Shadows kill spellcasters, Intellect Devourers kill melee classes, Gelatinous Cubes kill scouts and sneaks. For everything else, there's Master Card.

1 goblin isn't a threat. 47 goblins, however....

You could easily call this video "Five Ways For a DM to Lose Friends".

Something that wasn't mentioned about gelatinous cubes that wasn't mentioned that's really fun to bust out: Have a digested adventurer inside the cube, your players will think they are running in to fight a skeleton, and they will end up running smack into a cube

I have killed more PCs with rats than with dragons

"Your favorite low-level monsters" - Honestly, just regular animals. At low levels you can sort of inject a feeling of believability into your setting just by including real animals like wolves and boars and bears. Sure, Goblins are fun, but what about happening upon a small scouting pair of goblin corpses, only to find that a pack of wolves ambushed and killed them? Or when trapsing through the jungle and your party is on the look-out for Yaun-Ti and Lizardfolk, blindly walking into a Gorilla's nesting ground. Moments like these inject a healthy dose of verisimilitude into your setting, (unless you're going for a particularly alien setting on purpose) and makes your party realize the dangers and harshness of the wilderness in general than say happening upon a more fantastical creature like an Owlbear or a Griffon.

Shut up, stop it! My DM watches your channel, you're gonna get my character killed!

*Dungeon walls:* start speaking kobold *Adventurers:* panic

Be wary of the elderly in a profession that has a high mortality rate.

There's a great blog series called "The Monsters Know" which details how to use different monster types effectively. It seems to take inspiration from "Tucker's Kobolds", turns it up to 11 and runs with it.

Always remember: Casting a "Protection from good and evil" spell on a person controlled by an intellect devourer will make the creature burst out of its skull. This is a great way to introduce the creature to a new party especially in a mind controll plot: My players came into a town which was cut of by heavy snow storms from the rest of the world for longer than usual and discovered that several things seemed odd with the population. Some people there characters personally knew acted strange, others died in that winter. After they consulted a lich about the strange behaviour (Yeah sorry thats my go to support "villain". Ancient liches that just because goofballs after they achieved everything they wanted and got bored for centurys) he recommended to cast this spell onto the person. The characters thought they would be curing the father of the rouge and instead were just like "WHAT THE..." when suddenly his head exploded and this creature popped out.

Y'know what I like about you guys? You have the answers in the description. You don't muck around and play coy with it, you just tell us. Thank you for that

PC: makes kobold mad. Kobold: Throws angry skunk at his face, then kick him in gelatinous cube pit.

Goblin Slayer knows fully well how dangerous low level monsters are.

One of my favorite monsters I've come across for 5th Edition has been the Fire Snake. It's a CR 1 elemental that works as a great wake-up call to players who are getting complacent or new players realizing that there's more than just "hit the thing till it dies" as a tactic. It has a multi-attack of a bite and tail whip that does 1d4+1 physical damage and 1d6 fire damage on a hit. And when it gets hit in melee, the sheer heat of its body is enough to hurt the player for 1d6 fire damage. If you have some smug level 1-2 Min-Maxing fighters or barbarians who thought they made impenetrable characters, throw a couple of these at them and watch the horror in their faces as they find themselves scrambling for ranged weapons and the mage cursing himself for only taking Fire Bolt and Burning Hands for damage dealing spells.

The problem with using Rot Grubs to attack a high-level party: "I cast fireball on myself"

I recently ran a 1-shot where the party had to deal with a mage who'd been taken over by an intellect devourer. The foreshadowing was there well in advance, but when they killed him and the beast popped out of his head, they panicked, as they knew what was going to happen. In one turn, it downed one of the party members and went to devour the brain of their low INT barbarian. Thankfully, he rolled a Nat20 on the save, which let them finish it off in a couple turns. That said, if that barbarian had failed that save, there was most certainly going to be at least one PC death that night. Was a tense couple of rounds.

Slew trolls, giants, and demons with little drama. Goblins, Kobolds, and rats still terrify me.

