-specific.

The best parts are perhaps the weirder races:

• It's always great to get a whole segment discussing the Blood War between the Demons and the Devils. We get some of this in the original 5th Edition Monster Manual, giving a fair amount of context to the Blood War. There's also an expansive 'who's who' of the Abyss and the Nine Hells, and I'm going to state again here that unlike my original coverage of Tome of Foes, I'm going to skip talking about all the 'named' bosses and save them for another article. 
• The Gith is also a nice chunk of lore, and not being the most familiar with them back when I was covering this book initially in 2020, it's nice to see some more expansion about the cultures of the Githyanki and Githzerai. I still am not the biggest fan of these psionic aliens, but have grown to appreciate them a lot more in the last half-decade. 

The rest of the first half covers the following, though: one chapter for Dwarves, one chapter for Gnomes and Halflings, and one chapter for Elves. The Drow stuff for the elves are all right, I suppose, and kind of obligatory... but so much of that chapter is just discussing a lot about the very specific pantheon in the Forgotten Realms which... really is super-specific and honestly wasn't the most well-presented. I liked the Dwarf segment, particularly with this book probably being the first that highlighted some differences in culture about the various dwarven 'sub-races' that are honestly only there for the players' benefit. And I just don't remember anything at all from the Gnomes/Halfling segment, despite finishing that chunk of the book a day before writing this article.

But anyway, we're here for the monsters. The monsters in this book are a fair bit more scattershot. There is an attempt to give us a bunch of extra Drow and Duergar stats, and a whole lot of bonus fiends, but for the most part I do like Tome of Foes as functioning as a real mix-bag of random creatures. 

There are a lot of new fiends here, and just like my original coverage of Tome of Foes, after the first batch of monsters we'll take a detour to talk about Demons, Devils and Yugoloths in two pages and then move on to the rest of the book. 

• Click here for the final part.
• Click here for the next part.
• Click here for the index.

[Originally published May 2020; revised on April 2026]

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Allip 

• 5.5E/5E: Medium Undead; Neutral Evil; CR 5

The first Dungeons & Dragons bestiary I read was the 3.5th Edition Monster Manual, which featured the Allip as one of the monsters in the book. And the artwork is a relatively simple monster concept: a wraith made up of swirling smoke and cloth, with proportions that are just a bit off for a regular humanoid body structure. This artwork stuck with me for quite a while, even if the lore associated with the Allip is quite simple -- someone driven to suicide by madness, and now haunts those who tormented it in life. This does really overlap a lot with other undead like Revenants (vengeance) and Ghosts (unfinished business), making the Allip a bit more redundant.

5E's take on the Allip gives it a lot more of an interesting backstory. Allips are created specifically when someone discovers a forbidden secret. Curses tied to the discovery of a secret (such as a demon lord's name) may be annihilated by the secret and be transformed into an Allip, a combination of the fragments of the victim's shattered psyche and the overwhelming psychic agony. It is such a great twist on the 'forbidden secret' trope, and with how much D&D draws from Lovecraft, this tie-in to 'forbidden secrets drives you mad' is a lot more appropriate for fantasy than the rather oversimplification of mental illness and suicide that the original Allip is. 

Every Allip is wracked with the remnants of the horrifying insight that broke them in the first place, and they are driven by a compulsion to share this secret. They can't say the whole thing, but the whole mess that is the Allip causes even these fragmented chunks of forbidden knowledge to cause temporary insanity in those that hear them. Properly sharing this knowledge (not an easy task due to the Allip's own madness) would allow them to pass on the curse, and a potential encounter with an Allip is for the spectral undead to hide in a library or a wizard's tower, and slowly influencing their minds so that the wizard or scholar produces reams of text that rambles on and on... and within that text is the secret the Allip is trying to pass on. 

