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Kobold Press - Guide To Monsters
Kobold Press - Guide To Monsters
TO MONSTERS
WITH ESSAYS BY
WOLFGANG BAUR, CELESTE CONOWITCH, MONTE COOK,
CRYSTAL FRASIER, MIKE SHEA, STEVE WINTER, AND MORE!
EDITED BY AMANDA HAMON
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Praise for Guides from Kobold Press
Kobold Guide to Gamemastering
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On Concepting Monsters
Monsters Are Scary, by Mike Mason.............................................................11
Designing Monsters From Myths and Folklore,
by Wolfgang Baur.............................................................................................17
Monster Mash: Creating Your Favorite Monsters from
Pop Culture, by Celeste Conowitch................................................................23
From Concept to Creature: Building Monsters
From Nothing, by James Haeck .....................................................................29
On Detailing Monsters
Designing Memorable Monsters: Crafting Fun Encounters
Through Special Abilities, by Monte Cook ...................................................37
The Hierarchy of Draconic Needs: Making Your
Monsters Stand Out, by Crystal Frasier .......................................................43
The Divine Art of Reskinning Monsters, by Michael E. Shea ...................49
On Being an Unnaturalist: Monster Wrangling for
Fun and Profit, by Kelly Pawlik .....................................................................55
On Using Monsters
Telling a Story with Encounters, by Shawn Merwin ..................................65
Why the Characters Fight: Building Anticipation for
an Adversary, by Meagan Maricle .................................................................73
Tactics Make All the Difference, by Kate Baker ..........................................79
When Fighting Doesn’t Solve Everything: Noncombat
Encounters with Monsters, by Steve Winter ................................................85
Make a Friend With It: Turning Monsters Into Allies,
by Shanna Germain ........................................................................................93
Pacing an Encounter Just Right: How to Keep
Things Moving, by Vee Mus’e .........................................................................99
Maps and Monsters, by Luis Loza ...............................................................105
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Creating mystery and doubt is key here, as you want the players to
experience the thrill and fear of the unknown. Instead of giving players
their common names, use descriptions instead—tell players what the
adventurers see.
Thus, rather than saying, “An ogre steps out of the cave,” tell them
something like the following: “Your nostrils are assaulted by a foul and
earthy smell, which seems to be emanating from that dark cave mouth over
there. As you turn to look, you get a sense of something large moving just
inside the cave, but it’s too dark to make out anything.” In this example,
you’re using the senses (in this case smell and sight) to build some
atmosphere and tension.
Let’s say the party creeps toward the cave; how might you build this
encounter further? Don’t show the monster fully, but rather hint at it and
leave room for the imagination. Your player’s minds are wonderful things
that can conjure all manner of horrors when given tidbits of information.
For example, you might say: “As you approach the cave, the smell is
almost unbearable. Death hangs heavy in the air. Whatever has happened
in this cave can’t be good. When you shed some light into the cave, you
make out a large form, perhaps a humanoid, which seems to sink back
into the darkness away from your light. There’s a sound of leather cracking
and the chink of metal. You get a sense of something old and cunning;
something waiting and lurking.”
In this description, you’ve added sound to the senses as another element
to help the mood of the scene. Now, instead of just another ogre in just
another cave, you’ve established some tension. The players know whatever is
lurking in that cave is dangerous and deadly, but they don’t know what it is.
At this point, it could be anything. The players are likely racking their
brains, trying to figure out what’s inside and what the level of risk is. Great!
The unknown is the key to fear. You want to play with that. The more that
is unknown, the greater potential is for fear.
You might continue: “OK, so you cautiously enter. You taste blood and
sweat on your tongues. The air is heavy. You see movement at the edge
of your light. There’s something gnarled and pockmarked, and you see
a sudden glint of steel. There’s a great bellowing roar! A huge, giant-like
thing bursts forth. An immense and misshapen head full of yellowed teeth
lurches toward you rapidly! What do you do?”
In describing the scene and situation without using the word “ogre”
and taking a bit of time to dress things up, you allow the players’ minds to
help fuel the nightmare. You turn an ordinary encounter into something
scary and unpredictable. Such things are likely to push the players into
making rash or hasty decisions, putting the party at risk while also
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A tingling sensation might become a warning sign. The feeling of being
watched and tracked could swiftly turn the hunters into the hunted. You
can weave such elements into your description and scene building. By
doing so, you can guarantee your players will take notice when you tell
them their characters suddenly feel like there are hundreds of insects
crawling over their skin.
In fact, revulsion is a useful tool when describing a scene, moment, or
monster. We are repelled by unpleasant things and some of us can have
violent physical reactions, like vomiting and cold sweats. While these
things won’t affect the adventurers in a mechanical sense, they will help the
players to get into the right mood.
Visceral description of horrible creatures and the injuries they can cause
can play a role in cementing images in the players’ minds. Of course, be
aware of your group—ensure you understand what level of gore (if any) is
appropriate to the people in your game. If in doubt, ask before play and/or
use some form of consent mechanic. It’s a shared game and experience in
which everyone should be having fun.
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For instance, when there’s an invisible creature, the foliage might move
unnaturally, footprints might make squelching sounds in the mud or
blood, and so on. Can the adventurers hear the monster’s breathing? Do
its scales grate against the stonework? Is it leaving a stinking trail of slime
or noxious matter behind it, which becomes visible five minutes after its
passing? Use strange smells and sounds to heighten the mood of such
scenes, keeping the players guessing while also hinting at what is about to
befall them.
Engaging and memorable encounters start with what you, the GM,
describes. Use your description not only to set the scene but also to set the
tone and mood. How you describe monsters plays a major factor in how
your players react and engage with the game. The more you invest, the
more the players will too.
When using monsters, keep things fresh and interesting, don’t rely on the
mundane, and be creative whenever possible. In doing so, you open a new
window full of possibilities.
On Concepting Monsters 17
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Ghosts, for instance, embody the fear of loss when they possess hapless
villagers or curse their own descendants. Wild, black-furred beasts prey
upon the fear of the unknown when they lurk in the woods, seeking to eat
small children or steal livestock.
These monsters are fine for folklore, but they don’t bring much new to
the table for an RPG. Possession monsters remove player agency and are
often a bookkeeping mess. Simple beasts in the woods could just as easily
be wolves, goblins, or nasty gnomes.
So, ask yourself: what elements of your folkloric monster are going to
surprise players at the table? What elements are going to feel incredibly
familiar and rote? If you mostly only have a differently colored werewolf,
or an even-more-complicated possession, you might want to choose
something else on which to base your RPG creature.
The second place folkloric monsters fail is in what they do bring to a
game from story. For example, rübezahl is a counting demon from my
own Germanic heritage, also found in many Balkan stories. It’s a form
of counting monster similar to some vampires and Japanese ghosts: it
feels compelled to count things like grains of wheat or rice, or pebbles, or
anything put in front of it. In a story, the rübezahl’s counting obsession
gives a hero a chance to get away, or to outwit the demon long enough to
accomplish some goal.
In Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts for the fifth edition of the world’s oldest
roleplaying game, designer Dan Dillon carefully avoided making this
monster too easily defeated. The demon’s compulsion to count might work
only once to slow this monster, thus limiting the degree and potency of
rübezahl’s compulsion while still making that lore valuable to players who
know it. In this as well as other instances, it’s best to discard a monster’s
weaknesses partially or entirely to make them more useful and playable.
Designing a monster from folklore does not get you off the hook
in terms of creating new and compelling mechanics. The best of such
monsters have tricks that are not necessarily apparent in the source
material—that is, your job as designer is to expand the range of tricks that
suit the monster’s theme, far beyond the original story.
You’ll note, for instance, that a medusa in tabletop RPGs often does have
the petrifying gaze of Greek legends. It also has a longbow and a sword
and snake hair, which owe more to modern interpretations such as Ray
Harryhausen and 1981’s Clash of the Titans.
Another point where folklore might provide a stumbling block lies
in cultural exchange, which can spark a variety of reactions. Where one
reader might see positive cultural transfer between two groups, another
might see cultural appropriation or misrepresentation. Often the difference
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WHAT WE DON’T KNOW: THE TWIST
The risks I discuss above are partly mechanical, and partly lore-based. Both
issues can be avoided by choosing creatures whose lore is not too deeply
embedded in our culture, or creatures whose lore is narrow enough that
they can be introduced to players as something they might not know.
For instance, the letiche is a monster from Cajun folklore—a human
child raised by alligators. This is a rich premise for design, but it includes
no heavy inspiration for mechanics. Instead, we’re borrowing a hook and
making it the starting point of design.
How would such a monster arise and survive? Which feral traits does it
share with alligators? What strange customs might be part of this? Could it
be part of an alligator-friendly tradition of magic or even a form of sacrifice
to swamp divinities? Or do certain lizardfolk find this an entertaining way
to keep their alligators sharp—using a letiche as a scout, climbing bald
cypress trees in the bayou and directing alligators to prey?
That is up to you; the name and the concept, though, will bring a Cajun
idea to a wider audience. Plus, the letiche’s backstory suggests a terrain,
some anatomical and art elements, and connections to a wider world.
Sometimes, that is all you need to start up something fresh.
