Simple Multi-Phase Boss Fights in Mythic Bastionland
Forgive me.
Mythic Bastionland doesn’t have generic monsters. There are Warbands, which I steal from constantly, and there are beasts and NPCs attached to each Myth.
What there isn’t is a library of reskinnable stat blocks, or a conversion guide for the classic D&D monsters…
So if you want something that isn’t tied to a Myth and isn’t just another flavor of humanoid you’re on your own.
Somebody should really sit down and do a proper B/X conversion.
Not me though.
We’re going to be talking about something else today.
(A lot of people like Just Use Bears, and sure, going back to the old D&D monsters for inspiration is always good.) But this isn’t what I’m going on about today.
What I am going to do is solve one specific problem: what to do when you want a single monster to stand against four or five knights and their retainers and actually be frightening about it.
And yes, OSR purists, cover your ears. I do mean a boss fight.
The objection, which is correct
The saint of Goblin Punch, that holy being of light, His Radiance Arnold K has written about why boss fights don’t fit OSR games. The argument is that the OSR is about player freedom, and a boss fight is not that. You march the party through a sequence of encounters toward a scripted climax, and the whole thing becomes a Railroad linear narrative.
Mandatory fights are Boring.
The other problem is that bosses often devolve into long, HP-bloated slogfests. The outcome is determined at round 1 or 2 and the rest of it is just chipping away at HP.
Also boring.
But at the same time, tense climatic battles can be awesome. Nobody railroaded anybody if the players heard about the thing in the hills, decided the thing in the hills needed killing, hired help, and rode out. And if they return laden with loot and missing some limbs? All the better.
That is why Arnold K also in his Wisdom gave us a bunch of dynamic boss fights, because he knows that fighting big dangerous monsters is FUN.
It is fine to want a desperate pitched battle against an incredible foe.
But there is another problem, which is that the knights always win
MB combat is fast and lethal. It’s also very easy on the GM if you let the players handle it.
But the knights are CLEARLY assumed to win. They have Smite. They have Deny. They’re rolling big fat d12s. They are monsters in their own right.
So you point at a thing and your players get to curb-stomp it, and everyone has a great time, and the encounter is over. That’s cool and everything, but it is also the same as DnD 5e.
Yeah, I said it.
Just as in DND, combat is so nonlethal as written that it relies on the GM and the players to set the stakes.
There are ways around this that have nothing to do with monsters. In my last MB game, an Arthurian one, the Glass Knight fought a duel to the death against a Spider Mercenary.
They clashed at dawn outside the walls of a holding that was under siege by the vile mercenary warband. She fought for her lover, the beautiful and brave Lady Isobella of the Tree of Light, wielding that Lady’s own sword. They fought inside a ring of mercenaries beating their shields and their spears and howling. She beat him in two rounds.
Stabbed him through the stomach, then through the heart.
It was awesome. And when it was over the mercenaries turned on the knights who had been standing there watching it, and we went straight from the duel into a pitched battle, twenty mercenaries against four or five knights and a sorceress.
At the end of it the fields of Vercia were littered with the slain and the dying, because it was 20+ individual combatants and the knights chewed through all of them.
That was dynamic and fun. None of it required a special monster. The stakes did all the work.
The problem is that sometimes you don’t want twenty fucking combatants on the board. Sometimes you want one or two, you want to track one or two stat blocks instead of twenty, and you still want the thing to be a genuine threat. Something that can’t be deleted before it actually threatens a PC.
Two pools
More hit points is the wrong answer. That’s a sack of meat and everybody hates it.
Instead, give the monster Guard and Vigor appropriate to what it is. Then do it again, as a second creature.
So YES, I’m talking about a multi phase boss fight, fuck you if you thought this was RPGs, we are Soulsborne today lads.
TWO different stat blocks. TWO Guard and Body pools.
