The victim of the obsession curse is able to pass this curse on to others, when he explains the mysteries they R researching. All victims who die from this curse lose their souls in the phylactery, increasing the lich's chance to reform itself. Upon reformation their spirits R enslaved to the lich. Slaves R immaterial but posses all magical knowledge they possessed in life. These enslaved are also able to pass on the curse. Whispering secrets to wizards, and spreading pages of the cursed manuscripts. The lich can cause these enslaved spirits to become material, for a short time per day. The lich freely operates a wizard's eye attached to each spirit, and can teleport between materialized enslaved souls. It can maintain a certain number of slaves, but will also absorb more souls to increase it's power.
Perhaps it is not a phylactery at all, but a soul jar imprisoning a wise wizard. The party must find a way to destroy the Grisgol, without destroying the fragile jar. The wizard who put the soul in the jar, will be an obstacle as well.
A soul jar Grisgol actually imprisons an NPC of ancient legend. A hero who's long internment has had vast consequences on their psyche. A hero who's return has great consequences for the world, but someone must become the hero's vessel. Perhaps by some accident or intended ritual, this hero could share someone's body, but the powerful persona of this driven entity, will overcome the body's owner. The ancient spirit longs for life, and cannot easily restrain itself.
The Grisgol wanders an ancient library. A storehouse forgotten behind hidden doors. The history of this creature has got to be hidden somewhere within it's tomes.
I once homebrewed an ooze made of gold, treasure, and magic items. It can disguise itself as a hoard of treasure to lure victims in, and can turn their gold into more of itself. At one point, a DM I know took the concept, and gave it sentience for the purpose of making it into one of the most repugnant and terrifyingly inevitable beings--*A TAX COLLECTOR*
"We face the greatest Evil in all the land." "Vecna?" "The lich wishes he were as eternal!" "Tiamat?" "An amatuer in comparison." "Who could be so terrible?" "The IRS."
@@connerbixby6532 Funny enough, one of the players accidentally created another golden ooze tax collector, and named it IRS (pronounced 'iris'). And as it just so happens, I recently reworked the monster homebrew.
I imagined a form of mimic rather similar to that. A blob of golden goo that uses chests, vases, etc etc as a shell and flat out mugs people passing through for their gold and preciousmetals/gemstones. Though the sentient versions tend to barter for random stuff they find. Magic items, imperishable food, etc etc.
I just love the idea that the madness that the person is driven into eventually ends up having them construct another Grisgol after it all, like some kind of wierd regeneration method for the monster
Doubles as a Lich population control mechanism as well. The cursed individual might spend their entire life hunting the main ingredient, even going so far as to found a secret order of Lich-hunters, which could explain the name. The Order of Saint Gris, and their Lich-sealing art the Gris-Gaol.
Expanding on the lich pact idea: When a character would normally die, time stops and everything becomes faded. A humanoid figure sits next to a campfire besides you, its face hidden by a hood. It offers to help the would be dead hero in exchange for a favour. If the pc agrees, the are not killed and now have a lich who down the road will require them to retrieve the heart of darkness. I would hide the fact that the humanoid is a lich until much later. Should only be used once in the campaign.
Used this creature as a subplot fight in a abandoned wizarding school, where a lich popped next to his phylactery and was totally chill about it. He let the party keep him as a sort of pokemon to be cast during difficult fights (or as a intimidation tactic). The lich was down with this because he was "incredibly bored of immortality and needed to spice up his unlife"
That's such a fun idea! A lich who isn't evil and have lived so much they aren't exactly interested in the evil things they did before because they are just bored.
Oh I got a good one for this… imagine… a dracoliche is slain somehow, and his massive filactory either spawns from his Draconic horde a giant sized Griscol or perhaps more horrifically an army of griscols all controlled by the one containing the filactory like a hive mind and the party has to find which one is the core to stop them all
Well even if dragonlochiches do have bigger souls they don't always use bigger phylacteries exemple: daergaurauth (orwhatever the spelling is) agrullably the strongest dracoliche in existence and champion of mystra uses a small gem for a phylactery
Off the top of my head, here we go... 1. The Grisgol is a magic item delivery system that goes awry when it becomes self aware and wants to become a tourist. 2. The spells are getting rejuvenated each day, right? So maybe 1 of the 10 spells is lost to time and people want that spell for practical/archeological purposes? (Include homebrew spells here.) Possible historical artifacts. 3. Maybe a lich uses being a Grisgol as an alternative to Lichdom? Maybe they were more of an Artificer than a Wizard and wanted to disrespect a rival Spellcaster? (Give Artificer spells and maybe class features like the arcane cannon). 4. A party of adventurers couldn't break the phylactery and so made the Grisgol and ordered it "Never engage, keep the phylactery from enemy hands." (Give it non-detection, pass without trace, dimension door and maybe even Plane Shift.) 5. One army makes a Grisgol or a handful into an antimagic weapon that just gathers up magic items of the opposing army to weaken them for a 2 pronged attack.
Alternativally: Necromancer's apprentice hires the party in secret to retrieve the "Heart of the Tome Golem". After some time, romors that a powerful lich has risen again after being defeated by a party of adventurers start to spread.
Oh, I really like 4. Just throw on a reason the party need to kill it. Say, it's an evil party trying to return a high-ranking piece to their master's forces. Or invert 4, and make it a good aligned being in some kind of soul trap similar to a phylactery. Especially potent as a means of showing how cunning a bbeg is; making their prisoner very likely to be destroyed by potential allies trying to prevent the 'Lich' they've found from recovering.
What if the party's warforge was actually a Griscol that lost its memories and was serving as a prison for a lich? The madness effect afterward is Griscol with it's memory intact, is just the golem explaining to the party on how to fix him before the lich can return to its former strength.
I like the idea that one of these was created deliberately to imprison the phylactery and prevent the lich's minions from retrieving it and reanimating him. Could flavour its spells and items as being holy relics assembled by a good-aligned religious order.
1. Great sideways approach to a warforged magic user PC. "I dunno, man, I'm just built different I guess. Can't pick your ingredients, am I right?" 2. Madness is Geas cast by the party that is trapped as magical items a la Beauty and the Beast, and one of them sacrificed himself to become the heart of it with no hope of escape or redemption. He is incurably evil and will actually fully become a lich if released. 3. "Are you my mother?" Griscol just randomly assembled in the trash heap of a wizarding school, mage tower, artificer's workshop and is desperately and dangerously looking for its "parent". Madness passes to whoever fails the save.
Plot idea (not necessarily a hook but a development): A Grisgol is made of the heart of a defeated lich and that lich still retains it’s consciousness. However, through making it a grisgol, the wizard that helped defeat it erased its memories and implanted an impulse to wander the world. The goal being to gradually and organically start a change of heart in the lich so that if it ever regained its memories it would no longer be a force for evil. The first idea that came to mind was a grisgol being a wandering magic item salesman. Since they are made of magic items they would probably have a knack for finding or creating them, but because they themselves don’t have a need of money or supplies the only thing they ask in return is a trinket, small amount of money, or convincing that the item is of great need. (If anyone’s ever read the SCP file on Cain then this would be like a less depressing version of that) OR The other option is this grisgol is cursed to wander the land, explicitly helping those in need, giving away anything it can survive without, and the only spells it’s inscribed with are spells for regenerating it’s magic parts and ones like conjure food and water/purify food and drink/etc, and all the while inside the lich still retains its personality. After a few centuries of doing this it either is still bitter but can be swayed but has gone completely numb. (This would be more like torture than a new beginning). Depending on the overall tone of your campaign, either of these could be a good option for a side plot or an addition to fighting a big bad
Behold: The Narrative Golem. Seriously this is just a walking McGuffin it's incredible. Especially like the Maddening Remains effect. I can't imagine a PC not trying to loot a golem made of magic items and I mean there ya go lol Plus you don't have to TELL them they're cursed and also you can have NPCs afflicted by it. Just a lot of cool possibilities.
