Wood Woes

Time to mosey on over to our Wilderness Trek Wandering Monster Guide and add another classic timber threat to the mix!

This was a trickier post to piece together this week because of the sheer number of tree blight variants to choose from here. So, to Google, we went to see how others are picking these woodland warriors for their own campaigns!

First off, let’s give Brite Minis the proper nod of excellence for their support-free Vine Blight sculpt. Yes, they do have a little John Travolta Saturday Night Fever pose going on, but maybe that’s why they drew our 3D-printed monster selection hands this week.

Now, we need to properly acknowledge our inspiration for this encounter thanks to the excellent writings of DM Dave Publishing and their most excellent article, “Blight Variants for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.” Be sure to give their really well-thought twig guide a good read. This free DnD blog post really helped us determine how to tackle this blight-wandering monster encounter.

If you like what you see and are looking for a mountain of content for a super reasonable monthly Patreon price ($7), you can’t go wrong with their ever-expanding library of DnD content. We also subscribe to his ongoing e-newsletter for all the free content goodness it provides.

So, we have a lot of wood chipper choices. First three are WotC’s go-to monsters and then DM Dave’s below that.

• Twig Blight: AC 13, HP 4 | minion
• Needle Blight: AC 12, HP 11 | ranged
• Vine Blight: AC 12, HP 26 | soldier
• Fire Ivy Blight: AC 13, HP 27 | stealthy
• Moss Blight: AC 13, HP 68 | heavy hitter
• Pollen Blight: AC 14, HP 44 | area effects
• Rot Blight: AC 14, HP 76 | summoner

Blights will never be too tough to hit because of their natural armor, but they can still mess you up, thanks to their varying combat tactics and abilities.

We’re going to build this wandering monster roll as a pure ambush encounter. This means that if this particular entry comes up in the table roll, the group has chosen a very, and we mean very bad, place to rest.

Once again, we’ll use an Online Encounter builder to refine the number and type of baddies for our six-member, fourth-level party. The goal was to create a Medium encounter difficulty/CR 5 rating.

Blights have False Appearance, which means that they’re indistinguishable from their natural surroundings while they remain motionless. So DM Ben is going to say that they, unfortunately, made camp for their long rest right on the Rot Blight’s home turf (which has several Twig Blight guards of its own). The other 2 ranged Needle Blights will come in at the top of round 2 (as their 60-ft blindsight means they needed to first move into range to assist).

Here’s what we came up with…

• Twig Blights (3): Total XP 75 | minions
• Needle Blights (2): Total XP 50 | ranged
• Rot Blight (1) | Total XP 1,100 | tank

We really want to play up a cool mix of blights to test the group’s tactics and introduce a level of pure chaos as the attacks unfold. We love DM Dave’s Rot Blight because of its 10-ft reach, menacing rot fruit ranged attack, and 3 melee attacks.

Wizkids made an absolutely awesome prepainted Rot Grub Miniature from their Lords of Madness set, so we’re excited to potentially add that mini to the gameboard mix. You could also print up this Carrion Swarm model by Printed Legends if you want to press your 3D printer into service.

One last notable touch to our Needle Blight miniatures by Brite Minis is how the backside of the sculpt simply looks like a bunch of twisted vines. DM Ben is looking forward to the players’ reactions when he explains that the trees “suddenly just come alive right in front of you!”

Now, all that’s left to do is update the master Wilderness Trek Wandering Monster table!

Until next time!