Fiddlesticks, The Ancient Fear

Medium Construct or Fiend (Demon) Chaotic Evil

CR6(EXP)

Armor Class: 15 (natural armor)

Hit Points: 71 (13d8 + 13)
Speed: 40 ft.

Passive Perception: 13
Saving Throws:
Skills: Deception +5, Insight +6, Persuasion +5
Condition Immunities: charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned, unconscious
Damage Immunities: poison
Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from non-magical attacks
Damage Vulnerabilities:
Senses: Darkvision 60ft.
Languages: None, But it can mimic any noise it has heard.

STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA

13 (+1) 15 (+2) 12 (+1) 14 (+2) 16 (+3) 14 (+2)

Special Abilities :
Create Effegie. Fiddlesticks can magically manifest a harmless but indistinguishable copy of
himself. When this copy is created it will remain motionless standing like a normal scarecrow
and will remain there for 24 hours unless Fiddlesticks dismisses them or dies. These effigies
have a 15 AC, 1 hit point, and trusight up to 30ft. If a creature comes within 30ft., It will animate
and take a random action and then dissipate into nothing. All creatures within 30ft. of an effegie
when happens must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or become magically frightened for 6
seconds. If an effegie frightens a creature it will magically alert Fiddlesticks. Fiddlesticks can
only manifest 3 of these effigies at a time.

Harmless Scarecrow. While Fiddlesticks remains motionless, it is indistinguishable from its

manifested Effigies.

Devour Fear. Whenever fiddlesticks lands a Melee Weapon Attack on a frightened creature
that attack is considered an automatic Critical Hit.

Actions/Attacks:
Multi Attack. Fiddlesticks can make 2 attacks, 1 with its claw and 1 with its sickle or it can
make 1 reap attack

Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 6 (2d4 + 1) slashing damage.

Sickle. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 10ft., one target. Hit: 9 (2d6 + 2) slashing
damage.

Reap. Ranged Spell Attack: +6 to hit range 60ft., one target. Hit: 12 (2d8+3) necrotic damage.
Fiddlesticks throw a crow made of necrotic energy at a creature, a creature hit by this attack
must succeed on a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or become “Silenced” until the end of
Fiddlesticks next turn. A “Silenced” creature cannot talk, or speak verbal components for spells.
Any verbal noise they attempt to make comes out as inaudible crow sounds.

Terrify. Fiddlesticks can target one creature it can see within 60 feet of it. If the target can see
Fiddlesticks or one of its effigies, the target must succeed on a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or
be magically frightened of Fiddlesticks and the effigies until the end of Fiddlesticks’s next turn.
The frightened target is paralyzed.

Bountiful Harvest. Fiddlesticks attempt to tether and drain the life force from surrounding
creatures. Each creature within 30ft. of Fiddlesticks must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution
saving throw. Each creature that fails this saving throw 9 (2d8) necrotic damage and
Fiddlesticks regains a number of hit points equal to the combined total of necrotic damage dealt
this way.
SCRIPT:
Long, long ago, in a tower by the edge of the sea, a foolish young mage summoned something
into the world that he was not prepared to control.

What stepped before the boy was something older than recorded history. Something darker than
a yawning, starless night. Something the world had desperately tried to forget.

In an instant, the mage, the creature, and the tower itself were lost to all of time.
At least, that's what the stories say.

children frighten each other around the fire with tales of a monster that raises itself from
untended graves.

drunken sailors trade accounts of something standing alone on a tiny, distant atoll from which no
one has ever returned.

soldiers tell fables of a lonely farmhand who was blamed for a poor harvest and fed to the
crows, later returning to the world as a demon.

But these are simply fables to frighten young children. No one would ever be afraid of a silly old
monster called Fiddlesticks...

Right?...
WRONG! Very wrong!

Fiddlesticks is a primordial entity that predates the rise of civilization, building its body out of
random items and piecing itself together to look more human.

The reason he does this is to lure in his prey and not scare them off right away. He is able to
mimic the voices of the creatures and people he has killed like some kind of demonic Kenku.

Reports of him span the entire world as well as similar reports of 9 other demons, but it is
debated on if these 9 other demons are also fiddlesticks in different forms.

The general lack of information about Fiddlesticks implies that he is supposed to embody the
fear and terror of the unknown.

Other creatures similar to fiddlesticks have been called demons and all of them seem to eat or
absorb a kind of negative emotion or feeling

Tahm Kench feeds on the greed of mortals

Evelyn Feeds on the lust

Fiddlesticks seems to feed on fear

And my ADC feeds the enemy team.

Fiddlesticks like many champions over the years got completely reworked and changed to fit the
games modern aesthetic and because of that all of his old lore and trivia don't really help us
understand his current iteration.

Up to this point I have stayed 100% true to the source material but because of how little
information we have on him I'd like to add my own interpretation of the character so that it's
easier to tie into multiple DnD settings.

