11/10/2021

Today, I bring you a monster that I created from a miniature that came with the Massive Darkness board game. This game has some of my favorite PC miniatures and a ton of goblins and orcs, but the model that caught my eye was the Overseer. Once I saw it, I knew that my players had to face it. I painted it up and got it ready for the table.

We were playing the Out of the Abyss adventure module so I knew that something like this would easily fit into the Underdark. (There were Demon Princes roaming around so another aberration would be believable.)

If you find a miniature that sparks your imagination, don’t be afraid of creating something new. There are some nice 5E stat block makers that will do all of the math for you and generate a stat block that looks like the ones out of the Monster Manual.

It is always good to throw something new at your players, especially if they have been playing for a long time or if they are also DMs. After a while, your players will learn the general stats and abilities of common creatures so it is hard to make them uneasy about a fight.

A new creature brings back the sense of facing off again something unknown. Describe the ability in a new way that makes it feel different. The Overseer’s gaze ability was described as it using its telepathy to project its alien thoughts directly into the PC’s mind.

Even if you aren’t comfortable with creating new stat blocks for creatures, just reskin a common creature into something new by using a different miniature or different name for it. Professor Dungeon Master over at Dungeoncraft talks about how he changes up monster names and stats in his Caves of Carnage Playlist. (It is a great channel, you should check it out if you haven’t already).

Another source of new monsters is third-party monster manuals like the Tome of Beasts, Creature Codex, and Tome of Beasts II from Kobold Press. (I have all three of them and they are GREAT for new monsters).

During a session of Out of the Abyss with a different group (I ran several different groups at my local game club, sometimes through the same adventures), I had the party encounter a Crypt Spider (Creature Codex, pg 348) while traveling through the Underdark on their way to Gracklstugh. It isn’t an especially tough creature (CR2), but it has two very unique ‘abilities’ that surprised the PCs.

First, it has the ability to create zombies from humanoid creatures that it has killed with its poison. Second, it has INT 10 and speaks Common and Undercommon. So as the party was fighting zombies in a small cavern, I had the spider web one of the PCs and start to drag them off towards its lair. The player, thinking it was a ‘normal’ giant spider and trying to be funny, has his character yell “Hey, let me go!”. I had the spider stop, turn back to the PC, and say in Common: “I don’t take orders from my food” then continue dragging the PC away from the fight. The PCs were shocked! They now knew that something was different about this spider and the “feel” of the fight changed. If the spider could talk, what else was it capable of doing? Things like this change a standard easily-forgotten encounter into something that I still remember after years.

Keep on gaming!