5E Albino Apelings (Derro Minions)

Now I have more familiarity with the 5E system, I think it’s time to revisit the concept of apeling minions for (Suloise) derro. For those of you joining late, this concept comes from one of Gygax’s “Gord the Rogue” novels where the “albino pygmies” that represent the derro descendents of the Suel slaves that survived the Rain of Colourless Fire are accompanied by hordes of further devolved baboon-like creatures – the implication being the “beasts” are in fact degenerate derro that have become animalistic in nature.

An Albino Apeling Mob?

Base Apeling, Albino

So let’s start with the base creature, as that’s going to determine a whole lot of where I go from here and will be useful to have for single individual creatures as a base for a companion or familiar to derro leaders or savants. The ultimate aim is to spin up apeling mobs (the 5E term for Pathfinder-esque swarms and troops essentially) for use as mook minions or environmental obstacles for fights with derro leaders, although I note that standard 5E derro already fairly mook level for higher level parties.

I’m going to base the apelings on the baboon as it’s easily recognisable, has a similar Ability contour and attack approach to the one I envisage, is the right Size and has readily available stats on the web / importable into Roll20 for use in virtual play – a significant factor given that’s what my group (and all the kids) these days are doing given “the virus”…

First, let’s compare the base derro statblock (OotA, page 138 – but generated using this online D&D 5e Statblock Generator resource with thanks). The only minor changes I have made is to the weapons and languages as I prefer derro to *not* speak Dwarvish and substitute Deep Speech to make them more alien and incomprehensible, which I think fits better regardless of whether they are of Suloise (Greyhawk) or default 5E Faerunian origin:

With the base baboon one:

So essentially I need to preserve the basics of each and merge the two into a devolved derro primate by mashing the stat blocks together using one as a template overlay. Albino apelings are baboon like creatures devolved from derro so aren’t the same as normal baboons even if they appear similar. Principles to apply to achieve this include:

• Animalistic monkey like traits carrying over as “beast” type
• Physically weaker than the derro but more “ape-like”
• Mental abilities equal to or lesser than derro
• Clear links to derro origin eg darkvision, sunlight sensitivity

Let’s use the baboon as the base stat block then and mash the derro specific aspects across as a “template”. Putting this all together with the above principles, looks something like this:

Notable additions include:

• Higher Dexterity than baboon to represent more inherently nimble derro nature
• Rounding hp to 5 for use with mob rules (see below)
• Mental Abilities dropped to derro levels eg Wisdom in particular
• Athletics for thematic effect for movement and combat descriptions
• Deep Speech instead of Dwarvish (personal preference of mine as above)
• Added a rock* attack with recharge 6 to represent devolved tool user

*Yes, I resisted the urge to make this a throw excrement attack, these are baboon-like creatures not monkeys but sure go ahead and change it if you want LOL.

I’ve included the derro’s inherent Magic Resistance, which I have two minds about. On the one hand it adds to the survivability given the low HD aspect and fits thematically with their derro descent, but on the other hand it seems a bit excessive for a beast creature. I’m leaving it for now as I think it will make more sense as I work up the apeling hordes concept (see below).

Apeling Tactics

I’m a big fan of Keith Ammar’s “The Monsters Know what They’re Doing” blog (and his subsequent book), particularly his rational approach to making monsters more interesting to fight. I’ve already commented on his derro article.

So let’s check how an individual apeling would behave firsty before proceeding to create the apeling mob as a distinct stat block.

With Dexterity as their primary offensive and defensive Ability, the apelings would preferentially attack from range pelting their opponent with rocks so need a reason to close and engage in melee. I made their rock attack subject to recharge and I’d consider that their derro handlers drive them into battle to offset this natural tendency.

Given their terrible Intelligence *and* Wisdom, combined with their Pack Tactics ability the default strategy becomes clear – when forced into melee, apelings swarm their opponents and try and overwhelm them to gain advantage from their fellows, engaging until driven off and only fleeing too late or if they find themselves in single combat.

This lends them to naturally form mobs which suits my purposes.

Following Keith’s reasoning then, with their Ability contour and Pack Tactics, apelings are very much like weaker dumber versions of kobolds that don’t rely on traps but similarly flee when the numbers shifty against their favour. Their Sunlight Sensitivity gives them the same reaction – they dwell in darkness and flee from sunlight.

