The Single Strongest Monster Of All Time in D&D 

Chronus: Darkvision 60' So the god ravager, scourge of the cosmos, a deities nightmare... can't see past his shins in the dark?

"Lets put greatest threat to Gods into ultimate God killing simulator and give him a eons of practice" For infinitely wise and powerful creatures that was rather stupid plan.

please upvote so DMs can have quick access around after watching the full thing Genius Loci - 1:40 Elder Titans - 3:25 Dream Larva - 5:18 Umbral Blot - 6:45 Iron Colossus - 7:43 Phaethon - 9:30 Primal Elementals - 10:45 Xixecal - 11:47 Devastation Vermin - 13:29 Cronus - 16:55 Hecatoncheires - 19:55

"The Hecatoncheires can only attack a a small creature up to 10 times" Dongo the Gnome Fighter: Pathetic

I love that the strongest thing in D&D history is basically just a Fighter with 100 Attacks per round lol.

false. the strongest and most dangerous monster is a jaded, pissed off DM

I love the idea of Genius Loci, it could make for some really cool horror stories where you slowly uncover that the villian is not someone but ~somewhere~

The Umbral Blot feels like you could do a big surprise long term campaign where the Blot just uses wizards for the goal of a bunch of chaotic evil destruction and use it as the final boss with some set up to make damn sure the party can actually fight it.

A god of fertility isn’t a good chalenge Laughs in shubniggurat.

DMPCs: allow me to introduce myself

Cronus: "DC 69 fort save on attack or die." Me: "Nice."

college debt? heartbreak? homelessness? THAT is what Dream Larva become?

I love how the god that came up with the plan to defeat Cronus was the kobold god. XD

I feel that if these monsters came to 5e they would be nerfed to all hell like the demon lords or the arch devils

Jokes on the Hecaton and the gods, Kronus has spent his time basically training in the dragonball time chamber.

Daurgothoth (CR 50): I am God! Time dragon (CR 90): Keep on dreaming, boy.

A tarrasque with a ballon strapped to its back seems pretty unstoppable

>go to fight fertility god >every party member is suddenly very pregnant

I'm so happy to see the Epic Tome from 3.5 still getting reviewed in 2020. I loved reading through the monsters in that book, even knowing that I'd never get to run them. They're just so unbelievably dope. Sentient spheres of annihilation? The undead stillborn fetal remnants of Gods? The oldest fey who are to the High Elves what the High Elves are to humans? Yes, yes yes please more of these!

I'm surprised I never learned that about Kurtulmak before, considering I'm somewhat of a kobold fanatic.

I couldn't stop laughing at the idea of the Hecatonkeries being made and the gods just going: "NOPE. PUT THAT IN A CAGE AND BURY IT. WE FUCKED UP."

If Cronos and Hecatoncheires are THAT powerful in D&D, I would hate to see what TYPHON would be like.

it's heartwarming to know that the strongest known creatures in dnd are good aligned

The Epic Level Handbook was one of the best 3rd edition books written.

"A god of fertility probably wouldn't be a good fighter" *Freya glares, sword in hand, from her chariot pulled by giant cats*

Lady of Pain CR Level: *D O N T*

7:47 that's the Magic The Gathering art for the card Damnation. A board wipe

Zeitgeist is the single most overlooked adventure path I've ever seen and the best I've ever done. So glad to see artwork from that masterful campaign (4:00)!

That huge skeleton with the sword is just legendary

Love how the "appear only some thousand >>AEONS

The interesting thing about this is that CR does not always help define strength. Asmodeus for instance is listed as CR32 in the BoVD, but on his own 9th layer of hell, he is all powerful. Many beings have a home plane/place of existence where they control the very fabric of reality. Against such power there are few who could survive. The infinite planes of Pandemonium are stated to react to the divine nature of beings and change their reality based on the strongest being that lives there. In those kinds of places, the list of those who can make a difference is very few.

Always thought that the Terrasque was the be all end all most terrifying monster ... Needing so many things and having someone that needs 'Wish' When I learned about playing DnD ...back in the day...I became terrified of this thing. Then I learned aboot the 'Lady of Pain'

"In Greek Mythology, the Hecatoncheires was born from Uranus..." That must have been one hell of a burrito

A footnote from my DM logs for my current campaign: "When you absolutely have to kill the party: Eldritch Vampiric Hydra-Headed Ancient Draconic Tarrasque Krakenlich"

the CR50's in 3e which you seem to be using, had the gods looking at high 90's CR. The gods from that deities book were pretty well overpowered.