Those that survive fighting an Allip but hears its 'howling babble' will often be stuck with a compulsion to learn more about just what knowledge can spawn this hideous being. That bit is probably the coolest (and scariest) part of the 5E Allip, that even after destroying this wretched creature, the adventurers might still be tormented by strange phrases and visions, with the sense that you're meant to know something, if only you know what that something is. 

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Astral Dreadnought 

• 5.5E/5E: Gargantuan Monstrosity - Titan; Unaligned; CR 21

How cool is the Astral Dreadnought? The first time I saw an Astral Dreadnought, it was neat visually but not the most exciting... until you realize the sheer size of this thing, and the lore that comes with it. The design is pretty simple. A giant serpentine body, two massive crab-claws (actually crab-like in 5E), and a face with a massive fanged maw and a single beady eye. The Astral Dreadnought are titanic beings that live in the Astral Plane, which is both the Dungeons & Dragons universe's version of both a spiritual plane and space. The Astral Dreadnought was famously featured on the cover of the AD&D Manual of the Planes, which explains a lot of the cosmology that D&D is built upon, and somewhat infamously, did not actually appear inside the book. That specific artwork of it was traced and inspired another pillar of sci-fi/fantasy, Doom's Cacodemon. When the two bestiaries of 5E are combined into Monsters of the Multiverse, the Astral Dreadnought is shown looming menacingly on the book's cover.  

Astral Dreadnoughts have existed since the dawn of time, devouring all they encounter. The Dreadnoughts are as big as the largest dragons... or at least, that's what its face and arms are. The serpentine tail 'trails off into the silvery void', a feature that its previous incarnations also seem to share. It gives this being a strange, mythical or reality-warping quality that makes it a lot more mysterious than 'just' a giant alien space kraken. 

Astral Dreadnoughts, by nature, are solitary, and if two Dreadnoughts meet they end up fighting each other. Their eye reflects swirling constellations, but insanity awaits anyone who gazes into the eye of this ancient being. Looking at something as vast and infinite as the Astral Dreadnought causes the sudden realization of mortality. The Astral Dreadnought itself casts an anti-magic field from its eye. It's not commented upon by the prose, but this is the same effect caused by a different creature with a single eye atop a giant mouth -- the Beholder. Is there a real connection, or is it just the game giving a powerful ability to two creatures it wants to hype up?

Astral Dreadnoughts have good enough instincts to track spellcasters and keep them under the gaze of its eye, but it is otherwise a remorseless, indiscriminate hunter. It's not a proper 'organic' being, so anything it eats gets transported into a demiplane (specifically, a demiplanar donjon), a mini-dimension within itself... which mostly just contains eons and eons' worth of corpses and detritus. Which means you can escape the demiplane if you are a powerful enough of a spellcaster to know these planar-teleportation spells...  and also survive being crushed by the Astral Dreadnought's gigantic fangs and claws. It is a unique existence that the Dreadnought goes through, since it doesn't really need sustenance. And yet it is still driven by hunger and the need to feed. When a Dreadnought dies, its demiplane implodes and its contents are released into the Astral Plane, which is an interesting aftermath. In addition to the obvious rescue system, I could see an adventuring hook where we've got spelljamming crews that specialize in taking down Dreadnoughts and then salvaging whatever ancient treasures it has swallowed over the eons. Or, well, a dungeon inside a Dreadnought. 

In addition to being a giant crab-snake monster, the Astral Dreadnought has a couple of extra abilities. It has the property of permanently being tethered to the Astral Plane, unable to leave or be transported away. It can sever 'silver cords', as well -- spellcasters who enter the Astral Space not with a spaceship but by spells like 'astral form' are tethered to their bodies with a silver cord. Astral Dreadnoughts can just cut that. They are also able to unleash psychic blasts, and to temporarily teleport a foe they see into their demiplane, although they get ejected out soon enough if they don't enter through the mouth. 

In the setting of D&D, the Astral Dreadnoughts were created by Tharizdun the Chained God, who specifically sends out the Dreadnoughts to devour planar travelers who seek portals that might lead them to gaze upon gods improperly. I don't know enough about Tharizdun other than what Critical Role has shown me, but it is nice to know just a bit of the Astral Dreadnoughts' backstory.

