By: Chris Acuff

This is going to be a series where I am going to spotlight some of my favorite, lesser known or used monsters in DnD, specifically ones that are available in the 5e books or 5.5.

What’s so great about the bulette, and it is even in the description in the 5.5 book that I have here in front of me, is that they are land sharks. 

Yeah, that’s right, LAND SHARKS 

Sharks, cool. Sharks where they aren’t supposed to be? Even cooler. 

The things in the raw stats that I particularly like is the 120 foot tremor sense (ability to sense through the ground) and a 40 foot burrow speed. 40 feet? Damn, these little guys dig quick. 

Bulettes, like many monsters in DnD, are best used when thinking about them as if they were real animals. I am going to reference my series on using intelligent monsters here, but while that mostly focused on humanoids, here I want to just focus on stuff acting like animals. 

Bulettes, like sharks, are ambush predators. Swim fast, eat fast, get away fast. These lil’ bastards are faster than the average player character, and have an additional leap bonus action to move even more. If you have a bulette jump out and then stay in combat, you are playing them wrong. They should run, or leap, immediately after their attacks if their prey isn’t dead. Players should only be getting hits on these guys from opportunity attacks or prepared actions. 

And THAT is what makes them fun. These guys fight differently. They should keep your players on their toes, attacking from surprise and GTFO-ing. 

I have a story for a time I used them to show why I like them. 

In a long running home brew game back in the regular 5e days, I had these little bastards hanging out in a vast desert the players had to cross, and I wrote that they were particularly attracted to precious metals, making them a significant risk for traveling caravans. 

One of the characters in that game had their soul tied to a black sword (The same sword from this post, although not the same campaign) and that character could not go farther than a certain distance from the weapon. During the night at camp, another character that hated the one tied to the sword immobilised him, took the sword out into the desert, dragging him behind through the limiting distance to the sword. When the sword was left in the desert, a bulette ate it, dragging him even further through the sand. 

This became a huge inflection point in the story. The paladin who had sworn an oath to protect the necromancer who was tied to the sword had to go save him. It was a wild land shark chase that turned into an amazing combat and character moment. I don’t want to spoil it here in case I ever do get a chance to make that comic book. 

What makes the bulette so interesting, to me, is how it can be used in story. Obviously I used it in a very specific way in that home game, but what a bulette allows you to do is designate an environment where nowhere is safe. The ground itself can be a constant threat, forcing players to come up with creative ways to make camp at night or just to cover the ground. They can make interesting dungeon guardians too- but I actually prefer them as an environmental factor more so than a regular enemy because they are animals, not intelligent, and not domesticated by monsters. They should attack, run, and NOT fight to the death. 

What can make a bulette encounter even scarier is if the players don’t manage to kill them. If the characters have their own great white whale (bulette- this is a moby dick reference, do people still get moby dick references?) out there somewhere then they know that territory is dangerous ground.