Apeling Minions

Once I work out how to stat it up as a proper Monster Manual style description I wil using the Homebrewery templates with background information and ecology, but for now the base apeling seems usable as a pet / minion for a derro leader / ranger, a familiar for a variant derro warlock-savant or wizard-savant, or even as a potential wild shape form for a druid-savant.

Apeling Mobs

There are several ways in 5E to run large groups of smaller, low CR creatures, as detailed by this excellent article by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish. The main aim of all the systems is to minimise the dice rolls to keep the game flowing and encourage description.

I’m only going to deal with two of the options here however to keep it simple and I’m only going to use two horde examples by size:

• a Large apeling horde (16 creatures), occupying four 5′ squares
• a Huge apeling horder (36 creatures), occupying nine 5′ squares

I want to mix these in with standard derro and leaders / savant variants like a druid or warlock savant so combinations of the above (eg 1 Huge horde, 3 Large hordes, 2 Huge hordes / 4 Large hordes, 3 Huge hordes) produce a range of apelings from 30 to 100 or so creatures without things getting unwieldy by having too large a single horde or too many smaller creatures.

DMG Mob Rules

The simplified damage rules on p250, suggest an approach to handling attacks by mobs which has been converted into a calculator by Sly Flourish. The DMG table itself is a bit simplistic so I prefer the following variant table that incorporates a variation in attack bonus and also the effect of Advantage. This is useful as the apelings have Pack Tactics meaning one successful attack for every 3 that attack a character with average AC, and one in five for opponents with higher AC.

The DMG system and derivatives is a bit fiddly, and doesn’t really account for tracking hit points or AoE effects, but is simple enough although it falls down with very low CR creatures such as the apelings where advantage can create extra attacks and disadvantage leads to zero attacks landing, ignoring the natural 20 critical effect.

Sly Flourish’s Lazy Approach

Mike’s approach is worth reading the full article, but boils down to three things:

• Tracking damage in multiples of 5 (rounding as required for individuals)
• Tracking horde attacks, assume a base of 1 in 4 attacks succeed
• Adjudicating ares of effect spells and saving throws as 1 in 4 succeed

For an apeling horde, this results in the following:

• Apelings round up to 5 hp each
  • Large hordes (16 apelings), have 80 hp
  • Huge hordes (36 apelings), have 180 hp
• Apelings have Pack Tactics, so 1 in 2 attacks succeed unless the opponent has superior armor class or invokes shield, in which case it drops to 1 in 4 succeed.
  • Large hordes (16 apelings), inflict 8hp per round
  • Huge hordes (36 apelings), inflict 18hp per round
• Apeling hordes fit into the AoE of most relevant spells, their hp of 5 each now makes it easier to track effects like color spray, but their Magic Resistance assists with their saving throws so 1 in 2 succeed.

Abstracting this out so that the horde can be represented as a single “swarm” creature for easier book-keeping with some adjustments incorporated from DM Dave’s article, this results in the following two base stat blocks, calculating the horde’s CR using an online tool:

This is superficially similar to one of Mike’s older approaches to reskinning mobs as a single creature, which he abandoned because of the inherent limitations but I’ve tried to include his suggestions into the whole stat block.

Note: following Mike’s suggested approach, the melee and ranged damage should scale downwards as the horde loses members, dropping by 1hp melee (or 2hp ranged) for every 5hp damage it suffers, abstracted to dropping by 25% when a quarter of it’s hp is lost (4 apelings and 9 apelings respectively) – a further drop in damage can be easily modelled by switching to the smaller sized horde after the Huge horde suffers 50% and splitting the Large horde into individual apelings (that presumably attempt to flee) if the smaller Large sized horde drops to below 50% hp. 

I’ve dropped the standard swarm resistances as the compromising apelings are Small size not Tiny size and kept the immunities, but the horde may be susceptible to some non damaging AoE effects at the DM’s discretion.

Technically there should be an upper limit on the amount of damage an apeling horde can inflict in melee based on the number of Small creatures that can surround and attack a Medium sized creature (12 apelings) or a Large creature (20 apelings). I would hand wave this however for most (stronger) parties by describing that the apelings swarming all over each other in order to attack and consider that a proportion of them grapple their individual opponent to provoke opportunity attacks.

Conclusion

I don’t think I’m quite finished with the apeling concept, but I’ve worked it up into a usable creature and two hordes that I think can be used with minimal prep for a game involving derro to add some challenge to otherwise higher level parties. HOw exaclt the apelings interact with the derro may need to be a subject for another article.