How to Build a Better Monster!! Encounters & Adventures!!

let blade draw blood from Heart and Hand let Stream Run Red and quench the land under Hill under Stone unto skin and undo bone for hearth for home for rigid Queen for life for Death and All between welcome to macro the RPG art show my name is Kyle and today we are writing an adventure all around a monster we are going to create that monster we are going to create stats for that monster and we're going to write our prep notes for that Adventure get a glass of water to hydrate and sit in your comfiest chair because this is going to take a while I've also added chapter headings to the timeline for this video so if you're looking for something in particular you can scrub through and find it later we're going to use some preview pages from my own project monstrous which is going to be hitting crowdfunding this September and we're going to use the 30-page preview packet from the lazy DM's Forge of foes by teos abedia Scott Fitzgerald gray and Mike Shea monstrous is going to help us build our concept and story and the forge of foes is going to help us actually design the mechanical rules that will govern 5e combat for this monster and we're also going to sprinkle in some mcdm action Orient into design and then we're going to follow some of the steps for prepping an adventure with Mike Shay's Return of the lazy dungeon master I have always said on this channel that different monsters should tell different stories monsters should be more than just a name that goes along with the stat block that they should convey tone and theme and even suggest a progression of events and a pace for the adventure you know like once upon a time there was a happy little village until one day dot dot dot monsters are an interruption of the status quo yes the whole world might be filled with all kinds of different monsters they might be a fact of the world but without integrating them into the story they become ho-hum now I don't expect everyone to do this for every single Monster that shows up in all of their games I don't even expect folks to use this for a quarter of the monsters in their games but most Epic Fantasy adventure games are planned around big monster set piece fights and those deserve a little love and that's why I've been making these building better Monsters videos for the channel and that's why we're making monstrous this book categorizes Monsters by The Narrative themes that you might want to include these monsters to help you tell we offer detailed suggestions and examples but also provide blank worksheets for you to create your own monsters we're going to be looking at some preview pages from our brutes category in this book some examples of brutes are going to be things like Orcs or werewolves the kinds of monsters that will serve as a dangerous Elite threat against low-level parties and fill in the ranks of the enemy for higher level play what we're suggesting as a theme for brutes is that they are these super soldiers that have been created through necromancy or sorcery and have lived their original context think of the urakai Orcs that Saruman digs up underneath his castle in the movie version of Two Towers an ancient fighting force from a war that has passed into Legend sitting waiting to be given orders or worse cursed to carry out those orders into eternity so let's start filling out the brute core abilities worksheet the first blank that we run into is for the blood pact long ago the brutes willingly entered into a blood pact with the pact holder they swore to obey The Pact holders Command 2 and we gotta figure it out the monster that we are designing is this behander Knights it's kind of like a headless horseman that haunts the the highways and Roads and I want to use this monster to say something about the Loyalty of knights to their kings and maybe this guy used to be a loyal Knight of a king that was usurped maybe in life this Knight was known for personally collecting his taxes in full plate armor and now in his Unholy Vengeance he has sworn to collect the hands of those who have been paid with the coinage of the usurper King and maybe this behander Knight was such an ill Omen hanging over the rule of the usurper King that that guy was immediately deposed by someone else and all of the coins bearing his likeness were collected and buried with him in an unmarked Barrow to be forgotten and the behinder Knight without anyone left to hunt disappeared from the world so the blood pact of the behander would be to hunt those who carry the false King's gold phrasing the blood pact in this way really brings out an ancient flavor in lots of myth and lots of tolkien's writings making Oaths is a bad thing it's like guaranteeing that fate is going to give you more than you can bear it's really easy to imagine how to involve the players into the story behind this monster especially in an old school game where treasure seeking players have pilfered this random nameless this Barrow they got a hot tip on and then when they start spending their gold everywhere they spend it gets a visit from the behinder or if you want to take a heroic or investigation angle uh perhaps the behinder just starts showing up and an investigation is conducted by the players to figure out why this behander has returned from stories of old to plague the land again the next blank spaces on our worksheet are what The Pact holder bestows upon the brutes as their new abilities so in this case we're going to say that it has this horrible Bayon goat Steed ahead of severed hands and the command of hounds I always love to give some built-in reason to add additional minions to any kind of fight even if I want my players to be focusing on one monster in particular the next section on our worksheet is the mark of the Damned which is explains why the sorceries that created this brute went awry and it also