Monster Workshop is a weekly feature where I build new monsters or monster variants for Dungeons & Dragons. A new Monster Workshop drops every Wednesday.
For this week’s edition of Monster Workshop, I picked an annoying monster from a favorite game series. Chus or chuchus appear in various Legend of Zelda titles. I’ll present a couple of variants here, but there are five versions plus tables and chu potions on GM Binder.
Chus
A product of alchemical experimentation on oozes, chus are a widespread pest. They take the form of rubbery blobs, typically less than a foot tall, and they come in an array of colors.
Experiment Amok. The first chus were intended to be living cauldrons, consuming the components of potions and excreting the finished product. Unfortunately, the chus behaved erratically and their excretions still required further refinement.
Deemed a failure, the first chus were unceremoniously dumped in the wilds, and their creators expected them to die out within a few weeks outside lab conditions.
Surprising Resilience. Chus proved a resilience and adaptability not suggested by their simple forms. Their population grew and quickly spread. The chus seek out plants, small animals, and potion reagents and consume them until they eventually burst, forming a new batch of three to five chus from the resulting puddle in as little as a day.
Left to their own devices, many types of chus have formed, and they adapt to new environmental stimuli in just a few days.
Design Notes
I based these chu statblocks on their appearance inĀ The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Wind Waker ranks among my favorite Zelda games, not least of which because each of its enemies feels unique and presents a different combat challenge.
I still remember the satisfaction of figuring out the tricks and rhythm for each new monster. It kept battles varied and interesting and it rewarded learning to use all of Link’s big bag of tools as the game progressed.
The chus are meant to present an extremely low level challenge, as they do for the most part in Wind Waker. Red and green chus are pretty basic hack-and-slash challenge, while yellow, blue, and purple offer a little more challenge and variety.
I wasn’t always able to model the chus’ abilities exactly due to the difference in medium, but I think I arrived at something close. The yellow chu loses its charge when it drops below a hit point threshold, which feels close to the game’s “hit it with a projectile to stun it and turn off the electricity” mechanic.
Purple chus in Wind Waker have to be petrified with light in order to deal damage to them, but building D&D mechanics for that would make them unwieldy at best. Instead, I opted for a simpler “resistances in the dark” build.
I gave the green chu magic resistance and the red chu more hit points so they’d feel just a little different and justify their related potions. The blue chu is a compilation of red, green, and yellow.
Chus are definitely meant to be encountered in groups, and I think there’s enough to them that they can be tossed into higher level fights to spice things up alongside stronger monsters.
If you throw a bunch of chus at your players, let me know how the encounter turns out. Thanks for reading. Until next time!
Check out last week’s Monster Workshop on the rancor.
chasetriesagain.com 