Enderman
Medium aberration, lawful evil
- Armor Class 12 (Natural armor)
- Hit Points 46 (7d8 + 14)
- Speed 40 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 14 (+2) 14 (+2) 14 (+2) 10 (+0) 14 (+2) 10 (+0)
- Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 12
- Languages Enderman
- Challenge 1/2 [o1/2,d1/2] (100 XP)
Ender Teleport (Recharge 4-6). As a bonus action, the Enderman magically teleports, along with any gear it is wearing or carrying, up to 120 feet to an unoccupied location.
Water Susceptibility. For every 5 ft. the enderman moves in water, or for every gallon of water splashed on it, it takes 1 cold damage.
Actions
Fist. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d12 + 2) bludgeoning damage.
Move 5ft. Cube of Earth. The enderman magically picks up or deposits a 5ft. cube of earth.
Reactions
Reactive Teleportation. The enderman can take its Teleport bonus action as a reaction to taking damage or being targeted with a ranged weapon or spell attack. In the latter case, the attack misses.
Haters of eye contact. Endermen shriek at and attack any non-enderman creature that looks them in the eyes.
Plane-hopping aberrations. 12 enderman can perform a ritual that opens a portal to another plane. Though the portal is temporary, the surrounding rocks are hardened into a frame that retains some conjuration magic. A skilled mage with 12 ender pearls can reactivate the portal in that frame (Arcana DC 20, pearls consumed on attempt). On their home demiplane, the End, endermen build cities to store their treasures, and fill them with shulker guards.
Ender pearl cores. 50% of the time an enderman's central ender pearl survives its death and can be retrieved from its corpse (see the necklace of ender pearls magic item).
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Shulker
Small aberration, unaligned
- Armor Class 20 (Natural armor)
- Hit Points 35 (10d6)
- Speed 0 ft.
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 14 (+2) 3 (-4) 10 (+0) 3 (-4) 11 (+0) 1 (-5)
- Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
- Languages --
- Challenge 1 [o1,d1] (200 XP)
Adhesion. A shulker's bottom shell adheres to any flat solid surface. The shulker has advantage on all saving throws and ability checks it makes to resist being moved.
Homing bullets. The shulker's bullet attack ignores cover.
Actions
Shulker bullet. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d6 + 2) bludgeoning damage, and the hit creature is afflicted with shulker levitation for its next two turns. While afflicted, the creature levitates upward at a speed of 15 feet/turn at the start of its turn. While levitated, the target can move only by flying or by pushing or pulling against a fixed object or surface within reach, which allows it to move as if it were climbing. At the end of the second turn, this bullet's levitation ends, and the creature falls if nothing else (such as levitation from another shulker bullet hit) keeps it aloft.
Reactions
Reflexive Teleportation. As a reaction to becoming unadhered or to taking damage that reduces it to 9 hp or fewer, the shulker teleports to a flat surface within 60 feet.
Enderman symbiotes. A shulker is the oyster to an enderman's pearl. Endermen that have produced a proto-pearl place it in a shulker. Over the following months the shulker secretes a magical nacre equivalent that grows the pearl until it is large and powerful enough for an enderman to manifest out of it, at which time the baby enderman teleports away. In exchange, endermen feed and house shulkers.
Shrinking shells. 50% of the time a dead shulker retains a usable side of its magical shell. Two of these shell sides can be combined with a suitable chest to create a shulker box.
Endermen, shulkers and Minecraft belong to Mojang. Image credit: Minecraft wiki (dirt texture), screenshot and editing by u/NobleCuriosity3
CR Calculation (Enderman)
Hitpoints comes from the fall damage heart conversion: 40 half hearts x 1.15 = 46. AC comes from its lack of natural armor bars in minecraft going into the armor regression formula. Those two values combine for defensive CR 1/4. However, its resistance to projectile attacks and general nuisance factor from the teleportation pushes me to up it to CR 1/2 (or at least round the final CR upward, anyway.)
