d12 Enveloped in your Prismatic Embrace

When the living prismatic misfired spell or swarm of rainbow bats or spectrum ghost gives you a rainbow hug, roll an explosive d12 (GM decides any particulars about damage amount and save difficulties):

1: Fiery red damage.
2: Acidic orange damage.
3: Electro-yellow damage.
4: Poisonous green assault; save vs death-poison.
5: Stony blue assault; save vs turning to stone.
6: Indigo Insanity assault; save vs mania.
7: Violet Dimension assault; save vs dimensional displacement.
8: Ultraviolet Violence assault; everyone has to save each round for d6 rounds to resist the temptation to mindlessly attack you.
9: Sonic Chartreuse damage.
10: Radioactive Infrared damage (permanent damage, only heal-able after a Cure Disease is cast on you).
11: Unleveling Ulfire assault; save vs losing levels.
12: Roll again twice (these both are explosive rolls too).  

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C.I.F.A.L. >>Pimp My Monster

Ran a couple of new players through some Gates of Gann. There is a Fiend Folio CIFAL in one of the rooms. No idea why. But as the fight went on, I realized these things are held together by "nuclear energy," and started to describe glowing core bits where bugs had been knocked off by melee blows. The players got really excited and started using video game logic to attack the glowing spots. I adjusted for this cool strategy a bit on the fly, but I realized I could have made this monster cooler and weirder.

So what can we do to spice up a CIFAL? The more good hits you make to it, the more radiation starts to leak out. Make a save vs CON damage each round with a penalty equal to the glowing wounds. 

One of my players was arrowing that spot. I think whenever an arrow hits, it should glow and then explode for some extra damage or radiation. Crits to glowing areas should also be bittersweet experience.

Finally, when the CIFAL dies, have it explode. Everybody save vs cancer and save vs blindness! A nuclear Scooby-doo ghost runs away, looking for new bugs to collect (it'll take a few weeks).
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d12 Crazy Monster Abilities & Twists

This is a non-exhastive list. Your task, dear reader, is to roll on the table and make a monster today! Note that you decide the specifics. For instance, a Midas could transform things into whatever. You'll see.

1. Bloodied: something special happens when the monster is down to half HP. Thanks, 4e Obama.
2. Death boon: slaying it blesses the slayer.
3. Death curse: it's bad luck to kill an angel.
4. Shut up: Verbose about the fight. Maybe polite!
5. I'll be back: Gaseous or vermin form escape.
6. Invincible.
7. Somebody help me: Needs to posses a PC's body to interact with reality.
8. Sympathy for the devil: Hurting it hurts you.
9. Magic hole: any weapon that strikes it turns to spaghetti. Any wand pointed at it turns to fetta.
10. Avengance shall be mine: PCs are marked for revenge if they harm the monster; something strong will stalk them.
11. Turtle: Transforms to regenerate for a few rounds, and may have a strong antipathy field or putties show up to protect it.
12. Midas: If something touches it, 1 cubic ell of that thing turns to gold. Sucky lead midases escape alchemical explosions sometimes.

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d12 Gaze Attacks that aren't Stoning

While perusing this monster list, I came across an entry that dungeon-snapped me:

Floating Horror(C): AC 4 Move 6 HD 6+1 Bobbing loathsome squid beast with two great quartz eyes. Shrink-ray gaze attack (save vs stoning) range 60', their tentacle attacks also turn targets to solid glass (save vs stoning).

Gaze attacks: we rarely see them for anything but making people into stone. So here are 12 more ideas to make your PCs regret not carrying mirrors on sticks into the duneon.

