Homebrew - Savage Species for 5e
Header Image: Savage Species by WotC
Way back in 3rd edition, there was a sourcebook called Savage Species (2003) that detailed how to create playable characters out of monstrous creatures. These monsters started at Air Elemental to Green Hag to Harpy to Mind Flayer to Rakshasa to ending at Water Elemental. In total there were 200+ pages on creating monstrous characters, feats, equipment, spells, prestige classes, the monsters themselves, and more.
Sadly, there hasn’t been anything similar for 5th edition, and there probably won’t be. Sure, you can play as kobolds, orcs, yuan-ti, and a few other monstrous creatures but those just don’t have the same feel as playing as an Azer or a Medusa. They might be terrifying, but after selecting them at character creation, they won’t get stronger.
This piece of homebrew only includes four creatures as an example of this process. It includes Azer, Dryad, Medusa, and Mind Flayer.
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Setup
The initial idea for this came from us working on our Deep Dives. We’d see so many cool and interesting monsters (not including the Harpy) that would get featured in this book and it made me want to do the same. If a player is really interested in playing a Medusa for a specific type of character, and the GM is in agreement, the rules here can provide a way for that to happen while keeping the power levels between players in some sort of alignment.
The way that these monstrous creatures work is that at character creation, your race would be the creature you want to play as. You don’t get everything at this stage, and in fact, many of the things you do get are stripped-down versions of their ultimate form. Then, as you advance along your adventuring career, you can unlock the prerequisites for your savage species.
To gain these stronger racial powers, you must, at level up, select the traits for that creature instead of gaining a new level in another class. This helps keep the balance roughly the same between the characters in the party but I should mention, whenever you do homebrew or things like this, it’s often going to make characters more powerful than just a vanilla character who only has the Player’s Handbook. This is true even just for magic items, they make the character more powerful than the base assumptions of the game and so what passes for balance in this system is going to have to be adjusted by the GM, which is why we all have a GM!
Though, this isn’t me saying that these will only increase a player’s power by a little bit like some magic items. Think of them more like rare to legendary magic weapons in terms of the power they provide. The higher the CR of the creature, the more power they are going to innately have.
Power
The basics of creating these monsters are to take their Challenge Rating and divide it by 2. That is the number of traits a player must level up in before they can have the full complement of monster powers that their species is known for, not including the starting character creation racial traits. These traits are spread out across the levels, often at set intervals per the GM’s discretion. The final trait level should be set at the same level a single character can expect to have a medium difficulty encounter against the creature, these rules can be found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide in Chapter 3.
For example, the Mind Flayer is a CR 7 monster worth 2,900 XP upon defeating them. Dividing their CR by half, a character must level up their species a total of 3.5 times (going with 3 in this example) along with their starting racial traits. In addition, a medium difficulty encounter for a single character against a mind flayer requires the character to be 15th level per the chart in the DMG. This means that our traits are going to be spread out across 15 levels with the last trait only available to 15th level characters. To keep things simple, we’ll set it up that the Mind Flayer traits are available at level 5, level 10, and level 15.
If you are familiar with the Savage Species sourcebook, you might know that they, in fact, have it set so that it takes 15 levels until you unlock the full power of a Mind Flayer, but that seems excessive to me. They were going for exact comparison to the Monster Manual while I don’t go exact, I’m not concerned about the players having the same hit points, saving throws, skills, or ability scores as the monsters presented in the Monster Manual, only that they have the opportunity to gain the powers of that monster.
Monster Examples
I created four examples for this post, along with the rules, and they hit a variety of different levels. The Dryad, at CR 1, are the weakest monsters, while the Mind Flayer, at CR 7, is the strongest. The strongest monster you could create using the rules provided would be CR 10 creatures, like the Aboleth. It would require 5 monster traits, plus starting racial traits, and you wouldn’t unlock the final form of your powers until level 20, which is a long time but probably worth it when you can slime your friends and force them to submit to your will.
I won’t go through all of them, but I will go over two; the Azer and the Mind Flayer.
