What if the Kraken is too big to release? Niels RPG Toons uses cartoon-style fantasy art to tell vibrant, expressive stories, including one about a tentacle monster so big it's an ecosystem unto itself. Get monster stats, lore, and papercraft miniatures for monsters from the Stars and Sea campaign bundle at https://www.patreon.com/posts/free-download-43834622
Read the transcript and get more from the show: https://scintilla.studio/monster-niels-rpg-toons-makes-a-monstrosity
Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio
Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter
Meet my guest RPG Toons:
https://www.patreon.com/rpgtoons
https://twitter.com/rpgtoons
Opening music from ComposerJD and Hoffzart at AdventureMusic: www.patreon.com/adventuremusic
Closing music from Jason Shaw at Audionautix.com
This Monstrosity itself is too large to fight
Niels - RPG Toons:in any traditional sense.
Niels - RPG Toons:Like you can't just pick up your spells and your swords and go down to the bottom
Niels - RPG Toons:of the sea and start stabbing this thing.
Niels - RPG Toons:You have to come up with more interesting means of dealing with it.
Niels - RPG Toons:The threat comes not from the monstrosity itself but from what it does to the
Niels - RPG Toons:environment . It's been releasing little twinkling spores into the sea
Niels - RPG Toons:that infest creatures with these sort of starry mutations , who then end up
Niels - RPG Toons:doing the bidding of this Monstrosity which wants to do one thing and one thing
Niels - RPG Toons:alone, and that is consume all magic.
Niels - RPG Toons:It wants to eat magic, get bigger and bigger until it has eaten everything.
Lucas:Can you tell me how you would like to be introduced?
Niels - RPG Toons:With appropriate levels of pomp?
Niels - RPG Toons:No, I don't, I don't know.
Niels - RPG Toons:Um, RPG, toons, I guess, Neils RPGtoons.
Niels - RPG Toons:I don't really have any other names.
Niels - RPG Toons:I studied game art and game design for video games at at uni.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then during that time I also got back into role-playing games.
Niels - RPG Toons:And this was also when I was studying game art and I was sort of practicing
Niels - RPG Toons:that standard fantasy painting style.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then.
Niels - RPG Toons:At some point someone compared the night elf that I was playing to
Niels - RPG Toons:Dede from "Dexter's Laboratory."
Lucas:No.
Niels - RPG Toons:So I was like, that's really, it's funny.
Niels - RPG Toons:I, I want to draw that.
Niels - RPG Toons:So I took a, I sort of took that style and, and drew my character
Niels - RPG Toons:as Dede from Dexter's Lab.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I was like, wow, this is really fun.
Niels - RPG Toons:Let's see what else I can do with this.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then I started drawing more and more fantasy cartoons, and kind of
Niels - RPG Toons:completely abandoned the painting really because the cartoons just seemed so
Niels - RPG Toons:much more expressive and interesting.
Niels - RPG Toons:So how it started was doing character commissions.
Niels - RPG Toons:People started to ask me if I could draw their character in my style.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I called so many requests for that.
Niels - RPG Toons:I thought.
Niels - RPG Toons:I should start up a identity for it, so RPG toons was born.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then if there's, if I could say two things that I want to accomplish
Niels - RPG Toons:it's to sort of capture the spirit of modern morning cartoons, like
Niels - RPG Toons:say She-Ra or Avatar and translate that spirit into D&D campaigns.
Niels - RPG Toons:Cause I think that D&D can be a lot more festive and emotional than
Niels - RPG Toons:Wizards of the Coast wants you to believe with their presentation.
Niels - RPG Toons:It's a monster called the Monstrosity which is a gigantic tentacle.
Niels - RPG Toons:Most of it lives under the sea.
Niels - RPG Toons:I mean, nothing new or special about that.
Niels - RPG Toons:But I find it interesting because this Monstrosity itself is too large
Niels - RPG Toons:to fight in any traditional sense.
Niels - RPG Toons:Like, you can't just pick up your spells and your swords and go down to the bottom
Niels - RPG Toons:of the sea and start stabbing this thing.
Niels - RPG Toons:You have to come up with more interesting means of dealing with it.