1. Stink-rays make you have intense constipation. The smell of poo starts to exude through your pores. Will save to shit. Failure 3 days in a row spells death via internal rupture. Risky click. Fumble means an embolism from straining too hard.
2. Rat-ogle turns you into 3 rats. They have animal intelligence, and must all be together in a sack before magic has any hope of restoring you. Their instinct is to run away.
3. Glamour-glare makes you charmed by the monster so long as you can see it. What's more, the power rubs off on you and mutates. Should you survive the monster, you will have the same power for a few weeks. This is great at first, but it doesn't take long before the charm gives way to stalking, obsession, and cannibalism by your admirers.
4. Chilling-look turns you into a snowman or ice-sculpture. If you melt, you'll be beyond all but the strongest magics to restore. Any party henchmen will openly wonder if drinking you will give an imbiber your powers.
5. Dopple-dazzler switches the monster's consciousness with yours. This is a good one to give to mute or animal monsters, but cunning monsters work too; there is little evidence that the transfer has taken place, beyond the DM mysteriously asking for a save and frowning.
6. Rapturous-stare. Those who look upon this monster and hear the bell it holds at the same time are raptured-- they get translated to the heaven or hell they deserve.
7. Withering, phytophotodermatitistic-glare. This gaze is actually a chemical cloud (maybe, or maybe it's a gaze if you want). It makes your skin and eyes sensitive to UV light. Plenty of that in sunlight. Enough to kill you maybe. Like being a vampire without the fun.
8. Reverse-poop-peep. Your digestive system is completely flipped upside down. The rest of you remains the same. Clever players may realize that gazing again while doing a handstand can reverse the effects.
9. Mother-blink. The DM casually asks you what your PC's mother is like. Was she an adventurer? Was she smart? Strong? Anyways, you just turned into your mother.
10. Impregnating-stare. You are filled with eggs of the monster. They will eat their way out. If the monster was a fungal fiend (cordycepts-clops), you turn into a zombie and climb a tree before going catatonic.
11. Binding-reflection. You turn into a large mirror. In the mirror, your reflection can be seen, mutely banging on the glass, asking to be let out. Breaking the mirror breaks your soul or otherwise dooms you. On the other hand, shards of that mirror are pretty helpful in a dungeon with monsters that have glare attacks...
12. Inverse-polarity-vision. The DM instructs you to write down 3 adjectives that describe your PC. All of these traits are reversed. Strong becomes weak. Cowardly becomes brave. Republican becomes Democrat.

d60 Ways the Wizard Has Found to Cheat Death

This post is just me copy-pasta-ing people's ideas from g+ way back in September, 2015. I added numbers, fixed what I assumed were typos, and removed hard to game stuff where necessary. Obviously very little credit goes to me.

Claytonian JP

1: Must be beheaded.

2: Vulnerable only to water.

3: Heart must be fed to an adder.

Benjamin Baugh+4

4: Has hidden her soul in the heart of a child - the next King.  That soul will pass to the heir of the crown in time, and so it goes.  The wizard will defend the King's line, and in turn the King will not raise a force to kill her. So long as the soul lives, she lives. She is dark heart of the land, a splinter that can not be pulled. 

Gus L+3

5: Soul placed into large, burly body made of gold plated animate bronze and covered in spell reflecting runes.

 

6: Aquatic, goes to battle inside enslaved water elemental of largest size.

7: Also a dracula.

Benjamin Baugh+4

8: She possesses many bodies, all grown from skin and hair and blood of her own now crone-like original form.  Her conscience moves freely among these bodies, which possess their own intelligence, but no spark of life or creativity or magic.   As long as one lives, she will persist, and she lives by the sea, near a port that regularly hosts foreign ships. 

Benjamin Baugh+4

9: She is married to the Dragon of the Sea, and partakes of the Dragon's formlessness and eternity.  You can not kill the sea.  You can not cut it.  You can not force it to remain still.  She is restless, changing, temperamental, but so long as her marriage remains, she does as well. 

Scott Martin+3

10: The mirror image has all the hit points, the body you target is the illusion.

Benjamin Baugh+2

12: She is preserved in the last moment of her life, which is extended into infinity by juice of the Colorless Lotus, and projects illusions of startling reality into the world when she must act. 

Wayne Rossi+2

13: Is actually a colony creature and keeps backup parts of self in jars throughout the world.