Azer
The first example is the Azer who is a CR 2 monster. They have 1 creature trait that you can unlock at 5th level. These are a pretty straightforward monster that just requires deciding when certain traits are given to the player, as well as providing weaker versions that get stronger upon selecting their creature level at a later time.
Racial Traits
Starting out, you get the basics of character traits; ability score increase, size, speed, and languages, as well as creature types, like elemental for Azer. Lastly, we start getting some of the power of the Azer with illumination, damage resistance, and the fact that their body is quite warm to the touch.
While the Monster Manual has them have immunities to fire and poison, I think that that is quite powerful for a 1st level character and so reduced it to only resistance with the knowledge they’ll get immunity at 5th level. I also gave a weaker version of their heated body, decreasing it from a d10 to a d6.
Azer Trait 1
At 5th level, or whenever you decide to level up in Azer, you get hit points, your heated body gets more powerful, you can now heat up your weapons, and you are immune to fire and poison. It’s a good boost in power, especially for those who like to swing their weapons a lot, but it does mean that for this boost, you are locking yourself out of capstone abilities for your class or delaying when you get certain powers.
Mind Flayer
The next example is the Mind Flayer who is a CR 7 monster. They have 3 creature traits that you can unlock at 5th, 10th, and 15th level. This monster requires quite a bit of breaking apart and providing pieces of their powers as they level up. Each trait level grants them more powerful abilities that build on their racial traits.
Racial Traits
You get the basics of character creation as well as a few powers that we will slowly build on as you get more powerful as a Mind Flayer. You have limited psionics, short telepathy, your tentacles are unarmed strikes, and you can even extract brains… otherwise, you’d starve. All of these powers will get stronger and stronger the more levels you take in Mind Flayer.
Mind Flayer Trait 1
Upon taking this as your level at 5th (or higher), you get your hit points, your previous powers are stronger, and you now get mind blast. I didn’t add mind blast to racial traits just because it seemed rather strong to get all the other things and this power as well - so it got moved to trait 1. While its weak at this point, it’ll get stronger the stronger you grow as a mind flayer. The biggest cheese I can see coming from the Mind Flayer is that eldritch knights would love to take this as their race because their tentacles rely on their intelligence for the attack roll and for damage. Right now it isn’t too crazy at a d6 (previously a d4), but by the third trait, you’ll be dealing 1d10 with the ability to stun creatures if you grapple them and the like - so kind of like a situational monk… in fact, monks might have loved this class if they weren’t so focused on having three main class abilities already.
Mind Flayer Trait 2
As before, everything just gets a bit stronger and you become magic resistant. Magic resistance is a tricky thing for me, I’ve never really sure how powerful WotC thinks it is, especially because Yuan-ti get as a racial ability - which blows my mind.
Regardless, the biggest thing this level up is with the mind blast, though the tentacles are getting pretty spicy too. Your mind blast can now be used quite often, though you are restricted to its power only once per minute. So while you have 4 or 5 uses of it, depending on your Intelligence modifier, you are limited on how often you can activate its properties. This seemed like the easiest way to show off your ability to recharge it faster at the next trait level up.
Mind Flayer Trait 3
Our final trait brings the player to the full might of the Mind Flayer with more powerful psionics, greater telepathy, a more powerful extract brain feature, powerful and stunning tentacles, and a mind blast that has no limit to the number of times you use it but has a recharge die associated with it.
The power boost of being a mind flayer is pretty strong, but as it takes 15 levels before you can finally get there, it doesn’t really come on line until the same level that a wizard is unlocking their 8th-level spells - and if that wizard was a mind flayer, they’d only be getting 6th-level spells since they are three levels behind.
Final Thoughts
This was a fun creation as I enjoyed the challenge of trying to create playable monsters that are more than just a CR 1/4 monster. These monsters are much stronger than that and so, if a player wants to unlock their full power, must be willing to spend a few levels in order to gain it. I hope you enjoyed this, even if you have no interest in adding this to your game, its a fun experiment and gives you a deeper understanding of balance, creature abilities, and more.
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