I really like the idea of this narrative of this construct kind of arising by accident. Perhaps it's the first of its kind just because of a particular interaction between a couple of items in a lich's vault and has started to develop its own level of sentience.. with a few screws still loose, maybe. The lich is trapped within the phylactery still but as a construct it's deaf to the lich's attempts to manipulate it. It may not even be hostile to the party at first - they might be the first intelligent creatures it has ever met. Though being literally made of magical items would make it a tempting target for murderhoboing, the lich being unleashed afterwards feels like a pretty good consequence for their choice to strike down an innocent for loot. The lich may try to tempt them to do so though... many, many options. I also really like the idea of randomly rolling to see what spell it casts in a given encounter. I'd be sorely tempted to leave it at least partially to chance what spell would actually come out, or roll on a wild magic table with it. Runes flaring and weird things sloshing and flashing... potential for potion or grenade effects to come into play as well after it takes damage and something smashes inside. The barbarian strikes, glass breaks, he gets sprayed in the face with an Owl's Wisdom potion. EDIT: found a random spell generator with a quick google because of of course there are a lot of them out there. I guess my grisgol knows: Slow, Storm Sphere, Entangle, Stone Shape, Create Bonfire, True Seeing, Planar Binding, Melf's Minute Meteors, Blindness/Deafness and... Remove Curse. HMMMMM. Some of these spells are not like the others.
I love the idea of a grisgol arising through happenstance. If the party is out to get the phylactery, they could even meet this Grissom and either have to fight it as a sort of final encounter, or maybe the Grisgol is sentient and they have to decide wether to destroy it or not. Also random spell rolling is a super fun idea!
my idea was that the thing appears in a dragons hoard, like the dragon accidentally claims a phylactery as part of his hoard or maybe a lich intentionally slips his phylactery into the dragons possession since few places are more secure than a dragons hoard. then the dragon starts piling more valuable magic items on top of it, as dragons tend to do, the grisgol comes into existence buried under a mountain of treasure he can't possibly escape from and when the players slay the dragon and sift through his treasure they get jumped by the griisgol, whom they need to fight while still weakened by the dragon and then boom lich spawns right in front of them and even though a party that can take a dragon could most likely also take a lich, they have fought the dragon and the grisgol back to back, with the magic users are out of spells and the fighter low on hit points they are powerless to fight or escape and all they can do is bargain with the lich.
What if the phylactery isn't that of a lich, but an archlich (good-aligned lich)? Maybe some evil cult or entity managed to trick and defeat a powerful archlich that was the protector of a settlement or country in order to have free rein to do whatever evil stuff they want. And since they couldn't figure out how to destroy the philactery, they decided to hide it away in a dungeon and create a Grisgol to protect it even further and stop the archlich's regeneration. So the party is tasked to retrieve this phylactery in order to free the archlich.
I was thinking a similar thing. Except it would arise unprompted. The party would have to collect the philactery and instead find this monster to defeat. (With the intent of bringing back the archlich for its guidance/knowledge (also giving an interesting extra layer to the curse))
Archliches did not create phylacteries as did normal liches, and instead used practical magical items that could serve as more than just a repository for their souls, typically taking the form of a small spellbook.
I can imagine the grisgol being a living prison for a lich their phylactery, they would be a pretty powerful guardian and you could probably say something like the scrolls also provide the bindings to keep the lich locked up.
I like this a lot, too...especially if it means that the grisgol isn't actually a random collection of magical items. In other words, the wizard who put this together had to bring a *precise* combination of items together to cancel the phylactery's power. It might look like a garbled mess to the untrained eye, but it has structure. I especially like this because it gives a theme of "method to the madness" which ties in nicely with the curse infliction, flavor-wise.
And what if your PCs are sent to destroy the Grisgol by followers of the Lich? They’re told the Grisgol is an evil creature that has been terrorizing innocents except it was the Lich cultist the entire time.
This is kind of what I was thinking. Like the Phylactery wasn't something that could have been destroyed at the time, due to lack of knowledge or whatever, so a wizard created the Grisgol as a way to contain it for the time being and locked it away in some horrible tomb. Now the party stumbles on the tomb, defeats the Grisgol and in the process unleashes something far worse.
I want to make a sentient grisgol who is good but has to deal with the fact that he is part of something so evil. Maybe even make him a fun npc for the party who is trying to kill a lich, only to reveal later that in order to win they have to kill their favorite npc
Bonus points for making it seem like a big ol' coward, seemingly caring about only it's own survival, when in reality it knows it's death will "unleash the unspeakable Evil that is A-KU."
My brain immediately: What if, as DD says, the scrolls light up when it casts a spell, the party then tries to remove those scrolls from its body.....with the right check they theoretically could and deny the construct of some of its spells...could potentially add another layer to the fight....
i love "monster of the week" style shows and im rly happy you take into account the "lore" aspect and not just stats bc it really allows ppl like me to enjoy these videos, when i just want to hear stories abt creepy creatures
My favourite poetic justice way to run the Grisgol curse is that by attempting to 'solve' it, the victim unknowingly begins to put it back together again.
Mate, I always wanted to be GM for D&D, create a story for people, but getting into that world felt very difficult to put up an afford of starting to study it. Really greatful for all of your videos, i am just starting to watch all of them, but they way you tell about the world, it's connections, with examples, all your hints, everything in your videos is something i didn't know i needed that much. The sheer passion you have for it makes this complex world and game amazing, and accessible. Can't express how much interest you created for me now, thank you!!!!! My frist video i saw of your channel was The False Hydra, it was amazing!
Okay, this might be an obvious one, but what if the madness curse and the phylactery were connected? As in the curse is caused by the influence of the lich whose phylactery was used as the grisgol's heart, and the secret the afflicted character is forced to pursue ends up allowing the lich to manifest.
I remember seeing this thing in the Monster Manual III so many years ago and thinking it was so cool. To this day the Grisgol remains one of my favorite D&D monsters. Thanks for covering it and porting it to 5e!
This is just perfect. I just ended a campaign where a major bad guy was an ancient lich and my players asked for an epilogue one-shot. They think they yeeted the philactery into the Elemental Plane of Fire, but maybe some genie or worse creature picked it up to give me a villain for said one-shot.
If the party brings the grisgol chunks to a merchant, I would definitely consider cursing the merchant bc of the maddening remains, which could lead to a lot of different stories for them, whether it's a side quest for the party to save their favorite buyer from a curse they accidentally put the on them, a return trip to the dungeon to gather every single shred of parchment for the merchant that leads to an encounter with a servant of the lich looking for the phylactery, or the merchant's obsession with the remains causing a supply shortage in the town or city that forces the party to figure out how to keep the town from starving without new shipments of food
Man, I love how much this channel's production levels have evolved over the years! Long gone are the days when you'd spend the whole video staring at the ceiling!
Interesting. One idea that came to my mind is that a lich "disconnected" his phylactery. Maybe it's seperated soul grew sick of the atrocities it's corporial half was doing and animated the new body to weaken it's other side's magical power. Or maybe the lich just botched the ritual and this golem is what he got after regeneration. The curse would then be an obsession to reconstruct the original body, an warlock pact offered may allow the patron to eventually possess the warlock's body.
I honestly have an interesting concept for this, in one of my campaigns I have a bbeg who was killed in the process of becoming a lich so their phylactery isn't entirely full with their own soul and it ended up having half become an undead monster and the bbeg currently believes their phylactery was destroyed, so a glitchy GrisGrol
@@Dragowolf_Rising Three of the five people had to drop out because of work and school of the campaign so I never got to use it but I will someday use a Glichgol against a party
I think I might make it so that when the party hits the Grisgol you roll to see if it releases the choking dust or shatters a potion bottle, which might damage the weapon or something.
What if the madness curse causes the player who is obsessed with discovering some secret and aranging the items in a specific order causes the player to eventually (unknowingly) rebuild the monster and rid himself of the curse that way
I was thinking the same thing. It would be interesting if the character rebuilds it while they're alone, and the party comes back to their base to find the character dead or kidnapped and a trail leading to an escaped grisgol.