Benjamin Baugh+1

14: She sacrificed her body for greater understanding of strange realms, dream, and the land beyond the threshold of sanity, where the Hungry Hunters and the Laughing Boys dwell.

    Her consciousness and her soul live in her Name now, inhabiting it like they once did her body, her Name a living thing in the abstract realms she explores.
     When you speak her name, she sees what you see, hears what you hear.  When you say it while looking in the mirror, she comes to possess you for a time, until you next sleep.
     To kill her, you must eradicate her Name from all common knowledge. 

Claytonian JP+2

15: Mathmagican that twists Zeno's paradox to stalemate heroes that would draw near or shoot arrows.

Claytonian JP+6

16: Made of paper-mache. Real wizard is sipping cappuccinos in Paris.

Christopher Weeks+3

17: He exists now as a legend. The only way to destroy him is to destroy everyone who knows of the legends. But you too must know the legends or you wouldn't be after him...

Nobilis Reed+1

18: Soul bound to the the body of an owl. Hijacks familiar-calling rituals before they are complete, kills the nascent familiar and takes its place. Gradually takes over the mind of the young wizard, uses him or her until no longer useful, finds another.

Benjamin Baugh+2

19: She was consecrated as a Sacrifice to the Old Goat, the Midnight Man still worshiped in secret out in the pagan countryside.  So long as she maintains her ritual purification, none but the sacrificial blade of the Goat's priest can slay her, for the Goat is a jealous god, unwilling to give up what it was promised.
     This is complicated by her murder of the Goat's whole priesthood, and purge of its worshipers.  There is no living hand which can wield the knife now.
     So she lives, so long as she maintains her purity.

Claytonian JP

20: You must find their secret name, write it on rice-paper, pin the paper to an effigy, and burn it.

Wayne Rossi

21: Has a deal with a demon so that he can instantaneously switch places with it.

Benjamin Baugh+2

22: An accident during her apprenticeship turned her into a small white mouse, a condition her master refused (or was unable) to reverse.
     She rallied, and overcame her disadvantages, and is as capable a wizard as any human practitioner now.  Due to a peculiarity of the magic, she maintained her human intelligence and wisdom, and as well as resilience and constitution.   So she is a very strong and very tough mouse indeed.
     She has built for herself (and commissioned from cunning gnomes) a arcanomechanical psuedomoculus resembling her own youthful human form.  Within the armored head, she sits a her ease - the space within the hollow cranium, a comfortable sitting room for a mouse wizard.  her apartments in the psuedomoculus's chest are luxurious, and well-appointed with mouse-sized magical apparatus.
     Killing her involves cracking this walking fortress, catching her, and then doing enough harm to her mouse-sized form to kill a seasoned adventuring wizard.  

Christopher Weeks+1

23: She can only be harmed by the creations of her daughters. It has been foretold!

Paul C+1

24: Wizard's beard is actually an alien parasite that regenerates and controls the body to do its terrible, unfathomable objectives (treat as Geas).  

Benjamin Baugh

25: She dissolved herself in a solution of hemlock and acid and plague puss.  She is a Miasma now, a disease which lives within a victim.  She possess those infected, and though the fever of her magic kills them eventually, she has plenty of opportunity to spread.  Some do not become possessed by her, and instead host her miasma without succumbing to it.  She is unconscious within such hosts, but they are still contagious. 

Claytonian JP+1

Why are you milking my puss, lady?
I'm gonna be immortal!

Chris F+2

26: The wizard/witch only exists in the past, in a time stopped moment. The being you're fighting is just a mystical projection.
     Not only do you need to find a way to travel back in time to kill them, you need to know the exact moment that their living self is suspended in and figure out how to get near them without getting caught in the time stop.

Christopher Weeks+1

27: The wizard has infused the polar ice cap with their very essence and will always find a way to come back so long as the ice cap remains safe. (See: Witch Of The North and Al Gore.)