I'm SOOOO happy you added the Hecatoncheires to this list. So many people have never heard of it and a DM of mine in the past ended one of our campaigns utilizing it. It was epic and unforgettable! Thing is an absolute monster and I always default to that when it comes to scariest beast. I'm less afraid of a Tarrasque than that thing!

An interesting case is the Lady of Pain from Planescape- a being so powerful (at least, within Sigil) that they refused to ever print any stat sheets for her, since opposing her isn't even HYPOTHETICALLY possible, even for the gods. She even slew the god Aoskar- but not in single combat, simply AT WILL.

The Kobold god of traps deserves more recognition, damn

If Titans are extremely smart and close themselves off to contemplate existence, can you confront them with the realization that all moments of happiness only distract them from and magnify the immeasurable loneliness of life and win by induced depression?

all this reminds me of is that i had a DM who had a CR 74 monster in their homebrew campaign. we actually managed to kill it with a bomb that completely destroyed everything within a 10 mile sphere of the initial blast. i was flying above it in a plane (artificer DMPC made it) and just barely was safe from the blast.

There is actually one monster in 3.5e that has a higher CR. Time Dragons from issue 359 of Dragon Magazine. No need to talk about them, but they do hit CR 90 as a Great Wyrm

Dm: ok, so the Goddess of Fertility uses a legendary action to use its *Burgeoning Birth* on Kranthrax. Kranthrax, you are now 9 months pregnant; in 2 rounds you will give birth to a champion of the goddess. Kranthrax: ...but my character is male..!? Dm: and your point is?

I've seen this video a bunch of times and I always love it! You really nailed it,👍

Your enthusiasm for the monsters is inspiring ❤

Chronus: I literally kill gods for sport Level 400 fighter mutant: Hehe everything get *S L A S H*

The Immortals Handbook Epic Bestiary Volume One (sadly, the only volume ever written) has some absolutely insane entries, topping out at the CR 9721 (not a typo) neutronium golem.

"over 80 feet tall or higher" has redundancy

I haven't seen this guy in my recommended for years. Nice to see he's still uploading.

8:08 One thing that drives me a little bonkers about playing D&D is how poorly weights and sizes are understood and handled by the creators. 350,000 pounds! That's only 175 short tons. That's less than the combined weight of three M1 Abrams tanks. We see objects of that weight all the time in our every day lives. Add an extra zero, and now you're up to the weight of a submarine, which feels more right for something animated by god tier magic. Just a mini rant of mine not directed at you, MrR. It shows up all the time in D&D gameplay where the game tries to make you care about actual weights and sizes but then it scales things in the most bizarre and unrealistic ways. As an engineer trying to balance fantasy with the numbers said fantasy wants me to actually care about, it's easy to get sucked out of the immersion.

DM: Well you all failed your saving throw, so you all die upon seeing the Dream Larvae The party: aw man we just became lvl 27... Me: Wait I'm not dead then DM: What do you mean? It's an instant kill. Me: I'm Blind 😎

If you want an actual idea as to the power of a deity in D&D, look at the "Demigid's and Dieties" rulebook. It's for third edition, like Cronus and Hecatoncheires

Awesome information. Great video.

Can we take a moment of appreciation for the lack of ads from our benefactor 👌🙌

Hmm, iron colossus.... sounds like something a large high level party could be hired to hunt down for a guild of blacksmith that don't want to worry about getting iron for a few generations.

Hecatoncheires! One of my favorite monsters, even if I've never been able to fight one!

Why you gotta do that to me with the dream larva coming at me man? Freaking me out with the transition dude.

2:20. It's latin and literally means something like "Spirit of the place" (And the c gets pronounced as a k)

"The CR 33 Iron Colossus is similar to an Iron Golem except that its body is sculpted from 150,000 pounds of pure iron. It weighs around 350,000 pounds." Huh? Where does the other 200,000 pounds come from?

26:34 AJ Pickett's video about force and prismatic dragons describes the prismatic dragon as a draconic version of Zaphod Beeblebrox from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and a prismatic dragon that lives near a humanoid settlement would be like a fraggle from Fraggle Rock, with the inhabitants of the town or city being like the Doozers. EDIT: I recommend looking up the Time Dragon from 3.5e... It'll blow your mind.

This is why I love 3.5 edition, the imagination there was so over the top that afterwards Wizard didn't had the choice to categorized them as ''non-canon''. MrRhexx are you gonna do videos about Gods? Even if many monsters are bigger and stronger than them, it could be quite fun to know more about them and to classified them.

CR 90 Great Wyrm Time Dragon: *These guys are cute* For anyone curious, you can find this bad boy in the Dragon Magazine #359 p. 36

The strongest named entity in D&D - at least, as far as Realmspace is concerned - would be Ao. For those physically present in Realmspace on the Material plane, it's The Atropal.