Another option for a twist involves taking a familiar folkloric monster
and broadening it in its range and gaming application. This should be a
very familiar twist to any designer who knows the origins of medusas,
pegasi, or lorelei, all of which exist as much more generic versions in
tabletop RPGs (the last of them from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts).
Taking a monster that is unique in folklore and making it a whole type or
a collection of related monsters shows that a good idea can be adopted and
then transformed into something that powers many more stories in a game
context than the original context.
For example, the story of Medusa is about a specific person and the
gods Athena and Poseidon, and the Lorelei is from a very specific place
along the Rhine River. Part of the work of designing from folklore is taking
these creations out of that context and making them accessible to tabletop
players in a much broader, more generic, and highly entertaining form as
exemplars rather than unique individuals.
Unless you are using the folklore to make an NPC (a different subject
entirely), make your folkloric monster useful in more places, with fewer
restrictions, and as part of a broader category that depends less on specifics
of language or specifics of culture. For games, you want creatures that are
generally useful in hundreds of different worlds and possible stories, and
that means stripping away some aspects of a monster’s origins to make it
easier to place in new adventures and participate in new stories and genres.
On Concepting Monsters 21
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many of those who see it. No matter which direction you go with this sort
of broadening, the mechanics should still be connected thematically to the
version of Nessie that players already know.
This is the great joy of designing from folklore. If you’ve done it right,
your audience will love seeing something they have seen in books, TV,
or movies brought into the gaming sphere in a way that both respects the
source material and expands on it. The right selection of old, familiar powers
joining with new twists and original mechanics that highlight the monster’s
core theme and flavor—that is a designer flex that shows you understand
and appreciate the source, and you also bring something fresh and new to
delight a tabletop player and to make the monster fun and playable.
Go forth, and give some new life to old tales by designing a folkloric
monster of your own!
Wolfgang Baur has worked for Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Kobold
Press since the days of grunge. He currently oversees Kobold Press in
Kirkland, Washington, where he also writes occasional adventures, settings,
and adaptations for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, both for Wizards of
the Coast’s Forgotten Realms and for Kobold Press’s Midgard setting. He’s a
bibliomaniac and a fan of obtuse, ornate, and recondite verbiage.
On Concepting Monsters 23
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“The Divine Art of Reskinning Monsters,” starting on page 49.)
I assure you; reskinning works more often than you might think. Let me
give you an example.
Recently, I sought to design an encounter based on John Carpenter’s
horror classic The Thing. Here, I was confronted with a significant obstacle:
how the heck was I going to build stats for a seemingly unbeatable alien
thing? If Kurt Russell could barely defeat it, how would my players?
I started by deciding what I wanted to show “on screen” and “off screen”
in regard to this monster—that is, what I wanted the players to experience
and play through using the game’s rules, which is “on screen,” and what
I wanted to simply narrate but not express mechanically, which is “off
screen.” I then built mechanics only for these “on-screen” confrontations.
I didn’t need to provide mechanics for how the monster sneak around
the base or infect NPCs while they were alone—events that all happened
“off screen.” I knew my players’ imaginations would fill in the gaps.
I did, however, need to represent the classic end-game fight, in which my
players faced off against a writhing, organic mass of tentacles. For this fight,
I needed a totally alien tentacled aberration—and I found that the otyugh
stat block hit all those qualifications!
An otyugh is a pretty standard monstrous fixture in the world’s
oldest roleplaying game. And by throwing some descriptive paint on its
mechanics, I had a perfect way to bring The Thing to life. I didn’t even need
to build anything from scratch!
I’m a firm believer in bringing pop culture monsters to life in the easiest
way possible. However, sometimes finding an existing monster to reskin is
difficult. When you need to design a monster like this from scratch, I still
recommend scanning the catalogs of existing monsters—if you’re playing
the 5th Edition version of the rules, try including Kobold Press’s Tome of
Beasts, Creature Codex, and Tome of Beasts 2—to find special features you
can grab for your monsters.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to build a xenomorph from the famous
Alien movie franchise. One of the worst traits of the xenomorphs (or the
best, depending on your perspective!) is their acidic blood, which causes
massive destruction upon contact with skin or any other bodily material.
While there isn’t such a specific acidic blood trait readily available in any
monster catalog (I hope), in the 5th Edition rules, you might consider lifting
the fire form trait from a fire elemental. The heart of this fire form trait is
the same as a xenomorph’s molecularly acidic blood; if you try and hit the
creature at melee range, you are going to get burned. If fire form deals acid
damage instead of fire damage, the trait now works for a xenomorph.
While it does, of course, take a little creative re-imagining, learning
to scan monster features in this way saves you a world of trouble while
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Your players want to have a thrilling kaiju battle. They don’t want to
compare whether their fight was exactly like the scene in a film.
With this in mind, why not make Loki from the Thor films a villain with
challenge rating 6? He can always return to menace the party and be more
prepared next time. Why not create the mogwai of Gremlins as challenge
rating 20? As long as you can deliver a satisfying interaction that provides
the same impact as the media you’re emulating, you can shape the numbers
to your needs.
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28 KOBOLD Guide to Monsters
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Monsters built from a power are often conceptually simple but rapidly
understood by players. This makes them a great starting point for new
monster designers!
Do you have a single power you’d like to design a monster around right
now? If you don’t, start by thinking of other monsters you’ve seen in
fantasy or science fiction. Make a list of 5 to 10 powers off the top of your
head and choose one (or more!) that you really like.
Here’s a list of ten iconic powers to inspire you, but don’t feel limited by
this list; the possibilities are endless:
• Flight
• Laser beams (or magic beams, etc.)
• A body made of fire
• Shapeshifting
• Size-shifting
• Teleportation
• Incredible speed
• Supernaturally tough
• Ally summoning
• Dimension shifting
Once you have a power in mind, you may be wondering how to
represent it in terms of game mechanics.
This process is different in every game, but it’s simplest to look for an
existing monster in your game’s monster book with a similar power and
then borrow the way that power works. You might decide you want to
tweak some of the numbers to suit your monster’s specific use, but save
filling in all the numbers until you have a solid understanding of the
creature’s traits and powers.
Now that you have a power in mind, and a loose set of mechanics to
represent that power, you can start building outward.
Let’s use laser beams as an example in the 5th Edition of the world’s
oldest roleplaying game. You want your creature to fire magic beams, so
you decide to represent that as a ranged spell attack that has a +5 bonus to
hit and deals 14 (4d6) radiant damage.
Next, consider: what purpose does this creature serve in your combat
encounter? (If you’ve created a creature that shoots magic laser beams, it’s
probably a monster that wants to fight; on the other hand, choosing an
ability like shapeshifting should get you to consider the social applications
of this creature instead.)
It’s always a good idea to follow the path of least resistance in your mind.
You may be drawn to design game mechanics next—or you may think of
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As long as you can roleplay your “new” creature as a compelling
character, and describe them as having few interesting physical traits
as well, there are good odds your players will never notice their game
statistics are identical to an existing monster.
However, some of the best stories in gaming arise when the characters
encounter creatures whose powers in combat synergize with their role in
the story. Just like your players would be jolted out of your fiction to see
a character that’s hailed as a master wizard fight only with a sword, your
players would be immersed deeper in your game when a monster’s story
role and combat role are in harmony.
If the characters are fighting a dragon and the dragon’s loyal advisor in
their lair, it makes sense for the dragon to be a majestic terror in combat,
while the advisor uses buff spells to keep their master alive.
As another example, if you’ve created a story whose villain is an erinyes
devil that deserted her platoon, you can take an existing monster stat block
and add a single new trait to it to represent its craven personality. In the 5th
Edition rules, an erinyes is typically a courageous and disciplined warrior
of hell, but giving her the ability to cast expeditious retreat at will totally
transforms how she behaves in combat. Standing and fighting doesn’t befit
this monster’s cowardly nature. Just by making one small change, this
flighty deserter is able to speedily evade her foes while still raining arrows
upon her pursuers!
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There are ten different dragons, with stat blocks for four different age
categories, across the 5th Edition rules. To make this into a new creature,
it’s a simple matter to take your new abilities, plug them into the stats of
an existing dragon, and remove any redundant features (for instance, you
don’t need this dragon to have both a starlight beam and a breath weapon).
Of course, if you’re designing this monster for publication, you should
build the creature’s stats from the ground up instead of just copying them,
but this method works perfectly for creatures you’ll use in your home game!
IN CONCLUSION
So, after all this, you’ve created a monster! Set it aside for a day to give it
time to breathe, then return to it and appraise it with fresh eyes. Do you
like it? If it’s good, then congratulations! You have a monster that you can
use in your game with pride! Your players may forget it the moment the
game ends, or remember it for years to come, but no matter what they
think, you have created something you can iterate upon for the future.
And if wasn’t so great after all, throw it out. Maybe you realized it stunk
when you returned to it, or maybe you only realized once you tried to use
it in-game. Either way, it’s the easiest thing in the world to throw it out and
start again from a new seed.
There are countless story ideas, innumerable monster powers, and more
pieces of concept art than any one human can possibly see in their lifetime.
Hunt down a new spark of inspiration and begin again. And this time,
build a monster that’s more fun, more fascinating, and more innovative
than the last!
I f an RPG is a play, then monsters are the Game Master’s main actors.
