GMs casually hiring you to make the creatures for them & then just putting what you describe it as, as the final thing "Oh, I need you to describe a Veserab for my bestiary" "Oh, uh, uh... Tentacle eel with wings, uh invisible legs and ears?" *Intently writing" "uh, huh"
No one knows what he really looks like. The second he shows up it's too late. He breaks people. He hurts them, swooping down from the shadows. He's.. Veserabman.
we could combine this with the mating rituals of octopi that disconnect a leg during mating to pass their reproductive fluid to the female and the angler fish which fuse their bodies to the female. Veserab males will have legs while post-mating males will be missing some or all legs before they grow back depending on how well they were in locking on to the female who will have many disconnected legs embedded into their skin from many males each mating season, the female will eat any males that fail to disconnect their legs as well as any legs that are easily reachable, leaving ones on the back and around what would be the neck to continue to inject genetic material for many months and creating the appearance of a mane on females with large pacts. tbh I mainly wrote this down to get it out of my head
@@marcuswillbrandt5901 yer this is why i cant be a DM, I would come up with way to much info that the PCs would have no need to ever know and no organic way to get it to them
In regards to the inconsistency of the description. Perhaps a cool idea would be that as the species is matriarchal in nature the females could exhibit those missing features. A good excuse to give the creature an extra stat block variation and something that helps players identify it as the leader of the..."flock"?
I like the idea of it living in an ancient island which is isolated from the world and changing it's name to Legolas. Because it's a devolved version of powerful ancient beast with strong legs and huge bat ears.
My headcanon: veserab do have spindly legs and long ears. However, the legs are connected via a taut membrane similar to their wings. When gliding and surveying their territory, they hold their legs out, letting that membrane assist their wings in catching the wind, and helping them camouflage by extending the grey countershading on their belly and breaking up their silhouette. Likewise, their ears are large openings about 8 inches behind the mouth, located about 35 degrees from the top of the head on either side. They are essentially large flaps of skin and cartillage connected to small muscles that are used to hold the flaps open while gliding and surveying their environment. Like this, they can detect movement and sound from 2000 feet away unobstructed. They are not able to actually blindsee at this distance, however. It's more like telling what direction something is in. When they decide to attack, however, the ear muscles relax and the legs fold into their body. This reduces their hearing, but increases their profile's aerodynamic properties and their control in flight. They preserve their blindsight through a small organ within the head, which amplifies their echolocation similar to the melon on a beluga whale.
I choose the believe that instead of Veserabs flying in a formation like a V or a line, they form a circle and spin around one another. The keep this formation until they find their prey, center the prey in their death circle, then descend and clamp onto any body part they can.
I've been planning an adult purple dragon encounter for my party and I've been looking for some kind of nocturnal hunting minion for the dragon to use... Now i'm design an alien lamprey hive inside the dragon's lair where the lamprey queen was captured and tamed by the dragon, thank you, Dungeon Dad.
The way I used to Veserab in one of my home brew settings, was more based on basic biology than anything. I took the picture as being a baby and made the 4 lagged one with ears the adult version. So I lowered the stats for the babies and made them smaller. My players seemed to like it and it worked for me😊
Keeping the veserab as a beast makes sense. Given all the insanely weird monstrous beasts we have in our world, and continue to discover, it's not that wild to think that the fantasy realm would have something fantastical that's a beast too. Also, love that Snoop Dogg did a cameo appearance at the end.
In the Forgotten Realms novels during the Shade Enclave’s invasion/conquest, these were the mounts used by the elite warriors of the Shade Enclave. I don’t remember them being described as having ears or legs. I have never seen the Veserab drawn before yet i immediately recognized the image you used based on the novel’s descriptions throughout the trilogy of the Twilight War
A new recommendation for a monster for you to cover, anotger horrifying beast: Bodendrucker also known as the Leveller. Absolutely gigantic elephant with tentacles for a trunk, who hunts down and eats Purple Worms
Verserab are highly sought after for their wool is particularly soft and the ivory in their tusks makes for fine jewelry. Their feathers make for the softest of pillows and their shells can be ground up to make potions of storm giant strength. The queens prostate can be consumed to cause hallucinatory effects used for spirit journeys and their slime can be used as blinker fluid in your car. It's a wonderful plant.
