As you may know by now, we’ve done a lot of work with monsters in Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition. Amongst other things we have:

• Revised the monster math.

• Changed the Challenge Rating calculations.

• Added useful tables for each monster, such as names, signs, behavior, lair features, encounters, and more.

• Created fun new variants for many of the core monsters.

• Included spells as actions in the stat block to save having to look up extra stuff.

• Included useful stats like proficiency bonus and maneuver DC.

That’s not all, though. We also want to provide you with plenty of tools to help you devise your own monsters and create balanced encounters.

Designing Monsters

The Monstrous Menagerie contains an appendix which guides you through the process of designing your own monster. While this will always be a mix of art and science, we have tried to provide as much in the way of hard figures as we can.

Our monster-math guru (no, not the Monster Mash!) is Paul Hughes, who you may know from his Blog of Holding, where he dissects and reconstructs monsters from the core rules. With graphs. Lots of graphs! Paul really knows monster math.

For example, we have a table which tells you the average AC, Hit Points, Proficiency Bonus, Ability Bonus, Damage Per Round, and Easy and Hard save DCs for each Challenge Rating.

Those base scores can be modified up and down, and we provide guidelines on what happens when you do that. For example, if you increase a monsters AC by 3 points and want the CR to remain the same, you can reduce its hit points or damage per round by 5% per point of AC.

Templates

This book includes several templates which can be applied to a wide variety of monsters. For instance, the skeleton template can be applied to any beast, humanoid, giant, or monstrosity, allowing you to create skeleton bears, berserkers, and bulettes, among other horrors. 

Building Encounters

Encounter Building has also received a complete overhaul.

Encounters are built up of a number of elements, including monsters and exploration challenges. Both of these can be mixed freely into one encounter, as each has a Challenge Rating.

We have some basic shortcuts for eyeballing an encounter’s difficulty.

• Is the total Challenge Rating of all the monsters close to half the total party level? If so, the combat encounter will be hard. If the total CR is lower than this, the battle will be easier; as the CR gets higher, the battle gets harder. If the total CR equals or exceeds the total party level, the combat may be impossible to win!

• Are there any monsters with a CR 50% higher than the average character level? If so, the battle may be deadlier than anticipated.

• Are the adventurers level 4 or lower? Keep battles on the easier side, especially against many foes! For low-level adventurers, a few unlucky die rolls can turn a possible battle into an impossible one.

You’ll be familiar with the idea of easy or hard encounters from O5E. We define each of these. For example:

Hard Matchup

• A battle in which the encounter CR approximately equals 1/2 the total party level.

• A fight in which the adventurers must spend significant resources to triumph. Losing is possible but the odds are on the party's side.

• Between long rests, the party can probably face 1 such battle per tier (1 hard fight at 1st level, 4 hard fights at 17th level). 

• For a Tier 1 party, a hard battle can easily prove to be deadly.

But the highlight of this section is a big table which allows you to match the average party level with the encounter CR to find out how tough that battle will be. We also give results for parties of 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6+ adventurers.

The encounter building section also has information on modifying the encounters for low level parties, using elite and legendary monsters, an encounter point budget for the adventuring day at various tiers of play, how to include an exploration challenge in a combat encounter or vice versa.

Not only that, we also have details on how to add various encounter elements such as darkness, lava, underwater, webs, crowds, and many, many more things, and how those things affect the encounter CR. For example:

Poisonous Plants (+1 CR)

Spotting the telltale signs of dangerous vegetation requires a DC 15 Nature check. Poisonous plants can be as sparse as a few shrubs or as pervasive as fields of harmful groundcover.

When a creature starts its turn within the area or enters the area for the first time on a turn, it makes a DC 10 Constitution saving throw, taking 3 (1d6) poison damage on a failure, or half damage on a success.

Of course there are more exotic things, too, like brown mold, low gravity, magnetized ore, memory crystals, and other fun things to surprise your players with!

And There’s More

That’s just a quick look at some of what we’ve done with monsters. We’ve really dived under the hood and there’s plenty more which we didn’t have room to talk about today. We can’t wait to share it all with you … in just about 8 weeks now!