One of the benefits of playing in person is to be able to create and enhance monsters. Don’t get me wrong, I love the benefits of playing online due to the ease and automation but it can be limiting. Not that you can’t create entire campaigns and monsters, but it just takes more effort than if you are playing in person. It is just much easier to create and enhance monsters in person.

I have two recommendations for Homebrew Monsters

1. If you are playing in person, I highly recommend taking the published monsters as a starting point and create unique monsters that create challenges all your own. Even if you are using standard monsters like Orcs and Skeletons, make them unique. Do they come from a special lineage? Do they have special powers? What is the mythos and history behind the caste? Spend some time thinking about these detail and build out history of them. Dungeon Masters sometime take this lower level monsters and just use them as unremarkable pawns when they could be so much more. Name them, have class and difficulty variations, and have inter-monster politics. The opportunities are endless.
2. Sometimes I have tended to drop an assortment of monsters in a location with little rhyme or reason. Many times, I have opted for the maximum variability although the grouping didn’t really make sense. Why would there be Skeletons and a Dragon in a dungeon? Who knows, but the battles would be awesome. My second recommendation is to plan ahead for the overall collection of monsters and sometimes less is more. I was inspired by re-reading the Silmarillion and it struck me how few evil monsters Tolkien used. Orcs, Spiders, Goblins, Evil Men, dragons, Balrogs, and BBEG demi-gods – that’s it. The genius was the depth and creativity within that seemingly small collection of monsters. In both Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, the opponents have an unbelievable depth from being named, having history, and emotions and conflicts. Don’t feel that you need tons of different monsters, build a world of your monsters that is cohesive, has depth. and makes sense.

For my recent campaign, I have created a new species of Orcs, Goblins, and Spiders. There will still be multiple BBEGs, but the focus of the challenges will be on cohesion/conflict rather than monster variability.

I am looking forward to the new focus and I think the players are enjoying that the monsters aren’t just a collection of CR ratings, but have a mystery and story behind them that they have to solve.

Where did a line of Ice Orcs come from? Why do they have variations of white triangle insignias on them, where did spell casting Orcs come from?