The Vagabond system is seriously cool (Taron is a good d&d class designer, invested into making the mechanics convey what they are supposed to represent), and it's 80% the way to be fully backed. The rules are free in the kickstarter page too. I haven't had the fortune to purchase any of its products, but from playing with the sample versions of his products at our table, I can 100% recommend. Also I suggested the diseased condition affecting hit dice on stream
@@matmil5 It's definitely very different from 5e! Combat is super snappy and there's less dead airtime for players because it's a group initiative system and players are rolling to dodge enemy attacks. Monster stat blocks are written to have an easy-to-follow guide for typical turns in combat (if x, do y, else do z). The game is being designed with solo-play in mind so everything can kind of run itself and takes a lot of mental load off of the GM. There's actually a solo adventure you can pick up on the kickstarter right now to try out! Character creation is much simpler than Pathfinder, but not at the expense of options! There's lots of class and ancestry options, but each one is easy to read and comprehend how it'll play at the table. As part of character creation, you get to pick a Future which is a destiny full of milestones at which points you'll level up. ua-cam.com/video/Ho-FwopQgqo/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Indestructoboy
@@matmil5 For one, the Arbiter (GM) doesn't make d20 rolls - they're assumed to do their thing unless the players successfully roll against them. Additionally, Vagabond has a solo play option so you don't actually need an Arbiter or even a group. Those are probably the two main distinctions in my opinion, but it does differ in other ways while still having a similar "mouthfeel" to 5e. The character creation is simpler and combat is quicker, and the character options are designed to really evoke their fantasy and not just be drab mechanical buff.
Horror story idea. A veserab appears in the world, specifically in some mostly misty swamp. The town residents nearby become frightened as some kind of new beast is hunting around their settlement. Groups of villagers have tried hunting it, but only a few lucky survivors have come back to tell the tale. I would imagine the veserab would hunt in the mist, carefully observing it's prey from the ground. Before launching foreword with it's flying speed and quickly mauling someone or something. Before disappearing again next turn by flying back into the mists. However I have no clue what it's animal cry is, but I imagine it is like that of a fox. Personally I like the idea of this thing screaming for no reason as part of it's cry, I mean a horrible screaming beast that has barely any information on it, and is more than fast enough to pick off prey in large groups one by one like the xenomorphs from aliens can potentially be very effective. What do you guys think?
I’m actually DMing a Curse of Strahd session right now, and I used the Veserab as homebrew encounter for a cave mission I made, the party had to go into this crypt to find a certain body of a noble whose descendants are really kind to the party, and the party has started to learn that they are in fact in a dread domain because they started seeing Veserabs on the ceiling of the cave curled up on the stalactites clicking vigorously, so they had to go through the cave with really high stealth checks or the whole flock would notice them, I have never seen a player tense up more in this whole campaign than I did there
I'm such a *sucker* for the horrible puns *flying* around in this video 😅 Thanks, Dad! I'm in Portugal at the moment, and lampreys are eaten here, typically grilled or stewed. There's also a traditional holiday dessert called lampreia that's basically a bunch of fried sugary egg yolk strings and milky egg yolk sauce shaped to look like a lamprey, dopey face and all. Given that veserabs are bestial, I'd probably just import both of those ideas into my DnD world and have veserab-shaped desserts and veserab stew 😋
If you keep them in The Shadowfell I'd say the legs & ears could be retractable. If you go with the Shadowfell version as that's more a plane of Sprit than of Flesh I can imagine replacing the Noxious Cloud breath weapon with a debilitating cone of Gloom flooding minds the those caught in it with terrible memories of previous victims, thus allowing a Willpower save to power through. This is similar to Noxious Breath, but makes it more of evocative of a plane of the Dead and lets different party members be the ones more likely to survive the cone. If you're keeping it as a beast in the material world, perhaps replace the "Noxious Breath" with a "Overpowering Screech" same mechanics, but it's using the vocal chords it uses for echolocation to instead unleash an overpowering high pitched scream that debilitates the party. I just feel that breathing what's essentially mace takes this out of being a normal beast.
First appearance: "The Lost City" adventure module, way back in 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I actually own it. It's a fun module that is an old-school dungeon crawl, with an opportunity for wider, underground adventures. He(it?) was part of a load of optional content for continuing the base adventure. If you can find it online, or a copy in a used bookstore, check it out. It was revisited later, in "Return to the Lost City", but I'm only familiar with the original.
My buddy ran a 20th level 3.5 game where we fought zargon the returner! I made a Necromancer. I may have taunted zargon, who immediately full attacked me and I died round 1
Me thinking "i wonder if my character can have one as a mount?" Dungeon dad "atleast the party will investigate to see if they can get their hands on." *me looking for cameras*
Thanks for watching everyone! You can check out the Vagabond Kickstarter right here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelrousergames/development-for-vagabond-ttrpg?ref=7wyzp3 What monster should I cover next?
Idea! Giving them taloned feet at the end of their pinions, and long hypersensitivity ears that they fold back along their body when in combat to protect their sensory organ. Kinda like the monsters from A Quiet Place
Obviously this creature started out as an ordinary beast related to a Lamprey, which developed adaptations to the Plane of Shadow by expressing genes for legs & huge flappy ears. Eventually, the legs became redundant as the ears developed into highly versatile wings. Therefore, historical descriptions differed from the artist's renderings created at the time of their first publication; because 4-legged veserab are no longer observed in the wild, responsible Shadowfell researchers eventually updated their guide info to avoid misidentification by adventurers encountering the modern variety. By modern Torilian standards, all of these Shadow-adapted mutant forms would indeed be considered 'alien' Monstrosities. (However, I believe it would be appropriate for _a Druid native to the Shadowfell,_ to treat them as a conventional Beast; pending DM approval, of course.)
