Isaac Minarik

Shadar Kai: The Magic Begins

• The Good: MtoF's shadar-kai are pretty good, as WotC stat blocks go.
  • Spells as part of their multiattack
  • Cool modular abilities
  • Traits that are mostly usable in combat.
  • Uniqueish weapons
• The Bad
  • Fey Ancestry is mostly redundant with their charm immu...
    2022-01-29 19:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Just one today, but it's a doozy

5e's got a real lack of titans. If I want to set off a titanomachy, the tarrasque is my only real option, and even that feels a bit lacking. So as a start at remedying that, here's Isimir, Scream of the Frozen World, from the proto-germanic "Isaz" for "Ice" and the old norse "Ymir" for "Screamer"

I did my very best to m...

Coupla Inevitables here.

An inevitable isn't really a combat encounter. An inevitable is a reminder to your level 20 players that they are still small potatoes in the scope of the universe. It's the reason why wizards hire adventurers, rather than leaving their towers. It is the naturalistic fallacy personified; These are the rules, and the rules are...

Cultist of Night and Shadow Mastiff

The Cultist of Night was based on a challenge to create a cultist of Shar that was relevant into T2 and T3, but still felt like a cultist, and I think I mostly succeeded here. They're good at two things: teamwork and dying. They're not gonna be able to take down your demigod PCs on their own, but they'll provide enough nuisan...

Aarakocra Day!

Aarakocra combat is swift and deadly. These mfers want to lure you into the air, because they know that they're better flyers than you, and they're about to prove it.

The Skyhunter dives at you with his flight lance, staying out of reach of ground foes and knocking airborne ones out the sky. If you find yourself in the ...

Oni Devourer and Alraune

The Oni Devourer is a lower CR fella based on Shuten Doji, a legendary oni bandit.  When he's low on HP, the players can chop his head off, which gets rid of his multiattack but doesn't actually stop him from biting you. Then, if he manages to regenerate, he can pop his head right back on and keep coming at you. For an e...

Abishai, continued

I'm just gonna keep ranting about Abishai if y'all don't mind.

Power of the Dragon Queen on the Red Abishai is a really cool ability, only slightly held back by the fact that it's totally useless in any practical application. Is Tiamat really out here executing plans that require Wyrmlings and Young Dragons to be charme...

Starting on Abishai

WotC must've set the CR of the abishai late on a Friday afternoon, because they went real wild with it. The black one, for instance, has some nice defensive abilities, but certainly not enough to make up for the ~130 extra HP it should have at that CR.

The black abishai also showcases one of my problems with 5e monster ...

Radiant Idol and Gray Render

The Radiant Idol is an Eberron creature, but thematically works in most settings. It's an angel too prideful and self-obsessed to chill in the upper planes, so it hangs in the Material and tricks mortals into worshipping it. Their wings are bad and busted, and in fact they're so bad at flying that they'll mess up any flying m...

Fire and Water Myrmidons

I tried to sort of mirror mephits with the myrmidon format, with their Elemental Ripose reaction taking the place of the mephit's Death Burst trait. Mephits are some of the more fun enemies out there, and I really felt they needed a mid-CR version to keep them relevant through the game.

Still debating whether to tackle ...

Filling out Silver Dragons

Nothing too crazy here, just made Wyrmling-Adult versions of the silver dragon. I've never used a metallic dragon as a campaign villain, but statting these out has got my brain churning.

Air and Earth Elemental Myrmidons

Myrmidons serve an interesting role, in that they have all kinds of cool elemental abilities, but are bound by general humanoid-ish limitations. This makes them a really good thematic substitute for elite magical soldiers, basically like benders from Avatar. Here are the Air and Earth ones, but I'm eventually planning on goin...

January Chonk Poll Winner

Video: Crown of the Trench; fresh out of the mold!

Couple more Kuo-Toa

You can never have enough humanoid variants, so here's another pair of kuo-toa. The drowner is an ambush monster that traps you in its net and then drags you into the water,  where it beats you until you lose your breath and start to suffocate.