Suddenly I feel a lot better about giving all of my characters unnecessarily high intelligence. . .

Hey guys, long time fan. I just wanted to point out you actually got the intellect devourer's ability wrong. Their Devour Intellect ability doesn't just stun the target if the 3d6 beats the target's intelligence, it reduces it to zero, meaning the target is stunned until it can regain intelligence. There is only one way by RAW that the ability score can be restored, which is greater restoration, a 5th level spell. That also means their intelligence contest for their Body Thief ability AUTOMATICALLY wins. Which actually means if you get hit with Devour Intellect, and the 3d6 beats your intelligence, your allies have a single round to kill the devourer or you die. If there are multiple devourers, the target could be dead before any of their allies get a turn. They are the single deadliest creature in the monster manual, by far. The DM doesn't even need a "rocks fall" situation. Four or five intellect devourers in an ambush will kill a party very easily.

The fact that such low CR monsters can still be a legitimate threat to higher level PCs in the right circumstances is one of the things I love about 5E. In some of the previous editions, some of my favorite monsters just became completely superfluous without monkeying with their stats a lot. EDIT: Also I am legit super happy that kobolds came out as the deadliest low CR monsters. Not enough DMs play them the way they would actually behave when you look at their stats and the kobolds' awareness of their own capabilities compared to adventurers.

Know what my dirty DM secret use of swarm is? Big baddies and lieutenants with plague and terror themes call upon swarms who mount on the them and serve as armor, terrible, disgusting and terrifying armor, which attack, and only after the death of the swarm, the baddie begin to take hits on their Health Points. Nasty.

*when you have a 19 in Str and a 17 in Int* I'm a glass cannon susceptible to everything *except* these monsters!

Enjoyed the details and tactics. 1. Shadow 2. Swarm 3. Intellect Devourer 4. Gelatinous Cube 5. Kobolds

Something far too many DM's fail to remember is monster intelligence. I've nearly TPK'd several high level parties with Kobolds and Goblins. Have them react to parties like parties do to them.(started before these two got there) Played by their intelligence, dragons and vampires should be nearly impossible for even very high level parties.

Oh god, a pit trap with a gelatinous cube in it?! That's terrifying

As a Kobold fan and user of the Kobold monstrous adventurer, I approve of this video.

21:43 Oh god **flashbacks to total party kill at the second encounter of our first session when the DM rolled 3 nat 20s in a roll, causing 4-5 kobolds to absolutely demolish us**

I'm just imagining a mountain with a dragon's lair, and then camps of kobolds throughout the whole mountain.

We took this to another level on our one-shot night. 5:1 kobold vs premade basic adventurers in a defend the abandoned tower game. The kobolds were given a number of traps, and a few secret doors to build thier defenses before the adventures arrived. Nobody has taken kobolds for granted since.

Kelly makes a blind turn into a narrow, squeaky-clean dungeon corridor: "Chewy, no, wait, DON'T!!!"

You're doing a great service, sharing the ancient knowledge of Tucker's Kobolds with the newest generations of DMs. Keep it up! And GREAT advice at the end, about not busting out some of these asymmetrical threats against brand new players. Many of them take a good deal of system mastery to understand how to effectively fight them, and new players are likely to feel confused and frustrated instead of feeling like it's an exciting challenge. As always, every DM should know their group, and design their game to give them the kind of fun that they're after. But these monsters are GREAT tools for throwing some curveball creative challenges at experienced players.

I would rule that a paladin would lose all divine abilities if he was taken over by an intellect devourer.💀

I'm currently playing a barbarian and have 78 HP and one kobolt inventor dowend me in a single round.

I remember reading a dnd story where a group invited a vietnam vetran into a game of dnd and they had a "tuckers kobolds" scenario planned. It was a *very* intense gaming session.

The deadliest monster for a low-level party is a Tarrasque.

SPURT! "I WIN!"

