Let’s Play D&D With ‘The Meg’
I hope your character has a healthy respect-slash-fear of the ocean. Because today we’re getting on a boat and playing D&D with The Meg.
Between Shark Week wrapping up and The Meg 2‘s release this week, we’ve got sharks on our minds. But we’re also talking D&D here so we can’t be looking at your standard, run-of-the-mill sharks. No, these are the “here there be monsters” sort of sharks that remind us how the ocean is huge, terrifying, and largely unknown. Are megalodons probably extinct? Yeah, probably. But you know where I bet they definitely aren’t extinct? The same fantasy world that also regularly features dragons. This week we’re playing D&D with…
The Meg
Like I said, we’re not looking at regular sharks as much as the truly horrific and giant ones. Plus, sharks already exist in D&D.
Thanks, DnD Beyond!
At this point, I feel like you should know where I’m coming from. I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was little. So while other kids were ‘Horse Girls’ I feel like it would be fair to call grade-school-me the ‘Orca Girl.’ Even before they started working together to sink ships, I thought they were neat. It also means that I had too many fun ocean facts… that wasn’t fun for almost anybody else. All of this to say, making a megalodon sheet was a very fun excuse to jump right back into looking up fun sea-life facts… Which will actually, hopefully, be fun in this context.
So while D&D’s giant shark is about 30 ft long, the great white is usually 19 ft area, and Megalodons were closer to 50 or 60 ft. That said, the movie specifies that this is a 75 ft long horror-movie shark, so that’s what we’re working with. Making the meg roughly the same size as a tarrasque.
This size also means that while the horror movie meg may be fast, in real life they were more likely to have a swimming speed between 1 and 3 mph. This means that Michael Phelps could outswim one pretty easily. You and me? Maybe not so much. Since great whites can swim so much faster than this- probably in the area of 35 mph, it felt fair to undercut the giant shark’s speed significantly for the meg. Depending on your character’s swimming speed, they may be able to avoid this creature. Of course, if their plan is to avoid it by staying on the boat, this may not be an option for long since they deal double damage against objects and structures… like boats.
They will charge or ram, and while they don’t get a lot of speed, the 50 tons of weight behind them would still hurt quite a bit. Unlike many other large creatures, they don’t have a tail attack because sharks can’t swim backward, and would probably have a hard time navigating their tail around as a weapon while continuing to move forward. But they make up for it with a big mouth and lots of sharp teeth.
Like many other large beasts, the meg can bite and possibly swallow anyone unlucky to get in front of it. And once it bites you, it’s going to smell blood in the water and come back for more.
How do you think your party would do against a meg attack? What is your favorite weird, little-seen, or possibly extinct sea creature? What movie, show, comic, game, or book should I make sheets from next time? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring!