Offensive CR comes from the enderman's 7 half-heart attack on Normal. That's 8.05 hp. With a +4 attack bonus that's offensive CR 1/2.
Speed comes from the enderman's 0.3 minecraft speed attribute.
The enderman's teleport should be 100 feet, but the monster manual convention of 120 feet teleports is very consistent. So even though Enderman's teleport is different than the standard teleport action (because it's a bonus action, and the Enderman doesn't have to see its destination), I'm keeping it at 120 feet. I also went back and revised the necklace of ender pearls to have this same distance.
CR Calculation (Shulker)
Before getting into the CR, a brief talk about range. Because the shulker can't move, and because its attack likely makes a hit creature unable to approach the shulker (and potentially moves the creature out of the shulker's range, if it's small enough), the range of its attack is much more important than creature attack range typically is. In minecraft shulkers will attack players up to 15 blocks away (~50 feet), and the bullets can home in on players from I think indefinite distance, though they do so somewhat haphazardly. So what do I put for the attack's range? I originally wanted a) to make it so there can be a decent battlefield size a shulker can actually hit PCs in, b) to make sure that a shulker or two in an open field isn't just impossible for non-flying PCs to approach, and c) to use a standard range increment for ease of use and adherence to convention. From the weapons table the actually frequently used options were 20/60, 30/120, 80/320 and 150/600. I ended up modeling the attack as a javelin (30/120) because I wanted melee characters to be able to get close enough to throw their own javelins at the shulker at least once, so that this isn't like a flying opponent where melee characters can't do anything (this is also why I didn't give the shulker a defensive CR boost for its potential to lift melee characters off the ground), because 30x30 is a decent battlefield size for interior fights, and of course it pleasingly lines up with the shulker's levitation.
Hitpoints comes from the fall damage heart conversion: 30 half hearts x 1.15 = 34.5. AC comes from its 20 natural armor bars (when closed) in minecraft going into the armor regression formula (0.375*20+12.375). With those two statistics it's hp def CR 1/8, but moved up three steps due to high AC for total def CR 1.
For offensive CR, we assume that the shulker is in a place where targets can levitate up more or less indefinitely, and is fighting targets that can't fly. We also assume that the cover-ignoring ability is mostly flavor text; a dm could have simply placed the shulker in a place with little cover to the same effect. Per the normal CR guidelines, we assume all of its attacks hit for three rounds to calculate dpr over those rounds (the offensive CR is then modified by the actual to-hit). Thing is, some of the damage is delayed: if it hits one target for three rounds, the target will float up a total of 60 feet (the last 15 ft at least on a round after the 3 rounds is up) before plummeting and taking 1d6 bludgeoning/10 feet fallen (Of course this is making the assumption that none of a PC's allies throw the floating PC a rope (tied to something) they can use to climb down against the levitation.). Even more optimistically, if the shulker spreads out its attacks, it will lift 3 different targets 30 feet each. If we assume the full 3d6 falling damage to three targets, dpr is (5*3+3*3*3.5)/3 = 15.5 dpr. With its +4 to hit, that would be (just barely) offensive CR 2. But this is a kind of optimistic scenario for an ability that can be bested by a ceiling, a wall, or a standard 50 foot rope (PCs can climb down the 15 ft per round). Let's assume that once the 3 rounds are up (and the shulker is likely dealt with) the PCs rescue any floating companions. Then the first hit will fall 30 feet, the second one 15, and the third not at all, for (5*3+4*3.5)/3 = 9.6 dpr. That comes out to offensive CR 1, which I feel is more realistic.
So, shulkers are CR 1.
Speed does NOT come from the minecraft speed attribute because shulker's speed attribute translates to a 100 ft/round movement rate, the same as Ghasts, Vexes, and the Ender Dragon, which is not at all what anyone who has ever played minecraft would expect of a shulker. After doing some experimentation I discovered that that speed value might be intended to represent the shulker bullet, which does in fact move at almost exactly 100 ft/round (they move ~5 blocks/second).