Next campaign we're going into epic levels. This helped me as a DM. Thank you.

I tossed a Hecatoncheires in one one of my epic level campaigns as a final boss fight pf the campaign, there is one blaring weakness they have that most people likely wouldn't think about but one of my players did, the stat bloc in the epic level handbook for one doesn't say anything about them not needing to breathe, so one of my players tricked it into a force wall cage they setup and then drowned it by opening a gate to the elemental plain of water, the uber epic god killing monster that is the Hecatoncheires can be drowned

Gods: makes titans Titans: makes giants Gods: Wait that's illegal

You just KNOW that someone's tried to lewd a prismatic dragon...at least on the internet.

Honestly, one of the coolest parts of this video is learning that Kerafyrm had its origins--both in design and power--in Dungeons and Dragons.

Id rather like to see a" Scariest" or " Most weird/unique" version of this.

So.. basically just the generic monsters from the Epic Handbook. In the same Edition, the true D&D deities listed in the book Deities and Demigods have a 'minimum' CR of around ~66 for the lesser deities such as Bahamut. It does not specify their CR but it gives the statement that, 'if forced to use a CR for a deity, a good starting baseline guide would be to take their total HD + divine rank, as a minimum." It also lists the stats for not only the "standard" (I believe Greyhawk, the one with Bahamut, Cuthbert, Pelor and such), but also 3 others for comparisons: the Asgardian, Pharaonic, and Olympian pantheons. In actual gameplay the deities' realistic CRs would be likely significantly higher than this gives you, but the range it does give is something around CR66 to CR87 or so for someone like Moradin or Corellon. However, there are several abilities the deities have which outstrip literally anything normal monsters can throw at them. I can tell you up front that the stats given for Cronus here would not suffice to actually *defeat* one of the actual deities listed in this book, aside from maybe one of the weaker demigods such as Hercules. A true martial deity such as Heironeus would not lose to him, though Cronus is capable of at least damage the deities with his massive weapon strength. The problem more likely is that Cronus simply would not be able to keep up with the Deities' other abilities and would lose by default. But honestly this is not new. Several other sources have claimed to have god-equal or god-killing power monsters and then I look at their stats against the actual deity stats and laugh. Cronus is definitely up there near it, though. The Hecatoncheires ultimately falls into the same trap... their lore says they can, but the actual stats do not bear this out. In particular, the entry for Thor indicates that he could literally one-round a Hecatoncheires, from up to *18 miles* away, by boomerang-throwing Mjolnir at it 4 times, because Thor with Mjolnir is absolutely ridiculous, dealing *64d8+116 = 628* raw physical damage per hit. Not per round, per *hit.* Also, Thor as a Greater Deity always rolls a 20 on attack rolls and always gets the maximum result of any die roll. He still rolls to check if he crits, but other than that everything is counted as a 20. So, he automatically hits the monster 4 times in a row without any special feats, only raw stats, and without using any of his activated deific powers aside from using Alter Size to grow to be 1600 feet tall because why wouldn't he if he were fighting one of these things? Of course, Thor with Mjolnir is an extreme example and even the other martial deities do not come close to his raw output with this weapon unless they were to create similarly-powerful artifact weapons for themselves... but they can certainly do so, especially with the help of someone like Boccob, who can, and I quote: "Create Magic Items: As a deity of magic, Boccob can create any type of magic item." With no GP limitation or stat limitation because he is a Greater Deity. So Boccob can literally clap his hands and create Mjolnir-level artifact weapons as if he were Edward Elric transmuting his arm-blade, and distribute them to all of the deities, if he wants to do so. With such a weapon, Boccob himself could literally slap down a Hecaton with nigh-impunity. The dragons, though, are awesome. I *love* Prismatic and Force dragons. Prismatics are potentially capable of getting to "Beyond Great Wyrm" and truly competing with some deities..... somewhat.

Been consuming your contents lately after playing Baldursgate3. I love the lores and your videos!

Chronus: A Created God that seeks to hunt all other Gods out of hatred Handy Boi: I'm about to end this whole man's career.

You know every time I see these lists the only thing that pops into my mind is "How do normal people survive in these realms?"

“What if a god were to put everything they had into making *the best thing?* “ I kinda like the thought of something as powerful as a god trying really hard to make something cool.

Love how most of these have roots in mythology and history. Greek specifically.

Everyone: 2020 can't get any worse! December: *Cronus escapes*

Cronus: I crush Sneaky Kobold god: I have a different plan for you.

