The 5E version of the Battlezoo Bestiary (for which I statted up the 5e monsters) is out now, and you can buy it! The book contains more than 100 balanced, mechanically interesting monsters, plus a cool monster-parts magic item creation system which I worked on as well and which has been a ton of fun in my playtests.

check out this in-depth review of the Battlezoo Bestiary from Knights of Last Call, which is called “Move over Paizo and WOTC, is THIS the best monster book for PF2 and D&D 5e?”. Spoiler: they give the PF2 an A grade, and the 5e version got an A+ and was called “an oasis in the desert” of 5e monster design.

I’m proud of how it came out. Take a look!

So I could have been finishing up the hex crawling app, I could have been fixing Dungeon Robber to work without flash, but instead I became obsessed with an idea that came to me in a dream: writing a land-conquest AI for hexer, my hex-crawl mapping web app, in order to turn it into a strategy web game called Imperium. The mechanics are pretty much as I dreamed them. Pretty solid for a dream actually: on your turn you claim a swath of contiguous same-type hexes, or build a fortifications to solidify hold on a conquered area. (My dream actually had a cool idea I haven’t implemented – yet: around halfway through the game, you unlock the ability to choose a specialization, like forester or mountaineer, which gives you a 2nd action on your turn. You can only use it to conquer areas of the specialized type. Maybe in the 2nd edition.)

The game is a tad imperialist – see if you can spot it! It’s subtle but it’s there But it’s really fun. I was playing it obsessively for a few days.

There is a lot of luck in the map layout – you can get a random map that gives you a big advantage or disadvantage – but to win the campaign mode (claim and hold 4 provinces on different random maps) takes a bit of strategy considering how simple the rules are. Imperium is now one of my top timewasters. Play it!

Now that the feverish work of writing the Monstrous Menagerie is done, I finally set up a new printer for the Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map poster. You can now get it on Etsy (in time for Christmas I THINK). Here’s the store!

Over Thanksgiving I ran a hex crawl D&D game. I needed a map, so I decided to write pen-and-paper tables for generating wilderness hexes. It should be suitable for a pick-up game, so you can explore hexes one by one without having to prep a whole map beforehand – but you have to end up with a map that tells a story: big forests, jagged mountain ranges, rolling plains, and seas instead of a hexy mishmash.

I decided that it would be quicker to write a javascript map to instantly iterate over different ideas rather than roll lots of dice and scribble on lots of pieces of hex paper.

Of course, the project got away from me, and I ended up with a full hex crawling tool with hand-drawn graphics, settlements and roads, monsters and dungeons, autosave and save features, a map editing mode, and a note-taking feature so you can detail your world.

Use Hexer!

I’ve had fun generating lots of little wildernesses (or not so little! With 6-mile hexes, it’s about the area of Wales), and I’ve run two game sessions so far. We’ve leveled up from 3 to 5, battled lots of A5E monsters, and found a little village as a base of operations for future expeditions. Eventually I’ll convert this back from a web app into a set of D&D rules.

Just a quick note, if you missed the kickstarter and want to get LevelUp5e books (including the Monstrous Menagerie!) you can sign up now!

I want to tell you about one of my absolute favorite monsters I put into the Monstrous Menagerie, which is available for two more days as part of the Level Up 5E kickstarter. (Go back it!)

That monster is… the sea serpent.

Kind of a weird favorite monster, right? It’s kind of a fringe D&D monster. As far as I know, it hasn’t appeared in a Monster Manual (unless the first edition giant sea snake counts?). It was mentioned as a homebrew possibility in OD&D, and it’s been in a few adventures and supplements and adventures across the editions, including Fizban’s, but it’s never been a core monster. It’s always puzzled me that the sea serpent, arguably the most well-known oceangoing monster in popular culture, has had so little D&D traction.

This won’t do at all. The sea serpent is an iconic and instantly recognizable threat. Furthermore, ocean encounters are sparse enough in D&D. I’m running a high-level nautical campaign and need all the monster variety I can get beyond dragon turtles and marids. I want every sea captain to be just as wary of sea serpents as they are of storms and sea hags.

