Michael's RPG Shelf: "Holy Crit, It's The Tarrasque!"

Dungeons & Dragons has some truly iconic monsters outside of the one from which it takes half its namesake. There's a reason Wizards of the Coast picked a Beholder for the cover of the Monster Manual which you see in that little thumbnail. But if your players have any sort of history with D&D via previous editions, there's one creature that rightfully strikes fear into the hearts of virtually every inhabitant of the multiverse.

No, I'm not talking about Tiamat, Demogorgon, or even the demi-lich Acererak. I don't mean demi-gods like Iuz, or domain masters like Strahd and Kas. I'm talking about the one creature nasty enough to give most of those guys a real run for their money in a straight-up fight: the Tarrasque.

Source: Forgotten Realms Wiki

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The Tarrasque first entered D&D as an official monster all the way back in first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where it received a write-up in 1983's Monster Manual II. It was introduced as a sort of uber-monsters, the sort of thing a Dungeon Master could throw at players who complained about the relative lack of dangerous beasties that could take on their characters. Standing fifty feet tall, with a length of seventy feet from snout to tail, it utterly dwarfed not only the PCs but virtually every other creature in the game. Barring literal gods or the most gargantuan Ancient Dragons, there was almost nothing which could stand toe-to-toe with the Tarrasque and expect to last more than a couple of rounds. Thus the Tarrasque (and it is always the Tarrasque, not a Tarrasque--there's only one known to exist) is what you toss into the campaign when you don't want to take the time to homebrew and playtest a version of Godzilla.

It has existed in every version of Dungeons and Dragons since 1983, and most subsequent editions have given him ever-higher ability scores and ever-nastier powers. While the 1E Tarrasque was no push-over, the Tarrasque as written in the 2E Monster Manual was even more brutal, and the one which found its way into 3E is the Second Edition version, only more hulked out. Indeed, killing the Tarrasque was a common thought experiment for many DMs and their players. Even if you never came upon the beast yourself, it was fun to spitball ways one could destroy it and earn an entire swimming pool full of XP in one fell swoop. The only official published adventure to feature it was Chris Pramas and Jason Carl's The Apocalypse Stone--fitting, since that was meant to be an apocalyptic, campaign-ending shit-storm anyway.

Surprisingly enough, while it is no pushover, the 5E Tarrasque has seen a substantial nerf over its previous incarnations. Old versions of the Tarrasque couldn't even be scratched by anything less than the most potent magical weapons, possessed an absurd reserve of hit points (an average of 858 in its 3E incarnation), regenerated a fearsome amount of HP every single round, and couldn't be permanently slain by any means except reducing it to negative health then using a spell like Wish to beg whatever god or goddess who might be listening to please erase this thing from existence. What's more, the Tarrasque's skin was armored with a carapace which tended to reflect spells back at the person who cast them, assuming it didn't just shrug them off and keep going.

With Fifth Edition, the Tarrasque was toned down somewhat. While it's still a fearsome creature no sane PC would ever want to fight, it no longer regenerates hit points every round, no longer requires a Wish spell to obliterate, and has only (only!) 676 HP. It still can reflect some spells back at the caster, but only Magic Missile, ray-type attacks (Ray of Frost, for instance), or spells which require an attack roll to hit. Sorry Warlocks, this is one time your Eldritch Blast will not solve the problem.

But the Tarrasque wasn't entirely de-powered either. As befitting a creature of its stature, it picked up a few Legendary Actions, allowing it to move and/or attack on other people's turns, as well as Legendary Resistance which allows it to choose to succeed on saving throws it fails three times a day should it choose to do so. It's generally resistant to magic, getting advantage on all of its saves against magical effects, and flat-out ignoring any damage from attack spells that it doesn't reflect back at the caster. It's also flat-out immune to fire, poison, and non-magical weapon attacks which deal bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage, and it cannot be charmed, poisoned, paralyzed, or frightened. With an Armor Class of 25, just injuring it can be a problem. It can attack up to five times on its turn (one horn, two claws, one tail swipe, and a bite, all of which have anywhere from 10' to 15' reach), unleashes a 'Frightful Presence' against anything which can see it within 120 feet (save or run in terror), and can swallow a bitten creature, subjecting it to continual acid damage until it either dies or hits the Tarrasque so hard it throws up.