I mean that not just in the “actors on a stage” sense, but also in
the “someone who takes action” sense. Once the setting is in play and
the PCs are wandering around—in the wilderness, in a dungeon, in a
post‑apocalyptic ruin, or wherever—it’s the monsters that act on the GM’s
behalf. In other words, if the PCs leave a door in the dungeon open, the most
straightforward way for the GM to close it again is to have a monster do it.
The problem with this setup is that the PCs are very likely equipped with
fancy gear, cool abilities, and interesting names and backstories, and the
monsters are, well, in comparison, they’re throwaways with some teeth,
some claws, and some hit points. At least, they’re throwaways if the GM
doesn’t take some steps to make them interesting.
So let’s talk about making monsters—one of the primary tools in the
GM’s toolbox—memorable. While I’m going to focus mainly on creating
new monsters of your own, these guidelines also apply to choosing from
monsters that already exist from what is very likely the multiple bestiaries
you probably have on your shelf (I know it’s not just me!).
There are many ways to make a monster memorable and more
interesting, and none of them involve giving it a thousand hit points so that
the encounter with it becomes a session-long slog. Monsters aren’t more
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interesting simply because their stats are high (though there are exceptions
to this, which we’ll get to shortly).
Monsters are interesting because they present the players with a game
experience they’ve never had before. It’s a far better strategy to try to
challenge the players rather than their characters. When it comes to fun,
having to think of a solution is always more memorable than needing to
roll really high multiple times.
Think of each monster in terms of an encounter. What’s a fun encounter
you want to have? Break it down as basically as you can. Do you want to
have the characters experience a wild chase through the air? Deal with a
million creepy-crawlies in a narrow, pitch-dark tunnel? Lose their ability to
speak when they badly need to communicate?
Next, whatever the answer, design your monster for that goal. Or, to put
it another way, think of the scene in the movie of your game that you want
to see on the screen, and then make your monster work in a way that will
make that happen.
That leads us to ask the question: what makes a good encounter? Well,
first and foremost, it’s fun. But ideally there are multiple ways to deal with
the challenge presented (including perhaps avoiding it altogether) and
there are things for different types of players and characters to do.
Monsters shape an encounter through their abilities. That could be
as simple as “this monster attacks from an ambush” to complicated
supernatural abilities that reverse gravity or turn characters into chickens.
Let’s break that down into some very general categories.
Monsters have the ability to:
• Inflict damage
• Utilize or control the environment
• Incapacitate characters
• Affect PC abilities or possessions
• Wield incredible defenses
I’ll be honest; when I initially made the above list, it was much longer. I
had mind control, shape-changing, immunities, and more. But as I worked
on it, I realized most of the entries I had could all be consolidated. You’ll see
what I mean as we explore each category in more depth.
BREAKING IT DOWN
Here’s what I mean by each entry in my monster ability list.
Monsters Can Inflict Damage. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on
this. You know how this works. Practically every monster inflicts damage,
and thus, this is important but unlikely to make your monster memorable.
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For instance, mind control is a form of incapacitation. Take control of
a character for one round? Fun. Take control of a character for the rest of
the adventure? Well, you might as well say they’re dead, because that player
doesn’t really get to play their character.
(For what it’s worth, a long-term compulsion, such “attack every dwarf
you see,” is far more interesting than total mind domination. Then, the
player can do what they want—except there’s that one thing. When that
character and their friends encounters the band of friendly dwarves,
suddenly that’s a memorable moment for the whole group as they know
what’s coming and have to try to prevent it somehow.)
There’s little drama or tension in being utterly incapacitated. But being
forced into a situation where you can’t do what you want but you can still
do something? That’s good. If you don’t do that thing, then you’re in deep
trouble—that’s even better. Consider the monster that grabs a character
and starts to squeeze. That character can’t do what they wanted to do, but if
they don’t get out of that grip, they’re probably dead. That’s tension.
In other words, consider using incapacitating monsters that don’t take
characters completely out of the encounter, but change them for the
encounter. A character temporarily transformed into a tinier, clumsier,
more limited, or just stupider version of themselves isn’t out of the game,
they just have to deal with situations they wouldn’t otherwise cope with.
I’m not just talking about penalties to die rolls, but whole new situations.
The blind fighter might need to find their foe somehow before they can
attack. The wizard shrunk to tiny size must avoid being stepped on by their
friends even as they cast their spells. The possibilities are endless.
There are other ways to “partially” incapacitate characters. For example,
what if a character is ensorcelled or mind-manipulated so that they cannot
attack the monster? They can do other things, but they can’t make direct
attacks. Now the player needs to get creative to still participate in a battle in a
meaningful way, helping other characters or affecting the monster indirectly.
There’s practically no limit to the things you can do to “partially”
incapacitate a character. Think of it as a way to “damage” the characters in
nontraditional ways: turn a character slowly into mush, or instantly into a
toad, or freeze one of the PC’s arms, or have two characters switch bodies,
or have a giant magnet attract all the PCs’ metal equipment and armor.
And these are all just examples.
Monsters Can Affect PC Abilities or Possessions. A monster might
destroy the gunslinger’s pistol, or drain the brawler’s strength. These tactics
are pretty straightforward. They’re also frustrating for players. Foiling the
magic-wielding character with some monster that’s immune to magic for
one encounter is fine—perhaps even fun as it encourages the player to get
creative, but constantly countering the PC’s favorite spells is quite another.
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Consider, then, creating monsters with something that will make the
encounter feel different, but still fun, such as the suggestions in this essay.
Using these, you might give the players and their characters a new challenge
they’ve never faced before—in the form of a memorable monster.
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The problem isn’t the dragons. The problem is that none of your dragons
feel unique.
HAVING NEEDS
So you want a unique version of an existing monster, but what does
that mean? Perhaps foremost, you’ll want them to be interesting and
memorable—and for them to throw surprises at your players so they’ll talk
about those fights and the plot threads involved for weeks afterward. The
first stage of making your monsters unique is making them individuals,
with identifiable personalities and needs.
The fastest and easiest option to add some uniqueness to your monsters
is to give them a few personality quirks—some behavioral tics and
manners of speech that stand out—and run with it. If your green dragon
talks like a bayou witch and her lair is lined with terrariums full of lizards,
sometimes that’s enough to make a monster stand out, especially if the
heroes parley with her. Don’t underestimate the value a strange accent, an
outlandish bit of costume, or compulsive action can have on an encounter,
because it is specifically those differences that will stick in players’ minds.
If you want to flesh out your monsters even more, you might learn a bit
about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a basic framework from psychology
that describes human motivation, starting from those actions most
essential for life and moving up to those actions important to our personal
and spiritual fulfillment. Consider what need motivates your monster’s
actions, because that informs very different adventures and encounters.
Below are some ways to apply the categories of needs found in Maslow’s
hierarchy to your monsters’ motivations.
Physical Needs. These are the most basic things needed for survival, such
as breathing, eating, sleeping, and keeping warm. Monsters focused on
fulfilling these needs are either simple-minded animals or intelligent beings
put in impossible situations where they must fight for their basic survival.
“I am kidnapping this princess to eat her,” a monster concerned with
these needs would think.
Safety Needs. These are basic needs revolving around security and long-
term survival, such as securing long-term health, stockpiling for future
hardship, and securing protection from physical dangers. Monsters focused
on fulfilling these needs may be well-established animals or intelligent
beings bouncing back from some disaster, or they might be trying to
establish themselves in a new place.
“I am kidnapping this princess to stop the king’s attacks on my lair,” a
monster concerned with these needs would think.
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Re-painting your stat blocks can also mean changing how you describe
some elements of a creature, trading out damage resistances or the kind of
damage dealt by attacks. You might not have a lot of ice monsters for your
arctic adventure, but grabbing fire-based creatures and re-casting their
attacks and energy resistance as cold gives you a host of possibilities with
no extra work.
Playing with descriptions can also be used to give monsters seemingly
unique powers. So long as the end result of their attack is fundamentally
the same, you can describe it however you like. A medusa might carry a
bow, but you can just as easily describe her ranged attacks as deadly blasts
of venom from her cobra hair. You can make some truly bizarre monsters
just by adjusting how your describe their abilities: a basilisk whose
deadly gaze turns humans into jellyfish might seem very different on the
surface, but the end result is still a character transformed into a useless,
nonfunctional state.
NEW FEATURES
If you don’t want to build a monster’s stat block from scratch, consider
adding one or two special abilities from pre-existing sources to create your
unique monster. You can pull rules from any source—most games provide
verdant fields of rules text you can borrow, from monster powers to magic
items to class abilities to spells to feats.
Feel free to change a monster’s favorite skills without worrying about
the bonuses—if it’s important for your black dragon to be great at ice
skating instead of intimidating, just use their Intimidate modifier as-is
without worrying that ice skating isn’t a Charisma-based skill. Pull from
your monster’s general challenge rating to ensure the damage inflicted or
difficulty to resist are level-appropriate, or borrow from any level and use the
rules for setting level-appropriate damage and difficulties to adjust them.
When adding new abilities, keep in mind most combats only last a
few turns, so your unique monster isn’t going to be able to show off too
many of their unique talents. More than one or two adjustments and you
won’t have time to showcase them all, so it’s usually better to pick one fun,
showcase power than to drop in a dozen minor abilities.
