Rakshasas for everyone!

Rakshasas are one of D&D/Pathfinder’s iconic monsters. That means that your players known exactly each one of its strengths and vulnerabilities (which, by the way, sucks). Like trolls, I love to change classic monsters traits – in part because I like to teach my players that metagame knowledge is not something suited for every game (though fine for others); in part because in legends rakshasa are represented by amazingly different types of monsters (from brute cannibal ogres to a beautiful nymphs).

In my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign I came up with two house rules for my rakshasas. The first is a random table that defines a rakshasa’s weakness (DR). Instead of being vulnerable to ‘good and piercing’ weapons a rakshasa could, for example, be damaged by ‘holy water and piercing’.

Rakshasa Damage Reduction (d8)

1 . Good and piercing.

2 . Holy water and piercing.

3 . Salt and piercing.

4 . Silver and piercing.

5 . Fire and piercing.

6 . Wielded by a good priest.

7 . The song of a brass bell [at my game I gave this vulnerability to the Rakshasa Leader].

8 . Roll again.

Finally, I gave to each rakshasa one of the abilities below, based on its animal head.

Vulture-head (“Plague Demon”): claw attacks inflict disease and once per combat he can breathe a wasp swarm.

Orangutan- head (“Strength Demon”): the rakshasa gains what I call ‘subjective strength’. It gains a gaze attack. If the target fails at a Will save, he always fails opposed Strength-based checks (and Combat Maneuver rolls) against the rakshasa [at my game this rakshasa always attacked through grapple, the only way to get free was to use Escape Artists or to stun the demon].

Lizard- head (“Scale-folk Demon”): the rakhsasa’s tongue is a living serpent with a poison attack.

Boar- head (“Fire Demon”): this rakshasa gets hotter the longer he fights. After 1 round of combat, any natural attack (or unarmed or grapple) that hits it deals 1d6 fire damage to the attacker.  At the 3^rd round, the heat is so intense that anyone at 5 feet of the rakshasa suffers 1d4 points of fire damage per round (increasing by 1d4 every 2 rounds, to a maximum of 5d4). 

The Tiger-head Rakshasa was already the encounter’s boss, with a lots of class levels, so I let him as stated (though I gave him DR that can only be ignored by the sound of a brass bell).

[Ah, in the campaign the combat against the rakhsasas was one of the hardest and by far the most memorable ones. The PCs eventually won, but tide of battle changed a lot during the encounter – there were moments where only one or two (of a total of 4 players) were standing. The battle put 5 rakhsasas, 2 asura and 1 aberration against 4 PCs and 2 NPCs (both already wounded). The best part? The rakshasa master managed to escape (without one eye due to a cool critical hit from this Pathfinder Deck), to orchestrate his revenge – a perfect conclusion for me.]