Paul C+1

28: This wizard has betrayed and escaped the ancient Worm Kings, stealing the secret of their great power of regeneration. To truly kill this traitor, you must bury the wizard alive and let the worms reclaim him/her.

Frank Mitchell+1

29: The Sorcerer-King's true body, bloated to four times its original size, floats in a tank of greenish-yellow fluid in a tower without door or stairs somewhere in a trackless desert.  The ministers and generals of his growing empire receive orders telepathically.  Occasionally he'll conjure a simulacrum and take more direct action, although after about thirteen days each simulacrum dissolves into greenish goo.

Benjamin Baugh+2

30: She stole the Gorgon's eyes, and placed them in her own empty sockets.  She wears a mask that is lined within with a warped inverting mirror with vectors defined by sacred geometry and the magic of transmogrification.  The stoning gaze is reflected back upon the organs which created the effect, creating a loop, an anchor.  While she wears the mask, she is blind and weeps gritty tears eternally as the stoned then renewed orbs inflame her sockets, but while the mask remains in place, she is immortal and invulnerable.
     Removing the mask is a deadly proposition, however, as it frees her stolen gorgon gaze.   

Joseph Teller

31: Has a hidden painting ala Dorian Gray.

Jensen Toperzer+5

32: She exists across multiple universes and timelines. By breaking time, she shares knowledge and memories (though not spells, levels, skills, etc). You might kill her 18th level self, but in a parallel universe her 1st level counterpart knows what you did. Someday, she will no longer be 1st level...
By this method she will also travel to other universes to ensure some version of herself is born and follows the same path to awakening to her manifold mirrored self.
     However, there are not infinite versions of her, and though they share memories they do not all agree with each other. Also, once one awakens, only one of her can exist in a universe at a time.

Benjamin Baugh+1

33: Her head was severed by the Surgeons of Rith called the Thousand-Handed Healers and grafted to the Golden Scarab, a crablike armature of beautiful and horrifying craftsmanship.
     The Golden Scarab maintains her life, and allows her head to move and leap and climb faster than a dart spider.  The Scarab can also neatly sever the head from a victim, and insinuate its finer feelers and leg-parts into the neck stump, giving the wizard control over the body until it starves to death.
     While riding a body, the Scarab curls up around her head like an ornate collar.
     She will only die when her head is surgically removed from the Scarab, a process that demands at least the tools, if not the expertise, of the Thousand-Handed Healers. 

Bobby Martin+1

34: Just going by the book, my archmage spent all his time magic jarred into a clone of a near perfect human specimen. If the body's killed, his soul goes into a ring on his companion and can attempt to possess those nearby. Only by destroying the ring and killing his body can you kill him.
     Except he also has several clones of himself growing in secluded locations. When each clone is half grown, he kills it and starts a new one. If he's not around to kill it, it matures and becomes the new him.

A. Miles Davis+4

35: [wizard name] is actually part of a pyramid scheme. Thousands are recruited and provided a ritual that gives them access to the original wizard's knowledge and form. The first one died millennia ago.

Christopher Weeks+3

36: The sorceress has learned to control quantum forces, moving her frame of reference from one universe to the adjacent one with casual ease. As such, when you fire an arrow, swing a sword or attempt to poison her lamb, she simply shifts her frame to a universe in which you miss or fail. For the universe to continue working, it forces you along in her wake and so it is perceived as if she were merely the luckiest person in history.

 

Benjamin Baugh+3

37: She has stolen the deepest mystery of the Trickster's cult - she is master of the Lie You Must Believe. When any come to kill her, she tells them that their weapons are useless, that they are powerless against her, and that only the chosen one can end her reign, and so compelled, they leave dejected. She has lied to Death itself, the last time the Ferryman came for her.  She has lied to the Goddess of youth, to gain herself a renewed body. She must be careful never to directly contradict her own lies, for that will break the spell entirely. And she must fend off the flirtatious advances of the Trickster God, because it turns out he's kind of a creeper. 

Claytonian JP+2

38: Promised soul to several competing hellish factions. Keeps getting rejected to avoid an all out Blood War. Hell wants to keep the cold war going.

