King in Yellow
King in Yellow — The Encounter
Tattered poet-god of dead Carcosa, whose play unmakes minds · a boss your table can run with almost no prep. SRD 5.1-compatible.
Who Is King in Yellow
Read no further if your name is dear to you. In drowned Carcosa, where twin suns gutter into black water and the towers stand behind the moon, there reigns the one called the King in Yellow: poet, plague, and patient god. He wrote a play, and the play is a door. Its first act charms; its second act corrodes; by the final curtain the reader has learned a truth too exquisite to survive, and forgets the shape of his own name. The King does not war, for war implies an outcome he has not already written. He wears a tattered vestment of sunlight long dead and a pallid mask that is not a mask, and beneath it waits a form that morality cannot describe and the mind cannot keep. He is neither devil nor demon but author, and every soul that hears his strange music becomes at once both actor and audience in a performance that does not end so much as fall silent.
Run King in Yellow in Sixty Seconds
- Hold the Sign. The Yellow Sign aura is his real weapon: it chips HP and imposes disadvantage every round just for seeing him. Players can end it with a DC 17 Intelligence action to scrub it, so make them choose between attacking and disarming.
- Open with Strange Music on the tightest cluster for 8d8 psychic and an incapacitate — front-load it while saves are fresh, and target healers first to break concentration.
- Kill-priority is anti-caster. He is built to delete spellcasters: Whispered Line strips reactions, Step Behind the Curtain dodges the big nuke, and his saves are monstrous. Push your strikers onto him in melee.
- When bloodied, use Unbind the Mask to frighten and scatter the melee line, Drift to open range, and rely on legendary actions to keep pressure between turns.
- Three ways to run him: (1) solo finale boss using the full legendary suite; (2) with the Pallid Understudy for a duet that survives one death; (3) as a hidden author who never melees — flying, scrubbing-gated, all Strange Music and verse, a puzzle-boss the party must silence.
King in Yellow
Large aberration, neutral evil
CR 11 · 7,200 XP · GUIDELINEThe Yellow Sign. Signature. An emblem of the King's scripture hangs in the air around him. A creature that starts its turn within 30 ft. and can see him must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or take 7 (2d6) psychic damage and have disadvantage on the next attack roll or ability check it makes before the start of its next turn. A creature that fails this save three times is cursed until it finishes a long rest: while cursed it cannot benefit from the King's failures and has disadvantage on saves against his Strange Music.
Curtain of Carcosa. When reduced to 0 hit points, the King is not destroyed but collapses into tattered yellow rags and reforms in an unseen space within 1 mile at the next dusk, unless his Yellow Sign was first scrubbed from the battlefield (an action, DC 17 Intelligence check). Treat in-combat 0 hp as defeated for the encounter.
Magic Resistance. The King has advantage on saving throws against spells and other magical effects.
Actions
Multiattack. The King makes two Tattered Reach attacks and uses Strange Music if it is available.
Tattered Reach. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 18 (3d8+5) psychic damage, and the target's speed is reduced by 10 ft. until the start of the King's next turn as dead-sun threads cling to it.
Strange Music (Recharge 5-6). The King recites a verse of his play. Each creature of his choice within 30 ft. must make a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw, taking 36 (8d8) psychic damage on a failure, or half as much on a success. A creature that fails is incapacitated until the end of its next turn as the words rearrange its thoughts.
Bonus Actions & Reactions
Step Behind the Curtain. Reaction. When a creature the King can see hits him with an attack, he may teleport up to 30 ft. to an unoccupied space he can see; the triggering attack still resolves, but he has half cover against it.
Legendary Actions (3/Round)
Whispered Line. The King utters a fragment of verse. One creature within 60 ft. must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or take 7 (2d6) psychic damage and be unable to take reactions until the start of its next turn.
Drift (costs 1 action). The King moves up to his speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
Unbind the Mask (costs 2 actions). The King briefly shows the face beneath the Pallid Mask. Each creature within 15 ft. that can see him must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw or be frightened of him until the end of its next turn and take 11 (2d10) psychic damage.
