OSR: Three Monsters Ripped From - I Mean, Uh, Based On Battle Brothers

Battle Brothers is a hell of a game. I could go on and on about why I love it, but one thing that's stood out to me since the first time I sat down to play it is the enemy design. The basic enemies your mercenary company faces off against tend to be rather similar at first glance: brigands, orcs, goblins, and undead. But the game does a great job at making all its enemies feel different, escaping the trap many RPGs fall into, where any of those four are little more than 1 HD monsters with different aesthetics and equipment.

The game's main menu screen - by Paul Taaks

The game's two expansions – one free, one paid – mostly focus on adding new enemies to the roster. They're all good, if almost all more dangerous than the base game's enemies, and in some cases a bit cliche (trolls are tough and regenerate health but are dumb and cowardly, witches are weak as hell but screw with your guys by charming them and making attacks against them also damage one of your mercenaries). But the ones that aren't cliche? Oh, baby. They're amazing concepts.

Kind of. The monsters are cool, but since Battle Brothers is mostly about taking on a contract, killing some bad guys, going to a town to spend your coin on supplies, gear, and wages, then repeating it all over again, there's not a whole lot there for roleplaying, aside from some well-written but short and often choiceless random encounters. So while the enemies I'm listing below are based on the game, they aren't shot for shot recreations. I've taken some artistic liberties to make them more interesting and suited for RPGs than they already are. I'll have some notes at the end on what I changed.

Lindwurms

At first glance, these guys aren't that special. They're dragons. Tough armour, deadly attacks, even a hoard of collected treasure. But while they don't have flight and burning breath, they have something more unique: burrowing and rust-causing blood.

A Lindwurm - Paul Taaks

Lindwurms have a long, snaking body that shifts into a giant tail and two powerful limbs, covered in green, shining scales. Their arm-leg things can pull them across the ground at impressive speeds, but they mostly use this strength to dig. In just a few moments a Lindwurm can dig underneath the earth, moving underground and leaving a trail of upturned earth like the Graboids from Tremors. While they need to come up for air and aren't as smart as "true" dragons, Lindwurms are bright enough to exploit their movement. They love to burrow underneath forests, hedges, and walls in order to hinder those who would pursue them as they flee.

What makes them especially deadly to those who would hunt them is their blood. It's a powerful rusting agent, designed to blunt the edges of metal without destroying it, to better let them digest it. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, they eat metal. While they can secrete it slowly from their mouth, the agent is also used in defense, Xenomorph style. Thankfully, the rust is only skin deep. A vigorous scrub will remove the top layer, leaving the metal beneath actually sharper than before. But by blunting edged weapons and coating armour in a heavy layer of rust – like wearing waterlogged clothes – Lindwurms reduce the effectiveness of their foes after every attack made against them.

 

LINDWURM

HD 6 (30 HP, 15 Attack, 10 Save)

Wants To eat any metal it can find

Armour As chain (scales)

Move 2x crawl, 1x burrow (for up to three rounds between breaths)

Morale 7

Attacks Bite: D6+3, Melee

Tail Swipe: D6-1, Reach, against up to three adjacent targets

A serpent as wide as a cart and as long as a ship, with two powerful limbs at the front of its body and none at the back. As it moves, its green scales glitter in the sunlight, and even in darkness the slightest amount of light creates shimmers and rainbows. When it digs it kicks up copious amounts of loam, creates an obvious disturbance above its location, and causes the ground to rumble and shake. Its maw opens wide to reveals rows upon rows of sharp teeth, and when cut its blood is a vibrant yellow green, which glows with unnatural light.

A Lindwurm's blood rusts metal. Non-blunt metal weapons that deal damage reduce their damage rolls by 1 until cleaned, and every time an attacker lands a non-blunt attack at Melee range, their armour's granted defense is reduced by one step until cleaned.

Anyone with a basic familiarity with the legends of lands where Lindwurms are found, or monsterology as a whole, will know that Lindwurms eat metal. They'll also know that metals like gold and silver are resistant to their rusting, letting them linger in their stomachs for decades. Cutting open a Lindwurm will reveal D100 times D100 cash worth of gold, silver, and jewels (they'll happily eat shiny stones, thinking they're metals).

Alps

Nightmare-inducing psychic vampires from another reality. They cause and feed on nightmares, sneaking into settlements and causing the inhabitants to suffer restless nights for months on end until they die of sleep deprivation or psychic harm. In a stand-up fight, Alps are hardly a threat. But they don't take stand-up fights. In dangerous situations, they can induce sleep in targets who fail a Save, and even target multiple adjacent creatures.

Sleeeeep... - Paul Taaks

Once someone is asleep, an Alp can induce nightmares, draining their health every round and healing the Alp in kind. For Alps aren't creatures of flesh and blood. They have eye sockets but no eyes, mouths and teeth but no digestive tract. Their white, smooth flesh has no bones or blood beneath it, and slicing them open reveals that their skin is as thin as paper. They can't see through walls, but they can sense the presence of anything with a soul, and see despite having no external eyes. (They have one inside their skull.) An Alp is a creature not just related to nightmares – it is a nightmare, and is as much defeated by strong arm and sharp steel as it is by courage and willpower.

What makes Alps truly insidious, however, is how they enter and exit our world. Guilt and fear draw them like moths to a flame, and the truly guilty are bright enough to pull Alps from whatever world they come from into ours. As long as the "lantern" burns an Alp can fade out of our reality, and always threatens to bring more back with it. The only way to stop them from fleeing the moment they're threatened is to remove the source of the guilt.

