The best monster in Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players heroically murder all manner of fantasy-themed monsters. The first ones that come to mind are, well, dragons. Then goblins and werewolves and things. I’ve been through pretty much every book of monsters in the D&D universe since early second addition, and the best one is still the Living Wall.

The Living Wall “consists of greying and sinewy flesh–of faces, hands, broken bones, feet and toes jutting from the surface.” Just in case that isn’t terrible enough for you, it is also described as emitting “a cacophony of tortured minds and voices.” Oh, and if you fail a check you pass out from the horrific nauseating smell.

To create a Living Wall, first you have to entomb a living, breathing person inside a regular wall. That person is doomed to one of the most terrifying deaths imaginable, asphyxiating in total darkness and utter silence over the course of however long it takes them to suck down all the available oxygen. (It is of course possible to trap someone in a porous or cracked wall, allowing air to get in, so the person’s timeline stretches out for days rather than minutes as they slowly dry out… but this isn’t specified as a requirement.) While stuck in the wall the victim must curse the one who trapped him there loudly enough that people standing outside the wall can hear him.

And by the way, if you hear someone screaming obscenities from inside a wall and don’t do anything to try and help them out… you’re kind of a dick.

So eventually this tortured, agonized soul dies. But it doesn’t go anywhere. Oh no, it’s still stuck inside the wall. Whatever’s left of the prisoner’s life force is driven completely insane. Once this happens every corpse within eyeshot of the wall comes to life and clambors towards it, clawing their way out of the ground if they must, and meld with the crazed life force to become part of the wall themselves. From that point on, the same gruesome fate awaits anyone killed by the wall itself.

Back when I used to run second edition D&D I used to design monster encounters I used the total XP value of those monsters to gauge how difficult they were. More difficult monsters are worth more XP, you see, so obviously the monsters worth the most XP are the hardest to fight. A lowly orc is worth only 15 XP, while an old and powerful dragon is worth 20,000 or more. The Living Wall puts them all to shame, with an XP listing of “2,000 to 100,000+“.

See, the Wall doesn’t function like a regular monster. For one thing it’s not mobile, so it can’t position itself to ambush the heroes or chase them down or whatever else. In fact, it doesn’t get any actions at all unless provoked. Whenever someone attacks it, the Wall gets to return fire once for each creature trapped inside. If this particular Wall has inside of it a badger, five swordsmen and a Level 20 mage, you can expect every one of your attacks to be retaliated by some ferocious claws, five sword attacks and a goddamned fireball. Now imagine a Wall that happened to be in someone’s cellar near the site of a great and bloody battle that assimilates dozens of armed dead from both sides of the conflict.

Living Walls only eat creatures and the weapons they’re carrying; they doesn’t care about armor, treasure, or other items unless they’re magical. Which means, of course, that a particularly productive Wall is going to have a pile of shiny treasure in front of it, dropped by all the people it’s consumed over the years. Anyone getting close enough to the Wall to retrieve the treasure is groped at by dead hands jutting from the surface, and they hear moans of anguish begging to be pulled free. Actually taking hold of one of these hands to attempt that, though, is probably a bad move because the Wall can safely and instantly consume anybody who tries. Holy shit!

What I really love about the Living Wall is that it is very clearly a monster that is meant to be used in an actual adventure. It’s not like, say, the Tarrasque which is specifically designed to be absolutely unkillable by anything but the most fericously twinked-out grognards. Just to summarize, the Tarrasque is basically immune to all forms of damage forever, can deal hundreds of damage to multiple targets every round, can completely regenerate its entire monstrous form by the tiniest scrap of flesh and, oh yeah, requires a wish spell to kill. As of fourth edition you can’t even fly past or over the thing since it can magically bind flying creatures to the ground.

No, the Living Wall is an adventure hook all in and of itself. It’s obvious you can’t just hack your way through it, and even if you do, you still have to deal with the crazy-powerful (and crazy-evil) magician that built it in the first place. The damage it deals is overwhelming, but a party that learns what types of creatures the Wall contains can reasonably prepare and protect themselves. Discovering a Living Wall and putting together a plan to deal with it could take an entire session’s worth of work.

To say nothing of the emotional reaction to discovering a wall crawling with limbs and faces in the first place. I mean… yeesh.

It’s easy to design a D&D monster that looks ugly and rolls a bunch of dice whenever it wants to eat something. It’s a bit harder to design one that is meant to evoke a powerful response, have a built-in backstory and be virtually immune to standard D&D combat. I love the way the new fourth edition monster manual is laid out, and I love the new direction monsters have taken as a whole… but man. There’s just nothing in there that comes close to the Living Wall and all it stands for.

(By the way, thanks to my man CJ Awesome who saved me the trouble of having to dig into the dusty annals of my collection to get a picture of that monstrosity. You is good peoples, hombre.)