A gaunt, robed sovereign sits enthroned on a knot of writhing tendrils, crowned by a sunburst halo of dead light, his tattered yellow vestments draping a form that the eye refuses to hold. He does not threaten; he merely watches, as an author watches actors he has already condemned.
King in Yellow, Bound
Companion · acts on your initiative
Bound · GUIDELINEEchoing Verse (signature). Once per turn, when the King forces a Wisdom save, the Understudy may impose disadvantage on one creature within 30 ft. of it that can hear the recitation.
Actions
Ream of Pages. Melee Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8+4) slashing damage from whirling parchment, and the target cannot speak truthfully until the end of its next turn.
Reactions
Take the Cue. When the King is reduced to 0 hit points within 30 ft., the Understudy moves up to its speed toward him and the King's Curtain of Carcosa triggers even if his Yellow Sign was scrubbed away.
A faceless robed double in matching yellow, it mouths the King's lines a half-beat behind, ensuring the play continues should its author be struck from the stage.
Guideline numbers — formula-tuned and read from the miniature's design, not yet table-proven. Tell us how it ran in the comments.
How It Fights — by Tier
Same creature, scaled threat. The traits never change; only the numbers move.
Open with Strange Music while the party is clustered to shave a third of their HP off at once, then keep Tattered Reach on the highest-damage striker. If a saver dips below half, hit them with the Yellow Sign auras and finish next round. At this tier run him alone as a finale boss; the Understudy is optional.
Stay airborne and hover at the edge of the Yellow Sign's range so melee must come to you. Open on the cleric or any healer with Strange Music, kill-priority their concentration. Use Step Behind the Curtain to break off whenever a fighter pins you, and pair with the Understudy to lock down a second target.
This is the centerpiece: spend legendary actions on Whispered Line to deny reactions before your turn, then Multiattack the most mobile PC and Strange Music the cluster. Kill-priority anyone who can scrub the Yellow Sign (DC 17 INT). When bloodied, lean on Unbind the Mask to scatter melee and Drift to reset spacing.
Put King in Yellow on the table
Download the presupported STL and run the fight tonight — the model, and the encounter that comes with it.
Get the STL on MyMiniFactory →Clay Cyanide Companion Rules v1
How a bound creature acts
- A companion acts on its owner's initiative, immediately after the owner.
- It uses the Companion block above — roughly ×0.6 HP and damage, no recharge abilities, and at most one reaction trait.
- It moves freely; it takes its Action only while its owner is conscious.
- At 0 HP a companion is broken, not dead — restored on a long rest unless your table rules otherwise.
Original Clay Cyanide material © Clay Cyanide LLC — explicitly not the non-SRD official sidekick rules.
Questions, Asked at the Table
What CR is King in Yellow?
Natively CR 11 (Tier 3, levels 11-15) as a solo boss, since his legendary actions let him hold a table of high-level PCs on his own. Scaled stat blocks for Tier 1 (~CR 2) and Tier 2 (~CR 6) are provided so you can drop him in as a climactic finale at any level.
Can King in Yellow be a companion or ally?
Not as a party member — he is an author who treats every creature as an actor in his play, never an equal. The Pallid Understudy companion is offered instead: a bound double that amplifies his verses and keeps the King from dying outright when it stands beside him.
How do I stop his Curtain of Carcosa from reviving him?
Scrub the Yellow Sign from the battlefield with a DC 17 Intelligence action before he drops to 0 hit points. If you do, he is gone for good; if you don't, he reforms at the next dusk within a mile. Note the Pallid Understudy's reaction can override this and trigger the Curtain anyway.
Tell Us How It Ran
This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 ("SRD 5.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Clay Cyanide Miniatures is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or specifically approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC. This content is compatible with the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game. Companion rules, lore, names, and original mechanics © Clay Cyanide LLC.
Technical Specifications
32mm, 75mm
STL, Pre-supported STL
Standard or ABS-like resin, 0.05mm layer height
Yes — ready to print, optimized supports included
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