The creators of Baldur's Gate 3 have said it's going to have one of these in the Underdark, and it can attack players at random, even when they're already in a fight.

When fighting a Land Shark in the close confines of a town, or a dungeon, don't forget that this creature is a living siege weapon, it will bring down walls (rock fall damage and chance of getting immobilised), it's burrowing will create difficult terrain and short pit traps, it is capable of spinning around and slapping sprays of smaller rocks and dirt at it's prey with that heavy, armored tail. The Bulette can kick with both back legs like a mule, it can flatten it's legs against it's body and twist that armored body around to bludgeon and increase it's armor class in the process. They are not hindered by water, so they can attack in the same way a crocodile might, plus their prodigious leaping ability can be used to launch themselves from a high vantage point, down onto their prey. For the extra leg attacks, I suggest you allow the Bulette to attack adjacent foes on the foes turn, with each leg only able to attack once per round, you could impose a movement penalty on the Bulette of 10ft for each leg that attacks that round, or perhaps use a recharge mechanic, or have it that the Bulette only attacks with all it's limbs when it is at more or less than half it's full hit points.

Aw, it's like a baby Tarrasque. How terrifying.

My party (level 4) fought one of these today. It was horrible, the druid and rouge were just straight up killed and everybody else nearly died. We decided to run

Some players think they can outsmart me, maybe, maybe. I have yet to meet player who can outsmart boolet.

Dm here, the wizard decided to try and tame one after it intervened in a really deadly encounter, (one of my anti-tpk contingencies). It had 3 hp left and he healed it a little bit with some potions. It wasn’t aggressive because he healed it, and then they spent hours trying to tame it, so I let them go ahead with it. Bob the bullete came along for multiple combat sessions, and it was a nightmare trying to scale encounters with it. Then the wizard forgot about him and left him out in the woods for two weeks. This last session they discovered his discarded saddle underground, unaware that he has eaten the entire halfling village about two days south. He’ll probably make another appearance later on, possibly being a villain’s mount.

A protection from hunger and thirst will work on them and a charm monster spell.....what an awesome mount it would make!

I'd like to clarify the out-of-universe origin of the bulette. Gygax bought a bag of plastic dinosaur figurines to use as models in some Proto-D&D game he was playing with coworkers, and the figurines in question were actually so cruddily made that they looked nothing like actual dinosaurs. thus the bulette, rust monster, and owlbear were invented on the spot.

When a bear a shark Gator and armadillo get drunk .

I am envisioning a party encountering a pack of bulette hunting centaurs.

I’ma call it the cremé bulette. Variant species. Politely ravenous. 😆

one of my players threw some magic beans and the effect was 15 random creatures would spawn. I decided to let the roll a d100 and told them if you roll really high something awesome spawns if you roll low something horrible spawns. they were already in combat with earth cultist who used Bulettes as well. well they rolled a 1 out of a d100 and 15 bulettes burst from the ground. they did the smart thing an ran.

These are quite scary. Land shark is a fitting name.

Until this moment, I called it the .

This must be the creature that you encounter in the Rotting Bog in the Marsh of Chrlymber in Balders Gate: Dark Alliance

I just stick to "Landshark" because Landshark Lager is one of my main staples for D&D sessions. X3

As always great work Master Pickett! Best of 2017 to you!

Are creatures like this found mostly in the prime material realm, or would you find them in, say, the fey wilds, or the earth elemental plane?

THANK YOU!!!!! Running an encounter this weekend featuring this beast - you just made it come to life. Rock on!

I know you probably don’t see these anymore but it Kinda does look like a Dino but over time it was changed the original looked like an Ankylosaurus

I imagine that dwarves use domestic breeds of these guys to pull their wagons and the like.

I want to see a video of a rhino jumping like that, that just sounds so cool.

Heh. I had a character that liked to cook and eat monsters, Bulette was his favorite meal, he actually started a Bulette ranch eventually, to sell the delicious meat.

Oh my I have an idea now to basically run the plot of the movie tremors except with bullettes.

They are more like a Bear then a Wolf. Fast over short distances but not in it for the long haul. Bears can run fast over short distances but a Wolf can maintain speed for long distances up to several miles.

I was looking at AD&D MM, & the opening image is on the first page in the book. I just broke out laughing.

My DM just got the new beast heart book so I've been researching each of the 15 companions and your videos have been a great help now I want a halfling beastheart with a bullete companion that occasionally tries to eat him that or a warlock tiefling who's asked for power and their patron just gave them a poorly trained hell hound.

Secular Beef! Bulette are so aggressive. I didn't know. Good thing no one is playing a halfling in my game. Even if you got one as a mount I imagine unfortunate misunderstandings. Maybe the magic in elves turns their stomach. Could be that drow taste so bad, bulette swear off all elves.

Oh my gosh thank you so much for this :)

Grand as always my dear fellow

Awesome! Thanks A.J.

16:23 How did the Bulette and the Pertyon end up not fighting each other? X_x

-ette is pronounced et. -et is pronounced with the long a sound. So bulette as in Gillette the company. Thanks for the great video. Bulette have always been one of my favorite.