This guilt, however, is self-determined. They are as likely to be drawn to a murderer as they are to someone in the midst of a religious crisis, and the guilty naturally try to hide their guilt, or don't even recognize it as the cause of the town's nightmares. Even if you can track down the offending party, it's not always so easy to stop them. Not everyone is a murderer you can kill with impunity – sometimes, the guilty party is well-protected, or more often, a sympathetic character the party will want to help through their self-doubt.

And while the party works towards this, the Alps will fight them at every turn. In the night, they will attack the party directly, and when that fails they will send the lantern nightmares designed to exploit their underlying anxiety. They will kill pillars of the community to rile the people up into witch-burning mobs. They will make their nightmares seem to point towards a false source, like a nearby crypt full of undead. They will never let you get a restful sleep.

ALP

HD 2 (10 HP, 11 Attack, 6 Save)

Wants To feed on nightmares, to keep their "guilty lantern" alive and tormented

Armour None

Move 1x crawl, they can crawl up walls like spiders

Morale 3

Attacks Bite: D6-1, Melee, but they only use it if cornered

Humanoid creatures that crawl like a spider, with smooth, ghostly pale skin and empty eye sockets. Their mouths pull back to reveal grinning yellow teeth and bright red gums, and their heads are covered in strange protrusions, like horns and tusks made of flesh. They move as if they had no weight, and when struck by your weapons feel as though they are much lighter and softer than they should be.

An Alp can cause a creature within Near distance, and anyone directly adjacent to it, to Save or fall asleep. Lots of things can wake people up, but spending a round hooting and hollering will wake up anyone within Reach distance, as will any physical harm.

An Alp can cause a sleeping creature to suffer nightmares, dealing D6+1 AP damage every round until the creature wakes. The Alp heals that much damage in kind.

An Alp can fade out of our reality at will. This takes an action and renders the Alp incorporeal until the end of the round, at which point it leaves our world entirely. Alps ignore all physical damage from non-magic, non-silver weapons while incorporeal. If an Alp leaves our reality, it can only return if their guilty lantern still "burns".

Nachzehrers

I would have renamed these guys Ghouls, but I want to make my own version of ghouls, more peaceful ones based on Lovecraft's stories. That, and/or a tougher, more feral ghoul based on the one from Darkest Dungeon. In Battle Brothers these guys were originally called Ghouls before being renamed to Nachzehrers, a name which helps sets them apart and reinforce the game's Germanic setting.

Nachzehrers of increasing size - Paul Taaks

Nachzehrers are created from the corpses of those dead by suicide or accident. Anyone who is felled by their own hand has the potential to become one, although suicide with a concrete purpose, such as self-sacrifice or for honour, tends to prevent them from forming.

Such deaths are far from normal, and not every death results in a Nachzehrer. What makes them so common (at least as far as monsters go) is their ability to make more of themselves. Nachzehrers consume humanoid corpses wherever they can find them, digging up graveyards and attacking peasants and other weak sophonts – creatures with the intelligence and free will of a man – opportunistically. They can devour a corpse in seconds, gorging themselves on the flesh.

As they feed on corpses they grow in size and strength until they can swallow men whole. When they sleep in this bloated state their flesh splits and rends, turning one into two, or even four for the largest ones. In this way a single suicide can quickly spiral out of control, upturning their graveyard before spilling into the countryside in a growing pack.

Nachzehrers have grey, mottled skin, slavering maws full of jagged teeth, and scattered patches of dark black hair. As they consume more corpses they become larger, stronger, and grow spiraling horns, sharper teeth, and more and thicker hair.

NACHZEHRER

HD varies; usually starts at 1 (5 HP, 10 Attack, 5 Save)

Wants To eat the corpses of intelligent creatures

Armour None

Move 1x scurry

Morale 5

Attacks Claw: D6, Melee, +1 damage at 2 HD, +2 at 4 HD

Hunched over, bestial humanoids who move on all fours. Their grey skin is covered in bumps and patches of dark black hair. Each hand ends in sharp claws, uncannily similar to rows of fangs that fill their drooling mouths. When they howl it sounds like a man's imitation of a howl, or perhaps just a pained scream. The largest ones are covered in layers of fat, and have sharp, spiralling horns rising out from their foreheads.

Nachzehrers can eat the corpses of sophonts as well as other Nachzehrers. This takes an action and causes them to grow one size at the end of the round, from 1 HD to 2, and then from 2 to 4. When they grow their current HP is raised to their new maximum, and their Attack and Save are also raised.

A 4 HD Nachzehrer is too full to eat corpses, but is so large it can eat a human. They can swallow a creature within Melee range if they fail a Strength test, dealing D6 AP damage every round until the Nachzehrer is killed. On the plus side, when they are killed, their bloated bodies "pop", freeing the trapped creature without having to cut them free.

So what did I change?

Lindwurms in BB have the acid blood and digested treasure, but not the burrowing. I honestly thought they burrowed, but since they're a rare enemy and one I don't normally like to fight I just don't see them often enough to remember they don't until after I started writing.

Alps are more or less unchanged except for the bit about being attracted to guilt. They also get a damage resistance buff for "existing partly in dreams" which gets stronger the more of your mercenaries are asleep, but that was too finicky for RPG combat so I made them able to escape reality entirely. After that I thought "well what's stopping them from just fleeing and returning endlessly", so I added the guilt attraction so that there's a way to banish them.

Nachzehrers are unchanged. The game implies that big ones become lots of smaller ones, and makes it unclear whether or not they're naturally occurring or the product of suicides, so all I did was clarify it.