Rocs 5e
Guide by Sam West, @CrierKobold
Have you been recently inspired by Godzilla or King Kong, and want to run some massive, city-threatening monsters who are more forces of nature than tactical villains? It's time to ROC.
These things are basically a mundane hunting hawk that’s scaled up to be the size of a plane. They are kaiju-sized monstrosities capable of wreaking as much havoc as a dragon in their own right, and while they may lack complexity mechanically, their speed, size, and nature sets them up as horrifying mid-tier big bads that bring disaster wherever they go.
Rocs are Gargantuan. This size category is reserved for 32 to 64 ft. tall monsters that weigh 16 to 125 tons. They take up 20 ft. by 20 ft. spaces. A bird of prey this size will have a wingspan that goes blocks in distance, and its height will dwarf most two-storied buildings when upright.
Running a Roc
Rocs aren’t complicated. If you ignore the numbers, they have about as many traits as a CR 0 beast, in some cases less. Where it gets its advantages are its raw numbers. It’s got a 120 ft. fly speed. These things are jets that also have a Beak that deals 4d8+9 piercing and Talons that deal 4d6+9 slashing and pick things up, no save or contested check offered. With 248 hit points, if a party is going to take this thing down, they’re going to need a lot of damage, supporting magic to lock it down and be able to not only survive high drops but take 50+ damage each round.
Player Levels
I’d only recommend players in groups level 11 or higher attempt to take one of these things on. Given these raw numbers, its CR certainly is justified, and without a diverse party capable of hitting it with impactful grapples or magical conditions that lock it down, they can struggle to take on something this fast and large.
Groups of martial characters with little tools to mitigate its speed and grapple will get slaughtered by this thing should it play and fight like the gargantuan bird of prey that it is. Rocs can put down hundreds of points of damage while only entering the party’s threat range briefly each round, making melee-only characters a major liability unless they can pin something ten times their size down.
Defining Gameplay to Work With
Roc’s size, speed, and talons tell you exactly how to run Roc encounters. It wants to drive by the party, pick up a character while slashing into it, and let gravity play as its teammate. It can shrug off plenty of damage with its moderate AC and a giant swath of hit points, making it manage just fine against attacks of opportunity.
Mentality and Tactics
Nature is the best teacher for how to run a roc. We’ve seen birds of prey use gravity to deal with their captured prey, and they rarely stick around the group. They isolate their targets, pick em up after ripping into them a bit, and drop them to the ground for even more damage.
The basic play pattern is the rock starts about 60 feet above the party, dives onto the most vulnerable party member, picks them up after beaking it and raking it with its talons, and uses the drop as a secondary form of damage. On its next turn, it can fly further up while ripping and rending the grappled target, and letting go the near-dead body should it start to fight back and let gravity finish the job.
Should everything hit, deals over 100 damage from just the roc’s attacks, and by flying 180 feet vertically upward, 18d6 (63) damage from the fall over two rounds, which is enough damage to put a raging 9th-level barbarian down through their resistances.
As the Main Antagonist
Dragons have earned a reputation as schemers; smart, devious monsters that hoard gold, amass a following of underlings, and rule over regions with monstrous might. Rocs can match the size, speed, and lethality of a dragon, but lack the brains to put together a cohesive scheme. As mentioned previously, they’re more so forces of nature a region has to reckon with. They make for superb monster movie villains, leaving ruined towns and cities in their wake as their hunting ground expands and it devastates the natural order around it.
They aren’t confronting the players with much of a moral question; they simply are announcing they are top of the food chain, and if unchallenged, will do what they need to do to survive, usually decimating and humbling humanity in the process.
As a Supplementary Monster
Given their nature, I love a smarter villain weaponizing these things by simply pushing them out of one region and closer to civilization. Mind Flayers, Aboleths, and Dragons all to me feel like they could have the means to deprive a roc of its regular prey and gently push it towards devastating a region that was unaffected by it.
What leads the Roc to change its hunting ground is an adventure of its own that points to a larger malicious threat lurking behind the scenes that has massacred wildlife to drive the Roc further and further away from its home and into the realms of civilization.
Controlling one otherwise would require some mastery of animal handling unseen by mortals. If you want a God of the Hunt to feel threatening, having it use a Roc like a regular hunting hawk on its arm will quickly establish a near incomprehensible size difference that paints the god as a force the players can’t mess with.
Combating the Monster
Should a Roc be a problem for you and your party, combating it requires a lot of tactical thinking and proactive defensive measures. As soon as something is taloned and dragged upward, if there isn’t a plan to safely get to the ground again or fly, it’s dead.
Proactive Defensive Measures
Feather Fall is a cheap effect that can protect your character from the fall that sentences them to death. Dimension Door and other teleportation effects can similarly defend you from hitting the ground harshly after being dropped from the sky like a sky-diver without a parachute. Fly and flight speeds will serve similar roles in keeping you alive; spreading out these abilities across the party will be the easiest form of mitigating the fall damage Rocs kill with.
When going into this fight, you want to stock up on resources to ensure every member of the party both can escape its grasp on their own and can survive the subsequent plummet, ideally while repositioning to avoid the same fate next round.
Shielding the talon attack to prevent getting picked up in the first place is a meaningful defensive option to have at your disposal as well.
