Strategic/intelligent mimics: Mimics that wouldn't immediately attack players, they'd wait until the players let their guard down. My players stayed a night in a house full of them. I'm not allowed to homebrew monsters anymore.
The Starstone Colossus. Basically, in my game there was an incredibly rare metal just called Starstone (really creative, I know. It was my first campaign). During the course of the campaign, the wizard of the group lost a limb and it couldn't be reattached since it was dissolved with a disintegrate spell. As such the group heard of this nigh unbreakable metal, as well as rumors of a dwarf smith who was the only one able to not only craft with it but also golem forge it to move or attune to people. Basically, he made golem prosthetics. The group went to find him and he asked for help to get more Starstone ore. As such the party went down into his personal mine, noting that there were not any enemies to be found. Finally they came to the center chamber, seeing a massive stone that had seemingly fallen centuries ago through the mountain and embedded itself inside. This was the source of Starstone ore, and the party began to approach. The stone began to shift and move, standing upright in a humanoid form with red beady eyes and equally as red streaks of mystic energy running through its form. The stone that fell from the heavens was actually a massive golem/automaton and it had been driven mad. The party had to find a way to harm it, so Shadow of the Colossus style, they started climbing its form to find weakpoints. Massive fists, falling rocks, and bellowing cries nearly killed a few of the players, but they managed to defeat (not actually killed, just deactivated it basically) the massive stone and metal behemoth and retrieved a large deposit of Starstone from its body. Needless to say, the wizard earned his arm that day.
A homemade shield guardian, called a Defender. Gave it a legendary action that it had to roll for recovery every turn, which made it balanced for my low level players (level 5 PC's.) The only reason why I even made a monster like that at such low levels is because one of my players (my younger brother) told me that my encounters were too easy, so I made him choose his words more carefully next time. Knocked 2/4 players unconscious, and made the players rethink their strategies. The defender is coming back, they just don't know it yet *evil laugh*
Wanna traumatize your players look for a cr 8 enemy called huge giant crab, give it a multi attack action to attack twice, in cornered spaces each crab will probably solo a level 8 character with it's burst damage. Like in the story I also commented.
First-time DM, here's hoping none of my players see this, because they haven't encountered this enemy yet... But I'm insanely proud of the idea I came up with and can't help but share! I really liked reading up on Water Weirds, and figured, if a Weird can manipulate water to act as its body, why can't it do the same for other liquids? I built an entire combat in an alchemist's shop, so there's a variety of different Weirds from different types of potions and poisons, each acting slightly differently depending on the liquid it is made from! There's even a surprise round at the end where all the various potions intermingle and create one giant Concoction Weird, which will be the first true "boss monster" my party faces... Can't wait to see how they tackle this :)
@@derpfluidvariant0916 Well seeing as a Weird is bound to the fluid in which it resides, and these are in exceptionally large cauldrons in an alchemist's workshop... The party would have to somehow "capture" a body of water (or, rather, potion in this case) large enough to drown in. Still, theoretically possible and I would absolutely allow it if they found a way!
@@tannerbarnes7392 As is typical for all things DnD... The group fell victim to scheduling conflicts and the campaign fell apart before I could make them face this combat. But it's in my back pocket for some time in the future ;)
Not me but a friend of mine. He made a homebrew species known as drunklings, they are robots that are able to use powerful fire magic, but they have to drink in order to use it. It's a lot of fun.
Haven't played DnD but had this idea for awhile Dinero, a named Troll who lives out in a cave and defends his treasure from adventurers...because he's an honest businessman and is sick of parties barging into his cave thinking they can take stuff without paying for it. Approach him politely and do an honest transaction and you can get some good stuff. Steal anything or attack him, and he'll more than willingly use said good items to kill you. Has the voice of Bert from Sesame Street
Pretty interesting, I recommend highly you play, I get if people are busy and all but it’s so much fun, if you can’t go to a local game shop and ask about adventures league (or if they run dnd nights) then join a discord server!
The third session I DM'ed my players had fast tracked through what I had planned and were on the way back with us still having 20 minuets left of the game so I panicked and decided to throw an ogre in the path that they had to take to get back to town. They decided to sneak around it and managed to almost do it when our wizard rolled a 1. Before I could even finish describing the ogre turning around they half panicked started singing. "Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed" then the rouge sang "She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb In the shape of an "L" on her forehead" and before I knew it the whole group was singing the whole song. I counted it as a crit success and the ogre walked away humming the song.
I have a BBEG coming that I haven’t pitted my players against yet. Basically he has an amulet that makes him immune to almost all damage, save for a few random damage types that change at the start of his turn. The gems in the amulet change colors based on what damage type the boss is susceptible to. If all three end up the same color, he turns vulnerable instead. In one encounter, one of the PCs actually got so upset watching him kill an NPC in a cutscene that they tried to eldritch blast him, and when I rolled for the amulet in secret, him taking zero damage scared them and the rest of the party into letting him and his cultists to escape without further trouble. He can also control flying swords with their own stat blocks, but that part isn’t nearly as cool
Our DM had a few but the one he was really proud of was the Brain Gel. At least that's what we dubbed it. So imagine an Illithid group is transporting an elder brain through a sewer system but is starting to starve. The unusually clean sewer doesn't strike them as odd until the first couple get stuck in something. The others try to save the now dissolving mind flayers only to start getting pulled in as well. The brain tries to communicate with the gelatinous cube basically eating its escorts to no avail. The gel is held back for a little while but finally gets to the brain and tries to envelope it. The two begin a back and forth struggle. One for desperate survival and the other for, well a big meal. After some time the gel and brain kind of fuse into this whole new creature. A gel that can not only think in very complex terms but also has a certain level of psychic power. It uses its new abilities to lure meals while also repelling threats. Sadly we bypassed the fight because we felt we weren't ready. We had planned to come back later but the events of the campaign side tracked us hard. Once it was all done the DM said it was probably a good thing. He wasn't entirely sure if anyone could kill it without losing half of their party first. It might have been overpowered.
The bone ship, A massive construct of necromantic creation. At a glance, it's simply an erie looking sailing vessel made from flesh and bone. But once it reaches shore, it will crawl on thousands of skeleton legs. Anything in it's way would get trampled. The players were too low level to attack the vessel directly. They had to climb on board and kill the necromancer controlling it, all before it destroys the port town that the players were staying at.
For me it has to be the giant eye of a beholder surgically removed and kept alive in guard of a door to the next room. The room this eye was was a long corridor with prison cells on both sides. The eye had an anti-magic cone that spanned 180 feet. On top of that, there were creatures that had a human shape and could use a poison breath attack. They came from fleshy growths stuck on the wall that was also attached to the giant eye. Lastly, the giant eye, when first attacked, would blink and use a disintegration ray at point blank range.
Holy sh*t the disintegration ray it so mean and cool! I can imagine the eye blinking and changing color just before blasting some poor adveturer to bits! So awesome!
Not a massive monster considering that my players are already LvL 11, but I recently had two mastiffs that had collars that could cast enlarge on them, essencially turning them into mammoth sized dogs. We had a lot of fun, especially when the invisible bard prestidigitated the nostrils of the two to smell like "obnoscious old lady perfume". Overall I enjoyed using them because they where a nice surprise and they put a dampener on my parties "I cast invisibility" antics.
Luum Lizards. Halfling sized lizards with pack tactics, and a special ability to generate a loud scream. They're common pests in the desert prison city of Tare'Tuk. Things nearly tore our monk limb from limb, but clever castings by one of the bards managed to keep half of them out of the fight until the party could regroup.
only for a Oneshot but my favorite personal creation was Big Jelly G, he was an ochre Jelly with humanoid level intelligence who bounced off of walls to knock people prone in a giant sweeping attack (players could make dex saves to dodge) and as the fight went on he'd use more and more Psudopods to slap folks around with Goo Fu.
I have a full homebrew campaign in a medieval land called Cadrifel. Pretty much every enemy is homebrew. There are a few that I like more than others. For example: Scorponites. They are a race of scorpion like people that dwell in the emerald desert to the southeast. They once ruled over Cadrifel with an iron fist until all the rival factions united and fought back against them. They are now trying to regain their control over the world. They are just basic soldiers, but with poisonous tail attacks they can use as a bonus action once every three turns. However they have their own weapons called scorponite battle claws that act as a shield and weapon. Scorponites are even cooler when the magic versions are brought in with their burning battle claws. Scorponites are cooler plot wise than combat wise. When it comes to combat, the BBEG/crazy elven priest trying to control the powers of Mesongrath, goddess of destruction, takes the cake. He has all sorts of custom spells that would absolutely tear through anyone who hasn’t leveled up enough. My favorite of his abilities is Sabtralac’s chains, a brutal attack able to restrain multiple adventures, deal multiple types of damage, and put them through a mental phase where they just lose their mind if they fail a wisdom save. Not to mention, this guy also has a giant stone arch above him during the boss fight that just rains down absolute chaos onto the battlefield. The best thing is, is that when he is beaten, mesongrath is weakened to a state of immortality where she joins the party, and also has pretty much the same powers as the BBEG.
I threw a homebrew boss introduction at them. The Harvester is an enemy that takes an object from the bodies of worthy opponents and will brutally kill those that it deems unworthy. They convinced it they could become a worthy opponents convinced it by doing an arm wrestling contest. Player got a 16 and the boss got a 14. I described how she struggled against the havester for 5 minutes before pushing it back a bit. Afterwards the Harvester declared that they could become worthy and left Harvester has a 24 in strength Player has a 18 in strength
I have a favorite homebrew but not really monster that I straight up got from a 2018 nerdarchy video - a flesh construct inside a animated armor holding a flying sword that is chained to the armor gauntlet. This monster is not very strong or impressive, but he is the meta gamer nightmare - when you see a monster suddenly having actions after it already acted in the same turn, experienced players go straight to legendary action, meaning those guys get really worried because this is a monster for lower levels. When it gets hit, if no one noticed the trick, the damage goes to the armor first, then the golem, when the golem dies, the sword breaks from the armor and they have to kill it lastly. It's funny too that the AC will drop drastically when the armor breaks.
False Hydra. Threw this at my party while investigating a village that had people going missing with no one seemingly knowing that anyone was missing at all. Nice twists and turns that confused them as well as village npc's speaking with subliminal messages during conversations, not to mention the streets being randomly covered in blood while people dont seem to notice a damn thing.
Was wondering if someone would bring up this one. I was in what was advertised as a homebrew DnD campaign inspired by the visual novel series Danganrompa - a Dungeonrompa campaign if you would. After the executions, all PCs and NPCs (besides the mastermind/Monokuma stand-in) had to roll an intelligence save to remember the past events within the killing game. Initially, I thought this was just a form of segmenting the game into chapters. As it turns out, part of the reveal would have been that it was a False Hydra campaign in disguise - the mastermind would feed the deceased's bodies to the monster, causing the rest of the group to forget. There actually were some hints hidden within the environment, but our characters never quite managed to stumble on them. I say "would have" because the campaign ended midway through the "5th chapter" (Danganrompa normally has 5 standard chapters + a 6th where the secrets of the entire game are uncovered). We were very close to the end, so it's sad, but as consolation the DM willingly divulged all of the NPC's secrets and the planned ending.
The Bee Rex... Half Bee, half TRex, and totally pants shittingly terrifying. I remember it better because the killing blow was dealt by our magic user polymorphing into a giant bobbit worm and suplexing the BeeRex into the ground. It was the most glorious kill I’ve ever seen in game
Two kobolds in a cloak. A spell caster standing on a brute. Seperate initiatives and drastically different ACs. Had the players roll a d4 to see which one was targeted when attacking, the pure confusion and frustration was orgasmic.
The hideous hive lord: it’s essentially what would happen if a troll was a host to insect hives, not that different from trolls in terms of abilities/stats,although it’s claw attacks dealt poison damage,and had what i like to call the true troll freak ability,instead of regular regen,it can grow insect parts(example: you chop of an arm grows a spider leg,chop of its head grows a centipede like head),everytime you would hit it with force or bludgeoning damage it would be like pissing of a literal hornets nest,the more force damage you hit it with,the more insects swarm out of it,weak to fire tho
Hah. My favorite homebrewed monster was also called Amalgam. It consisted of the BBEG of the campaign (Jervis Mundalian was his name), and all of his followers and right-hand men, congealed into a gigantic fleshy mass. The mass was considered one creature for some purposes and separate creatures for others. You could cast instant death and single-target spells on it, but the wimpy underlings would take the brunt, and each of them only had about 30 HP. Any healing done to it would essentially revitalize that HP pool, prioritizing the BBEG and his right-hand men, but reviving the pool of mooks as well. In addition to all the right-hand men and the BBEG being able to act on their own turns, the creature was considered an ooze and could move into and over the players' spaces, crushing them under the weight of the mass and hitting them with a constant barrage of clubs, the favored weapon of the mooks. When a certain amount of damage has been done to each part that the powerful individuals controlled, all the mooks were considered to have died, which ultimately severed the powerful NPC from the mass, unable to rejoin and much more easily targeted with single-hit spells. The fight took nearly five hours to complete, with the party slowly gaining ground until ultimately they managed to sever Jervis, and the fighter of the party chased his fleeing as down and slammed her hammer into him, turning him into a smear on the floor and nearby walls. Then they trapped his soul in a gem and buried it deep underground at the bottom of the ocean, because fuck that guy. I had so many rules and abilities written down for this sucker that the document is about seven pages long, just for this one creature. Really proud of that bit of homebrew. I've done some others that I'm proud of, especially because they're subtler and more thematic instead of just being a pile of HP, but I'm proudest of this because it was the perfect endcap to a three-or-four-year-long campaign.
One of my more favorite Homebrew monster creation is a NPC that I made in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, using one of my players backstory. Spoilers ahead if you haven't read/played the module. I took the stat block for an assassin and edited it to make Gwyn, a high ranked goon in Xanathar's fantasy mafia essentially. He had slightly better Ability Scores, and some skills here and there, but my favorite part was the new bonus action I gave him, especially since it's somewhat of a reference to an older MrRipper vid. Essentially, Gwyn could use a bonus action to "Make a Distraction" where he could drop 1 of 5 oil filled sacks next to him, or succeed on a DC:15 improvised throwing weapon attack to toss it within 30 ft. Once the bag hit the ground, the bag would burst open to reveal a "Distraction" construct. Gwyn would essentially use a bonus action on his turn to spawn one of these little fuckers, then a bonus action on his subsequent turns to essentially target someone and declare them the target of these flaming child sized, cloth covered, metal skeletons. Just like in the old video, it had serrated claws that it would try to attack you with, and if a distraction hit you, you had to succeed a DC:15 Dex save, or you would end up taking 2d6 + 3 Fire Damage as the thing just started to climb the creature it was targeting. The best part was it's bonus action though, cause if you failed to get the construct off, you'd have to make a DC: 20 Dex save to shake it loose before it emptied it's acid sack into your face, dealing 5d8 Acid damage and blinding you for 1d4+3 turns minimum, and you'd have to roll a CON save to see if your eyes were still more or less functioning afterwards. It could only empty it's acid bag once, but if it did, you were pretty much screwed. I was hoping to use him in a final standoff between the PC's as they were just about to enter the vault, but since one of my players was gone from the table for so long, I made it so that he was essentially captured by Gwyn's little group within the Xanathar Guild and was essentially interrogated to see if he knew where the Stone of Golor was. Thankfully, he didn't know, and he was able to get free with time. However, when the Shifter Blood Hunter found out about this, she didn't take to kindly to her friend nearly being beaten to death. Unfortunately for her, trying to stealth against a group of assassins and their mindflayer boss, doesn't go so smoothly. She just BARELY managed to make it out of the minor hideout Gwyn's team was using and basically feral style ran all the way back to the Trollskull Manor to heal and warn the other party members.
Taluk Nightsworn: an enemy NPC with absolutely stupidly high stats. Introduced as a traveler from another world, Taluk is permanently drunk, has three features dedicated to avoiding hits, and regains health and increases damage by 1 point every time he takes a drink. He has two actions per turn, and taking a drink is always his second action. He also had a massive Bluff stat (+21) and had a magic pistol canesword. He was only defeated by using a potion of randomness (d100 potion of my own making) that turned him into a pile of gold coins. Several of my players nearly died trying to defeat him before his shiny death.
The insomnaphage : invisible but susceptible to true sight and advantage on stealth checks. It hunts by preventing rest until it's targets have so many levels of exhaustion that death is imminent. It is physically weak to balance having only 8 hit points. Every night going through a "haunted wood" that would take four days to cross it disturbed the parties sleep by screaming at ear splitting levels and snapping branches to throw into the fire. They finally figured out a trap when everyone had two levels of exhaustion.
