No, I’m not talking about the landlord from Three’s Company who thought Jack was gay. I’m talking about that classic beastie who first graced the pages of the Monster Manual.
In my current 1st ed. Night Below campaign, I am getting a lot of use out of monsters I never used, or rarely used in the past. The Roper is one of those ones I probably have not used since the 80’s. Just wasn’t one of my favorite monsters. Well, the party explored an area of NB with ropers in it, so it was time to buck up and refresh myself on these weirdo underworld horrors.
As you probably know, ropers resemble stalagmites and stalactites, and are otherwise all mouth and ropey tentacles. In the MM, the ropers can reach out and grab a victim from 50 feet away, and drag them 10’ per turn towards the mouth, which does a nice 5D4 in damage (yeah, it’s a pain to roll all those D4’s, cause I only have around two of them). If you come in contact with a rope, you will lose half your strength inside 1-3 turns. That is pretty good, and the monster manual entry mentions no saving throw agaist this. I gave my players a break by allowing a save, but this was probably the closest the party has come to losing a member or two anyway. Even though I allowed the save vs. the tentacles, I did rule that anybody caught by a rope was helpless and could not attack or cast spells. All you could do was attempt your “open doors” roll to break free.
With a great magic resistance, and natural resistance to lightning (which the party MU found out about the hard way), they are pretty much only affected by blows and fire.
I used two of these monsters in the same room, and if you are going to use ropers I would suggest you go carefully with having more than one. The party averages around 8th level now, and two ropers were challenging for them. The rewards for the party a great though, as each roper is worth 10,000 experience points and usually has a belly full of gems or coins. The party for sure earned those treats!
I'm trying to recall fighting ropers, but that memory is blurred from running in terror from grells, hook horrors, purple worms and all the nightmares from that third book.
ReplyDeleteSounds great. My memory too is blurry from the last time I battled ropers, but I've always been a fan of them. They are a lot more nasty than I remember.
ReplyDeleteChris: The ropers are in a part of the NB that is a bit off the beaten path and easy to be missed by players if the DM doesn't give them a shove. It is not that important a place to visit, but considering the experience point values of Ropers and Xorn in the area, not to mention around 30,000 GP worth of gems laying around, it is a worthwhile place to be checked out.
ReplyDeleteI came here to make the Three's Company joke, dammit.
ReplyDeleteWill, the only reason I made this post was for the tight, old school sitcom reference!
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