I was going to put a beholder zombie in my dungeon for Saturday... not anymore ;)

Great discussion, showing how creatures can be used entertainingly as well as realistically. Good points on how to implement such encounters in a balanced way, too. Appreciate the tribute to Tucker's Kobolds, too. I was inspired by that article to have a lone PC encounter goblins that dropped narcotic seedpods into his campfire from overhanging trees: his dismay and rage at waking up hogtied, surrounded by goblins happily looting his gear was truly beautiful. He escaped (of course) and eventually got his revenge, but was much more wary about adventuring on his own afterwards...

When you started talking about rot grubs, it reminded me of my group's first encounter with them. Our fighter had opened a standing casket filled with them, and they collapsed on him and started to begin their burrowing. Just five minutes before, I had given him a potion of fire breath that I had. Now, none of us were familiar with this enemy, so it was by pure luck that he decided that he would chug that potion and breathe fire on the entire swarm, setting them and himself on fire. It killed the entire swarm all at once, and our DM told us following this encounter that him choosing to set himself on fire to kill the grubs was the one thing our party could have done in that circumstance to prevent him from certain death. He was initially suspected of meta-gaming (which our group heavily frowns upon), but he was just as shocked by the information as the rest of us. He just wanted to kill a lot of enemies at the same time (fighter, remember? And a bugbear on top of that), and figured a free fire breath was the best option. One of our players who wasn't present for that game was told about the encounter, and he would have been the only person other than the DM who knew the severity of this swarm. After we finished that particular dungeon (which our DM warned us at the start was specifically designed to kill the party), he congratulated us on how incredibly smart/lucky we were to only have one player die. It didn't even end up being permanent, because our party hired a high level cleric to cast resurrection on my bard's corpse, and he was reborn as an Aasimar. Our DM gave out a huge laugh before revealing what he was reborn as, because that's a hell of an upgrade for a narcissistic wordsmith.

I just shared this with my dm, i feel our party just overpowers him a little too often with our tactics.....

Thank you for introducing me to Tucker's Kobolds

Regarding the gelatinous cubes, I had a GM pull out a Black Dragon who lined their lair with the damn things. It's too big to use their engulf on, and it's immune to acid anyway. In 3.5 I remember legion devils being the "Kills things WAY above their CR" hammer with which to slap down munchkins. Their pile of infinitely stacking bonuses based on how many of them are in the area just scaled way too hard.

I threw a few shadows at my party in an outsider/Un-dead themed dungeon once, one player had a magic dagger that allowed them to raise up a creature they killed for the next few hours, and I had a Shadow demon encounter planned after that fight. For those who don't know it from memory, shadow demons have a 1 for their STR scores, so this shadow the party re-animated was able to One shot the boss monsters, and frankly I never saw that coming

....is there a swarm that's immune to the gelatinous cubes damage after being swallowed? That would be a crazy symbiotic relationship between the two...

My character died two weeks ago to two mimics. He's a level 11 Ranger with 100 maximum hitpoints, but we had just slogged through a deathtrap of an assassin's hideaway (which included a Gelatinous Cube falling from the ceiling on top of him), he got locked in the room alone with only about 30hp remaining, and he was down to one weapon after two of the ones he had were destroyed by black puddings, so he couldn't benefit from his Two Weapon Fighting fighting style and Dual Wielder feat. A few good attack and damage rolls later and the rest of the party shows up to open the door and dispatch them just a little too late for me to fail my last death save. It was a great session, I'd do it all over again with all the mistakes because almost immediately beforehand he found a treasure cache with a diamond in it that allowed the bard to cast Raise Dead on him. Even without that, seeing the characters different reactions for that watching your own funeral feeling was priceless. AND I finally get to put a years-old joke to rest that my character would be the first in the party to die.

18:00 The ghostly three facing the gelatinous cube in the sewer of Drakkenheim 😉

The quality of the content continues to improve. Keep up the good prep work and solid editing. It makes them so much more compelling than videos of people rambling unprepared.