explains how this monster goes about leaving its mark on the world we have three different options for the origin of the curse and we're going to choose the option that says to create the blood pact The Pact holder channeled an evil power more tainted than was intended some of the tales about Headless Horseman are Fae in nature and I can easily imagine some Fey Patron kind of putting their own little twists on this bargain next we complete the following sentence now marked by the curse the brutes spread its evil upon the world the brutes Mark blank by blank so our brutes are going to Mark those who are carrying the coins of the usurper King by cutting a gash on their forearm and moreover whoever is marked by this behander has three nights full of nightmares of being ridden as a horse across the cindery planes of hell and at the end of the third nightmare the festering wound the gash on the forearm of this victim bursts open and the victim's gangrenous hand crawls out into the night seeming to follow the echoing sound of a hunting horn across the Misty Moors and if the victim doesn't bleed out right there that very night the Searing Phantom pains might drive them mad I don't know exactly how this cursed Knight is going to be able to blow a hunting horn without you know like a face but um I don't know it's creepy I like it who knows maybe I'll change it to the sound of snapping Over The Misty Moors this whole Mark of the Damned effect for the brutes is really designed to foreshadow and Pace out the whole adventure and include sort of like a ticking clock or Clues to follow on this investigation to solve this big problem of the monster many of the abilities that are on these Core worksheets are designed to aim your monster at the world or at NPCs and not necessarily at the player in you know initiative combat we still like to put our spin on combat abilities but we also assume that whatever game you're running has combat abilities that are designed for that game already the next blank to fill in is the profane aversion in their cursed State the brutes cannot abide and we'll say here the homely hearth fire which they avoid at all costs so like Orcs are allergic to the sunlight and and nasgul can't go over running water you know that kind of thing these kinds of rules make these monsters feel more like they are a part of folklore or myth while also offering ways for players and NPCs to buy some time while they figure out how to deal with the situation finally we fill in the last blank under Unleashed Beast Hood in battle the brutes are merciless leaving their victims I'm going to say penniless and haunted and you know in some cases handless we also have some multiple choices for extra combat effects again kind of designed to be targeted towards NPCs and the terrain but they might give you some ideas for combat abilities in your system of choice as well I'm going to go with the third option the attack is shocking scattering common soldiers who flee and spread terrifying tales of the beasts and that's an example of one of the Core worksheets from monstrous Kenny Webb has been doing absolutely incredible on the writing duties for monstrous even writing that alliterative rhyming poem that I read at the beginning of the episode the book is going to be packed with wonderful treats like that as well as all of the useful tools that we are building to help you think through the monsters and stories in your game click the link in the description below to sign up for email alerts for when this campaign goes live soon next we're going to take a look at the lazy DM's Forge of foes and build out the 5e stats that we would need to run the behander in a game this book just recently finished up its crowdfunding campaign but it is still available for pre-order and they have a 30 page preview packet for free on that pre-order page and I'm going to have a link in the description below to that page go there get this book that preview packet by the way that's what we are using in today's episode I'm just going to take a half page of notes to figure out all the mechanical stuff step one in Forge of foes to building a quick monster is to determine the challenge rating I'm going to pick CR2 because I want something in the neighborhood of an orc Champion an orc Captain something like that so I'll just copy down most of the stat modifiers from that orc Champion I'll set the speed at 30 or 60 if the behinder is mounted and at the end I'll go back and make sure that the AC is like 16 for chainmail or something like that now we come to the super useful monster statistics by challenge rating table which is going to tell us almost everything we need to know to run a monster in combat other than all the cool special abilities that will be covered elsewhere in the book now there's a very similar table to this on page 274 of the dungeon Masters Guide but to be frank I trust Taos Scott and Mike and the collective wisdom of the intervening years since the DMG was published more than the original DMG plus 4G foes offers a ton of support that the DMG G just doesn't everybody's got their own way to take monster notes I like to write down the skill proficiency bonus just by itself and then in the moment I can decide if the monster would have that skill or not oh and this proficiency bonus would also be added to whatever stat I am using to attack to get my attack bonus just like monstrous Forge of foes is designed for home Brewers this isn't about making something that you're going to publish and charge people money for so take the notes that make sense to you leave out all the craft that you don't think will come up or you feel like you could wing it if you had to next we'll check that useful chart again to see how many multi-attacks we get and how much damage those would do and then we will add all of those up and we will get our damage per round which is also a column on that chart I always stifle a yawn when I read multi-attack in a stat block but the nice thing is you can use this multi-attack damage or damage per round for any move that you want to it doesn't have to be just like I swing with my sword twice it can be whatever you want because you know what the balanced damage amount is for each of these kinds of attacks I also like to go with flat damage because I would rather be looking at my players than looking at Dice and trying to do math the last little bit of this step is the save DC on any of these special abilities I might decide to you know BS in the moment so if I wanted to spice up a combat and say something like the curse at night turns to you and holds up its free Gauntlet and dozens of rotting hands crawl up from the earth beneath you and clutch at your ankles and try to pull you into the ground itself I can tell you to make a strength save and know what the DC is the preview packet for the forage of foes also comes with a fairly comprehensive list of traits that go along with each kind of monster type so I can quickly jot down a couple of notes on what Undead monsters kind of do in this game and hey I'm also going to add elongating limbs from that ooze trait over there because you know it's got a hand theme going on it seems like it could be a creepy Visual and a memorable battle and you know while I'm at it I'm also going to add some turning Defiance which is from aghast which is also a CR2 monster her nobody tell the cleric and the last thing I'm going to write down for these notes is a couple of companion creatures I had this idea that the behinder had the command of hounds so I'm going to write down you know the wolf and the blink dog and the death dog and you know let's throw in some crawling Claws and I'm gonna put in their CRS and the page number in the monster manual where I can find them I then print out little cards or copy down the stat blocks for these companion creatures on some index cards that I could reference and mix in quickly on the Fly this is a really flexible way to adjust encounters as I go and kind of remix things to keep things from getting stale if they end up fighting this thing once and running away and then fighting it again later when they're leveled up and kind of know the situation better but the forge of foes doesn't just have all the dry stat block stuff it also talks a lot about how to build stories around your monsters or choose monsters that are based on the story you're already telling now I'm fairly confident that I could run a pretty good combat with this behander just with the stats that I've written down from the forge of foes but to seal the deal I am going to employ the action-oriented monster design from Matt colville's video link in the description just in case you haven't seen it yet Matt suggests augmenting normal 5e monster design with the inclusion of an extra bonus action an extra reaction and three villain actions this helps to make the combat more memorable flavorful and challenging without leaning on things that are just going to extend combat like increasing the monster's hit points or Armor class I'm going to start with a villain action each villain action is tied to the first second or third round of the combat I'm going to start with my turn one villain action and have all of these hands grow out of the ground and try to hold people in place it's a really cool visual the dogs will already be involved in the combat and I think it's going to really raise the stakes but also you can avoid it can completely with the strength save and maybe it only lasts one round the next idea I have is for my Turn 2 villain action which is going to be a misty charge the behinder is going to disappear in a cloud of mist and then reappear somewhere else on the battlefield charging towards one or more of the characters and using his multi-attack as he rides past them for one of the bonus actions I'm going to say that he can cause some minuscule amount of necrotic damage on his turn to anyone who has taken damage from him or any of his hounds and I'm going to give him another bonus action that allows him to heat coinage to be red hot it'll cause some amount of fire damage to anyone who is carrying any coins at all serving as a stand-in for a kind of ranged attack and I think it would be funny to watch all of my players look down at their character sheets in a place they're not used to looking during combat and it makes me want to make a monster that causes damage based on like unused spell slots or something now by turn three I imagine most of my hunting Hound ads have been obliterated so why not give the behander the power to resurrect them as skeleton dogs as this cursed Specter raises his hunting horn into the Moonlight the skeletons of his hounds crawl out of their rotting skin and for a reaction I'm going to create a move called faithful step which allows him to teleport adjacent to a Target that one of his hounds has successfully wounded with all these teleporting moves can you tell that I had someone who is a grappling Barbarian in my last 5e game can you tell can you tell now we've come up with all of our stats and combat abilities and actions and now it is time to plan out what this adventure is going to look like the gold standard for prep methods in my opinion is Sly flourishes Return of the lazy dungeon master also by Mike Shea you can probably tell I'm something of a fan of Mike's work Mike has some memorized his steps for prepping a session on his blog and in some videos that I will link to in the description below but really to get all of the information that you can and glean all the wisdom that you can you really ought to get yourself a copy of the book the steps that we're going to focus on are creating a strong start for the session outlining potential scenes that could happen in the session defining the secrets and clues that our characters can discover in their investigation as they peel back the mystery of the monster develop fantastic locations that feel exciting to explore and would serve as an interesting set piece for a big old monster fight outlining important NPCs that we might want to plan a little bit more around and then we'll choose any other relevant monsters that might come into play the first thing that comes to mind for starting a session that is about hunting down and dealing with the behander is to say that our characters are walking on the road at 9 night nearing a road house or an inn that they plan on staying at when suddenly they hear the sounds of combat the baying of a strange goat and The Barking of Mad Dogs when our heroes arrive only the hounds still remain and someone has already been marked by the behander this way we don't have to you know GM Fiat our main bad guy out of the combat and we can have a suspenseful story of like what exactly happened here after the combat has finished the heroes can then help these Travelers make it the rest of the way to the Inn to settle in for the night and lick their wounds or charge into the Moors in the middle of the night in search of the behinder in any case it's very likely that our players will wind up back at that end to recover their hit points and spell slots and that's when they can catch up with this victim and find out more information about this cursed Knight our our next step is to outline some potential scenes now we don't want to spend a lot of time at all planning out these scenes because they may never happen but it gets us to think through some of the things that are likely to happen or that we can try to steer our players towards try to imagine if you were watching a monster of the week episode of this what are the kinds of places they would go to find out more information what's nearby what's in the neighborhood and who can they draw on for help I imagine they're probably going to have to go track down the grave robber that started circulating these coins and causing these problems in the area I think a lot of drama is going to go down at this Roadhouse Inn and we might also want a conversation about the Deep history and backstory of this area and the cursed Knight so let's put a ranger Watchtower within a reasonable distance of the Inn as well our next step is really easy because we've already written most of it by going through and taking notes from months stress about this creature we've created Secrets includes blow my mind and I will never get over thanking Mike for bringing this prep method to me the idea is that you have all of these secret facts about the adventure and about the world and about the characters connections to it and you just make a list of 10 of them for every session and importantly you never write down where they're going to find this information or who they're going to find it out from you just have it there so when characters are investigating a location or talking to an NPC and they look at you like you're supposed to tell them something important you have a big list of important things to tell them I'll write out all 10 secrets on a separate sheet of paper after I've finished all of my scratch notes next is to come up with some fantastic locations to support exploration and our big set piece fights these are the places that our players are really going to remember member and they're going to know they're important because you're going to write down a couple of short evocative descriptions of how it feels to be in this place of the sights and smells we're not writing a bunch of purple prose box texts but we are writing something that we have on hand so we can make these locations feel real it also helps to tie these fantastic locations to some kind of Monument or structure that you can then plan the battle map around if you expect combat to occur here I'm imagining that this behinder Knight operates upon this old crumbling stone bridge that arches over this marshy Cesspool for some of the other locations I'm going to draw upon what I've already put down in The Old Road Zine so opening up to the map of Seoul Cypress Valley I can kind of just pick and choose a couple of these locations on this map to put into my game I really like the image of these will of the Wind circling around these ancient way stones and this Barrow Mound with all of these hands and arms popping out of it and if I'm looking for some more inspiration I can just pick out some rumors of the valley the Wisps devour light and drink breath or maybe the night in the valley suffers not the sound of metal and glass maybe I could even pop some of those rumors into the secrets and clues so I'd have them on hand for NPCs to tell the players about then we will outline some important NPCs the first NPC that pops into mind is the victim the person who gets marked at the beginning of the adventure I'm really gonna pull on the heartstrings of the players with this one so I want it to be someone that they feel compelled to help cure this curse so maybe it's some kind of country Doctor Who is out on house calls or how about a midwife that is returning from Recently helping someone deliver a baby next there is the grave robber the thief that maybe even paid the Midwife and started this whole problem I mean that's pretty bleak the idea that uh you know somebody would Rob an old tomb just to pay for the delivery of their child but I don't know I think that makes it interesting that'll make this situation stand apart and we'll have plenty of other kinds of you know Daring Do in combat in other places in the adventure we don't need to also fight a thief now I generally don't really like to put in a bunch of fantasy races into my RPGs but I really like the idea of a kenku as the as the thief because these bird people can only speak by repeating words that