I rarely comment on anything. your ecologies are the best. I can barely wait for the next vids. An OTYUGH vid would be amazing. Thanks for being here. you are a well of inspiration.

Thanks AJ.

I thought it was _intended_ to be pronounced "boo-let" (similar to "bullet," but with a long "u"). It's a large pointed beast that charges straight ahead, exerting its mass at great speed: a living 'bullet.'

Just as the ancestors of the elephant and rhinoceros used to be covered in long fur to protect them from the cold of the ancient Ice Ages, so too did the ancestors of the bulette also used to be covered in a coarse fur coat. Similarly, just as the ancient mammals were called the wooly mammoth or the wooly rhinoceros, this creature's forbears are known as (cue music) ... Wooly bulette, Wooly bulette, Wooly bulette! Matty told Hatty, that's the thing to do Get you someone really to pull the wool with you. Wooly bulleeeeeeeeee, wooly bulette! Wooly bulette, Wooly bulette, Wooly bulette!

Looks like this was the inspiration for the Pokémon Gibble.

Going on to that comment at the beginning about the toy dinosaur. I used to have that as a kid. Thank you for reminding me of that. Always thought it was a weird thing and then I saw this creature in the monstrous manual. First thing I thought was, huh, so that was what that toy was. Followed by, why the hell was that in with dinosaurs?

i love how in 2e its scals could be forged into +3 shields by grandmaster dwarven armoursmiths

Thank you AJ! The sound is great. Ya nailed it my man. I hope that it affects your following in a positive way. Keep it up & we will watch & Listen! T.Rust Monster \oo/

We're going to need a bigger wagon! Get it?

Pic at the end made me think. Peryton!

I imagine bulette leather would make excellent horse barding

Haha.... Bulette.... mit senf und Ketchup XD.

I would never allow anybody to ride one of those things. I'm actually planning on using them as demons. Abyssal siege engines related to the tanari creations.

One way I would help tame them is a Harness of Sustenance, with a saddle enchanted with earth gliding power. So that the Rider glides with the Bulette through the earth.

Could always get them a ring of sustenance so they are never hungry XD

I dont know if it's just me, but the bulette is surprisingly cute to me

I got bullet as a figure. he looks cool. don't know about him.

In german the word "Bultette" means burger patty When I first heard of bulettes in dnd I was like, wtf xD

Threw an undead one of these at my party along with an allip. It sent the monk into death saves with a single attack, after it had been slammed three times by the fighter who specialized in a homebrew weapon known as a dag'nah. He was dealing 3d6+7 repeatedly, and it still managed to nearly kill two of the party.

I had that set of dinos ! from the late '60s I believe.

maby have more images related to what your talking about, but really great videos keep them coming.

its acid can be used to help get ores.. its egg laying habits make good fertilizer that would be a prime way to make money to keep some of things things alive

These have always been one of my favorite monsters. The villain for my next campaign does lots of experimentation on monsters, using golems to capture and train predators since they don't have meat or bleed. I wanted to include pygmy land sharks as one of his homebrew creations, used mostly as guard dogs for the ground floor of his labyrinthine tower. Selective breeding and magically stunting their growth has shrunk them all the way down to a small size category, about the size of an actual dog. This would obviously reduce their strength and constitution considerably, but allow them to harass intruders more easily with hit & run tactics. They still lack proper pack instincts, at best tolerating each other and at worst squabbling or cannibalizing, but will obey the commands of the golems that patrol their chambers, who can call "tamed" monsters into battle to assist them. Pygmy land sharks lack the punch of a full-grown bulette, but instead use opportunities created by their golem masters to lunge out of the ground and attempt to bite chunks out of any meat-filled creatures they can find before disappearing back underground. Im unsure if I should adjust the ground/digging speed of the pygmy bulettes though, or if their hit & run tactics would be just as effective without a speed increase due to their tactics. What do you think AJ, is pygmy bulette a good name or should I call them "dirt piranhas"?

I actually imagined them to be somewhat like a duncleosteus, that it doesn't have teeth in the traditional sense, but instead its teeth are boneplates protruding from its skull/head armor, that will keep growing during its entire lifetime and are always sharp due to rubbing against the plates in the lower jaw. Imagine an underground civilisation, that has "domesticated" bulettes they use as beasts of burden. Or having the ground erupt before you, as one of these Beasts jumps out onto the street, attacking everything in front of it, and ducking out of the way to avoid the projectiles of the people in the Chariot, that is drawn by the bulette. Also, I have no idea why, but for some reason, when I try to imagine a well trained, "friendly" bulette, I can't help but imagine it to behave like Spike from the A Land before Time series.

Ankheg problem? Send in the Bulettes; now its just a land shark problem.

great opportunistic predators them landsharks are

I'm surprised there was no mention of its dorsal plate and its ability to be crafted into a shield.

