In my Aurikesh campaign, my PCs are in rebellion against the prince of the domain they live in. I’ve given them the names and brief descriptions of a bunch of the Prince’s inner circle of advisors and military commanders. As much as possible, I wanted these characters to feel like the opposite numbers of PCs and preserve the illusion that they work like PCs. That’s not really how NPCs work in 5e design philosophy, so I had to construct a stat block that created that illusion, rather than just building a 12th-level Barbarian or whatever.
I like some of the existing high-CR warrior-like stat blocks (Champion, Blackguard, Warlord), but there aren’t a lot of Barbarian analogues above CR 2-4. To that end, I created the Holy Zealot stat block for Belic the Bloody, the Prince’s executioner who liked his job way too much. In the most recent session, the PCs took him on; they won, but he tore through two PCs in extremely short order first, so it felt like a good challenge. He was backed up by two mages who were entirely ineffective – one cast a Fireball that got Counterspelled, the other cast Hold Person and was stone dead before we got to the turn of the one PC who failed the save. (The PCs played smart, I’m not upset about this.)
Anyway. I thought y’all might also have a need for a heavy hitter that can pose a serious threat in tiers 3 and 4.
Holy Zealot
Medium humanoid (Any Race), (barbarian)
Armor Class 17 (breastplate)
Hit Points 168 (16d12 + 64)
Speed 40 ft.
Initiative +2 (advantage)
Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha
20 (+5) 14 (+2) 18 (+4) 8 (-1) 14 (+2) 11 (+0)
Saving Throws Str +9, Con +8
Skills Athletics +9, Intimidation +4, Survival +6
Damage Resistance bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing
Senses Passive Perception 12
Languages any one language (usually Common)
Challenge 12 (8,400 xp) PB +4
Reckless Attack. At the start of its turn, the zealot can gain advantage on all melee weapon attack rolls until the start of its next turn, but attack rolls against it have advantage until the start of its next turn.
Fanatical Focus (Recharge 5-6). When the zealot fails a saving throw, it can reroll the save. It must use the new result.
Dire Leap. The zealot can leap up to 20 feet (horizontal) as part of its movement. The zealot ignores the first 30 feet of falling damage, and if it attacks and hits immediately after landing, it deals 3 (1d6) additional damage per 10 feet fallen.
ACTIONS
Multiattack. The zealot makes three Greataxe attacks, and can use Zealous Presence.
Greataxe. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 11 (1d12 +5) slashing damage and 10 (1d6 + 7) necrotic damage. The zealot deals a critical hit on a natural 19 or 20, and that attack deals an additional 13 (2d12) damage.
Zealous Presence (1/Long Rest). The zealot grants advantage on attacks and saving throws until the start of their next turn to allies within 60 feet who can hear them.
Design Notes
Reckless Attack did a lot of work in this fight. In the 3-4 rounds this guy was up and fighting, I landed 3 crits, and as you see, I had written those to be particularly devastating (as is the case for PC barbarians, and as particularly suits executioners).
Zealous Presence, on the other hand, wasn’t even worth using. There was a real possibility in the course of the adventure that Belic could have appeared alongside veterans rather than mages, and if he had, Zealous Presence would have been great. Even when building a bespoke stat block for a named NPC, it doesn’t pay to drill down to exactly one possible approach to combat–there are just too many emergent possibilities.
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This looks like a fun and effective stat block. I always like NPC blocks that re-interpret specific PC subclasses into them. There are so many caster blocks that do that, but there seem to be relatively few martial ones, so this is nice to see.
Between MCDM’s “Flee Mortals” and Sly Flourish’s “Forge of Foes”, monster design is in a really interesting place right now. I’m very curious to see what the 5e24 Monster Manual looks like. Mike Mearls is also doing some very innovative design work on monsters on his Patreon right now, along with a whole series about subclass design specific to each class.
In a slightly different direction, I noticed that your Zealot has a +4 to Intimidation. While that is not unusual for a monster, especially a scary fighter type, I am curious how you run monsters using things like Intimidation against PCs. I find that the resolution tends to be table-specific because it relies on the players and their reactions more than any mechanical levers the DM can pull.
Fun content, as usual.
My thought on +4 Intimidation is that a) it says something about how the NPC interacts with PCs, even if that thing is not mathematical and b) it prepares for the NPC to interact mathematically with other NPCs, if needed. In the session where I used this, there was in fact a moment of Belic the Bloody browbeating a group of NPCs, so for me it didn’t make sense NOT to include this.
I’m glad you like it! I can imagine myself writing more of these for other subclasses, because meeting and fighting people who basically function like PCs (even if they’re not mechanically identical) is cool to me.