I love how many places this one can go. I think that, for my first attempt, I'd want to just test drive it as a wand golem. I'd add some kind of effect such that a random spell has a chance of targeting something random (including the grisgol itself) every time it gets hit...and maybe some magic distortion field surrounds it too. Fun times!
I have this idea that edits the Grisgol a little. Make it sentient and have the lich still be alive. The Grisgol, angry that is stuck in forever torment (until the lich claims it's phylactery), seeks it's former in order to destroy itself, not knowing it's life source is the very sword it carries.
I happen to be Josiah and am also a Dungeon Dad! Well met! I enjoy your monster videos, bringing stuff up from 3.5 especially. Makes me want to go back and leaf through the monster manuals.
This has quickly become my favorite D&D series. Was hooked and subscribed from the first video I watched (False Hydra) and the quality of the other videos stays top notch!
I just clicked on this one to listen as I drove to work, and lo and behold it's absolutely a perfect addition to my new campaign. So this makes like two dozen of your vids that I've added in now lmao
I like the idea of the party being guided to fight the grisgol by an old wizard, only to realize the wizard was a lich who wanted to free its phylactery from the construct that was sapping its power.
Oh man! Great monster. It only lasted a round with my OP group but as soon as they started scrambling around in the scraps for spell scrolls they started falling one by one to the madness. half the group is obsessed, the other half trying to knock them out. Chaos! Thanks
I've recently started DMing for a group of friends and I found your videos as I started looking for DM tips and stuff and I just have to say that I love these monster of the week videos and have been saving them for when my party gets to those higher levels, but I have been planning where in my world some of these things have settled and I know exactly where to put this one as well. Thank you so much for all of these great ideas and the stat blocks to go with them, makes my life so much easier.
One of the best parts of these monster filled worlds is having monsters interact with each other, like imagine giving the players one of these and they run into a town full of paranoid people mumbling to their selves and it walks off into a house with some broken floorboards and it starts going ballistic and then you see it. A false hydra.
I enjoy making things relatable, and while I don't do DND the idea of one of these creatures that is terrified of adventurers because they try to take pieces of it's body, but is willing to travel with someone and eventually learns they're made with a lich soul is a fascinating concept if you reworked this into an NPC
That would be one of the best ways to become a warlock and being on a first name bases with you patron, being in the favour of a lich is the best health plan in all the realms.
I wanna have the party fight this, then a pseudo-lich like being rises from the phylactery to sell the magic items that made up this monster. "After all, you just saw how effective many of these items are for yourselves."
Okay, I love how easy this creature is to scale up or down depending on the spells it has. I totally want to use this as a recurring enemy in my magic school campaign.
One of the first things I thought of when you mentioned the Lich being freed after the party loots the Grisgol is that the Lich could simply offer to cure them of that Maddening Remains curse, or the Choking Dust poison in return for their phylactery and freedom, and then leave. If you want to be nice, that is. lol
Idea: Make the Maddening remains curse purpose in a way to make revive the destroyed Grigsol. I feel it will be interesting the concept of a mad party member slowly making a more powerful version of a old monster they fought. There is definitely a lot of room to imagine and be creative with this monster!
Holy, I finnaly found a youtube channel about DnD monster that's interesting and informative, probably will watch all Monster's of the week Usually when I search about DnD monster the videos are more about the person telling a story with the monster instead of being informative Thanks!
this gave me a great idea for a lich story. I plan on having the lich make a grisgol on purpose and send the thing out into the world to wonder forever. only ever stopping to let the lich come back. this would make the party turn their focus onto finding the grisgol and the phylactery so they can beat the lich.
I only found your channel yesterday, and wow- I love your presentation style. Your oration and visual gags were perfect. And I’ve just become acquainted with the Lich of Adventure Time so this was a really nice surprise, especially when I didn’t expect this episode to go in that direction! Looking forward to watching more.
20:11 That totally looks like Fred. I love that a couple pieces of art used were from Michael Clarke's library. He's a fantastic artist, and doesn't get nearly enough love.
For the longest I've had the idea to play a warforged armorer artificer that somehow used to be a living humanoid, and I think adding grisgol flavor to that would be perfect. A mortal tinkerer is involved in an accident that destroys their body and bonds their soul to an artifact, and they pull their new grisgol (warforged) body together from magic items around their lab. Every item they make is incorporated into their body to help them survive their mission to discover the secrets to reclaim their lost original body.
I like the idea of having an npc that the party frequently interacts with, getting this curse and slowly turning insane while sending the party on more and more dangerous quests for more and more seemingly mundane and useless things for the NPC's "research".
I think many like myself thought of the idea of re-flavouring the grisgol to be the protector of the phylactery which only becomes active when phylactery is in danger as anyone who know how a lich works, they always have many protection of this weak point. So, imagine your party has finally reached the ancient wizards mage tower (lich's former residence now dungeon to protect their phylactery) when they encounter the Grisgol. If they don't kill it in time maybe the Grisgol jumps out the window or cast dimension door or teleport escaping with the phylactery & returning it to their master's side
All i can imagine is a lich doing a scooby doo-esque chase just trying to get his soul home back like "Bro please i just want to know what its like to have a body like cmon guys its not funny"
Having watched a few of your videos, I am impressed with the production quality and effort. It feels like it's best I have come across in the DnD space. Informative and funny, Jakey-esque.
Ohh this is a perfect back story for my Battle Smith Artificer. His Steel Guardian could be a kind of Clockwork Grisgol Golem. Perhaps it's Phalactory is the heart of a Fallen family member, and the PC in an attempt to keep them "Alive" has used their heart to build them a new body. Interesting!
I had a four grisgol honor guard set up in a tomb. One of the items each of them possessed was a portable hole. None of my party succumbed to the curse sadly, but after they had braved the tomb and escaped with a scant number of hit points between them all and began to rifle through the loot... the following spell battle between four liches arguing amongst themselves and the party just scrambling to survive with priceless.
In a more light-heated campaign, after the party makes off with *all* the loot: _Lich appears_ “Good afternoon gentlemen, could I trouble you for some souls? I really am quite famished.” Edit: I’d also like to say that liches tend to fall into the “evil, maniacal, reclusive undead wizard” category far too often. Where are all the friendly comedy liches with their skeletal band? (don’t question how they play the wind instruments)
A cool idea I had is the Phylactery is indeed a magical weapon, however it is not the Lich's original Phylactery. Perhaps long ago, a team of heroes managed to trap the Lich inside a new Phylactery that was much weaker and couldn't allow the Lich to re-manifest. Then, to ensure nobody could ever undo what they did, the wizard created a Grisgol using that weapon as its power source, which continually drained the Lich's power so that even over time it could never gain too much power, as well as the Grisgol itself protecting the weapon against anyone who may be looking to free the Lich. That way, when the party defeats the Grisgol for some completely unrelated purpose, and find a strong magical weapon amongst the remains, they will start using it. However they are completely unaware that every creature with a soul that they slay with that weapon is feeding the Lich trapped within, and eventually he can gain enough power to manifest. As for the curse, I think thematically it could be interesting if that paranoia ultimately serves the purpose of them trying to reconstruct the Grisgol without even realizing it. Then when all the pieces are in place, they realize that the secret they were searching for requires a sacrifice, and are compelled to either give their own life or the life of something else. In reality, this sacrifice just serves to jump start the Phylactery and revive the Grisgol. But maybe this cursed person replaced the Grisgol's parts with more fresh ones. New spell scrolls to replace the old tatered ones, for example. So now it's spell list is different.