A very, very cool monster and a really fun concept. Again, the Dreadnought already looked pretty cool in older editions, but the simple slight changes of giving it a pair of proper crab claws instead of two pokey horn-like fingers makes it look so much more menacing. The new mouth also helps too. Iconic for a reason!

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Balhannoth

• 5.5E/5E: Large Aberration; Chaotic Evil; CR 11

Looking at a bunch of the monsters debuting in Tome of Foes, whoever selected the monsters for this book really liked the 3.5E and 4E material, adapting a lot of the monsters that were highlighted in those two editions' first Monster Manuals. Debuting in the 3rd Edition, the Balhannoth is a creature that I must admit I've never really paid much attention to. It most certainly looked neat, a giant 'slug-blob' monster similar to the Otyugh with a large maw and around a half-dozen tentacles whipping around from its body. 5E made it visually look much more like a mollusk, if not for the monstrous Predator-mouth it has, and the mass of spiky squid tentacles it has. The older versions of the Balhannoth had a bit more mass, I feel. 

It's a neat design, but I had always kind of dismissed it as just a 'tentacle slug monster' before doing the first incarnation of this review article. It doesn't help, though, that the Balhannoth had changed its lore and powers from edition to edition. 3E had it just an Underdark specialized predator that tracks magic and disables them with its tentacles; 4E had them be shifty creatures that can teleport and turn invisible. 5E has the Balhannoth be a Shadowfell native... and have a variation of its 4E power set, but as a service of its main gimmick -- illusions. Or 'altered reality', technically.  

5E Balhannoths are seemingly designed to make full use of its lair. They are able to alter reality within its lair to make the place appear inviting to travelers. They have a limited form of telepathy to scan nearby creatures and alter its lair accordingly. With an intelligence score of 6, it doesn't seem to be properly intelligent, but with this telepathy it can mimic a convincing facsimile of the desires of the people passing by... but it never gets all the details right. Books might be empty, golden items feel like counterfeit, pictures might be indistinct... after all, the Balhannoth is just mimicking for the express purpose of luring travelers to enter its domain out of curiousity. Within its domain, Balhannots can do things like teleport other people around, and warp reality as based on the minds of any other beings that enter it. 

Like most Shadowfell creatures, Balhannoths feed on negative emotions, like fear and despair, and use its ability to teleport short distances or turn invisible to move near its prey,  than grapple them with its mass of tentacles and feed on them. When not lurking in their own lairs, the Balhannoth are sometimes captured by Drow and other sentient Underdark beings and install them on passages as guardians. 

Honestly, having this weird limpet slug monster be such an emotion and mind-reading based opponent is such an unexpected direction to take the Balhannoth, but I for one like it. It gives DMs a nice excuse to describe weird, creepy unexpected locations, which is always a great excuse! It really does elevate the Balhannoth more than its previous incarnations, which always felt like just a random cluster of powers slapped on a tentacle monster and the shrug of 'it's an Underdark predator'. 

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Berbalang 

• 5.5E/5E: Medium Aberration; Neutral Evil; CR 2

The Berbalang draws its name from a mythical creature from Filipino folklore, which tends to behave similarly to the 'ghoul' trope common to many mythologies. In Dungeons & Dragons, the Berbalang debuted as early as the original 1E Fiend Folio, and even then they had written the Berbalang as a being associated with astral projection and the Astral Plane. Which is... unexpected, but there you have it. The Berbalang is depicted as a very 'classic devil' being, with a wiry body, pointy ears, bat wings, and even a goatee in its 5th Edition art. 

Berbalangs are obsessed with gathering secrets, and apparently in 5E they 'creep across the petrified remains of dead gods in the Astral Plane'. That feels a bit overly specific and epic, but okay. They have an obsession with speaking with the dead, whether from the corpses of the dead gods they like so much, or from the bones of dead creatures they have collected. For no real reason other than seeming curiousity, Berbalangs record the stories they obtained from the dead upon the bones of the same creature. 

