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Building Better Monsters Part 4: Monster Themes and Implementing Your Designs

If you’ve read this far you’ve got the goods to design a monster, so now it’s time to think of your creation as part of the bigger picture, as a denizen of a universe. You’ll need to consider how your monster relates to the world around it as well as other monsters so that you can determine how to role-play them and how they will act in combat.

There are loose themes that the most monsters will fit in if your campaign fits into any of the better-known genres. The themes for monsters are based on creature type, location and its association with other creatures.

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Building Better Monsters Part 3: Making the Monster Fit the Bill

One thing that keeps coming up is the idea that monster design should be elegant, graceful, smooth and all these other flowery and juicy sounding words. What I mean to say in more direct terms is that your monster needs to realize its design goal with as little effort from you while DMing as possible. When your monster hits the grid and it’s time to throw initiative, the party is going to immediately do its best to murder your new creation. As a result your monster is going to have very little time to make a good impression.

In music one of the mistakes young musicians make all the time is not playing expressively. They practice a piece for ages before they perform it and come to know its subtleties and complexities very well, but their audience doesn’t. In order for people to understand the piece of music on first hearing the way that the musician has come to understand it over a period of weeks, the musician has to accentuate its good qualities so that they are readily apparent.

As the DM you have the very same problem with your monster. Any trimmings that don’t further your goal for the monster should be removed. Strip the monster down to what abilities it really need because it’s only going to get a few rounds of combat to use them.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

So you’ve got your idea for your monster and you know what you want it to do and how you want it to function in your game. It’s time to put those plans into action. There are a lot of considerations to be made and it can be daunting to figure out where to begin. My outlook is that the best place to start is anywhere. The following considerations are not placed in any special sequence. As you read each heading remember that you can never be too creative.

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Building Better Monsters Part 2: More Than the Sum of Its Parts

In Building Better Monsters Part 1 we talked about the inspiration for monsters and how to identify the ideas that make up a monster design, mainly the monster’s form and its function. This time around we’re digging into the stat block. Every DM has read a stat block before but they’re worth paying close attention to. Stats are the functional manifestation of the monster, and stat blocks are the way that your ideas about monsterhood will be recorded. As such stat blocks are a sort of monster design fundamental, a rudiment for DMs.

You’ve come up with your own idea for a monster so it is time to realize these ideas mechanically. You want to have your design support your plans for your creature as elegantly as possible so that when you get to the table your creature behaves how it ought to with as little effort from you the DM as possible. You have an idea of what you want that monster to do, and good design will let you do that more easily. In order to put all the parts together gracefully a monster designer needs to have a good understanding of what all the parts at their disposal are so that they can put them together creatively.

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Building Better Monsters Part 1: Meet Your Maker, Monster

This article is the first in a series of four on designing monsters from scratch, getting the most out of your homemade monsters and understanding the mechanics of monsters so that you can use and build them creatively in your game.

  • Part 1 deals mostly with the larger ideas behind monster design so that you’ll be able to build the monster that fits the bill.
  • Part 2 is about the stat block, what it means and the relevant in-game and out-of-game factors that can change your understanding of the stat block.
  • Part 3 is about designing statistics for your monster and how various interpretations of the statistics can change the way your monsters will function as part of a narrative.
  • Part 4 is about implementing your designs and the process of review. Now let’s begin.