I had a truly shitty week since my mom and bro got covid and all the responsibilities transfered to me. That message at the end really moved a fiber. Thank you for be caring
Ooh, that would depend on the setting~! I've done things from unstable (mentally and physically) modded soldiers that mutated depending on the damage dealt (Did that before the game came out that does the same thing), to a stitchwork assassin from D&D that was little more than an animated brain and veins inside a human-shaped bag of armored leather. It was able to move as if boneless, gaining partial haste, could use weapons, or create a cloudkill effect by ejecting compressed gas from all the disgusting liquids within through its stitches, if it didn't just squirt the acidic goo its decaying state produced at you to melt your weapons and armor. Of course, you couldn't get it with critical hits either, as the brain migrated throughout the body constantly, practically swimming as it used the veins to puppet the limbs. If you destroyed its suit, it'd crumple into a mass of goo and tissue...and then, if you didn't succeed at dodging it for a few turns (as it couldn't survive long without a body once exposed), would attempt to latch onto a person, breaking their bones and turning them into a 1-hp puppet that the players either had to kill, or try and hit the now throbbing brain that could be sticking just about anywhere on their torso...turning the character into a hostage. It could also take over recently slain corpses in this manner, and would drain blood to heal itself in this state. Of you kill the puppet, it'll try and latch onto someone else if they're in range, or if it thinks the fight's too much, it may actually try and flee with its hostage...which...probably wouldn't be seen again. I know the barbarian (shocking, I know, but he had a load of horrible rolls that night) didn't get to be seen again when it fled back to its creator as fast as their legs could carry it. Needless to say, the players were forever looking over their back after that, afraid they'd have to deal with it again. Fortunately they never did-it was only there to try (and thankfully fail) an important NPC.
I haven’t DMed many games (like one of a decent length and one quest of an official book), but I had some skeletons in a secret chamber guarding the evil guy (he wasn’t that big) that had new armor and weapons so they higher AC and average damage. And the bad guy was a cleric/warlock skeleton.
In short, I brought Sirenhead to Skyrim. He was under control of a hagraven that had been luring kids to her grotto. The party had been tasked by the family of one of these kids to rescue said kid. In place of Sirens, he had Nordish war horns, and his body was closer to that of a Spriggan crossed with a frost giant (except 2-3 times bigger than the latter). The best part was that he YEETED the warforged Dwemer sphere (who had offed a wyrmling red dragon pretty much by himself at the beginning of the campaign). I've yet to top that encounter.
My favorite monster(s) I've used were skeletons (D&D 5E). (The party, 5 players, all level 3, including Colin) The party had been hired by a rich wannabe adventurer (named Colin) to help lift a curse on his families estate. His family had been attempting to get him to return home be any means, including force. After some years of failed attempts they seemingly gave up, with a few years after this he decided to see if something was wrong. Upon the town he found that no one had been in the estate, for a ghostly thick fog now filled the courtyard. Upon reaching the town they found that the fog had filled every street and open space. No towns people could be seen or heard as well as no signs of recent activity. The party could only see about five feet in front of them, but they could hear quite footfalls ahead of them, behind them, and to the sides every now and then as they walked through the town. Upon reaching the estate, it was noted that the gate had now been broken off of its frame. The estate was massive, with several large gardens and a two story mansion, with many rooms and chambers. As the party walked down the cobblestone pathway towards the mansion, they came upon the first skeleton holding a shield and a spear, standing motionless. The party knocked it over, smashing it to pieces and continued. Moments later they could hear quite footfalls behind them. They quickly reached the door to the mansion, and finding it unlocked, entered. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, as clearing no one had been here for years. The party split up, searching the rooms on the first floor, and encountering other motionless skeletons. They moved some, turned them around, destroyed others, and finding nothing of value met up in the main hall by the front door, and continued up the large staircase to the second floor. Entering into a large ballroom they closed the door behind them, at which point a few moments later they heard something turning the door handle as they were about to leave into the next room. The door opened slightly, everyone stopped, as one party member walked to the side to take a peak. There he saw a skeleton, with a sword and shield, standing there motionless. This freaked everyone out, and they quickly left into the hallway, coming upon the children's rooms, where Colin found his sister, and one of his brothers, long since dead, now skeletons. As the party heard noises coming from the the ballroom, they looked to see about seven skeletons, all with various weapons, standing motionless, and in the process of walking across the room towards them. They did what they could moving the bed and other furniture to block the hallway, and heading further down the hall, found the master bedchamber. There, they found Colin's mother, long since dead, as well as some notes detailing a strange disk that had been acquired (Colin's father dealt in buying, selling, and collecting of strange artifacts.) and how strange things had started to happen after the disk was brought home. As they left the chamber, turned a corner in the hall, they could see coming from a closed door at the end of the hall, a bluish white light coming from under the frame. Upon opening the door they saw Colin's father, sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, holding a stone disk, some nine inches across and about half an inch thick, with blue and white runes glowing across it. His father didn't look up as they entered, but continued muttering to himself, staring at the disk in his hands. The players tried to approach him, but were pushed back by a magic field of some kind. After casting dispel magic, the field vanished, and as his father looked up at his son, tears streaming down his face, he said "I'm sorry" and turned to dust. At this moment a figure appeared a few feet from behind the chair, seemingly out of thin air, a tall skeletal knight, with blue glowing fog flowing from his eyes and mouth. He looked at the party saying "Now you've gone and spoiled my fun. No matter, his usefulness was coming to an end for me.". The party not being one to wait, attacked first, and within a few rounds soon found that the skeletons from the hallway were now coming in, moving freely and joining in the fight. The party managed to take down the knight, but a moment later saw that his, and the other, bones were starting to rattle, as they began to reassemble themselves. One of the players took the disk, failed the wisdom save, and started looking intently at it, with a magic field starting to push everyone around him away. It took a few rounds, but they were able to destroy the disk, at which point all of the skeletons stopped moving, turning to dust, at which point the fog lifted. The party found that the entire town had been killed by the skeletons. Side note: I'm a Props DM, I like to try and have items for my players to hold, see, etc, and had replaced all of the lights in the gaming room, hallway, and bathroom with blue and green lights, as well as set up candles and salt rock lamps to add more atmosphere. One of my players also had to bring her five year old kid for this session, and though he was playing his switch in the other room, I got him involved without anyone noticing. Gave him a long black wig, told him to put it on backwards over his face, and when I rang a small bell, for him to stand in the doorway to the room, and after he was noticed, to leave and go back to his game. At the moment I described that the players saw what looked like a little girl walking from one room to another, passing through the door, I rang the bell, and my players kid stood in the doorway, wig on head. One player saw this, freaked out, everyone looked at the kid, then back to me, that's when he left, they all looked back and didn't see anyone there. It was perfect, it freaked some people out, and made others, myself included, laugh really hard.
The "Breadnought". An enormous construct made out of bread. It had been made accidentally by a good aligned, half-cloud-giant-half-blue-dragon female (who was also a nudist) living in the feywild. She baked as a hobby and a built it as a joke and to kill vermin, not expecting it to go rogue... The cool thing about the Breadnought was it would react differently to different damage types. For example if it took fire dammage it would get "Toasted" witch would raise it's Ac, If it was splased with water it would become soggy and be resistant to blunt dammage or if it took necrotic dammage it would have an aura of ergot and make you go insane if you stood too close to it. It's only true weakness was slashing dammage as it would make it loose strength by slicing it. Players loved that fight!
Turducken. This was the boss fight in a food-themed dungeon. Large-size turkey, claw attacks, slow and ponderous. Players thought it was easy, but when they killed it, it exploded into AoE hot stuffing damage and spawned two medium-size chickens that were faster and harder to hit. Each one also exploded into stuffing and spawned two ducks, which did less damage because ducks don't have very sharp feet, but these ones flew.
Not a monster but I ran a sci-fi campaign where the final boss was a possessed warship designed to level continents with missile fire from orbit. The ship was orbiting a planet and my players had decided to board the ship and fight their way to the reactor and plant explosives on it and detonate it from a safe distance. I was trying to force them to use their warship in battle and even gave them an npc skilled in aerial combat to pilot the ship and control the weapon systems.
I just learned about the roper and how it had spider climb letting it chill out on the ceiling it also blends into the stalagmites with a +5 to stealth making it almost impossible to see it but the best part? Its tendrils have a 50 ft range. Guys.....opportunity of attack
Mirror hunters: My party walked into a large room covered in mirrors positioned at odd angles and a locked room at the other side. One of the party walked up to a reflection and noticed the reflection had a key dangling around his neck. He turned back to the party to tell them but the reflection didn't turn away. 2 claw attacks and a crit bite rolling nearly max damage put the fighter in the low teens in round one. And the party spent much of the first couple rounds getting jumped at odd angles by creatures that ducked in and out of mirrors getting to reposition to another reflection it could see as a bonus action. It wasn't until they started breaking mirrors which forcibly ejected the monster inside for the group to beat on did it actually turn in their favor. So far in this campaign I have been getting my encounters beaten way too easy. This was a fun change of pace and I felt incredible having them barely win the fight after 2 of them almost dying.
Haven't run it yet, but I had an idea for a City Guard - themed campaign, with the players being recently trained rookie guards, initially going through their Final Test. Idea is that everyone starts at level 4, with 10 extra hp, proficiencies in all weapons/armor, with boosts being based on their class and/or race to get a +1 if their class or race was proficient in it, or a+2 if both race and class shared said proficiency. (Seriously, such things should have been factored in, like elves and their bows, dwarves and their axes, and some other races with weapon/armor stuff and the fact that martial classes tend to get that stuff too - something like advantage or expertise at any rate.) General ideas are the following - Save baby from burning building (test), Save kid stuck in a tree (real), save hostages from Cult (test), Save father and son pair who are stranded a little far from the shore (real), and Save city from Big Evil Dragon (Test). It was during the making of the Cult Section NPCs and the like that I made something of a mistake - when adding racial traits, I also added in the stat boosts from their respective races. Given that we're talking about some CR level 2 (like Bandit Captains) and 3 (Like Knights) creatures, a +2 to the right stats could mean better AC, or a better chance to hit, and/or more damage. Still, it might be good fun.
Gotta be Coldlight Walkers. Not sure if they’re exclusive to Rime of the Frostmaiden, but potential spoilers either way. I’m a DM, and this is my first campaign. I had a recent addition to my PCs- a Drow Ranger (who planned to multi class into monk) who had a knack for running in, getting bodied, and usually rolling death saves at least once per combat. He also had a knack for charging in head first, even without backup. Well, for a variety of reasons, I had to kick him from the campaign. I’d had a player leave before, but it was a very well written character with very clear non-main quest related goals, so I said he just left because he had better goals (in so many words). But this was my first time kicking a player, and a poorly (and overly) written one at that. I mulled it over a few days, talked to some fellow DMs, and finally made my decision. The characters were recovering from the previous night’s combat with the goblins. Paladin & Ranger went down, so they had to rest there anyway. They awake to weird noises outside there tent. They all exit the tent and saw this strange glowing figure walking towards them. Ranger sprints forward, attacking with both scimitars, landing both hits and dealing decent damage. “The creature looks irritated.” _OhNo.MP3_ Alright, it’s the creature’s turn. Multiattack and a crit, 4d6 cold damage _per hit_ plus like 4d10 bludgeoning damage _per hit._ “After taking 2 blows and not moving an inch, the thing punches through _ranger_’s chest, lifting him into the air. It then uses its other arm to cleave him clean in half. But not a drop of blood touches the ground- instead, shards of ice and snow fall gently to the ground where _ranger_ once stood” Anyone killed by a cold light walker is instantly frozen and unrevivable for like a week. Not to mention it dealt like 50+ damage to the 22 HP character. Then, on the next players turn, I clearly stated, “by the way, that wasn’t a cutscene. It actually dealt enough damage to do that. You’re all in danger” just to make sure they didn’t think they actually hit that hard.
I was GM of a 3.5/pathfinder campaign. They were in an underground labyrinth with witches blocking their way out. Dark creepers all around the area, massive 3 level maze, and sounds of enormous bull like shouts. All while they were level 4 (4 party.) only I had the map and was able to let them know where they were able to go. My friend playing a very persuasive paladin, was able to do a slight sign language like communicating with the dark folk. This, led them to the exit that was next to the big bad. They were 1v4 with what I described as a Minotaur with black flames falling off its body and cold blue eyes with massive horns. It was a massive battle maze battle that sent them back away from the exit, smart maneuvers to break the horns of the Minotaur, jumping out of the way of charge attacks, and few interesting ideas used. Most players noticed I kept mentioning things like “it’s broken horn is now filled with a pure black horn, slices into the body are covered by black incorporeal charcoal, and it’s legs kept sinking into the ground.” One player asked what was going on and if it was close to death. I just chuckled, “the DEMON-ontaur has not taken damage. You are merely destroying the body.” The party went blank. I honestly wanted it to get here or when one character went unconscious before I helped. The paladin took off his helmet (he wore a full face helmet) and said he was going to make a intimidation check to get it to back off since they were both taking damage or losing parts. He rolled. Nat 20. I rolled, Nat 1. I described how he took off the helmet and made an echo in the cave so loud the rock sounded like it was shaking. The demon inside the Minotaur, furious at this act, ripped the face of the Minotaur to scream back, but the creatures body was now crippled. The archer, asking if she could shoot two arrows at once with a contingency, rolled and hit both eyes of the creature as it laid falling to the ground… the ground was silent. They had beaten the unbeatable. TL/DR: low level party fights against a homebrewed demon possessed Minotaur that can’t take damage and intimidates it to death.
Hi! I'm from Ohio, too! My favorite monster I and my husband made (We co-DM) is the Titan Corpse Dragon. Backstory is that a dark god of the void fell, and when he did, the physical aspect of him was crystalized and scattered. The Void Crystal, once reassembled (as much as it could be, players could destroy shards which would nix certain amount of hit points from the final boss) would call out to all the dead in the land. All of it. People. Animals. You name it (except plants of course.) The dead would gather and create a dragon larger than a Red Dragon. One of its legendary actions is Call the Dead which essentially draws more dead to it. Depending on how many dead could get to it before the armies fought them off would determine how many hit points it regained equal to the type of undead it absorbed. However, its other legendary action was "Corpse Breath" in which case it would v*mit up X amount of undead to fight the army but lose the equivalent amount of hit points in the process. We are still working on it as it will be essentially the precursor to directly fighting the true form of the BBEG, but it's going to be a whopper of a fight, as the armies of the entire continent - if they can unite - will be fighting this thing with our heroes using bonus actions to command the legions.
I created a HB monster a while ago called The Emaciated Amygdala Things whole deal was psychic damage, area fear, and minor mind control. However, I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn't super tanky, so I made it spawn copies of itself that could only move. Essentially at 1/2 HP one of the copies became a permanent 2nd Amygdala, and the reveal has quite possibly cemented my role as the "horror" dm that will make fights harder if he feels you haven't had enough difficulty. Also the creature escaped, so now it's an ever present threat for a lot of my stories to just put it into the game. As for backstory, it's essentially a scout, and so most of its abilities are about information gathering. TLDR it's a converted bloodborne creature that is on par with a minibus. Had a party of 6 5th level chars fight it and it knocked out two before it escaped. Good times.
My favorite Homebrewed monster I’ve used was the Dancer of the Boreal Valley from Dark Souls 3. The D&D 5e stat block I used was made by DungeonDad on UA-cam. It was really fun to run in combat. My players just about shit themselves when they realized what they were about to fight. To this day it still holds a place in my heart as the best boss fight I’ve run in my time DMing.
I once had a DM that had a dullahan knight who was originally a DMPC get overwhelmed and overtaken by a mind flayer. It was a hell of a threat, because the dullahan was incredibly tanky on it's own, but gained a knowledge of additional magic abilities courtesy of the mind flayer. And the only way to stop the dullahan without entirely destroying him was to find his head. It was insane!
My favorite monster is the huge giant crab, my party was hunting and I sorta left some of those crabs in the swamp burrowed with a bit of their backs coming out, just a little piece, and gave them multi attack so now they attack twice, the party was supposed to be 5 players, but 2 didn't make to the session, so I even asked them if they wanted to proceed hunting and they said yes, well I managed to place 3 of those crabs on the swamp. And my players saw their backs coming out of the mud, and my ranger, murder hobo at the time along with the barbarian and brainless warrior, who were around level 8. The ranger says "I shoot the carapace" (he and his short bow at 6 meters from the crab). Well he landed the hit but the crab emerged from the mud and let out a cry, that warned the other crabs, what happens next is a brutal encounter with 3 cr8 crabs that have double damage potential. Party only managed to survive because the bard player arrived late. So I said "oh that's your time to shine the party is almost dying in a single encounter" he was like "oh my gosh is the boss" I just smiled then said, "The bard who was hunting with you guys just before partying ways, hears the battle and finds you having trouble with 'the boss' ". Long story short 3 players of mine managed to survive a encounter meant for 5 players and a helper npc 'hell hound of the rogue who died from disease(player retired)', until one of the late players arrived and managed to save their asses from crabs that were just trying to defend themselves. Edit: Funny thing is since most of the crabs were borrowed the party didn't know they were giants, until coming out of the muddy swamp, to this day they are still the most hated enemy, and most brutal encounter my players had, it's kinda of a meme between us. Made my players be traumatized with 3 crabs. Whenever I say crab they already get shivers coming down their spines.
My last campaign had a running gag where the paladin would just keep smashing through doors whenever I put one in their way. To hell with puzzles and keys, I got 20 strength. In the late stages of the campaign I made a door golem as a miniboss. It wielded a mace made of doorknobs, it had a giant safe on its chest, its head resembled a small tower with a rising gate for a mouth, windows for eyes, and its joints were door hinges. The stats used a slightly modified Iron Golem as a template, except it had a shield as well: A giant door. One of its attacks was to make the door open and suck one of them into it, leaving them in a demiplane where they would take random elemental damage depending on where they ended up. Another attack was to release a massive cannonball from the safe on its chest. It was stupid as hell but the paladin player loved it.