Finally, its gargantuan size makes it an obscene siege weapon: it deals double damage to all structures and objects it attacks. It'll tear through the mightiest castle in a matter of seconds, and even magic structures like a six-inch-thick Wall of Stone are no match for its ferocity.

So, barring divine intervention or continuous exposure to a Sphere of Annihilation, how in the Nine Hells do you deal with a Tarrasque should your party be unlucky enough to awaken one in a 5E campaign? Good question. Let's get cracking.

What Is The Tarrasque, Anyway?

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Part of any good battle plan involves knowing your foe: what he likes, what he doesn't, and why he's there. Unless you have a savage Dungeon Master using it to get back at the players for running a campaign off the rails, the Tarrasque isn't going to pop up overnight for no reason at all. Figuring out why your DM is using the Tarrasque, and where the creature fits into the grand scheme of things is often the most important piece of information you can learn. The Monster Manual itself is intentionally vague on this point, which allows DMs to make the creature into whatever they want. In the aforementioned Apocalypse Stone adventure, the Tarrasque is a doomsday creature stirred to life by the fact the world is literally coming to an end, but this isn't its only possible purpose.

In any properly-written campaign, the Tarrasque doesn't just pop up out of nowhere and start eating everything in sight. If you drop it on your players like it's just another random encounter, they'll have every reason to hate you. PCs should have some idea that they'll eventually be facing the Tarrasque, preferably well before it shows up in their back yard. This is a creature with a Challenge Rating of 30 in a game where the highest levels of power a PC can acquire puts them ten entire levels below that. They're going to need time to gather as much information about the monster and its powers as they possibly can, and decide how they're going to deal with it, assuming you want it to be the badass, be-all, end-all campaign capstone.

Visitors to Ravenloft know they're eventually going to face Strahd. People wandering into the Tomb of Annihilation understand that Acererak will be waiting to kick their asses. You best be believing Tiamat will crop up in an adventure called "Rise of Tiamat". Let your players learn about the Tarrasque beforehand if you expect them to actually fight it and potentially emerge victorious, because their characters will need time to prepare for that battle.

Battle Plans

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Just figuring out how to fight the Tarrasque is a puzzle unto itself. The thing has a monstrous Armor Class of 25 to go along with all those resistances, meaning you'll need top of the line gear and skills to have even a prayer of damaging it. Its Multiattack skill lets it hit five times in one round, for an average of nearly 150 damage assuming it focuses all its attention on one person, and with it's whopping +19 bonus to hit, it's almost guaranteed to smack even the most heavily-armored or nimble target with each blow. Even a level 20 Barbarian with a full-on rage-boner for the thing can't easily shrug off that much damage for more than a round or two, so getting in close to fight is out of the question. It's obscene offensive power bolstered by its Frightful Presence means anybody getting within 120 feet of it is apt to have a very bad day. In addition, its Legendary Resistance means it can just make saving throws against three attacks if it wants, so trying to do anything that could put it in a bad situation is going to flat-out fail until you've at least burned through those auto-saves. What's more, if you somehow manage to pose a significant threat to the Tarrasque, one which registers to even its low Intelligence, those Legendary Actions it has can allow it to bolt like a bat out of hell even in the middle of somebody else's turn. If it wants to really get the hell away from you, you aren't going to catch it unless you have access to some serious speed-boosting abilities of your own.

But what if we're looking at this entirely the wrong way? Trying to kill it by simply mobbing on the damage is like staging a direct, full-frontal assault on Area 51 on the assumption that they can't shoot everybody. Unless you've managed to mass an army of fear-immune, magical-weapon-wielding forces willing to march to almost-assured destruction (Hi there, Necromancer!), the most likely outcome is a field strewn with corpses and an enraged, hulking Goliath who now has plenty of fodder to replace all the calories it just burnt wrecking your army.