Saint Arnold got here first, as in all things. Change the Rules and Change the Combatants are numbers 12 and 13 on that list of his. But what follows is a specific way of doing it for Oddlike and MB creatures, where Guard and Vigor hand you the two pools basically for free, and that’s still useful.
The trigger is depletion of the first pool. When the first stat block is Mortally Wounded, it takes one round to become the second stat block.
YES, SHUT UP, I KNOW THIS IS THE SIMILAR TO 4e’s Bloodied condition.
But it’s different though.
The transformation round
The transformation consumes an entire round. Obviously you’re going to want to describe how horrifying it is and maybe give them a badass, yet cryptic, one liner.
During that round each knight chooses one of:
Recover Guard, up to half their total. If they haven’t been hurt, they should do something else.
Regain one spent Feat. Roll a save using whichever Virtue. Want Smite back? Roll VIG. Want Deny? Roll Spirit.
One other meaningful action. Stabilize a Mortally Wounded ally, reposition, retrieve a dropped weapon, whatever they invent.
Attacking the transforming monster accomplishes basically nothing, but they’re welcome to try.
Jimothus
I’ve written about Jimothus before. In the event, my party rolled a 10 on the reaction roll and spent the night dancing with him instead, then brought him home to Aethonia and made him rich. So this fight never happened. But it was loaded and ready.
Jimothus the Dancing (Small)
A1, 6GD, VIG 15, CLA 15, SPI 5
Claw (d10), Leaping Tackle
Salt of Denial: Jimithus negates the first hit against him each round.
Charm: 1d6 creatures must pass a CLA save or treat Jimithus as a friend.
If Small Jimothus is Mortally Wounded, within 1 round he becomes Large Jimithus.
Jimothus the Dancing (Large)
A3 (thick hide), 14GD, VIG 19, CLA 17, SPI 15. Fights as a Warband.
Ripping claws (3d10)
Horrifying Swallow (slow): a creature must pass a VIG save or be swallowed, taking 2d12 damage and becoming Impaired.
Small Jimothus is an evasion problem. He negates a hit every round, he turns your friends against you, and 6GD means the party’s whole plan is landing attacks.
You solve him with volume and positioning.
Large Jimothus doesn’t care about any of that. He fights as a Warband, which means your ordinary attacks are nearly worthless, and 3d10 will murder you. Everything the party figured out in round one is now wrong.
That’s the point. Round three should feel nothing like round one.
The Warrior of the Grove
In the Teitanblood Islands the party went into the ruined monument of Grey-Eyed Athys. They had to fight their way in through snake people, who are the cursed remnants of an old warband that got sent there and never came home, but that’s neither here nor there.
Deep inside, an olive tree has grown up through the temple. Something was set to guard it. The Warrior of the Grove was very old by the time the party found him, folded down into the roots and grown over, in the manner of Heide Knights. He unfolded himself and offered battle.
When they mortally wounded him he came apart into the Warrior of the Swarm, a mass of serpents that bit and grappled.
Warrior of the Grove
A3, 8GD, VIG 13, CLA 10, SPI 13
Spear (2d8 hefty), shield (d4)
Can Smite, Deny, and Focus
Warrior of the Swarm
8GD, VIG 13, CLA 10, SPI 13
Bite (1d8 blast), Grapple (d4 blast)
Anyone taking damage from the grapple cannot move on their next turn, barring some gambit.
Cannot be harmed except by Blast
Different problem entirely.
The principle
Just change the rules.
Just have decisions that aren’t “Smite the mf down.”
A fight that changes its rules halfway through beats a fight that just has more meat in it.
TBH you could probably have a fight that takes 3-4 phases once the knights start getting armor, Brutal weapons, and racking up their Guard through wound accumulation.
Additionally, I ran a couple other boss fights like this in Worlds Without Number. One resulted in tears, bargaining, and a near-TPK that was saved by a critical hit. The other resulted in a PC’s leg getting melted off.
Maybe I’ll write about that another time. For now, please forgive me for my sins, and enjoy unleashing multiple stat blocks on your unsuspecting players.