Put this on the reddit after the fact. The second campaign I ever ran was with a bunch of college students, and to keep it from being "meet in a tavern simulator", I decided to make them security detail for a bunch of bards, and to make their adversary for the first (and final) arc a siren. Since there wasn't one in the monster manual, I decided to use the merrow/merfolk stat blocks as a template and make one. It ended up being a smash hit for a level 2-ish party of 6 and their level 3 NPC companion. I basically took a merfolk and gave it spells, sound-based attacks and status-inflicting moves, and also gave it an ability to make people attack each other. The mind control ability was its main weapon, because it got it back 50% of the time. But it also had a secret, my favorite ability I've given to a monster yet. It was a transformation called Fury of the Storm. I revised it when I made an official Siren stat block years after the campaign ended, but this ability basically stayed the same. It went a little something like this: When the siren drops below half of its hit point maximum, it transforms. Rage takes over its body and mind, warping its more humanoid form into something more akin to a merrow, with long whiskers, bladed fins, sharper claws and teeth, and glowing red eyes. Its scales become sharper, covering more of its body, and its hair becomes longer and hangs in the air as if it were submerged in water. Water is torn from the air and swirls around its body, acting as magical armor. It gains the following benefits: The siren's AC becomes 15. The siren's Dexterity becomes 16, its melee attack modifier becomes +5, and its melee attacks now deal 8 (2d4 + 3) slashing damage. The siren's respective movement speeds are doubled. The siren gains 15 temporary hit points for one minute or until they are depleted. The group's necromancer ended up killing it with inflict wounds in spectacular fashion, and to this day, it is my favorite monster boss fight I have ever done.
Once I had this humanoid chicken chef guy named Gordon Blew, my players just used a bunch of fire spells and made fired chicken. Then a half giant ate the fried chicken.
My homebrew golems The 2 main ones being the Mithril and Adamantine The Mithril were originally mean to be a assassin/ spy to report stuff to my main villains right hand man who made them to take off the “heads” of armys (officers and war heroes) as a way to demoralize the enemy so they would surrender instead of fight as a way to reduce casualties. And the Adamantine golem which are immune to all energy based attacks and non-magic weapons. Also to fulfill a similar purpose as the Mithril but due to them being so heavy they would just walk through everyone to get to them instead of silently. Which is also demoralizes the enemy. Because only magic weapons could actually hurt it. These golems are so rare that their only 4 ever created existence. The right hand man has the immortality epic boon so he has been around 10,000s of years innovating on the magic items list and inventing other deadly enemy’s. Also their both above CR 16 though I believe the Adamantine golems are around CR 26 I don’t know currently they are buried very deep in my homebrew monsters which is surrounded by other homebrew things
Cableworms: A Star Wars D20 campaign had a mission in an underground junkyard infested with these things. Cableworms eat iron, most easily found by scraping rust off abandoned machinery. Human or alien blood is an even easier source of iron. Cableworms have a tough metallic segmented shell, can bore through metal (though very slowly) and attack in swarms.
My favorite is the Withered mind from one of my home brew campaigns. It was responsible for the disease and aberrations appearing around the country called the wither. It was first created by the original inhabitants of the country long ago who worshipped a Goddess of the flow of nature. The civilisation eventually started expanding their own lives with arcana focus around time which angered their goddess resulting in the them getting cursed. It manifested in a somewhat humanoid form but was taken down by a powerful sorcerer called Moíra(greek for fate) who trapped the curse within himself. The final boss of the campaign is this sorcerer now taken over by the curse. The party took them down with the help of an NPC also called Moíra, who after defeating the withered mind got corrupted himself attacking the party. The sorcerer nail rid of the curse helps the party defeat the new boss by stalling for them and giving them a spell that they must focus on. After a long battle the spell finally worked sending the new boss back in time to torment the first Moíra. Time loop babyyyyy.
About the Engine of Destruction one - water boils at 212F, so to get it to vaporize/burn things, that temperature would need to be higher, if you’re using Earth physics anyway.
Guardian tank: (yes it’s the guardian tanks from BOTW) HP: The combined health pool of the entire party. St: 19 Dex:10 (when it’s a prototype and can’t move) 18 (when it’s completed) Con:16 Int:16 Wis:15 Cha:12 Has a 2 hit claw attack (only usable when it’s fully operational) A laser attack that takes 2 turns to charge but opponents must make a Dex save of 15 or take damage based off of the “Damage Severity by Level chart” (So Lvl 1-4 characters would take 2d10 damage) Of course the character won’t need to make a Dex save if they’re behind cover. Basically in one of my campaign ideas there’s a prototype in A friendly artificer’s basement that will attack any intruder, just in case A rogue decides to split from the party.
I used a Metagross from DnDwiki and re-skinned it to be a Palanquin Spider, which was the first trap the Party encountered. Immediately, after capturing the Barbarian, and skittering off, the party had to fight some more Homebrewed Monsters. During that time, it ran off and hid. When the party entered the fight room, they found a table, a massive barrel, and a large grinder built into the ground. When the Warlock entered to inspect(the rest of the party REFUSED, being absolutely terrified more than likely), it fell down, and attacked the Warlock, knocking her unconscious as a swarm of small, robotic Spiders(a homebrew monster I made specifically for this encounter), crawled up from the grinder. The party couldnt do much in terms of AOE, and the dang thing just about KO'd them. I was really excited to throw such powerful monsters at them, and see them succeed. This entire dungeon was a wonderful creation of mine, and would love to go into more but wont due to already making a massive wall of text.
Not just a monster, but a full team. For my first campaign as the DM, I homebrewed the full story and based it off the story of Pokémon Sapphire. End of the world due to mass flooding, even had a blue Aboleth that served as a Kyogre+Archie substitute. The main goal of the campaign was to get the Mcguffin “Nerus’ Sapphire” from the aboleths lair in the heart of the Swamp to stop the unending rain that was going to flood the swamp and the surrounding lands and turn it into ocean. So of course, all the major villains/enemies were Pokémon you’d see on a Rain team. I hombrewed Pelipper, Politoad, Scizor, Keldeo, Kingdra, Ferrothorn, And for the penultimate boss, a Sentient Mega Swampert that ran operations above ground. The Scizors were my favorite as they had a glaring weakness to fire but due to the never ending storm in the swamp, they’re only weakness was just some decent damage. I’d love to use them again some day.
My absolute fav was a set of butterflies. Just pretty butterflies? How could they be any fun? Try pretty *poisonous* butterflies. They were happily swarming on a honey fountain, and when the players came in they landed on them curiously. Those butterflies nearly became a TPK as the heavy hitter kept failing and falling into the honey. It got even better as they'd already found the main treasure room (they accidentally ran the loop backwards thanks to finding a hidden door) and had ignored the big chest full of moth balls - stored in the lair's boss's bedroom, in his closet, where he could access it easily. I couldn't stop laughing as they brute-forced and figured out how to make mothballs on the fly to avoid the butterflies only to find out the secret room on the other side was the laundry for the dungeon. The entire place was some crazy lepidopterist's house. It included a room made of mimics. Not just the enemies, but the doorway, the door, the decorations and the *loot*. Moth and butterfly patterns everywhere. Best monster ever
One of my favorite encounters from my first campaign. A withered Drauger like giant from another dimension, The King of Winter, wielding a 25ft greatsword and incredibly powerful ice magic. Think Shadow of Colossus size. Sealed away ages ago in a glacier after his life force was dwindled enough to force him into a sleep, he was awoken by miners picking away at the icy prison. After making the miners into a meal his flesh began to regenerate. My players are still somewhat traumatized from it lol
I use honk honk as a cautionary tale. I ran a small oneshot for a member of my regular party (the most chaotic anti railer). Honk honk is for all intents and purposes a goose. Except he has level 14 warlock class abilities, with the station set of an elder being. He's something of a rumour among the rest, I made sure the player I showed him to was fearful of his power via the total SLAUGHTER of a large gang of bandits by the bird
I had created the Tartarus Ooze. It was basically the Venom Symbiote from Spiderman, except effectively undead. This Ooze would slip into the stomach of a fresh corpse and reanimate the creature with Intelligence intact. It is carnivorous and the Host would have to consume large quantities of meat least the Ooze begins devouring the creature from the inside. Once the Ooze gains enough mass it can manifest as the 'black suit' with corresponding buffs. The story had a initial Player Killing event where the downed character (Bard) becoming the Host of the Ooze and choosing to sacrifice their neutral Good alignment to 'tame the monster' when they insulted the only Cleric in the area capable of curing the possession.
Serpentine basilisk with a burrow speed whose gaze attack deals dex damage. I put it in a dungeon with mostly dirt/gravel floors. Its combat style was hit and run. The party was terrified, but it was a fun encounter because nobody likes save or die. I also developed my own dragons who have 2 elemental types.
It was only semi homebrew- i used some kind of giant monstrous boar, I think from one of the tome of beast books, but I added that it was dripping a black ichor from every orifice, was about twice as large as it should've been, and had far too many eyes and teeth - I'm real big on body horror when things are Real Bad. Basically, it was this boar that had been taken over by something deeply plot relevant that they hadn't learned about yet, so it was this big epic "oh shit what's that" moment
This one time, I had a group and everyone was a fan of Jojo's bizarre adventure. (I never really watched the show, but I know the lore and get the appeal.) So I decided to incorporate Stand-like enemies, basically a physical manifestation of one's personality. How they worked is that the user would have a disc-like crystal with a cool design on it (think Beyblade top layers,) and the user would crush them in their hands to summon a humanoid-like being with certain powers based on the user's personality. (Are they caring for others? They heal. Are they charismatic? They use buffs.) They can be killed like any other monster, but killing it, or the host will kill both of them. They are also able to be convinced to stop fighting since they are a lot more open to reason than humans. If you know the host well enough, you could easily deactivate them. I called them "Seramon" (Seraph and Demon). My BBEG was the one who mainly used them, but some more important characters could use them as well. I eventually ended a session telling them they found Sermon Templates (Blank Seramon Crystals) and told them to create their own disc design and Seramon if it made sense for their character. They absolutely loved this enemy and I later incorporated it into future D&D sessions and my other players loved the homebrew idea as well.
The Hunters of Bera, homebrew group that specializes in hunting magic users. High dex so hard to hit, and a few nasty tricks that go well beyond just anti magic. My players learned that the hard way when one used entangle and managed to catch the hunter. He quickly learned that was a bad idea as, as an action, hunters could steal a concentration based spell used on them, and turn it back on the mages. It was hilarious watching that players face when the entangle suddenly just, disappeared only to reappear restraining him and another player. XD
Frillgadam. A four legged raptor like monster that can release a frill fan from around its neck. This fan can be used to intimidate and shield it’s younglings from other monster. If a creature or caster hits the monster while the frill shield is out, the monster can reaction absorb elements, or reaction bounce it back in a random direction with its tail frill. This only applies to ranged spell attacks/ elemental breath attacks. The frill does expose vulnerabilities when used so the party can play around upclose and ranged
The Royal Treasure Jelly. A slime that is able to disguise itself as a huge pile of gold coins and treasure. It has 300HP but low AC, so while it’s easy to hit, it can distract a party very effectively. If it gets defeated, it always drops a few magic items, since they are the only thing that can survive it’s acid. It’s also full of money. It engulfs foes and hits like a truck with +7 and 3d6 acid. When it gets attacked, the attacker must make a DC15 Dex check or get stuck.
I call it Body-Without-Mind. It's an amorphous, dark purple aberration that unleashes a wave of energy that causes everyone within range to make a saving throw based on their highest ability score, or one of them if there's a tie. If the creature (player) succeeds, the creature merely copies up to 1d4 attributes from the victim and the ability score Body-Without-Mind chose increases to match it, but if it fails, it steals one of the victim's abilities, copies 1d4 - 1 other abilites, and it reduces the victim's best ability score by that number. It then takes a humanoid form, grotesquely amalgamating all of its victims attributes onto itself. It can sometimes also grow additional heads and limbs for multiple attacks and reactions per turn, and can split into seperate bodies, dividing attributes among them.
I've made a living military Now, let me make it clear I don't mean soldiers that are alive (that's literally the one non living thing) I mean living tanks made from years of magical alterations to a large mammal. But my personal favourite is the BBEG, a giant 6 legged mech made from normal steel and other metals. This thing had 5 long distance cannons (very similar in appearance to the WW2 railway cannons), 2 long- mid range missles, 3 groups of 10 swarm missles and several shooting platforms for the undead. It was controlled by 15 fleshy hulks each with a different job (like moving the legs or opening doors) they all wanted control of the hulks and made for fun but unpredictable combat, one second the players would be charged by the machine another it would be in far enough away so only it was in range
I had made some Medusa variants. They started out as mutations created by The Time Of Troubles in The Forgotten Realms (this was way back in 2nd Edition). They have since began to breed true and have become new species of their own. 1) The Midasa: The Midasa is for all intents and purposes exactly the same as the standard Medusa (hit dice, attacks, saving throws, stats, etc) with one exception. The Midasa's gaze attack doesn't turn its victim to stone . . . it turns him into solid GOLD (the name being a take on King Midas and The Midas Touch). As there is no "Gold To Flesh" spell, there is no known way to change someone back to flesh, short of a "Wish" or "Miracle" spell. Also, should a Midasa turn too many victims into gold, she could devalue gold and throw The Realms' economy into chaos. 2) The Mambadusa: The Mambadusa is virtually identical to her more common cousins in all aspects except one. The snakes she has for hair are the deadly Black Mamba snake. The snakes are six feet long, having a much greater reach than those of a typical Medusa. If bitten, the venom has the same effect as that of a Black Mamba viper. In 2nd Edition it was Save vs Poison or Die Instantly. If you make your saving throw, you fall unconscious and your physical stats (STR, DEX, CON) all drop to 3. You then must make a Save vs Poison every day, each time with a slightly better bonus. Failure = Death, success = living for another day. On the 7th day, if you have made all of your saving throws, you regain consciousness. Your stats are all still at 3, but you can now recover 1 point to each stat for each day of rest after recovering from the venom. 3) The Mirrodusa: The Mirrodusa is identical to her more common cousin in every conceivable way except for one. She is immune to her own gaze attack. Thus using a mirror to reflect her gaze back at her is useless. 4) The Minidusa: The Minidusa is the least powerful of her cousins. Her name has nothing to do with her size, but is in fact a reflection of her lack of offensive powers. The Minidusa has no gaze attack, and her snakes have no venom. She is very rare, as Minidusae are often killed on sight and have little by way of defenses. I also created a new breed of ogres which I call augres (pronounced the same as "ogres" but they consider themselves to be "The Gold Standard" of ogredom, hence the "AU" at the beginning of their name as that is the symbol for gold on the elemental chart). An ogre-mage from Karatur came to Faerun by accident and stumbled across his more primitive western cousins. He easily conquered the tribe and became their new chieftain. He then started conquering neighboring tribes of not only ogres, but verbeeg as well. He then started enforcing selective cross breeding between the tribes. Verbeed men with ogre women, ogre men with verbeeg women. They would also kidnap humans and force them into their breeding pool. With enough interbreeding between Ogre/Verbeeg hybrids, Human/Verbeeg hybrids, and Human/Ogre hybrids, the ogre-mage was able to eventually breed out the stupidity and clumsiness of his primitive western cousins and create a new breed of ogre that is intelligent, fast, and far more dangerous. He even managed to kidnap a few firbolgs and vodkyn to add to the gene pool. The end result would be quite terrifying to any smaller race if/when they decide to conquer lands outside of their home territory.
game: Gamma World monster: Drag Wolf found in grasslands or plains. don't remember stats due to it being about 40 years ago. lol had huge hind legs, small front legs. tactics: always attacks in pairs. before "attacking", lopes like an idling dragster engine and then lets out a deafening roar upon racing toward it's prey. anything in the area, other than the wolves had to make a save to avoid being stunned by the roar. damage done with bite and/or bludgeon damage due to being rammed. not overpowered but quite fun. :P
Essentially final fantasy's Alexander aka. A chronomancer mecha fortress. The party fought a mecha inside a mecha and there was a whole lot of time based mechanics and lasers and it was glorious.
Top 3. Twisted Wendigo. A Wendigo mimicry created by and eldritch being. 4 attacks, 3 legendary actions with multiple possibilities including a high damage charge, a cage of crushing vines, gaius, regeneration, and fearing the part. 3 legendary resistances too. Uses all base stats and abilities for a standard Wendigo too, but with 500 hp and 15 Ac. 2. Regenerator: Based very loosy off the Hunters and Ubermorph from the Dead Space Trilogy, it is the accolite of the same Eldritch being. Res to all non-magic, immunity to Necro, Ice, Psy, and Acid. Only weak to Radiant. Gets 2 rounds in initiative too. 3. Eldritch Hounds: These creatures are dog like twisted forms of people that have been felled by another hound. Instead of dying, the unconscious body returns to consciousness as their body is twisted and broken into this form and is manipulated by an Eldritch Being. They have dire wolf stats, but can shoot bone barbs for 2 d6.
The Soulthief. A wereraven, killed by necrotic spells, and transformed into an undead being. Its like a large black raven skeleton without legs or pelvis, but reminding strangely of a humanoid. The arms are 2 meters (7 ft.) long, and have sharp claws. They "walk" similar to how a gorilla would. They have only 6 m (20 ft.) walking speed, but 9 m (30 ft.) climbing speed. They can shimmy from branch to branch, but also burry their claws into the ceiling of a room, and use their climbing speed for that. It has a effect, which only allows a creature to flee from it once it came into 6 m (20 ft.) by making a cha-save. It makes two claw attacks per turn against the next creature it senses a soul from (neither other undead or constucts). With every hit the target has to make a check to not be grappled by the Soulthief. If it does the main ability comes to play. As a bonus action the Soulthief may eat the soul of a grappled target. It makes 3D8 necrotic damage (halfed by a succsessful con-save), lowers the targets max HP, and restores some itself. One a creature drops to zero after getting hit by a Soultheft-attack, the creature is unconcious, even if they get healed. If the Soultheft is not killed in three days, the targets soul gets completly eaten, and the target is dead. If it gets revived, it has lost all its personality, and the character is no more. If the Soultheft dies, the soul returns to the body of the target, and his max HP are normalised instandly. It has nice physical abilitys, but spells that target the mental abilitys will do their job great. For those who care, it's CR 6. Only used him once. It was a tough fight (as it was supposed to be). I made my cleric smile, as I told him, he rolled a -1 as save against bane.