A Berbalang's main ability is to create an astral projection, and send this spectral Berbalang to other planes, watching the servants of gods and even the gods themselves. While a Berbalang is manipulating this duplicate, their original body is unconscious and can't protect itself. It's an interesting little gimmick, and one that does make the Berbalang an interesting creature to use in a smaller-scale conflict. Being a creature of a measly CR 2, it really does feel like a the whole 'secrets of the dead gods in space' thing feels a bit too epic for it. Tome of Foes ties the Berbalang a bit into one of the species that they are highlighting, fellow Astral Sea dwellers Githyanki, who sometimes hire Berbalangs to spy over their enemies. 

Despite being listed as 'neutral evil', Berbalangs themselves also seem to be just driven by the pursuit of knowledge and not much else. This makes them potential NPCs for a group of players to meet, to ask for information. However, Berbalangs refuse to entertain petitioners unless they come bearing particularly juicy secrets or bones. This makes them a more intelligent and sinister version of the Nothic, I feel, as another secret-obsessed weirdo. 

Overall, the 5E Berbalang interestingly combines aspects of its 1E and 4E incarnation. The 1E Berbalang secludes itself in a cave, and sends its astral projection either to the Astral Plane for 'mysterious' courtship, and in the Material Plane to feed. 4E's Berbalang is a truer-to-real-world-mythology adaptation, simply being a ghoul that feeds on corpses to gain memories from them. Combining all of them into the 5E version is interesting, even if I really do feel like it works better as a creature based on the Material Plane and sending its duplicates to Astral Space. 

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Boneclaw 

• 5.5E/5E: Large Undead; Chaotic Evil; CR 12

Introduced in the pages of 3.5E's many Monster Manuals, which gave us a lot of fantastic, grisly 'mutated' undead is the Boneclaw. As far as I can tell, however, in its appearances in 3.5E and 4E (it made the first Monster Manual in that edition!), the Boneclaw is 'merely' a particularly vicious undead with the titular bone claws, with some vague mention of oni magic being tied to it. The artwork is consistently cool, though, with sinews around the Boneclaw's lower jaw and large muscles on its arms to lift the three massive claws. I like that little detail that's consistent even as the monster received minor redesigns over the various editions. 

5th Edition kept the basic design of the Boneclaw, but adds quite a bit to it. The Boneclaw is a bit stronger with a lot of stealth-related bonuses and the ability to teleport between shadows, using its long reach to ambush its opponents or to abduct them. The 5E Boneclaw is essentially framed as a 'discount Lich' with its ability to rejuvenate. That alone doesn't make the Boneclaw special, since we've had other undead with a phylactery-adjacent resurrection ability... but the twist with the Boneclaw is really fun. 

The origin story of the Boneclaw is that it was originally a wizard who tried to become a lich... but failed. They are turned into a Boneclaw instead, where instead of an undead master of magic, they get turned into cackling, gibbering undead who are slaves to darkness and hatred. Instead of having its soul migrate into a phylactery, the lack of power causes the would-be lich's soul to migrate and get pulled to a humanoid with "an unusually hate-filled heart". The soul is bonded into the evil of that person, and the Boneclaw becomes forever enslaved to its new master's wishes and whims... both conscious and subconscious. 

This means that the Boneclaw is an unwilling slave to a different evil person, and this is decided by proximity. It could be something as simple as falling into another member of an evil organization, or even one of the evil wizard's minions who now has total control over his old master... but it could just as well be the local bugbear chief, a serial killer rotting in a prison, or just the local town bully. This new person becomes the Boneclaw's anchor, and whenever the Boneclaw is destroyed, it reforms within hours around its master, fully restored. It's far more efficient than Lich or Death Knight or Mummy restoration, with the little problem that Boneclaws don't get to control their actions. 