Niels - RPG Toons:And the whole point of the campaign that we're building around it, called the
Niels - RPG Toons:Stars of the Sea , is about the players discovering that this monster's there, why
Niels - RPG Toons:it's there and eventually how to stop it.
Niels - RPG Toons:So the threat comes not from the Monstrosity itself but from what it does
Niels - RPG Toons:to the environment . It's been releasing little twinkling spores into the sea
Niels - RPG Toons:that infest creatures with these sort of starry mutations who then end up doing
Niels - RPG Toons:the bidding of this Monstrosity which wants to do one thing and one thing
Niels - RPG Toons:alone and that is consume all magic.
Niels - RPG Toons:It wants to eat magic, get bigger and bigger until it has eaten everything.
Niels - RPG Toons:So it creates all of these little monsters to try and accomplish this.
Lucas:It's a many-tentacled monster who lives under the sea.
Lucas:And, while that is certainly a familiar trope I'd love to hear
Lucas:how you how you encountered that archetype and what you feel like
Lucas:you've added to it or taken away.
Niels - RPG Toons:Now that's an interesting question because I , I really
Niels - RPG Toons:like taking very familiar tropes and then trying to get the most out of them
Niels - RPG Toons:what I can and in the first campaign that we did That that is not this one.
Niels - RPG Toons:That's about like the, the trope is town on a giant turtle.
Niels - RPG Toons:Right.
Niels - RPG Toons:We've seen that a hundred times before.
Niels - RPG Toons:I was like, I want to do that, but really get into everything.
Niels - RPG Toons:You know, where did this turtle come from?
Niels - RPG Toons:Why is the town on there?
Niels - RPG Toons:The campaign starts with the turtle sleeping underground.
Niels - RPG Toons:What happens when that wakes up?
Niels - RPG Toons:What happens to the town?
Niels - RPG Toons:What happens to the the people?
Niels - RPG Toons:How can you as an adventurer make a difference in this?
Niels - RPG Toons:What is essentially a disaster presented as a fun, fun adventure.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think the same counts for this Monstrosity.
Niels - RPG Toons:I wanted to take.
Niels - RPG Toons:The idea of a sort of an unknowable "C'thulian" horror and try
Niels - RPG Toons:to put our own spin on that.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think that's a very exciting way of working.
Niels - RPG Toons:I think that it works particularly well for role-playing games because
Niels - RPG Toons:you can really work with what people already know and because of that, take
Niels - RPG Toons:a lot of shortcuts in people's brain.
Niels - RPG Toons:Cause when you say big tentacle monster, only the ocean, everything
Niels - RPG Toons:one already knows what that means.
Niels - RPG Toons:So you don't need to spend that much time explaining that.
Niels - RPG Toons:And you can instead explain the, the minutia and the mechanics of it because
Niels - RPG Toons:everyone already knows what the big ideas.
Niels - RPG Toons:So you don't have to explain that again which I think is very
Niels - RPG Toons:convenient for these type of things.
Niels - RPG Toons:Cause I think it helps dungeon masters who need to take this story
Niels - RPG Toons:and run with it run it better.
Lucas:Yeah, it's part of a shared cultural experience that is it's
Lucas:really interesting to me that the D & D is becoming the medium of oral
Lucas:storytelling where we get to access the collective consciousness and pull
Lucas:on those images that people have.
Lucas:So when you talk about the mechanics and the minutiae let's One of the reasons that
Lucas:I love doing this with game designers is that they're not just working with the
Lucas:storytelling and the literary aspect.
Lucas:They have to turn it into something mechanical and technical that we can use.
Lucas:So the monstrosity specifically how is that, how did you bring
Lucas:that into fifth edition, D and D from a mechanical perspective?
Niels - RPG Toons:Right.
Niels - RPG Toons:So, to begin with.
Niels - RPG Toons:I knew that I didn't want this to be a monster that you can fight because
Niels - RPG Toons:I think that's a really boring climax to, to a campaign where you just
Niels - RPG Toons:fight the big dragon or something.
Niels - RPG Toons:I always want something more interesting to happen there, but of course you do
Niels - RPG Toons:need stuff in the world to interact with.
Niels - RPG Toons:So the goal was to design a few monsters that tell the story of
Niels - RPG Toons:how this Monstrosity interacts with the world without people having
Niels - RPG Toons:to actually fight the big monster.