Hrm. Legs or no legs.... Ima go with.....the matriarch sprouts legs, loses half its fly speed, and becomes a sort of brood mother. Its job is to poop eggs, and care for the young while its brood hunts.
In my first campaign I ever DM'ed, one of the players was an Aaracokra monk. He would grapple an enemy, fly up to an absurd height, and simply drop them. This monster feels like the best way to get vengeance on him
Iirc correctly in forgotten realms, there's a forgotten deity in the draconic pantheon that "died" as he fought asgorath that was described as manta ray looking like. So maybe you could expand upon the veserab for it to be also draconic and antagonists of dragons. Lets say a chaotic instead of lawful draconic being.
Wasn't these in that Paul S. Kemp novel as mounts. Yeahhhh the 2nd book, I thank it may have been called God Born or something like that in the Sundering series
Your explanation at 1:23 makes me wonder what category beastfolk would fall into, or if it would vary based on the specific variation of beastfolk. I'm thinking lizard people, wolf people, all that kind of stuff. The biggest reason I wonder this is because one of my buddies I've been thinking about playing with would probably like to play as one, so the distinction could be interesting to explore from a story perspective.
A really cool monster from 2nd and 3rd edition is the urophion, these monsters are caused by a Roper being turned into a mindflayer and are just as intelligent as mindflayers but interestingly aren't always loyal to the elder brain (though most of them still are)
Very cool monster, I love monsters like this and the digester that are essentially just weird animals. That being said, on the topic of recommendations, you should check out The Book of Unremitting Horror well as Veins of the Earth, which both contain a bunch of fantastic and creepy monsters, the latter of the two also featuring some weird animals of its own.
The party is hired by a pair of authors co-writing a compendium of monsters and are arguing over the physical description of veserabs. They are to go to the shadowfell and determine once and for all how Ms y limbs it has.
When you described the legs, I imagined its wings were two of the legs, and the other two were smaller/shorter and located lower on the wing membrane down its body (using the art as reference) and the legs were part of the wing membrane, sort of like the membranes on bats, or "flying squirrels". Hence the hind leg claw attack could still be a thing, and would still look good in the art in my opinion. The "fan-like" ears I got little for, but my brain is imagining a feathery gill-like structure, not bat ears. I imagine its face catches sound like an Owl's face and directs the sound to its "ears" for the best hearing.
a common consensus looks like the legs and ears are retractable or hidden in combat to reduce damage to sensitive organs. i would like to think of the legs like nubs that extend out for combat similar to a breloom. This would be almost like a chameleon going up to twice the body length away to account for its reach.
I think that if you have a player that pops featherfall after being dropped by this screamers should have disadvantage on attack rolls against it, and vice versa, the monster has advantage in aerial combat. Or perhaps a party member can be grabbed by one of either side and pulled into the air, counting as grappled, taking damage overtime until they either pull free or are pulled apart.
#teamlegless I think they should remain at least semiaquatic and I think introducing (small) dog sized versions that live in submerged caverns or a perpetually gloomy swamp; a nest of them huddled together dangling from a treebranch. So introduce them as larger than normal lampreys and it isn't until 2 or more latch onto a PC that their wings unfurl and begin lifting the poor PC out of the water and into the air that the remaining flock to feed on in a frenzy. I think the incapacitating smoke breath pushes the creature well into the Monstrosity category. That said on a natural 20 on the bite attack should trigger face bite, which much like a dark mantle blinds and suffocates the victim. Especially the fully grown version that would just latch onto the head completely possibly threatening decapitation.
Possible plot idea: you come across a settlement where the locals use veserabs as mounts/guards/etc. & one of the veserabs (personally I'd go with either the matriarch or one that's much beloved by the local children) has caught some unknown illness that is slowly killing the creature, & that's causing all all the other veserabs in the settlement to act up.
5e wolves are brutal and people always play them offs. Even at mid tier. They do damage just above their cr. The whole pact tactics + pounce combo is brutal. Sure the dc isn't high but you fail you fail had as odds are by next turn you will have a bunch of wolves biting on your body. This gives me those types of vibes and I love it
I think we could work the ears and legs back into the design with out changing the current one much. jut by adding a line here and there it can have them back. I look at the art work as it attack mode. By tucking it ears down or back and pulling it's leg in. it protect them when it is feeding or attacking. With this change it could latch on ceilings and also can be used to warn players they know they are their.
@@KevinVideo May I pitch 2 more creatures? 😅 - Angel of Decay (Rot Harbinger) = undead angels that caused those they touch to rot - Blood Fiend = vampire fiends that prey on other fiends and has a healing factor
you can always think of this creature as a caterpillar where before they molt their small feline looking creatures with a gaping maws, after their molt their legs fuse together into wings
My first thought for the missing legs and ears was maturity. Maybe the offspring of these creatures begin either wingless, or with tiny, nonfunctional wings. They scurry along the ground and use their large ears to help them navigate. As they mature, the veserabs shed their legs in favor of strong wings, and their ears shrink down as their echolocation becomes more powerful. A "young veserab" stat block would be cool for a ground mount.
