TRYPOPHOBIA WARNING
While most of my monsters aren't too disturbing to look at, this particular monster is very unsettling. If you have trypophobia, or don't like blood, click here to skip the image on the next page.
If you like horrifying creatures, however, proceed for one of my most disturbing yet.
Special Thank You!
Thank you to Joshua Peters for allowing me to borrow his expertise on Zoology, and to Kaiya for always being able to up the horror factor!
Sanguinam Toad
The Blood Beast
Spiciness: 4/5
While the Sanguinam Toad presents a lot of danger to one party member at a time through use of its Swallow ability, it lacks any form of insta-kill ability, or AoE, making TPKs nearly impossible (unless you throw a LOT of Toads out). The true danger to the party's overall health is the Tadpoles; if 3 latch onto a single target without hit dice to spare, they could kill the target in 2 rounds (with 6 stacks of exhaustion).
Preparation
The Sanguinam Toad is a horrifying beast-- but also a great parent. It carries its tadpoles in its own back, which feast on its blood until they are grown enough to hunt on their own.
Cooking the Toad
Round 1: With a 15ft bonus action tongue attack and a 30ft jump, you should be able to hit most party members on the first turn. Aim for someone with a low AC (toads know not to chew through plate mail at least) and if possible, someone size Small. You want to jump in, grab someone with your tongue, bite them (with advantage from the Sticky Tongue grappling effect), and then jump away with them. If you managed to grab a size Small person-- congrats, your speed isn't halved by grappling them, so you remain mobile.
Round 2: Start off by swallowing the creature you've grappled (it's rude to fight with your mouth full), and then continue to hop away from melee opponents happily with your now digesting prey; if you provoke an attack of opportunity, fine! That's one more tadpole spawned. Try to get within 15ft of a ranged opponent and use Sticky Tongue on them; if you succeed, they'll have disadvantage on their ranged attacks and be within range of the Retributive Gore ability.
Don't forget to regain 10hp at the end of your turn from Sanguine Regeneration!
Round 3+ Now bite the already grappled creature (with advantage)-- and continue this attack pattern. If the swallowed creature dies, great! They're now considered an Object (not a creature, per RAW), and you can swallow another.
If you get low on health: Simply hop away to heal.
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Cooking the Tadpole
Tadpoles are deliberately simple to run-- after all, there's going to be a lot of them. Since the Tadpoles can spawn once per turn, that means there's a potential of (N+1) x T new ones per round, where N is the number of party members and T is the number of toads.
If the Tadpole isn't latched: Wiggle towards the nearest creature, then use an action to Latch and a bonus action to Drain. If this fails, the Tadpole takes 1 damage.
If the Tadpole is Latched: Bonus action to Drain.
How to Survive
Wondering what your party might do to fight off such an encounter? It's simple, really:
Stay Back
If the party stays 20ft away from the Toads, there's a much lower chance of the Tadpoles being able to Latch (since they'll be attacking on their own, rather than using the Sanguinam Toad's Retributive Gore for the attack roll). If they stay 25ft back, the Tadpoles won’t even be able to reach the party members with their slow speed of 5ft, though to make the encounter spicier, give them some water or blood to swim through with their 30ft swim speed.
Use BIG hits!
If you're going to damage the Toad, deal a LOT of damage. Dealing 1d4+dex damage to the toad only to miss all your attacks means you did 5 damage to the Toad, but spawned a whole new enemy.
Ready your action
Retributive Gore only triggers once per turn-- which means a particularly smart player might ready their action to fire when the Toad spawns a new Tadpole, allowing them to deal extra damage without spawning another tadpole.
Areas of Effect
Tadpoles don't have a lot of health, so AoEs are likely to kill them even if they pass the save. The problem with this is that the Tadpoles are likely to be sharing a space with your allies-- but an evocation wizard can simply have the spell not affect their allies.
Still, if a player has health to burn but is quickly gaining stacks of exhaustion, it may be better to simply hit them with the spell in an effort to prevent instant death at 6 stacks of exhaustion!
Sanguinam Toad
Large beast
- Armor Class 13
- Hit Points 68 (8d10 + 24)
- Speed 30 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 19 (+4) 17 (+3) 17 (+3) 2 (-4) 10 (+0) 3 (-4)
- Senses darkvision 30 ft., passive Perception 10
- Challenge 5 (1,800 XP) Proficiency Bonus +3
Amphibious. The Toad can breathe air and water.
Standing Leap. The Toad's long jump is up to 30 feet and its high jump is up to 15 feet, with or without a running start.
Sticky Tongue If the Toad is not grappling a creature, it may use its bonus action to attempt to pull a creature into its mouth. 15ft range, +6 to hit. On a hit, the creature is grappled (DC 15 to escape) and pulled up to 15ft closer to the toad.
Retributive Gore Once per turn when the Toad takes damage from any source, it bursts a blood-bubble on its back, sending out a leech-like Tadpole towards a creature within 15ft of it. Make an attack (+6 to hit) against the creature. On a hit, the Tadpole latches on the creature it's attached to. See Tadpole statblock for details.
Sanguine Regeneration. If the Toad has a creature swallowed at the end of its turn, it regenerates 10 hit points.
Actions
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 20 (3d10 + 4) piercing damage, and the target is grappled (escape DC 15). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, and the toad can't bite another target. This attack has advantage on creatures already grappled by the toad.
Swallow. The toad makes one bite attack against a Medium or smaller target it is grappling. If the attack hits, the target is swallowed, and the grapple ends. The swallowed target is blinded and restrained, it has total cover against attacks and other effects outside the toad, and it takes 14 (4d6) acid damage at the start of each of the toad's turns. The toad can have only one target swallowed at a time.
If the toad dies, a swallowed creature is no longer restrained by it and can escape from the corpse using 5 feet of movement, exiting prone.
Sanguinam Tadpole
Tiny beast
- Armor Class 12
- Hit Points 3 (1d4)+1
- Speed 5 ft., swim 20 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 4 (-3) 15 (+2) 12 (+1) 3 (-4) 12 (+1) 7 (-2)
- Senses Darkvision 30ft
- Challenge 0 (0 XP) Proficiency Bonus +2
Blood Sustenance. The Tadpole must continually drink blood to survive. Usually it does so from the body of its parent (which does not harm the toad), but can feed from any creature to do so. If it ends a turn without Draining, it takes 1 necrotic damage.
Drain If a Tadpole is Latched onto a target, it may Drain them as a bonus action. The creature it's latched onto rolls one die equal to their hit dice (ie: a d8 if their hit dice is a d8), and loses 1 hit die from their pool if they have any remaining. That creature is damaged for the amount rolled, and the Tadpole gains an equal amount of temporary hit points.
If the creature has no remaining hit dice, it still takes the damage it normally would, but also gains one stack of Exhaustion.
Actions
Latch. Melee weapon attack, targets a creature that shares its space, +4 to hit. On a hit, the Tadpole is connected to the creature, and is moved when it moves. When the tadpole reaches 0 hit points, it falls off.
Latching is not grappling!
When designing this, I thought about using the grappling rules for this-- but it doesn't fit well. How could one use Acrobatics to pull a leech off oneself? And how is a tadpole (with -3 to Strength) going to hold onto its prey with an Athletics check? It's not just holding onto someone-- it has sunk its teeth deep into them and begun to drink them dry. To put it succinctly--
don't use the grapple rules here.
Thank you for checking out this monster!
If you liked this, check out my book of Spicy 5e Encounters meant to offer your players a more challenging experience,
or check out Pip's Ode to Eccentricism for Classes, Subclasses, Player Races & more!
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