5 Encounter Templates for any Dungeon
When designing your adventuring day, it can be difficult to know how to create encounters and where to place them. The following encounter templates are to help fuel inspiration for your dungeon and provide simple encounters to slot in when you aren’t sure what you want next.
No specific monsters are provided as these templates are meant for any level of party, but rather words like “Easy”, “Hard”, and “Deadly” are used. These terms should be taken to mean whatever monster your party would find Easy, Hard, or Deadly. You know your party best.
If you aren’t sure what monsters to use or how many to use at what CR, I recommend using an Encounter Builder like the one on DnDBeyond or Kobold Fight Club to help you select your monsters.
Lastly, I will also be using terms like “Skirmisher”, “Leader”, and “Brute”. These are monster archetypes. Check out Monster Roles in an Encounter for more information on monster archetypes and how to make exciting monsters!
Dungeon Encounter Templates
Defensive Battlefield (Deadly)
This template focuses on defensive creatures holding off enemies, like an adventuring party trying to enter a cave complex or laying siege to an old castle or similar structure. The defenders might be kobolds hiding among boulders or cultists attempting to prevent the party from interrupting a ritual to summon forth an elder evil from the Far Realm.
x1 | Hard Artillery monster with either flight or elevated terrain (like a balcony or cliff) with a ranged attack. If the stat block doesn’t already come with one, change its melee attacks to range and re-flavor them as needed, or give it simple cantrips to cast.
x3 - 4 | Easy Brute monsters who run interference and attempt to keep the adventurers from focusing on the elevated monster. They charge forward with little care for their own safety.
In this fight, the Artillery monster uses rocks, ledges, crenellations, or whatever else to hide behind and gain cover from attacks, all the while it can launch missiles, magic, and more at the party.
If you are feeling especially fiendish, you can include a few areas that the players can hide behind for cover, but some of them are trapped, like with pit traps, explosive runes, or vials of acid that the Artillery monster can explode with fire arrows, magic, or other incendiaries.
Pack Attack (Medium)
In this encounter, the party must face a horde of enemies who quickly run in and out of combat, never staying in one sport for long. This could be wolves, flying enemies, or any other creature that could disengage or hide easily, like Lurkers or Skirmishers.
x5 - 7 | Very Easy Skirmishers or Lurkers who can run in and out with ease. A key strategy for them is confusing the players as to who is hurt, how much damage they’ve done to the group as a whole, and getting the players to waste attacks from disadvantage.
The monsters are constantly on the move. Either this is because they can Disengage as a Bonus Action like a rogue, because they can hide in darkness, or they have an ability that teleports them or stops their enemies from hitting them. They will be constantly refreshing the front line as they take damage, putting monsters with higher hit points up front and the others dropping back.
Ideally, this encounter takes place in tight corridors that hamper the party’s movement. In addition, splitting paths, patches of darkness, outcroppings, and more can provide cover and heavy obscurity to let the monsters disappear from view, right before they launch right back in and deal a devastating blow with sneak attack damage.
Coordinated Assault (Hard)
The party must face-off against two lines of enemies, the first are powerful Soldiers who can’t be simply brushed aside, and the other line of monsters are weak Artillerists who hide in the back and hope they don’t get hit.
x3 | Medium Soldiers who utilize a defensive line that is difficult to move past. Either because they have an ability like Sentinel, that allows them to stop creatures from moving past, or because they fill the width of the tunnel with their bodies and shields.
x3 | Easy Artillerists who hide behind the defensive line and throw bolts, bombs, magic, and more at the enemies. These Artillerists run away the moment their front line is defeated, preferring to flee than find out what getting hit by a barbarian’s axe feels like.
This encounter is all about tight spaces and forced movement. You want your front line of Soldiers to keep the party back from the real threat, the Artillerists launching wave after wave of ranged fire, unconcerned about getting punched in the face. It is ideal to set this encounter up in a tight corridor, a narrow tunnel, or anywhere else two or three creatures can stand abreast and hold back the tide. If they are in a wider area, give the Soldiers an ability that can stop movement or make the area difficult terrain so that players are de-incentivized from running at the back line.
The Artillerist is here to create more of a threat. Too often are combats just people smacking each other in the face, with Artillery, they change things around and now you have to deal with people you can’t directly confront. This is frustrating and annoying, especially if the Artillerists can hide or impose disadvantage on ranged attacks, like through cover or darkness.
In addition, this is a great time to highlight ranged combat and special abilities, like the monk’s ability to catch missiles or the wizard who really wants to throw a fireball but everyone keeps getting in the way.
Leader and Minions
You have delved deep into the dungeon, now you must face a sub-boss or leader of a large group that exists within. Waves of mobs and low-level creatures are fodder for your spells and weapons, with a dangerous Leader shouting orders in the back and keeping up the pressure.
x1 | Hard Leader who will stick near the back and is constantly buffing and ordering its allies around. While a Leader can fight and has decent hit points, its real talent isn’t in dealing direct damage, but commanding its forces to do damage for it. This might be it commanding allies to attack with their reactions, providing buffs like a bard, or triggering the environment in different ways like causing rocks to fall, traps to be triggered, and more. Regardless, once the Leader is defeated, bonus damage and abilities suddenly end for the environment and weak mobs.
x7+ | Very Easy monsters who don’t do much by themselves. They are severely under-leveled compared to the party, but they are strengthened by their numbers and their leader. Perhaps while they are within 30 feet of their Leader, they deal bonus damage or gain a bonus to their AC. Regardless, they are easy to defeat one-on-one, but when they gather in a group, adventurers will have to fight hard to win.
This encounter is all about the Leader’s effects on its minions. In fact, the Leader should never run out of minions. If there ever comes a time when all the low-level monsters are defeated, the Leader simply whistles an order and more minions show up. The party will have to learn that they can’t waste their time on the weakest of enemies, they need to focus on the leader and bring it down.
This encounter could even be a single creature, but the single creature can create minions out of its body that constantly harass and attack the party.
Solo Monster
This is it, what the entire dungeon has led up to… or maybe this is just a side boss who is going to make the party worried about what the true boss has in store for them.
x1 | Deadly monster, this could be any type of monster role, from Leaders to Skirmishers to Brutes
This encounter should highlight the natural abilities of the boss monster. If they can hide in shadows, they should be in a place where they can hide. If they specialize in swinging a sword and bashing people, they should be in an area where they control the landscape and where they can’t get picked off by ranged attackers.
In reality, the most important aspect of this encounter is the environment. If you put a Lurker in a bright room filled with lava and no places to sneak about, the boss is dead. On the flip side, if you put a Lurker with a swim speed in an area with a lot of interconnected waterways, you give the boss a chance to appear anywhere in the encounter and cause absolute devastation whenever it appears.
Adjusting Encounters
These templates are just guidelines to help you build out your dungeon encounters and fulfill your Adventuring Day encounters. There are a wide variety of ways that you could use the templates and plenty of different ways that you could have monsters work together against your party.
In addition, don’t forget about traps or hazards, and how they can take the place of low-level monsters and be powerful battlefield controllers that push your players into positions that the monsters want.
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