Negative LA-Assignment : Resurrection, but no diamond here

[Beni-Kujaku]

Bloodrot

And we're back! And for today, we have the quintessence of this thread: the bloodrot. So, remember how oozes had some of the worst stats compared to their HD and their only good ability score was constitution? What if... We made them undead. Good idea, huh? Yeah, I thought so. Now, bloodrot are not really oozes per se, not even reanimated dead oozes. Just animated blood and other fluids from people dissolved in acid. Makes me wonder what made a necromancer choose to try to animate what is essentially only acid at this point, and how the newly formed bloodrot got out of the acid considering it doesn't have any acid resistance. In fact, the bloodrot is much closer to an elemental than an ooze, with only a slam attack and the weird DR 5/-. Of course, 4e expectedly didn't get the memo, and the bloodrot is now ooze-typed (as well as undead, since 4e doesn't have creature types the way 3.X does). 4e also gives us this great bit of flavor text: "The creature is a vaguely humanoid-shaped mass that reeks of blood."



The "humanoid-shapedness" will be left to the reader's appreciation.


Ok, so, what does being a mass of blood with roughly 5 times as many hit points as the creature it comes from gets you?

- 10 Undead RHD. Off to a great start. Undead grants you very good immunities, but that doesn't excuse the downright awful perks of the type after a few RHD.
- +6 Str, -10 Dex, no Con, -8 Int, -10 Wis, +4 Cha (total -18), NO natural armor. Are you kidding me? What are these stats exactly? There are 1 RHD creatures with better Str and Cha than that, and without the 3 unuseable stats. Also, you have no Con, which is a problem when you'd like most of your HD to be class levels. The fact that it has no natural armor and -10 Dex continues the tradition of ooze(-like) monsters having some of the lowest AC in all of D&D, with only 4 AC more than the absolute lowest AC possible, the Elder Black Pudding. If it wasn't clear by now, this is worse than awful.
- One 10ft reach slam with blood fever. This is strong disease, with 1d6 Con/1d4 Cha damage, and really hard to heal (Break Enchantment or Remove Curse, plus a Heal check), but still a disease, with a 1 min incubation. Hence probably irrelevant. That also means that your only way to use your less-than-decent Strength is to hit people one at a time, with no way to use either gloves of man or mouthpick weapons.
- 20ft land and climb speed. Not only can you not hit people effectively, you can't reach them effctively either. Did I mention this monster is awful?
- Improved Grab, Constrict. You're medium, with only +6 Str and Improved Grab only on your slam. You won't use it.
- Blindsight 60ft, DR 5/-... Okay, that's actually pretty good, especially with...
- Sanguineous Mount. If you infect someone with blood fever, you can enter their body and nauseate them for as long as you wish. Effectively, this is a Save-or-Lose, since not only are they unable to attack, the blood fever continues to affect them and they will slowly die. On the other hand, dual-save SoL are not new, and most of them do not require you to stay motionless the whole time while letting to your enemy the choice of throwing themselves off a cliff to kill you in the process.

So... What can you do with that? Well, decent strength and charisma look like barbarian fuel, but with low HP, low speed and your main ability requiring you to not tank anymore, that's not really good. I think it would make an acceptable glaivelock, which would allow it to have some iteratives while having some actual class features. The other way would be to go monk, but Evasion doesn't really work with -10 Dex, and you get no Wisdom either. Now, is this even worth 1 RHD? Most of your chassis is awful, but you still get really good immunities, blindsight, DR... That should make it a pretty strong 1 RHD, LA+1. Maybe you could even get someone out of the picture if you hit them with hideous blow into Improved Grab into blood fever into Sanguineous mount... Once in a blue moon. And undead RHD being some of the absolute worst there is, even DLA-7 doesn't seem exxagerated.


The bloodrot is a combination of the worst parts of two of the worst types there is. It is extremely passive by itself, and the absence of split hurts it even more than other oozes. Still, that's a good introduction to Heroes of Horror, which is the only book reviewed so far in the LA-assignment thread with not even one monster above LA+0. Buckle up boyzengirls, we're going on a ride!