Kraken
Gargantuan Monstrosity · · CR 23
- Monstrosity
- Gargantuan
- Tier 4
Kraken, CR 23, fills the gargantuan monstrosity role with chaotic evil disposition. Encounter regions: underwater. Sourced from Monster Manual (5e 2014) and Monster Manual (5.5e 2024).
Stat Block
- Challenge Rating
- 23
- Type
- Monstrosity
- Size
- Gargantuan
- Alignment
- —
- Speed
- —
- Habitats
- Underwater
- Sources
- Monster Manual (5e 2014), Monster Manual (5.5e 2024), Flee, Mortals!
Ecology
Krakens are the apex predators of the deepest ocean trenches, beings so vast that even other leviathans avoid their territory by hundreds of miles. A kraken's presence is felt in absent fish, drowned shipping lanes, and inexplicable lightning storms over featureless sea. Around them, deep-sea ecosystems collapse and reform; sahuagin pray to them as gods, dragon turtles flee at their scent, even aboleths concede certain trenches. They feed on whales whole, on entire merchant fleets, on the occasional planar visitor unwise enough to enter ocean depth. A kraken's appetite shapes whole oceans, and an ocean without a kraken is one only because the kraken has moved on.
Behaviour
Krakens are intelligent, vengeful, and cosmically alien. They speak many languages, including Celestial and Abyssal, and they remember slights for ages. They sleep for centuries, dream prophetically, and are sometimes consulted by gods. When awake, they are voracious and destructive, but never random; every ship they sink served some grudge held since the world was young. They worship no one, fear nothing they have met, and consider themselves the proper rulers of the prime material's seas, with the surface dwellers as a temporary infestation to be drowned in time.
Origin
Krakens are said to be the spawn of an elder sea god whose body was shattered in primordial conflict, each kraken a fragment grown sentient and grown angry. Some scholars insist they predate mortal life entirely, that the seas were theirs first. Their reproduction is unknown to surface scholarship; no kraken has ever been observed mating, and yet new krakens occasionally rise from deep trenches as if hatched from the dark itself. The oldest are believed by sea cults to be aspects of a single being still being slowly reassembled across geological time, with the worst yet to come.
Related Monsters
Frequently Asked Questions about Kraken
- What is the challenge rating of Kraken?
- Listed CR for Kraken: 23. Match it to a party that matches the highest-tier encounter math.
- What type of creature is Kraken?
- By creature type, Kraken is a monstrosity, gargantuan size.
- Where does Kraken live?
- The published habitats for Kraken: Underwater.