I have played so much D&D in my short lifetime. I can fairly definitively tell you I have fought against or run every single monster in both 5th edition monster manuals, and am close to working my way through every monster in the extended sourcebooks also. I crave something new, both for variety’s sake and also to give my players something to fear.
The human brain is incredibly adaptable. It’s a big reason we’ve been able to completely take over the planet. Impossibly dangerous, terrifying things take only a bit of practice to become trivial to us big smart humans. An event that when first experienced might be the most traumatic and terror inducing moment of a person’s life can be conquered on autopilot, tolerated with utter nonchalance and then instantaneously forgotten, with enough repeat exposure. There are human beings that run into burning buildings for a living. Human beings who defuse bombs for a living. There are even human beings who work retail.
Scary is only scary when it’s unknown. It’s the reason the monsters in horror movies stop being as creepy when you see them in full light. Why the third act of so many creature features drop the spookiness and descend into full on action flicks. As soon as something is familiar it stops being scary. The world is full of countless horrors, but we only call the things we don’t understand horror. Familiar horrors are inconveniences. Too mundane to be scary.
There is only one real fear that humans have - and that is fear of the unknown. Every other fear, no matter how intense, is ancillary. There is a certain amount of exposure to anything terrifying this world holds that can render it dull. With practice, man and his (or her, or their) mighty brain conquers all.
Seasoned D&D players know this creeping banality all too well. Every adventurer knows that trolls can’t regenerate when they take fire damage, that the element of a chromatic dragon’s breath attack changes with its color, that a Lich can’t be killed until its phylactery has been destroyed. This meta-knowledge goes against what makes a monster hunt a monster hunt. When you’ve played as much as I have the sense of discovery is gone.
Hunting monsters should be an adventure into the dark. A screaming charge, sword drawn, into the hazy periphery of human knowledge. A good combat should have a healthy helping of revelations as to what this thing can really do. Theories should be thrown around, some attacks should work as planned, others should fail. There should be a rush of relief, hope and excitement when the players stumble upon an unexpected weakness, and sheer horror as they discover an unexpected strength.
It is my aim with this project to restore terror, mystery and discovery to D&D 5th edition with a handful of totally unique creatures, illustrated and given stat blocks by yours truly. I will be making as many strange and horrifying monsters as possible (before I get bored) and releasing them all for free here on this page. The goal is to make each as unalike existing D&D monsters as I can, to bring some fear of the unknown back to monster hunting.
In true tabletop fashion, I’ll be using some randomisers as prompts for each monster. I’ll be randomising the challenge rating, creature type, size and environment for each new monsters. Restriction breeds creativity, I know I’ll be forced to come up with better ideas if I’m working within arbitrary parameters. I’m also hoping to get some strange and bizarre combinations of challenge rating (CR), size and creature type that aren’t present in any other D&D monster.
I’d hoped to be able to use dice but unfortunately the numbers are a bit too awkward for that. Instead, I’m using wheeldecide.com an excellent and very dramatic website for generating random outcomes. It appears not to have been updated since the COVID-19 pandemic but I love it all the same.
I want my assortment of monsters to roughly reflect the existing rarity of the different kinds of D&D monsters. To ensure this, I conducted a brief audit of all of the monsters in the 2014 monster manual with the goal of ascertaining the rarity of various demographics of monsters for this edition of D&D. I counted how many monsters there are of each CR, type and size. I tried to do environment as well but started confusing myself and decided it wasn't worth the effort. I counted using the search tags on Kobold Fight Club , an absolutely incredible resource for any DM wanting to search or peruse monsters. Kobold Fight Club is also the reason I only audited the 2014 monster manual. It only has 2014 monster manual monsters, and made this process so easy that I couldn't face manually counting with a physical book. The monster manuals are roughly the same, this is vibes based anyway and shouldn't matter.
Interesting observations I made as a result of my audit are below:
The main application of this quick audit will be weighting the wheel spins to more frequently be landing on CRs, sizes and creature types. The only exception to this will be beasts, since the high number of beasts in the monster manual are because a vast majority of beasts are based on real animals. When you exclude the real animals (or giant forms of real animals) beasts actually have a similar rarity to oozes. Coming up with fake animals, especially strong fake animals, seems hard and kind of annoying and I don’t want to be stating real animals for this project so I’m going to be weighting beasts as comparably rare to oozes.
Creature size weighting will be roughly parabola shaped, with medium being the most likely outcome. I’m also be implementing an advantage/disadvantage system considering the correlation between gargantuan size and high CR. If the creature I’m spinning for has a CR of below 10 I will spin the size wheel twice and take the smaller result. If the creature is above 20 CR, I’ll spin the size wheel twice and take the larger result. This way I don’t end up with too many ridiculous situations where I get a CR0 gargantuan creature or something of the sort. I’m not completely opposed to the creative challenge of having to design my way out of that one, but something that bizarre and out of step with D&D convention (and also logic) needs to be rare.
Although nearly every monster in the manual can be found in multiple environments, I think the best system for environment randomisation is simply spinning the wheel once, and then treating what I land on as the main environment that a given monster can be found in, but not necessarily the only. The secondary environments will be determined by me when I'm making the stat sheet. Rolling more than once to determine these secondary environments is a bit too creatively restricting, especially since there's a lot of intuitive overlap between native environments (i.e. coastal monsters are often also aquatic monsters, grassland monsters are also often forest monsters). Environments will also all be equally weighted because I lowkey could not be bothered counting every single one for every single monster.
I’m neither statistician nor mathemagician but a humble student of the humanities so I’m eyeballing the actual numbers used in the weighting of each wheel spin. There will be as few formulae as possible used at every stage of this process.
I admittedly had a secret secondary motivation for doing the CR weighting: I want to be making a variety of monsters for adventurers of every level. I do not want every third monster to be a CR20+ campaign ending giga boss. Those kinds of monsters take substantially more time and effort to make and very rarely get run due to the nature of how D&D campaigns work. Lower CR monsters are also dual use, they can be fought alone or in small groups by lower level adventurers, or in a horde by higher level adventurers. It is simply more efficient to make more little guys. I am a hyper intellectual utilitarian genius making one billion calculations per second.
Which is funny, because the first monster I made kind of immediately threw this philosophy out the window.