I just imagined the party put all the loot in a bag of hold. Then when they go to grab something from the bag they pull out a litch by the head He says " hay how's it going?" Then goes to attack. Then asked " wait is this (x kingdom)?" " No that's been gone for hundreds of years" " Oh I see" then leaves bc he's got no beef with the current kingdom. But comes back. Edits a spell page, possibly fixing or un-cursing it. Then becomes a background figure like the G-man
A specific idea I had with the phylactery heart is that the Griscol, instead of being made randomly, is made to contain the heart instead of just so happening to be the core. Perhaps a noteworthy kingdom is using it as a power source and has a limbless Griscol somewhere in the depths, or liches (either bad or homebrewed good) were purposefully contained in a far weaker form and stashed away, still consciousness and maybe even controlling the Griscol, but can’t escape and thus is left to rot mentally.
I have an idea for the phylactery heart. I'm going to throw a Grisgol at my loot hungry players. When they defeat it, the phylactery heart will serve as a spell storing necklace. The item will allow the user to store spells from spell scrolls, as the scrolls fold origami style and enter the stone. After ten spells are stored, the phylactery will be charged and ready to be triggered. The moment the phylactery is near a decent amount of magical items, it will pull those items and reform the Grisgol with access to whatever spells the party stored, as well the magical items it used to form its body. These items very likely may come from the party, themselves. Now the party has to defeat the reformed Grisgol that they have buffed and destroy the phylactery in order to reclaim their items.
I'm going to be running a Tamriel game soon, and think I might use this as the "Naked Nord" scenario. The Lich appears as a younger healthier version of himself, kind of like a Cline spell, but without any physical objects (think the opening to Terminator). He doesn't want to confront the party directly, but approaches them claiming to have been robbed by a witch and asks them to help him retrieve his belongings by leading them to a super dangerous dungeon he hopes will get them killed, and he can just retrieve the phylactery off their remains.
The party will be introduced to a man on horseback with a small, bundled up humanoid behind him. Behind them, on a small wagon, is a badly damaged golem with talismans and shiny baubles all over it, glowing faintly. He will say the bundled up figure has leprosy, and the golem was something he was sworn to protect by some made up Duke. The bundled up figure won't communicate, but the golem will wave at about the same time this bundled up form tries to twitch their arms, and look around when the bundle slowly cranes it's neck. Hopefully they won't investigate too much further, cause these are two powerful necromancers who were just short of lichdom. The Grisgol is the only thing keeping this diminutive lich from fully losing itself to undeath. A sort of life support system while they escape from their old base and establish a new one, away from their pursuers. Eventually, they will re-attempt the process and not screw it up as much this time. Kinda like full metal alchemist huh?
The lich made himself into a lich to get revenge and then the lord made him into one of these things. I'm thinking about some kind of crazy battle insues between the two as the lords hired wizard could be shoveing the bard livhes soul into this phalactery. Which is of course used to make one of these crazy cool creatures.
This monster reminded me of a Hungarian fantasy anthology, where the overarching story is that a magic devouring demon has broken free in the basement of a mage's tower, killed the mage, and started going floor by floor, eating magical defences, and other stuff. And in the attic, a bunch of sentient magic items, the members of the mage's magic item collection start talking to each other while the Jarvis type security system constantly informs them of the progress of the demon. The stories of the anthology consist of the personal stories the magic items tell each other about themselves. And the book ends by the items working together, animating and using each other like this grisgol, and killing the demon.
A grisgol is the ultimate insult you can visit upon a lich. As to make it you have to have destroyed the lich beforehand. Not only do you have the lich's soul in your possession but you use it to make a shoddy golem.
I was thinking along similar lines. What if a powerful lich defeated a hated enemy lich and instead of destroying it, he turned it into a clown/jester themed grisgol that the the lich forced to humiliate itself in mean spirited ways for the lich's twisted amusement. It could have a jester's hat made of tattered wizard's hoods. Its phylactery might be a jester's scepter with the power to suck in souls. It might hid it's real nature under a charm person clown mask. It might have a squirting flower gag that squirted Tasha's hideous laughter instead of water. Or the flower might be the phylactery and it sucks in souls. The powerful lich might be defeated in battle. The heroes are then dispatched to the lich's lair to find and destroy it's phylactery at all costs before the lich comes back. In the lich's throne room they find a pitiful obviously insane clown in a cage with a sad sob story of how it was forced to amuse the sadistic lich or have it's soul sucked. It offers to tell were the traps and the phylactery is and to show how to destroy it. Unfortunately it destroys the lich's phylactery by using it's own phylactery to suck in its contents. It then leaves the heroes while laughing insanely. You now have a supervillain with the personality of Batman's Joker, the magic powers of a lich and the resistances of a golem.
the first idea I had for a Grisgol was as a self-defending phylactery in a secure demi-plane; emergency wards that are either automatically or manually activated by the Lich's death order the Grisgol to deactivate (if that's possible for a construct) until the Lich reforms, upon which it could be re-assembled and await further orders. However, I also like the idea of the phylactery belonging to a more friendly/helpful Lich who was sealed away by another as a prank, stuck from reviving because of a Grisgol with the most annoying spell combination you can think of. They could even let the party settle down at the Lich's lair for a while as a reward, maybe be introduced to them as a new vendor NPC, willing to part ways with special treasures in exchange for odd-jobs and quests.
I think it would be kinda cool to make a Grisgol made of mostly magic monster parts or raw resources that the players fight near a huge smelter and once the players defeat it it throws itself into the smelter and it’s melted remains just pour out into an available weapon cast and boom, party has a new magic item with a cool story
This is amazing I was think that in my party discussions I could bring up a artificer that builds one of these and maybe our warlock could place his soul in it.
Thanks for watching everyone! See ya in the next one! 😄
I'm replacing a couple of my homebrew monsters like this with this.
The victim of the obsession curse is able to pass this curse on to others, when he explains the mysteries they R researching. All victims who die from this curse lose their souls in the phylactery, increasing the lich's chance to reform itself. Upon reformation their spirits R enslaved to the lich. Slaves R immaterial but posses all magical knowledge they possessed in life. These enslaved are also able to pass on the curse. Whispering secrets to wizards, and spreading pages of the cursed manuscripts. The lich can cause these enslaved spirits to become material, for a short time per day. The lich freely operates a wizard's eye attached to each spirit, and can teleport between materialized enslaved souls. It can maintain a certain number of slaves, but will also absorb more souls to increase it's power.
Perhaps it is not a phylactery at all, but a soul jar imprisoning a wise wizard. The party must find a way to destroy the Grisgol, without destroying the fragile jar. The wizard who put the soul in the jar, will be an obstacle as well.
A soul jar Grisgol actually imprisons an NPC of ancient legend. A hero who's long internment has had vast consequences on their psyche. A hero who's return has great consequences for the world, but someone must become the hero's vessel. Perhaps by some accident or intended ritual, this hero could share someone's body, but the powerful persona of this driven entity, will overcome the body's owner. The ancient spirit longs for life, and cannot easily restrain itself.
The Grisgol wanders an ancient library. A storehouse forgotten behind hidden doors. The history of this creature has got to be hidden somewhere within it's tomes.
I once homebrewed an ooze made of gold, treasure, and magic items. It can disguise itself as a hoard of treasure to lure victims in, and can turn their gold into more of itself. At one point, a DM I know took the concept, and gave it sentience for the purpose of making it into one of the most repugnant and terrifyingly inevitable beings--*A TAX COLLECTOR*
"We face the greatest Evil in all the land."
"Vecna?"
"The lich wishes he were as eternal!"
"Tiamat?"
"An amatuer in comparison."
"Who could be so terrible?"
"The IRS."
@@connerbixby6532 Funny enough, one of the players accidentally created another golden ooze tax collector, and named it IRS (pronounced 'iris').
And as it just so happens, I recently reworked the monster homebrew.
I'm totes taking that idea.
AGGGGHHH
I imagined a form of mimic rather similar to that. A blob of golden goo that uses chests, vases, etc etc as a shell and flat out mugs people passing through for their gold and preciousmetals/gemstones. Though the sentient versions tend to barter for random stuff they find. Magic items, imperishable food, etc etc.
