Blood Terrors appear to be immortal, and are often found as tomb guardians in the cyclopean barrows of the Tyrannis Gígās (the Tyrant Giants). Long mistaken for some sort of transformation of the Tyrannis’ skyldur (their human serfs or chattel), the true nature of the Blood Terrors was rediscovered when the long-forgotten Idol of the Beast was recovered among the island kingdoms of the south. What had once sealed the Beast’s connection to this world now became a conduit through which its will could be made manifest and around which new cults could arise in dim memory of a primitive and bestial past.

Blood Terrors are a pure extrusion of the Blood of the Beast. Their glistening bodies — with skin-less musculature defined by clotted coagulations — boil with a raw, powerful rage.

BLOOD TERRORS (CR 6): 60 hp (8d8+24), AC 19, claws +11/+11 (2d6+4), Save +9, Ability DC 16.
Str 16, Dex 12, Con 18, Int 10, Wis 14, Cha 10
Skills: Balance +9, Climb +11

Blood Spray (Ex): Works like a grease spell. Persists for 1 minute. Triggered as immediate action if injured. Does not affect other creatures of the Beast.

Blood Blight (Su): 1/day, exude a 20 ft.-radius mist of blood that acts like unholy blight (3d8 points of damage; sickened for 1d4 rounds). Will save halves damage and negates sickened. (Sickened is -2 to all action checks.)

Immune poison
Resist acid 10, cold 10, fire 10
Telepathy 100 ft.

This stat block is designed for use with Legends & Labyrinths. It can be used with 3rd Edition games without modification.

This material is covered under the Open Game License.

Go to Part 1

ACTIVE SCANNING vs. ACTIVE SEARCHING

Since we’re discussing perception-type tests, let’s swap from passive perception tests to active perception tests for a little coda of sorts.

When it comes to active perception tests, there is a distinction between what I’m going to call searching (tossing a room, feeling for hidden seams on the wall, running your fingers under the edge of a table) and scanning (peering out into the darkness beyond your campfire, doing a manual spectrum-analysis with the ship’s sensors, holding your breath and listening intently).

This distinction between searching and scanning is one that I find most games either struggle with or ignore entirely, and I think this also reflects common GMing practice. I didn’t fully grok the distinction myself until it got repeatedly pushed in my face running the Tomb of Horrors: Trapped in a cycle of paranoia and terror, the players wanted to search for traps without touching anything (because touching it could trigger the very disaster they were trying to avoid).

In combination with passive perception, this essentially creates three tiers of perception:

• Not actively looking. (Passive Perception)
• Actively looking, but not physically interacting. (Scanning)
• Actively looking while physically interacting. (Searching)

(I use the word “physically” here, but the same conceptual breakdown can apply to non-physical scenarios: For example, the difference between noticing a hostile malware attack, actively scanning a program without loading it into memory, and actively scanning a program while running it. Or unexpectedly noticing that a girl on the far side of the bar is smiling at you vs. specifically scanning a social event in order to identify the Skrull shapeshifter vs. actually joining the party and talking to people to see if you can get the Skrull to slip up.)

These conceptual tiers exist even when the system doesn’t necessarily distinguish between them, so I’ve found it useful, when approaching a new system, to give a little thought to how I want to handle them.

For example, 3^rd Edition D&D distinguishes between passive perception (Listen/Spot checks) and active perception with physical interaction (Search checks). You can also have active perception at a distance if you spend an action to take an additional Listen/Spot check. For my house rules, I stated that passive Spot checks can be made against Search DCs at a -20 penalty and that Search checks could be made without physical interaction at a -10 penalty. (Collectively, this creates a zone of overlap between the skills and provides guidance for the previously uncovered zone between the two.)

DIVIDED PERCEPTION

As the example of D&D suggests, the difference between passive perception, scanning, and searching is not the only way perception skills can be divided. They are also often divided by different methods of perception (Listen vs. Spot, for example). In other cases, there may be only one skill, but it may come baked with a preconception about which sense(s) are involved in perception (Call of Cthulhu, for example, only has a Spot Hidden skill).

Regardless, I think it’s important not to get stuck on the idea that sight is the only sense that can be used to notice things. Get sound and scent and touch involved.