Niels - RPG Toons:Right?
Niels - RPG Toons:They'll have to come up with something more interesting for that.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I, I don't want to get into that here for any listeners that
Niels - RPG Toons:might be following our production.
Niels - RPG Toons:Don't know how to, how it ends yet.
Niels - RPG Toons:But so how this Monstrosity will then manipulate the world is by
Niels - RPG Toons:releasing a tiny little spores in the ocean and they infest other
Niels - RPG Toons:creatures and form other creatures.
Niels - RPG Toons:And those are then the creatures that we can interact with.
Lucas:For some of my guests, it's very helpful to talk about, well,
Lucas:this is a large aberration, neutral, evil and it's a very easy way
Lucas:to do it.
Lucas:I'm not getting the sense that that's the heart and soul of this.
Niels - RPG Toons:yeah, no, we don't even publish alignments or
Niels - RPG Toons:challenge ratings or anything like that with our creatures because.
Niels - RPG Toons:I guess it's just not important to us.
Niels - RPG Toons:what those things are,
Lucas:Huh.
Lucas:Okay.
Lucas:That's interesting.
Lucas:So if you don't publish those things, what do you publish?
Niels - RPG Toons:Stories of how they, how they live in the world.
Niels - RPG Toons:So instead of saying that this Melissa, if I had to put an alignment to it,
Niels - RPG Toons:I mean, neutral, neutral, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:Just the ultimate neutral.
Niels - RPG Toons:It doesn't have a motivation all at once is to consume.
Niels - RPG Toons:There is no morality to it.
Niels - RPG Toons:Eh, now it's become a very complicated question.
Niels - RPG Toons:I see.
Niels - RPG Toons:I look, I can tell you one of the, the more interesting sort of design challenges
Niels - RPG Toons:that we had to tackle in order to design these things, because there's this
Niels - RPG Toons:concept that it wants to consume magic.
Niels - RPG Toons:So we have a lot of mechanics that revolve around that and we wanted this creature
Niels - RPG Toons:to , to be able to directly Interact with the players on that sort of story level.
Niels - RPG Toons:But you run into a problem there where you can't just make all of
Niels - RPG Toons:these courageous resistant or immune to magic, because that sucks, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:If you have a wizard in your party, they're not going to have a fun time.
Niels - RPG Toons:So with every one of these expressions of the most diversity we had to come up with
Niels - RPG Toons:a, sort of a different, a unique way of how it is empowered by spells But that's
Niels - RPG Toons:still, if you fight a group of them spell cast is still have opportunities to act
Niels - RPG Toons:and aren't just seeing immune in their screen to make a video game reference.
Niels - RPG Toons:So we have one, for example, that is just a bunch of tentacles.
Niels - RPG Toons:And whenever you hit it with a spell, it spawns another tentacle and it
Niels - RPG Toons:like, it gets increasingly strong.
Niels - RPG Toons:The more spells you throw at it, but it still takes damage
Niels - RPG Toons:and it will still go down.
Niels - RPG Toons:It just increased in strength.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then there's another one that gets a temporary shield
Niels - RPG Toons:when you hit him with the spell.
Niels - RPG Toons:So there becomes more of a strategy of, "Do I unload as much as I can in
Niels - RPG Toons:one round so it can only shield as much as one round's worth or do we go more
Niels - RPG Toons:with a de-buff strategy and we leave the damage up to the, the rogues and
Niels - RPG Toons:the fighters and things like that?"
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think there, there will be a few more creatures to come that play
Niels - RPG Toons:into this whole "eating magic" stuff.
Lucas:What is the environment in which you would like to see this run, how
Lucas:does the environment interact with this?
Niels - RPG Toons:This all takes place in a coastal city that is called the
Niels - RPG Toons:Resplendent City of Silver Spires.
Niels - RPG Toons:And the idea is that the city is incredibly high-magic and in particular,
Niels - RPG Toons:in the field of magic items, like they produce a lot of them and they live
Niels - RPG Toons:relatively modern lives and powered by all this magic stuff which is of course
Niels - RPG Toons:a great target for this monstrosity.
Niels - RPG Toons:It wants to eat all this magic.
Niels - RPG Toons:It's delicious.
