I'm going to have my players fight the Predator. It will be an actual alien, with alien tech and spaceship. I've been putting together the monster stats, and decided that I want to do something more interesting than just giving it thermal vision like the movie. At a certain point my players will realize they're fighting the Predator, and while I'm not concerned about them meta gaming their way around thermal vision, I want something that will surprise them and require some work on their part to figure out and undermine. Thoughts?
You could give it tremorsense a la Toph Beifong. Pinpointing location through vibrations in the ground, so the way around it is through flight, levitation, etc.
So I considered bother tremorsense and just having it use be blind and use sound, but I didn't think either would make sense for a humanoid, surface dwelling predatory creature. But, I'm thinking that these creatures purposely blind themselves to make their hunts more challenging, so they use sound and tremors to hunt.
I think it was the second Predator movie with Danny Glover where it shows the predator changing up his helmet’s vision to different types once he realized they were thwarting thermovision. You can invent what those senses are since you will have to do the same for thermovision.
You could give it a permanent Detect Magic with increased range, chances are the party has magic items so the Predator would essentially be able to see them through walls, and illusion spells would basically be useless, however if they discover it was detecting magic the party could place a magic object the get the Predator off their trail or even use the tactic to set an ambush. They could also exploit the fact that Detect Magic can't see through lead or a foot of stone.
I'm going to have my players fight the Predator. It will be an actual alien, with alien tech and spaceship. I've been putting together the monster stats, and decided that I want to do something more interesting than just giving it thermal vision like the movie. At a certain point my players will realize they're fighting the Predator, and while I'm not concerned about them meta gaming their way around thermal vision, I want something that will surprise them and require some work on their part to figure out and undermine. Thoughts?
A lot of people have compared the Orthon to the Predator. Could build from that.
You could give it tremorsense a la Toph Beifong. Pinpointing location through vibrations in the ground, so the way around it is through flight, levitation, etc.
So I considered bother tremorsense and just having it use be blind and use sound, but I didn't think either would make sense for a humanoid, surface dwelling predatory creature. But, I'm thinking that these creatures purposely blind themselves to make their hunts more challenging, so they use sound and tremors to hunt.
I think it was the second Predator movie with Danny Glover where it shows the predator changing up his helmet’s vision to different types once he realized they were thwarting thermovision. You can invent what those senses are since you will have to do the same for thermovision.
That's what I was hoping to get some ideas for, haha
You could give it a permanent Detect Magic with increased range, chances are the party has magic items so the Predator would essentially be able to see them through walls, and illusion spells would basically be useless, however if they discover it was detecting magic the party could place a magic object the get the Predator off their trail or even use the tactic to set an ambush. They could also exploit the fact that Detect Magic can't see through lead or a foot of stone.
I LOVE that idea! Thanks