So lets dispense with the idea of a tit-for-tat slugfest where your party tries to deliver almost seven hundred damage before Tarrasque swallows all of them whole. Let's look at this from a tactical standpoint, and get an idea of how to wisely engage with something this damn powerful.

Do You Even Have to Fight It?

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A lot of players make the mistake of assuming that just because the DM drops something in their lap, it is of an appropriate Challenge Rating for their PCs, and therefore combat is the best or only option. With the Tarrasque, however, unless your party has been specifically contracted, coerced, or otherwise obligated to do away with it, your wisest course of action will literally be to do anything that gets you far enough away that it ignores you in favor of someone or something else. If you do not have to fight the Tarrasque (or any other monstrosity with more CR than you have levels), then do not fight the Tarrasque. If your DM's trying to teach you a lesson about discretion being the better part of valor, take him up on his offer and mass teleport/dimension door/misty step yourselves the hell out of its way.

Make Someone Else Do the Work

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The arrival of the Tarrasque is absolutely the best time to call in any outstanding favors your party may have accumulated over the years. If a deity somehow owes you a boon, you've made a bargain with an ancient dragon, or the local ruler pledged her support in exchange for a favor you once performed, by all means, cash in those chips. This is also the perfect time for the more Charismatic among the PCs to practice their Persuasion rolls, since the local Arch-Mage may lend out a powerful artifact, or a personal helping hand, if it means a monstrosity doesn't tear down his tower or devour his library. If ever there was a time that called for a unification of the forces, the arrival of the Tarrasque certainly qualifies. Do your best to ensure your PCs aren't the only ones out there in direct contact with it, and your odds of success will increase. How much they increase depends on the number and power of the additional forces your group is able to muster, but this is a doomsday scenario we're talking about here so any little bit helps.

Focus On What Can Hurt It

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For all its special resistances and immunities, the Tarrasque is not indestructible by any stretch of the imagination. While it shrugs off non-magical weapon attacks, fire, and poison damage, it takes normal damage from acid, cold, lightning, thunder, radiant, force, psychic, and necrotic attacks that get by its spell-reflecting/neutralizing carapace and its general resistance to magic. If you're going to bring magic to bear against a Tarrasque, make sure you're using spells that force it to save rather than ones requiring a ranged attack to bypass this protection. Creature abilities like a dragon's breath or other similar effects aren't considered spells, so if you can bribe, cajole, or Dominate Monster a dragon into your squad, the Tarrasque's hide won't protect it from a face full of acid, lightning, or cold blasted from the mouth of a huge winged horror.

Hilariously, this means cantrips like Acid Splash, Sacred Flame, Toll the Dead, Frostbite, and Vicious Mockery can conceivably damage the Tarrasque every round. Unfortunately, anybody using them will be close enough to risk a retaliatory strike (or at least a brush with its Frightful Presence). With advantage on all of its saving throws, you don't want to rely on the Bard verbally abusing it to death, but if you can do something to negate its Blindsight, it may be possible for the magically-inclined sorts to chip away at it after they've blown through all their higher-level spell slots.

Tarrasque's Achilles Heels

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With a Strength and Constitution of 30, and a proficiency on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma-based saving throws, there's one area where our gargantuan adversary is notably less-protected, and that's the Dexterity save. With a Dex score of 11, the Tarrasque is only averagely mobile, and not terribly agile. And while it can't be paralyzed, it is possible to knock it prone. There are a number of effects that can potentially accomplish this, from spells like Grease and Sleet Storm to simple items like bags of ball bearings, to the Legendary Wing Attack of a dragon. Getting the Tarrasque down and keeping it down are two different things, but melee attacks against a prone creature are all made with advantage, while being prone imposes disadvantage on its own attack rolls. Naturally, the Tarrasque is going to use its Legendary resistances to instantly make any saving throw where failing would put it in a disadvantageous position, but it can only do so three times per day. Once those resistances are spent, Dexterity saves are one of the Tarrasque's blatant weak points, and the wise party will open up on it with everything in their power capable of bringing it down.