Niels - RPG Toons:So players will be fighting a lot of these little monsters in different places
Niels - RPG Toons:around the city where they can see them interact with the magic and various ways.
Niels - RPG Toons:Like for example, the first time that they'll be encountering these
Niels - RPG Toons:courageous, if they follow the campaign as intended, which of course they
Niels - RPG Toons:don't have to this is when a couple of holiday makers on the beach is
Niels - RPG Toons:like one is proposing to the other.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then they set off some illusory fireworks to celebrate
Niels - RPG Toons:their romantic moment.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then a bunch of tentacle monsters rush out from there,
Niels - RPG Toons:from the ocean to come grab him.
Niels - RPG Toons:And the idea said, then of course the heroes jump in to save them.
Niels - RPG Toons:And that sort of kicks off the the, the whole story.
Niels - RPG Toons:And there are various other moments where we expect.
Niels - RPG Toons:The players to encounter the monsters interacting with magic and various
Niels - RPG Toons:ways where they are stuck on a magic engine and you have to like scrub them
Niels - RPG Toons:off or defeat them in a different way.
Niels - RPG Toons:And there are places where they are particularly attracted to bards
Niels - RPG Toons:and then you have to Yeah, figure out which bars are infested by the
Niels - RPG Toons:monstrosity in which ones aren't.
Niels - RPG Toons:And who can you save and who do you have to well kill, I guess, or a cure,
Niels - RPG Toons:if you can find a way to cure them.
Lucas:Do you think the Monstrosity or, the Stars of the Sea is meant to be
Lucas:true to life in any way, or to tell us something about the world we live in?
Niels - RPG Toons:To really fully answer that question, I have to dig a
Niels - RPG Toons:little deeper into the origins of the monster because this threat did not come
Niels - RPG Toons:from outer space or a different plane.
Niels - RPG Toons:It wasn't summoned by some great evil thinker.
Niels - RPG Toons:It is the accidental result of years and years of accumulated magic trash that
Niels - RPG Toons:eventually gained some form of sentience.
Niels - RPG Toons:I think that one of the possible sort of endings for this campaign
Niels - RPG Toons:is that the Monstrosity is defeated, not by a fight, but by structural
Niels - RPG Toons:reform and giving up magic items.
Niels - RPG Toons:Essentially stop feeding the beast and it will stop growing.
Niels - RPG Toons:And the idea is that this whole story really reflects the way
Niels - RPG Toons:that our world deals with issues like climate change and pollution.
Niels - RPG Toons:Hopefully when it all comes together the players will feel like
Niels - RPG Toons:that's what they've experienced.
Niels - RPG Toons:And our hope is that we will empower them with a way to actually
Niels - RPG Toons:solve it, which is unfortunately not so easy in our real world.
Niels - RPG Toons:I mean, these are issues that my wife and I are generally concerned with and I
Niels - RPG Toons:think everyone should be And when we were talking about what campaign to tackle
Niels - RPG Toons:next we started talking about what sort of deeper stories we could tell with
Niels - RPG Toons:each of the campaign ideas that we had.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then with this one, which started with a very simple idea again, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:"Big monster under the sea," that was the basic premise is big
Niels - RPG Toons:"C'thulian" monster under the sea.
Niels - RPG Toons:And we were like, okay.
Niels - RPG Toons:So how do we make that meaningful, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:How do we put meaning in that?
Niels - RPG Toons:And then we sort of slowly came up with that.
Niels - RPG Toons:And then everything started falling into place because we have this big city,
Niels - RPG Toons:there'll be lots of factions there and they are paralyzed by bureaucracy to do
Niels - RPG Toons:anything about this because they are too comfortable and they are, they have very
Niels - RPG Toons:nice lives that they don't want to change.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think that a lot of people Have that problem in real life too.
Niels - RPG Toons:I mean, including me, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:I'm not a Paragon.
Niels - RPG Toons:I'm not excluded from this whole issue.
Niels - RPG Toons:I also would like to keep all my cool gadgets and I too want to
Niels - RPG Toons:fly to my parents twice a year.
Niels - RPG Toons:You know what I mean?
Niels - RPG Toons:Fewer.
Niels - RPG Toons:So, so yeah, we, we were motivated to try and tell that story in a way and
Niels - RPG Toons:I'm not sure if there even is a moral message, we just want it to reflect
Niels - RPG Toons:what we see as the worlds truths
Niels - RPG Toons:in a DD story.