I just recently ran what I was calling a "Draugr," but that name was just set dressing and a hint at how to properly dispose of the thing. My players were all level 1, so I couldn't use an actual Draugr stat block, which is someone's CR8 homebrew iirc. My Draugr was basically a souped up Zombie, with high strength, dex and a bigger armor class. I actually gave him proficiency in Stealth over anything else, because I was taking heavy inspiration from Slasher movie villains when I made him. To kill him for good, you had to burn him down to ash. Otherwise, he'd take a long rest and just get back up again. It took the party a couple tries to figure this out. The end result was a 7 foot tall undead warrior with a rusty axe, who could jump out of the shadows, silent as a cat, and hit really hard. He took to standing just out of the players' line of sight using distance and darkness, picking his battles closely, and you had to deal with him in a very specific way or he'd come back next session for a sequel. Hope he was as fun to fight as he was to run, lol
Lilith(spider woman) was supposed to be a throwaway mini boss in my first campaign but ended up Stockholm Syndroming half of the party and scaring the crap out of the others. I ended up using her all the way to the conclusion of the campaign. It was eerie how powerful a strong, ruthless and dominating character can be, and how easily I managed to create a disturbing link between her and the players.
I've got three 1. The emperor of the Darkglass Desert: So for context this is my alternate quest giver npc, he would be an alternative source of quests if they want to do something different. He is an ancient elder blue dragon who is a fallen, magemaster, commander. Each of these being special titles in my world. Fallen is when an entity does something that is the opposite of their patron deity would do, which angers them to the point of cursing them, in this case immortal until dealt a fatal injury. This means he has been around for centuries, if not millennia longer than his species would. Magemaster, this means he has mastery over at least five types of magic, to the point of being able to use them without using spell slots. Commander, this means they can command, order, train, and upkeep upwards of 500 troops at one time. Basically a BBEG in his own way. He was cursed by his mother Tiamat (yes, that Tiamat) with immortality for helping a "lesser species" and has lived since before the campaigns historical conflict. He has spent the millennia training in magic and protecting those in his territory. He doesn't have any quarrels with copper dragons, in fact he has several who live his territory as scouts, since they have a better reputation. The aren't meant to fight him, but if they do... First phase, he calls in Kobald knights (monster number 2) to fight so he can get a read on his "opponents". After two or three waves he moves on to phase two. Phase two: Titan, he attacks physically with claws and his head as a blunt weapon, he is too big to attack with his tail, or he will use a spell slot on a telekinetic spell to attack with weapons in his hoard. After either A. A party member falls B. He takes over 100 damage. Or C. Ten turns have passed. He moves to phase three Phase Three: Arcane Anarchy. If they make it to this point and haven't turned tail and ran, I'm doing my damnedest to kill them, Hence, Magemaster. He is mastered in the four basic elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, second only to a Dracolich in the Necromantic arts, and dabbled in shadow magic. He opens with a breath attack, and prepares a reactionary earth wall. He then proceeds through each of the four elements in attacks, should they survive that he uses a Homebrew combination spell: Smokescreen to submerge the battlefield in oily black smoke, and then uses three more Homebrew spells to booby trap the area. Swampland Summon, for changing it to difficult terrain, Magmabomb, to leave little surprises for them and Absolutezero, to keep them from trying to parkour off the walls. Once the smoke clears, he starts Hell on earth, blasting inverted elements, courtesy of hybridizing shadow magic with the other four elemental magics, while using reactions not to defend, but to raise the dead as a distraction. Hopefully their dead, or they leave because in five turns after raising the dead, he will collapse the cavern on the (remains) of the party. They could kill him, if and only if, they are high enough level... And I'm feeling merciful. 2. Kobold Knights: Standard foot soldiers for dragons or leaders of kobolds that don't follow a dragon. Same stats as an aarakocra, wings included (spells/enchantments are so useful), but with a breath weapon corresponding to their color. Typically have a higher quality weapon like a broadsword or a set of daggers, sometimes enchanted. Capable of any alignment, though more inclined to the morality part of their color, like the dragons the look like. 3. Nature Golems, natural magic causes parts of the landscape or resources to suddenly come to life. Stone: more defensive and physical. Capable of channeling barbarian rage or using fighter techniques Plant: in tune with druidic magics, and regeneration occurs with access to sunlight and water, 1d8 of health a turn. There are others but these are the two common ones. What did you think of my monsters?
The ATC (Arcano-technological construct) It's the bodies of dead warforged outfited with a corelike gem in the chest that allows it to use spells, an arm with a mounted arcane canon and the other replaced with a frost blade. They are brought back to serve the order of Kapash by high level necromancers. High AC, right arm doing slashing and cold damage, the left arm shooting scorching rays and the core gem gives them shield 3/day, counterspell 1/day and a pulse wave that recharges on 5 or 6 every turn. They are resistant to non magical, necrotic and force damage. That's mark I. Mark II also can fly as with flight spell, can cast counterspell 3/day instead of 1 and can switch the type of damage of the scorching ray for cold or lightning as a bonus action. We have a strong story arc around warforged as one of my player is one of them searching for his lost memories and trying to keep his former brothers at arms from falling in the hands of the BBEGs and becoming those desecrated monsters.
New DM here, my first homebrewed monster us something that I am proud of. I took a young brass dragon (5e) and added traits of the barbed devil. This mutant was caused by a mad scientist (gnome) named Madox. The Barbed Dragon went mad and rampaged around the lab. The party WATCHED the gnome inject the dragon as it pleaded in Draconic for them to save him. They were forced to kill him.
I can answer this, me and a few friends when we were first getting into dnd ran an elder scrolls-themed homebrew campaign. We made a skooma guardian because everybody was addicted to skooma.
I helped a dm make a homebrew monster from my character (drow ranger that wanted to tame a wolf for family and honor and stuff, but had a cherished childhood item that was enchanted to ward away wolves). The monster was a giant sentient wolf that communicated through telepathy. It had a lot of strength, dexterity, and constitution, but charisma, intelligence, and wisdom stats that might as well be zero. It attacked the party because it thought my character hated wolves (it was affected by the enchantment, but its int and wis are so low it just doesn’t care that it’s brain says “danger, run!”). When my ranger figured out why they were being attacked, he decided on abandoning the necklace for now. After a couple sessions, the wolf joined the party temporarily, and left after we beat the current BBEG (we had four I think, first was a cult leader, second was a super powered elemental, third was a corrupt king that slew all kinds of things including wolves, which is why the wolf helped us. Fourth was… wait for it… eldritch abomination. No name. We never got one. One of the npcs that summoned it asked for its name, heard it, and exploded.). Long story short, I helped make beeg wolf for my backstory with dm, it ended up helping kill a bbeg. Stats for those interested: Strength: 16 Dexterity: 15 Constitution: 15 Charisma: 3 Intelligence: 2 Wisdom: 2 Special thing: Moon’s Call If the beeg wolf is in a forest biome or is where wolves presumably live and uses this ability, roll a d6. Roll a d4 an amount of times equal to the number rolled of the d6. An amount of lvl 1-4 wolves equal to the number rolled will then appear from the forest as allies. Once the battle is over, these wolves will retreat back into the woods.
Idk if this counts but my favorite monster design is my BBEG. He was a spider on the bottom half, a human torso, and goat head with spider eyes. His skin was infested with egg sacs of tiny spiders which would swarm my players like a bees nest when they damaged him. He had perfect night vision, but weak to light. My favorite part is how it was defeated and what it accomplished. When one of my players (a barbarian) was just getting back from a nearby river he had used to get the bugs off, he dumbly jumped face first and sword out to try to slice its head off. Nat1. The spider used 4 legs to grab his arms above his head and legs below together so he couldn't move. My other players tried distracting him unsuccessfully. After a failed escape roll and no success in a death roll the spider ripped him in two feeding him to it's spider younglings. My party all seeing this except 1 at the river were shocked and had little time to grieve. They realized strength wasn't their main, well strength. They cast bonfire doing much damage, they cast their swords with green flame and cut 3 of its legs. Yet they defeated it with what it had taken . After the river player got back he had little time to grieve. He tried hugging the corpse just to get reswarmed by the small spiders. He started his raise dead ability on his fallen comrade. He only brought him partially back without his legs and low intelligence. But I let him be controlled by his old player for the time being only remembering who killed him. Then the players lit the barbarian with chemicals made to explode and helped him crawl close. They fought back confusing the main spider with dancing lights and stabbing it with their blades. Once the barb was close enough they ran away and cast fire ball on the barb blowing him and the spider to smithereens. Easily my favorite death of a player and creature.
Have you ever played Undertale? If so, you know of a certain psychopathic plant known as Flowey. None of the players in my campaign had ever heard of Undertale, so this worked out really nicely. While crossing through a mountain range, they all rolled Dexterity saving throws, and the two with the lowest saving throws were pulled in by mysteriously growing vines (which was a kind of homebrew rule that I had to make sure that they didn't completely miss important plot points because they were too talented.) The ones who fell in fell on a soft bed of flowers, significantly lowering their fall damage. The others climbed down after them. There, they met the seemingly adorable and friendly Flowey, who promptly tried to murder them. He was killed, but little did the party know, it was far from over. Flash forward about a year. The party has had a few other scrapes with him at this point, only to discover that my homebrew Flowey was not a single organism, but a large hivemind spreading throughout the underdark to spread his special brand of chaos. While exploring the underdark, the party came across a beholder that had been skewered with vines, and appeared to be dead. It was not long before the beholder opened its eyes, and began cackling maniacally as all of it's eyestocks grew petals around the eyes and began shooting eye beams at the party. It was wacky and terrifying and my players began genuinely questioning my sanity after the monstrosity I created
High on my list is the Lernean Hydra Tarrasque using 2e AD&D. All the Tarrasque's unique abilities plus it had means of dealing with flying PCs (unlike 5e), plus the abilities of a Lernean Hydra. Can't be killed by damage to the body unless it would be enough to kill it outright, and every 1/8 of its HP worth of damage it takes is assumed to sever a head unless only blunt weapons are used and even then it's pretty likely a case could be made if enough damage is dealt at once. Super high regeneration and every turn it regrows two heads for every one cut off, to a maximum of 12 (healing in the process even without regeneration), unless the stump is cauterized with fire or acid (to which the Tarrasque is immune). One additional attack per head plus the Tarrasque's abilities concerning bites (guaranteed to sever limbs and likely to sever heads on top of dealing massive damage and hitting the best achievable AC including with magic on a -5, meaning it cannot miss unless you somehow managed to impose a -7 penalty on it. Even then it would hit on a 2+). Slapped the rules for legendary creatures on it, gave it additional hit dice, breath weapons (of which it can use one per head) and wings. It is by far one of my favorite homebrew monsters to throw at epic-level PC's who think they're immortal. Considered making it a boss for the already stupidly difficult Tomb of Horrors but that dungeon is already ridiculous.
The angler beast . It starts with someone calling for help from a frozen lake , the players venture on to the ice and they see a young girl stood on the fragile ice calling for help As they approach (within 10ft) they notice the girl is in fact dead and has a thin fleshy tenticle attached going into a hole in the ice . Then suddenly the ice cracks open and a giant amphibian creature with long sharp teeth will burst out . I used this for an icy tundra campaign and it was both terrifying and intense . Specially because Upon killing the creature the ice they're on begins to crack and drift apart and the players have to somehow escape the lake
not mine but my dm's he made a creature called the hanged wizard's mark/abomination it was based off or a character called fiddlesticks i think its from league of legends though im not sure anyways it was a scarecrow with a rusty chained lantern that would burn in some circumstances we couldnt figure out the trigger for we thought it was at will so this thing marks somebody for death then torments them in their dreams (happened to my character) i was playing a variant human war cleric and so it starts to speak in voices i have heard and would know until it began to mimic the voice of a party member when she jokingly called him daddy (she was a cat shifter life cleric) she was very short so she played a trick on me at the general store in a small town plagued by disappearances called madren (homebrew setting). so my character Arrol Dawnmoore goes off the forest path after notifying his party he sees lantern fire so we go to investigate, its probably important to mention when he sees lantern light the party was in a fey infested forest but they usually kept away from the paths a sighting wasnt unusual so the party watches him go and then bend down to put out the flame only to find there was no flame. the creature had cast an illusion on a fallen lantern from a ex convoy guard we knew who he was as he was part of the convoy we were on to bring supplies to a city on the coast surrounding a large stone pillar the locals refer to it as the tower of mythren i think (the campaign is on hiatus for a while now) that was attacked by a dragon that could perforn magic which was unheard of in this setting. but anyways back to the creature it was hunting arrol specifically and terrorized his dreams for months to the point he was asking the party artificer to make him a contraption to help him sleep better but nothing could be done he was a heavily religious man who just wanted to sleep he prayed to his goddess until he fell asleep and then the nightmares woke him up all the while the most common sign of this thing's presence was the sound or that rusty lantern creaking in the wind which the dm has a sound for i kept hearing even when we werent playing the game until one day i was at work my lunchroom door creaked as someone came into the room and i screamed because i was immersed in thinking about this campaign and it scared me. also in this campaign is a warlock who hasnt hit a ranged spell yet and we joke that the lore reason is that he needs glasses but just doesnt know it because his vision has always been bad
My favourite that i made was a set of triplets that were direct servants of a homebrew war god, each of them had a speciality, one was physically powerful, one was incredibly agile and the other was a well versed magician, to the players this all seemed fine until round two when a chime of a large bell could be heard and unbeknownst to the players the souls and abilities of the three bodies has swapped, this made coralating attacks together difficult plus they were on an egg timer for every round to keep pressure on leading up to the bbeg right after them, the encounter took down 2 players before they realised using some investigation and perception skills that every chime if the bell not only the souls were swapping around but also a damage immunity was also, so for 1 round 1 huge muscular body could be incredibly fast and immune to projectile weapons and the next it could be casting magic and immune to melee damage. My players were all well versed in their characters and loved this fight, with some mid combat medic checks and a fair bit of work they managed to take them down. Only to watch the three souls wisp away in dark clouds of smoke up to the war god bbeg to then be devoured by him. This is where we ended the session and our group chat had over 600 messages in the following 24 hours devising plans on what the hell to do. I truly loved that session and is still a standard i hold myself to today.
P.S - They did figure out how the mechanic worked in the end and they even got a guy to paint the fight scene and now it hangs proudly behind the DM chair in our gaming room 😁
My favourite monster was the first ever monster I homebrewed, it was basically a giant owl made of books that acted as the guardian of the magical library
1 Kobolds,not so much for the creatures themselves and more because if how hectic you can go with their lairs, I always use improvise actions with this guys. That said, they might not be great if you take away the home field advantage 2 mimics, with a bit of tweaking on their stat sheets… this things can take the form of any structure you can think of. I’ve made whole rooms into mimics, huts, giant doors, hallways. They are hilarious to use even when they might get killed pretty quick… its more about the surprise element with this guys. 3- Elementals, they are walking forces of nature in vaguely humanoid shapes. A fire elemental can turn a whole forest into a field of cinders and ashes, water elementals are walking grapplers (literally) what happens when they take their grappled foes into a bottom of a lake? 4- Any decently intelligent humanoid. Look to the history of humanity for reference to this one.
Strategic/intelligent mimics: Mimics that wouldn't immediately attack players, they'd wait until the players let their guard down. My players stayed a night in a house full of them.
I'm not allowed to homebrew monsters anymore.
Wake up and you find the equivalent of a dozen spawn campers. Ouch.
You are one mean fella.
The Starstone Colossus.
Basically, in my game there was an incredibly rare metal just called Starstone (really creative, I know. It was my first campaign). During the course of the campaign, the wizard of the group lost a limb and it couldn't be reattached since it was dissolved with a disintegrate spell. As such the group heard of this nigh unbreakable metal, as well as rumors of a dwarf smith who was the only one able to not only craft with it but also golem forge it to move or attune to people. Basically, he made golem prosthetics.
The group went to find him and he asked for help to get more Starstone ore. As such the party went down into his personal mine, noting that there were not any enemies to be found. Finally they came to the center chamber, seeing a massive stone that had seemingly fallen centuries ago through the mountain and embedded itself inside. This was the source of Starstone ore, and the party began to approach. The stone began to shift and move, standing upright in a humanoid form with red beady eyes and equally as red streaks of mystic energy running through its form. The stone that fell from the heavens was actually a massive golem/automaton and it had been driven mad. The party had to find a way to harm it, so Shadow of the Colossus style, they started climbing its form to find weakpoints.
Massive fists, falling rocks, and bellowing cries nearly killed a few of the players, but they managed to defeat (not actually killed, just deactivated it basically) the massive stone and metal behemoth and retrieved a large deposit of Starstone from its body.
Needless to say, the wizard earned his arm that day.
This thing sounds really cool. I can picture it in my head, and it looks sick.
You mind if I use this idea in my campaign (slightly altered of course)
@@hivemind2158 I don't mind one bit.