Funny you mention kobolds. I've got a party that just lost their fighter to a flame trap surrounded by kobolds. The idea was that it was a false encampment; they'd been slaying kobolds for the past five or so sessions for a Dwarven noble. Lo and behold, a Dwarven friend they knew fell from a tree, hanging dead and mangled. They immediately rushed out to find the kobolds and followed tracks the kobolds had laid, leading into a thicket. As soon as the fighter saw huts in the thicket and a pile of dwarves, he rushed in, tripling a rope that lit the thicket on fire. He had already noticed the wet matting of the forest but continued, not realizing it was oil. The thicket surrounding the hits (maybe a fifteen foot space) lit aflame. He was trapped, surrounded, targeted through the brush. The kobolds couldn't see what triggered the trap, but didn't need to. Their projectiled, covered in a deadly poison, stunned and held the fighter in place while the oxygen around him grew thin. His compatriots rushed to his aid. After being poisoned, burned, and eventually suffocated, the kobolds retreated only after the corpse of the fighter that had destroyed a kobold nest single-handedly lie bloody, torn, and defeated. All in all, the party thought it a valuable lesson and thoroughly enjoyed it. They knew there were kobolds. They knew they were prone to trappings and trickery. They realized they could have been more careful and they shouldn't be as overconfident. The next session is tomorrow; with a new character they plot vengeance for their fallen friend.

I remember Tucker’s Kobolds! Thank you for bringing up that classic story. 😃

Dopplegangers. Just. Dopplegangers. It only takes 2 to mess up an upstart 5 person party of 4th level characters.

All hail Mr. Tucker and his Kobolds!! As a long time D&D player, you two get an instant like and sub for bringing up not only Tucker's Kobolds, but the genuine uses for the other four creatures were spot on as well. Very sneaky, and much applause as a player and DM.

The only deaths ever occurring in my PCs party was when i sent some kobolds after them. Once, a kobold inventor threw a rot grub swarm at them while, in the back, another kobold summoned a shadow.

Gelatinous cubes and intellect devourers? Looks like my eldritch knight is frontlining those fights.

my personal favorite encounter for early encounters (haven't tried higher levels, but I'd imagine it scales up) is an animated armor on a warhorse. everyone focuses on the armor, then get pretty beat up when they get trampled by the horse. being knocked prone can be pretty rough with multiple enemies. plus, it feels more fair than dying instantly.

If you haven't already, you can read the original full Tucker's Kobold's story here: media.wizards.com/2014/downloads/dnd/TuckersKobolds.pdf

Honestly, I'd probably run intellect devourers differently. The "teleport inside your brain to kill you and take over your body" is insane. Maybe make them sit on top of your head and control you. That way you can kill the devourer and get back your character. Makes the combat itself just as challenging, while being way more forgiving in the long run.

Intelect devourer is still one of my favourite low cr monsters. Used it against a wizard, on a short solo section of the campaign, and even though he survived being hunted down, he was scarred by the experience ^_^

One of my first characters I played was a high elf arcane trickster who almost died at level 3 from rot grubs. He survived because he used sleep centered on self. As a high elf he was immune to effects that put him to sleep so while the grubs were asleep he got another player to perform surgery on him to get them out.

Great video, guys! The bounded accuracy of 5e is great in that it allows dungeon masters to have the entirety of the Monster Manual at their disposal, regardless of the level of their players. They may have to use more monsters with mixed unit tactics, but a party of level 15-20 can just as easily encounter a threatening host of skeletons and goblins as well as a dragon. This can keep things fresh and varied, rather than just limiting parties to the same handful of high level endgame monsters over and over again.

I knew Tucker's Kobolds were coming :P Good Show!

Ghost was my party's first monster encounter. It was kinda scary for 4 level 1 characters!

“They can be messy if they get all up in your space...” That is both hilarious and frightening at the same time.

velociraptors are usually a quite deadly encounter. Not because a velociraptor is anything scary on its own, but they often come in packs.

One time my character died to a kobold. One. Single. Kobold.

Pixies are dangerous too for their CR. A group of creature with such powerfull spells is relly hard to fight

I love the dungeon materials you guys are using. They work really well with the minis.

As a player, I really worry about all these "kills you outright" abilities given to all these low level monsters.