5th Edition does something I homebrewed, address their limbs as their being a burrowing monster... if they work as "land sharks", go through the dirt and rock as if swimming with limbs that big on top of how sharks actually work, they can leap with monstrous ability. Also, thier acid in their mouth on top of their burrowing is really downplayed... they eat earth as they burrow. That's a total hyper-acid that kills anything it swallows instantly. Dwarves and other beings who use their hyper-acid to uncover super-metals and other hard to destroy materials could also use that in their refining techiniques. And the Bulette being a hyper-predator that kills males it mates with that also abandons its young so it tends to not eat them would totally stop them from being an ecological disaster that even a magical fantasy world could not contain as a monster that operates within the realm's natural laws. Self-containing super-predators are good super-predators. The one thing 5th Edition does not do is to keep the Bull (or Tiger) Shark fantasy element as their land version... they have that fin sticking out for all to see when moving close, their rumble being their version of that "Jaws" terror music. Halflings being their favorite prey is because Jaws preferred places where people swam in mass numbers, and Halflings lived in homes that were in soft-earth burrows. Ankegs and other beasties made Bulletes fall out of most of the spotlight.

honestly, i feel the teeth likely are hidden by the beak having developed a toothed maw sorta shape almost

I'm pretty sure centaur tribes would be terrified of these.

Gary Gygax pronounced it BULLET (like the ammunition) at Gregcon 85 and ,since HE *created* the creature, HE was right and everyone saying different is wrong.

If you want to keep to shark biology you could say the males latch onto the females neck with his jaws while he positions himself to copulate and on many occasions if it’s a larger female and she’s not particularly in the mood she will eat the male (weather he’s finished or not)

love this video could you do one on the blood hunter from 5E?

I can picture animalistic borrowers like bulette and purple worms bursting out of the ground to capture one PC in its jaws then fleeing underground to eat their prey in peace.

I took the stats of the bullete and put it toward a giant sized real world creature, the mole cricket. I saw one and it looked like a monster, so I made it one!

Bulette: Ride Husband. Life good. Husband fight back. Kill Husband. Husband gone. Think about Husband. Regret.......

I can imagine one shooting up out of the ground, grabbing a buffalo in its jaws, doing a crocodile style death roll to kill the beast, and dragging it down into the ground with it as it returns home to eat or feed the unfortunate beast to its brood.

*Knock knock* “Candy-gram”

Anyone remember the old PS2 game, Bauldur's Gate: Dark Alliance? There was a swamp in Act 3 that was positively full of these things and it was awful! I hated that area and died so much.

I really wanna see that rhino jump you mentioned

I designed a Puntastic Bulette Cannon for launching sleeping Bulettes at fortresses. Best crazy mage idea.

Giant sized ring of sustenance for hunger issues

Heh ... the boo lay.

We had them coming from the elemental plane of earth to make them a little more challenging to higher level players.

I usually call them Bullies. Vorse encountered them before, well one that was constantly hounding and stalking a Halfling village. I decided to become bait and well... The Bully learned the hard way of not trying to eat a hoof Minotaur Paladin with a sharp great axe +2. Anyway we found its nest of eggs and... well Vorse had an omelet with the Halfling Chief.

I think this inspired a creature in the original 1966 Ultraman, a kaiju looks very similar to it.

I've always wanted to get a bulette pet, mostly to name it Creme

I herd somewhere (I don’t remember where) that a Bulette is related to the armadillos. Just something I remembered. Kinda an interesting piece of alternative lore if you don’t want to use the other ecology. Oh! I just realized that a Bulette could be like an Owl-bear and be part shark and part armadillo I should have waited to see the end of the video before righting this comment

Also . Ever Hurd of atlas animalia . There’s several species of bulette

I had an idea that a Druidic character named ghrothen, found a land shark with an arrow in its head when it was a baby. Him, being a nature lover, took the little land shark to the town wizard to heal it. The wizard would agree, but in order to heal the land shark, a piece of ghrothens soul would be embedded into the land shark, turning it into an eidolon.

There's cougars where I live, "kill the deer so the cougars don't come close to homes" isn't really an alien concept here.

Bulette jelly

Boolay! Watch it now, watch it, woolly bulette.

Knock knock knock! Candygram!

Thoughts on a sapiant / humanoid or lycanthropy variant of these beasties ?

He said that a half-orc barbarian would aspire to ride a bulette right when I began writing one down on a character sheet

Can you do video of the ankheg

Like in German Bu let te (A type of meatball)

Fun fact, that only happens if the female praying mantis is not properly fed, sort of like with Ankeg's.

A full party of halflings would look like a five dollar fill up meal from KFC in the eyes of a bulette.

... Candygram...

So do the bulette actually use their claws for burrowing? Or do they rely solely on their slime to break down the soil and move through it like a sandfish skink?

Save the buffalo! Lead them to the nearest Halfling town! :P

If he intended for it to be pronounced "boo-lay", then he badly misspelled it. Based on the spelling given, it should properly be "boo-let". One way or the other, but you either have to follow the spelling =>orfelicitous< options. (Technically, you >could< call it a "snarf-garble" despite the spelling, or take one of the above pronunciations and spell it "nnsdlixzsaeiou", and any number of other options, but only the two options presented address the actual issue; hence "felicitous".)

You should of opened with SNL Land Shark Candygram video.

got a link to the interview with the creator?

boo-lay sounds French which means it sounds Elven, which means boo-lett is the more crass pronunciation, AKA Dwarven