A homemade shield guardian, called a Defender. Gave it a legendary action that it had to roll for recovery every turn, which made it balanced for my low level players (level 5 PC's.) The only reason why I even made a monster like that at such low levels is because one of my players (my younger brother) told me that my encounters were too easy, so I made him choose his words more carefully next time. Knocked 2/4 players unconscious, and made the players rethink their strategies. The defender is coming back, they just don't know it yet *evil laugh*
Wanna traumatize your players look for a cr 8 enemy called huge giant crab, give it a multi attack action to attack twice, in cornered spaces each crab will probably solo a level 8 character with it's burst damage. Like in the story I also commented.
@@mechaslayer6648 I'm not to sure I wanna traumatized anything, but I will be screenshotting this to put into my homebrew. this is genius
What was the legendary action?
First-time DM, here's hoping none of my players see this, because they haven't encountered this enemy yet... But I'm insanely proud of the idea I came up with and can't help but share!
I really liked reading up on Water Weirds, and figured, if a Weird can manipulate water to act as its body, why can't it do the same for other liquids?
I built an entire combat in an alchemist's shop, so there's a variety of different Weirds from different types of potions and poisons, each acting slightly differently depending on the liquid it is made from!
There's even a surprise round at the end where all the various potions intermingle and create one giant Concoction Weird, which will be the first true "boss monster" my party faces...
Can't wait to see how they tackle this :)
Would it be theoretically possible to kidnap a healing potion weird? That could be a fun way to become rich.
@@derpfluidvariant0916 Well seeing as a Weird is bound to the fluid in which it resides, and these are in exceptionally large cauldrons in an alchemist's workshop... The party would have to somehow "capture" a body of water (or, rather, potion in this case) large enough to drown in. Still, theoretically possible and I would absolutely allow it if they found a way!
This sounds awesome! How did it turn out?
@@tannerbarnes7392 As is typical for all things DnD... The group fell victim to scheduling conflicts and the campaign fell apart before I could make them face this combat. But it's in my back pocket for some time in the future ;)
That is so creative!!
Not me but a friend of mine. He made a homebrew species known as drunklings, they are robots that are able to use powerful fire magic, but they have to drink in order to use it. It's a lot of fun.
Sounds a lot like Futurama's robots. They run on alcohol also.
Haven't played DnD but had this idea for awhile
Dinero, a named Troll who lives out in a cave and defends his treasure from adventurers...because he's an honest businessman and is sick of parties barging into his cave thinking they can take stuff without paying for it. Approach him politely and do an honest transaction and you can get some good stuff. Steal anything or attack him, and he'll more than willingly use said good items to kill you. Has the voice of Bert from Sesame Street
Pretty interesting, I recommend highly you play, I get if people are busy and all but it’s so much fun, if you can’t go to a local game shop and ask about adventures league (or if they run dnd nights) then join a discord server!
@@thatboyUPS I'll have to look around
@@TheGraveKnight if you need help with getting into the community and all that my discord is: UPS#0087
That’s such a damn good idea. Great job.
The third session I DM'ed my players had fast tracked through what I had planned and were on the way back with us still having 20 minuets left of the game so I panicked and decided to throw an ogre in the path that they had to take to get back to town. They decided to sneak around it and managed to almost do it when our wizard rolled a 1. Before I could even finish describing the ogre turning around they half panicked started singing. "Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed" then the rouge sang "She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb In the shape of an "L" on her forehead" and before I knew it the whole group was singing the whole song. I counted it as a crit success and the ogre walked away humming the song.
I have a BBEG coming that I haven’t pitted my players against yet. Basically he has an amulet that makes him immune to almost all damage, save for a few random damage types that change at the start of his turn. The gems in the amulet change colors based on what damage type the boss is susceptible to. If all three end up the same color, he turns vulnerable instead. In one encounter, one of the PCs actually got so upset watching him kill an NPC in a cutscene that they tried to eldritch blast him, and when I rolled for the amulet in secret, him taking zero damage scared them and the rest of the party into letting him and his cultists to escape without further trouble.
He can also control flying swords with their own stat blocks, but that part isn’t nearly as cool
So… you’ll roll like for Chaos Bolt to determine his weaknesses?
@@LocalMaple When in doubt, that's how I would do it
@@LocalMaple yep! I have a D12 table and roll 3 of them to determine his weaknesses
Our DM had a few but the one he was really proud of was the Brain Gel. At least that's what we dubbed it. So imagine an Illithid group is transporting an elder brain through a sewer system but is starting to starve. The unusually clean sewer doesn't strike them as odd until the first couple get stuck in something. The others try to save the now dissolving mind flayers only to start getting pulled in as well. The brain tries to communicate with the gelatinous cube basically eating its escorts to no avail. The gel is held back for a little while but finally gets to the brain and tries to envelope it. The two begin a back and forth struggle. One for desperate survival and the other for, well a big meal. After some time the gel and brain kind of fuse into this whole new creature. A gel that can not only think in very complex terms but also has a certain level of psychic power. It uses its new abilities to lure meals while also repelling threats. Sadly we bypassed the fight because we felt we weren't ready. We had planned to come back later but the events of the campaign side tracked us hard. Once it was all done the DM said it was probably a good thing. He wasn't entirely sure if anyone could kill it without losing half of their party first. It might have been overpowered.
The bone ship,
A massive construct of necromantic creation. At a glance, it's simply an erie looking sailing vessel made from flesh and bone. But once it reaches shore, it will crawl on thousands of skeleton legs. Anything in it's way would get trampled.
The players were too low level to attack the vessel directly. They had to climb on board and kill the necromancer controlling it, all before it destroys the port town that the players were staying at.
Dude I really love this.
As a Necromancer in nearly any game that allows me to be one, this makes my dark heart hurt.
Oh, I am stealing this
ooh oh that's sick man.. nice idea
For me it has to be the giant eye of a beholder surgically removed and kept alive in guard of a door to the next room. The room this eye was was a long corridor with prison cells on both sides. The eye had an anti-magic cone that spanned 180 feet. On top of that, there were creatures that had a human shape and could use a poison breath attack. They came from fleshy growths stuck on the wall that was also attached to the giant eye.
Lastly, the giant eye, when first attacked, would blink and use a disintegration ray at point blank range.
Holy sh*t the disintegration ray it so mean and cool! I can imagine the eye blinking and changing color just before blasting some poor adveturer to bits! So awesome!
Not a massive monster considering that my players are already LvL 11, but I recently had two mastiffs that had collars that could cast enlarge on them, essencially turning them into mammoth sized dogs. We had a lot of fun, especially when the invisible bard prestidigitated the nostrils of the two to smell like "obnoscious old lady perfume". Overall I enjoyed using them because they where a nice surprise and they put a dampener on my parties "I cast invisibility" antics.
Luum Lizards. Halfling sized lizards with pack tactics, and a special ability to generate a loud scream. They're common pests in the desert prison city of Tare'Tuk. Things nearly tore our monk limb from limb, but clever castings by one of the bards managed to keep half of them out of the fight until the party could regroup.
only for a Oneshot but my favorite personal creation was Big Jelly G, he was an ochre Jelly with humanoid level intelligence who bounced off of walls to knock people prone in a giant sweeping attack (players could make dex saves to dodge) and as the fight went on he'd use more and more Psudopods to slap folks around with Goo Fu.
"Goo Fu" There is something about this that I love and I'm not sure why
I have a full homebrew campaign in a medieval land called Cadrifel. Pretty much every enemy is homebrew. There are a few that I like more than others. For example: Scorponites. They are a race of scorpion like people that dwell in the emerald desert to the southeast. They once ruled over Cadrifel with an iron fist until all the rival factions united and fought back against them. They are now trying to regain their control over the world. They are just basic soldiers, but with poisonous tail attacks they can use as a bonus action once every three turns. However they have their own weapons called scorponite battle claws that act as a shield and weapon. Scorponites are even cooler when the magic versions are brought in with their burning battle claws. Scorponites are cooler plot wise than combat wise. When it comes to combat, the BBEG/crazy elven priest trying to control the powers of Mesongrath, goddess of destruction, takes the cake. He has all sorts of custom spells that would absolutely tear through anyone who hasn’t leveled up enough. My favorite of his abilities is Sabtralac’s chains, a brutal attack able to restrain multiple adventures, deal multiple types of damage, and put them through a mental phase where they just lose their mind if they fail a wisdom save. Not to mention, this guy also has a giant stone arch above him during the boss fight that just rains down absolute chaos onto the battlefield. The best thing is, is that when he is beaten, mesongrath is weakened to a state of immortality where she joins the party, and also has pretty much the same powers as the BBEG.
I threw a homebrew boss introduction at them. The Harvester is an enemy that takes an object from the bodies of worthy opponents and will brutally kill those that it deems unworthy. They convinced it they could become a worthy opponents convinced it by doing an arm wrestling contest. Player got a 16 and the boss got a 14. I described how she struggled against the havester for 5 minutes before pushing it back a bit. Afterwards the Harvester declared that they could become worthy and left
Harvester has a 24 in strength
Player has a 18 in strength
I have a favorite homebrew but not really monster that I straight up got from a 2018 nerdarchy video - a flesh construct inside a animated armor holding a flying sword that is chained to the armor gauntlet.
This monster is not very strong or impressive, but he is the meta gamer nightmare - when you see a monster suddenly having actions after it already acted in the same turn, experienced players go straight to legendary action, meaning those guys get really worried because this is a monster for lower levels.
When it gets hit, if no one noticed the trick, the damage goes to the armor first, then the golem, when the golem dies, the sword breaks from the armor and they have to kill it lastly. It's funny too that the AC will drop drastically when the armor breaks.
False Hydra. Threw this at my party while investigating a village that had people going missing with no one seemingly knowing that anyone was missing at all. Nice twists and turns that confused them as well as village npc's speaking with subliminal messages during conversations, not to mention the streets being randomly covered in blood while people dont seem to notice a damn thing.
Was wondering if someone would bring up this one. I was in what was advertised as a homebrew DnD campaign inspired by the visual novel series Danganrompa - a Dungeonrompa campaign if you would. After the executions, all PCs and NPCs (besides the mastermind/Monokuma stand-in) had to roll an intelligence save to remember the past events within the killing game. Initially, I thought this was just a form of segmenting the game into chapters. As it turns out, part of the reveal would have been that it was a False Hydra campaign in disguise - the mastermind would feed the deceased's bodies to the monster, causing the rest of the group to forget. There actually were some hints hidden within the environment, but our characters never quite managed to stumble on them. I say "would have" because the campaign ended midway through the "5th chapter" (Danganrompa normally has 5 standard chapters + a 6th where the secrets of the entire game are uncovered). We were very close to the end, so it's sad, but as consolation the DM willingly divulged all of the NPC's secrets and the planned ending.
@@TheStarsTwilight honestly really cool. It's rather creative.
@@derpfluidvariant0916 Thanks but I wasn't I wasn't the DM, just a player. Still glad you liked this mini story though.
The Bee Rex... Half Bee, half TRex, and totally pants shittingly terrifying. I remember it better because the killing blow was dealt by our magic user polymorphing into a giant bobbit worm and suplexing the BeeRex into the ground. It was the most glorious kill I’ve ever seen in game
Beerannosaurus Rex
Two kobolds in a cloak. A spell caster standing on a brute. Seperate initiatives and drastically different ACs. Had the players roll a d4 to see which one was targeted when attacking, the pure confusion and frustration was orgasmic.
11:24 Oh THAT'S where the line "GENTLEMEN BEHOLD!!!!!" is from in "Let's Move" by The Perceptionists.
The hideous hive lord: it’s essentially what would happen if a troll was a host to insect hives, not that different from trolls in terms of abilities/stats,although it’s claw attacks dealt poison damage,and had what i like to call the true troll freak ability,instead of regular regen,it can grow insect parts(example: you chop of an arm grows a spider leg,chop of its head grows a centipede like head),everytime you would hit it with force or bludgeoning damage it would be like pissing of a literal hornets nest,the more force damage you hit it with,the more insects swarm out of it,weak to fire tho
Hah. My favorite homebrewed monster was also called Amalgam. It consisted of the BBEG of the campaign (Jervis Mundalian was his name), and all of his followers and right-hand men, congealed into a gigantic fleshy mass. The mass was considered one creature for some purposes and separate creatures for others. You could cast instant death and single-target spells on it, but the wimpy underlings would take the brunt, and each of them only had about 30 HP. Any healing done to it would essentially revitalize that HP pool, prioritizing the BBEG and his right-hand men, but reviving the pool of mooks as well. In addition to all the right-hand men and the BBEG being able to act on their own turns, the creature was considered an ooze and could move into and over the players' spaces, crushing them under the weight of the mass and hitting them with a constant barrage of clubs, the favored weapon of the mooks. When a certain amount of damage has been done to each part that the powerful individuals controlled, all the mooks were considered to have died, which ultimately severed the powerful NPC from the mass, unable to rejoin and much more easily targeted with single-hit spells. The fight took nearly five hours to complete, with the party slowly gaining ground until ultimately they managed to sever Jervis, and the fighter of the party chased his fleeing as down and slammed her hammer into him, turning him into a smear on the floor and nearby walls. Then they trapped his soul in a gem and buried it deep underground at the bottom of the ocean, because fuck that guy.
I had so many rules and abilities written down for this sucker that the document is about seven pages long, just for this one creature. Really proud of that bit of homebrew. I've done some others that I'm proud of, especially because they're subtler and more thematic instead of just being a pile of HP, but I'm proudest of this because it was the perfect endcap to a three-or-four-year-long campaign.
One of my more favorite Homebrew monster creation is a NPC that I made in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, using one of my players backstory. Spoilers ahead if you haven't read/played the module. I took the stat block for an assassin and edited it to make Gwyn, a high ranked goon in Xanathar's fantasy mafia essentially. He had slightly better Ability Scores, and some skills here and there, but my favorite part was the new bonus action I gave him, especially since it's somewhat of a reference to an older MrRipper vid.
Essentially, Gwyn could use a bonus action to "Make a Distraction" where he could drop 1 of 5 oil filled sacks next to him, or succeed on a DC:15 improvised throwing weapon attack to toss it within 30 ft. Once the bag hit the ground, the bag would burst open to reveal a "Distraction" construct. Gwyn would essentially use a bonus action on his turn to spawn one of these little fuckers, then a bonus action on his subsequent turns to essentially target someone and declare them the target of these flaming child sized, cloth covered, metal skeletons.
Just like in the old video, it had serrated claws that it would try to attack you with, and if a distraction hit you, you had to succeed a DC:15 Dex save, or you would end up taking 2d6 + 3 Fire Damage as the thing just started to climb the creature it was targeting. The best part was it's bonus action though, cause if you failed to get the construct off, you'd have to make a DC: 20 Dex save to shake it loose before it emptied it's acid sack into your face, dealing 5d8 Acid damage and blinding you for 1d4+3 turns minimum, and you'd have to roll a CON save to see if your eyes were still more or less functioning afterwards. It could only empty it's acid bag once, but if it did, you were pretty much screwed.
I was hoping to use him in a final standoff between the PC's as they were just about to enter the vault, but since one of my players was gone from the table for so long, I made it so that he was essentially captured by Gwyn's little group within the Xanathar Guild and was essentially interrogated to see if he knew where the Stone of Golor was. Thankfully, he didn't know, and he was able to get free with time. However, when the Shifter Blood Hunter found out about this, she didn't take to kindly to her friend nearly being beaten to death. Unfortunately for her, trying to stealth against a group of assassins and their mindflayer boss, doesn't go so smoothly. She just BARELY managed to make it out of the minor hideout Gwyn's team was using and basically feral style ran all the way back to the Trollskull Manor to heal and warn the other party members.
Taluk Nightsworn: an enemy NPC with absolutely stupidly high stats. Introduced as a traveler from another world, Taluk is permanently drunk, has three features dedicated to avoiding hits, and regains health and increases damage by 1 point every time he takes a drink. He has two actions per turn, and taking a drink is always his second action. He also had a massive Bluff stat (+21) and had a magic pistol canesword. He was only defeated by using a potion of randomness (d100 potion of my own making) that turned him into a pile of gold coins. Several of my players nearly died trying to defeat him before his shiny death.
The insomnaphage : invisible but susceptible to true sight and advantage on stealth checks. It hunts by preventing rest until it's targets have so many levels of exhaustion that death is imminent. It is physically weak to balance having only 8 hit points. Every night going through a "haunted wood" that would take four days to cross it disturbed the parties sleep by screaming at ear splitting levels and snapping branches to throw into the fire. They finally figured out a trap when everyone had two levels of exhaustion.
I had a truly shitty week since my mom and bro got covid and all the responsibilities transfered to me. That message at the end really moved a fiber. Thank you for be caring
Ooh, that would depend on the setting~! I've done things from unstable (mentally and physically) modded soldiers that mutated depending on the damage dealt (Did that before the game came out that does the same thing), to a stitchwork assassin from D&D that was little more than an animated brain and veins inside a human-shaped bag of armored leather. It was able to move as if boneless, gaining partial haste, could use weapons, or create a cloudkill effect by ejecting compressed gas from all the disgusting liquids within through its stitches, if it didn't just squirt the acidic goo its decaying state produced at you to melt your weapons and armor.