As a dm who is starting to f around with the Shadowfell, I'm very happy to see another awesome Shadowfell based monster because there aren't that many.
My encounter idea is that the party are camping at night or traveling at night and suddenly a clown pops up telling them that they need to hide and hurriedly tells them there’s a large group of people over this way. Before the party can ask him anything the clown is swooped away into the air screaming (like those monsters from Pitch Black) while being tore apart. The party can either try and fight, run away, go where the clown pointed at. If they go where the clown pointed at they can discover that Druid PETA released it and other dangerous animals at night causing mayhem.
Was watching this 11:46 and thought oh man sure would be cool to use them as mounts for a grung village rules by an aboleth and then low and behold the man starts talking about using them as mounts love it
My players ran into these guys after they were trapped in the Shadowfell for a while. They ended up going on a quest to capture a wild one to tame as a mount in order to befriend a shadar-kai who had recently lost his.
This creature would fit quite nicely in a sort of underground secret world sort of setting, like the Underdark or Skyrim's Blackreach. They are perfect for the role of a predatory species fairly high up the food chain in a more alien yet still perfectly natural locale.
I like the idea of some bad guy using a few as their clothing, then when the party challenges them thinking that there is just one enemy the bad guy says a command word and his tamed veserabs suddenly launch from their master, breathing their noxious breath over a wide area while their master triggers a few pitfall traps, using the confusion to make the traps far more successful than they otherwise would have been.
These guys need legs so a low level randon encounter can be a pack of infants that glide down and latch onto faces like a facehugger, where thay bite and scratch and choke at the same time.
@DungeonDad So I just found another misprinted D&D beast. The Dire Elephant from Monster Manual II in 3.5. It's a gargantuan animal, has a strength of 40, and, for some godforsaken reason, a CLIMB SPEED OF 10!!!! Which, under the rules of 3.5 means that it had a standing climb check of more than 30. So not only could this enormous pachyderm cling to a shear cliff wall or cave ceiling, but it would take a godlike effort to dislodge it. City sized spider elephant.
Here's a plot hook. Someone hires you to find out what the hell Veserab actually looks like, so they can make an accurate bestiary.
GMs casually hiring you to make the creatures for them & then just putting what you describe it as, as the final thing
"Oh, I need you to describe a Veserab for my bestiary"
"Oh, uh, uh... Tentacle eel with wings, uh invisible legs and ears?"
*Intently writing" "uh, huh"
that is unironically a pretty good plot hook
No one knows what he really looks like. The second he shows up it's too late. He breaks people. He hurts them, swooping down from the shadows. He's.. Veserabman.
"Do Veserab have legs?" only the males, which are smaller and use them to grasp the female during copulation
Oddly specific but yeah that would be interesting!
Retractable legs, like how some gastropods have retractable eyestalks
we could combine this with the mating rituals of octopi that disconnect a leg during mating to pass their reproductive fluid to the female and the angler fish which fuse their bodies to the female.
Veserab males will have legs while post-mating males will be missing some or all legs before they grow back depending on how well they were in locking on to the female who will have many disconnected legs embedded into their skin from many males each mating season, the female will eat any males that fail to disconnect their legs as well as any legs that are easily reachable, leaving ones on the back and around what would be the neck to continue to inject genetic material for many months and creating the appearance of a mane on females with large pacts.
tbh I mainly wrote this down to get it out of my head
@@NeonDripKitty True fun thing is to try to include this into the story as DM
@@marcuswillbrandt5901 yer this is why i cant be a DM, I would come up with way to much info that the PCs would have no need to ever know and no organic way to get it to them
I like the idea that the veserab’s “massive ears” are in fact their wings, which is either extremely cute or extremely horrific
In regards to the inconsistency of the description. Perhaps a cool idea would be that as the species is matriarchal in nature the females could exhibit those missing features. A good excuse to give the creature an extra stat block variation and something that helps players identify it as the leader of the..."flock"?
Or just make their legs "rectractable".
The males could also be permanently underdeveloped, like some insects or like anglerfish
So. Like a queen?
How about calling a group a Vessel of Veserab.
@@lvendahl6776 Or perhaps a swarm?
I think "invisible legs and ears" should count as a magical ability and the creature should again be classified as a monstrosity
I mean, they could be "invisible" in the sense that they're too small.
booo give us more cool beast
It feels like the last dungeon dad video just came out. You really are spoiling us rotten.
I like the idea of it living in an ancient island which is isolated from the world and changing it's name to Legolas. Because it's a devolved version of powerful ancient beast with strong legs and huge bat ears.
My headcanon: veserab do have spindly legs and long ears. However, the legs are connected via a taut membrane similar to their wings. When gliding and surveying their territory, they hold their legs out, letting that membrane assist their wings in catching the wind, and helping them camouflage by extending the grey countershading on their belly and breaking up their silhouette.
