Creature Templates: Creating Homebrew
I’m not sure how your games go, but mine often involve combat with some crazy creatures and introducing new monsters for several of my veteran players to keep them on their feet and sometimes… if I’ve done a really, really good job… I’ll even get them to say “oh, shit”. I live for those moments when something new and surprising explodes out and they have to match wits with something they have no idea how it works… unfortunately, I go through a lot of monsters. And I mean a lot of monsters, I see a cool moonster in the Monster Manual and my players will eventually see them too.
To keep things exciting and fresh for my players, I often have to create my own monsters. None of them abuse meta-gaming knowledge, but many are veterans or enjoy studying the game to get better at it. It’s no fault of their own they know what the kobold stat block looks like, and so if I want to keep things fresh and exciting at the table, I am forced to make homebrew stat blocks. A few days ago, on Reddit and in real life, I saw many not sure how to create swarms or how to create zombies and I realized… I know how to do that, I make it for my groups all the time, and so I thought I’d write down and share my templates for creating different types of monsters. Here are four templates for you to plug in your monsters and go to town on your players!
I’ll be talking about each of them below the download buttons.
Even though these templates have been used a bit on my own monsters, not everything might be balanced across every monster. Be sure to look over a monster and make sure nothing is standing out too much in case something interacts badly with the template.
Zombie Template
The first one we are going to go over is the Zombie template, and that’s just because I like to subvert expectations. Everyone else would tackle this list in alphabetical order, and I really should too. But I’m not going to. Bam, expectations subverted. Does that make me cool? … sigh, I’ll never get there.
Zombies are a strange creature because their stat blocks can be a bit ambiguous when you first look over them. They have horrible AC, lots of health, an ability to keep them up after being knocked down, and they just shamble around. Creating a template for them is easy in that you basically strip almost everything magical from the zombie to create them, but complicated as you must go through their ability scores and do a lot of manipulating to get the zombie just perfect.
The basics for a zombie are: they are stronger and healthier than they were in life, they are far slower than when alive, and their mental stats just suck. Apparently having a necrotized brain doesn’t help you out much when it comes to trivia questions or being a forceful personality.
One of the neat things about zombies is that you don’t actually have to change much about their CR, which makes creating and balancing them fairly easy. Sure, they have a few extra hit points but their AC is pretty awful and a zombie isn’t going to be much of a threat, which is probably why in all those zombie movies they go around in large groups.
The biggest thing about creating a zombie is just deciding what traits it has that should be kept in its undead state. An undead tiger should still be able to pounce or sniff real good, but a dragon isn’t going to be able to keep its fire breath as that is an unnatural ability… at least, on planet Earth its unnatural. This was of much debate for myself when deciding what is considered natural and it would probably be different for each DM.
Luckily, this optional part of removing traits doesn’t tend to make the monster much stronger as it has so many other negatives in the stat block to keep it at a similar Challenge Rating even if you keep a few of the more strange abilities like Beholder eye rays.
Swarm Template
You’ve written into the adventure that there are 1,000 kobolds in a sewer and told your party that a thousand kobolds stare up at them. For some reason, your party still demands that they are keeping the great dragon egg that the kobolds worship and they will not be giving it up, even if they have to slaughter every kobold in the sewer. Well, normally I’d say that all the heroes die because 1,000 kobolds can still murder a group of veteran characters but sometimes you let the characters talk their way out of certain death and then just have the kobolds empty the entire sewer where ever that party is sleeping that night… not that I have experience with this or anything… cough cough.
Swarms are fantastic tools for when you get to higher levels and you still want to include the lower CR mobs, but don’t want to keep track of 30+ skeletons for your necromancer. Instead, you can just throw those skeletons into a few swarms and have them as simple monsters that just cause problems for the players while your necromancer finishes summoning the skeletal tarrasque to life.
