Lessons for the Dungeon Master looking to make the confrontation between the party and your colossal foe the stuff of legends by looking at Shadow of the Colossus.
The goal of the Inspirations mini-series/subset of blogs is to look at other forms of media such as movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc. to serve as a point of reference or well... an inspiration for DMs out there trying to craft their games and worlds. This will be the first in a mini-series/subset of blog posts.
Semi-recently, on the PS4, one of my favorite games ever was rereleased with a new HD version, bringing Shadow of the Colossus back to my radar, and memories of playing it on my PS2. This game was cool. Unfortunately, I do not own a PS4, but thinking about it did bring something to mind. I often used it as an inspiration and brought some of the mechanics into my games to make fighting gargantuan foes feel truly epic, in all senses of the word. On top of this, Shadow of the Colossus is gorgeous, and the soundtrack is wonderful.
I can gush about this game for an eternity, but that's not why you're here. Before jumping into this, I'll explain the game for the uninitiated, or as a reminder to those who haven't played in awhile. In Shadow of the Colossus, you play as a boy named Wander who has come to the Forbidden Land to resurrect a dead girl. An ancient deity-like being called Dormin tasks you with slaying 16 colossi in order to bring the girl back to life. You then discover, battle, and take down each colossus. They are the only enemies you encounter in the whole game.
But what can we as DMs learn from Shadow of the Colossus when it comes to the moment when your players' characters finally encounter that truly massive foe. What can we take away from this classic video game in to help make those encounters epic in every sense of the word and absolutely memorable? Let's take a look:
1) Tone and making the player characters feel small.
2) Making your gigantic foes impervious to conventional attacks
3) Making the battle less a battle and more an encounter around a puzzle and a test of other skills.
We'll do what we usually do here and start with the first one.
I am beginning to feel like I'm sounding like a broken record, but tone is almost always important to making encounters and other facets of the game memorable. It is what sets apart the average DnD session from the super cool ones we often tell that rando in the FLGS about when chatting. Shadow of the Colossus really nails the idea of tone. Firstly, when you finally discover the arena you will be fighting the next battle in, you are given a glimpse of what it looks like. It will help to give hints as to what the colossus will be like, what challenges to expect, and even perhaps give ideas or help you think of ideas to take the behemoth down.
Then, you are often treated to an introductory shot of the colossus. One of my favorites is when you walk to the edge of the arena, a massive hand comes up the side and the colossus hoists itself over the edge, towering over little Wander. As it brings itself over the ledge, it causes the earth to shake and each limb makes a thunderous sound as it comes crashing down. The beast bellows, steps forward, and the music swells, and the battle begins. This cues the player that this colossus is coming to get you. He is not playing around. Give your massive monster an intro like this. Make it cool. Watch the intros of the colossi, or come up with your own.
What Shadow of the Colossus really gets right, though, is making the player feel truly small compared to these gargantuan creatures. They shamble slowly. Their attacks come slow and look heavy. They bellow loudly. Most of them tower over wander. Their movements sound as if they carry weight, their foot steps often causing the ground to cave under them. Their footfalls also cause the earth to roar. You feel truly insignificant and small to these creatures. Some even ignore the player until they hurt them or all together. The developers made sure to have cues to make the players feel truly small, and it works so well. Use these ideas to help describe your monster. It's movements, the way it sounds, and just how big it is. You can even use structures and natural things, like trees, help to show just how big your enemy is. Also, throwing in a bombastic, orchestra soundtrack similar to the one in the game can really set the tone you're looking for.
Next, let's look at making your behemoths impervious to conventional attacks. This requires you as a DM to sort of fudge the rules as written and do away with typical AC rules for narrative purposes. I would not do this often, but I would do it for that one special encounter that you want to feel EPIC. It even makes sense that something like a colossus or giant beast would be impervious to conventional means of harm. Your weapons are no better than maybe pins and pebbles to this creature. But how do we go about harming them then?
In Shadow of the Colossus, the colossi are all essentially unharmable with most weapons. You are armed with nothing more than a magic sword, a bow, and your trusty horse in your adventure. In order to truly harm the colossi, you have to climb them and find a way to find the sigils on their bodies and stab them with the sword. For climbing giant beasts, you can call for athletics or acrobatics checks. In Shadow of the Colossus, you have to keep an eye on your stamina in order to hold onto the colossus lest you run out and fall down. You can then have constitution checks or some other appropriate check to determine if the character stays on. This can make for a feeling of fighting a leviathan or a real kong-sized monster.
In one of my past campaigns, I pretty much used this mechanic as if it were ripped straight from the game. In order to harm the giant antlered bear/badger creature I called a witchbeast, the players had to get on its back and stab it in its face where the witch's magical seal was to fell the beast. They had to pass checks to hold on, checks to climb on, and so forth. Called shots were also allowed for other characters. It was a fun and memorable fight. More on it later.