What I'm getting from this is always have a paladin or cleric D:

As a DM I dislike how Intellect devourer is written... In general I dislike anything with a SoD before res becomes available. I spend the majority of my DM prep time on weaving my PCs backstories into the main plot (my games are generally focused on PCs personal stories) so a death of a PC is huge loss of content for a single bad dice roll. Gelatinus cube is interesting but I have found most melee characters will just attack it from inside since restrained doesn't prevent attacks and disadvantage doesn't matter since it's AC 6.

This video gave me so much inspiration for my next arc of our campaign. Thanks!

I have used Mongrelfolk in our recent campaign and it was such a nice breath of fresh air when it comes to encounters and player experience.

There's always room for 10 x 10 jello!

2 creatures I find scary for their relatively low CR are: 1) the banshee, CR 4 and has a built in save-or-suck attack with her wail 2) also CR 4, the Helmed Horror- immune to conditions, resistant to magic (with immunity to 3 DM chosen spells) resistant to nonmagical, non-adamantite weapon, the _only_ resistance to the beloved force damage in the MM (which is a full blown immunity BTW); oh, and an intelligence score of 10, higher than the average lv 4 fighter. these things are the terror of every spellcaster

Never winter Nights forever scarred me when it comes to Intellect Devourers. Easily the hardest part of the early game main campaign

Thank you guys I've taken away a couple great ideas to use against in my campaign. I'm so happy you mentioned foreshadowing and warned DMs against using these creatures against new players. They are, however, fantastic encounters for experienced players at lower levels. Straightforward encounters balanced as per the guidelines in the DMG can be pretty boring for experienced players but show them a completely clean hallway, corpses with their brains sucked out shadows doing funny things immediately ramps up the excitement precisely because the players know what danger they are in. As a players being able to leverage your experience is a satisfying feeling.

Last session it was vegepigmys and we had little to nothing that we could start on fire....one torch between 6 pcs so it was dropping them to 0 and getting the one player to burn the bodies before they regenerate.

Love the cinematography on this one!

correction at 13:38, the intellect devourer's stun isn't "until the end of the PC's next turn", but rather it causes the PC's intelligence score to drop to 0, leaving them stunned "until it regains at least one point of Intelligence", combining that with body thief ensures a -5 penalty to that contested roll,

Definitely one of my favorite videos by you guys. Top notch job!

Back a few D&D Editions I almost had a TPK when I threw a Nilbog at a 2 & 3rd level party... The party beat the crap out of that "goblin" and freaked out when it wouldn't die..

Sounds like the perfect counter for rot grubs is the flames of phelagos feat. Need to burn them off? I'm on fire!

In one campaign I’m in, the first session had a fight against 2 rat swarms. We were level 3 and one guy almost died pretty rapidly. And in another, one guy was taken over by an Intellect Devourer in the first session and, while we knew it at the time, he then led the party towards its friends the following session.

love how you mention the gelatinous cubes i used those once and paired them with some rogue dwarf colony in one of my games where the dwarves used the cubes to help in crafting so i kept describing everything as acid etched

My favorite trap: 30' pitfall right into a Gelatinous Cube .

Just ordered my skullsplitter dice. Thanks for the code and love the videos and twitch streams

For interlect devouerrers: just send the Wizzard into meele... with a int of 19 or 20 it's completly immun to the Stun...

In Curse of Strahd our rogue ran into a room without checking and ran right inbetween 3 shadows. They rolled best initiative. All 3 hit and the DM rolled 3d4. He rolled 4 on all of them and the rogue's STR was 12. Our DM does not like killing players, but he does not deus ex machina to save us if it happens. He was so shocked, because he was not expecting that encounter to be a problem and after the rogue died we did kill them on the first turn. It was just the worst luck on the rogue's side.

Something like timestamps would be really nice. I just want to have specific info in some vids.

