For one of my freelance projects, I submitted a hefty list of new monsters, and the project lead picked a goodly number of them. In this post I’m writing about one that didn’t make the cut, just because I thought it was an interesting idea. It’s a re-imagining of one of the enemies I most hate fighting in Slay the Spire: the Nemesis. I’m constructing my own story for it here.
Bone Harvester
Creatures that linger and suffer in undeath hunger for things of the living world – not only blood and flesh, but bone as well. Bone harvesters are the remnants of people who were murdered and mutilated, particularly if the killer wished to humiliate them in death. They are doomed to hunt their missing bones by slaying others and dismembering them.
Silent Flight. Bone harvesters look like upper bodies, usually clad in rags or tattered robes. They fly silently, hovering when necessary, just above a Medium creature’s sight-line.
Trail of Carnage. A bone harvester is unable to recognize its own lost bones, and wants to mutilate others as it was mutilated. It chooses its targets at random, though it favors creatures that share its original ancestry. Once it has harvested a bone from a creature, it may choose a new target, or abandon the fight completely to seek a target elsewhere.
Undead Nature. A bone harvester doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep.
Bone Harvester Challenge 7
Medium undead 2,900 XP
AC 15 (natural armor)
HP 97 (15d8 + 30)
Speed 10 ft., fly 40 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
10 (+0) 18 (+4) 14 (+2) 10 (+0) 10 (+0) 16 (+3)
Proficiency +3
Skills Perception +3, Stealth +7
Damage Vulnerability bludgeoning
Damage Resistances necrotic
Damage Immunities poison
Condition Immunities exhaustion, poisoned, prone, unconscious
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 13
Languages understands Common, doesn’t speak
Harvest Bones. When the bone harvester starts its turn next to a dying or dead creature with bones, it extracts leg bones from the creature, and the bone harvester gains 20 temporary hit points and recharges its Etherealness bonus action. If the creature is dying, it immediately fails a death saving throw. The creature’s walking and climbing speeds are reduced by 15 feet until it receives a heal or regenerate spell, or a prosthetic leg. A bone harvester never harvests the bones of the same creature twice.
Marked for the Harvest. The bone harvester chooses one creature with leg bones that it can see and places its mark upon them. While a creature is marked, its bones seem to writhe inside its flesh, and the bone harvester can always sense the direction and distance to it.
The mark can be removed with a remove curse spell. The mark ends when the bone harvester takes a bone from it, or when the bone harvester uses this trait to mark another creature.
ACTIONS
Multiattack. The bone harvester attacks twice with its sickle and once with its cleaver.
Sickle. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (2d6 + 4) slashing damage and 4 (1d8) necrotic damage.
Cleaver. Melee or Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft. or range 20/60, one target. Hit: 6 (1d4 + 4) slashing damage, and the target’s speed is halved until the end of their next turn. If the bone harvester throws its cleaver, the cleaver returns to it at the end of its turn.
BONUS ACTIONS
Etherealness (Recharge 5-6). The bone harvester becomes ethereal until the start of its next turn, and it has advantage on the first attack it makes after ending its Etherealness. While it is ethereal, it can’t affect or be affected by creatures on the Material Plane. It can perceive them, but they can’t perceive it unless they can perceive the Ethereal Plane.
Combat
The bone harvester uses its Etherealness trait to reposition, avoid people defending its chosen target, escape from any form of grapple or restraint, and make itself occasionally immune to retaliation. It doesn’t think in terms of self-defense, but it is likely to decide to mark an aggressive foe once it has harvested a prior target.
Design Notes
Etherealness is the main trait that carries over from Slay the Spire, because it’s the Nemesis’s main trick; filling your deck with Burns didn’t particularly fit the story I was imagining for it here. If the Slay the Spire monster revealed a bit more of its story, or just varied up its tricks a little more, I would have had more to work with, but no such luck.
5e doesn’t go in for Lurker monsters very much at all, and that’s a big part of what I’m hoping to achieve with Etherealness.
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I love a gruesome undead monster and this one fits the bill. What I like even more are monsters that add something to the lore of the world, and undead are especially good at this. The various specific origins of all the different ghost-adjacent incorporeal undead are a great example. A character in the world might be expected to know the basics of how a ghost is made or how to defeat a troll, so adding in monsters that have very specific, but also mundane origins is really cool.
The bone harvester is a terrible undead monster, but it doesn’t require a powerful necromancer to make one. It requires a murder, albeit one laced with an appropriately extravagant amount of body horror. I could also imagine that drawing and quartering a criminal might result in a bone harvester. Maybe that’s a form of execution that authorities avoid because of this problem. Keith Baker’s recent Chronicles of Eberron featured a whole chapter about the various kinds of undead and their specific origins, including variations for culture and magic traditions. That kind of lore really helps build a world up.
Mechanically, I don’t really have much to say. The monster seems fun and challenging, though maybe a little bit on the fragile side for a CR7.
I’m glad you like it!
I intentionally went a little lighter on hit points because, at least once and maybe more in each fight, it gets to spend its entire off-turn probably immune to the whole party. If it got that two rounds in a row, that fight’s already getting a little tedious by the time you can finally attack it. That’s my thought, at least.
OK, I can see that as a decent justification. I was recently reviewing the mechanics around the Ethereal plane from 3rd edition and they made me wish 5e had more mechanical support for things like Etherealness. In 3rd you could hit ethereal creatures with force effects, like Magic Missile, but ethereal creatures couldn’t hit targets on the Material Plane. Assuming you could perceive your target obviously. I miss those weird corner case rules interactions. I understand why they haven’t been carried forward into 5e, but I wish they had been.
No argument from me on this point! I like a meaningful cosmology and interactions.