Before we start talking about design, we should think about the question: why IS there no core sea serpent in D&D? Is there a design pitfall I’m not seeing?

Well, one problem is that sea serpents aren’t adventurer scale. They threaten ships. In the fantasy sea serpent battles I remember best – Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and even Gary Gygax’s Gord the Rogue series – the serpent is trying to destroy the ship, ignoring the crew for the most part. Any monster that can smash a ship to flinders is just the wrong size to fight PCs, right?

Ehh, maybe. But the 5e kraken and tarrasque beg to differ. In D&D, no monster is too big to fight.

In fact, I see sea monsters’ size and tactics an as an opportunity to make them unique among monsters: they can be useful opponents at any level. While most monsters are threats to characters, sea serpents are primarily threats to ships. Since ship statistics don’t change much between character level 1 and 20, that means that serpents are perennial threats. After all, even first-level characters take ship rides. And in D&D, a shipwreck is the beginning of an an adventure, not its end.

Our usage of sea serpents will change over the course of the PCs’ career:

At low levels, sea serpents are a force of nature, like a storm at sea, that threatens shipwreck on the coast of the Isle of Dread. Low-level characters don’t own ships, and they’re too weak to get the sea serpents’ attenion, so all that’s imperiled is the characters’ mission. Still, even the weakest character can point a ballista or score a critical hit that saves the ship!

At medium levels, sea serpents are still primarily a threat to the PCs’ ship, not to the PCs. It’s a chance for a “safe” battle where the stakes are a setback (shipwreck or ship damage) rather than character death. However, since mid-level characters might own their own ship, these stakes can still feel meaningful. And at this level, victory is possible: while the heroes might not be able to kill the monster singlehandedly, they should have a good chance of driving it off with the help of the crew.

At high levels, the sea serpent is just another monster to be killed, like the dragon turtle or kraken. High-level characters can deal enough damage to get the sea serpent’s attention, so it’s likely to be a battle between the sea serpent and the characters, with the ship an afterthought.

I think this could be a good model for ship-bound combat in general, from the high seas to astral piracy to space and beyond: the monster is tailored to fight the ship at low levels, but its attention can be claimed by the characters at high levels.

Now let’s stat out the beast!

First of all, let’s look at ships in 5e D&D: the strength of a typical ship will determine how much damage a sea serpent needs to do. Ship hit points range from 300 (sailing ship) to 500 hit points (warship). If a sea serpent deals 50 damage to a sailing ship each round, that would mean that the PCs have 6 turns to drive the serpent away in order to save their ship. If they can’t do it by then, it ain’t happening.

Here’s what I imagine a sea serpent doing in a turn:

Over on the Level Up site, I’ve written previews of some of the most complex and high-level monsters in the Monstrous Menagerie: spellcasters (including the lich!) and dragons.

From Spellcasting Monsters in Level Up:

One of our goals with the Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition Monstrous Menagerie was to make enemy spellcasters less of a pain to run. With an updated stat block format, we’ve made it possible to run a complex battle without looking up spells in another book or online resource–-all while working as expected with existing spells and features like counterspell and antimagic field.

From Dragons in Level Up:

The Level Up: Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie has dragons–-lots of dragons. With 85 pages of true dragons (about 90 stat blocks and variants) and 15 more pages of dragon turtles, sea serpents, and so on, we have a full source book’s worth of draconic friends and foes.

Along with the usual chromatic and metallic dragons, we have gem dragons (sapphire, amethyst, and emerald dragons) and a new category of dragons, essence dragons (earth, river, and shadow dragons).

Check out these two blog posts for lots of details and stat blocks! And then head to the Level Up kickstarter, where there are 3 days left. (I really want to get to $750,000, which is the level where I write a jabberwock as a stretch goal!)

Level Up: Advanced 5E, the project I’ve been working on for a year, is now live on Kickstarter! (Funded in 18 minutes!) Go back it immediately!

Let me tell you about my contributions to each of the 3(?!) core books.

The Monstrous Menagerie

The Monstrous Menagerie is closest to my heart. I’m the lead writer and designer on this one. In this book, I’ve worked over every stat block in core D&D (except the dozen Wizards IP monsters: mind flayers, gith, displacer beasts, and so on). This is a straight up upgrade of the Monster Manual. There’s really no reason not to get the Monstrous Menagerie.