Of course, you couldn't get it with critical hits either, as the brain migrated throughout the body constantly, practically swimming as it used the veins to puppet the limbs. If you destroyed its suit, it'd crumple into a mass of goo and tissue...and then, if you didn't succeed at dodging it for a few turns (as it couldn't survive long without a body once exposed), would attempt to latch onto a person, breaking their bones and turning them into a 1-hp puppet that the players either had to kill, or try and hit the now throbbing brain that could be sticking just about anywhere on their torso...turning the character into a hostage. It could also take over recently slain corpses in this manner, and would drain blood to heal itself in this state.
Of you kill the puppet, it'll try and latch onto someone else if they're in range, or if it thinks the fight's too much, it may actually try and flee with its hostage...which...probably wouldn't be seen again. I know the barbarian (shocking, I know, but he had a load of horrible rolls that night) didn't get to be seen again when it fled back to its creator as fast as their legs could carry it.
Needless to say, the players were forever looking over their back after that, afraid they'd have to deal with it again. Fortunately they never did-it was only there to try (and thankfully fail) an important NPC.
A bear who stole a kayak from a lady and a bucket from Phil Swift
I haven’t DMed many games (like one of a decent length and one quest of an official book), but I had some skeletons in a secret chamber guarding the evil guy (he wasn’t that big) that had new armor and weapons so they higher AC and average damage. And the bad guy was a cleric/warlock skeleton.
My guy is very wholesome, he deserves only the best.
I do everything I can Charlie, all the love!
@@BrianVaughnVA you’re an amazing person!
In short, I brought Sirenhead to Skyrim.
He was under control of a hagraven that had been luring kids to her grotto. The party had been tasked by the family of one of these kids to rescue said kid. In place of Sirens, he had Nordish war horns, and his body was closer to that of a Spriggan crossed with a frost giant (except 2-3 times bigger than the latter). The best part was that he YEETED the warforged Dwemer sphere (who had offed a wyrmling red dragon pretty much by himself at the beginning of the campaign). I've yet to top that encounter.
My favorite monster(s) I've used were skeletons (D&D 5E). (The party, 5 players, all level 3, including Colin) The party had been hired by a rich wannabe adventurer (named Colin) to help lift a curse on his families estate. His family had been attempting to get him to return home be any means, including force. After some years of failed attempts they seemingly gave up, with a few years after this he decided to see if something was wrong. Upon the town he found that no one had been in the estate, for a ghostly thick fog now filled the courtyard.
Upon reaching the town they found that the fog had filled every street and open space. No towns people could be seen or heard as well as no signs of recent activity. The party could only see about five feet in front of them, but they could hear quite footfalls ahead of them, behind them, and to the sides every now and then as they walked through the town. Upon reaching the estate, it was noted that the gate had now been broken off of its frame. The estate was massive, with several large gardens and a two story mansion, with many rooms and chambers. As the party walked down the cobblestone pathway towards the mansion, they came upon the first skeleton holding a shield and a spear, standing motionless. The party knocked it over, smashing it to pieces and continued. Moments later they could hear quite footfalls behind them. They quickly reached the door to the mansion, and finding it unlocked, entered.
Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, as clearing no one had been here for years. The party split up, searching the rooms on the first floor, and encountering other motionless skeletons. They moved some, turned them around, destroyed others, and finding nothing of value met up in the main hall by the front door, and continued up the large staircase to the second floor.
Entering into a large ballroom they closed the door behind them, at which point a few moments later they heard something turning the door handle as they were about to leave into the next room. The door opened slightly, everyone stopped, as one party member walked to the side to take a peak. There he saw a skeleton, with a sword and shield, standing there motionless. This freaked everyone out, and they quickly left into the hallway, coming upon the children's rooms, where Colin found his sister, and one of his brothers, long since dead, now skeletons.
As the party heard noises coming from the the ballroom, they looked to see about seven skeletons, all with various weapons, standing motionless, and in the process of walking across the room towards them. They did what they could moving the bed and other furniture to block the hallway, and heading further down the hall, found the master bedchamber. There, they found Colin's mother, long since dead, as well as some notes detailing a strange disk that had been acquired (Colin's father dealt in buying, selling, and collecting of strange artifacts.) and how strange things had started to happen after the disk was brought home.
As they left the chamber, turned a corner in the hall, they could see coming from a closed door at the end of the hall, a bluish white light coming from under the frame. Upon opening the door they saw Colin's father, sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, holding a stone disk, some nine inches across and about half an inch thick, with blue and white runes glowing across it. His father didn't look up as they entered, but continued muttering to himself, staring at the disk in his hands. The players tried to approach him, but were pushed back by a magic field of some kind. After casting dispel magic, the field vanished, and as his father looked up at his son, tears streaming down his face, he said "I'm sorry" and turned to dust. At this moment a figure appeared a few feet from behind the chair, seemingly out of thin air, a tall skeletal knight, with blue glowing fog flowing from his eyes and mouth. He looked at the party saying "Now you've gone and spoiled my fun. No matter, his usefulness was coming to an end for me.". The party not being one to wait, attacked first, and within a few rounds soon found that the skeletons from the hallway were now coming in, moving freely and joining in the fight. The party managed to take down the knight, but a moment later saw that his, and the other, bones were starting to rattle, as they began to reassemble themselves. One of the players took the disk, failed the wisdom save, and started looking intently at it, with a magic field starting to push everyone around him away. It took a few rounds, but they were able to destroy the disk, at which point all of the skeletons stopped moving, turning to dust, at which point the fog lifted. The party found that the entire town had been killed by the skeletons.
Side note:
I'm a Props DM, I like to try and have items for my players to hold, see, etc, and had replaced all of the lights in the gaming room, hallway, and bathroom with blue and green lights, as well as set up candles and salt rock lamps to add more atmosphere. One of my players also had to bring her five year old kid for this session, and though he was playing his switch in the other room, I got him involved without anyone noticing. Gave him a long black wig, told him to put it on backwards over his face, and when I rang a small bell, for him to stand in the doorway to the room, and after he was noticed, to leave and go back to his game. At the moment I described that the players saw what looked like a little girl walking from one room to another, passing through the door, I rang the bell, and my players kid stood in the doorway, wig on head. One player saw this, freaked out, everyone looked at the kid, then back to me, that's when he left, they all looked back and didn't see anyone there. It was perfect, it freaked some people out, and made others, myself included, laugh really hard.
The "Breadnought". An enormous construct made out of bread. It had been made accidentally by a good aligned, half-cloud-giant-half-blue-dragon female (who was also a nudist) living in the feywild. She baked as a hobby and a built it as a joke and to kill vermin, not expecting it to go rogue...
The cool thing about the Breadnought was it would react differently to different damage types. For example if it took fire dammage it would get "Toasted" witch would raise it's Ac, If it was splased with water it would become soggy and be resistant to blunt dammage or if it took necrotic dammage it would have an aura of ergot and make you go insane if you stood too close to it. It's only true weakness was slashing dammage as it would make it loose strength by slicing it.
Players loved that fight!
I see Monster Hunter armour thumbnail. *I CLICK!*
CLLLLLLLICK!
That Doctor Weird impression was excellent!
Thank you! I love Doctor Weird and Steve.
Turducken. This was the boss fight in a food-themed dungeon. Large-size turkey, claw attacks, slow and ponderous. Players thought it was easy, but when they killed it, it exploded into AoE hot stuffing damage and spawned two medium-size chickens that were faster and harder to hit. Each one also exploded into stuffing and spawned two ducks, which did less damage because ducks don't have very sharp feet, but these ones flew.
Not a monster but I ran a sci-fi campaign where the final boss was a possessed warship designed to level continents with missile fire from orbit. The ship was orbiting a planet and my players had decided to board the ship and fight their way to the reactor and plant explosives on it and detonate it from a safe distance. I was trying to force them to use their warship in battle and even gave them an npc skilled in aerial combat to pilot the ship and control the weapon systems.
I genuinely shed a few tears of happiness at that ending message
I just learned about the roper and how it had spider climb letting it chill out on the ceiling it also blends into the stalagmites with a +5 to stealth making it almost impossible to see it but the best part? Its tendrils have a 50 ft range.
Guys.....opportunity of attack
Mirror hunters:
My party walked into a large room covered in mirrors positioned at odd angles and a locked room at the other side. One of the party walked up to a reflection and noticed the reflection had a key dangling around his neck. He turned back to the party to tell them but the reflection didn't turn away. 2 claw attacks and a crit bite rolling nearly max damage put the fighter in the low teens in round one. And the party spent much of the first couple rounds getting jumped at odd angles by creatures that ducked in and out of mirrors getting to reposition to another reflection it could see as a bonus action. It wasn't until they started breaking mirrors which forcibly ejected the monster inside for the group to beat on did it actually turn in their favor. So far in this campaign I have been getting my encounters beaten way too easy. This was a fun change of pace and I felt incredible having them barely win the fight after 2 of them almost dying.
The hanged man has multiplied.
Haven't run it yet, but I had an idea for a City Guard - themed campaign, with the players being recently trained rookie guards, initially going through their Final Test. Idea is that everyone starts at level 4, with 10 extra hp, proficiencies in all weapons/armor, with boosts being based on their class and/or race to get a +1 if their class or race was proficient in it, or a+2 if both race and class shared said proficiency. (Seriously, such things should have been factored in, like elves and their bows, dwarves and their axes, and some other races with weapon/armor stuff and the fact that martial classes tend to get that stuff too - something like advantage or expertise at any rate.)
General ideas are the following - Save baby from burning building (test), Save kid stuck in a tree (real), save hostages from Cult (test), Save father and son pair who are stranded a little far from the shore (real), and Save city from Big Evil Dragon (Test). It was during the making of the Cult Section NPCs and the like that I made something of a mistake - when adding racial traits, I also added in the stat boosts from their respective races. Given that we're talking about some CR level 2 (like Bandit Captains) and 3 (Like Knights) creatures, a +2 to the right stats could mean better AC, or a better chance to hit, and/or more damage. Still, it might be good fun.
Gotta be Coldlight Walkers.
Not sure if they’re exclusive to Rime of the Frostmaiden, but potential spoilers either way.
I’m a DM, and this is my first campaign.
I had a recent addition to my PCs- a Drow Ranger (who planned to multi class into monk) who had a knack for running in, getting bodied, and usually rolling death saves at least once per combat.
He also had a knack for charging in head first, even without backup.
Well, for a variety of reasons, I had to kick him from the campaign.
I’d had a player leave before, but it was a very well written character with very clear non-main quest related goals, so I said he just left because he had better goals (in so many words).
But this was my first time kicking a player, and a poorly (and overly) written one at that.
I mulled it over a few days, talked to some fellow DMs, and finally made my decision.
The characters were recovering from the previous night’s combat with the goblins. Paladin & Ranger went down, so they had to rest there anyway.
They awake to weird noises outside there tent.
They all exit the tent and saw this strange glowing figure walking towards them.
Ranger sprints forward, attacking with both scimitars, landing both hits and dealing decent damage.
“The creature looks irritated.”
_OhNo.MP3_
Alright, it’s the creature’s turn.
Multiattack and a crit, 4d6 cold damage _per hit_ plus like 4d10 bludgeoning damage _per hit._
“After taking 2 blows and not moving an inch, the thing punches through _ranger_’s chest, lifting him into the air.
It then uses its other arm to cleave him clean in half.
But not a drop of blood touches the ground- instead, shards of ice and snow fall gently to the ground where _ranger_ once stood”
Anyone killed by a cold light walker is instantly frozen and unrevivable for like a week.
Not to mention it dealt like 50+ damage to the 22 HP character.
Then, on the next players turn, I clearly stated, “by the way, that wasn’t a cutscene. It actually dealt enough damage to do that. You’re all in danger” just to make sure they didn’t think they actually hit that hard.
I was GM of a 3.5/pathfinder campaign. They were in an underground labyrinth with witches blocking their way out. Dark creepers all around the area, massive 3 level maze, and sounds of enormous bull like shouts. All while they were level 4 (4 party.) only I had the map and was able to let them know where they were able to go. My friend playing a very persuasive paladin, was able to do a slight sign language like communicating with the dark folk. This, led them to the exit that was next to the big bad. They were 1v4 with what I described as a Minotaur with black flames falling off its body and cold blue eyes with massive horns. It was a massive battle maze battle that sent them back away from the exit, smart maneuvers to break the horns of the Minotaur, jumping out of the way of charge attacks, and few interesting ideas used. Most players noticed I kept mentioning things like “it’s broken horn is now filled with a pure black horn, slices into the body are covered by black incorporeal charcoal, and it’s legs kept sinking into the ground.”
One player asked what was going on and if it was close to death. I just chuckled, “the DEMON-ontaur has not taken damage. You are merely destroying the body.” The party went blank. I honestly wanted it to get here or when one character went unconscious before I helped. The paladin took off his helmet (he wore a full face helmet) and said he was going to make a intimidation check to get it to back off since they were both taking damage or losing parts. He rolled. Nat 20. I rolled, Nat 1.
I described how he took off the helmet and made an echo in the cave so loud the rock sounded like it was shaking. The demon inside the Minotaur, furious at this act, ripped the face of the Minotaur to scream back, but the creatures body was now crippled. The archer, asking if she could shoot two arrows at once with a contingency, rolled and hit both eyes of the creature as it laid falling to the ground… the ground was silent. They had beaten the unbeatable.
TL/DR: low level party fights against a homebrewed demon possessed Minotaur that can’t take damage and intimidates it to death.
Hi! I'm from Ohio, too! My favorite monster I and my husband made (We co-DM) is the Titan Corpse Dragon. Backstory is that a dark god of the void fell, and when he did, the physical aspect of him was crystalized and scattered. The Void Crystal, once reassembled (as much as it could be, players could destroy shards which would nix certain amount of hit points from the final boss) would call out to all the dead in the land. All of it. People. Animals. You name it (except plants of course.) The dead would gather and create a dragon larger than a Red Dragon. One of its legendary actions is Call the Dead which essentially draws more dead to it. Depending on how many dead could get to it before the armies fought them off would determine how many hit points it regained equal to the type of undead it absorbed. However, its other legendary action was "Corpse Breath" in which case it would v*mit up X amount of undead to fight the army but lose the equivalent amount of hit points in the process.
We are still working on it as it will be essentially the precursor to directly fighting the true form of the BBEG, but it's going to be a whopper of a fight, as the armies of the entire continent - if they can unite - will be fighting this thing with our heroes using bonus actions to command the legions.
I created a HB monster a while ago called The Emaciated Amygdala
Things whole deal was psychic damage, area fear, and minor mind control.
However, I figured out pretty quickly that it wasn't super tanky, so I made it spawn copies of itself that could only move.
Essentially at 1/2 HP one of the copies became a permanent 2nd Amygdala, and the reveal has quite possibly cemented my role as the "horror" dm that will make fights harder if he feels you haven't had enough difficulty. Also the creature escaped, so now it's an ever present threat for a lot of my stories to just put it into the game.
As for backstory, it's essentially a scout, and so most of its abilities are about information gathering. TLDR it's a converted bloodborne creature that is on par with a minibus. Had a party of 6 5th level chars fight it and it knocked out two before it escaped. Good times.
Man your Dr. Weird and Steve are on point.👍
My favorite Homebrewed monster I’ve used was the Dancer of the Boreal Valley from Dark Souls 3. The D&D 5e stat block I used was made by DungeonDad on UA-cam. It was really fun to run in combat. My players just about shit themselves when they realized what they were about to fight. To this day it still holds a place in my heart as the best boss fight I’ve run in my time DMing.
PANR has tuned in.
Happy father's day big cat.
Happy fathers day brother!
I once had a DM that had a dullahan knight who was originally a DMPC get overwhelmed and overtaken by a mind flayer. It was a hell of a threat, because the dullahan was incredibly tanky on it's own, but gained a knowledge of additional magic abilities courtesy of the mind flayer. And the only way to stop the dullahan without entirely destroying him was to find his head. It was insane!
My favorite monster is the huge giant crab, my party was hunting and I sorta left some of those crabs in the swamp burrowed with a bit of their backs coming out, just a little piece, and gave them multi attack so now they attack twice, the party was supposed to be 5 players, but 2 didn't make to the session, so I even asked them if they wanted to proceed hunting and they said yes, well I managed to place 3 of those crabs on the swamp.
And my players saw their backs coming out of the mud, and my ranger, murder hobo at the time along with the barbarian and brainless warrior, who were around level 8. The ranger says "I shoot the carapace" (he and his short bow at 6 meters from the crab).
Well he landed the hit but the crab emerged from the mud and let out a cry, that warned the other crabs, what happens next is a brutal encounter with 3 cr8 crabs that have double damage potential.
Party only managed to survive because the bard player arrived late. So I said "oh that's your time to shine the party is almost dying in a single encounter" he was like "oh my gosh is the boss" I just smiled then said, "The bard who was hunting with you guys just before partying ways, hears the battle and finds you having trouble with 'the boss' ".
Long story short 3 players of mine managed to survive a encounter meant for 5 players and a helper npc 'hell hound of the rogue who died from disease(player retired)', until one of the late players arrived and managed to save their asses from crabs that were just trying to defend themselves.
Edit: Funny thing is since most of the crabs were borrowed the party didn't know they were giants, until coming out of the muddy swamp, to this day they are still the most hated enemy, and most brutal encounter my players had, it's kinda of a meme between us. Made my players be traumatized with 3 crabs.
Whenever I say crab they already get shivers coming down their spines.
My last campaign had a running gag where the paladin would just keep smashing through doors whenever I put one in their way. To hell with puzzles and keys, I got 20 strength. In the late stages of the campaign I made a door golem as a miniboss. It wielded a mace made of doorknobs, it had a giant safe on its chest, its head resembled a small tower with a rising gate for a mouth, windows for eyes, and its joints were door hinges.