TINKER
For all their reputation as finely tuned machines, roleplaying games are
pretty robust and hard to break. It’s hard to derail everything just by
tinkering with the numbers, so don’t stress about tweaking bonuses and
saving throws or adding a few extra hit points. Adding hit points is actually
one of the easiest ways to help a monster stand out without increasing the
challenge for your PCs—unique monsters stand out as priority targets, so
giving them the ability to soak up extra damage helps keep them around a
little longer to show off whatever unique talents you’ve come up with.
Most games have guidelines or charts for Game Masters that tell
you how far you can push your numbers before the challenge becomes
overwhelming for players. If you plan to tinker, get to know this
information to help guide you work.
MAKE IT UP
The deepest, darkest secret of game mastering—the truth that must never
be revealed to the players—is that you can just make stuff up. None of the
things that make your monster unique need to be accounted for in the stat
block. The rules exist to keep things balanced—locks exist to keep honest
men honest, as my father likes to say—and you can throw that balance out
whenever you like if everyone keeps having fun. If you want your kobold
matriarch to teleport, shoot lightning from her tail, and crush stone (but
not human skulls) with her bare hands, you don’t need rules for any of that;
they can just happen. Be fair in how you apply this broad and undefined
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ability—it’s generally best to point rules-free options at NPCs and terrain
rather than using them against the PCs themselves—and always keep in
mind the goal is to have a fun and memorable game.
Crystal Frasier is a girl from small-town Florida who now has 20 years’
experience writing for comics, fiction, and games. She has contributed to
major brands such as Marvel Comics, Pathfinder, and Dungeons & Dragons,
as well as small-press projects and anthologies, but she got her start self-
publishing transgender-focused webcomics. Today Crystal is the proud
momma of two energetic corgis, Calamity and Adamant.
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WHAT IT MEANS TO RESKIN
What does it mean to reskin a monster? In case you’re not familiar with the
term, the concept is an easy one.
Reskinning is simply the practice of taking an existing monster in your
favorite monster book and wrapping it in the narrative flavor of something
else. An ogre might be reskinned as a champion barbarian. A red dragon
might be reskinned into a powerful, fire-breathing demon. Drow might be
reskinned into a band of magic-enhanced assassins.
When you reskin a monster, you’re taking an existing block of mechanics
and wrapping it in a new story. You can reflavor existing monsters into ones
that fit into your game world. It’s that simple. It’s also extremely powerful.
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Mashing Monsters Together. Sometimes, you want more than just a
couple of traits to change up a monster. Say you want a skeletal mammoth,
a vampire gladiator, an owlbear wraith, or a werewolf mage. In this case
you’re taking two whole stat blocks and mashing them together. Some
RPGs offer templates to support such changes, but even if no templates
exist for your favorite RPG, you can use one stat block as a template and
mash it up with another to make something new.
Doing so is much like adding traits, only we’re likely adding a bunch of
them. When mashing up two monsters, start with the most mechanically
complex monster as the base monster and choose traits from the less
complex monster to augment it. This reduces the overall amount of work
you need to do to mash them together. Mashing monsters like this is more
art than science; you should be careful to choose the elements that will
make the monster feel unique without going too far.
SHIFTING DIFFICULTIES
When you change the mechanics of a monster, you’re also likely changing
how difficult it will be to fight. While most GM’s guides offer advice on
understanding the challenge rating of monsters you create, such guidelines
are already loose at best.
Because you’re developing monsters for your own group, you likely already
know what your characters are capable of. Any abstract measurement of
difficulty tends to break down when applied to a specific group of characters
played by specific players. Worry less about applying a mechanical challenge
rating to a monster and worry more about how you think this monster will
actually play out when the characters in your game face it.
Do your characters tend to eat through a monster’s hit points quickly?
Do they tend to absorb crazy amounts of damage inflicted by monsters?
These questions will have a much bigger effect on how you tweak a
monster than the arbitrary scale of difficulty used for monsters overall.
PITFALLS OF RESKINNING
Reskinning monsters isn’t without peril. A common problem with
reskinning is using the wrong mechanics to fit the flavor of a particular
monster. You may love that black dragon stat block, but it probably won’t
work well for the undead spellcaster you were hoping for.
Packing too many actions onto a single monster also won’t work too well.
If a baseline monster already has suitable actions, giving it a bunch of extra
things to do likely won’t help it at the table.
Let’s say we’re creating a troll acolyte; a troll who picked up a spellbook
and managed to decipher some of its arcane teachings. Giving a troll magic
missile won’t make much of a difference if its bite and claw attacks are so
much more effective. A troll who can cast shield, however, will get the
players’ attention.
When you’re adding features onto a monster, ensure any new actions you
give it are effective and evocative enough to be worth the monster’s actions.
One big potential pitfall with reskinning is accidently giving players a
peek behind the curtain. Players will lose their connection to the fiction
if they figure out you’ve reskinned one monster into another. Keep your
monster book hidden and avoid the temptation to let the players know
how crafty you were turning a fire giant into that animated war machine
they just fought.
Making your game feel real means hiding the secret machine behind the
curtain so the players can hang onto their illusions. As always, when you
tweak, reskin, or otherwise turn the dials in your secret room, do so to
make the game as fun and exciting as you can.
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IT DOESN’T END WITH MONSTERS
Here’s a final secret: reskinning doesn’t end with monsters. It turns out
you can reskin just about anything in your RPG when you need to. NPCs,
dungeons, maps, factions, nations, histories, pantheons, and even entire
worlds can be reskinned into whatever best suits your game. Always feel
free to ride off of the inertia provided by others and use it to propel your
game into fantastic new stories.
Mike Shea is the writer for the website Sly Flourish and the author
of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM’s Workbook,
Fantastic Lairs, Fantastic Adventures, Fantastic Adventures: Ruins of the
Grendleroot, and a number of other books. Mike has freelanced for RPG
companies including Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, Pelgrane Press, and
Sasquatch Games. He’s been playing RPGs since the mid ’80s, and he’s been
writing for and about RPGs since 2008. Mike also happens to be the son of
Robert J. Shea, author of the ’70s cult science fiction novel Illuminatus! He
lives with his wife, Michelle, in Northern Virginia.
I ’m an unnaturalist.
I document monsters—detailing how they relate to their natural
surroundings, trying to understand their psyches, noting the details about
their appearances, habits, and abilities. I’ve been an unnaturalist since the
first time I read about Greek mythology as a child, daydreaming of giant
three-headed dogs and women with heads coifed in serpents.
When I cracked the cover of my first Monster Manual, I was stunned;
there were people who knew exactly how hard it was to resist the medusa’s
petrifying, and they had noted it with illustrations and notes on her
ecology and psychology. And she was in a book with hundreds of other
creatures, similarly presented.
My purpose was clear: I had to join the fearless assemblage who must
have risked the very heart of darkness to provide this information for other
intrepid explorers to use. If you enjoy thinking about monsters, and all the
considerations their existence entails, I suspect you’re an unnaturalist too.
If you’re interested in dipping your toes into publishing the results of
your unnaturalist tendencies, read on.
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IT STARTS AT HOME
One aspect of roleplaying games that makes them superior to other types
of games is, in my opinion, the ability to add consequential content with
relative ease. Homebrewing allows any Game Master to introduce or
customize a monster—or anything else in their game—to whichever degree
they see fit. Like most GMs, I started down the path of the unnaturalist by
doing just this.
In my experience, GMs homebrew monsters for three reasons, as follows.
Necessity. Sometimes you want your game setting to have a creature that
isn’t readily available or isn’t available at all. Does your world have forest-
dwelling dwarves who live in the treetops and brachiate through the tree
canopy? I haven’t seen any published, but in most roleplaying games it’s
a simple matter of swapping one or two standard traits for the ones your
arboreal dwarves need to thrive in their leafy demesne. Homebrewing out
of necessity can be done on an ad hoc basis; you can make trade-offs on the
fly inside an existing set of statistics to give a creature the features it needs
to suit your purpose.
Inspiration. Sometimes you’re exposed to a monster through a piece
of media and are inspired to recreate it for your game, or even just
to represent it statistically in your RPG of choice. If you want to use
the demogorgon from Stranger Things, or the luck dragon from The
Neverending Story, or volcra from Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novel series
to thrill your players, you need to stat them yourself.
Worldbuilding. For me, this is the most satisfying reason to homebrew
monsters. Creating monsters as a part of worldbuilding allows you to
put your stamp on the game world, even if the world you’re using is
a long‑published setting. The shadow fey and clockwork creatures of
Midgard do as much to distinguish that setting from the Forgotten Realms
as its ley lines or the fact it’s a flat world do. Creating custom monsters for
your campaign helps prevent your players from metagaming their way
through encounters with the stock monsters from your game’s bestiary.
Self-Publishing
To say self-publishing is easy would be disingenuous; it’s a ton of work.
People who say that really mean that almost anyone can put together a
product of some level of quality and easily upload it to a venue where you
might sell some copies.
The biggest benefit of self-publishing is you can release into the wilds
whatever dark children you wish. The limit is your imagination and your
skill at presentation through words and images.
On the other hand, pouring all your love and creativity into your
self‑published pamphlet of beasts doesn’t necessarily give you an audience or
sales. Barring an instant audience, you’ll need to build one, probably slowly.
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Finally, established publishers have an audience for their material, which
means your work will get seen.
