Todd Kenreck: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes has a lot of monsters, but amongst the most horrific is the Cadaver Collector.
Jeremy Crawford: The Cadaver Collector has appeared in several editions of D&D, now returning in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. It is this lumbering creature, the construct, with spikes on it, upon which are the corpses impaled of various warriors.
Now Cadaver Collectors, as we describe them in Mordenkainen's, are originally from the Outer Plane of Acheron. Acheron is this realm of endless war. It's associated particularly with orc and goblinoid deities, as well as many others, where it is often described, there are these giant cubes, like moon-sized cubes, with warring factions on them, and these cubes are slamming together. Upon those war-torn cubes, these large constructs, the Cadaver Collectors, wander around taking the dead and impaling them on the spikes on their backs. Then they are able to summon forth the specters of those fallen warriors.
Now, what happens then, is different necromancers and other spellcasters then sometimes draw these Cadaver Collectors from Acheron into the Material Plane, where then they wander and are even more horrific, since they are so out of place. Often, especially if the summoner is slain and the path back to Acheron is lost, these Cadaver Collectors might wander for centuries, looking for a way back to their war-torn plane, all the while, collecting, as their name implies, more and more cadavers to place upon their back ... Essentially, to give themselves almost this cloak of corpses upon their mighty backs.
Todd Kenreck: So you're basically saying that Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is this nightmare fuel.
Jeremy Crawford: Yes. Yes. Cadaver Collectors are just one of the many nightmares in this book. Many, many nightmares for the heroes of Dungeons & Dragons to face and hopefully to drive away from the world.
Of course, everything in the Outer Planes is larger than life, because the Outer Planes are, even more so than in the other fantasy realms of D&D, a place of metaphor given flesh. That's why you go to the Outer Planes to see goodness itself manifest, war itself manifest, generosity in the flesh, evil in its darkest forms, right there in front of you, and you can touch it. That is what it's like, so Acheron is just war and really, in many ways, senseless war, going on forever and ever and ever.
<3
As dark as this monster is, I feel kind of sorry for this creature because on the material plane, it was taken from its home, by collecting bodies it is just doing what it is supposed to do, and all the while, its main goal is just to go back home. The oblex from the earlier article, alternatively, is just scary.
So... this thing collects corpses on the outer planes and summons the souls of said corpses in specter form. The outer planes are made up of spirits already - they ARE they souls of people who died. The orc/goblin conflict, for instance, is made up of all the usual goblinoid souls and orc souls that died on the material and go to serve their god in endless war.
How do you summon the soul of a soul? I get that Outsiders leave corpses when they die on their native plane. I remember it happening on Yggdrasil, for instance, another eternal-war plane. And I get that it could just be an echo or whatever, rather than a real soul, but its just something that bothers me. You effectively have the ghost of a ghost. Just.. gah!
I love this, but I was really hoping it would be more like the 3.5 Corpse Gatherer - an humongous shambling undead graveyard.
Can you say screwed if your DM ever decides to put you up against this or you fail a save. I would not be able to do this to any of my players unless absolutely necessary or perhaps if they had deserve it in any way.
Why is it that while Mordenkainen says that overly powerful celestials are as bad as overly powerful fiends, why are 70% of the monsters in his book either devils or demons?
Sounds like a fun encounter to fight against a necromancer, I just imagine a war of the undead.
First the Oblex and now this thing. This sounds like a really cool collection of enemies!
I really do love this creature
I can just imagine gigantic waves of zombies, skeletons, revenants and the like clashing in an all-out war.
sad