What are your most successful monsters?

[NeoTiamat]

I'm currently approaching the close of a Fey-heavy episode in my campaign, which seems to be a sufficiently successful that it's prompted the comments of 'Why don't more people use Fey?', which in turn got me thinking what kinds of monsters are the most successful.

Which creatures were most memorable, what wer the scariest monsters, the most eerie ones, the sinister fiends that made the players sweat? Which monsters, once revealed, prompted the shocked gasps of surprise or the terrified shudders? What horrid entities battled the PCs to a standstill in epic encounters?

So let's see if we can get some nice collective wisdom on this. DMs, which monsters have you used to greatest success, the ones that caused the biggest emotional impact on the PCs. Players, looking back on your career as doers of good, which monsters made you fear?

[Jester of the FoS]

For me as a player? Chulls. I loath freakin' chulls.
It doesn't help that I have a tendency to play small-sized support characters in 3e.

[Sorti]

Surely Toben the Many, with some added ghost story

[HuManBing]

It's weird and probably cliche, but my players have generally been more afraid of my human enemies than of the supernatural stuff I throw at them. They're naturally respectful of Azalin and his undead legions, but there's something about Drakov's living sadists that makes them really hate him with a passion.

[Lucius]

I think the most successful monsters in my campaign are both humans ( I love to use human villains) and hags (with these I was able to really scare my players).

Some deserving an honorable mention are demons, ghosts and...Vertheig, this one was really a surprise for my party.

[Tykus]

For me, it would have to be Leederick, the Phantom Lover. I did a 3.5e update of him, making him a boogeyman fey DL. Needless to say, the players thought I was using "Rule Zero" to keep him alive but I wasn't (they just hadn't found his weaknesses)

[Jester of the FoS]

As a DM I had two.

My most successful bad guy was Beezly. I poor choice of names, but at the time it worked. He was a pit fiend that shapechanged into the mayor of Mordent town and acted as the group's 'guide'. He sent them on missions and tasks that furthered his goals.
Meanwhile, they occasionally stumbled into his side plots and he had to interfere, smacking them around but never killing him. They always wondered why the evil pit fiend that was dogging their steps never finished them off (they assumed I was being a nice DM. He just didn't want his unwitting minions dead).

He was this lovely physical threat that I could have smack them around without worrying about killing them because he always held back.

The second Big Bad I had was a human. Varney the faux vampire (named from obvious sources). He was a human con-man who used superstition to pretend to be monsters to receive tributes. He was also involved in a number of land scams and other mild evil schemes.

[NeoTiamat]

Most of the rest I can understand, but why Chulls? One doesn't commonly associate giant lobster-men with inducing player trauma. PC trauma, yes, player trauma, not usually.

Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly), I've had good luck with quasi-human villains, in particular a rather deranged Necromancer who's suffered a few too many DPCs.

But monster wise, I tend to return to three creature-types time after time:

• -Undead. They're classic, they're easy to link into the plot when your archvillain is a necromancer, and they're very diverse. You want a bruiser? Invest in a mummy or a hulking corpse from Libris Mortis. Need some zippy skirmishers? Incorporeal undead are very hard to beat in this role. Casters? Start off with Devourers in Core and move on to Vitreous Drinkers in MMIV. Not to mention the dozens of templated undead which give you unsurpassed variety.
  
  -Outsiders. HD per HD, Outsiders are everything I love in a monster, from a combat perspective. They have resistances, they have damage reduction, they have spell resistance, they usually have pretty good AC and HP. They also frequently have several SLAs, and are often very good in melee combat. I tend to recolor outsiders some to get them into Ravenloft (usually as spirits or some kind of magical construct), but I've no complaints.
  
  -Fey. On the surface, they're not very impressive foes, and I'm sorry, but Shadow Fey never really did it for me. But WotC has released a number of delightfully sinister Faeries in it's time, such as the Frostwind Virago, Banshrae, or Verdant Prince. Moreover, what attracts me to the Fey is the kind of twisted logic that characterizes them. They're creatures of story, and as one of my rather perceptive players noted, to a Fey, the narrative logic of a story is as valid as any kind of normal logic. I also add a heavy dose of Mephistophelian 'Let's make a deal', which is fun.

[Jester of the FoS]

Most of the rest I can understand, but why Chulls? One doesn't commonly associate giant lobster-men with inducing player trauma. PC trauma, yes, player trauma, not usually.

The trauma of watching your gnome bard get chewed on and being helpless on the floor while the rest of the party gets mauled. Feelings of impotence and such. And trying to beat its 17+d20 grapple check.