The stats used a slightly modified Iron Golem as a template, except it had a shield as well: A giant door. One of its attacks was to make the door open and suck one of them into it, leaving them in a demiplane where they would take random elemental damage depending on where they ended up. Another attack was to release a massive cannonball from the safe on its chest. It was stupid as hell but the paladin player loved it.
Put this on the reddit after the fact.
The second campaign I ever ran was with a bunch of college students, and to keep it from being "meet in a tavern simulator", I decided to make them security detail for a bunch of bards, and to make their adversary for the first (and final) arc a siren. Since there wasn't one in the monster manual, I decided to use the merrow/merfolk stat blocks as a template and make one. It ended up being a smash hit for a level 2-ish party of 6 and their level 3 NPC companion.
I basically took a merfolk and gave it spells, sound-based attacks and status-inflicting moves, and also gave it an ability to make people attack each other. The mind control ability was its main weapon, because it got it back 50% of the time. But it also had a secret, my favorite ability I've given to a monster yet.
It was a transformation called Fury of the Storm. I revised it when I made an official Siren stat block years after the campaign ended, but this ability basically stayed the same. It went a little something like this:
When the siren drops below half of its hit point maximum, it transforms. Rage takes over its body and mind, warping its more humanoid form into something more akin to a merrow, with long whiskers, bladed fins, sharper claws and teeth, and glowing red eyes. Its scales become sharper, covering more of its body, and its hair becomes longer and hangs in the air as if it were submerged in water. Water is torn from the air and swirls around its body, acting as magical armor. It gains the following benefits:
The siren's AC becomes 15.
The siren's Dexterity becomes 16, its melee attack modifier becomes +5, and
its melee attacks now deal 8 (2d4 + 3) slashing damage.
The siren's respective movement speeds are doubled.
The siren gains 15 temporary hit points for one minute or until they are depleted.
The group's necromancer ended up killing it with inflict wounds in spectacular fashion, and to this day, it is my favorite monster boss fight I have ever done.
Once I had this humanoid chicken chef guy named Gordon Blew, my players just used a bunch of fire spells and made fired chicken. Then a half giant ate the fried chicken.
My homebrew golems
The 2 main ones being the Mithril and Adamantine
The Mithril were originally mean to be a assassin/ spy to report stuff to my main villains right hand man who made them to take off the “heads” of armys (officers and war heroes) as a way to demoralize the enemy so they would surrender instead of fight as a way to reduce casualties.
And the Adamantine golem which are immune to all energy based attacks and non-magic weapons. Also to fulfill a similar purpose as the Mithril but due to them being so heavy they would just walk through everyone to get to them instead of silently. Which is also demoralizes the enemy. Because only magic weapons could actually hurt it. These golems are so rare that their only 4 ever created existence. The right hand man has the immortality epic boon so he has been around 10,000s of years innovating on the magic items list and inventing other deadly enemy’s.
Also their both above CR 16 though I believe the Adamantine golems are around CR 26 I don’t know currently they are buried very deep in my homebrew monsters which is surrounded by other homebrew things
Cableworms: A Star Wars D20 campaign had a mission in an underground junkyard infested with these things. Cableworms eat iron, most easily found by scraping rust off abandoned machinery. Human or alien blood is an even easier source of iron. Cableworms have a tough metallic segmented shell, can bore through metal (though very slowly) and attack in swarms.
Sprinkles has tuned it!
My favorite is the Withered mind from one of my home brew campaigns.
It was responsible for the disease and aberrations appearing around the country called the wither. It was first created by the original inhabitants of the country long ago who worshipped a Goddess of the flow of nature. The civilisation eventually started expanding their own lives with arcana focus around time which angered their goddess resulting in the them getting cursed. It manifested in a somewhat humanoid form but was taken down by a powerful sorcerer called Moíra(greek for fate) who trapped the curse within himself. The final boss of the campaign is this sorcerer now taken over by the curse. The party took them down with the help of an NPC also called Moíra, who after defeating the withered mind got corrupted himself attacking the party. The sorcerer nail rid of the curse helps the party defeat the new boss by stalling for them and giving them a spell that they must focus on. After a long battle the spell finally worked sending the new boss back in time to torment the first Moíra. Time loop babyyyyy.
4:07 LUL xD
also: angry HONKS, I dig it, and those corn bois ^^
About the Engine of Destruction one - water boils at 212F, so to get it to vaporize/burn things, that temperature would need to be higher, if you’re using Earth physics anyway.
Guardian tank:
(yes it’s the guardian tanks from BOTW)
HP: The combined health pool of the entire party.
St: 19
Dex:10 (when it’s a prototype and can’t move)
18 (when it’s completed)
Con:16
Int:16
Wis:15
Cha:12
Has a 2 hit claw attack (only usable when it’s fully operational)
A laser attack that takes 2 turns to charge but opponents must make a Dex save of 15 or take damage based off of the “Damage Severity by Level chart”
(So Lvl 1-4 characters would take 2d10 damage)
Of course the character won’t need to make a Dex save if they’re behind cover.
Basically in one of my campaign ideas there’s a prototype in A friendly artificer’s basement that will attack any intruder, just in case A rogue decides to split from the party.
I used a Metagross from DnDwiki and re-skinned it to be a Palanquin Spider, which was the first trap the Party encountered. Immediately, after capturing the Barbarian, and skittering off, the party had to fight some more Homebrewed Monsters. During that time, it ran off and hid. When the party entered the fight room, they found a table, a massive barrel, and a large grinder built into the ground. When the Warlock entered to inspect(the rest of the party REFUSED, being absolutely terrified more than likely), it fell down, and attacked the Warlock, knocking her unconscious as a swarm of small, robotic Spiders(a homebrew monster I made specifically for this encounter), crawled up from the grinder. The party couldnt do much in terms of AOE, and the dang thing just about KO'd them. I was really excited to throw such powerful monsters at them, and see them succeed. This entire dungeon was a wonderful creation of mine, and would love to go into more but wont due to already making a massive wall of text.
*I'm not posting my favorite homebrew monsters .*
*I would have to write a small book or video .*
Me too, me too.
Not just a monster, but a full team. For my first campaign as the DM, I homebrewed the full story and based it off the story of Pokémon Sapphire. End of the world due to mass flooding, even had a blue Aboleth that served as a Kyogre+Archie substitute. The main goal of the campaign was to get the Mcguffin “Nerus’ Sapphire” from the aboleths lair in the heart of the Swamp to stop the unending rain that was going to flood the swamp and the surrounding lands and turn it into ocean. So of course, all the major villains/enemies were Pokémon you’d see on a Rain team. I hombrewed Pelipper, Politoad, Scizor, Keldeo, Kingdra, Ferrothorn, And for the penultimate boss, a Sentient Mega Swampert that ran operations above ground. The Scizors were my favorite as they had a glaring weakness to fire but due to the never ending storm in the swamp, they’re only weakness was just some decent damage. I’d love to use them again some day.
My absolute fav was a set of butterflies. Just pretty butterflies? How could they be any fun?
Try pretty *poisonous* butterflies. They were happily swarming on a honey fountain, and when the players came in they landed on them curiously.
Those butterflies nearly became a TPK as the heavy hitter kept failing and falling into the honey.
It got even better as they'd already found the main treasure room (they accidentally ran the loop backwards thanks to finding a hidden door) and had ignored the big chest full of moth balls - stored in the lair's boss's bedroom, in his closet, where he could access it easily.
I couldn't stop laughing as they brute-forced and figured out how to make mothballs on the fly to avoid the butterflies only to find out the secret room on the other side was the laundry for the dungeon. The entire place was some crazy lepidopterist's house. It included a room made of mimics. Not just the enemies, but the doorway, the door, the decorations and the *loot*. Moth and butterfly patterns everywhere.
Best monster ever
One of my favorite encounters from my first campaign. A withered Drauger like giant from another dimension, The King of Winter, wielding a 25ft greatsword and incredibly powerful ice magic. Think Shadow of Colossus size. Sealed away ages ago in a glacier after his life force was dwindled enough to force him into a sleep, he was awoken by miners picking away at the icy prison. After making the miners into a meal his flesh began to regenerate.
My players are still somewhat traumatized from it lol
I use honk honk as a cautionary tale. I ran a small oneshot for a member of my regular party (the most chaotic anti railer).
Honk honk is for all intents and purposes a goose. Except he has level 14 warlock class abilities, with the station set of an elder being.
He's something of a rumour among the rest, I made sure the player I showed him to was fearful of his power via the total SLAUGHTER of a large gang of bandits by the bird
I had created the Tartarus Ooze. It was basically the Venom Symbiote from Spiderman, except effectively undead.
This Ooze would slip into the stomach of a fresh corpse and reanimate the creature with Intelligence intact. It is carnivorous and the Host would have to consume large quantities of meat least the Ooze begins devouring the creature from the inside.
Once the Ooze gains enough mass it can manifest as the 'black suit' with corresponding buffs.
The story had a initial Player Killing event where the downed character (Bard) becoming the Host of the Ooze and choosing to sacrifice their neutral Good alignment to 'tame the monster' when they insulted the only Cleric in the area capable of curing the possession.
Every major boss (notably the Cataclysm Parable) from the Arcadum violet arc were amazing boss fights
Serpentine basilisk with a burrow speed whose gaze attack deals dex damage. I put it in a dungeon with mostly dirt/gravel floors. Its combat style was hit and run. The party was terrified, but it was a fun encounter because nobody likes save or die.
I also developed my own dragons who have 2 elemental types.
It was only semi homebrew- i used some kind of giant monstrous boar, I think from one of the tome of beast books, but I added that it was dripping a black ichor from every orifice, was about twice as large as it should've been, and had far too many eyes and teeth - I'm real big on body horror when things are Real Bad. Basically, it was this boar that had been taken over by something deeply plot relevant that they hadn't learned about yet, so it was this big epic "oh shit what's that" moment
This one time, I had a group and everyone was a fan of Jojo's bizarre adventure. (I never really watched the show, but I know the lore and get the appeal.) So I decided to incorporate Stand-like enemies, basically a physical manifestation of one's personality. How they worked is that the user would have a disc-like crystal with a cool design on it (think Beyblade top layers,) and the user would crush them in their hands to summon a humanoid-like being with certain powers based on the user's personality. (Are they caring for others? They heal. Are they charismatic? They use buffs.) They can be killed like any other monster, but killing it, or the host will kill both of them. They are also able to be convinced to stop fighting since they are a lot more open to reason than humans. If you know the host well enough, you could easily deactivate them. I called them "Seramon" (Seraph and Demon). My BBEG was the one who mainly used them, but some more important characters could use them as well. I eventually ended a session telling them they found Sermon Templates (Blank Seramon Crystals) and told them to create their own disc design and Seramon if it made sense for their character. They absolutely loved this enemy and I later incorporated it into future D&D sessions and my other players loved the homebrew idea as well.
That naming gave me more of an idea of you gotta catch 'em all or they digivolve into champions...
Goose Mobsters
Gooby Mobby
The Hunters of Bera, homebrew group that specializes in hunting magic users. High dex so hard to hit, and a few nasty tricks that go well beyond just anti magic. My players learned that the hard way when one used entangle and managed to catch the hunter. He quickly learned that was a bad idea as, as an action, hunters could steal a concentration based spell used on them, and turn it back on the mages. It was hilarious watching that players face when the entangle suddenly just, disappeared only to reappear restraining him and another player. XD
Frillgadam. A four legged raptor like monster that can release a frill fan from around its neck. This fan can be used to intimidate and shield it’s younglings from other monster. If a creature or caster hits the monster while the frill shield is out, the monster can reaction absorb elements, or reaction bounce it back in a random direction with its tail frill. This only applies to ranged spell attacks/ elemental breath attacks. The frill does expose vulnerabilities when used so the party can play around upclose and ranged
The Royal Treasure Jelly. A slime that is able to disguise itself as a huge pile of gold coins and treasure. It has 300HP but low AC, so while it’s easy to hit, it can distract a party very effectively. If it gets defeated, it always drops a few magic items, since they are the only thing that can survive it’s acid. It’s also full of money. It engulfs foes and hits like a truck with +7 and 3d6 acid. When it gets attacked, the attacker must make a DC15 Dex check or get stuck.
I call it Body-Without-Mind. It's an amorphous, dark purple aberration that unleashes a wave of energy that causes everyone within range to make a saving throw based on their highest ability score, or one of them if there's a tie. If the creature (player) succeeds, the creature merely copies up to 1d4 attributes from the victim and the ability score Body-Without-Mind chose increases to match it, but if it fails, it steals one of the victim's abilities, copies 1d4 - 1 other abilites, and it reduces the victim's best ability score by that number. It then takes a humanoid form, grotesquely amalgamating all of its victims attributes onto itself. It can sometimes also grow additional heads and limbs for multiple attacks and reactions per turn, and can split into seperate bodies, dividing attributes among them.
I've made a living military
Now, let me make it clear I don't mean soldiers that are alive (that's literally the one non living thing) I mean living tanks made from years of magical alterations to a large mammal. But my personal favourite is the BBEG, a giant 6 legged mech made from normal steel and other metals. This thing had 5 long distance cannons (very similar in appearance to the WW2 railway cannons), 2 long- mid range missles, 3 groups of 10 swarm missles and several shooting platforms for the undead. It was controlled by 15 fleshy hulks each with a different job (like moving the legs or opening doors) they all wanted control of the hulks and made for fun but unpredictable combat, one second the players would be charged by the machine another it would be in far enough away so only it was in range
I had made some Medusa variants. They started out as mutations created by The Time Of Troubles in The Forgotten Realms (this was way back in 2nd Edition). They have since began to breed true and have become new species of their own.
1) The Midasa: The Midasa is for all intents and purposes exactly the same as the standard Medusa (hit dice, attacks, saving throws, stats, etc) with one exception. The Midasa's gaze attack doesn't turn its victim to stone . . . it turns him into solid GOLD (the name being a take on King Midas and The Midas Touch). As there is no "Gold To Flesh" spell, there is no known way to change someone back to flesh, short of a "Wish" or "Miracle" spell. Also, should a Midasa turn too many victims into gold, she could devalue gold and throw The Realms' economy into chaos.
2) The Mambadusa: The Mambadusa is virtually identical to her more common cousins in all aspects except one. The snakes she has for hair are the deadly Black Mamba snake. The snakes are six feet long, having a much greater reach than those of a typical Medusa. If bitten, the venom has the same effect as that of a Black Mamba viper. In 2nd Edition it was Save vs Poison or Die Instantly. If you make your saving throw, you fall unconscious and your physical stats (STR, DEX, CON) all drop to 3. You then must make a Save vs Poison every day, each time with a slightly better bonus. Failure = Death, success = living for another day. On the 7th day, if you have made all of your saving throws, you regain consciousness. Your stats are all still at 3, but you can now recover 1 point to each stat for each day of rest after recovering from the venom.
3) The Mirrodusa: The Mirrodusa is identical to her more common cousin in every conceivable way except for one. She is immune to her own gaze attack. Thus using a mirror to reflect her gaze back at her is useless.
4) The Minidusa: The Minidusa is the least powerful of her cousins. Her name has nothing to do with her size, but is in fact a reflection of her lack of offensive powers. The Minidusa has no gaze attack, and her snakes have no venom. She is very rare, as Minidusae are often killed on sight and have little by way of defenses.
I also created a new breed of ogres which I call augres (pronounced the same as "ogres" but they consider themselves to be "The Gold Standard" of ogredom, hence the "AU" at the beginning of their name as that is the symbol for gold on the elemental chart). An ogre-mage from Karatur came to Faerun by accident and stumbled across his more primitive western cousins. He easily conquered the tribe and became their new chieftain. He then started conquering neighboring tribes of not only ogres, but verbeeg as well. He then started enforcing selective cross breeding between the tribes. Verbeed men with ogre women, ogre men with verbeeg women. They would also kidnap humans and force them into their breeding pool. With enough interbreeding between Ogre/Verbeeg hybrids, Human/Verbeeg hybrids, and Human/Ogre hybrids, the ogre-mage was able to eventually breed out the stupidity and clumsiness of his primitive western cousins and create a new breed of ogre that is intelligent, fast, and far more dangerous. He even managed to kidnap a few firbolgs and vodkyn to add to the gene pool. The end result would be quite terrifying to any smaller race if/when they decide to conquer lands outside of their home territory.
That’s awesome
@@gaylordrobinson1199 Glad you liked it. Feel free to use some of these monsters in your own campaigns.
game: Gamma World
monster: Drag Wolf
found in grasslands or plains.
don't remember stats due to it being about 40 years ago. lol
had huge hind legs, small front legs.
tactics: always attacks in pairs. before "attacking", lopes like an idling dragster engine and then lets out a deafening roar upon racing toward it's prey. anything in the area, other than the wolves had to make a save to avoid being stunned by the roar. damage done with bite and/or bludgeon damage due to being rammed. not overpowered but quite fun. :P
Essentially final fantasy's Alexander aka. A chronomancer mecha fortress. The party fought a mecha inside a mecha and there was a whole lot of time based mechanics and lasers and it was glorious.
Top 3.
Twisted Wendigo. A Wendigo mimicry created by and eldritch being. 4 attacks, 3 legendary actions with multiple possibilities including a high damage charge, a cage of crushing vines, gaius, regeneration, and fearing the part. 3 legendary resistances too. Uses all base stats and abilities for a standard Wendigo too, but with 500 hp and 15 Ac.
