Monster Design: The Iphik

Hello! I’m Jonathon, one of the team members at Gelatinous Cubicles, and the drafting author of our release last week, the iphik. I and the rest of the Gel Cubicles team put a lot of work into these chitinous lads, and I wanted to write up something that goes over some of the design choices I came to, why I came to them, why we did or didn’t cut or change them, and some other interesting tid-bits about the iphik that I’d like to share.

Overall Design Philosophy

So for anyone who doesn’t know, the main way we handle creating content over at Gel Cubicles is by selecting a primary author for a given project, otherwise referred to as the ‘Drafter’. They’re the ones who put in the majority of the creative juices on a project and for the most part make decisions regarding that project’s contents, be it flavor text, design, lore, stat block choices, etc - while the rest of the team provides feedback, corrections, and insight as needed.

Given we’re not a hive mind over at Gel Cubicles, much like the iphik, this naturally means that every project will have a little personal touch in it - what one of us might like to include might not fit the creative vision of another, and we find this process yields some great results, since every single thing we make is someone’s baby, just given final form through collaborative efforts.

So what did I have in mind when I started working on the iphik?

Pheromones! 

Specifically, ant pheromones. I’m no biologist, but even with my limited understanding, I find ants to be really interesting. Individual ants don’t have a whole lot of what we might call individuality - most species spend a lot of their time doing one or a small number of tasks, be it searching for food, getting to and processing food, fighting stuff, digging, etc, and most of this is coordinated through pheromones. My vague understanding is that bees and probably most other nest-building bugs work this way, and if I’m wrong about any of this, thankfully it doesn’t matter too much. If you feel like my inspiration for a race of bipedal bug-men for a fantasy RPG isn’t up to snuff, feel free to correct me in the comments!

I wanted a species that could communicate and organize through pheromones, specifically because I didn’t want the peons of this race to be mindless servants that had no personal drives when apart from their superiors. Thus, iphik pheromones influence how you feel, not how you think. 

I also wanted these pheromones to be an important part of the way the iphik communicate and interact with the world. The iphik are hard for outsiders to understand because of the strange way they perceive things. The traces of their pheromones that they leave everywhere and the strange way iphik senses work results in them not depending on visual sight the same way other races do. Thus; conditional blindsight that represents the weird way that they see the world.

Lastly - these are bugs! They need chitin and multiple limbs! I tried my darndest not to explicitly riff of the thri-kreen, (though we did use some art from older editions meant for the thri-kreen in the doc) but I wanted them to have sturdy natural armor and be good at climbing walls as well as lifting heavy things. So they have a climb speed and get advantage on strength checks and saves, representing their ability to leverage their bodies and their muscles in ways only exoskeleton bug lads can. It also has the happy coincidence of making the iphik queen an absolute joy to run, which I’ll go over a bit later.

I also explicitly wanted to avoid any biochemical aspects with the iphik aside from their pheromones - no acid spit, no web-shooting, no sticky hands to climb on walls. They’re more humanoid than they are monstrous, and I wanted to represent that in their abilities as well as their fluff.

Nest Defense - Why the Drones are Dangerous

At first glance you might notice iphik drones don’t hit very hard, and while they have a pretty high AC for their CR, they don’t have a whole lot of HP behind that high AC. They’re pretty vulnerable to non-Strength saves as well - so why wouldn’t well-prepared PCs just tear through them?

Two things: numbers and a little thing I partially lifted from a stat block in Star Wars 5e, reaction attacks based on allies.

One iphik drone hits like a wet noodle. Give it a friend, and both can hit like wet noodles on their turns, plus one can hit you every time you attack their buddy. Add another, and that’s three wet noodles plus two more follow-ups at least - thus numbers translate into punishment if you let them swarm you. Most combat encounters usually result in standing in one place and walloping something until it or you die, which is still largely true with the iphik (it’s a flaw of 5e if anything), but the Nest Defense reaction and iphik drones used in groups punishes that tactic enough to make anybody but the thickest Totem Barbarian reconsider just standing there and taking their lickings; Even a high AC fighter will get hit eventually with that many attacks coming their way.

Blindsight and the Value of Simplicity

So the iphik have blindsight. That’s cool. Why do they have blindsight?

Because it makes them interesting.

Iphik only have their blindsight so long as they can smell and either hear or see (aka, are neither blinded nor deafened). There’s no status in D&D that takes away your sense of smell mechanically because nothing runs off of scent mechanically, but it’s there - so feel free to take advantage of that if you ever run these lads. Stinky smoke bombs will cut off their blindsight!

