The displacer beast is one of the most beloved creatures in Dungeons & Dragons. It has even found its way into the pantheon of creatures featured in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Let's look out from our cat towers and gaze upon ways you can use these hunters in your game to add thrills and excitement for your players.
- With a Bit of Work, They Can Be Useful Pets
- Poaching for a Cloak of Displacement
- Unseelie Sentry
- Minions to a High-Level Enemy
- Base Under Siege Scenarios
- Displacer Beasts in the Domains of Dread
Why We Love Displacer Beasts
What makes the displacer beast such a popular D&D monster? The genius of the design plays a major role. Big cats number among some of the most skilled predators in our world. These animals are known and feared for their stealthy, sleek, stalking prowess.
Taking a real-world predator and giving it the ability to displace light—simulating another identical beast just a few feet away—leans into the vibe of being unsure of just how many creatures are hunting you. Anyone who has ever owned a particularly mischievous house cat knows how often it almost seems there must be at least two of them for all the mayhem they cause.
How to Drop Displacer Beasts in Your Game
We've compiled a list of some of our favorite places to add a displacer beast into a game for thrills and delights.
1. With a Bit of Work, They Can Be Useful Pets
Almost every D&D party has asked their Dungeon Master at some time or another if they can befriend a furry creature they come across. The Wild Beyond the Witchlight comes with statistics for a displacer beast kitten, so now your party can raise your own mischievous, monstrous kitten.
Adopting a displacer beast kitten has a lot of story potential. Monstrosity or not, though, raising a displacer beast kitten carries many of the same difficulties as raising a wild animal, especially one whose nature usually leads them to be predators. Characters keeping a displacer beast around as a sidekick may have to undertake all sorts of side missions and quests in order to help train the kitten to safely travel with them, such as taking them hunting, getting them to respect you enough to heed your commands, and conditioning them to not see you as their next meal. These can be downtime activities, short quests to accomplish between major adventures, or even ongoing things for the players to look out for.
2. Poaching for a Cloak of Displacement
A cloak of displacement is a rare magic item that allows a character to take on the same displacement abilities as a displacer beast. But where do cloaks of displacement come from? The Crafting Magic Items rules in Xanathar's Guide to Everything allow characters to create magic items in their downtime, using materials gathered from appropriate sources.
A possible campaign quest could be hunting down and defeating a displacer beast in order to use its displacement tentacles as an ingredient in a cloak of displacement, either for the party or as a job for someone else seeking the materials. Since a cloak of displacement is a rare item, it would usually require a CR of 9 or above for gathering appropriate materials, meaning you'd likely have to face off against at least three or more displacer beasts before satisfying the quest.
But if you've got players, like myself, who might have expressed a veil or hard line against animal cruelty in your session zero, you could flip the script a bit. Rather than have your heroes doing the hunting, they could be tracking down a gang of poachers in an area that has been seeking out creatures for usage in a black market for magic items. Or perhaps some enterprising ne'er-do-wells had been trying to raise displacer beasts to make cloaks, only to have them escape and become an invasive species in the area.
The lore of displacer beasts has them originating as trained hunters of the Feywild's Unseelie Court before they escaped their domestication and eventually found their way to the Material Plane. But while the Unseelie may not have been able to keep the displacer beasts as a species within their control, that's not to say a mutual respect between an Unseelie archfey and a specific displacer beast couldn't still lead to a beneficial partnership.
If you're setting an adventure in the Feywild, leaning on one of the plane's more notable species as the skilled sentry or guardian for an antagonist or a shrewd NPC would help lay down the local flavor.
4. Minions to a High-Level Enemy
Coming in at CR 3, a displacer beast is a pretty resilient and hardy foe. Their namesake displacer tentacles make them hard to hit, obviously. Their Avoidance trait also grants a lot of protection against area-of-effect attacks that require saving throws, allowing them to take half damage if they fail, or none on a success.
So while a party of higher-level adventurers can start to overcome the displacer beast's toughness when they team up to take one down, using them as minions for a higher CR baddie can be a game-changer. Giving a big foe two to three reinforcements that are incredibly tough to make a dent in will force your players to rethink and hone their strategies and help you create a truly memorable combat encounter.
Of course, there's the obvious one, with minor spoilers below for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, so skip this next paragraph if you still haven't seen it and want to be surprised.
A huge part of what makes your typical displacer beast so scary is that they actually enjoy the hunt. They delight in tracking down their prey, such as your player characters. So, do what Forge and Sofina did. Put your players in a maze with some displacer beasts for a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek. It doesn't even have to be an arena challenge per se.
A party of heroes in close quarters with a pack of displacer beasts hunting them can create thrilling suspense at the table. That tension could work just as well for adding a ticking clock to a dungeon crawl as it could in a battle colosseum filled with spectators. For pop culture inspiration, imagine the scenes from Jurassic Park when the raptors pursue the kids through the facility.
6. Displacer Beasts in the Domains of Dread
Valachan, Domain of the Hunter in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, features a jungle landscape with roaming packs of this fearsome monster led by a particularly cunning displacer beast working with the domain's dark lord, Chakuna.
Chakuna's home, the Pantara Lodge, even has a stable of displacer beasts. Her displacer beasts like to roam the mists that border the domain and attack travelers who try to escape.
Using this location for an adventure in your game leans into the fear factor and monstrous elements of the displacer beast. This type of adventure could call to mind tones of a movie like Predator, with the heroes being pursued by a hunter who is hard to track and detect.
Sink Your Claws In
We've only made six scratches at the surface of what a displacer beast can offer your campaign, but we think this particular monster has a lot of potential in a wide variety of games. If you're planning on using a displacer beast in your game or if you're debating over which fearsome predator you should use to hunt your party down, we hope these tips will help you find a place for the displacer beast!
Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
you gotta love em
Displaced beasts are so cool. I’m planning on putting them into my next dnd campaign.
Some nice suggestions for an iconic DnD beastie
this is very sweet, might combine them with enderman to really screw with my players (:
How does your front page work ? This was added within the last day but is several items down on the front page. Pure random chance that i happened to see it.
Agreed. I just stumbled into this one.
Yeah, I hate having to scroll through last month's ads about books just to see actual articles
I actually really liked this article! This is exactly what these kinds of articles should do! I'd especially love if at some point they could be expanded to be sort of a "module" type quest, like the example with the poachers but even more developed. Give us some NPCs and pictures and motivations and maybe even a map. There's SO MUCH free content from third party creators and on pinterest and whatnot, it'd be great if DnDBeyond could try and load up some of that to compete.
The Displacer beast was never a cat; look at the original picture, It was a monstrosity that no one ever cared about killing.
It is to the credit of human nature that we love more readily than we hate. Yeah, there's no telling what strange and terrible beast someone will call cute. Sometimes that makes it a struggle to keep a villain in the story.
I knew displacer beasts are awesome, but I didn’t know they had so many more traits!
This was a really nice spotlight article with just enough stubs to inspire a few encounter ideas.
Fantastic article, Riley!
Their my favourite monster
Does anyone not like these beasties, even if the are responsible for a few of our character's demises?
💩
In some settings displacer beasts and blink dogs are 'natural enemies'. So throw in a pack of blink dogs in a few of these scenarios for extra animal goodness.
I really have to remember that displacer kittens exist for when my dm runs witchlight this week
I'm so glad you enjoyed the article!
nice