As I mentioned, I’m the guy writing the D&D 5E conversion of Roll for Combat’s Battlezoo Bestiary, a monster book in your choice of Pathfinder 2 or D&D 5E. It has four days left of its Kickstarter as of today and it’s already collected more than $200k.

I want to talk about what I’m doing on the book, and share a sample monster, the butcher booth.

The butcher booth is basically a large mimic – but it’s the Sweeney Todd of mimics. It infiltrates market squares and poses as a booth or building. It mimics the sounds and smells of an inviting business, such as the sharpening of barber razors or maybe the smell of delicious meat pies. When people come in to engage in commerce, the demon barbershop seizes them in its jaws and flies away. Truly you’re never safe in the world of D&D, even during a shopping session!

Here’s the original Pathfinder 2 monster. Click to expand

I took the Pathfinder monster and converted it to 5E. Despite PF2 and 5e’s shared lineage, there are quite a few conversion considerations.

The #1 issue is space. Pathfinder 2 is terse and keyword-based, while 5E uses natural language. For instance, it’s easy to give the Pathfinder butcher booth the ability to swallow creatures whole:

Swallow Whole (1 action) (attack) Huge, 3d6+8 bludgeoning, Rupture 23

The Pathfinder GM knows that Swallow Whole is a keyword they can look up to find the half-page of Swallow Whole rules. The rest of the entry fills in details. For instance “Huge” means that the creature can swallow creatures of up to Huge size. “Rupture 23” means that if the monster takes 23 or more piercing or slashing damage, the engulfed creature cuts itself free. And so on. Many of the rules are offloaded onto core book, so the actual swallow attack is about 10 words long in the monster entry.

Compare that to the rules for swallowing a creature in 5E. Here’s the 5E behir’s Swallow:

Swallow. The behir makes one bite attack against a Medium or smaller target it is grappling. If the attack hits, the target is also swallowed, and the grapple ends. While swallowed, the target is blinded and restrained, it has total cover against attacks and other effects outside the behir, and it takes 21 (6d6) acid damage at the start of each of the behir’s turns. A behir can have only one creature swallowed at a time.

If the behir takes 30 damage or more on a single turn from the swallowed creature, the behir must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution saving throw at the end of that turn or regurgitate the creature, which falls prone in a space within 10 feet of the behir. If the behir dies, a swallowed creature is no longer restrained by it and can escape from the corpse by using 15 feet of movement, exiting prone.

This approach means less page flipping but more stat-block real estate used. The behir Swallow attack is more than 150 words compared to PF2 Swallow Whole’s 10 words! A problem since the PF2 Butcher Booth stat block is already quite large. We don’t want the 5E version to be unmanageable in size.

For the 5e butcher booth, I actually removed the swallow action. I thought that I could accomplish a lot of the same thing with a bite attack that grapples and restrains and pulls the target inside the booth. At that point, the butcher booth can keep on chomping every turn, and can even fly away with hapless victims inside. I wrote a special bite action that can affect every creature inside its space, so it gets more dangerous as it imprisons more creatures.

This and similar considerations mean that, as I convert PF2 monsters, I’m making what you could consider a loose translation of the PF2 creature. I’m not in the business of re-implementing Pathfinder inside D&D. Whenever I can, I replace Pathfinderesque rules with something that works well in D&D, which is usually something simpler.

Another example: Pathfinder’s action economy is based on a character or monster having three actions. Every monster ability is listed with an action cost, and the GM can mix and match in different ways each turn. On the other hand, 5E monster action economy (excluding legendary monsters and low-level mooks) is based around the Multiattack action. A D&D monster may have many possible actions, but Multiattack usually specifies the way in which the monster can do the most things. Multiattack is sort of like a monster’s AI: it’s what a monster should probably be doing in combat if the DM doesn’t have a big spell or a rechargeable breath weapon on deck.

