New Monster: Leprechaun
“Oh, so ye wanted some of my so-called pot-o’-gold? Well, friend, since ye seem so sure about yer good fortune… how about a wager?”
Art Credit: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lW8AY
While the majority of the most famous creatures from folklore and legend have already been given official statistics in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, one of the big (although not tall) exceptions still remaining is the classic Irish leprechaun! As a classic feature of folk and fairy tales, leprechauns will be appearing in the compendium of past, present, and future paragons and magic, Legends of Prestige and Prowess, when it releases. In this preview, you can even see one of the many quotes that line the pages of the compendium, penned by its in-narrative collector and publisher, the great Archmage Ergosa. As not just an academic but also as a perfectionist and completionist, she agreed to gather the magic and lore that her two peers, Archmage Beluud and Archmage Rizzak, the ones responsible for the other compendia (The Elements & Beyond and The Impermissicon), weren’t interested in. It seems that neither of those two archmages were very interested in leprechauns, but it’s their loss, as leprechauns make for a fun inclusion in all sorts of adventures!
Most encounters with a leprechaun probably won’t involve all-out combat. While these little folk often enjoy a good prank (even the kind that can ruin your day), most of them aren’t so malicious that they’ll trigger a conventional battle to the death. But keeping a leprechaun from pranking you — or making things right if they already succeeded — can be so fraught with difficulty that the DM must ask for initiative rolls regardless! For example, the leprechaun might play a game of “Keep Away” with the PC’s precious items, leading them into the nests of wild animals and across dangerous terrain along the way. If caught, the fey will exclaim that it was all in good fun, as they knew the powerful adventurers weren’t ever in any real danger! You may even need the leprechaun statistics for allied leprechauns that aid the PCs in battle; they might make a leprechaun friend or simply conjure one using the conjure woodland beings spell. Of course, like any people, some leprechauns are simply mean or even evil! An evil leprechaun in the style of Rumpelstiltskin makes for a fantastic recurring villain for low-level campaigns, especially those that focus on the Feywild.
There is a final note that we believe is important to address. Although leprechauns in some sources are depicted as innately greedy and miserly, there are issues with simply repeating that depiction without examining it. They may be fey, but the leprechauns in this homebrew are still people. Branding an entire lineage of people as innately greedy is an extremely dangerous and harmful trope that has caused a lot of damage and pain in the real world throughout history, especially when drawing on real-world stereotypes as many modern depictions of leprechauns do. We could have simply ignored this part of the classic leprechaun narrative, but instead, we saw the leprechaun’s lore as an opportunity to push back against such stereotypes, which we believe is vitally important to do in all spaces — even (or perhaps especially) in D&D and other role-playing games.