Since the iphik are usually encountered in their nests or other compact locations, their blindsight makes them very hard to get the drop on - and even harder to hide from.  Rogues are a pretty solid counter to the iphik because of Sneak Attack and their ability to get away from swarming Drones with Cunning Action. Blindsight somewhat reverses that trend by making Rogues have a much harder time hiding from the iphik to get the advantage they probably need to reliably get past that chunky 15 AC.

So not only is blindsight cool - it helps to shore up, but not eliminate the iphik drones' weaknesses while making fighting them more interesting as a result!

The Joys of Grappling

I love the grappling system. It’s a fun and often overlooked way of controlling combat with one of the least useful ability scores in D&D - Strength!

Without spoiling too much, I once grappled a particularly famous vampire during a cinematic encounter with my Cavalier Fighter, pinned him to the ground with two stellar Strength checks - then dragged him over into a spell called sickening radiance. This was so effective that the DM had to 'cheat', letting this vampire use a legendary action to automatically get up, just so I didn’t force him to broil to death in all that radiant damage.

Anecdotes aside, grappling can be a really fun way to mix up a combat, and not just for the players. During playtesting, the iphik queen got her grubby mits on a rogue with her legendary actions - and flew his sorry butt 40ft up into the air using another. She then spent her turn introducing him to her pike… and then dropped him for an unavoidable 4d6 damage.

She then did this again.

Three times.

It was great. Highly stressful and dynamic - the rogue trying to get away from her while she kept pace, fun was had by all.

Much like the queen, iphik overseers are explicitly designed to grab and lockdown people with their features, allowing not only the overseers but any drones supporting them to really focus in on whatever unfortunate dork got close enough to get got. Even drones can employ this tactic - all iphik have advantage on strength checks - and it can really put the pressure on a party to work together, lest someone gets beaten to death by hammers.

Oh, and don’t forget - monsters can push people prone too, and it doesn’t have to be the same one grappling the target either!

The Great Climb Debate

So I’m going to level with you; there’s one thing about the iphik I don’t like. 

It’s something I, personally, really struggled with during the design process that the rest of the team eventually convinced me needed to be simplified.

I hate that the iphik have a climb speed.

Now, I don’t mean that I hate them having a climb speed at all. That’s great! It makes sense and opens a lot of interesting encounters for an often-underground species like the iphik.

What I dislike is that they have an unconditional climb speed. That may not make much sense at first, but let me explain.

Say you have an iphik overseer, toting around a box in addition to his shield, pike, and maul. His hands are all full up on stuff, and he needs to get to a ledge 25ft above him. In my mind’s eye, I see him putting one or two of his hand-carried items down, and climbing up the wall with his strong, ant-man hands, making a second trip to go get whatever he left behind. Easy.

But rules as written - and how I imagine most people might run the iphik - he can just… go up that wall. No problem. The mental image of this burly ant walking horizontally up the wall, as if under some gravity denying spell, hurt me in my very kobold soul. 

So why didn’t I change it? Well, I tried - I took a few different stabs at a feature that specifically gave the iphik their climb speed only when at least one hand was free, but it always was pretty clunky to parse mechanically. Either they lost it when all their hands were full, or they gained it, but it wasn’t in their speeds normally, or it had to be a spell-like ability which didn’t fix the problem - It was a mess.

Would most people be able to make sense of it? Probably.

Would anyone and everyone that needed to run the iphik get it? Probably not.

And we care a lot more about our content being clean and effective and fun to use than we do about catering to a single stubborn designer’s perfect idea of how some bug-men get up walls.

So we simplified it to how it is now. I still kind of dislike it, but it was definitely the right choice.

The Future of the Iphik

Everyone on the Gelatinous Cubicles team put a lot of work into the iphik, but I consider them to be chiefly my creation. I’m their dad, and them my weird, bug kids. As such, I have a number of other ideas that I want to work on someday that will expand what is available for the iphik in terms of content.

I’ll keep the specifics to myself, but I’m mulling over a few different ideas for stat blocks - especially a proper block for iphik militia - and hey, if you feel like sharing any ideas for things you’d like to see (or anything you make!) let me know in the comments!

I also want to work out the best way to handle turning the iphik into a player race. Given the strange abilities they have, I can see them being a little too powerful, but I’m sure there’s a way to make it work. Bugbears don’t perfectly align with their stat blocks in the monster manual either, and I’m sure I can rely on my team to beat my expectations into a more reasonable shape down the line.

Conclusion

Well that about wraps it up for this little think piece of mine. I hope you got something out of it, and even moreso, I hope you like the iphik! If you end up taking them for a spin in your own games, I’d absolutely love to hear about it in the comments below; if your games go anything like our playtesting, it should be a blast!

    - Jonathon "the Kobold Wrangler" Engstrom