Another game that sort of borrowed from Shadow of the Colossus with this mechanic was Capcom's Dragon's Dogma. When fighting large monsters, the player could attack through conventional means, but to deal significant damage and take the creature down, the player could climb the beast and attack a weak point as long as they had the stamina to do so. This is something you could do as a DM as well if you aren't a fan of completely hand-waving combat rules. When the party finds itself in an encounter with larger foes, I often get asked if they can climb the beast to stab it in weak spots, to which I respond, as any good DM would want to say, 'Yes.' These can make those relatively small characters feel like they foe they are fighting is huge. I mean holding onto a dragon for dear life as it rips through the sky to land a hit on the oh-so-used heart weakspot makes for some cool imagery.
Finally, we're going to look at one last part of the colossus battles from Shadow of the Colossus to help us build a better show down between the party and gargantuan foes. The game is often described as an action/adventure game, but also, it is often compared to puzzle games and considered to have puzzle elements as the player must discover the way to reach the colossus' sigil in order to harm it. After the first colossus, this often involves solving a sort of puzzle in order to open or find the weakness. I have two examples I want to look at specifically.
The first one is with one of the smaller colossi. IT stands roughly the size of a bull. It charges Wander and is highly aggressive compared to some of the other colossi. Perhaps it has a sort of Napolean complex due to being such a little guy, at least for a colossus. Its body is covered in stone armor and a sigil nowhere in sight and nowhere to climb it. Through the fight, you can pickup wood and light it with braziers tucked away in the arena. It turns out our colossus is afraid of fire. You back it over a ledge, to which it falls and the armor breaks, revealing the oh so sought after sigil, and the fight is easy peazy after that.
The other example I want to look at is one of my personal favorite battles in the game. It is against the well known colossus from many screen shots that has a pillar as a sword.
You learn quick you have to goad Gaius into swinging its Washington Monument sword at you, and you have to make sure to be out of the way when it comes crashing down. It gets stuck for a few seconds, giving you enough time to run up it and grab onto its arm, but you may notice armor is in the way. You have to get Gaius to first strike one of the stone plates on the ground to shatter the armor, then climb the sword and solve the rest of the combat puzzle.
Notice something about these fights? Due to the part we explored about having to harm the monster through unconventional means, we have to find that new way, and this turns the fight from just a slug fest at something with a stupid high AC and a stupid amount of HP into less of a fight and more of a puzzle. An idea you can even incorporate into this include super slow attacks that instead of hitting an AC, the character has to pass a check to dodge it. The shaking earth calls for a footing check of some kind. On top of this, you can make it so the players have to get creative as this big monster chips away at their hit points.
Back to that witchbeast fight. The players had a hard time just straight up mounting a monster to stab its face. I can't blame the witchbeast, I wouldn't be a fan of that either, but the players learned that they could goad the monster into a charging attack, make it run into a large tree or boulder, and it would be stunned long enough to allow them to climb onto its back to begin working toward the head. It worked, and the players were able to catch on quickly. As the beast bucked and ran about, those holding on had to pass checks to maintain a grip. Those on the ground did their best to distract the witchbeast from shaking the other party members on its back.
You will want a general idea of what the party needs to do to harm the kaiju-sized monster, but don't get too stuck on an idea. Allow your players to get creative as a group and come up with interesting solutions. Let them work. This can cause for some cool team-up ideas that allow them all to use their strengths together to bring down the awe-inspiring foe and win the town's favor, make them champions of the land, save the princess/prince, or whatever it is that they get for defeating a monster straight out a legend or a religious text.
It might not be your cup of tea to bend the rules for your fights and your encounters, and that it is okay. This was just trying to give ideas to DMs looking to freshen up encounters and make the climatic encounter vs the giant whatever feel EPIC with Shadow of the Colossus as a sort of helping guide to designing that encounter. I have personally used a lot of the ideas that I have proposed, and I must say I got those ideas from Shadow of the Colossus. They worked, and the players at the time really liked the fight. It still gets brought up from time to time.
So, I say give it a shot. I hope that you were able to get something from this, but as always, here at Kobold Stew, I like to talk with you and not at you. What are your thoughts on this? Do you have ideas that you use yourself to make these encounters special? Let me know! Until next time... Happy gaming.
Mr. Puddins
NOTES FROM THE CHEF: I know that I have put out a lot of posts in my Inspirations mini-series, and I hope you are enjoying them. I do want to try and put out more variety in my content though. I hope to put out things such as character builds/ideas, general table-top stuff,reviews, eventually get into Asmodeus' Advocate, and focus more on my home brew setting. I don't have another Inspirations planned, and due to them dominating my blog posts, it may be some time until we see another one.
I have gotten my home brew setting posts off the ground though, so feel free to check that out!
If you are looking for more Dungeons and Dragons content, a new stream/recorded game to follow, or something to check out, be sure to check out at Swordfall, an actual play podcast/channel that plays every Tuesday! I am a player in the game, playing as Kraka-Tur, the Air Genasi barbarian. The group is great, and it's great fun. Check it out! We had session 0, and t went swimmingly. It is a fantastic group that is pretty agreeable.
Session Zero: