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.

The Battlezoo Bestiary is a big D&D Kickstarter that’s going on RIGHT NOW: it’s at $130,000+ as I write this. For $39, you can get a big hardcover of new monsters, in either PF2 or 5e format. And that’s where I come in.

I’m working on the 5e versions of the monsters along with star editor William Fischer. Naturally the Battlezoo monsters will be fully business-card-ified, with meaningful and calibrated CRs, and incorporating the lessons that William and I have learned from working on the Monstrous Menagerie together. The Monstrous Menagerie plus the Battlezoo Bestiary will make a nice set: a leveled-up book of standard monsters plus a book of original, out-there monsters to surprise and delight.

There’s some amazing monsters in here! I can’t wait for you to unleash them on your unsuspecting players.

I haven’t been posting much here, but I’ve been writing D&D every day – and wishing I could share it with you. Soon, you will be able to get ALL the “Paul Writes DND” content you could possibly want.

This is the Kickstarter for enworld publishing’s upcoming 5e reboot, Level Up: Advanced 5e – their biggest project to date. I’ve written and contributed to a ton of pieces of the core book! The treasure tables! The backgrounds! Spellcasting! Rebalanced spells! Rare spells! The rogue class! Stuff to spend money on once you’re high level! New and improved encounter guidelines! We’re really proud of how this project came out: it adds lots of neat things that 5e has been needing.

AND… that’s my name on the cover of the Monstrous Menagerie.

The MoMe’s going to be HUGE – more than 500 pages. A big team of designers worked on the Monstrous Menagerie, including Anthony Alipio, J R Zambrano, Jocelyn Gray, Josh Gentry, Mike Myler, Morrigan Robbins, Peter Coffey, Peter N Martin, Russ Morrissey, Sarah Breyfogle, Sarah Madsen, Shane Stacks, Will Fischer, Will Gawned, and Yvonne Hsiao, along with 80 pages of dragon wrangling by Cassandra Macdonald and Andrew Engelbrite, and spectacular work by editor Will Fischer.

This is the monster book I’ve been wanting to write. I think it’s going to be the best monster book ever.

The MoMe has 95% of the monsters in the Monster Manual (minus some, like the mind flayer, which are WOTC IP) and then adds 250 more monsters, variants, and templates – enough for a second manual. I’ve carefully rebalanced every monster’s math, and I’ve created new, highly playtested encounter guidelines that provide challenges at high level. I’ve created dozens of “elite” monsters – improved legendaries that can, I believe, provide a solo challenge to high-level parties. (They said it couldn’t be done! I think it can! We’ll see when you get your hands on the book!)

And there’s so much adventure fuel in here. You can flip open the book to any entry and generate everything you need for a full encounter – including monster motivations, names, treasure, and future adventure hooks, all with a few dice rolls, without looking anything up.

Here’s an example entry, the mimic:

Sign up to be notified when the kickstarter launches!

I haven’t posted for a while, but rest assured I have been busy on D&D stuff that I think you’ll like.

I’m a lead developer on enworld’s upcoming Level Up RPG, which is a crunchy version of 5e written with the benefit of 7 years with the system, written by a huge cast of talented designers.

and, what’s really been keeping me busy, I’m the lead writer on Level Up’s bestiary, the Monstrous Menagerie.

The core game book and the bestiary are launching next year, and right now I’m knee deep in monsters.

What will the bestiary look like? Imagine a fully-compatible reboot of the Monster Manual with the math fixed a la monster manual on a business card; with added tactical options for monsters; with hundreds of new variant monsters, including a lot more high-level opponents; with an expanded NPC section; and with lots of encounter prompts built into each monster – combat tactics, example monster groups and treasure for parties of different levels, name lists, tables of random behaviors and environments; and new encounter-construction guidelines that are easier to use and provide a more consistent challenge than the official ones. I’m getting my complete wishlist of what I want in a bestiary. And it’ll be released under the SRD, so you’ll be able to play with it and expand it however you want.

A couple of example monsters have been posted over at enworld, including this ancient green dragon.

I’m proud of how it’s coming out and I can’t wait to finish writing it so I can get my hands on a copy and start using it!

With all that monster construction taking up every second of free time, I’m delayed on some new toys that I’ve been meaning to get you. RSN I plan to get you folks the following:

-Within days or weeks: Version 1 of the long-promised Blog of Holding improved treasure tables! (I’m also doing the treasure tables for Level Up, so you can expect equally mathematically rigorous treasure tables in the Level Up core book next year.)

-Within weeks: another distributor of the Dungeon Generator poster! With Inktale gone, I’m looking for another service with high enough print quality to do justice to all those tiny little details.

And finally – I haven’t looked into how to get old flash games working. If someone figures it out, let me know and I’ll post the instructions so we can continue to play Dungeon Robber.

You know that MyHeritage service that creepily animates your photo of your great grandma using AI?

It will happily animate D&D paintings too. Here’s Alias from Clyde Caldwell’s great Curse of the Azure Bonds cover. Have you ever wondered what she would look like if she were looking slightly to the left?

Sure, deepfake technology is a menace will will further devalue truth, empower liars and charlatans, and open the door to unconscionable harassment and invasions of privacy. Let’s use it for its one noble use, eerily animating Dragon Magazine and D&D novel covers, and then delete all the source code. Drop any other AI D&D videos in the comments!

EDIT: How about this suuuper-creepy version of Dragon #136 by Ken Widing.

She looks like she’s just realizing she’s inside a Dragon Magazine cover. Watch her mental journey as she looks for a way out, which she finds in the last terrifying split-second of the video when she notices you. (Warning: everyone who has watched this video all the way through has disappeared 2 weeks later)

(Looking through old Dragon Magazine covers, I’m realizing for the first time that they are 50% ladies with teased hair and 50% gentlemen who are skeletons. God I hope I can deepfake one of the skeletons)

EDIT EDIT: How about everyone’s favorite vampire, Strahd von Zarovich by Ben Oliver.

The deepfake animation gives Strahd a creepy, artificial semblance of life that works insanely well for Strahd. If they ever do a Ravenloft movie, Strahd should be completely deepfaked.*

*except they will have deleted the source code by then