Likewise, their ears are large openings about 8 inches behind the mouth, located about 35 degrees from the top of the head on either side. They are essentially large flaps of skin and cartillage connected to small muscles that are used to hold the flaps open while gliding and surveying their environment. Like this, they can detect movement and sound from 2000 feet away unobstructed. They are not able to actually blindsee at this distance, however. It's more like telling what direction something is in.
When they decide to attack, however, the ear muscles relax and the legs fold into their body. This reduces their hearing, but increases their profile's aerodynamic properties and their control in flight. They preserve their blindsight through a small organ within the head, which amplifies their echolocation similar to the melon on a beluga whale.
I choose the believe that instead of Veserabs flying in a formation like a V or a line, they form a circle and spin around one another. The keep this formation until they find their prey, center the prey in their death circle, then descend and clamp onto any body part they can.
I love how they clearly could see that the Veserab dosent look like how its described but they were just basically too lazy to fix that fuck up.
I've been planning an adult purple dragon encounter for my party and I've been looking for some kind of nocturnal hunting minion for the dragon to use...
Now i'm design an alien lamprey hive inside the dragon's lair where the lamprey queen was captured and tamed by the dragon, thank you, Dungeon Dad.
The way I used to Veserab in one of my home brew settings, was more based on basic biology than anything. I took the picture as being a baby and made the 4 lagged one with ears the adult version. So I lowered the stats for the babies and made them smaller. My players seemed to like it and it worked for me😊
"eyeless fiying tooth puppies"
man now I wanna see a deathkiss adopt some
Further proof to a head canon of mine- the MMs are compiled works based on interviews with adventurers. And full of misperceptions.
Keeping the veserab as a beast makes sense. Given all the insanely weird monstrous beasts we have in our world, and continue to discover, it's not that wild to think that the fantasy realm would have something fantastical that's a beast too.
Also, love that Snoop Dogg did a cameo appearance at the end.
I think even the "magical" part makes sense if we consider its shape was made by magic. They have no magical powers, but magic mutated them
So was he paid by the cameo app or something?
@@indiana47 It's AI.
@@KevinVideo that makes more sense.
In the Forgotten Realms novels during the Shade Enclave’s invasion/conquest, these were the mounts used by the elite warriors of the Shade Enclave. I don’t remember them being described as having ears or legs. I have never seen the Veserab drawn before yet i immediately recognized the image you used based on the novel’s descriptions throughout the trilogy of the Twilight War
A new recommendation for a monster for you to cover, anotger horrifying beast: Bodendrucker also known as the Leveller. Absolutely gigantic elephant with tentacles for a trunk, who hunts down and eats Purple Worms
Well that sounds metal as fuck.
This thing is the definition of “Digglett used Scratch”
Verserab are highly sought after for their wool is particularly soft and the ivory in their tusks makes for fine jewelry. Their feathers make for the softest of pillows and their shells can be ground up to make potions of storm giant strength. The queens prostate can be consumed to cause hallucinatory effects used for spirit journeys and their slime can be used as blinker fluid in your car.
It's a wonderful plant.
The Vagabond system is seriously cool (Taron is a good d&d class designer, invested into making the mechanics convey what they are supposed to represent), and it's 80% the way to be fully backed. The rules are free in the kickstarter page too.
I haven't had the fortune to purchase any of its products, but from playing with the sample versions of his products at our table, I can 100% recommend.
Also I suggested the diseased condition affecting hit dice on stream
How does it differ from 5e? And most importantly, is character creation simpler from pathfinder?
Been looking to maybe branch out so i am curious
@@matmil5 It's definitely very different from 5e! Combat is super snappy and there's less dead airtime for players because it's a group initiative system and players are rolling to dodge enemy attacks. Monster stat blocks are written to have an easy-to-follow guide for typical turns in combat (if x, do y, else do z). The game is being designed with solo-play in mind so everything can kind of run itself and takes a lot of mental load off of the GM. There's actually a solo adventure you can pick up on the kickstarter right now to try out!
Character creation is much simpler than Pathfinder, but not at the expense of options! There's lots of class and ancestry options, but each one is easy to read and comprehend how it'll play at the table. As part of character creation, you get to pick a Future which is a destiny full of milestones at which points you'll level up. ua-cam.com/video/Ho-FwopQgqo/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Indestructoboy
@@matmil5 For one, the Arbiter (GM) doesn't make d20 rolls - they're assumed to do their thing unless the players successfully roll against them. Additionally, Vagabond has a solo play option so you don't actually need an Arbiter or even a group. Those are probably the two main distinctions in my opinion, but it does differ in other ways while still having a similar "mouthfeel" to 5e. The character creation is simpler and combat is quicker, and the character options are designed to really evoke their fantasy and not just be drab mechanical buff.
This is the first time I’ve managed to slither into one of your videos while it’s still fresh. I like it.
Welcome to the pre-party!
