Many of the strangest creatures in D&D have been explained as the result of mad wizards experimenting on life. Often these are hybrid animals like owlbears or vizzerdrix, but many stranger combinations exist as well.
The amalgam creature template is a tool for the dm to make their owl bizarre hybrid to populate the tower of the latest mad wizard.
The template allows you to take any creature and combine it with any other creature. This involves taking the best of both creatures and adding a third of the HD of the weaker base creature on top of the HD of the stronger creature. Obviously this is a very complex process, and the CR of the resulting monster will have to be assessed manually, but the unpredictable result is often worth it, as this template can help even more than most with surprising even the most knowledgeable player.
The ways hybrids can be created is as varied as the results. Some are created by skilled craftsman with clarity of purpose, while others are the result of madmen playing with forces they barely understand. Natural and unnatural processes can also create mad results, from collapsing planes dumping mutated and merged survivors on the material plane, to the children of powerful magical being carrying traits of both parents.
In other cases the monsters created with this templates are not hybrids but entirely their own, simply another strange creature in the magical world of Dungeons and Dragons.
The idea of hybrid creatures is nothing new, and of course there are other ways to create hybrids of various kinds. Bloodforge from Dreamscarred press has a large collection of hybrid player races, as well as several half-something templates. The old 3.0e sourcebook Savage Species has a selection of templates, including the Tauric Creature template that lets you stick a humanoid on a larger creature. The Complete book of Eldrich Might has a spell that allows creating temporary almagams, including a lot of variance depending on which of the two targets fail their Fortitude or Will saves.
And a favorite of mine is Crossbreeding: Flesh and Blood from the Encyclopedia Arcane line. This is an entire book about the subject, including rules for players to be the mad wizard for once.
AdamÄra (Bunyip/Wyvern) are deadly predators that hunt in both the Ocean Below and the Seas Above of Mar-Samadura.
The Magocratic citystate of Achen’Daroth is widely known and feared for the great magical wonders its rulers have created over the centuries. It is the latest magitech factory that has their neighbors watching fearfully, for in that new complex of spell engines, ritual chambers and ley conductors massive numbers of hybrid soldiers are being created.
One of the greatest feats of alchemy is the ability to distill the essence of a creature into a potion that can temporarily grant the abilities of that creature to the drinker. These potions are lesser artifacts on the level of the Alchemist’s Stone or the Sun Orchid Elixir.
Monsters of Porphyra, 6
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