Now at first glance I'm tempted to make fiddlesticks the product of an evil mage. Maybe this
mage animated a scarecrow and it gained sentience. If that works for you go right ahead and
create an adventure about that.

But I am going to dive a little deeper, I'm going to make my fiddlesticks part of a bigger picture.
Something more evil and disturbing than just an evil farm tool.

I'm going to take fiddlesticks and the other demons I mentioned earlier and tie them to their
negative emotion. Making a kind of demonic coven.

So. My fiddlesticks in a normal dnd setting would go like this.

“Far away in a small farm town a boy lays in his bed looking out his window toward his family's
farm. As he lays there slowly drifting off to sleep a crow bounces off his window, the boy jumps
and his heart races. No longer able to easily fall asleep he goes back to staring at the fields. A
light breeze blows through the field and the scarecrows clothing flaps, as if it was waving at him.
Unsettled and still on edge from the crow the boy rolls over in his bed turning his back to the
scarecrow. As he closes his eyes disturbing images of the scarecrow begin to flood his
imagination. Unintentionally crafting a nightmarish version of the scarecrow in the fields. The
boy seeking reassurance rolls back over to face his fear and prove that the scarecrow isn't
actually scary. He opens his eyes just in time to see his window sliding open and fiddlesticks
stepping inside”.

In a normal dnd setting I would make Fiddlesticsk along with all the aforementioned demons a
byproduct of the very emotions or feelings they feed on.

Perhaps when somebody is seriously scaring people or in places of great fear fiddlesticks will
appear.
An example of this could be towns folk believe that an old abandoned cabin is haunted and it is
a place of great evil with enough people feeling scared or believing that the cabin houses evil
spirits, those feelings could be an invitation for Fiddlesticks to claim it and truly give them
something to fear.

Humanoids lusting or feeling greedy could make one of the other demons appear.

In the game league of legends fiddlesticks has several abilities that show what he is capable of
and give us a good idea of how he would trick and attack his prey.

Instead of doing a copy and past of his entire kit I want to focus and just a handful of his
features and make them his go to tactics.

My fiddlesticks is going to focus on making some sort of copy of himself either as an illusion or
physical entity, draining creatures of their fear and life force, and a massive storm of crows.

For his statistics I have decided to take the scarecrow stat block from the monster manual with
some thematic adjustments.

Trying to keep this in the CR 6-9 area we have given him some decent modifiers and
resistances.

Getting into his first special ability we have given him his Effegie. This ability lets fiddlesticks
create harmless copies of themselves that essentially act as animated alert spells.

These effigies grant fiddlesticks the ability to hide from and cause fear in unsuspecting
adventurers. As well as fiddlesticks can pretend to be one of these harmless scarecrows to get
a kind of sneak attack on t its prey.

Fear is a touchy subject to me. I dislike the idea of telling players how their characters are
feeling or what they are scared of magically or not. However taking a look at the scarecrows stat
block its fear ability doubles as a paralyze.

Fiddlesticks to me uses his deception and fear abilities to single out a target and attempt to pick
people off one by one. So I have decided to give him the ability to critically hit anyone who is
feared as long as he is in melee range with them.

He has multi attack with some very basic low damage attacks, and of course his targeted fear
ability just like the scarecrow, but there are 2 other things i want to focus on.

I gave fiddlesticks a ranged attack that can hopefully buy him some time against the parties
wizard. Fiddle could fear him but getting close enough to a mage could be troublesome.
So this ranged attack originally was just the ability to cast Toll the dead but in game fiddlesticks
can use it to stop other champs from casting spells for a brief time.

So i have decided to add this new kind of feature to his stat block.

Essentially he would use this against the druids, mages, and rangers of the party to protect
himself for a turn and potentially close the gap between them.

If they fail this attacks saving throw they cannot speak or make any noise with their mouths,
whenever they try only the sounds of crows can be heard instead.

This does not stop mages but it disables their spells with verbal components for a turn.

Lastly I'd like to talk about his insurance against being surrounded and pounded.

He is able to force all creatures within 30ft of himself to make a saving throw, those who fail lose
2d8 hit points and fiddlesticks regains all the hit points taken from the creatures.

I found this ability very enjoyable to design however it could be very troublesome if your
characters lack any form of ranged damage. However a way to out maneuver this attack would
be to hit fiddlesticks one at a time and have the characters move around in different directions.

This forces fiddlesticks into using his weaker ranged attack or only getting one person in his
drain.

I considered putting a recharge on this ability so he couldn't spam it but after some thinking it
may be fine as is.

See if all the players surround a creature and easily kill it i dont think they will feel very
challenged, but it's their choice to use that strategy. Running away or spreading apart and using
ranged attacks are options they could take.

And let's be honest killing is what fiddlesticks does.

Thanks for watching!

Tell me in the comment section how you would make your own Fiddlesticks? Did you enjoy my
version? And what do you want to see next?

Ill see you in the next video!

Bye!