What are your most successful monsters?

[LouisVendredi]

My most memorable villain was a woman from Dementieu.

Here's the story:

The party entered a small town in Falkovnia just in time to witness the execution of a woman for killing her husband. Asking around, they found out that there had been a rash of women killing their husbands. This all started after the Burgomaster's wife died.

My clever party soon figured out that it was the ghost of the Burgomaster's wife that was possessing the women and killing their husbands as a means of irrational revenge.

Once they figured that out, I had to change things slightly to make things more interesting.

They did some digging and met the wife's sister. She had followed her sister from Dementlieu when her sister was on a diplomatic mission and stayed when her sister married the Burgomaster because she didn't trust him and had been trying for years to convince her to leave him. She didn't believe the riding accident story about her sister's death because her sister was afraid of horses. She convinced the party to kidnap the children so she could take them home to Dementlieu.

They party went to get the children and confronted the Burgomaster about his crimes. At this point, the wife possessed the female wizard in the group who had used Change Self to make herself look like the wife to scare a confession out of the Burgomaster. The possessed wizard almost killed the Burgomaster but the party was able to find out that the Burgomaster had, in fact, killed his wife, but in self-defense.

The wife had attacked the Burgomaster and she fell down the stairs in the struggle. When they asked why she attacked him, he told them that she said her sister had told her he was abusing the children.

The party questioned him under a Zone of Truth and discovered that he had beaten the children, but no more harshly than was expected of a good Falkonvian father.

[Archedius]

I read somewhere the mention of a beast called the Centaur. I took the idea and ran with it. Instead of an actual centaur I made it into a hag-crafted composite zombie.

It had a horses body, human torso, several arms added, a horses head w/ two halves of a human head attached to the sides of the mouth(so as to continue the mouth), the teeth in the mouth were replaced with iron spikes, two arms inside the mouth to grab 'food'- worst of all was that it was mildly intelligent and capable of procreation.

I never let my players catch a glimpse of it, just the sound of it in the distance, mangled and dissected corpses of victims, the sight of a travel companion being hit with a hook as they rounded a hill and dragged off into a distant ruined fort.

When they entered its lair they saw that it was almost finished making another just like itself and they felt they had to kill it before it could finish. It was a brutal fight- it ended up grappling a PC and leaping off a parapet when it was nearly dead out of spite (PC lives but broke both legs)

It was one of my favorite homebrewed monsters, and one of the wierdest for me.

[DasSoviet]

Unfortunately, though Ravenloft is the only setting in which I own all the published 3rd edition books in either hard or PDF form, I've yet an opportunity to run a campaign that lasted more than one or two nights in The Mists before collapsing due to a myriad of reasons.

However, I must say my most terrifying monsters, from what I gathered from the player's at least, was in a World of Warcraft campaign of all things. A bit of background before I launch into this: Duskwood is the southern province of the last great human kingdom of Stormwind, which has fallen under the twin curses of a powerful, extraplanar weapon believed to have been a gift of the Night Elf goddess and the dark magic streaming out of the cursed mountains to the east, once home the mortal host of the Lord of All Demons (commence thunder and lightning!). Commence the arrival of werewolves, undead, giant spiders, and a whole host of other horror-staple beasties.

Now, in the campaign I was running, the players had discovered that one of the leaders of the Defias Brotherhood (completely seperated evil human group irrelevant to this story) had set up a new base deep in Duskwood, so they hoof it down there. And once they cross the river, I make full use of the atmosphere by cranking out some rather effective mood music, and describing in great detail how the sun fades behind the trees, which slowly grow more and more twisted, with features that appear too human, hung with spiderwebs too large, with leaves that are too quiet despite the chill wind. Spot check, notice glowing eyes which send a chill down the spine of the player that notices it before it disappears into the foliage without a sound. Player insists on chasing after it, other PCs follow, leaving their NPC companions back on the road. They search for several minutes and find nothing but rotted and maggot-filled corpses of animals (I evoke heavy Scourge imagery here, making them burn most of the corpses in case they animated as undead... which was all part of my brilliant test to see if they were into the game enough, yes, I still pat my back over the brilliance of it all!)

Return to the road, on edge but believing they're relatively clear, only to find their companions dead and desecrated, their corpses trampled and burned to death, seemingly simultaneously, or flung across the road in macabre fashion. As they're analyzing their corpses, had one animate a wraith and energy-drain one of them. Took my players a good couple of minutes to calm down enough to roll for their initiatives...

Of course they won, but it set the tone for the entire rest of the gaming session so perfectly, I was a bit upset when it finally ended, knowing that the moment I let my players go free, they'd all head immediately to the web and look up all they could on the entire matter...

Runner up would be when they found the Defias outpost they were originally looking for. All dead, until they bothered to check the records... one would think they wouldn't fall for the same trick twice eh?

Eventually, they found out what did it, through second-hand stories about similar deaths. The Dark Riders of Karazhan... of course, one step into Deadwind Pass, where Karazhan lies, and the players when fleeing back the way they came... thank you Caller In Darkness!

And that's the story of how I turned a couple of one-shot wraith into the most terrifying beasties I've ever had the pleasure of running.

[kottakinge]

Dr Dominiani and Malistroi the fiend from Circle of Darkness where the worst for my PC.
Then the old Smyte in Mordent (near the Halloway Manor)

[A G Thing]

I personally never got to play a Ravenloft game cause I'm the only one who tries to run it in our group, but I have to say when I run I manage serial killers and bogeymen quite well... My players began researching them as soon as they learned of one of the stories and most of them kept a candle lit next to them the rest of the campaing but they cringed to find themselves having to chase Mr. Fox into his own house. They had no single real encounters in that house, just unnerving quirks of reality and illusions tricking them into acting frantic... Then Mr. Fox manages to seperate them and they have to chase him to prevent the halfling character from being carried off... The monk who was a bit of a hot head chased him into a closet where he managed to find himself paralysed and dying while Mr. Fox cut his fingers of, gouged out his eyes, deafend him in both ears and cut tendons in his arms and legs... Just before he died however the players scared Mr. Fox from his entertainment and salvaged thier friends life...

But they were so tense they were making all the mistakes I needed and they fell into them beautifully... I rewarded them well and they still speak fondly of the game...

But as for standard monsters I use, Undead, swarms, and natural creatures and base humaniods...

I also had an Ogre Mage who I played more of a lower demon and he was a great Mastermind...

[Nahuris]

The one my players feared the most....
The Roach Lord.
He was sort of an undead... his body consisted of his skeleton and skin... the rest of him was a vast number of flesh eating roaches.... he could also summon swarms, ect.

He could see through the eyes of any roach that made up his body... so he would send in one roach to scout an area..... ect.
He could get in any opening, as long as a roach could fit in.... and in his human form.... looked human enough to pass. He worked as a road warden for the barony.... so he traveled between the various small towns, occasionally eating victims. Since he always attacked via sending his swarm out.... no one every linked him with the deaths. The party never quite managed to beat him.... and a couple of the players still have nightmares about him.

Nahuris

[Nahuris]

I almost forgot... as long as enough of the Roach Lord's components survived... he would eventually eat enough, and breed enough to reform.......

Nahuris

[cpt_machine]

I have gotten alot of mileage out of Goblyns but it tends to be on the southern core only.