The monitor is a lightning mage that can attack his allies if they look...

Jiangshi

This is a real fun one: the Jiangshi is a ghoul or zombie that can only move by hopping due to its rigor mortis, often characterized as a vampire. Rather than blood, the jiangshi drains the pure animating magic of life from its victims. The fun of a jiangshi is in its unique movement, and the fact that it's a vampire that wan...

Gulon and Veteran today

The gulon is a Scandinavian legendary creature, a big wolverine that eats itself sick and then squeezes through small spaces to push the food out so it can eat more. This thing is gross. With the Opportunistic Feeder trait, I tried to give the sense that it's starting to eat you alive, evoking the autocrits players experience...

Starting on Silver Dragons

The silver dragon was always my least favorite of the metallics.  At high levels, you should always assume that every PC will fail every save they aren't proficient in, so what the hell is a dragon doing with a paralysis AoE big enough to catch the whole party? I can't imagine a single scenario where that ends up being f...

Filling out the complement of guard drakes

I like the Worry ability on these guys. I'm always a little horrified seeing two carnivores play tug-of-war with a prey animal, so I tried to get players to feel that impending doom of a steadily worsening situation. This ability is especially nasty if you use any sort of massive damage rules (Dael Kingsmill has some really g...

Maedar and Iron Golem

The maedar is interesting. I tried to make something that made sense in a medusa's lair and added another threat vector for players. I got rid of the Glyptar mechanics, though, since they happen on a time scale that makes them kind of irrelevant for a game of D&D. 

For the Iron Golem, my goal was to make it pos...

Couple of guard drakes today

I'm real happy with how these are coming along. A buddy of mine used to keep some giant tegus, and the first time one of those snaps at you your amygdala just takes over and wrenches your body away and sets you on your ass. Anyways, that's what I tried to capture with the Bluff Strike reaction. 

January Chonk Poll

Time to figure out which sets we're going to chonk up this month with 50mm versions. Top Left: Gilded Specter, Top Right: Asphodel, Bottom Left: Crown of the Trench, Bottom Right: Petrifying Gaze.

More Displacer Dragons!

Hope you didn't think we were done with these! Here are the ancient and greatwyrm versions, now with a breath weapon that tests how well your party members know each other's abilities.

Giff!

I've never had a chance to run a planescape campaign, but I know that when I do, Giff will feature heavily in it. These beautiful bastards only need three things in life: someone to fight, someone to tell them who to fight, and someone to give them a ride to the fight because none of them have their spelljammer licenses. ...

Displacer Dragons

All right, first custom monster for a patron! This fey dragon takes the disorienting illusions of the displacer beast and cranks them up to 11, making you lose your sense of direction, self, and general faith in reality. Fey stuff always gives me a great excuse to get weird with it, and I think I achieved that here.

January Dice Poll

Since it's our first month and we don't have any requests yet, here are four sets that I like that we haven't made in a good long while. King Crimson is the pink one, City of Tears is the blue one, Artemis is the green one, and Sun G...

Some kuo-toa today

The stock kuo-toa has a lot going on, but it's largely stuff that won't come up in a fight, and serves to add complexity without depth to the gameplay experience for most players. I dropped the sunlight sensitivity, athletics advantage, ghost-sense, and net, and I slimmed the wording on the shield. The spear now is a harpoon ...

Discord is Up!

Swing by to talk about 5e game design, critique existing designs, request specific monsters be moved up the queue in time for your game, report typos, or anything else, really.

Anyways, here's a fun magic item for you.

Welcome!

Whether you're here to get a sampler platter or just looking for a low-investment way to get started in D&D, welcome! Here are well over a hundred homebrew monsters from CR 0 to CR 3 for you to kick your campaign off the right way. Low CR creatures deserve cool abilities, too.

Let's Start With A Bang!

I started this project because I realized all of us are out here having to homebrew any encounter we want to be halfway engaging for the players, or leaning hard on combat descriptions, which is a lot of energy expended that could be used on other types of campaign prep. Here are 462 play-oriented, varied, balanced, monsters ...