The dark side, as it were, of working for hire is that you don’t own the
work you produce under contract. Once you’ve turned it in and been paid,
the publisher can do with it what they wish, including not release it at all.
Furthermore, working for hire is predicated on the ability to get contracted
for it in the first place.
Roleplaying games are a tiny niche inside the publishing world. Getting
a contract to write for a roleplaying game publisher requires as much or
more luck and perseverance as it does skill.
Few people start at the top; you should be prepared to work your way
from indie micro-publishers up, building your reputation and repertoire
one monster at a time.
ITEMS OF CONSIDERATION
Once you decide to transition from homebrewing, whether opting for self-
publishing or through an established publisher, there are a few things to
think about.
Who is my Audience?
It’s impossible to appeal to everyone. Before you start writing your
monsters, you should have a good idea who you think will use them. Part
of this is dictated by the game you’re writing them for. When you’re putting
together a ‘zine of beasts for Free League Publishing’s MÖRK BORG RPG,
you want each of them to be as hardcore and metal as possible, and you
want to make sure your material is presented in that game’s unique style.
The world’s oldest roleplaying game, on the other hand, has a much more
generic, and arguably family-friendly image, so a pleasure golem made of
tongues and protuberances might offend some people.
If you’re doing an unnaturalist’s work for hire, you also need to consider
your publisher’s audience. Most publishers, even third-party ones
producing material for popular games, focus on specific themes or types of
beasts. Focus your work on whatever monsters you’ve been contracted to
do and save that one concept you love but doesn’t fit for a different project.
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There are other considerations of course, but if you at least have answers
to the above questions, you’re going to be crafting some great beasts.
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62 KOBOLD Guide to Monsters
G ames are a set of rules that come together to create a process. That
process, in turn, is meant to create an experience for the participants,
as well as an outcome. A single game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” for
example, has a relatively simple set of rules and a concise process that
produces a single-winner outcome in a matter of seconds.
A roleplaying game, on the other hand, is comprised of many more
rules that produce an incredibly complicated process, and the outcome of
that process doesn’t necessarily produce “winners” or “losers.” The most
striking outcome of a roleplaying game produces not a winner or loser but
a narrative as its artifact.
One of the most frequent questions an RPG player endures from non-
players about an RPG session is “Did you win?”
A variety of answers generally follows: “If you have fun, then you won
the game.” “The game is about storytelling, not about winning or losing.”
Or my personal favorite: “All the characters died, but we had a great time!”
This question, and the various answers it spawns, speaks to the narrative-
creation process inherent in most RPGs. When we design an “adventure”—
the segment of game play that we often delineate as a complete story that
the characters undertake—we’re really creating a machine.
Into our machine we pack the characters the players bring to the table.
Out the other end comes the story of what happened to those characters
and the world they inhabit as they moved through the adventure.
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ADVENTURE AS A GAME-MACHINE
It’s surely not that simple, of course. This RPG machine incorporates
the rules of the game, the desires of the players, the whims of the Game
Masters running the adventure, and countless other factors.
Yet, at the end of the adventure, we have all the elements of a story: the
characters involved, the motivations of those characters, the actions they
took, the things they said, the conflicts that were resolved (or not), the
locations they traversed and inhabited, and the end results of all of those
elements. We have, for better or for worse, a story.
That adventure-machine that we adventure designers create is a very
complex machine, as mentioned earlier. It has many inputs provided by the
players, the Game Master, the rules system itself, and the situation in which
the game plays out.
But that adventure-machine is also comprised of smaller parts. In a play,
these parts might be called scenes or acts. In a novel, these might be called
chapters. There is a specific term for them in RPGs: encounters.
The encounter is where the players, and their characters, interact with
games rules and the story-outcome most significantly. Although character
creation lets the players interact with the rules to decide who their
characters are and what they are capable of doing within the game, the
encounter is where the gears turn to process the inputs into a story.
As we build adventures, sessions, plots, campaigns, worlds, or whatever
aspects you want to name, the encounter is the smallest complete building
block we have at our disposal.
Information
What the characters know and what the characters are trying to learn are
integral to the story that comes out of your encounters. Often, the gaining
of that information is the entirety of the conflict in an encounter.
Where is the headquarters of the cult? What magic can defeat the
otherwise invulnerable foe? What’s the queen’s favorite flower? Who
captured the lover of one of the characters? These are all questions that
might drive your encounter forward.
It’s not just the information the characters learn, however, that is
important to the story of the encounter. The design of the encounter also
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must hinge on what the characters know (or think they know) before the
encounter begins. The difference between what they know at the start and
at the end of an encounter is how the story grows and changes. Without
knowing the current situation clearly, the impact of changes is lost, thus
weakening the story.
There is drama and tension in the dissonance between the information
known at the start of the encounter and the information learned once
the encounter starts. As the characters move through the encounter, they
probably learn more information that helps them make decisions within
the encounter. This information might be new, might confirm previously
gathered information, or could show the characters the information they
received previously was incomplete or incorrect.
Goals
The reason to have an encounter is because the characters are trying to do
something (or possibly several things), or something is being done to them.
This is the hoped-for resolution of the conflict of the encounter‑story.
For combat, the goal is often to overcome the enemy. There is power in
making different goals than killing in combat encounters: escape a room,
rescue a prisoner, retrieve an object, or the like. The overall adventure-
story becomes more interesting when the individual encounter-stories are
diverse and not repetitive.
To elaborate, varying goals for encounters from one to the next, on
the other hand, is a great tool for making great encounters and great
adventures. Not every combat should be about simply killing all the
monsters. Not every roleplaying encounter should be just persuading and
getting information. Not every exploration encounter need be simply
finding the trap and disarming it.
And more importantly, not every encounter goal needs to tie directly
into the goal of the adventure—although you do want every goal to take
the story of the adventure forward in new and exciting ways. Even if an
adventure seems like a straight-forward, hack-‘n’-slash dungeon crawl, the
goal of one encounter might be to help the friendly deep gnome find the
tastiest mushrooms for his soup, because only he has the key that gets them
through the door they need to pass. Such changes of pace are welcomed in
an adventure-story.
Threats/Challenges
The threats and challenges of an encounter are, simply put, the things
that stand between the characters and their goals. The most obvious
threats during most encounters are the slavering monsters that oppose the
characters.
This is a foundation of RPGs, and it behooves us to remember this brings
many players to the game. That doesn’t mean every encounter needs to
be about overcoming that particular type of threat; it’s just important to
remember that getting too far away from the threat of monsters killing the
player characters can leave a significant number of players dissatisfied.
That said, most players are going to appreciate a wide variety of threats
and challenges, whether or not deadly monsters are involved. Similarly, not
every challenge needs to have life or death as the final stakes. Ask a player
whose character has a very powerful magic item if they would rather lose
their character or the magic item, and you might be surprised at the answer
(or you might not). The challenge of completing a ritual dance at a royal
social gathering without stepping on anyone’s toes might be as tense and as
memorable as fighting the demon lord.
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Regardless of the challenge presented, always keep in mind how the
characters or the world are going to change based on different outcomes. If
there is never a chance of failure, there is no real conflict, and therefore no
real story. By the same token, if the only consequence of failure is death or
the end of the game, there is no story either, because failure should lead to
as much growth in character and plot as success.
Setting
In stories, the setting provides a context and an atmosphere for the
characters and plots that take place. In short, they immerse the listener in
an environment that should complement and inform the story.
Where an encounter takes place, and the details you use to describe
the setting, are equally important for immersion in an RPG, but their
ramifications are often far more important.
Will the setting make the challenge harder or easier for the characters?
Can the characters affect the setting in a way that changes aspects of the
encounter? Or maybe the NPCs or monsters can change the setting as well
unless the characters stop them?
During the encounter, the most important thing to remember with
setting is how the setting and its components might affect the characters as
they attempt to deal with challenges and achieve their goals. Focus on what
is relevant, downplay what is not, and keep the characters focused on the
details they need.
After the action of the encounter ends, however, taking a larger look at
the setting can enhance the story that unfolds. How did the characters’
actions change the encounter setting (or the larger world setting)? Did
the wizard start a large fire in the town by haphazardly throwing spells?
What does that mean for the story going forward? Almost every action a
character takes in an encounter could have repercussions to the setting or
the NPCs therein.
Choices
It is certainly possible an encounter may not have any specific threat
or challenge, or the goal may be as simple as making a choice. After
recovering a magical crown from the orc’s lair, the characters must decide
to whom they should give it.
Shawn Merwin has been a freelance game designer since 2001 and has
worked for Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, Pelgrane Press, Modiphius
Entertainment, and countless others. He’s been an administrator for many
organized play programs, and he recently worked on Baldur’s Gate: Descent
into Avernus and the Acquisitions Incorporated hardcovers for Dungeons &
Dragons. He’s currently Executive Lead Designer at Ghostfire Gaming, and he
talks about gaming topics on a weekly podcast called Mastering Dungeons.
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72 KOBOLD Guide to Monsters
R oleplaying games are, at their heart, stories, and every story needs
great adversaries. Monsters and villains are great adversaries in your
stories, your worldbuilding, your campaign, or even a character’s backstory.
An adversary can create tension in the narrative and provide engaging
storytelling and roleplaying moments while it works against your characters.