I just love the idea that the madness that the person is driven into eventually ends up having them construct another Grisgol after it all, like some kind of wierd regeneration method for the monster
Such a great idea
Imma steal this, straight up.
This is so good
Doubles as a Lich population control mechanism as well. The cursed individual might spend their entire life hunting the main ingredient, even going so far as to found a secret order of Lich-hunters, which could explain the name. The Order of Saint Gris, and their Lich-sealing art the Gris-Gaol.
This was the first thing I thought of!!!!
Expanding on the lich pact idea:
When a character would normally die, time stops and everything becomes faded. A humanoid figure sits next to a campfire besides you, its face hidden by a hood. It offers to help the would be dead hero in exchange for a favour. If the pc agrees, the are not killed and now have a lich who down the road will require them to retrieve the heart of darkness. I would hide the fact that the humanoid is a lich until much later.
Should only be used once in the campaign.
I love this idea!
Lemme just yoink that into my plot hat
Awesome
Used this creature as a subplot fight in a abandoned wizarding school, where a lich popped next to his phylactery and was totally chill about it. He let the party keep him as a sort of pokemon to be cast during difficult fights (or as a intimidation tactic). The lich was down with this because he was "incredibly bored of immortality and needed to spice up his unlife"
Nice.
That's such a fun idea! A lich who isn't evil and have lived so much they aren't exactly interested in the evil things they did before because they are just bored.
I’m guessing the party fed him souls of crooks they killed as a kind of payment for helping them out?
@@stingerjohnny9951 yep! He only feasted on monsters and bad people. The Lich was interested in any souls but the party was morally good.
"Give me your money!" says the bandit.
"Lol" replies the cleric, throwing a Lich pokéball, "lmao."
Oh I got a good one for this… imagine… a dracoliche is slain somehow, and his massive filactory either spawns from his Draconic horde a giant sized Griscol or perhaps more horrifically an army of griscols all controlled by the one containing the filactory like a hive mind and the party has to find which one is the core to stop them all
Well even if dragonlochiches do have bigger souls they don't always use bigger phylacteries exemple: daergaurauth (orwhatever the spelling is) agrullably the strongest dracoliche in existence and champion of mystra uses a small gem for a phylactery
phylactery, dracolich
@@RuneKatashima sir, sir, sir… we don’t do that here, leave that in Reddit and Facebook
@@mouchtachegaming5869 The best route for a lich is make the pylactery be a giant fucking adamantium cube
@@Superbug-tf8zyMake it the foundation for a house.
Off the top of my head, here we go...
1. The Grisgol is a magic item delivery system that goes awry when it becomes self aware and wants to become a tourist.
2. The spells are getting rejuvenated each day, right? So maybe 1 of the 10 spells is lost to time and people want that spell for practical/archeological purposes? (Include homebrew spells here.) Possible historical artifacts.
3. Maybe a lich uses being a Grisgol as an alternative to Lichdom? Maybe they were more of an Artificer than a Wizard and wanted to disrespect a rival Spellcaster? (Give Artificer spells and maybe class features like the arcane cannon).
4. A party of adventurers couldn't break the phylactery and so made the Grisgol and ordered it "Never engage, keep the phylactery from enemy hands." (Give it non-detection, pass without trace, dimension door and maybe even Plane Shift.)
5. One army makes a Grisgol or a handful into an antimagic weapon that just gathers up magic items of the opposing army to weaken them for a 2 pronged attack.
Love this stuff
Alternativally: Necromancer's apprentice hires the party in secret to retrieve the "Heart of the Tome Golem". After some time, romors that a powerful lich has risen again after being defeated by a party of adventurers start to spread.
Oh, I really like 4. Just throw on a reason the party need to kill it. Say, it's an evil party trying to return a high-ranking piece to their master's forces. Or invert 4, and make it a good aligned being in some kind of soul trap similar to a phylactery. Especially potent as a means of showing how cunning a bbeg is; making their prisoner very likely to be destroyed by potential allies trying to prevent the 'Lich' they've found from recovering.
What if the party's warforge was actually a Griscol that lost its memories and was serving as a prison for a lich? The madness effect afterward is Griscol with it's memory intact, is just the golem explaining to the party on how to fix him before the lich can return to its former strength.
I might steal this for a player character for a warforged spellcaster
@@Jdvalentine13 go for it, just let me know how it turned out later.
@@Jdvalentine13Did it turn out well?
I like the idea that one of these was created deliberately to imprison the phylactery and prevent the lich's minions from retrieving it and reanimating him. Could flavour its spells and items as being holy relics assembled by a good-aligned religious order.
1. Great sideways approach to a warforged magic user PC. "I dunno, man, I'm just built different I guess. Can't pick your ingredients, am I right?"
2. Madness is Geas cast by the party that is trapped as magical items a la Beauty and the Beast, and one of them sacrificed himself to become the heart of it with no hope of escape or redemption. He is incurably evil and will actually fully become a lich if released.
3. "Are you my mother?" Griscol just randomly assembled in the trash heap of a wizarding school, mage tower, artificer's workshop and is desperately and dangerously looking for its "parent". Madness passes to whoever fails the save.
Plot idea (not necessarily a hook but a development): A Grisgol is made of the heart of a defeated lich and that lich still retains it’s consciousness. However, through making it a grisgol, the wizard that helped defeat it erased its memories and implanted an impulse to wander the world. The goal being to gradually and organically start a change of heart in the lich so that if it ever regained its memories it would no longer be a force for evil.
The first idea that came to mind was a grisgol being a wandering magic item salesman. Since they are made of magic items they would probably have a knack for finding or creating them, but because they themselves don’t have a need of money or supplies the only thing they ask in return is a trinket, small amount of money, or convincing that the item is of great need.
(If anyone’s ever read the SCP file on Cain then this would be like a less depressing version of that)
OR
The other option is this grisgol is cursed to wander the land, explicitly helping those in need, giving away anything it can survive without, and the only spells it’s inscribed with are spells for regenerating it’s magic parts and ones like conjure food and water/purify food and drink/etc, and all the while inside the lich still retains its personality. After a few centuries of doing this it either is still bitter but can be swayed but has gone completely numb. (This would be more like torture than a new beginning).
Depending on the overall tone of your campaign, either of these could be a good option for a side plot or an addition to fighting a big bad
Behold: The Narrative Golem.
Seriously this is just a walking McGuffin it's incredible. Especially like the Maddening Remains effect. I can't imagine a PC not trying to loot a golem made of magic items and I mean there ya go lol
Plus you don't have to TELL them they're cursed and also you can have NPCs afflicted by it. Just a lot of cool possibilities.
Lol! Not telling the player that they’re cursed is an expert level maneuver
I really like the idea of this narrative of this construct kind of arising by accident. Perhaps it's the first of its kind just because of a particular interaction between a couple of items in a lich's vault and has started to develop its own level of sentience.. with a few screws still loose, maybe. The lich is trapped within the phylactery still but as a construct it's deaf to the lich's attempts to manipulate it.
It may not even be hostile to the party at first - they might be the first intelligent creatures it has ever met. Though being literally made of magical items would make it a tempting target for murderhoboing, the lich being unleashed afterwards feels like a pretty good consequence for their choice to strike down an innocent for loot. The lich may try to tempt them to do so though... many, many options.
I also really like the idea of randomly rolling to see what spell it casts in a given encounter. I'd be sorely tempted to leave it at least partially to chance what spell would actually come out, or roll on a wild magic table with it. Runes flaring and weird things sloshing and flashing... potential for potion or grenade effects to come into play as well after it takes damage and something smashes inside. The barbarian strikes, glass breaks, he gets sprayed in the face with an Owl's Wisdom potion.
EDIT: found a random spell generator with a quick google because of of course there are a lot of them out there. I guess my grisgol knows: Slow, Storm Sphere, Entangle, Stone Shape, Create Bonfire, True Seeing, Planar Binding, Melf's Minute Meteors, Blindness/Deafness and... Remove Curse. HMMMMM. Some of these spells are not like the others.
