Guest Writer: Devlin DM
Get your party Invested in your Adventure using Lair Actions!
Are you sick of your epic villains dying in just a few turns as the party surrounds and splats them?
Do you get frustrated that your boss fights turn into boring slug fests where everyone involved just stands still and wallops each other?
Do you want to fill your players with dread anticipation with only two words?
“Lair Action. Skeletal hands burst from the floor and walls around you grasping and clawing.”
“Lair Action. The cave ceiling cracks, covering the ground with uneven rubble, it looks like the section above your head is about to collapse.”
“Lair Action. Maddening whispers fill your mind, urging, demanding, screaming that you turn on your allies and kill.”
Welcome Dungeon Masters, enter my domain and in this 3-part series, I shall impart to you the secrets of lair actions. I’m Devlin DM, part of the creative team for the bestselling Home-Field Advantage: A Compendium of Lair Actions. This Mithral product contains 250 unique lairs covering over 320 creatures and is available in PDF and print at DMsGuild.
In this article, I’m going to break down one of my favorite lairs from Home-Field Advantage, and use it to showcase how a monster’s lair makes a great hook for adventure!
The Banshee
The avarice, rage, and despair that drive a banshee suffuse into the environment of its lair, and forms a resonating energy that empowers a banshee further. Rejection of the Self. If the banshee sees a reflection of itself, it is driven into an incoherent rage as it tries to disrupt or destroy the source of the reflection and those responsible for creating it. While the banshee can see its reflection, it makes attack rolls with advantage, but it cannot take lair actions, and attack rolls against it have advantage. Wrath and Resentment. The negative emotions that drive the banshee burst forth when it wails. Each of the banshee’s lair actions causes a negative emotion to build up again. After the banshee has used each of its lair actions at least once, it regains the use of its Wail ability.
Lair Actions
On initiative count 20 (losing initiative ties), the banshee can take a lair action to cause one of the following effects:
The banshee is driven into a frenzied rage by the sight of creatures continuing to violate its lair with their ugly presence. On its next turn, the banshee can make an additional attack with its corrupting touch. Additionally, if the banshee used its Wail on its last turn, until initiative count 20 on the next round, the banshee has advantage on attack rolls against any creature which succeeded on its saving throw against the Wail.
One creature of the banshee’s choice that it can see must succeed on DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or be charmed by the banshee and share in its avarice. A creature charmed in this way must use its turns to try and safely approach the nearest beautiful or valuable object (e.g. an elaborate painting or a golden crown). Once a creature has moved to within 5 feet of the object, it spends its turns ogling it greedily. The creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns and whenever it takes damage, ending the effect on a success. This effect ends early if the banshee dies or uses this lair action again.
Overwhelming hopelessness floods the mind of one creature the banshee can see within its lair, sapping its will to live. The creature must make a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, the creature has vulnerability to necrotic damage and disadvantage on attack rolls. Its speed is also reduced to 0 and it won’t willingly move. A creature can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns and whenever it regains hit points, ending the effect on a success.
Multiple Banshee wails, scary stuff right? Banshees possess (heh) one of the few “save or die” effects in 5e, failing the save against their wail instantly reduces a creature to 0 hit points. Even on a success, a creature takes 10 (3d6) psychic damage. Top tip: If everyone fails, to avoid a TPK have the wail do 21 (6d6) psychic damage on a failure & half as much on a success.
Unfortunately, Banshees are kind of a one-trick pony. Once they use their wail, they’re reduced either to frightening creatures, which deals no damage and become useless once a target succeeds on the save, or a single attack each turn. With these lair actions, the fight becomes a desperate scramble to keep the banshee off balance by showing it its reflection. This is made harder by the Banshee’s Regional Effect:
Regional Effects
The banshee’s self-loathing permeates its lair, causing non-magical reflective surfaces such as water or mirrors within the banshee’s lair to appear cloudy. Such surfaces do not reflect images clearly unless they have been splashed with a flask of holy water within the last minute. If the banshee uses its corrupting touch against a reflective surface in this way the surface returns to being cloudy.
When the banshee dies, these effects disappear after 1d10 days.
Using this set of Lair Actions and Regional Effect will lead to a hectic, high-stakes combat as the party desperately tries to stall the ticking clock. But there’s a lot of knowledge that needs to be imparted here. In games like the Witcher and tv shows like Supernatural, figuring out how to fight the monster is a key part of the story. Since preparation is the key to beating a banshee in its lair, we also included this sidebar:
If players are to face a banshee in its lair, use a combination of Intelligence (Religion) and Wisdom (Insight) checks, books of lore, local rumors, helpful retired monster hunters, grumpy priests, etc... to make sure they are given ample opportunity to discover
the banshee’s ability to reuse its wail and how to use reflections to distract it.
This is a great excuse for the party to have a whole session preparing and scheming on how to defeat the banshee, involving a fun NPC and some crazy plans. Will they try and lure the banshee out? Bring sunshine in using a bunch of mirror? Make a bunch of holy water to keep the mirror sheen on the Paladin’s breastplate? Or something wacky and bonkers that “will never work” yet somehow your players will pull it off?
All you need is one NPC to provide them with the information, and maybe to adjudicate a couple of ability checks, but otherwise, you can sit back and watch as your players spend the whole session furiously plotting. Grab a map of the banshee lair and you’ve got 2 full sessions of D&D prepped in just a few minutes. Happy Adventuring!
Excited for more? Check out Part 2 of this series coming soon, where I’ll be showing off how to Make Monsters Scary Again and push lair actions to their limits with the Zombie Horde.
Can’t wait? Grab yourself a copy of Home-Field Advantage: A Compendium of Lair Actions and give your party boss fights they’ll never forget.
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Keep your blades sharp and spells prepared heroes!
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