Do the dark souls! Show the players the deadly enemy in an isolated situation which allows for experimentation, exploration, etc. Then, once they have an idea of how the monster works, throw a pack (only after they have had a chance to learn, and always leave an escape route if the players find they are unprepared)

As a point of clarification, if the Intellect Devourer rolls above its victim's intelligence score, its intelligence is reduced to 0 and it is stunned until it regains its intelligence. This makes the Intellect Devourer stealing the body trivial, unless of course you're a really lucky vegetable.

Combining threats is one of my favourites. Like zombies filled with rot grubs or an enemy with an intellect devourer already possessing that enemy so that whenever they have taken out the first enemy they now have a second one right on its heels

Who's territory would you rather trespass upon: A colony of kobolds Kevin McAllister's home

Ooh, the Gelatinous Cube. I'll never forget my party's first encounter with one. How could I? We were trying to find someone who could remove our paladin's cursed mask that made him blind, deaf, and (potentially) a were-wolf using a high elf were-rat who attacked us thaat we captured as our guide. We reach the camp of our captive's master. Our rouge sneaks in. Hears other were-creatures in the distance and drops into a storehouse. Finds himself suspended in mid-air. Suddenly takes 6d6 damage. Dragomborn fighter that's a fierce friend to the rouge hauls ass to the store house. Pulls rouge out and they take turns carrying each other away. Gelatinous Cube emerges. Paladin, guided by the Rat-man, (that's what we ended up calling the high elf) starts shooting Ray of Frost. Raurgh, our half-or barbarian attacks the Cube. Fighter and Rouge find our guide's master to try and get help. Master is a Beholder. Shit hits fan. Rouge and Fighter run being chased by the Beholder. Baarbarian gets sucked by Cube, and the Rat man is panicking. Cube sucks up Rat man. Barbarian frees himself. Fighter and Rouge are trying to bail. Paladin is drawn towards the one thing he can see--the Beholder. Barbarian gets suck by Cube again. Sees nothing but Rat man's skeleton. "It was as this moment he knew...he fucked up." Barbarian dies. Fighter and Rouge jump in a river and bail. Paladin swears service to the Beholder. After fruitlessly trying to heal the party and help beat back the Cube, I cast Command on the Beholder telling it to halt. Rolls 18. The Beholder looks at me and in my head, and deep and cruel voice says, "Flee." I jump in the river, too. And that's the story of how our first encounter with a Gelatinous Cube ended in disaster. (Rip Raurgh and the Rat Man.)

There was a 2nd Edition boxed adventure, Dragon Mountain, that had a mountain lair loaded with Kobolds. There was a dragon too, but the bulk of all interactions was with kobolds.

I had a great session with a gelatinous cube a couple weeks ago. I'm running a Strixhaven campaign. During an "after hours snoop," the PCs came across the secret behind how clean the stadium and locker rooms always are. A team of custodians were struggling to contain a gelatinous cube behind a panel of thick glass. It had engulfed one of the custodians and the PCs wound up having to make Athletics checks to keep the creature away from the other workers until the head custodian arrived and put the beast back in the Iron Flask they used to transport the creature. When asked, "What about Glory?", the head custodian shrugs and says, "don't worry about it..."

“Tucker’s Kobolds” I see you are men of culture as well.

ok, THIS is my last dnd video for the night.... wait what are the five cantrips I must have?....

I ran one encounter where a group of low leveled characters went to investigate something on a large rock just within jumping distance of a ledge on the shore, ten feet above freezing waters with no easy way to climb back up. There, a small group of ice mephits ambushed them with their Fog Cloud spell, which covered the whole rock. Suddenly, nobody can move more than a few steps without risk of falling off into the water and taking levels of exhaustion from the cold, while the mephits pestered them with little bits of damage from their AOE breath attacks from every direction. In the end, nobody ended up even remotely close to dying from this encounter, but like with the kobold example here it really showed me how much of a difference the terrain can make for any encounter with low-level monsters.

My favourite cube story involved the party triggering a trap that caused a trapdoor in the roof to loudly open in front of the party and drop a cube. The party then proceeded to run straight into the cube that was silently dropped around the corner behind them. They were reasonably high level and so survived the fight, but it was fun to double cube them.