I love the idea of a grisgol arising through happenstance. If the party is out to get the phylactery, they could even meet this Grissom and either have to fight it as a sort of final encounter, or maybe the Grisgol is sentient and they have to decide wether to destroy it or not.
Also random spell rolling is a super fun idea!
my idea was that the thing appears in a dragons hoard, like the dragon accidentally claims a phylactery as part of his hoard or maybe a lich intentionally slips his phylactery into the dragons possession since few places are more secure than a dragons hoard. then the dragon starts piling more valuable magic items on top of it, as dragons tend to do, the grisgol comes into existence buried under a mountain of treasure he can't possibly escape from and when the players slay the dragon and sift through his treasure they get jumped by the griisgol, whom they need to fight while still weakened by the dragon and then boom lich spawns right in front of them and even though a party that can take a dragon could most likely also take a lich, they have fought the dragon and the grisgol back to back, with the magic users are out of spells and the fighter low on hit points they are powerless to fight or escape and all they can do is bargain with the lich.
What if the phylactery isn't that of a lich, but an archlich (good-aligned lich)? Maybe some evil cult or entity managed to trick and defeat a powerful archlich that was the protector of a settlement or country in order to have free rein to do whatever evil stuff they want. And since they couldn't figure out how to destroy the philactery, they decided to hide it away in a dungeon and create a Grisgol to protect it even further and stop the archlich's regeneration. So the party is tasked to retrieve this phylactery in order to free the archlich.
I was thinking a similar thing. Except it would arise unprompted.
The party would have to collect the philactery and instead find this monster to defeat.
(With the intent of bringing back the archlich for its guidance/knowledge (also giving an interesting extra layer to the curse))
Yes! Imagine having an archlich coming to save your hide from some big bad evil guy at a later date and just decides to travel with you all.
Archliches did not create phylacteries as did normal liches, and instead used practical magical items that could serve as more than just a repository for their souls, typically taking the form of a small spellbook.
Have the bbeg be the one to make this construct as a way to show their dickery?
I like this idea a lot, I always disliked the idea that all Lichs/Arch-Lichs are automatically Evil/Insane.
I can imagine the grisgol being a living prison for a lich their phylactery, they would be a pretty powerful guardian and you could probably say something like the scrolls also provide the bindings to keep the lich locked up.
I like this a lot, too...especially if it means that the grisgol isn't actually a random collection of magical items.
In other words, the wizard who put this together had to bring a *precise* combination of items together to cancel the phylactery's power. It might look like a garbled mess to the untrained eye, but it has structure.
I especially like this because it gives a theme of "method to the madness" which ties in nicely with the curse infliction, flavor-wise.
And what if your PCs are sent to destroy the Grisgol by followers of the Lich? They’re told the Grisgol is an evil creature that has been terrorizing innocents except it was the Lich cultist the entire time.
This is kind of what I was thinking. Like the Phylactery wasn't something that could have been destroyed at the time, due to lack of knowledge or whatever, so a wizard created the Grisgol as a way to contain it for the time being and locked it away in some horrible tomb. Now the party stumbles on the tomb, defeats the Grisgol and in the process unleashes something far worse.
The editing in this video is off the charts man, well done
Thanks! 😁
I want to make a sentient grisgol who is good but has to deal with the fact that he is part of something so evil. Maybe even make him a fun npc for the party who is trying to kill a lich, only to reveal later that in order to win they have to kill their favorite npc
Bonus points for making it seem like a big ol' coward, seemingly caring about only it's own survival, when in reality it knows it's death will "unleash the unspeakable Evil that is A-KU."
amazing idea but this is evil
My brain immediately: What if, as DD says, the scrolls light up when it casts a spell, the party then tries to remove those scrolls from its body.....with the right check they theoretically could and deny the construct of some of its spells...could potentially add another layer to the fight....
I think that I would most definitely allow a player to try if they were able to figure that out!
Damn that's great love it
that wouldn't make sense tho, it'd be using different scrolls for different spells
i love "monster of the week" style shows and im rly happy you take into account the "lore" aspect and not just stats bc it really allows ppl like me to enjoy these videos, when i just want to hear stories abt creepy creatures
My favourite poetic justice way to run the Grisgol curse is that by attempting to 'solve' it, the victim unknowingly begins to put it back together again.
I was imagining the maddening curse to make you potentially build the Grisgol again
Mate, I always wanted to be GM for D&D, create a story for people, but getting into that world felt very difficult to put up an afford of starting to study it. Really greatful for all of your videos, i am just starting to watch all of them, but they way you tell about the world, it's connections, with examples, all your hints, everything in your videos is something i didn't know i needed that much. The sheer passion you have for it makes this complex world and game amazing, and accessible. Can't express how much interest you created for me now, thank you!!!!!
My frist video i saw of your channel was The False Hydra, it was amazing!
That really means a lot, thanks so much for saying so! I really hope when you do get a chance to GM for some folks you have an awesome time!
Okay, this might be an obvious one, but what if the madness curse and the phylactery were connected? As in the curse is caused by the influence of the lich whose phylactery was used as the grisgol's heart, and the secret the afflicted character is forced to pursue ends up allowing the lich to manifest.
You know, Maddening Remains sounds like a great idea to make a gray philosopher.
I remember seeing this thing in the Monster Manual III so many years ago and thinking it was so cool. To this day the Grisgol remains one of my favorite D&D monsters. Thanks for covering it and porting it to 5e!
This is just perfect. I just ended a campaign where a major bad guy was an ancient lich and my players asked for an epilogue one-shot. They think they yeeted the philactery into the Elemental Plane of Fire, but maybe some genie or worse creature picked it up to give me a villain for said one-shot.
I love these things, they’re literally construct servants AND the perfect prisons for your immortal enemies.
If the party brings the grisgol chunks to a merchant, I would definitely consider cursing the merchant bc of the maddening remains, which could lead to a lot of different stories for them, whether it's a side quest for the party to save their favorite buyer from a curse they accidentally put the on them, a return trip to the dungeon to gather every single shred of parchment for the merchant that leads to an encounter with a servant of the lich looking for the phylactery, or the merchant's obsession with the remains causing a supply shortage in the town or city that forces the party to figure out how to keep the town from starving without new shipments of food
Man, I love how much this channel's production levels have evolved over the years! Long gone are the days when you'd spend the whole video staring at the ceiling!
Most definitely! Thanks!! You guys basically got a front row seat to me learning how to edit lol. And there’s still so much to learn!
Interesting. One idea that came to my mind is that a lich "disconnected" his phylactery. Maybe it's seperated soul grew sick of the atrocities it's corporial half was doing and animated the new body to weaken it's other side's magical power.
Or maybe the lich just botched the ritual and this golem is what he got after regeneration. The curse would then be an obsession to reconstruct the original body, an warlock pact offered may allow the patron to eventually possess the warlock's body.
This is going directly into my palimpsest infested, cursed library of forgotten knowledge demiplane. Love it.
I honestly have an interesting concept for this, in one of my campaigns I have a bbeg who was killed in the process of becoming a lich so their phylactery isn't entirely full with their own soul and it ended up having half become an undead monster and the bbeg currently believes their phylactery was destroyed, so a glitchy GrisGrol
A "glitchgol" if you will. Maybe it is under a permanent Blink spell, popping in and out of the material plane. How did it turn out?
@@Dragowolf_Rising Three of the five people had to drop out because of work and school of the campaign so I never got to use it but I will someday use a Glichgol against a party
@@alisethegray331 An all too common end for ttrpg campaigns. I hope you get to use it and it makes a great impression!
I think I might make it so that when the party hits the Grisgol you roll to see if it releases the choking dust or shatters a potion bottle, which might damage the weapon or something.
What if the madness curse causes the player who is obsessed with discovering some secret and aranging the items in a specific order causes the player to eventually (unknowingly) rebuild the monster and rid himself of the curse that way
I was thinking the same thing. It would be interesting if the character rebuilds it while they're alone, and the party comes back to their base to find the character dead or kidnapped and a trail leading to an escaped grisgol.
