How to Easily create a TTRPG Monster!

Greetings, fellow adventurers and storytellers! What a wild week it’s been with the up and down weather indicative of seasons clashing in their timeless battle, but we trust that you are all safe and getting ready to enjoy the victory of spring later this week. Having been digging through the heavy (and quite dusty) tomes of ancient bestiaries lately, I thought it was fitting to write up a post about the very subject. But rather than a boring and long-winded treatise on how a showdown of the Gelatinous Cube vs Sarlacc would end up, let’s dive into tips for creating your own monsters! I’ve got three simple steps to help you create your monsters the easy way.

Step One – Flesh Out Your Concept

If you’ve been following along with our videos or blog posts for very long, you know that here we are huge fans of taking the time to build in the little details. It’s no different when it comes to something like the monster creation.

Why have boring one-dimensional creatures to battle when you can get caught up in the drama and excitement of something with a life of it’s own?

What role does the monster serve in the campaign? It is a boss? Dungeon fodder? Or maybe you’re creating the avatar of an angry god looking to carry out punishment? If you’re drawing a blank, it’s a good idea to consider putting your own spin on mythological/folklore creatures or you can even draw some inspiration from movies or books.

How does this creature tie into the greater story of the campaign? It’s important that the backstory of this creature and any potential plot hooks mesh well with your already existing story line and side plots.

Step Two – Determine Base Stats

This part of the monster creating process can be one of the most overwhelming and frightening bits. It can feel like you need a doctorate’s degree in Advanced Monster Mayhem Mathematics just to get all the stats balanced for your creature, but that doesn’t need to be the case!

Once you’ve determined the above information (which will also inform the creature type – Beast, Undead, Fey, etc.), you can use the ultimate CHEAT CODE! Flip open the bestiary of your chosen system and find a creature similar to the monster you’ve created. Now, we draw the line at outright plagiarism, but modifying the numbers using an existing monster’s stats as a base to work off of can make the whole process way less frightening and a lot more successful.

The CR (Challenge Rating) is important to pay attention to as it will determine how hard it will be for the party to win against the monster. For something like annoying dungeon fodder, you want a CR that is lower than the party’s. But if you want a brutal boss monster than can potentially take out a chunk of the team, you’ll want to bump up the CR higher than the party’s.

Special abilities can be a really neat way to add a personal touch to your monster as well as add a puzzle aspect to the battle.

For example, I had the opportunity to battle against a brood mother monster whose hide was extra thicc (haha). No matter what we threw at her or stabbed her with, our party just wasn’t getting anywhere until we started paying better attention to the hints provided by the Game Master. It took attacking the pillars in our underground setting to finally crush her before we were victorious.

Step 3 – Planning Rewards and Loot

Instead of going the route that video games usually do, where your reward doesn’t necessarily make contextual sense, try to make the loot and rewards match the quest that they are obtained on.

How many times in a video game have you gone on a side quest like having to hunt down a pack of wild boars and you miraculously find that one rare item you need to move forward in the game? Why would feral pigs have a Master Dagger hanging around, haha? Do they just carry that stuff on their hairy backs?

Instead, think about the context of where and why the party is battling your monster(s). If you’re off battling a pack of dire wolves, why not have the shepherd offer the party a reward when they complete the task for him? Or maybe the party can discover the den of the dire wolves nearby, where the corpse of a fellow adventurer met his end and left behind gear that the party would find useful.

If you’ve been struggling with making monsters for your campaign, we hope that these three tips will be just what you’re looking for. Creating monsters for your campaign can be just as fun as creating the story line, and it definitely makes a difference when it

comes to the sheer fun of the sessions.

We would love to hear about some of the monsters you’ve created or have been thinking about creating! Please share with us in the comments below, or jump on our YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=regMs8cnnWk) and let us know there! As always, you can join in this plus many more conversations when you join our Discord server https://discord.com/invite/g2NBTssuMh.

Thank you for joining us this week, and we’ll see you on the other side of the Spring Equinox!