Darren's Hydra with Minions for Heads

[John Harper]

This is so cool. Darren has designed a Hydra that has a bunch of extra heads treated as minions in the game system. This is so brilliant, I just wanted to start a thread to talk about it.

He also recommends setting aside some extra Strife which you can spend to bring in new minions to represent the Hydra's heads re-growing. Very cool.

This also means that the heroes could conceivably come up with a contest to separate the heads and the Hydra, so they don't have to fight both at once. Maybe they trick the heads into drinking drugged wine or something.

Anyway, I love the creative monster building here. This is great stuff, Darren.

[iago]

That *is* nice.  Good work, Darren.

[Darren Hill]

Thanks, guys :)
The idea came to me as I was thinking how to design those hundred-handed, 50-headed giants, and wondering how to get enough attacks to make them terrifying. So I thought of making each head and pair of hands a minion. That led to amusing mental images of disembodied hands floating about the battlefield. But it wasn't enough attacks! So, it turned into 1 Minion = a bunch of heads and hands, each having Multistrike x2. That would be enough for 50 attacks or so (it would be a lot less with the minion stacking bonus, of course).
The hydra is a little (a little!) less over-the-top, and works better. But now I can't help thinking of using this approach for lots of things now. Like doing Geryon - the three-bodied giant - as three separate NPCs joined at the hip, or the chimera's snake-headed tail as a separate NPC. :)

This also means that the heroes could conceivably come up with a contest to separate the heads and the Hydra, so they don't have to fight both at once. Maybe they trick the heads into drinking drugged wine or something.

That hadn't occurred to me, and it is cool.