I love how many places this one can go. I think that, for my first attempt, I'd want to just test drive it as a wand golem. I'd add some kind of effect such that a random spell has a chance of targeting something random (including the grisgol itself) every time it gets hit...and maybe some magic distortion field surrounds it too. Fun times!
I found your channel two days ago and I love your editing style and 5e stat blocks
I have this idea that edits the Grisgol a little. Make it sentient and have the lich still be alive. The Grisgol, angry that is stuck in forever torment (until the lich claims it's phylactery), seeks it's former in order to destroy itself, not knowing it's life source is the very sword it carries.
Discovered this chanel a day ago.
Its gold, good job!
I happen to be Josiah and am also a Dungeon Dad! Well met! I enjoy your monster videos, bringing stuff up from 3.5 especially. Makes me want to go back and leaf through the monster manuals.
the little lich phrases are so ding dang delightful! i need more!!!!
This has quickly become my favorite D&D series. Was hooked and subscribed from the first video I watched (False Hydra) and the quality of the other videos stays top notch!
I just clicked on this one to listen as I drove to work, and lo and behold it's absolutely a perfect addition to my new campaign. So this makes like two dozen of your vids that I've added in now lmao
You are super underrated man, I love how you dig up these forgotten monsters and update them to 5E.
I started choking the moment you said "Choking dust".
I like the idea of the party being guided to fight the grisgol by an old wizard, only to realize the wizard was a lich who wanted to free its phylactery from the construct that was sapping its power.
Oh man! Great monster. It only lasted a round with my OP group but as soon as they started scrambling around in the scraps for spell scrolls they started falling one by one to the madness. half the group is obsessed, the other half trying to knock them out. Chaos! Thanks
I've recently started DMing for a group of friends and I found your videos as I started looking for DM tips and stuff and I just have to say that I love these monster of the week videos and have been saving them for when my party gets to those higher levels, but I have been planning where in my world some of these things have settled and I know exactly where to put this one as well. Thank you so much for all of these great ideas and the stat blocks to go with them, makes my life so much easier.
One of my favorite monsters ever! Glad to see it get its due here!
One of the best parts of these monster filled worlds is having monsters interact with each other, like imagine giving the players one of these and they run into a town full of paranoid people mumbling to their selves and it walks off into a house with some broken floorboards and it starts going ballistic and then you see it. A false hydra.
A cool monster to get an adaptation is the Hell Sting Scorpion from the Fourth Edition D&D Monster Manual.
It's now added to the list.
I enjoy making things relatable, and while I don't do DND the idea of one of these creatures that is terrified of adventurers because they try to take pieces of it's body, but is willing to travel with someone and eventually learns they're made with a lich soul is a fascinating concept if you reworked this into an NPC
That would be one of the best ways to become a warlock and being on a first name bases with you patron, being in the favour of a lich is the best health plan in all the realms.
I wanna have the party fight this, then a pseudo-lich like being rises from the phylactery to sell the magic items that made up this monster. "After all, you just saw how effective many of these items are for yourselves."
I love your graphs man. They give me a chuckle every time I read their contents
Okay, I love how easy this creature is to scale up or down depending on the spells it has. I totally want to use this as a recurring enemy in my magic school campaign.
One of the first things I thought of when you mentioned the Lich being freed after the party loots the Grisgol is that the Lich could simply offer to cure them of that Maddening Remains curse, or the Choking Dust poison in return for their phylactery and freedom, and then leave. If you want to be nice, that is. lol
Idea: Make the Maddening remains curse purpose in a way to make revive the destroyed Grigsol. I feel it will be interesting the concept of a mad party member slowly making a more powerful version of a old monster they fought. There is definitely a lot of room to imagine and be creative with this monster!
Holy, I finnaly found a youtube channel about DnD monster that's interesting and informative, probably will watch all Monster's of the week
Usually when I search about DnD monster the videos are more about the person telling a story with the monster instead of being informative
Thanks!
Welcome aboard! Glad you're into what I'm doing!
this gave me a great idea for a lich story. I plan on having the lich make a grisgol on purpose and send the thing out into the world to wonder forever. only ever stopping to let the lich come back. this would make the party turn their focus onto finding the grisgol and the phylactery so they can beat the lich.
How did I miss this amazing monster? This is ....my next campaign laid out on a platter of silver awesomeness. Thank you!
Yes!
One of the most interesting Monsters of D&D.
Also I like the new format in the video, its good.
I can imagine a Grisgol-like race of these monsters as playable homebrew monsters in a D&D campaign.
I’ve never played dnd but you make it sound easy and interesting. Good format as well, more subscribers deserved.
I only found your channel yesterday, and wow- I love your presentation style. Your oration and visual gags were perfect. And I’ve just become acquainted with the Lich of Adventure Time so this was a really nice surprise, especially when I didn’t expect this episode to go in that direction! Looking forward to watching more.
20:11 That totally looks like Fred.
I love that a couple pieces of art used were from Michael Clarke's library. He's a fantastic artist, and doesn't get nearly enough love.
It really does!
I enjoy any content which is related to liches and the arcane. Thank you for providing this information on a creature I was not aware of!
For the longest I've had the idea to play a warforged armorer artificer that somehow used to be a living humanoid, and I think adding grisgol flavor to that would be perfect.
A mortal tinkerer is involved in an accident that destroys their body and bonds their soul to an artifact, and they pull their new grisgol (warforged) body together from magic items around their lab. Every item they make is incorporated into their body to help them survive their mission to discover the secrets to reclaim their lost original body.
I like the idea of having an npc that the party frequently interacts with, getting this curse and slowly turning insane while sending the party on more and more dangerous quests for more and more seemingly mundane and useless things for the NPC's "research".
That is beautifull, I will be incorporating this in one of our next adventures.
This is the ultimate enemy for a DM that only realized too late that they have been too kind to their party with magic items. A magical rust monster.
i love the idea of a +1 weapon actually being the powerful artifact that just needs recharged
Love these videos, and love going “OOH! THATS FROM WoW!!” Everytime I see something from or relating to it
challange 13! perfect
thank you for ending my hours long search for a good pre-boss enemy for my party. i can finally sleep...
I think many like myself thought of the idea of re-flavouring the grisgol to be the protector of the phylactery which only becomes active when phylactery is in danger as anyone who know how a lich works, they always have many protection of this weak point. So, imagine your party has finally reached the ancient wizards mage tower (lich's former residence now dungeon to protect their phylactery) when they encounter the Grisgol. If they don't kill it in time maybe the Grisgol jumps out the window or cast dimension door or teleport escaping with the phylactery & returning it to their master's side
All i can imagine is a lich doing a scooby doo-esque chase just trying to get his soul home back like "Bro please i just want to know what its like to have a body like cmon guys its not funny"
Having watched a few of your videos, I am impressed with the production quality and effort. It feels like it's best I have come across in the DnD space. Informative and funny, Jakey-esque.
Ohh this is a perfect back story for my Battle Smith Artificer. His Steel Guardian could be a kind of Clockwork Grisgol Golem. Perhaps it's Phalactory is the heart of a Fallen family member, and the PC in an attempt to keep them "Alive" has used their heart to build them a new body. Interesting!
I had a four grisgol honor guard set up in a tomb. One of the items each of them possessed was a portable hole. None of my party succumbed to the curse sadly, but after they had braved the tomb and escaped with a scant number of hit points between them all and began to rifle through the loot... the following spell battle between four liches arguing amongst themselves and the party just scrambling to survive with priceless.
oh boy this would be great to stick in a magical shenanigans collection that you find in every dungeon.
I'ma use this as a high-level mimic equivilent
In a more light-heated campaign, after the party makes off with *all* the loot:
_Lich appears_
“Good afternoon gentlemen, could I trouble you for some souls? I really am quite famished.”