Horror story idea. A veserab appears in the world, specifically in some mostly misty swamp. The town residents nearby become frightened as some kind of new beast is hunting around their settlement. Groups of villagers have tried hunting it, but only a few lucky survivors have come back to tell the tale.
I would imagine the veserab would hunt in the mist, carefully observing it's prey from the ground. Before launching foreword with it's flying speed and quickly mauling someone or something. Before disappearing again next turn by flying back into the mists. However I have no clue what it's animal cry is, but I imagine it is like that of a fox. Personally I like the idea of this thing screaming for no reason as part of it's cry, I mean a horrible screaming beast that has barely any information on it, and is more than fast enough to pick off prey in large groups one by one like the xenomorphs from aliens can potentially be very effective. What do you guys think?
I’m actually DMing a Curse of Strahd session right now, and I used the Veserab as homebrew encounter for a cave mission I made, the party had to go into this crypt to find a certain body of a noble whose descendants are really kind to the party, and the party has started to learn that they are in fact in a dread domain because they started seeing Veserabs on the ceiling of the cave curled up on the stalactites clicking vigorously, so they had to go through the cave with really high stealth checks or the whole flock would notice them, I have never seen a player tense up more in this whole campaign than I did there
I'm such a *sucker* for the horrible puns *flying* around in this video 😅 Thanks, Dad!
I'm in Portugal at the moment, and lampreys are eaten here, typically grilled or stewed. There's also a traditional holiday dessert called lampreia that's basically a bunch of fried sugary egg yolk strings and milky egg yolk sauce shaped to look like a lamprey, dopey face and all. Given that veserabs are bestial, I'd probably just import both of those ideas into my DnD world and have veserab-shaped desserts and veserab stew 😋
If you keep them in The Shadowfell I'd say the legs & ears could be retractable. If you go with the Shadowfell version as that's more a plane of Sprit than of Flesh I can imagine replacing the Noxious Cloud breath weapon with a debilitating cone of Gloom flooding minds the those caught in it with terrible memories of previous victims, thus allowing a Willpower save to power through. This is similar to Noxious Breath, but makes it more of evocative of a plane of the Dead and lets different party members be the ones more likely to survive the cone. If you're keeping it as a beast in the material world, perhaps replace the "Noxious Breath" with a "Overpowering Screech" same mechanics, but it's using the vocal chords it uses for echolocation to instead unleash an overpowering high pitched scream that debilitates the party. I just feel that breathing what's essentially mace takes this out of being a normal beast.
I imagine its echolocation uses its wings for sound collection like giant elephant ears that can also be used to take flight hahaha
I was making a Warlock and, while looking at Great Old Ones, found Zargon the Returner who (ironically) hasn't returned for 5e!
First appearance: "The Lost City" adventure module, way back in 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I actually own it. It's a fun module that is an old-school dungeon crawl, with an opportunity for wider, underground adventures. He(it?) was part of a load of optional content for continuing the base adventure. If you can find it online, or a copy in a used bookstore, check it out. It was revisited later, in "Return to the Lost City", but I'm only familiar with the original.
My buddy ran a 20th level 3.5 game where we fought zargon the returner! I made a Necromancer. I may have taunted zargon, who immediately full attacked me and I died round 1
@@jeremylackey6587 Yeah, Zargon was no joke, even back in the day.
Me thinking "i wonder if my character can have one as a mount?" Dungeon dad "atleast the party will investigate to see if they can get their hands on." *me looking for cameras*
Thanks for watching everyone!
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What monster should I cover next?
3:37 Barbarian and his friends communicate via scream (colorized)
👍👍 looking forward to next week's episizzle 😁!
This is definitely going into my folder for terrifying wildshapes
Can I have a link to that folder?
Came here for Vagabond, stayed for a high quality video!
I'm a big fan of monsters as fauna and this one will be very cool indeed
Thank you
Idea! Giving them taloned feet at the end of their pinions, and long hypersensitivity ears that they fold back along their body when in combat to protect their sensory organ. Kinda like the monsters from A Quiet Place
Obviously this creature started out as an ordinary beast related to a Lamprey, which developed adaptations to the Plane of Shadow by expressing genes for legs & huge flappy ears. Eventually, the legs became redundant as the ears developed into highly versatile wings.
Therefore, historical descriptions differed from the artist's renderings created at the time of their first publication; because 4-legged veserab are no longer observed in the wild, responsible Shadowfell researchers eventually updated their guide info to avoid misidentification by adventurers encountering the modern variety.
By modern Torilian standards, all of these Shadow-adapted mutant forms would indeed be considered 'alien' Monstrosities. (However, I believe it would be appropriate for _a Druid native to the Shadowfell,_ to treat them as a conventional Beast; pending DM approval, of course.)
Hrm. Legs or no legs....
Ima go with.....the matriarch sprouts legs, loses half its fly speed, and becomes a sort of brood mother. Its job is to poop eggs, and care for the young while its brood hunts.
