I’m a big proponent of Forge of Foes, the Sly Flourish book written by Mike Shea, Teos Abadia and Scott Fitzgerald Gray. It takes a very modular approach to creating 5e monsters. Seriously, I’d never have to create another monster the rest of my life, if I just used the stat blocks and recommendations for easy monster builds from these pages.
It would be really easy to use this advice to create basic monsters for other games, like Conan and One Ring. For these games, I do the very Lazy DM strategy of reskinning monsters (with minor tweaks to numbers to represent changes in weapons or attribute level). Then, I like to add special abilities that reflect the flavor and story of these monsters.
For instance, in One Ring, the PCs have interfered with the nefarious plots of very powerful entities. They hire bounty hunters to capture the PCs when they visit Dale. The bounty hunter teams consist of a husband, wife and child.
The husband and wife share the same stats. The child has her own stat.
The husband and wife are under cover in the Dale market as chefs providing pastries from a food stand. When they attack the PCs, they still have a rolling pin in hand. If cartoons and the Three Stooges have taught me anything, rolling pins are great to trip over and fall prone.
So, I gave the bounty hunters a special ability where they can spend a point of Hate as a reaction to roll the rolling pin at an oncoming target, forcing the target to make an Athletics roll. On a failure, the target falls prone and ends its movement.
It reflects special training of incapacitating targets and using the tools at hand: the rolling pin.
For the child, I let them spend a point of Hate to run in circles around their target in a dizzying pattern, making it more difficult for the PCs to hit her. This takes a stereotypical characteristic of young children and makes it a unique ability in combat.
I really like the idea of families serving as elite groups of bounty hunters or thieves.
In my Conan game, I created a family of spies that really got the better of my PCs. The adults had an ability to spent a point of Doom in order to make a special attack that targets the PCs’ suspenders, forcing their pants to fall down around their ankles, causing them to trip and fall. Watch the PCs struggle as their own pants prevent them from being mobile across the battlefield.
It is great to reskin monsters using our monster books for a template… or even using a template from Forge of Foes. However, rely on tools and training to create unique maneuvers for your monsters that will truly make your monsters memorable with the players.