But now that you have a great monster or villain idea, how do you make
sure your characters stay interested in overcoming your adversary?
For that, you need to build anticipation, which can be done in a variety
of ways.
These can include adjustments to the atmosphere around your table,
interactions between the characters and their adversary, threats to the
people and locations the characters love, rumors and legends about the
adversary, time limits for the characters to resolve an issue the adversary
presents, and clues about the adversary’s presence and machinations.
This list is detailed below, but it’s far from exhaustive. In the end, you
should feel free to take whichever approaches best fit your characters and
their adversaries.
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ATMOSPHERE
One of the most visceral ways to build anticipation in a game is by adding
atmosphere. The adversaries in games may appear as statistics and fun
artwork on paper, but they also exist in the minds of your players. A
player’s imagination can make an adversary more terrifying and powerful
than any numbers on a page, and building atmosphere around an
adversary allows us to better engage that imagination.
As a storyteller, you have many tools at your disposal for building
atmosphere.
Never underestimate the power of music, a dimly lit room, sound effects,
props, or scented candles or oils to stimulate the imagination. These tools
can help pull the players into your world or help them feel like they are
actually in an adversary’s lair.
If your players are facing an adversary that has returned from the grave,
try placing a small bowl of damp dirt or potting soil in the room to give the
room a churned-earth scent. If an adversary devoured all of a victim other
than its locket or similar piece of jewelry, pick up some costume jewelry at
a local party store to hand the players as tactile evidence of the adversary’s
power. Who knows? Maybe the players hold on to that locket for the
majority of the campaign, vowing vengeance for a victim they never knew.
If your players are facing an adversary known for a unique sound it
makes—does the monster always smack its lips right before it attacks; does
the villainous mayor clink coins in his pocket when he’s plotting something
nefarious?—adjust your manner of speech or use an appropriate sound
effect from any number of free and paid online sources. Then, every time
the characters encounter the adversary—or its minions or machinations—
they hear that sound, reminding them of the adversary.
Of course, not every session needs be in a candle-lit basement covered
in potting soil and Halloween decorations. However, subtle adjustments
at the table can be appropriate for enhancing anticipation around long-
awaited encounters with an adversary the characters have been hunting
for some time.
COST OF LOVE
A tried-and-true tactic for building anticipation is to threaten something
the players hold dear: a nation, a non-player character, a village, or similar.
This tactic should be used with caution, as its careless or excessive use
can lead to players refusing to connect with parts of your world out of fear
of having that connection later used against them. This tactic also requires
a bit of build-up to establish the connection you want to threaten; the
characters are unlikely to feel anticipation or urgency if they only recently
encountered the location or person being threatened.
If used with care and consideration for how it all fits into the story,
threatening something the characters hold dear can be a very rewarding
way of building anticipation for an adversary and of creating a feeling of
accomplishment when that adversary is defeated.
Keep in mind, “threaten” is not the same as “kill” or “destroy.” Death and
destruction have major ramifications—sometimes ones you might not even
realize until after the fact, and it is always a good idea to communicate with
your players before potentially removing or causing permanent harm to a
character’s loved one.
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The adversary killing the characters’ favorite town guard is sure to get
the characters’ attention, but minor threats can also be just as effective at
building anticipation around an adversary causing trouble.
For example, perhaps your adversary lives in the forest nearby and
enjoys a local delicacy or ale. It sneaks into the characters’ favorite tavern
each night and eats up the delicacy, leaving the locals scratching their
heads. The adversary’s forays into the tavern eventually become more
frequent, threatening the livelihood of the establishment and, therefore,
the stability of the characters’ favorite retreat. The anticipation builds as the
tavernkeeper expresses increasing desperation about the situation and the
local authority’s inability to discover or stop the culprit.
TIME LIMIT
To build anticipation very quickly, try introducing a time limit. Time limits
add extra pressure and urgency by telling the characters they have to face
the adversary within a certain time frame to prevent it from destroying,
taking, or harming something.
This “something” doesn’t always have to be something in which the
characters have a deep investment. For example, the time limit can be
related to the characters’ altruism or the needs of their employers. Time
limits can be as simple as saving a victim before it is sacrificed in a cult’s
profane ritual, or as complex as a race to mobilize an army to stop an
ancient monster before it fully awakens and destroys a region or world.
A time limit doesn’t have to be a single moment or event. For example,
if the characters are heading into a cult’s hideout to save local villagers, the
time limit might be the frequency at which the villagers are sacrificed—
the longer the characters take to stop the cult, the fewer villagers they
successfully rescue.
If the characters are trying to stop an ancient monster from awakening,
the time limits could be the amount of time the characters have to
reactivate the wards that previously kept the monster slumbering, in
addition to the ultimate time limit of the monster’s awakening.
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Conversely, subtle clues can tell the story of the adversary rather than its
game mechanics, but such clues might not be obvious enough, leading the
characters to lose interest in finding or defeating the adversary.
A mixture of subtle and not-so-subtle clues allows you to showcase the
adversary’s role in the world while ensuring the characters don’t lose focus.
A mixed approach might include the characters defeating some minor
threat and finding a mysterious symbol on or near their opponents. The
characters could encounter this symbol on multiple occasions, with each
new occurrence giving more clues about the type of adversary it is, the kind
of influence it has, and similar information. Each new occurrence reminds
the characters of the adversary’s existence and power, and each new piece
of information helps build anticipation for, and knowledge about, the
adversary, thus preparing the characters for the eventual encounter.
Meagan Maricle is an editor at Kobold Press and was the lead editor on
the Margreve Player’s Guide, Underworld Player’s Guide, City of Cats,
Empire of the Ghouls, Tome of Beasts 2, and the ENnie Award-winning
Creature Codex. When not saving kobolds from their own word-traps, she
schemes the demise of her players’ characters while petting her diabolical,
furry companion (“I’ll get you next time, PCs!”). She has been playing
(Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons since the early 90s, when her parents
turned her into an emerald wyrmling.
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Using the tips here, you can give your players exactly the right encounter
and, in the process, a fun experience. While not every piece of advice will
work for every encounter, I hope you’ll find something here to give you
inspiration for fine-tuning the difficulty of your encounter.
A lot of these tips boil down to “do something other than attack,” but
there are many different ways to do this without making the adjustments
feel unnatural.
Friendly Fire
We’ve all seen what happens when enemies are focused on taking out the
player characters above anything else. The evil wizard cares so little for
their minions they neglect to exclude them from a fireball, for instance.
Raging beasts fight each other for who gets the most delectable-looking
player character. If the PCs are overwhelmed, it can help a lot to lessen the
difficulty if some of the enemies take out others. Plus, it will serve to show
just how ruthless or bloodthirsty the enemy is!
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Allow Alternative Resolutions and Retreats
Finally, not every battle needs to be a fight to the death. Does the enemy
have any motivations beyond killing? If the player characters stole
something from the enemy, then they might be content to simply take
the item back after gaining the upper hand. An enemy who is protecting
something or someone could be just as happy to scare the player characters
away as to kill them.
A devious enemy could spare the player characters’ lives in exchange
for a service. An unintelligent but bloodthirsty creature might start
dragging one unconscious player character off for a tasty meal rather than
continuing to attack the rest of the party. Your enemy’s tactics at the end
of the battle can easily change based on the enemy’s motivations without
feeling forced or unnatural.
Movement is Key
Just as with making an encounter easier, movement is key to making an
encounter more difficult. Having enemies approach a powerful party and
stay there often results in getting clobbered quickly. Hit-and-run tactics
or making ranged attacks and continuing to move further away can help
extend the battle for a longer time.
Focus Fire
A group of weaker enemies may not be very scary when each one is
fighting a different PC, but they can be much more effective when they all
target the same character. This technique is even particularly thematic for
many types of enemies, such as wolves and other pack hunters, or squads
of militaristic opponents with a leader calling out orders.
Work Together
Sometimes an enemy is just too weak to do much directly against the
player characters. However, that enemy might be better used assisting
more powerful enemies. A weaker enemy can aid a more powerful enemy’s
attacks through actions or positioning. Other ways for minions to help
include healing the more powerful enemy or getting between the PCs and a
powerful spellcaster who is most dangerous when not directly threatened.
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far enough to keep the PCs from using their abilities against large groups.
Don’t make it easy for a fighter to cleave multiple opponents or for a wizard
to use an area-of-effect spell on all the enemies at once.
Rolling Battles
Lastly, there may be only so much you can do to turn a single weak
encounter into a difficult one. However, you can sometimes chain together
several weaker encounters to feel like a much stronger one. In a dungeon
setting, it is certainly plausible for the loud sounds of combat to attract the
attention of the creatures in the next room over.
IN CONCLUSION
These tips don’t cover every situation, but the suggestions here will
hopefully trigger some insights for your games. By thinking tactically, you
can fine-tune the difficulty of your encounters to give your players exactly
the experience they are looking for. Whether you need to make the players
sweat from a lackluster monster or keep an over-tuned creature from
causing a TPK, you’ll know what to do.
Kate Baker has been freelancing for TTRPGs since 2017. She has written
Pathfinder and Starfinder content for Paizo; Expanse and Mutants and
Masterminds content for Green Ronin; and Dungeons & Dragons content
for Wizards of the Coast. She particularly loves writing adventures, and she
plays RPGs as often as she gets the chance!