Frank Mitchell+1

39: Anyone who thinks they've killed the Arch Wizard Ruin will find they've merely killed a Ruin-golem.

Chris McDowall

40: Robot

Chris P.+2

41: Has a hierarchy of henchmen that impersonate the wizard ala Ra'as al Ghul from Batman Begins.

Mark Hunt+1

42: When Wizard dies, takes over nearest PC and continues the fight.

Wayne Rossi+5

43: When the archmage dies, his soul returns to his spellbook. When another wizard reads the spellbook, his soul is sent to Hell and replaced by that of the archmage.

Chris P.+2

44: Has the local clergy on his payroll. They will seek out his remains and resurrect him. Gives new meaning to the term "life insurance"..

Chris S+2

45: She has just spread a LOT of rumors to her longevity and not being able to be killed. lots of these rumors have to do with things like killing a succubus while in the throws of passion with her, or crafting a weapon from the spine of a dragon while living for a month inside of it. It's all total bullshit, but she has really good PR agents spreading these lies.

Benjamin Baugh+1

46: Her name is actually a title, her magic and regalia worn by different people through the ages.  There is always another Wizard, trained, waiting to assume the role, to take on the power and the panoply.  Occult probate law sees to the timely transfer of the mantle. 

Frank Mitchell+3

47: Narrative causality keeps the Wizard from lasting harm.  He is a central character in a highly successful series of novels, now being ghostwritten by three younger authors.  The publisher simply will not let the Wizard die.

Chris P.+3

48: The villain has made Death fall in love with him. For him to truly die, Death must be convinced to let the villain's life pass away.

Devin Parker+2

49: May only be slain by someone born with the wizard's birth name. Upon the wizard's earthly death, the slayer inherits the wizard's supernatural debts (deals with devils, etc.).

Craig Vial

50:To slay the wizard, you must slay yourself

Chris P.+2

51: To destroy the lich, you must destroy her phylactery. Unfortunately, it holds an evil far worse than the lich herself, perhaps the Tarrasque, Tharizidun, or even.. shivers... the old dancing guy that used to be in those 6 Flags ads.

Kevyn Winkless

52: The wizard is sealed and preserved within a block of eldritch crystal, and although appearing solid in fact acts in the world only through manifestation via a kind of Astral Projection - the wizard is thus able to "blink" from locale to locale at will, and is untouched by most physical attacks. Certain kinds of arcane attacks can force the manifestation to dissolve, and the wizard will be so shaken that manifestation is impossible for hours or days afterwards. The crystal is hidden somewhere unknown, and the wizard can only be killed by breaking it open and defeating the physical body.

Kevyn Winkless

53: Wizard has wrested control of a plane of Hell or the Abyss from the Demon Prince/Duke of Hell that ordinarily rules there (perhaps by becoming a trusted advisor and manipulating the creature from behind the throne?). Evil forces associated with that plane act in accordance to the wizards wishes - not only following direct instructions but instinctively acting to further the wizard's goals. Cultists and other devotees are instinctively hostile to those who have earned the wizard's enmity, and while the wizard may be defeatable on the Material Plane despite the advantages of being an extra-planar being, the result is simply for the wizard's spirit to be banished back to the home plane where a new body will form in time. (And during which period, worshipers will be particularly hostile to those who caused the wizard harm...)

Duncan Eshelman+1

54: Mind jars into a sentient fungi, which happens to be a faerie ring 20km in diameter.

Jaye Foster+5

55: The wizard doesn't actually exist. The superstitious locals simply blame everything on the wizard they believe lives in a long abandoned tower.

Klaus Teufel

56: She's a colony of snakes. (Thanks, Doctor Who!)

Jeff Rients+3

57: Mortal soul replaced with Multitronic-6 computer housed in hyperspace.

 

Claytonian JP

58-60: Roll again until you don't get this result and put a twist on what the entry is. I didn't write this one in 2015, BTW. I'm magic!
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