have been said to them recently it would add an interesting layer of social interaction and investigation to figuring out where this tomb is and what happened and how to return the coins to where he got them and all this good stuff in the last NPC I feel like we really need to figure out is the Inn keep of this extraordinarily conveniently placed uh Roadhouse I am going to call him butternut and I'm going to make him the most helpful person who has ever lived while also being charmingly Dopey I'd also probably need to take some notes on this Ranger character but this is a really good start and the last thing we're going to do today in our prep notes is choose appropriate monsters now we've already done a lot of this in making the notes of What kinds of creatures follow the behander around but there's other things that we can draw upon and have on hand when we're running this session because this adventure is taking place on a highway that cuts through some dangerous haunted Moors I think it would be a great idea to prepare a shambling mound a couple of different kinds of ghosts and skeletons and Undead creatures and and you know some giant spiders having these monsters on hand will make it easy to improvise if if our characters Zig when we think they're gonna zag or they run straight into the haunted barrows or you know whatever they do will have some idea of some flavorful thematic creatures to show them here's an example of some notes that I made in preparation for a 5e game last year I put my strong start at the top and most of this sheet is just a bunch of Secrets and clues I've also mixed in the important NPC stuff and the Fantastic location stuff into those secrets and clues as well and because this was an urban sandboxy game I also had a big list of what the Rival factions in the city might be up to just in case it came up any other notes would probably just be labeled directly over the top of whatever Dyson logo maps I decided to use for that session and other than that I would just have my monster stats and I'd be ready to go I only prep until I feel like I have a clear vision of how I think the session is going to go and a couple of different directions that could be taken are also covered in the notes and then I stop prepping and the only thing left to do is run the game and that is basically it we created a brand new monster we gave it some a mechanically appropriate stats and we planned out a a pretty beefy little adventure for it I think a couple of sessions hunting down this behinder night would work really well in a Monster hunting style campaign like if you're playing a game like from The Witcher or something it would work really well there or if you just want to make Overland travel seem more interesting like if they're kind of in between adventuring locations and you want to draw out the travel a little bit more and have a little like spooky episode this would work really well there too thank you so much for watching and I hope you enjoyed me showing you how we're building monstrous to help you plan out exciting flavorful adventurous sessions for your game check out the links in the description below to get notified when the crowdfunding campaign from monstrous goes live and also pick up Forge of foes and return of the lazy dungeon master because those are great books and I can't imagine running these games without them next to me and that is I think all I have to say about preparing an adventure that is based around a monster except you know there are going to be a bunch of skeletons in the Tomb of the usurper King and we did just take a bunch of notes and and finalize our design on what skeletons are going to do in monstrous and I should put one of our mimics in there too hey welcome to the aftercro uh I want to thank all of my patrons who really help support this show and all of my Endeavors it really means a lot to me and it really opens up a lot of options for you know what I can do and I really appreciate it I got a lot of feedback on the previous video on designing dungeons that the longer format as long as the content you know warrants the length is actually a really good fit for this channel so I uh maybe I maybe I went a little overboard maybe I packed a little bit too much into this episode but I had a lot of fun doing it and I kept going back to it and changing and adding things to it because I just wanted this to be the One-Stop shop to have all of my ideas for how to start from uh just a single Monster idea and how to take it all the way to where it needs to be to run a session based off of that that monster and I I really find it rewarding to work on these longer videos and give myself the time I need to collect my thoughts and put time into revisions um it's impossible to run these kinds of videos on a weekly schedule for certain especially once the semester starts but I'm really thinking about uh sort of like a quality over quantity approach to this moving forward we have a lot of thoughts about monster design as I am you know continuing to work on uh this this monstrous project so if you have any questions about that any kind of monsters that you want a video on please let me know in the comments below I'm always on the lookout for topics that people are interested in but in any case I will see you next time and thank you again for watching

Channel: Map Crow

Views: 31,418

Keywords: dungeons and dragons, game master guide, gm tips, dm tips, role playing campaign, dungeons and dragons dm, great gm villain, great gm one shot, dm tips dnd, dm tips combat, dnd game master guide, dm tips matt colville, building better monsters, map crow, lazy dm prep, lazy dungeon master prep, dnd monsters, dnd monster stats, dnd monster stat blocks, dnd 5e, monstrous, ttrpg, ttrpgs, rpg session prep, encounter building dnd

Id: c3k7KET8-ms

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023