And this is an interesting conundrum, which Tome of Foes brings up some complications about. Sure, destroying the Boneclaw is as simple as killing (or redeeming!) its evil master. Which, if the Boneclaw is a servile minion to a Big Bad Evil Guy/Gal, it is just essentially another brute that just needs to be taken down. However, a Boneclaw's master might not actually want such a servant or know that it has one, with 'particularly cruel children' being specifically listed as a potential Boneclaw host. This brings in an interesting conundrum, particularly because sometimes the Boneclaw's master doesn't even know they have a sinister guardian that goes around killing people at night that have disagreements with them. And sure, maybe being a cruel child or a town bully isn't the nicest, but most adventuring parties probably won't go around killing them for the crime of accidentally being bound to a Boneclaw that goes around fulfilling their dark impulses, right? It's a lot different than having the Boneclaw's master be an irredeemable serial killer or necromancer or something. 

And this last twist is what makes the Boneclaw particularly interesting to me. It is evil... but it is also an evil that can't be destroyed, and the way to deal with it can be as RP-heavy or not depending on what the story needs. Not a bad change from what was just a spiky ghoul in its original incarnation!

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Cadaver Collector 

• 5.5E/5E: Large Construct; Lawful Evil; CR 14

This one is a personal favourite ever since I first saw it. Cadaver Collectors are large automatons that resemble rusted figures with lots of spikes on their large dome-like upper body, and as their name implies, they collect corpses. Their artworks are always colourful but creepy, as the Cadaver Collector's back is littered with a lot of weapons and corpses sticking out of it. It's all a fucked-up version of some real-life insects (like the assassin bug), except the Cadaver Collector isn't impaling corpses on its body for camouflage, but as its function. Really like the general design, particularly its jawless face. Really love the mental image of this lurching behemoths wading through the battlefield, slowly, calmly picking up corpses and impaling them on their back like a far, far more morbid trash collector. 

Cadaver Collectors in 5th Edition are ancient beings that can be called by necromancers from the eternal battlefield of Acheron, but many of these necromancers get killed without dismissing the Cadaver Collectors, causing a lot of them to wander the Material Plane. And like all good robots, they just try to do their function to the best of their capabilities. They seek out locations of great battles, and collect corpses. While not mentioned in its 5E writeup, the original 3.5E entry does note that a Cadaver Collector's body collection is most commonly utilized for the creation of undead. 

While Cadaver Collectors would appear to be mostly concerned about just performing their function, they are quite strong threats themselves, able to belch out a paralytic gas. The corpses impaled on their body are also a source of a Cadaver Collector's main combative ability -- it summons the spirits of the corpses as Spectres to help it in battle, a brand new 5E addition that is nicely themed around the Cadaver Collector's association with the undead. 

I really do like this. I am of the opinion that Dungeons & Dragons is enough of a 'kitchen sink fantasy' that robotic beings like Nimblewrights and Warforged shouldn't be a particular problem to find in a D&D setting, but I like it a lot more when there is a nice marriage between sci-fi and fantasy, and having a giant corpse-collecting golem working for necromancers and the undead is a fun one. 

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Choker 

• 5.5E/5E: Small Aberration; Chaotic Evil; CR 1

Debuting all the way in 1st Edition but languishing in less prominent supplements, I really like the evolution of the Choker from just a weird humanoid with rubber arms to the more monstrous depiction of a noodle-limbed horror in 2E, and ultimately the 3rd Edition design that stuck through 3E, 4E and 5E. A slightly oblong-headed humanoid, with limbs that are clearly not bending properly, and with hands that open up like starfishes into very barb-tipped surfaces. 3E and 5E classified the Choker as an aberration, probably due to the vaguely tentacle-y design it has. 

Chokers are subterranean predators, and their inner skeleton is made up of flexible cartilage instead of bones, allowing them to lurk on ceilings and crevices, but also to slip into narrow fissures like the most screwed-up contortionists. They will place bodies of their previous victims in an easily-visible location, then attack from a secluded location with its long limbs. Their very nasty, jagged palms dig into their prey's neck and they just... well, choke their foes to death. 