2. Regenerator: Based very loosy off the Hunters and Ubermorph from the Dead Space Trilogy, it is the accolite of the same Eldritch being. Res to all non-magic, immunity to Necro, Ice, Psy, and Acid. Only weak to Radiant. Gets 2 rounds in initiative too.
3. Eldritch Hounds: These creatures are dog like twisted forms of people that have been felled by another hound. Instead of dying, the unconscious body returns to consciousness as their body is twisted and broken into this form and is manipulated by an Eldritch Being. They have dire wolf stats, but can shoot bone barbs for 2 d6.
Fav monster is Gobblor, the dire turkey lord. Basically a cockatrice with legendary actions and lair actions befitting a Thanksgiving session.
The Soulthief. A wereraven, killed by necrotic spells, and transformed into an undead being. Its like a large black raven skeleton without legs or pelvis, but reminding strangely of a humanoid. The arms are 2 meters (7 ft.) long, and have sharp claws. They "walk" similar to how a gorilla would. They have only 6 m (20 ft.) walking speed, but 9 m (30 ft.) climbing speed. They can shimmy from branch to branch, but also burry their claws into the ceiling of a room, and use their climbing speed for that. It has a effect, which only allows a creature to flee from it once it came into 6 m (20 ft.) by making a cha-save. It makes two claw attacks per turn against the next creature it senses a soul from (neither other undead or constucts). With every hit the target has to make a check to not be grappled by the Soulthief. If it does the main ability comes to play. As a bonus action the Soulthief may eat the soul of a grappled target. It makes 3D8 necrotic damage (halfed by a succsessful con-save), lowers the targets max HP, and restores some itself. One a creature drops to zero after getting hit by a Soultheft-attack, the creature is unconcious, even if they get healed. If the Soultheft is not killed in three days, the targets soul gets completly eaten, and the target is dead. If it gets revived, it has lost all its personality, and the character is no more. If the Soultheft dies, the soul returns to the body of the target, and his max HP are normalised instandly.
It has nice physical abilitys, but spells that target the mental abilitys will do their job great. For those who care, it's CR 6.
Only used him once. It was a tough fight (as it was supposed to be). I made my cleric smile, as I told him, he rolled a -1 as save against bane.
I just recently ran what I was calling a "Draugr," but that name was just set dressing and a hint at how to properly dispose of the thing. My players were all level 1, so I couldn't use an actual Draugr stat block, which is someone's CR8 homebrew iirc.
My Draugr was basically a souped up Zombie, with high strength, dex and a bigger armor class. I actually gave him proficiency in Stealth over anything else, because I was taking heavy inspiration from Slasher movie villains when I made him.
To kill him for good, you had to burn him down to ash. Otherwise, he'd take a long rest and just get back up again. It took the party a couple tries to figure this out.
The end result was a 7 foot tall undead warrior with a rusty axe, who could jump out of the shadows, silent as a cat, and hit really hard. He took to standing just out of the players' line of sight using distance and darkness, picking his battles closely, and you had to deal with him in a very specific way or he'd come back next session for a sequel.
Hope he was as fun to fight as he was to run, lol
Lilith(spider woman) was supposed to be a throwaway mini boss in my first campaign but ended up Stockholm Syndroming half of the party and scaring the crap out of the others. I ended up using her all the way to the conclusion of the campaign. It was eerie how powerful a strong, ruthless and dominating character can be, and how easily I managed to create a disturbing link between her and the players.
I've got three
1. The emperor of the Darkglass Desert: So for context this is my alternate quest giver npc, he would be an alternative source of quests if they want to do something different. He is an ancient elder blue dragon who is a fallen, magemaster, commander. Each of these being special titles in my world. Fallen is when an entity does something that is the opposite of their patron deity would do, which angers them to the point of cursing them, in this case immortal until dealt a fatal injury. This means he has been around for centuries, if not millennia longer than his species would. Magemaster, this means he has mastery over at least five types of magic, to the point of being able to use them without using spell slots. Commander, this means they can command, order, train, and upkeep upwards of 500 troops at one time. Basically a BBEG in his own way. He was cursed by his mother Tiamat (yes, that Tiamat) with immortality for helping a "lesser species" and has lived since before the campaigns historical conflict. He has spent the millennia training in magic and protecting those in his territory. He doesn't have any quarrels with copper dragons, in fact he has several who live his territory as scouts, since they have a better reputation. The aren't meant to fight him, but if they do...
First phase, he calls in Kobald knights (monster number 2) to fight so he can get a read on his "opponents". After two or three waves he moves on to phase two. Phase two: Titan, he attacks physically with claws and his head as a blunt weapon, he is too big to attack with his tail, or he will use a spell slot on a telekinetic spell to attack with weapons in his hoard. After either
A. A party member falls
B. He takes over 100 damage.
Or C. Ten turns have passed.
He moves to phase three
Phase Three: Arcane Anarchy. If they make it to this point and haven't turned tail and ran, I'm doing my damnedest to kill them, Hence, Magemaster. He is mastered in the four basic elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, second only to a Dracolich in the Necromantic arts, and dabbled in shadow magic. He opens with a breath attack, and prepares a reactionary earth wall. He then proceeds through each of the four elements in attacks, should they survive that he uses a Homebrew combination spell: Smokescreen to submerge the battlefield in oily black smoke, and then uses three more Homebrew spells to booby trap the area. Swampland Summon, for changing it to difficult terrain, Magmabomb, to leave little surprises for them and Absolutezero, to keep them from trying to parkour off the walls. Once the smoke clears, he starts Hell on earth, blasting inverted elements, courtesy of hybridizing shadow magic with the other four elemental magics, while using reactions not to defend, but to raise the dead as a distraction. Hopefully their dead, or they leave because in five turns after raising the dead, he will collapse the cavern on the (remains) of the party. They could kill him, if and only if, they are high enough level... And I'm feeling merciful.
2. Kobold Knights: Standard foot soldiers for dragons or leaders of kobolds that don't follow a dragon. Same stats as an aarakocra, wings included (spells/enchantments are so useful), but with a breath weapon corresponding to their color. Typically have a higher quality weapon like a broadsword or a set of daggers, sometimes enchanted. Capable of any alignment, though more inclined to the morality part of their color, like the dragons the look like.
3. Nature Golems, natural magic causes parts of the landscape or resources to suddenly come to life.
Stone: more defensive and physical. Capable of channeling barbarian rage or using fighter techniques
Plant: in tune with druidic magics, and regeneration occurs with access to sunlight and water, 1d8 of health a turn.
There are others but these are the two common ones.
What did you think of my monsters?
The ATC (Arcano-technological construct)
It's the bodies of dead warforged outfited with a corelike gem in the chest that allows it to use spells, an arm with a mounted arcane canon and the other replaced with a frost blade. They are brought back to serve the order of Kapash by high level necromancers. High AC, right arm doing slashing and cold damage, the left arm shooting scorching rays and the core gem gives them shield 3/day, counterspell 1/day and a pulse wave that recharges on 5 or 6 every turn. They are resistant to non magical, necrotic and force damage. That's mark I.
Mark II also can fly as with flight spell, can cast counterspell 3/day instead of 1 and can switch the type of damage of the scorching ray for cold or lightning as a bonus action.
We have a strong story arc around warforged as one of my player is one of them searching for his lost memories and trying to keep his former brothers at arms from falling in the hands of the BBEGs and becoming those desecrated monsters.
New DM here, my first homebrewed monster us something that I am proud of.
I took a young brass dragon (5e) and added traits of the barbed devil. This mutant was caused by a mad scientist (gnome) named Madox.
The Barbed Dragon went mad and rampaged around the lab. The party WATCHED the gnome inject the dragon as it pleaded in Draconic for them to save him.
They were forced to kill him.
I can answer this, me and a few friends when we were first getting into dnd ran an elder scrolls-themed homebrew campaign.
We made a skooma guardian because everybody was addicted to skooma.
I helped a dm make a homebrew monster from my character (drow ranger that wanted to tame a wolf for family and honor and stuff, but had a cherished childhood item that was enchanted to ward away wolves). The monster was a giant sentient wolf that communicated through telepathy. It had a lot of strength, dexterity, and constitution, but charisma, intelligence, and wisdom stats that might as well be zero. It attacked the party because it thought my character hated wolves (it was affected by the enchantment, but its int and wis are so low it just doesn’t care that it’s brain says “danger, run!”). When my ranger figured out why they were being attacked, he decided on abandoning the necklace for now. After a couple sessions, the wolf joined the party temporarily, and left after we beat the current BBEG (we had four I think, first was a cult leader, second was a super powered elemental, third was a corrupt king that slew all kinds of things including wolves, which is why the wolf helped us. Fourth was… wait for it… eldritch abomination. No name. We never got one. One of the npcs that summoned it asked for its name, heard it, and exploded.).
Long story short, I helped make beeg wolf for my backstory with dm, it ended up helping kill a bbeg.
Stats for those interested:
Strength: 16
Dexterity: 15
Constitution: 15
Charisma: 3
Intelligence: 2
Wisdom: 2
Special thing: Moon’s Call
If the beeg wolf is in a forest biome or is where wolves presumably live and uses this ability, roll a d6. Roll a d4 an amount of times equal to the number rolled of the d6. An amount of lvl 1-4 wolves equal to the number rolled will then appear from the forest as allies. Once the battle is over, these wolves will retreat back into the woods.
Idk if this counts but my favorite monster design is my BBEG. He was a spider on the bottom half, a human torso, and goat head with spider eyes. His skin was infested with egg sacs of tiny spiders which would swarm my players like a bees nest when they damaged him. He had perfect night vision, but weak to light. My favorite part is how it was defeated and what it accomplished. When one of my players (a barbarian) was just getting back from a nearby river he had used to get the bugs off, he dumbly jumped face first and sword out to try to slice its head off. Nat1. The spider used 4 legs to grab his arms above his head and legs below together so he couldn't move. My other players tried distracting him unsuccessfully. After a failed escape roll and no success in a death roll the spider ripped him in two feeding him to it's spider younglings. My party all seeing this except 1 at the river were shocked and had little time to grieve. They realized strength wasn't their main, well strength. They cast bonfire doing much damage, they cast their swords with green flame and cut 3 of its legs. Yet they defeated it with what it had taken . After the river player got back he had little time to grieve. He tried hugging the corpse just to get reswarmed by the small spiders. He started his raise dead ability on his fallen comrade. He only brought him partially back without his legs and low intelligence. But I let him be controlled by his old player for the time being only remembering who killed him. Then the players lit the barbarian with chemicals made to explode and helped him crawl close. They fought back confusing the main spider with dancing lights and stabbing it with their blades. Once the barb was close enough they ran away and cast fire ball on the barb blowing him and the spider to smithereens. Easily my favorite death of a player and creature.
Have you ever played Undertale? If so, you know of a certain psychopathic plant known as Flowey.
None of the players in my campaign had ever heard of Undertale, so this worked out really nicely. While crossing through a mountain range, they all rolled Dexterity saving throws, and the two with the lowest saving throws were pulled in by mysteriously growing vines (which was a kind of homebrew rule that I had to make sure that they didn't completely miss important plot points because they were too talented.)
The ones who fell in fell on a soft bed of flowers, significantly lowering their fall damage. The others climbed down after them. There, they met the seemingly adorable and friendly Flowey, who promptly tried to murder them. He was killed, but little did the party know, it was far from over.
Flash forward about a year. The party has had a few other scrapes with him at this point, only to discover that my homebrew Flowey was not a single organism, but a large hivemind spreading throughout the underdark to spread his special brand of chaos.
While exploring the underdark, the party came across a beholder that had been skewered with vines, and appeared to be dead. It was not long before the beholder opened its eyes, and began cackling maniacally as all of it's eyestocks grew petals around the eyes and began shooting eye beams at the party.
It was wacky and terrifying and my players began genuinely questioning my sanity after the monstrosity I created
High on my list is the Lernean Hydra Tarrasque using 2e AD&D. All the Tarrasque's unique abilities plus it had means of dealing with flying PCs (unlike 5e), plus the abilities of a Lernean Hydra. Can't be killed by damage to the body unless it would be enough to kill it outright, and every 1/8 of its HP worth of damage it takes is assumed to sever a head unless only blunt weapons are used and even then it's pretty likely a case could be made if enough damage is dealt at once. Super high regeneration and every turn it regrows two heads for every one cut off, to a maximum of 12 (healing in the process even without regeneration), unless the stump is cauterized with fire or acid (to which the Tarrasque is immune). One additional attack per head plus the Tarrasque's abilities concerning bites (guaranteed to sever limbs and likely to sever heads on top of dealing massive damage and hitting the best achievable AC including with magic on a -5, meaning it cannot miss unless you somehow managed to impose a -7 penalty on it. Even then it would hit on a 2+). Slapped the rules for legendary creatures on it, gave it additional hit dice, breath weapons (of which it can use one per head) and wings. It is by far one of my favorite homebrew monsters to throw at epic-level PC's who think they're immortal. Considered making it a boss for the already stupidly difficult Tomb of Horrors but that dungeon is already ridiculous.
The angler beast .
It starts with someone calling for help from a frozen lake , the players venture on to the ice and they see a young girl stood on the fragile ice calling for help
As they approach (within 10ft) they notice the girl is in fact dead and has a thin fleshy tenticle attached going into a hole in the ice .
Then suddenly the ice cracks open and a giant amphibian creature with long sharp teeth will burst out .
I used this for an icy tundra campaign and it was both terrifying and intense . Specially because Upon killing the creature the ice they're on begins to crack and drift apart and the players have to somehow escape the lake
not mine but my dm's he made a creature called the hanged wizard's mark/abomination it was based off or a character called fiddlesticks i think its from league of legends though im not sure anyways it was a scarecrow with a rusty chained lantern that would burn in some circumstances we couldnt figure out the trigger for we thought it was at will so this thing marks somebody for death then torments them in their dreams (happened to my character) i was playing a variant human war cleric and so it starts to speak in voices i have heard and would know until it began to mimic the voice of a party member when she jokingly called him daddy (she was a cat shifter life cleric) she was very short so she played a trick on me at the general store in a small town plagued by disappearances called madren (homebrew setting). so my character Arrol Dawnmoore goes off the forest path after notifying his party he sees lantern fire so we go to investigate, its probably important to mention when he sees lantern light the party was in a fey infested forest but they usually kept away from the paths a sighting wasnt unusual so the party watches him go and then bend down to put out the flame only to find there was no flame. the creature had cast an illusion on a fallen lantern from a ex convoy guard we knew who he was as he was part of the convoy we were on to bring supplies to a city on the coast surrounding a large stone pillar the locals refer to it as the tower of mythren i think (the campaign is on hiatus for a while now) that was attacked by a dragon that could perforn magic which was unheard of in this setting. but anyways back to the creature it was hunting arrol specifically and terrorized his dreams for months to the point he was asking the party artificer to make him a contraption to help him sleep better but nothing could be done he was a heavily religious man who just wanted to sleep he prayed to his goddess until he fell asleep and then the nightmares woke him up all the while the most common sign of this thing's presence was the sound or that rusty lantern creaking in the wind which the dm has a sound for i kept hearing even when we werent playing the game until one day i was at work my lunchroom door creaked as someone came into the room and i screamed because i was immersed in thinking about this campaign and it scared me. also in this campaign is a warlock who hasnt hit a ranged spell yet and we joke that the lore reason is that he needs glasses but just doesnt know it because his vision has always been bad
My favourite that i made was a set of triplets that were direct servants of a homebrew war god, each of them had a speciality, one was physically powerful, one was incredibly agile and the other was a well versed magician, to the players this all seemed fine until round two when a chime of a large bell could be heard and unbeknownst to the players the souls and abilities of the three bodies has swapped, this made coralating attacks together difficult plus they were on an egg timer for every round to keep pressure on leading up to the bbeg right after them, the encounter took down 2 players before they realised using some investigation and perception skills that every chime if the bell not only the souls were swapping around but also a damage immunity was also, so for 1 round 1 huge muscular body could be incredibly fast and immune to projectile weapons and the next it could be casting magic and immune to melee damage. My players were all well versed in their characters and loved this fight, with some mid combat medic checks and a fair bit of work they managed to take them down. Only to watch the three souls wisp away in dark clouds of smoke up to the war god bbeg to then be devoured by him. This is where we ended the session and our group chat had over 600 messages in the following 24 hours devising plans on what the hell to do. I truly loved that session and is still a standard i hold myself to today.
P.S - They did figure out how the mechanic worked in the end and they even got a guy to paint the fight scene and now it hangs proudly behind the DM chair in our gaming room 😁
My favourite monster was the first ever monster I homebrewed, it was basically a giant owl made of books that acted as the guardian of the magical library
K, the corn mephits are legit the winner here.
I have a special place in my heart for mephits
1 Kobolds,not so much for the creatures themselves and more because if how hectic you can go with their lairs, I always use improvise actions with this guys. That said, they might not be great if you take away the home field advantage
2 mimics, with a bit of tweaking on their stat sheets… this things can take the form of any structure you can think of. I’ve made whole rooms into mimics, huts, giant doors, hallways. They are hilarious to use even when they might get killed pretty quick… its more about the surprise element with this guys.
3- Elementals, they are walking forces of nature in vaguely humanoid shapes. A fire elemental can turn a whole forest into a field of cinders and ashes, water elementals are walking grapplers (literally) what happens when they take their grappled foes into a bottom of a lake?
4- Any decently intelligent humanoid. Look to the history of humanity for reference to this one.