Lucas:Yeah.
Lucas:It's less about getting people an answer and more about giving them
Lucas:a way to state the problem or a way to to, to really understand it.
Niels - RPG Toons:Yeah.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think also very importantly a way a route to catharsis, right?
Niels - RPG Toons:A way to act where in their real lives they might not be able to because I
Niels - RPG Toons:think that a lot of people struggle with this sort of feeling of powerlessness.
Niels - RPG Toons:I know I do.
Niels - RPG Toons:And I think that.
Niels - RPG Toons:Allowing a story like this to play out through a D D campaign, you can actually
Niels - RPG Toons:conclude that feeling because in the D and D campaign, you can win and you can
Niels - RPG Toons:make change and you can change the world.
Niels - RPG Toons:But in real life, that's not that easy, but you know, invest
Niels - RPG Toons:a few game sessions in a campaign like this, and maybe you can so.
Niels - RPG Toons:I think there'll be a nice feeling.
Niels - RPG Toons:I notice I'm really enjoying playing the campaign, so I'm of course,
Niels - RPG Toons:very biased because we rewrote it.
Niels - RPG Toons:All right.
Niels - RPG Toons:So, yeah.
Lucas:well, Hey I'm a firm believer that if if you don't like the thing
Lucas:that you make, nobody else will.
Niels - RPG Toons:Yeah.
Niels - RPG Toons:I think that's part of why we ended up in this particular business
Niels - RPG Toons:as well, because I've worked for.
Niels - RPG Toons:Companies in the past.
Niels - RPG Toons:And the beautiful thing about being able to just have an office with my
Niels - RPG Toons:wife and work on all our own stories is that no one can tell us what to make.
Niels - RPG Toons:We, we just get to do our own.
Niels - RPG Toons:Story.
Niels - RPG Toons:Uh, Thank you.
Niels - RPG Toons:Was it the coast for making open game license that enables us to do
Niels - RPG Toons:this and thank you all our patrons who so sweetly offer up their money
Niels - RPG Toons:every month for us to make all these stories to really change the left.
Niels - RPG Toons:So the better, I think it's very nice.
Niels - RPG Toons:Okay.
Lucas:Well, that's great, man.
Lucas:I'm glad that we live in a world that is capable of
Lucas:supporting businesses like these.
Lucas:And I'm really glad to be able to introduce you to people who might
Lucas:not have heard of you by this point
Niels - RPG Toons:me and my wife are in w have a Patrion it's patrion.com/rpg tunes.
Niels - RPG Toons:And on this, we release.
Niels - RPG Toons:Sort of these monthly packages of content that we call quest packs and all of
Niels - RPG Toons:these quest backs build up to a campaign.
Niels - RPG Toons:And last year we finished our first campaign.
Niels - RPG Toons:So if you sign up for patrial now there's already a complete
Niels - RPG Toons:campaign for you to try out.
Niels - RPG Toons:Complete from start to finish.
Niels - RPG Toons:And now we are working months in monthly installments on our next campaign.
Niels - RPG Toons:And that is the stars of the sea where the most rusty will feature.
Niels - RPG Toons:Yeah, fun.
Niels - RPG Toons:I mean, we do all sorts of other fun stuff on Patrion as well.
Niels - RPG Toons:We have a discord server that's very active where we play test our games.
Niels - RPG Toons:And there are some entrepreneurial patrons who have set up games
Niels - RPG Toons:for themselves in there as well.
Niels - RPG Toons:So there are lots of games and campaigns going on all the time.
Mike Holik:When you reached down to your holster to pull out , your standard
Mike Holik:repeater, you instead pull out a banana.
Mike Holik:You're not quite sure how it got there, but you hear this chittering
Mike Holik:robotic laughter come from somewhere behind you and you turn
Mike Holik:around and there's nothing there.
Mike Holik:Investigating a little bit closely.
Mike Holik:You come up to a cabinet and open it up and about a dozen inch tall little
Mike Holik:robots that look like they're made out of scrap and other random material
Mike Holik:fall out making this chittering noise.
Mike Holik:And they're carrying your your repeater blaster and they run into the other room.