I think it's like a bat and they sleep in the ceiling
No, I see it. You thought they were jaws. But in reality they were horrific clawed ears. They just happen to circle the mouth is all.
In my first campaign I ever DM'ed, one of the players was an Aaracokra monk. He would grapple an enemy, fly up to an absurd height, and simply drop them. This monster feels like the best way to get vengeance on him
Now I’m imagining them like Axolol, able to wildly shift their biology into a land, sea, or sky creature
Dude snoop at the end I love it lol
Iirc correctly in forgotten realms, there's a forgotten deity in the draconic pantheon that "died" as he fought asgorath that was described as manta ray looking like.
So maybe you could expand upon the veserab for it to be also draconic and antagonists of dragons. Lets say a chaotic instead of lawful draconic being.
Thank you for using twilight princess music, the best zelda ost, and I like to think these things sound like the shrieking eels.
The fucking snoop ai at the end, i can't breathe man
I knew I was not the only one who catched on to that
This is so perfect! One of the PC’s in my game is thirsty for Shadowfell lore. I’ll definitely include these delightfully legless nasties.
Wasn't these in that Paul S. Kemp novel as mounts. Yeahhhh the 2nd book, I thank it may have been called God Born or something like that in the Sundering series
The male veserab has legs so it can latch onto the female to mate.
Now I am imagining a bunch of Veserabs coming to the rescue amongst a demon invasion and hunting the demons.
It's like a D&D Zubat!
Gotta stock up on repels
Is it bad that this is my favorite creature now? It fights so funny.
Yes, it'll be so funny when it drops someone and the impact makes the blood fountain out of the gaping hole it chewed in them.
Thank you for making every week fun
Perhaps the veserab matriarchs are the only ones important enough to have legs and ears. XD
When I use these things, they'll be native of the underdark, rather than the shadowfell.
Your explanation at 1:23 makes me wonder what category beastfolk would fall into, or if it would vary based on the specific variation of beastfolk. I'm thinking lizard people, wolf people, all that kind of stuff. The biggest reason I wonder this is because one of my buddies I've been thinking about playing with would probably like to play as one, so the distinction could be interesting to explore from a story perspective.
A really cool monster from 2nd and 3rd edition is the urophion, these monsters are caused by a Roper being turned into a mindflayer and are just as intelligent as mindflayers but interestingly aren't always loyal to the elder brain (though most of them still are)
Added the monster to the list.
Very cool monster, I love monsters like this and the digester that are essentially just weird animals. That being said, on the topic of recommendations, you should check out The Book of Unremitting Horror well as Veins of the Earth, which both contain a bunch of fantastic and creepy monsters, the latter of the two also featuring some weird animals of its own.
The veserab: Proving that you don't need legs to kick someone. A true inspiration for all
*hears the word “horse”*
Griffins: “so anyway, I started blasting”
This video is amazing. I will totally be using lamprey puppies in my game. I would love to see a video on the Seugathi from Pathfinder.
The party is hired by a pair of authors co-writing a compendium of monsters and are arguing over the physical description of veserabs. They are to go to the shadowfell and determine once and for all how Ms y limbs it has.
When you described the legs, I imagined its wings were two of the legs, and the other two were smaller/shorter and located lower on the wing membrane down its body (using the art as reference) and the legs were part of the wing membrane, sort of like the membranes on bats, or "flying squirrels". Hence the hind leg claw attack could still be a thing, and would still look good in the art in my opinion. The "fan-like" ears I got little for, but my brain is imagining a feathery gill-like structure, not bat ears. I imagine its face catches sound like an Owl's face and directs the sound to its "ears" for the best hearing.
a common consensus looks like the legs and ears are retractable or hidden in combat to reduce damage to sensitive organs. i would like to think of the legs like nubs that extend out for combat similar to a breloom. This would be almost like a chameleon going up to twice the body length away to account for its reach.
I think that if you have a player that pops featherfall after being dropped by this screamers should have disadvantage on attack rolls against it, and vice versa, the monster has advantage in aerial combat.
Or perhaps a party member can be grabbed by one of either side and pulled into the air, counting as grappled, taking damage overtime until they either pull free or are pulled apart.
#teamlegless I think they should remain at least semiaquatic and I think introducing (small) dog sized versions that live in submerged caverns or a perpetually gloomy swamp; a nest of them huddled together dangling from a treebranch.
So introduce them as larger than normal lampreys and it isn't until 2 or more latch onto a PC that their wings unfurl and begin lifting the poor PC out of the water and into the air that the remaining flock to feed on in a frenzy.
I think the incapacitating smoke breath pushes the creature well into the Monstrosity category. That said on a natural 20 on the bite attack should trigger face bite, which much like a dark mantle blinds and suffocates the victim. Especially the fully grown version that would just latch onto the head completely possibly threatening decapitation.
Possible plot idea: you come across a settlement where the locals use veserabs as mounts/guards/etc. & one of the veserabs (personally I'd go with either the matriarch or one that's much beloved by the local children) has caught some unknown illness that is slowly killing the creature, & that's causing all all the other veserabs in the settlement to act up.
i was looking for a Mynock stand in for my Spelljammer game. Thanks Dungeon Dad, my players are going to hate it.