A Choker's arm is noted to be long enough that they can just extend their arm out of the crevice, and I do like the surprise of someone seeing a long tentacled limb wrapping around someone's neck. Perhaps it's a creature like an Otyugh or a worm-like creature like the Grick? And then they pull out the monster and it's a weird snarling mutant man. 

A Choker isn't particularly intelligent despite its humanoid appearance, although they are still able to communicate through howls. While most Chokers hunt alone, they do have 'communities', presumably like a troop of apes, that they might be able to warn or summon. I am a bit sad that we don't get any real explanation to its 'aberration' tag, or more descriptions of their biology beyond their hunting tactics. Growing up on 3.5E, I do find the Choker a classic, so I am quite happy to see this starfish-armed weirdo make the jump to 5E. 

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Clockwork 

• 5.5E/5E: Medium Construct; Unaligned; CR 1 (Bronze Scout), 4 (Iron Cobra), 5 (Oaken Bolter), 4 (Stone Defender)

Despite the term being used a lot in the games, I am actually surprised that the 'Clockwork' monster entry is technically brand new for 5th Edition. 'Clockwork Horrors' exist in 2E and 3E, and would be adapted in Spelljammer material for 5th Edition, but that's an always-replicating, ever-expanding mass of spidery robots. These 'Clockworks' are just merely robotic constructs created by gnomes. Setting-agnostic gnome artificer creations, I suppose, without bringing in the whole lore related to tinkerer gnomes from the Eberron setting.

Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes brings in four different Clockwork variations, but most importantly is a delightful pair of tables that lets the DM roll for Enhancements (stealth, self-repairing, enhanced durability, suction feet, a speaker...) which is nice. Far, far more important, however, is the Malfunctions table, which range from simple vulnerabilities to certain types of damage to overheating every other turn, faulty sensors, faulty targeting, 'tank controls' style limited steering, or my favourite, 'imprinting loop' where it keeps identifying each successive new being it sees as its new master. The trope of mechanical robots with malfunctions that translates into wacky hijinks never tire me. 

The lore for the Clockworks are quite generic, but I think it's meant to be beyond 'something something, gnome technology', just so that any setting that needs a Clockwork robot minion can just grab one of these statblocks. Tome of Foes gives us four variations, although the prose makes it clear that a 'Bronze Scout' might look very different depending on the gnome creating them. 

The first is the Bronze Scout, with the art showing us a multi-segmented snake with a fancy toothy beak, wheels with spikes, and two mantis-like arms. Bronze Scouts hide underground while its 'telescoping eyestalks' peek out to look at enemies. There are actually eyes, but they are located quite close to the body in the artwork. Again, it's a scouting unit so it can shoot a bit of lightning, but its primary function ties to its enhanced stealth and perception skills. 

The Iron Cobra is the only one of the four to have had previous incarnations, appearing in 1st Edition's Fiend Folio as a very rare invention of a great magic-user... but has since been reduced to a mere construct in subsequent editions (and a Homonculus sub-type in 4E). 5E's Iron Cobra, being a gnomish clockwork creation, is loaded up with alchemical concoctions, and of course, in addition to all the nonsense that gnomish inventions do, the Iron Cobra's alchemical venom does a random event -- poison, confusion or paralysis. 

The Oaken Bolter is an adorable mobile artillery, looking like a regular ballista on wheels... but by virtue of being listed as a Clockwork, it means that the Oaken Bolter is perfectly capable of moving around on its own. A pretty cool design, and I like the dragon-headed 'face' that the Bolter has. The Oaken Bolter as is shown here is able to swap between three ammunition loadouts: a harpoon to pull in captives, a lightning bolt, or good old explosive TNT. 