[Archedius]

Mohrgs have always been a favorite of mine to use- if you overwhelm the party it's easy to simply kidnap PC's or NPC's to do vile things to while their fellows try and rescue them.

Heucuva's can be fun. If you take the god they used to worship and have the monster begin to embody what that god considered sinful...well it can get disturbing (and gross).

Barghests are pretty cool to have emptying cemetaries.

[Archedius]

Mohrgs have always been a favorite of mine to use- if you overwhelm the party it's easy to simply kidnap PC's or NPC's to do vile things to while their fellows try and rescue them.

Heucuva's can be fun. If you take the god they used to worship and have the monster begin to embody what that god considered sinful...well it can get disturbing (and gross).

Barghests are pretty cool to have emptying cemetaries.

[alhoon]

The FoS members! Sneaky strange guys, experimenting with reality to control the world. Have a host of cloak-and-dagger followers.

[High Priest Mikhal]

The FoS members! Sneaky strange guys, experimenting with reality to control the world. Have a host of cloak-and-dagger followers.

I hope you mean the in-game FoS. I mean, it's not like any of us on the boards are pursuing evil plans for world domination...no, no domination of the Earth here. Really. There's not. I mean it.

The one I remember causing the most havoc was a Voodan from Souragne called Pere Morte (Father Death). What was supposed to be a one-off adventure turned into a mini-campaign as my players learned to fear and hate this man. He used nightcrawlers (check out the Lonesome Road website) and other nasty undead to terrorize the players, particularly skeletons.

When they cornered him in a New Orleans-style cemetary (crypts above ground) he called on his magic to reanimate the bones of those interred to attack. In New Orleans a body is interred for a year and a day, and in that time it's often reduced to mere bones by the humid heat and insects. They take out the coffin and stuff the bones in the back to make room for other bodies, and there can be ten to twenty different sets of bones in some crypts.

Being skeletons these were easily taken down, but not a moment after the last skull was bashed in they heard childrens' giggles. A wave of nightcrawlers, still looking like the children they'd been if very visibly dead, coming towards them. The way the creatures just kept getting back up (it was high tide and the cemetary was swamped, so I assumed their regeneration was working) and the fact they looked like kids finally broke the PCs and they retreated. Up until Pere Morte was killed they were stalked by nightcrawlers, always hiding and disappearing yet leaving behind evidence they had been there when the players looked for them.

[JinnTolser]

The last time I ran Ravenloft, which was several years ago now, there are two in particular that stuck out.

The first was just a half-Vistani ranger named Nikolai. He was the personal nemesis of the party's own ranger, and as an archer he could hit them from afar and they'd have loads of trouble finding out where he was. By the time they'd get to the tree or faraway hilltop he'd attacked from, he'd be long gone. He ended up becoming a Nosferatu later on in the campaign, and they killed him when they could finally get close enough. That was a proud moment for the entire party, as they'd been dealing with this guy since the start of the campaign.

The second was something I created out of Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead, based on the Cannibal Zombie but much stronger. Two of my PCs were separated from the rest when they encountered this thing. It was one heck of a tough fight, but they finally put it down. As they started to walk on and continue the discussion they'd been involved in beforehand, the thing stood back up. The expression on their faces still brings a smile to my face years later. They never did figure out how to permanently kill it, so after defeating the zombie again, they dismembered it, locked the head in a box, and had it blessed by a priest and buried far, far away from the rest of the body.

[HuManBing]

One of the most memorable villains I used was an ogre mage. This was a homebrew campaign that carried over to Ravenloft, though, so I don't know how well ogre magi would fit into a completely Ravenloft campaign.

The ogre mage was a keen tactical thinker and a charismatic leader of a band of evil humanoids. He was considerably more lawful than others of his kind, and he held together a ragtag band with admirable grip. He also knew talent when he saw it - instead of trying to kill the PCs, he initially started trying to recruit them, based on theirs skills. He also trained them in some rudimentary magic. At one point they had to help his mate (a female normal ogre) deliver a stillborn baby, and one of the PCs with Healing had to reach inside her to tear out the afterbirth. They saw the ogre mage weeping over his dead child and his grievously injured wife - that made him more human for them.

Later on he became an unexpected ally in Ravenloft, by attacking the Falkovnians. When Vigo Drakov shot him in the eye with an acid arrow, he swore a long, slow revenge on Vigo. The PCs eventually delivered Vigo to him and the ogre mage spent two weeks torturing Vigo to death.