5e wolves are brutal and people always play them offs. Even at mid tier. They do damage just above their cr. The whole pact tactics + pounce combo is brutal. Sure the dc isn't high but you fail you fail had as odds are by next turn you will have a bunch of wolves biting on your body.
This gives me those types of vibes and I love it
I think we could work the ears and legs back into the design with out changing the current one much. jut by adding a line here and there it can have them back. I look at the art work as it attack mode. By tucking it ears down or back and pulling it's leg in. it protect them when it is feeding or attacking. With this change it could latch on ceilings and also can be used to warn players they know they are their.
Hey Dungeon Dad! Love your channel! Would like to pitch the Bog Hag from 4e/3e for your next videos. 🙂
Added it to D-Dad's list.
@@KevinVideo Thank you! 🙂
@@KevinVideo
May I pitch 2 more creatures? 😅
- Angel of Decay (Rot Harbinger) = undead angels that caused those they touch to rot
- Blood Fiend = vampire fiends that prey on other fiends and has a healing factor
Great stuff as always
Great content as always
you can always think of this creature as a caterpillar where before they molt their small feline looking creatures with a gaping maws, after their molt their legs fuse together into wings
My first thought for the missing legs and ears was maturity. Maybe the offspring of these creatures begin either wingless, or with tiny, nonfunctional wings. They scurry along the ground and use their large ears to help them navigate. As they mature, the veserabs shed their legs in favor of strong wings, and their ears shrink down as their echolocation becomes more powerful.
A "young veserab" stat block would be cool for a ground mount.
12:07-12:16 Or Conquest, and not to mention Oathbreaker.
Cool, now there's 3 videos about beast type monsters
I just unironically want a Roving Mauler for 5e made by your blessed mind
Added your name to the list.
As a dm who is starting to f around with the Shadowfell, I'm very happy to see another awesome Shadowfell based monster because there aren't that many.
My encounter idea is that the party are camping at night or traveling at night and suddenly a clown pops up telling them that they need to hide and hurriedly tells them there’s a large group of people over this way. Before the party can ask him anything the clown is swooped away into the air screaming (like those monsters from Pitch Black) while being tore apart. The party can either try and fight, run away, go where the clown pointed at. If they go where the clown pointed at they can discover that Druid PETA released it and other dangerous animals at night causing mayhem.
this is just a starwars mynok but magical
Was watching this 11:46 and thought oh man sure would be cool to use them as mounts for a grung village rules by an aboleth and then low and behold the man starts talking about using them as mounts love it
I had idea for void creatures that evolve from one basic form which is basically small veserab and idk how to feel about it now
My players ran into these guys after they were trapped in the Shadowfell for a while. They ended up going on a quest to capture a wild one to tame as a mount in order to befriend a shadar-kai who had recently lost his.
Well time for the artists to draw an accurate version of this monster
if you wanted to up the CR, you could always add pack tactics, that would make them way more deadly
This creature would fit quite nicely in a sort of underground secret world sort of setting, like the Underdark or Skyrim's Blackreach. They are perfect for the role of a predatory species fairly high up the food chain in a more alien yet still perfectly natural locale.
I like the idea of some bad guy using a few as their clothing, then when the party challenges them thinking that there is just one enemy the bad guy says a command word and his tamed veserabs suddenly launch from their master, breathing their noxious breath over a wide area while their master triggers a few pitfall traps, using the confusion to make the traps far more successful than they otherwise would have been.
….I’m going to try and draw this thing as it was described! It could be very cool looking
AI?
@@dubuyajay9964 you mean Artificial Intelligence or Adobe illustrator? In any case no, I would use clip
@@zoromiticospadaccino Artificial intelligence.
These guys need legs so a low level randon encounter can be a pack of infants that glide down and latch onto faces like a facehugger, where thay bite and scratch and choke at the same time.
7:14 "You'll definitely be on their radar." I think you meant "sonar" there. 😉
That is, indeed, what I meant hahaha
4:09 reading the description of the beasts sounds more like the Locust/Sand Reapers from conan exiles
Is that AI Snoop Dogg at the end? 😂👏🏽👏🏽
Letssss goooooo more frequent uploads
@DungeonDad So I just found another misprinted D&D beast. The Dire Elephant from Monster Manual II in 3.5. It's a gargantuan animal, has a strength of 40, and, for some godforsaken reason, a CLIMB SPEED OF 10!!!! Which, under the rules of 3.5 means that it had a standing climb check of more than 30. So not only could this enormous pachyderm cling to a shear cliff wall or cave ceiling, but it would take a godlike effort to dislodge it. City sized spider elephant.
Snoop? If that was snoop, I would love to see him play.
This is like Diglett learning Sucker Punch lol
dope, I am always down for more shadowfel creatures it's one of my favorite places
Another great work 🎉
Awesome vid