And finally, we have a regular mecha in the Stone Defender. Unlike the Shield Guardians, the Stone Defenders guard their charges with two giant stone slabs it holds in its arms. Simplicity! A Stone Defender's special ability, of course, is to intercept attacks, jumping in the way of attacks meant for whoever their master assigns it to guard. But it also has a 'false appearance' trait, giving the hilarious mental image of this one-eyed robot putting its shields up and hiding flush against the wall. 

I wasn't particularly impressed by the Clockworks when I first reviewed them because of the lack of context around them (compared to other constructs like golems, Warforged, Shield Guardians, Helmed Horrors, etc) but I have grown to appreciate them for giving us a nice, convenient statblock to grab just like all the animal and NPC statblocks out there. 

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Corpse Flower 

• 5.5E/5E: Large Plant; Chaotic Evil; CR 8

A brand-new 5th Edition original, the Corpse Flower is a fun one. I've spoken a couple of times about the lack of variety of 'Plant' monsters in D&D, but we've got a nice, interesting undead-adjacent one here. Sprouting atop the graves and remains of necromancers or other undead creatures, Corpse Flowers grows to enormous size over weeks, and then just tears itself free from the earth and starts shambling around and collect bodies from graveyards and battlefields. 

The artwork shows a pretty nice scale of just a mount of dirt and vines, and the Corpse Flower shambles around on vines thick enough to pick up a human corpse like a toy. In the center of the mass are a bunch of digested skeletal remains, and blooming on top of the flower mound are a bunch of colourful yellow bulbs. I wonder if the corpse of the original necromancer that spawned the Corpse Flower is somewhere deep inside all of that tangled mass? 

Unlike the Cadaver Collector above, the Corpse Flower collects corpses for its own sustenance, as well as to repair itself. The Corpse Flower is also intelligent enough to 'despise the living' and have a 'malevolent bent'. This translates to some interesting abilities. Just like a similar 'corpses as resources' creature we covered a while back, the Devourer, the Corpse Flower's abilities depends on how many corpses it has stashed in its body. Each corpse within the Corpse Flower can be transformed into a zombie minion, or consumed to restore the flower's health as it regenerates from the compost, I suppose. There is some discussion about the corpses it consumes being utterly digested until nothing remains, so there could be a 'we need to recover a corpse of a friend for resurrection' storyline going on here. 

The Corpse Flower is also noted to have a particularly nauseating stench (which also translates to the zombies), which is identified as a defense mechanism that remains even after the flower is dead. Also, there's an interesting bit of flavour text where Corpse Flowers need to be identified, uprooted and burned while it's a seedling that just grew, which isn't relevant to the battle scenarios but I really do like as a world-building detail, where it could just as easily be part of the 'last rites' that people do when they do burial rites. 

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Deathlock 

• 5.5E/5E: Medium Undead; Neutral Evil; CR 4 (Deathlock), 8 (Mastermind), 3 (Wight)

Deathlocks debuted in 3.5E's Libris Mortis, as a type of undead who is consumed by the magic it wielded in life. There... isn't really that much beyond that. 4E gave almost every monster group three or four variations, and one of the variations of the Wight was a 'Deathlock Wight', which is also a spellcaster. 5E's Deathlock, meanwhile, joins the ranks of many mid-level sentient undead... which I thought is particularly fun because of a simple aspect... someone took a look at 'Deathlock' and 'Warlock', and decided that, hey, the two 'locks should be connected. 

Which, by the way, is a brilliant move. As a pun appreciator, it is one thing, but it does give the Deathlock its identity beyond just being a different undead 'just because'. When a warlock breaks a pact with his powerful patron will have their ticked-off patron transform their corpse into a Deathlock, who is forced to serve its otherworldly patron... as a soulless undead. That is quite a fun tie-in to one of the core classes of the setting. A nice little warning, perhaps, for your warlock players that their patron does not tolerate failure well? 