"Genius lossy" This pronunciation kills me

I remember GM'ing a heck of a long campaign (was almost 2 years long and the 5th campaign of mine) where the players had to face a CR62 "Invisible Wind" at the end (my own creation!) It was a Stellar-Wind Elemental with a world-sized aura of death. Immune to non-magical physical attacks, could become invisible and untargetable at will (the aura of death was impossible to hide, tho), and could slice planets in two by materialising as a "plate" within the planet bisecting it at the moment of materialisation. The players were super dismayed, but they still came up with a plan after 2 months of plotting and scheming on how to defeat it. They failed 😆 They were always supposed to fail, as then they transitioned to the Astral Realm for the next installment of the campaign. The looks on their faces when they couldn't find any reference to this enemy (and no clues how to defeat it) was priceless - a GM's greatest asset is their imagination. 🙂

Great vid! You could also mention the Time Dragon, which is the strongest dragon period. I think they are CR 70 or 80. INSANE!

In the forgotten volumes of the Dragon magazine there exists an even more powerful Dragon - The Time Dragon. Great Wyrm Time Dragon has a CR higher than Prismatic or Force Dragons.

"Imagine if Mother Earth could attack you with trees and dominate humans in order to speak." *Captain Planet*

I've always heard loci pronounced "low kai" which makes sense as it is a root term for words like locate and locus, other words that have to do with place. Having said that I'm aware there's not a ton of consensus on how c is pronounced in ancient Latin, but "lossy" just sounds wrong.

There are so many cool campaign ideas here.

Zeus: Bro, I need a hand! Hecatoncheires: I GOT YOU HOMIE!

I really liked the idea of the Hecatonchiries, but didn't want to throw a totally unreasonable challenge into my game, so I played around with the concept in my personal campaign setting. The gods of my world had a chained Hecatonchiries, leftover from the conflicts that created the universe. They carved off a piece of it and molded it into an assassin to send against a mad war god that had grown too powerful and was fixing to end the world in a massive magical war. The assassin killed the war god, but instead of returning the God's portfolio to the pantheon to be redistributed, it ripped it apart and cast it into the mortal world. A century later, new godlings are rising up from the places where the war god's power fell, and the assassin has manipulated my players into helping it break into the prison where the rest of the Hecatonchiries' body is, and carve off the rest of the arms and heads. Now there's a small army of Hecatonchirion spawn rolling across the country slaying gods, new and old alike. With the combined post-magical-nuclear-war setting and the literal Ragnarok happening, I've got my party playing apocalypse bingo.

There were a few books throughout the ages that brought some lovecraftian creatures into D&D. The 3.0 one that I recall had a few things in the 60 CR range; Azathoth, for example, which could be described as a moon-sized abomination that can move portions of itself to any place in the universe as polyps and is omniscient, and is stopped only because it has no mind and no urge to do anything.

“Genius Loci, well that sounds incredibly interesting and something will definitely be keeping that in mind

Me reading the tittle: BOBLIN THE GOBLIN

Who would win in a fight: A perfect child of the Gods, made in their image with power to rival, if not outright trump, their own... Or a tree with a buncha swords?

You should check out the draeden. They were miles across and older than the multiverse. They did not have a defined monster level (the predecessor to CR) but had an xp value of over 30 million xp. They were the rivals of the immortals, being far more powerful than the gods of most editions, and could take on a large number of immortals at once. It has been said that an entire layer of the abyss is actually a sleeping draeden.

Question, but first compliment: Awesome video. Love the work put into your craft. Question: do you credit the artwork used (anywhere)? I saw the Damnation artwork from MtG being used for the Blot portion. Cheers!

She's not a monster but she is the most powerful thing in all of D&D she's from 1st edition, the lady of pain

Genius Loci is actually pronounced “Loh-kee” not “Lossy”, latin doesn’t have soft C sounds. Also the singular form would probably be “Genius Locus.”

Imagine rolling an attack against the Devastation Beetle: "71? That's a miss"

*my CR 30 lvl 6 character stares at you menacingly*

So as for diefic challenge ratings, I seem to remember in either 3.0 or 3.5 that all dieties had 20 levels of outsider and 40 class levels... So they would all be in the 50-60 CR range as well

I'm curious what CR the mistress of pain would have, she would probably be a minimum of CR 60 since she managed to kill a god with no effort at all, but she would probably be even higher then that as she's one of the few things that doesn't get stats, a thing that doesn't have stats is essentially a thing that can never be defeated unless the narrative calls for it and requires a massive undertaking even then to do.

That CR 66 Prismatic Great Wyrm, make that Io in a campaign when the player characters go back in time. EPIC!!!

I live in Oklahoma and the sirens in your video made me think there was a tornado.

One you missed; the Old Wyrm variant on the Time Dragon is actually an absurd CR 90.