Also give some thought to how you can adjudicate situations in which the “wrong” sense is used to perceive something. Can you “hear” a secret door, for example? Maybe if there’s an unusual movement of air or some dim and distant sound echoing from beyond it. Normally you’d expect to detect an invisible person by listening for them, but if you were attentive enough couldn’t you perhaps notice the slight depression of the carpet beneath their feet?

In the case of D&D, I simply applied appropriate penalties for this sort of thing as the situation warranted. I eventually got tired of the divide between Listen and Spot for a number of different reasons (low utility from the division, causes problems with stealthy approaches, chews up skill points, etc.) and conflated them into a single Perception skill. This required figuring out what the effective loss of a particular sense would entail (not being able to see the invisible; not being able to hear in a zone of supernatural silence) and after some experimentation I went with a simple -10 penalty per sense you’re effectively lacking against a particular target.

Pathfinder went even further, conflating Listen, Spot, and Search all into a single Perception skill. But this actually provides something of a cautionary tale, because they failed to clearly establish a methodology for passive vs. active Perception tests, and thus rather bungled the result: If you strictly follow the rules as written, you don’t actively search for traps in Pathfinder. Perception tests default to being reactive (i.e. passive) and nothing in the rules for traps overrides that default. This does not appear to have actually been the designer’s intention, however, because, among other things, there’s a class ability which allows the Rogue to reactively notice traps they come within 10 feet of (which would be meaningless if that was, in fact, the default rule for all characters).

The point here is not that there needs to be a mechanical distinction between passive perception and active searching or between hearing and seeing or any other such division. Maybe such distinctions aren’t relevant to you or meaningful within the abstraction of the mechanics in the system you’re using. Or if there is a mechanical distinction, maybe that isn’t reflected in varying difficulty levels (as in my 3^rd Edition D&D house rules). D&D 5^th Edition, for example, distinguishes between passive perception and active perception (the former using a flat value vs. DC, the latter using a random roll vs. DC), but doesn’t vary the difficulty of the check based on whether you’re standing in the doorway looking into a room or actively tossing the joint.

The point is that these broad conceptual distinctions will arise naturally out of fiction-first declarations of intention and method during play, and because perception-type tasks are so ubiquitous and so frequent, you are going to want to have a very clear procedure for handling them in a way that both maximizes their effect and cleanly keeps the game moving forward.

NEXT: Social Skills

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

SESSION 12C: TO THE AID OF GOBLINS

December 2nd, 2007
The 1st Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

In the carriage on their way back to the Ghostly Minstrel the group discussed its plans. A consensus was reached that they should return to the aid of the Clan of the Torn Ear.

And so it was, early the next morning, that they found themselves working their way back through the increasingly familiar tunnels beneath Greyson House. Passing through the vaulted passages of Ghul’s Labyrinth they made their way into the caverns of the goblins.

As they came to the cave of stalactites and stalagmites where they had first met Itarek, Tee was hailed by a goblin they did not know.

He knew them, however, and welcomed them back to the caverns of the clan. Only two of the clan were on duty here now. The true danger lay elsewhere, but the clan had an ancestral duty to guard this passage.

The goblin dispatched his fellow guard to escort them to the chieftess. Crashekka greeted them in her great hall. Few goblins were to be found there now, and she explained that nearly all of the clan had been placed as a guard upon the stone bridge.

“Have you been attacked again?” Tee asked.

“Not yet,” Crashekka told her. “But we live in fear of an assault. I am glad to see you again. Without you I fear we would be lost.”

Crashekka personally led them to the stone bridge, and there they met with Itarek. He reported to them that there had been no sign of movement within the noisome caves beyond, but no further attempt to breach them, either.

Itarek gathered to him his three finest warriors.

“Is that all that can come?” Elestra asked, with Tee translating.

“The rest will be needed here. To hold the bridge,” Itarek said. “And they would not last long against the horrors that we have seen.”

Tee nodded her understanding, and then saw to distributing the cindershards they had purchased. Each of the six companions had one strapped to their body in one way or another, and a seventh was given to Itarek.

Ten of them crossed the bridge – six from the surface world and four of the clan. (more…)