Tome of Foes also gives another potential origin story, falling in to its original lore that a powerful necromancer might just be able to create a Deathlock through forbidden arts and dark magic, but that's a lot less unique. But whatever the origin is, the Deathlock's mind is warped with an overwhelming compulsion to please its master's desires, whatever they may be. Deathlocks always reflects their patron's interests, in stark contrast to potentially renegade warlocks that might have attempted to defy their much more powerful power sources. 

All Deathlocks have resistance towards Turn Undead, as well as a laundry list of spells. Tome of Foes even gives alternate tables for Deathlocks of the Archfey, Fiend or Great Old One patron, making the statblocks quite modifiable. Two additional Deathlock variants are also introduced here. First is the Deathlock Mastermind, a CR 8 spellcaster with far stronger spells. These Masterminds are given more freedom as their patron lets them devise their own plans and tactics, and often recruit minions to help it complete its goal. Masterminds are still  forever bound loyally to their masters, however. 

And the other one is the much weaker CR 3 Deathlock Wight, which is a weaker version of the base Deathlock, who has a much more reduced spell list and an additional sensitivity to sunlight. This Wight form is a 'special punishment' meted out by the patrons as punishment, denying whatever warlock they want to punish from the powerful spells that they likely sought out the patron for. This undead isn't as interesting as the Allip or Boneclaw on this page, but I have grown to appreciate the Deathlock and the storytelling opportunities it brings. 

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Derro 

• 5.5E/5E: Small Humanoid; Chaotic Evil; CR 1/4 (Derro), 3 (Derro Savant)

Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of the Derro. Originating in one of the earliest modules in D&D, the Derro beat out the Duergar as the 'subterranean evil dwarves'. Based off of the Dero ("Detrimental Robots") in Amazing Stories, the Derro of D&D are a race of all the most basic traits that a typical 'evil D&D race' has. Cowardly, superstitious, vicious, shabby, eager to hurt those weaker than them, quick to kowtow under those that are stronger than them. The Derro are individually weak, but turn into a cackling horde when together. As a species, they survive the Underdark due to a combination of their paranoia as well as the high rate of developing sorcerous powers and become 'Savants'. That's, uh... basically the same thing with the Duergar, but with a hobo survival aesthetic instead of goth Norse. 

The Derro is described as 'dwarf-kin', and most dwarves don't recognize them, while Duergar tell of a story of a clan of Duergar left behind when the others rebelled against their Mind Flayer slavers... and became demented and contorted instead. The Derro have their own mythology about their gods and how Diirinka managed to survive with deceitfulness, cruelty and treachery, even at the cost of his sibling. In some older editions, Derro are just... a race of mad Underdark species.

Cut out from Monsters of the Multiverse is a table insisting that all Derro suffers from a type of madness that manifests in strange tics, giving us a massive table with... honestly, a bunch of traits that feels less 'madness' and more 'weird social behaviour'. I really don't think "frets with hair or mustache" or "breathes loudly" is particularly crazy; and a lot of that table just describes someone who's introverted or have poor social graces. 

Maybe there's something interesting in the stat-blocks? They have sunlight sensitivity and a magic resistance, something that most Underdark humanoids have. The Savant variant has sorcerer spells, I guess? I don't know. Dungeons & Dragons has a huge influx of very samey Underdark species, and with all of the depth that Tome of Foes gives to the Duergar, the Derro just feels... odd. 

Unlike something like the Grimlock, I don't really get the vibe that this really should be classified as a separate race from the Duergar, especially with their new backstory. It really is a shame, because 5th Edition has done a lot of great retooling that made boring older monsters feel like they get a nice new twist, but the Derro just doesn't have anything particularly interesting going for them beyond 'wacky crazy psycho dwarf!!!' At least playing up their madness in a way that emphasizes their paranoia would be something. Maybe they are aware of something that most normal people can't see. Maybe tie them to the Far Realm or something. Maybe tie it to the source material, where the Dero are meant to be 'robotic' in the sense that they follow a sort of programming. I don't know. Something to make them just Evil Dwarf Subrace #2.