When I’m converting from the flexible PF2 action economy to the streamlined 5E one, I get to write the Multiattack, which means I codify the most fun collection of actions. That often means that I mix and match straight-damage attacks with fun, thematic powers that shake up the battle in an interesting way. The Butcher Booth’s multiattack is among the most complex multiattack I’ve written.

Multiattack. The butcher booth can use its Frightful Presence. It then attacks each creature in its space with its jaws, or attacks once with its jaws and uses Create Husk.

This strikes me as a fun attack routine. After a dragon-like Frightful Presence, it can bite everyone in its space (which could be everyone in the adventuring party if they all came in to browse for potions or whatever) or it can make a single bite – maybe pulling an external target inside for later digestion – and raise a previous victim as a zombie. Zombies pouring out of the general store should create some nice havoc in the marketplace, as well as being a rather heavy-handed criticism of capitalism.

The last thing I want to talk about is math. How do you convert a Pathfinder 2 AC of 30, or HP of 270, or a damage expression of 3d10+14, to D&D 5E?

Pathfinder is more mathematically rigorous than 5e and easier to math out. It provides monster creation guidelines that are more accurate than the 5e ones – in fact, without something like 5e’s bounded accuracy, you may break your Pathfinder monster if you venture too far afield from the guidelines. So all I need to do is take a look at the story being told by a Pathfinder monster’s numeric stats and tell the same story in 5e.

For instance: The Pathfinder butcher booth has a somewhat low AC and high HP for a level 12 PF monster. So to come up with 5e stats, I want to fire up my 5e Monster Manual on a Business Card and come up with somewhat low AC and high HP for a CR 12 5E monster. (I landed on AC 15 and HP 217 respectively.)

Here’s the final 5e Butcher Booth. Click to expand

If you want, say 100+ more 5e monsters like this, plus lots more stuff, go back the Kickstarter.

I want to show you the biggest, toughest monster in the Advanced 5E Monstrous Menagerie: the tarrasque.

The original 5E (O5E) tarrasque is – maybe not a pushover – but vulnerable against fairly low-level parties, especially compared to the tarrasque of earlier editions. For instance, since it has no regeneration and no ranged attack, it can be soloed by a level 1 aarakocra cleric with Sacred Flame. Silly exploits aside, I just don’t think it has a chance of standing up to an optimized level 20 party… and if the tarrasque can’t, no one can.

Enter the Monstrous Menagerie tarrasque.

I’m hoping this is the definitive 5e tarrasque.

The MoMe tarrasque is elite, which is a mythic-like class of monster in the MoMe which is as hard to defeat as two monsters of its Challenge Rating – in other words, as tough as two standard O5e tarrasques. According to my much more ambitious encounter calculations (which are also in the Monstrous Menagerie), this is just at the edge of what a level 20 party can accomplish. If you can trivially beat this tarrasque at lower level, I’d like to hear about it!

This tarrasque is designed to be a two-stage fight – where the second stage is optional.

Stage one is fairly similar to fighting the original tarrasque. It’s a bit tougher than the original – for instance, it has a recharge 5-6 Godzilla-like breath weapon that can drop many characters in one hit (though that’s not usually a problem at level 20), and it has an ability that allows it to knock flying creatures in a 300-foot radius out of the sky, including that pesky level 1 aarakocra cleric.

Once you’ve dealt around 600 points of damage – around the same as the O5E tarrasque’s hit points – the tarrasque has had enough. It turns around and retreats. You’ve saved the city and won the day!

Here’s where you can choose to make things harder on yourself. If you try to finish off the tarrasque while it’s wounded, you enter Stage 2 of the battle. And remember, you brought this on yourself.

In stage 2:
-It has another 600 hit points.
-It regenerates 50 points a round.
-That breath weapon that the tarrasque could use instead of its regular attacks, if it rolled a 5-6? It can now do every turn, along with its other attacks.
-It can only be killed by the use of a wish spell while it’s at 0 hit points.

In other words, defeating a tarrasque is still within the realm of possibility for, say, a well-equipped group of 16th level characters. Killing the beast is very much a stretch goal.

Speaking of stretch goals: You can get the Monstrous Menagerie via the A5e Kickstarter! Sign up for it now.