Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I also do have it set with an intelligence based infection that spreads to players based on how high thier intelligence stat is (the higher the easier to infect) so any creatures based around infection would also be helpful! :D
Lich/Archmage are what first springs to mind. I could see some beefed up Myconids using the infection spores, maybe myconids dominated by a Lich? In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica there are fungal liches, called the Devkarin Liches, which incorporates all my suggestions so maybe look at that?
He doesn't have much besides the skin on his bones. Me: I'll take the skin on his bones, then.
"You see a gigantic, monstrous praying mantis burst from out of the ground. It sprays a stream of acid from it's mouth at one soldier, dissolving him instantly, then it turns and chomps another soldier in half with it's- "
"When are we gonna take a snack break?"
A lot will depend on level, but Arcanaloth comes to mind for me. They don’t try to destroy information as hoard it, though.
Look at Ygorl, Lord of Entropy. He's a CR 23 so it would really depend on level, but if you want a high-level endgame boss it might fit. From the description: "A powerful being suffused with entropic power, Ygorl delights in the act of unmaking and bringing chaos to any ecosystem it visits...As a personification of entropy, Ygorl is cursed to see things as they will become—broken and consumed by the march of eternity. It has no sense of empathy or compassion, driven only to unmake so that the resulting base elements of reality can fuel the multiverse’s endless cycles of creation and destruction."
So basically it's all about breaking down structure and order to return things to chaos. He's considered the first Slaad, and there's a bunch of different CR levels of Slaad to give lower level enemies related to Ygorl, and you could easily add in your infection stuff to Ygorl's MO.
How much have you fleshed out this ruling council? Because I'm thinking the council could be a group of artificers (assuming your setting supports having artificers) who believe their tinkering is superior to the academic study of magic and science and the exploration of the arts available in the public library. They don't want the populace to be able to freely learn those arts, sciences, and magics and instead they want to gate access to knowledge behind their pseudo-magical artificer tinkering so people have to interact with their extremely servile automatons instead of being able to browse through the books. Only the automatons get the knowledge mixed up and wrong. Unfortunately, the magically corrupted knowledge has been infecting the minds of some of the people in the city, building a cult in service to the automatons and their artificer creators.
I really like Aertarial's suggestoin of using Ygorl. There might be some way to slot that in - maybe with the artificers combining their powers to summon Ygorl, whose power amplifies how the automatons work (and requires they consume and destroy the knowledge of the library). Instead of just one big bad, the players could hunt down the artificer cult leaders, and as they do Ygorl gets less powerful in the physical world (and easier for the party to outright fight in the big confrontation in the end).