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Monstrous Guide to Monster Roles

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Suggested Price $2.25

Let's be honest, Fourth Edition's legacy is lukewarm at best. There are many things this edition did wrong, but on the other hand it did many things right. One of the things it got right was that it clearly defined the roles or niches that players and monsters filled.

This guide is a way to apply various templates to existing creatures so you can easily create custom variants to fill specific roles. It was originally supposed to only be a few pages, but I decided to throw in examples of each role, as well as variants for certain roles.

What's included?

  • A quick reference chart so you can easily see what ability scores, hit dice, armor class, or speed need to be changed.
  • 10+ fully fleshed out templates ready to apply to any creature. These templates incude any traits, skills, powers, stats, actions or anything else that is needed.
  • Many premade example creatures created by applying the included templates to the Goblin from 5E Monster Manual.
  • Fully credited and color artwork.
  • Printer-friendly version available!
  • Documents are easy to navigate and searchable.
  • A living document. Templates will be tweaked for balancing or simplification purposes. A lot of the included traits and abilities were ripped from other creatures in the MM. Some of these may change over time into specifically tooled abilities.

If you like it, please rate :)

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Reviews (1)
Discussions (4)
Customer avatar
Tyler L August 23, 2020 4:39 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Love the resource look forward to using it to spice up so low cr creatures. Out of curiosity, I'm attempting to publish something on the site also id be happy to know how you got the back of the pages to look like the monster manual.
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Customer avatar
Sean W September 14, 2020 8:06 pm UTC
CREATOR
I used Homebrewery. https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/
Customer avatar
Artyom L May 15, 2019 5:31 am UTC
Great art!
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious here, but can the images be used for commercial projects? That is the ones I'm hoping to make actual money on?
Customer avatar
Roy H November 14, 2017 2:09 pm UTC
PURCHASER
I really enjoy this resource and it provides some excellent ideas on how to vary the monsters. I was curious about the challenge ratings, though. It wasn't very clear how the CR changed for each monster as you adjust their stats. Did you just calculate the new CR by using the Dungeon Master Guide?
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Customer avatar
Sean W November 17, 2017 1:37 pm UTC
CREATOR
To be honest I kind of just fudged them. I found monsters in the DMG with similar stats and damage per turn output and just copied their CR. I am going to be working on updating this to version 2 to make it more streamlined and easier to understand.
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Customer avatar
Roy H November 17, 2017 4:32 pm UTC
PURCHASER
Awesome! Thanks for the feedback! Overall, it's really a fun resource to use!
Customer avatar
Dave P August 24, 2017 8:33 pm UTC
Interesting idea and fairly good execution from the preview. However, without a better more detail description I can't see paying $10 for this. From what I have seen I would say $1-$2 max,
Also, one suggestion. I know the 4e paradigm was that solo (juggernaut) = 5 players, in reality worked better as x4. I would suggest you do the same.
One more thing, the leader is another template of abilities, not really and increase in AC or HP. A leader provided buffs, not necessarily stronger/tougher.
In general good work though.
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Customer avatar
Sean W August 25, 2017 4:36 am UTC
CREATOR
Thank you for the suggestion, I will try to provide a better description. The chart at the beginning is a quick chart simply showing the basic stat changes. The second half of the document (pages 5+) is the meat of it. It's essentially nothing but templates to apply to existing creatures. I've also included sample monsters created by applying the templates to the basic Goblin from the 5e MM.
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Customer avatar
Dave P August 25, 2017 5:07 pm UTC
Thank you for adding the description, very helpful. I think a lot of DMs could use something like this.
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14
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File Last Updated:
August 31, 2017
This title was added to our catalog on August 24, 2017.