Also, keep in mind that unlike most of the other high-CR powerhouses in the game, the Tarrasque has only a 3 Intelligence. It's an animal, first and foremost, so it's not going to formulate plans or try to out-strategize an adversary, it's simply going to come at whatever currently has its attention as hard and as fast as possible. This also means its likely to overlook the flaws inherent in doing such a thing, which may allow savvy PCs to lure it into less-than-ideal situations where it can be flanked, attacked from long range, or just into terrain that is disadvantageous to it, like deep water or a swamp.

With an Intelligence score that low, even with its +5 bonus on saving throws from its proficiency, Tarrasque is likely to fall for any Illusion magic it doesn't blow one of its Legendary Saves on overcoming. This makes spells like Hallucinatory Terrain and other high-powered Illusion magic exceptionally powerful, as they could be used to cloak a town, hide a lone assassin, or trick the monster into thinking that really deep pit is solid ground. Illusionary adversaries could conceivably harass the Tarrasque from multiple angles, making it waste attacks targeting things that don't exist.

Finally, as ferocious as all of its attacks are, no attack made by the Tarrasque is considered magical. In fact, the only special form of damage the Tarrasque dishes out is acid-based, and it has to first Bite, and then Swallow, a target for that to happen. Anything which is immune to non-magical damage and which deals magical damage itself can stand toe-to-toe with a Tarrasque, so somebody with the Invulnerability spell from Xanathar's Guide to Everything is a potential bulwark.

Think Outside the Box

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There's nothing in its description that says the Tarrasque doesn't need to breathe. Although with a 30 Constitution it can hold its breath for a hell of a long time, it is vulnerable to drowning, being exposed to vacuum, or other things which can afflict a creature with lungs. In fact, the fastest way to get rid of the Tarrasque involves sending it to a different postal code: if you can trick the big moron into walking through a Gate or other extra-planar portal, you can seal it up in the Elemental Plane of Water, the Negative or Positive Elemental Plane, or anywhere that isn't the Prime Material, which will virtually guarantee either its destruction or at least its isolation.

If you'd rather be a jerk, send Tarrasque to the 88th layer of the Abyss and make him Demogorgon's problem. If you're feeling like a particularly monstrous dick and don't mind alignment violations and making enemies across the multiverse, banish him to Ravenloft, zap him over to Ravnica, or teleport him into the Underdark to play with the Drow. Other locations may present themselves to you as well (the lair of a Kraken, maybe?), so keep your options open. Just be prepared for brutal retaliation if whatever finishes off the Tarrasque figures out who sent it there.

Polymorph him into a small animal like a slug or a snail, chuck him in a Bag of Holding which you then encase in lead, and dump on the bottom of the ocean--after his air runs out and his slug form 'dies', he'll come back with full HP in all his Tarrasque-ness...where he'll either suffocate in the airless environs of the empty Bag, or he'll break out and drown.

Or maybe the Tarrasque is going around ravaging the countryside because he's really hungry after that multi-century nap he just took. If so, a look at the Druid's Goodberry spell reveals a potential solution: a berry so consumed provides complete sustenance for the creature which eats it. Leave a few in Tarrasque's path, or fire a couple into its mouth, and you might avert catastrophe and send him back into hibernation. Hey, it's worth a shot, right?

All joking aside, a fight with the Tarrasque should be the sort of event talked about for years afterwards. It's an opportunity for your players and their PCs to pull out all the stops, call in every favor, and mount a truly impressive last stand against 5E's version of Godzilla. Depending on how your DM wants to play it, this could be a call for some of the most intense role-playing of the whole campaign as your PCs convince a disparate group of races and monsters to come together for a massive, world-shattering beatdown. Or it could be a convenient way for the DM to rid himself of a bunch of level 20 murder-hobos, thus clearing the slate for a new group of heroes to rise. It's Dungeons & Dragons--make it fun, make it epic, and make sure you let me know how your group handled (or didn't) the Tarrasque in your games!