Swarms are simple, except for one major part - their damage. Determining how much damage a swarm should do can be pretty hard, and while I typically just look around at other swarms and other monsters of similar CR, it's far easier when I just create a chart and can look at that as a quick reference. Creating a CR appropriate swarm can be a big challenge but luckily there is a good bit of wiggle-room when it comes to properly assigning a CR to a creature… just, be mindful that 1st level characters typically don't like it when you start pulling out d10s and d12s for damage dice.
One of my favorite parts about swarms it that they have a blanket resistance to Bludgeoning, Slashing, and Piercing and it’s not because I hate my martial characters. Rather, it comes from a magical weapon not being able to just fix everything. Your +3 longsword means nothing to a group of bugs and it forces players to get a bit more creative for an encounter, though its only martial characters forced to get creative and that is a problem by itself. With that said, make sure your swarms aren’t a massive regular thing without properly allowing your players to get prepared for it. If they are constantly fighting swarms, martial characters can start feeling pretty useless, pretty fast.
Elite Warrior Template
Sometimes you just need a monster that can hit real good. It doesn’t really matter if they have a bunch of special abilities, you have plenty of monsters that can do weird and unusual things. Instead, you just want a monster that can smack another creature around and be a big brute to the party. When I need a stronger than normal monster to act as bodyguards or act as the elite soldiers for a King or some other nobility, I end up creating a few elite warriors to add that extra punch in there.
Elite warriors are simple. They are strong, they are healthy, and they excel at martial combat. They aren’t worried about being suave or casting spells, they charge in, sword drawn and ready to fight. Which luckily translates well into their statblock as all you are doing is adding in bonuses to a base creature’s statblock and giving them a few extra attacks with their weapons. Your players won’t forget about the orc who could slice through 10 commoners in a single swing.
The biggest thing to pay attention to for these warriors is their Hit Points. While I provide guidelines on how to deal with their Hit Dice, it can quickly get out of hand if you quickly throw together a creature before the game. If you accidentally double a monster’s 13 hit dice to 26 hit dice, your party is going to have a bad day.
Corruption Template
I’m going to let you in on a secret… My players are currently fighting the hordes of demons and I realized that just sending demons against my party would be pretty boring after a little bit. When the party inadvertently opened up a gate to the Abyss and now an army of demons are swarming across the Material World, I knew that fighting a bunch of pig-demons and bird-demons would get pretty tiresome.
In comes my corruption template, this is to provide a bit of a fiendish presence to any creature with a pulse… and even then, a corrupted zombie is just a stat block away from being created! These corrupted creatures are the by-product of being around demons and their ichor and chaotic evilness.
This template is the only one that doesn’t have a direct connection to another creature in the Monster Manual, meaning this template was not inspired by anything. I just wanted a quick template I could throw on a monster, even if it was just in my head, and play a game with my table. They play a specific purpose in my game, to showcase what happens when a creature becomes corrupted.
And, these corrupted leave behind a small gift when they are killed forcing a party to work smartly against it. When a corrupted creature is killed, they are reclaimed by the fires of the Abyss and infernal flames explode out from them, hurting and killing those caught in the blast. This explosion can be a great surprise when the cultist goes down screaming in some sort of abyssal tongue as the unholy fires of demons explode around them.
The flavor is a major part of this template, and describing to your players how the warforged titan’s metal armor looks to be grafted onto demonic flesh is a great way to gross them out and bring the monster’s corruption to life. A kobold with the horrifying horns of a demon and ichor dripping from its mouth is a great way to reveal that things are not OK with the world.
Wrapping Up
Those are a few of the templates I use in my own games, and I hope you can find some great use in them! I find having a general idea on how to create a monster based off of other stat blocks to be very helpful and to speed up the creation process, and hopefully, you can create the great Kobold-Zombie-Elite-Warrior-Corrupted-Swarms to sweep over your world and bring its unholy wrath against your players! If you have any templates you’d like to see created, let me know in the comments below.
If you want a printer-friendly PDF of these templates, or any of my tools, consider supporting us at the $1 tier on our patreon! All homebrew that I’ve created or will create in the future will be uploaded to our patreon in printer-friendly versions. We appreciate any and all support!
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