Friday Encounter: Cloaking Devices

I've said before that cloakers unfairly get a bad reputation as "gotcha monsters" that only exist to pretend to be cloaks and fool anyone stupid enough to put on some random cloak lying around in a dungeon. But I've never seen them that way. Firstly, because in no game I've ever run has there been a situation where it would ever make sense for someone to put on a random cloak that they just found in a dungeon - and secondly, because the concept of a flat monster has so much more potential. Potential I intend to exploit here.

This encounter is best suited to a dungeon. There should be a room where there is a tall, narrow shaft in the ceiling, extending some 30 feet above the PCs' heads. The shaft is too narrow for a humanoid to fit through, and the sides are too steep to be climbed, but it is home to a cloaker - and it makes use of this fact to launch ambushes.

If creatures pass underneath the shaft, the cloaker will drop down on top of them, attempting to latch onto them with a bite attack to smother them. It will target any creatures bearing light sources if possible, so that it won't be adversely impacted by its sensitivity to light. If the creatures prove a threat to the cloaker and it drops to half HP, it will attempt to use its Phantasms ability to distract the party with illusory decoys before it retreats to the shaft to take cover. While in the shaft, the cloaker has full cover and cannot be targeted.

Even when wounded, the cloaker will attempt to secure its prey, using hit-and-run tactics against the party. It could wait for the PCs to pass through the room again, hopefully when they're weaker, and then strike. It could attempt to make noise to lure one of the PCs apart from the rest of the group and try to pick them off. A really devious feature for this encounter would be to have the shaft connect to other rooms in the dungeon, creating a network of narrow passages that the cloaker could travel through, but the party couldn't. You could even design an entire dungeon around this conceit!