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In the worst cases, even “heroes” start acting like unbearable jerks and
become the sort of people most of us would avoid in real life. That’s just
how these characters behave to their friends and neutral acquaintances.
Enemies and monsters are killed as fast—and with as little preamble—as
possible. Afterward, such characters just read the vital clues left carelessly
in packs and dens.
BAD HABITS
But let’s be fair to players: most of their behavior is learned from their GM.
If they have bad habits, they probably developed them as adaptive learning
fostered by the GM’s bad habits.
Here are six bad habits to look for in yourself as the GM if players are
reluctant to roleplay through encounters.
• You only confront characters with fights they’re likely to win.
• You steer every encounter into a fight anyway, even when characters
do try talking to the opposition. You might be just as guilty of
wanting to skip past the roleplaying and get to the bloodshed as the
bloodthirstiest of characters. In these cases, the players learn that
talking isn’t just unproductive, it’s counterproductive because it gives
the enemy a chance to get the drop on characters before attacking.
• You advance the plot to the same extent whether the opposition is
slaughtered, befriended, bribed, or routed. You probably think you’re
being clever about this and hiding your tracks well, but players pick
up on such things very quickly. They might not comment on it, but
they realize intuitively that there’s no good reason for the villain to
write out his entire plan in a letter to an underling; if he does, there’s
no good reason for that underling to carry the incriminating letter
around after reading it. The only reason for those things to happen is
so the PCs can get the information no matter how they go after it.
• The only time you encourage “roleplaying” is when you need to
deliver a large exposition dump. Characters tend to be passive
observers in these situations rather than active participants.
• You aren’t comfortable with roleplaying. Be honest here. Whether
you’re not very good at it or you think you’re not good at it, the solution
is practice. You won’t get better if you keep avoiding the problem.
• Your roleplaying situations turn awkward. Letting the conversation
become graphically violent, sexually suggestive, racially charged, full
of inappropriate jokes, or too much in any other way instills players
with the desire to never repeat that experience. You need to know and
respect your players’ comfort levels with uncomfortable topics and
GOOD HABITS
The same way players learn bad habits from their GM, they also learn good
habits. If you want to encourage more roleplaying when danger looms, try
any of the following as the GM.
• Remind players regularly through sights, sounds, and immersion that
society takes a dim view of murder. This is easy to do in towns and
larger settlements where characters often get out of control and wind
up assassinating guards and assaulting shopkeepers when perfectly
good alternatives were available (alternatives such as bribing or
distracting the guard and simply paying for their purchases the way
normal people do).
A player defaults to murder when they see it as the easiest, most
direct route to what their character wants. Sometimes, players need
to be reminded that society’s rules apply to their characters, too.
Depending on your players, this can be as simple as a sign stating
“shoplifters will be prosecuted” or as extreme as bodies hanging from
gallows and heads on pikes at the city gates, with nearby placards
identifying them as threats to public safety.
• Make the opposition obviously too strong for the characters to
defeat: a squad of giants, a lich with golem bodyguards, a dragon
whose lair contains many offspring and caretaker creatures. Don’t
withhold information about the opposition’s strength. Use it to fill the
characters with awe. Like the doomsday device in “Dr. Strangelove,”
the whole point is lost if you keep it secret.
Once fighting is removed as an option, characters must look for
an alternative. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking of this as a crude,
brute-force corrective. Characters should be reminded now and
then that the world extends beyond the horizon and they’re not the
biggest, baddest force of destruction in it.
• You can also reverse those roles and make the opposition too weak
for the characters to bother with. The weaker side must do everything
in its power to avoid a battle it’s bound to lose. The NPCs’ best option
is to persuade the characters they’re more valuable alive than dead.
The first few times you try this ploy as GM, it behooves you to make
sure it’s true; if the characters spare those NPCs’ lives, those NPCs
must actually prove helpful.
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If this deal turns out to be a trap the first or second time it’s offered,
players will never fall for it again, even if the campaign carries on
another 20 years. You can also use this to appeal to the players’ sense
of fairness or morality. Are the PCs really willing to slaughter a
hundred of the duke’s guards just to see him today instead of waiting
until tomorrow?
• Perhaps the most potent tool in your toolbox for discouraging
murder involves the characters needing their adversaries to stay
alive. Whether it’s because the characters can’t get information from
corpses, or because the adversaries’ lives are key to their goals, it’s
a good idea for you to place complex encounters in front of your
players that combat would actually complicate as oppose to solve.
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Instead, consider what the specific player is capable of and judge their
effort against that. If they came up with a terrific argument or delivered what
is for them an eloquent speech, reward the effort. If they phoned it in or
didn’t take it seriously, apply a penalty. Your job is to judge the player’s effort,
but not on a curve! Evaluate and reward the effort, not the performance.
If you’re not comfortable doing that, consider two things. First, you’re
not judging someone’s worth as a person, you’re just saying “nicely done”
or “I think you could have handled that better” in response to a moment in
a game. Second, the only way to improve is through practice.
In many cases, no die roll is needed. The GM simply decides whether
the characters presented a case or acted in a way that would sway the local
baron, monster, villain, or other NPC. A completely freeform approach
is perfect for handling roleplaying situations where the consequences of
success and failure aren’t huge.
Where the stakes are higher, more objective criteria are called for, along
with more planning by the GM. That’s where keywords come in.
USING KEYWORDS
In this context, “keyword” is a catch-all label for words, phrases, and
concepts that need to be brought up during a conversation with an NPC
or other creature. The GM builds a short list of the points player characters
need to address if their negotiation with this NPC is to succeed. What goes
on that list depends on the situation and on the NPC’s personality and
desires. For characters to “win” the encounter, they need to address some
or all of the keywords to the best of the players’ abilities.
You read that right. For the characters to succeed, the players need to
exert themselves.
Here’s a simple example: characters exploring a system of caves
encounter a xorn munching on a few uncut, semiprecious gems and
otherwise minding its own business. It’s too late to back off; the xorn felt
their approaching footsteps through the stone even before the glow of the
characters’ lanterns came into view. The xorn is curious, not hostile, having
never met explorers from the surface before. Once it sniffs steel, gold, and
other delicious, refined metals on these odd creatures, it isn’t going to let
them go by without finding out what they are and partaking of a few of
their “rations.”
For this encounter, the GM selects the keywords “steel,” “jewelry,”
“humanity,” and “sunlight.” If players discuss at least three of those topics
with the xorn and offer it some refined metal to eat, it lets them pass. Other
subjects are likely to come up, but the xorn doesn’t care about them and
they don’t affect the outcome of the encounter.
DISCUSS IT
Because roleplaying “success” is subjective, the GM has one other option:
letting the players themselves size up their performances. After the party’s
speakers finish their roleplaying exchange with the NPCs ask the table,
“How do you think that went?” Initially, most people will just exclaim,
“Great!” As players get accustomed to you asking this question after
roleplaying encounters, they’ll likely become more critical of their own
performances. When you demonstrate you take these scenes seriously,
they’ll start taking them more seriously, too.
The best solution to any problem at your game table is to talk about
it. If you’re concerned the game is becoming too much about tactics and
characters are too predictably antagonistic toward everything they meet,
discuss it. If you’re annoyed at how often players break character and
disrupt the mood with jokes and pop-culture asides, discuss it. If you want
to use the advice in this article and put more emphasis on roleplaying but
you’re afraid players won’t join in, discuss it.
For the GM, roleplaying monsters may be the most challenging and
enjoyable part of the job. Emphasize their alien nature and nonhuman
thought patterns. Use incomprehensible logic and twisted motivations.
When the villain has the stage, let your evil light shine.
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The magic of an RPG is not the tactical maps, the miniatures, or the
number crunching. It’s roleplaying. Encouraging players to immerse
themselves in their characters in every situation is how you lead them to
the best experiences a roleplaying game has to offer.
Steve Winter got his start in the RPG industry by answering a help-
wanted ad in 1981. He’s managed to make a living from RPGs ever since as
editor, developer, managing editor, creative director, web producer, designer,
and author on countless roleplaying games, adventures, board games, war
games, novels, magazines, and web articles. His most recent work includes
Scarlet Citadel, Tomb of Annihilation, Tome of Beasts, Deep Magic, and
Midgard Heroes Handbook.
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Or, maybe the party has already killed that family of giants, and when
someone pulls out a stolen trinket, Arges recognizes it as the one he gave
his sister, who was recently killed by . . . his new friends? Adding this
element to your game can open an incredible level of nuance to almost any
straightforward concept.
So, how do you go about making it possible to befriend monsters while
keeping them, well, monstrous?
You don’t want to take away monsters’ true nature, or change them
so much they’re no longer recognizable. Instead, try making tweaks
that are compatible with and appropriate to the monster’s abilities,
personality, alignment, and so on, while providing interesting openings
and opportunities for positive interactions, shared goals, and possibly even
long-term friendships.
In the real world, we’ve come a long way in our understanding of
creatures since those early days of making monster manuals. We now know
dogs can “talk” using recorded buttons, crows seem to hold funerals for
their dead, and bees can count at least as high as six and maybe even higher.
In tabletop games, creatures that once were portrayed as monstrous
beasts ready to kill and eat all humans are now seen in a more nuanced
light. They probably just want to raise their young, claim their territory,
and eat their kill in relative safety.