Edit:
I’d also like to say that liches tend to fall into the “evil, maniacal, reclusive undead wizard” category far too often. Where are all the friendly comedy liches with their skeletal band? (don’t question how they play the wind instruments)
A cool idea I had is the Phylactery is indeed a magical weapon, however it is not the Lich's original Phylactery. Perhaps long ago, a team of heroes managed to trap the Lich inside a new Phylactery that was much weaker and couldn't allow the Lich to re-manifest. Then, to ensure nobody could ever undo what they did, the wizard created a Grisgol using that weapon as its power source, which continually drained the Lich's power so that even over time it could never gain too much power, as well as the Grisgol itself protecting the weapon against anyone who may be looking to free the Lich. That way, when the party defeats the Grisgol for some completely unrelated purpose, and find a strong magical weapon amongst the remains, they will start using it. However they are completely unaware that every creature with a soul that they slay with that weapon is feeding the Lich trapped within, and eventually he can gain enough power to manifest.
As for the curse, I think thematically it could be interesting if that paranoia ultimately serves the purpose of them trying to reconstruct the Grisgol without even realizing it. Then when all the pieces are in place, they realize that the secret they were searching for requires a sacrifice, and are compelled to either give their own life or the life of something else. In reality, this sacrifice just serves to jump start the Phylactery and revive the Grisgol. But maybe this cursed person replaced the Grisgol's parts with more fresh ones. New spell scrolls to replace the old tatered ones, for example. So now it's spell list is different.
I'm finally all caught up. watched all the videos. Great work man cant wait for your next video.
I love how the curse the Gisgold releases is the same normal identity of most of my wizards.
"BUT THAT PAPER COULD HAVE MAGIC IN IT!"
I just imagined the party put all the loot in a bag of hold. Then when they go to grab something from the bag they pull out a litch by the head
He says " hay how's it going?" Then goes to attack. Then asked " wait is this (x kingdom)?"
" No that's been gone for hundreds of years"
" Oh I see" then leaves bc he's got no beef with the current kingdom. But comes back. Edits a spell page, possibly fixing or un-cursing it. Then becomes a background figure like the G-man
A specific idea I had with the phylactery heart is that the Griscol, instead of being made randomly, is made to contain the heart instead of just so happening to be the core. Perhaps a noteworthy kingdom is using it as a power source and has a limbless Griscol somewhere in the depths, or liches (either bad or homebrewed good) were purposefully contained in a far weaker form and stashed away, still consciousness and maybe even controlling the Griscol, but can’t escape and thus is left to rot mentally.
The Page Turner curse. I love it! I just found the theme of the campaign I'm writing. Love your vids! Thanks for making them!
You are so welcome!
I have an idea for the phylactery heart. I'm going to throw a Grisgol at my loot hungry players. When they defeat it, the phylactery heart will serve as a spell storing necklace. The item will allow the user to store spells from spell scrolls, as the scrolls fold origami style and enter the stone. After ten spells are stored, the phylactery will be charged and ready to be triggered. The moment the phylactery is near a decent amount of magical items, it will pull those items and reform the Grisgol with access to whatever spells the party stored, as well the magical items it used to form its body. These items very likely may come from the party, themselves. Now the party has to defeat the reformed Grisgol that they have buffed and destroy the phylactery in order to reclaim their items.
I'm going to be running a Tamriel game soon, and think I might use this as the "Naked Nord" scenario. The Lich appears as a younger healthier version of himself, kind of like a Cline spell, but without any physical objects (think the opening to Terminator). He doesn't want to confront the party directly, but approaches them claiming to have been robbed by a witch and asks them to help him retrieve his belongings by leading them to a super dangerous dungeon he hopes will get them killed, and he can just retrieve the phylactery off their remains.
MM3 is such a classic tome and it's full of really cool weirdos.
The party will be introduced to a man on horseback with a small, bundled up humanoid behind him. Behind them, on a small wagon, is a badly damaged golem with talismans and shiny baubles all over it, glowing faintly. He will say the bundled up figure has leprosy, and the golem was something he was sworn to protect by some made up Duke. The bundled up figure won't communicate, but the golem will wave at about the same time this bundled up form tries to twitch their arms, and look around when the bundle slowly cranes it's neck. Hopefully they won't investigate too much further, cause these are two powerful necromancers who were just short of lichdom. The Grisgol is the only thing keeping this diminutive lich from fully losing itself to undeath. A sort of life support system while they escape from their old base and establish a new one, away from their pursuers. Eventually, they will re-attempt the process and not screw it up as much this time.
Kinda like full metal alchemist huh?
I imagine the madness curse takes shape slowly to be a humanoid shape, thus reviving the Grisgol to walk again.
The lich made himself into a lich to get revenge and then the lord made him into one of these things. I'm thinking about some kind of crazy battle insues between the two as the lords hired wizard could be shoveing the bard livhes soul into this phalactery. Which is of course used to make one of these crazy cool creatures.
5 videos in and I should have subscribed 4 videos ago. Great stuff my dude!
This monster reminded me of a Hungarian fantasy anthology, where the overarching story is that a magic devouring demon has broken free in the basement of a mage's tower, killed the mage, and started going floor by floor, eating magical defences, and other stuff.
And in the attic, a bunch of sentient magic items, the members of the mage's magic item collection start talking to each other while the Jarvis type security system constantly informs them of the progress of the demon. The stories of the anthology consist of the personal stories the magic items tell each other about themselves. And the book ends by the items working together, animating and using each other like this grisgol, and killing the demon.
A grisgol is the ultimate insult you can visit upon a lich. As to make it you have to have destroyed the lich beforehand. Not only do you have the lich's soul in your possession but you use it to make a shoddy golem.
I was thinking along similar lines. What if a powerful lich defeated a hated enemy lich and instead of destroying it, he turned it into a clown/jester themed grisgol that the the lich forced to humiliate itself in mean spirited ways for the lich's twisted amusement. It could have a jester's hat made of tattered wizard's hoods. Its phylactery might be a jester's scepter with the power to suck in souls. It might hid it's real nature under a charm person clown mask. It might have a squirting flower gag that squirted Tasha's hideous laughter instead of water. Or the flower might be the phylactery and it sucks in souls. The powerful lich might be defeated in battle. The heroes are then dispatched to the lich's lair to find and destroy it's phylactery at all costs before the lich comes back. In the lich's throne room they find a pitiful obviously insane clown in a cage with a sad sob story of how it was forced to amuse the sadistic lich or have it's soul sucked. It offers to tell were the traps and the phylactery is and to show how to destroy it. Unfortunately it destroys the lich's phylactery by using it's own phylactery to suck in its contents. It then leaves the heroes while laughing insanely. You now have a supervillain with the personality of Batman's Joker, the magic powers of a lich and the resistances of a golem.
the first idea I had for a Grisgol was as a self-defending phylactery in a secure demi-plane; emergency wards that are either automatically or manually activated by the Lich's death order the Grisgol to deactivate (if that's possible for a construct) until the Lich reforms, upon which it could be re-assembled and await further orders. However, I also like the idea of the phylactery belonging to a more friendly/helpful Lich who was sealed away by another as a prank, stuck from reviving because of a Grisgol with the most annoying spell combination you can think of. They could even let the party settle down at the Lich's lair for a while as a reward, maybe be introduced to them as a new vendor NPC, willing to part ways with special treasures in exchange for odd-jobs and quests.
almost spat my water when I found out what the heart is, geez that's a VERY awesome monster indeed
The king's advisor of the arcane has gone silent: the party is sent to find out what happened and discovers the Grisgol.
I think it would be kinda cool to make a Grisgol made of mostly magic monster parts or raw resources that the players fight near a huge smelter and once the players defeat it it throws itself into the smelter and it’s melted remains just pour out into an available weapon cast and boom, party has a new magic item with a cool story
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm gonna steal all these ideas from you, so many good concepts for a campaign plot!!!
This is amazing I was think that in my party discussions I could bring up a artificer that builds one of these and maybe our warlock could place his soul in it.