Writober! Minion! Shadowdark Post-a-Day In October

This month is Drawtober: 31 drawing prompts related to the Shadowdark RPG, 1 a day, throughout October. But I’m borrowing the prompts for short essays. Today’s prompt is “Minion”.

Minions in TTRPG terms make me think of the roles of various foes that were established in D&D 4e.  Minions specifically were designed to be front-line minor grunt fighters, and usually in large numbers but weak compared to the other creatures in the fight.

Thinking about the roles of the various foes when planning larger battles is an important lesson one can learn from 4e D&D. And it is a lesson easily missed because many of us skipped over D&D 4e after trying it just a few times and feeling it was too different from prior editions.

These are the roles of D&D 4e monsters:

• Artillery – Ranged attackers that deal damage from a distance, often with high damage output.
• Brutes – Strong melee combatants with high hit points and damage, but lower defenses.
• Controllers – Monsters that manipulate the battlefield, affecting multiple enemies at once.
• Lurkers – Creatures that hide and ambush, striking when the time is right.
• Minions – Weak monsters that can be defeated with a single hit, often appearing in large numbers.
• Skirmishers – Agile fighters that excel in hit-and-run tactics, often avoiding direct confrontation.
• Soldiers – Agile fighters that excel in hit-and-run tactics, often avoiding direct confrontation.

But to make minions really count, try to use them in unusual ways!

• Have a wizard or powerful boss foe suck away a minion’s hit points to heal itself.
• Allow minions to impact each other. For example maybe two minions are attacking the same foe together so they get a bonus.
• Give them an ability to block a character’s attack against the more powerful foes (prevent the party from ganging up on the boss).
• Have a few minions mob a character so that character has to spend its turn breaking free.
• Have them do (or have something done to them) that proves of the main foe’s evil. For example the boss kills a minion for being incompetent after the minion misses or the boss casts an area of effect spell even though it will include a few minions.

Here are our previous Writober posts so far:

1. Torch – Rules for magic torch items (each is a single use magic effect spell like alarm or detect magic).
2. Skull – Goblin shaman who can turn victims’ skulls into ways to store spells.
3. Fiend – Lists of talents that Devils & Demons typically have for making your own.
4. Shadow – Easy ways to make other creatures into shadows.
5. Contagion – Discussing the purpose of diseases.
6. Valkyrie – A new 3rd party class.
7. Toadstool – A new 3rd party ancestry.
8. Witchlight – Alternate sources of “witchlight”.
9. Luck Token – Alternate ways a GM may allow a luck token to be used.
10.  Rage – The signature ability of a Barbarian class.
11. Altars – Ways to amplify priest spells into rituals when using an altar.
12. Pit Trap – Several ideas to spice up the good old pit trap.
13. Death Slug – Looking at the Death Slug’s deadliness and how that’s similar to old-school and low fantasy games.
14. Evil Eye – Various types of “Evil Eyes”: magic items, monsters, or curses.
15. Morzo Moth – A look at the Morzo Moth’s talents/actions makes one see the variety of the Western Reaches book’s monsters.
16. Diamond – Three subtopics: diamonds impacting economy; as spell components for rituals or spells not-yet-accessible; and a enhancements for magic weapons.
17. Slime – Game-able aspects of mundane slime as well as a green slime monster for Shadowdark.
18. Wyrdling – Shows how different and fun Shadowdark can be with this unusual class as an example of how much design freedom a creator of GM has.
19. Stingbat – Renaming (or even not giving creatures names) re-establishes the sense of wonder players had when fantasy was new to them.
20. Poison – A list of how poison is used in the core book, grouped by use & types of effects, plus a few new ideas.
21. Grumby Billows – A tribute to Shadowdarklings, the online free character generator (and more!) for Shadowdark.
22. Blood – Varying & unsual ways to use blood in your game.
23. Green Knight – A look at the Green Knight from King Arthur and how that differs from the one in Western Reaches. Plus stats for the mythic version.
24. Fear – Speculating on new ways to use fear in your game.
25. Drow – A stat block for a level 6 drow fighter.
26. Fireball – How you should allow your players to flavor the world and aspects about their background and abilities–and in Shadowdark that can even include spell effects.