With all that in mind, it’s a great time to update our understanding of
monsters, as well.
MONSTERS AS INDIVIDUALS
A great starting point is to think of each monster as an individual. Yes, a
monster might belong to the category of “devil” or “dragon” or “basilisk,”
which brings with it a specific set of statistics, expectations, and abilities.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean all basilisks are the exact same.
One might be smarter than the others. Or more friendly. Or maybe it was
blinded at an early age and it can’t damage the PCs with its gaze, and that
means it’s approachable.
When it comes to viewing individual monsters as unique within their
broad categories, dogs in the real world are a great analogy. Think of the
category of “dog.” While we can all agree to the basics of what a dog is—we
might even be able to come up with a set of general statistics, personalities,
and abilities that most dogs share—we also know that within that category
we’ll find creatures across a wide spectrum of sizes, shapes, personalities,
skillsets, and intelligences.
MONSTERS IN LOVE
There’s an old saying among writers: “All villains love a kitten.” The idea is
that even the evilest masterminds have a soft spot for something. You can
use this idea to your advantage—give your monster something to love and
they will instantly be more open to the possibility of friendship. The thing
you give your monster to love might be a home, a child, a pet, an object, or
even a player character.
Often, in games, when a monster loves something, we see it only in
relation to what kind of violence they will do to protect it. They love their
home and will attack anything that comes near it. They love food and
will happily eat the characters alive as a snack. They love their family or
community and will bust more than a couple of heads to keep it intact.
But what if the thing they love is threatened by something other than the
PCs? We’ve all seen those videos of wild animals who seek humans out for
help when their young one is wrapped in barbed wire or has fallen down a
storm drain.
Perhaps the manticore’s mate has gotten caught in a trap. If the PCs work
with the manticore to help free their mate, at the very least, the manticores
won’t make a meal out of the PCs. At the very best, they may be grateful,
which could be the start of a beautiful (if slightly unnerving) friendship.
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WORKING WITHIN ALIGNMENTS
Alignments exist, and we can’t talk about monsters without talking about
the fact that many of them are inherently designated as evil. If your
game traditionally uses alignments, you could, of course, throw out the
alignment system altogether or change it so that all of your fiends are
chaotic good (which creates a very specific tone). For a more nuanced take,
you could choose to work within the alignment system in interesting ways.
For example, if you have a character whose alignment is also evil,
perhaps they bond with the monster over their unique view of the world.
Or perhaps the evil-alignment monster and the PCs have the same goal
with different motives, or the same motivation toward different goals.
Having the PCs and the monster work together, and bond
together to achieve something, even for a short period of time, can
be the start of a lasting friendship (or, let’s be honest, the start of a
long-term rivalry, if things go awry).
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Another option is to have one of your players “run” the monster
alongside their own character. (Or perhaps, if you have a new player
joining, they can take on the monster as their main character—it’s easy
enough to tweak the stats in most games to turn a monster into a PC.)
There may be a different hundred ways to have your players kill
monsters—but there are just as many ways to have them befriend them.
And, who knows? That monster they befriend today may just be the
monster that saves their lives tomorrow.
W e all know the amount of effort and time it takes to prepare a game,
whether you’re brainstorming a world from scratch or delving into
more nuanced encounters. Just as important, though, is how time flows
while you’re playing your game. It’s far more fun for players and Game
Masters alike when a game’s pace is brisk and exciting rather than slow and
bogged down.
So, what makes an encounter successful in its pacing, and how do you
get there?
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GIVE THEM THE OLD ONE, TWO!
Combat-driven encounters, by nature, get your players’ hearts beating and
minds racing. There’s a palpable excitement that hangs in the air as your
player express good-natured groans: “Here we go!”
The minute you call for initiative, you need to be aware of counts beyond
hit points and armor class. As you create an epic battle with your words,
you’ll want to be sure the pace matches and carries the intensity through
from when those first rolls are made.
As both a GM and player, I’ve found the most effectively paced and
exciting combat encounters combine the use of turn efficacy with clear
and vivid descriptions of action. This way, everyone feels like they’re
participating, and everyone knows what’s happening.
Let’s explore these together to discuss why each of these matters—and
what you can do as GM to use these aspects to keep the game moving.
E very fight with a monster takes place somewhere. Unless your game
happens to take place in featureless simulation rooms made only for
combat, you’ll need to set up some kind of encounter site for your monster.
(Even then, you should use the power of your simulation room to create a
cool place to fight!)
When the inevitable fight does happen at your table, you’ll most likely
need a map of some kind to represent the fight location. While it’s easy
enough to pull out a battle map, toss some miniatures onto it, and call it
good, putting a little thought into the features of your encounter site can
make sure every fight is one that’s memorable and fun—or, at the very
least, not boring.
Maps can have different functionality; they might be anything from
interesting adventuring sites to fun props to useful references for regions
and cities. In this essay, however, we’re going to look at maps in relation
to monsters, as the majority of maps you’ll use at the table are paired with
some kind of encounter.
COMPLEMENT A MONSTER
The most obvious way to pair a map with a monster is to complement
the monster’s abilities. You might have decided you want to throw a big,
fearsome dragon at your players and want to have an exciting location
for the fight. The right map will allow the dragon to make the most of its
abilities, which might include flight, the ability to breathe blasts of flame,
and using its mighty size to overwhelm the brave heroes.
INSPIRE AN ENCOUNTER
Sometimes maps work the other way around. Rather than trying to shape a
map to suit a monster, you might begin with an interesting map and want
to find an interesting monster to place there.
As someone who likes to draw maps, I know all about creating a fun map
first and then trying to create an encounter that makes the most of it. This
is especially true now with so many great map-makers sharing their maps
with the world online and through virtual tabletops.
In this case, you can follow the above process, but in reverse. Identify
key features of the maps that you find interesting and use those to start
narrowing down possible monsters that might fight there.
A large canyon with high ledges is the perfect place for an ambush, so
throw some goblin archers on the top of the walls. They can harry the
heroes as they make their way through the canyon. Alternatively, you can
include a large monster with tentacles to pull heroes down into the canyon,
where it’s much more dangerous to fight.
It’s fun to consider how a monster might make use of a map that doesn’t
match its typical environment. What happens when you throw a troll into a
sewer? Maybe it hides among the sewer muck to ambush travelers. It could
use its tremendous size to reach from one side of a sewer tunnel to the other
and pull a hero over, forcing her companions to find a way across before the
troll escapes. The troll could even use its great strength to bring down the
ceiling of a small sewer tunnel, trapping or separating the heroes mid-fight.
TELL A STORY
While most maps are encounter locations first, you can’t ignore the
narrative capability of a good map. Most RPGs tend to rely on words and
players’ imaginations to handle the majority of the storytelling.
While maps feature lots of illustrations for characters, locations,
monsters, and so on, they also represent one of the few visual aspects of an
RPG with which the players actively engage. Their characters move around
the map, sometimes uncovering parts of the map piece by piece. This is the
perfect means to tell the players more about the monster that’s up ahead.
Let’s consider the dragon again. Maybe instead of a full-grown dragon,
it’s a younger and smaller dragon, so we can sneak it into the furthest
reaches of the villain’s keep. As the heroes are exploring the keep, you can
include various clues about the dragon’s nature.
There might be various gashes and tears throughout the keep to hint at
the dragon’s deadly claws and fangs. You could include large cow carcasses
that look like they were used to feed some large creature. Finally, you could
include burning debris and scorch marks along a large hallway that leads to
the room holding the dragon.
If your players understand the clues, they’ll probably know they’re in
for a fight with a dragon or some other terrifying creature, and they might
prepare accordingly. If not, oh well. They can always make new characters.
Consider which features you could include on your map to explain a bit
more about your monster. Slain prey can hint at the monster’s means of
attacking. Large bite marks are different from claw slashes, which are both
significantly different from eye lasers. A lair with lots of creatures turned to
stone can warn heroes that becoming a statue might be their ultimate fate.
Hinting at a monster’s key abilities might be the difference between prepared
heroes who come out on top and a pile of dead, picked-clean bones.
Luis Loza is a developer at Paizo Inc. working on the Lost Omens line.
He’s been playing RPGs for almost 20 years and has written as a freelancer
for multiple companies and game systems, including the Pathfinder RPG and
Dungeons & Dragons. His notable work includes creating Borne by the Sun’s
Grace, a Mexican- and Mesoamerican-inspired adventure for the Pathfinder
RPG, and creating playable otters for the Starfinder RPG. Luis is based out
of Seattle, where he lives with his wife and a cat that is unfortunately not
as cuddly as she lets on. You can follow him on twitter @donatoclassic and
check out his work at luisloza.com.
h• h
Kobold Guide to Board Games .........................................................$19.99
Kobold Guide to Combat ..................................................................$19.99
Kobold Guide to Magic .....................................................................$24.99
Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding ........................................................$19.99
Kobold Guide to Plots & Campaigns ................................................$19.99
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Through simple but effective techniques, these experts demonstrate how to:
• put an adversary’s environment and resources to best use
• employ common-sense motivations to guide a creature’s behavior and choices
• develop realistic alternatives to just fighting—and dying
• grab every player’s attention with powerful, sensory-filled descriptions
• make monsters much more than a piece of art coupled with a block of statistics!