Rotgrind Bestiary: Arcane Blot (Patreon)

Another ghoulish creature approaches!

Hey all, ZoranTheBear here! I wanted to take a crack at another monster, and I'm excited to share this one with all of you! Here is also some behind the scenes thoughts when designing this creature.

Magic manipulation has been done a lot in fantasy worlds. Either they corrupt a being to be a horrific monster or affect an individual's state of mind. I wanted to take some of those elements and make a monster that isn't the body but the effect on the creature, namely the crystal growths on the creature's body.

I find it truly terrifying to have a parasite taking over something and controlling it, all while the host is trapped, unable to stop what the body is doing. This concept was the mentality I kept when making the Arcane Blot, a magical parasite that seeps itself into the body to hunt down sources of magic to sustain itself. The host's consciousness and soul are trapped in the crystals on its back, watching and feeling every writhing pain and terrible consequence it commits.

This lore also leads to experimenting with a mechanic I don't typically see in TTRPGs. And that's disabling the ability to do a core action. One thing you never want to do is to disable altogether a player's ability to act or play.

In TTRPGs, a player must be able to do something on their turn because the time it takes to get to a player's turn varies, and the state of play is taken away when the game itself disables their ability to participate. The magic draining ability the creature has was adjusted not to disable the ability to cast magic, but to disable the highest spell slot if the circumstances to do the drain effect were met. The idea is that it's a trap built into a creature for unknowing magic casters to stumble into the Arcane Blot's claws.

I felt comfortable disabling the highest spell slots of a caster with the Arcane Blot's ability, mainly due to how good cantrips are in Pathfinder Second Edition. Like with any trap, it punishes but can be recovered over time.

Another aspect of the creature that was interesting to handle was the magical resistance. Usually, there are set elements and aspects built in the game for you to pull from, but I found there was nothing that specifically meant "general magic." Magic usually has an origin like force, fire, electricity, acid, etc. So finding something that was more general was difficult. So we added the GM advice section detailing the intent of the resistance, to be resistant to overall sources of "magic." Whatever that constitutes in your world and ours!

I hope you enjoyed this thought process and PDF!

May your days always be a critical success!

- ZoranTheBear

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