Friends & Foes: Slivers
Tags: 4e Monsters, 4e PDFs, Magic: the Gathering, Slivers
Anyone who plays Magic has a very strong opinion on slivers: you either absolutely love them, or you absolutely hate them. In particular, it seems that your opinion depends heavily on which the side of the table the slivers are played on…
Well, now you can make your D&D players feel that unrelenting hatred as well, as I present you with three slivers for 4th edition!
The Sliver Drone is the most basic of slivers, a weakling on its own which poses a threat only by copying other slivers’ abilities.
The Scaldvein Sliver makes its buddies’ blood boil–literally. Stay out of melee when this guy’s around, a every wound releases a bloody steam.
Finally, the Venomvoice Sliver helps by giving the hive the ability to reach out and touch someone… with a nice big gob of venom.
omg, I’m so gonna use this tonight. My PCs were gonna have to flee from a mage guildhouse. I’m probably gonna make them pass through a lab where there are gonna be loose slivers. One of my player loves to play my sliver deck so I guess he’s gonna have fun fighting them, I know I would. I’ll try to make others before/during the D&D session and send them your way tomorrow.
Sliver Queen and Cristalline would be good candidates.
You made them too powerful imo, their explosion abilities are gonna destroy melee. You should put the death explosion on an acidic sliver and it shares it with the other slivers.
Man, I like it. I like it a lot. The Magic conversions are quite cool, keep it up.
@Kapoue: Awesome! As the whole “collection 1″ thing implies, I totally intend to make more slivers. In particular. Some ideas that should be easy to stat up quickly would be armored slivers, giving armor bonuses, winged slivers, giving flying speeds, spiny slivers, giving bonus claw damage…
They’re tricky to balance, though, especially when you start combining them. In particular, I’m worried about the minions getting too powerful for their minion status.
I was planning on making sliver queens in the next one, where they can spawn sliver drones and increase the aura range for all the slivers around them.
@WerrWaaa: Thanks, will do! Of course, I intend to
plagiarizeborrow ideas from other sources too, and make things of my own design, but I’ve been on a magic kick for a bit.Slivers!!!! Run!!!! maybe as the number of slivers in an encounter grow they should also increase the xp value of themselves. BTW I LOVE this and I am gonna go create an entire campaign built around slivers lol… then I’ll play some magic and win with slivers I love it Thanks
Well, in the slivers that I make, I’m taking a two-fold approach to making them balanced…
First, I’m trying to keep them on the weaker side of average, in general, before factoring in sliver powers.
Second, I’m trying to avoid making any really powerful sliver powers. Ideally they should all be tiny boosts which make up for the fact that the slivers are designed weaker.
Do I succeed in these goals? I don’t know. But those are my design goals.
As far as exp goes, the experience for a creature is based solely on its level and status, so by the RAW you can’t actually increase the exp of the slivers. However, you would certainly be justified in ruling that an abundance of slivers makes the encounter more difficult, and thus the encounter is worth more exp.
In general, I expect to run 2-3 “real” slivers (i.e. ones with auras) and fill the rest of the exp budget with slivers which just soak up the auras.
I made some for my game but went a slightly different way
Sliver queen Level 10 Elite Controller
Large Abberant Beast (Sliver) XP 1000
Init: 10 Senses: Perception 13
Hp: 244
AC 26 Fort 23 Reflex 24 Will 25
Speed 4
Claw Reach 2 12 vs AC 1d8 5 (two attacks)
Birthing (Full Round, recharge 6)
At the end of the round a drone is born. The drone enters within 1 of the queen. It can act on this round on the queens turn. If any attack deals damage to the queen during the round this power fails.
Alignment Unaligned Languages : Sliver, Common
Str 16 ( 1) Dex 17 ( 4) Wis 14 ( 3)
Con 21 ( 6) Int 14 ( 3) Cha 4(-2)
Sliver Queen Aura: All other slivers within 10 gain 1 to all attacks and damage, 1 to all defenses. All other auras affecting slivers within the Sliver queen aura double their effectriveness.
Not sure on the actual ability stats But I don’t think anyone would bull strength her anyway… Whatcha think?
Interesting idea for the birthing, allowing it to be interrupted. Considering the queen is elite, though, I wouldn’t make that the only thing it can do on a turn. How about something like:
Birthing (Minor, recharge 4,5,6)
At the start of the queen’s next turn, if it hasn’t been damaged since using this power, a sliver drone is spawned adjacent to the sliver queen.
Actually, it might even work at-will, forcing the players to keep the pressure on the queen bitch.
minor action though? that seems pretty powerful you know adding to the encounter every turn. or wait whats the rule on recharge? whenever you want to use that power? cause then it could be up to 3 new drones a turn. maybe a move action and a minor because you know pushing out a fully formed full size baby should hurt a bit.
How about:
Quick Sliver Level 4 skirmisher
Medium Aberrant Beast (sliver) xp175
Init 11 senses perception 10
Hp 57
Ac 18 Fort 16 reflex 18 Will 16
Speed 7
Claw standard (at will)
9 vs Ac 1d6 4 damage
Quick Sliver Aura: All other slivers within 10 gain 1 Speed bonus, 5 Init bonus and 5 to perception checks
Well, I was thinking of the sliver queen as more of a termite queen, just this huge, bloated creature who’s pushing out slivers constantly. Plus, chances are that it’s not going to be a new sliver every round because the PCs will be attacking and hurting it, preventing it from spawning.
In any case, if and when my PCs ever do fight a sliver queen, it’s going to be a damned hard fight and they’re probably going to have to run away…
I don’t see why the quick sliver gives a bonus to perception checks, that seems odd. Otherwise that’s about what I was going to do.
i figured more like the queen from aliens you know slightly more of a hand to hand combat
don’t know why i gave perception just figure that with a sliver all zooming around they should get to pay attention a little more.
Funny, I never thought of slivers like Aliens, but it does work well. Actually, probably works better than my original idea of termites. Although I like the idea of a swarm of slivers (actually, I’m going to be making a sliver swarm soon…), whereas the Aliens were individually more tough.
a swarm! i love it like maybe sliver legion?