Elements to Target
How you lose to a Roc is by letting it get multiple rounds picking up and dropping the group. Fighting it in an enclosed space it can’t easily get into with its fly speed is the easiest way to handle that problem. Cover is crucial to this; you can use its size against it and prevent it from reaching the group outright without needing to lose its fly speed and waddle with its 20 ft. ground speed.
Once you’re confident you aren’t going to get picked off, having a readied action dedicated to getting its speed to zero will give you a chance at killing it. You have to chew through a lot of hit points while it's down, though, so even should you succeed and get a Hold Monster on it, if it gets a chance to escape, it's dashing 240 feet in the air away from the group to heal up and regroup. Having other characters whose job it is to lock it down after it breaks free can add a layer of protection to actually take it down for good.
Classes That Shine Against It
Full casters in the mid-tiers aren’t lacking in lock-down tools. Most have some method for getting it to save or stick to the ground. From that point, ranged, high-damage characters will shred through its hit points as fast as they can. A lot of character options can contribute to taking it down, but full-casters will have the best chance of actually killing this thing.
Melee-ranged classes like Monk and Barbarian will struggle to contribute to this kind of fight unless they are willing to risk their life to climb onto it and fight in the open sky.
The World Around It
Sustaining as a gargantuan bird leaves an impact. Wildlife around a Roc’s layer needs to reproduce fast, and there can’t be other massive competing predators that can hunt the large mammals and reptiles a Roc would need to sustain itself.
People will know to fear certain regions that are within miles of these monstrosities. If you see a bird in the distance that’s the size of a jet, you best believe you’re staying as far away from that region as you can if you value your and your livestock’s lives.
Environments
Mountains are the obvious nesting place for Rocs. They get a high vantage point over a wide area with plenty of space to scout around. Seas, too, make a lot of sense for Rocs to nest near with whales, dolphins, and large sharks all being excellent prey for them to hunt down.
Vulture variations of these monsters could work in mesas and other grounded environments. Wide, flat regions are prime hunting grounds for birds of prey. Their keen sight does help them hunt in sparsely wooded regions, but their size makes dense foliage rough for them to get through without devastating the landscape.
The following table has sample regions you can use to set up your own roc adventures.
Roc Hunting Grounds
| d6 | Environment |
|---|---|
| 1 | Atop a dormant volcano, a roc nest overlooks the surrounding islands and ocean |
| 2 | A mountain cave, once home to a dragon, has been repurposed by a roc for hunting |
| 3 | A roc nests on top of a series of jutting, flat rocks in a mesa as its peak predator |
| 4 | The roc has decimated a region of jungle like a meteor, landscape leveled out from its mountain nest as it hunts the dinosaurs that call the tropical place home |
| 5 | Dozens of hamlets dotting the countryside have gone eerily quiet; a Roc has moved in, and while it first just devastated their livestock, it swept in to clean up the farmers, too |
| 6 | Celestial mountains are home to god-like species of giants. All of the flora and fauna is massive, leading the rocs to serve the role of an average bird of prey |
Signs of a Roc’s Hunting Grounds
If you’re looking to add some flavor to your roc’s hunting grounds, consider the following table of sample descriptors to add some fear into your players as they scout the region.
Roc Signs
| d6 | Roc Sign |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bones of elephants, dinosaurs, or other larger beasts are commonplace every hundred yards, giving the region an eerie atmosphere of death |
| 2 | The first sign was the vacant pastures, void of grazing cattle. The second was a town devastated, roofs ripped from buildings and bashed inward, no living soul around |
| 3 | A city has ballistas mounted to the city walls and turrets scattered within the city limits, all default pointed towards a mountain in the distance |
| 4 | A picked clean bison corpse sits impaled impossibly high on a stone peak, dropped by a gargantuan threat |
| 5 | The local town is built entirely below ground and within the carved-in sides of cliffs |
| 6 | Craters dot the woodland landscapes with decades-old trees splintered like twigs from above |
Associated Loot
As beast-like hunters, rocs don’t really have much need or want to amass treasure. I would consider running raven-like Rocs who just have an affinity for shiny things, dotting their nests with magical item trinkets from the monster hunters dumb enough to attempt to take them on in their hunting grounds. I’d consider loading them up with gear that was aimed at besting the Roc, but failed to give the hunter enough of an edge to outlast the instantaneous death the beast puts out.
Loot in a Roc’s Nest
| d12 | Loot |
|---|---|
| 1 | Boots of Levitation |
| 2 | Belt of Stone/Fire Giant Strength |
| 3 | Carpet of Flying |
| 4 | Cloak of the Bat |
| 5 | Feather Token (Bird) |
| 6 | Figurine of Wondrous Power (Bronze Griffon/Ebony Fly) |
| 7 | Iron Bands of Binding |
| 8 | Ring of Feather Falling |
| 9 | Rope of Entanglement |
| 10 | Sun Blade |
| 11 | Wand of Binding |
| 12 | Wings of Flying |
Rewards for taking down a Roc can reflect the alternative devastation they represent. If a city doesn’t deal with it, they’re looking at natural disaster levels of spending to recover from the devastation they can cause, making the gold amounts offered incredibly enticing.
Roc and Roll (AKA: The Name of My Next Monster Hunter Campaign)
If you haven’t run a Roc and want to do some splashy, tactical monster hunting, I can’t recommend them enough. It's not a complex formula, but there are a lot of interesting elements that come from taking a mundane beast and scaling it up to be a kaiju. Good hunting out there!
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