Forging a Foe ...

I am working on something new, feverishly so, and I need a few new monsters.

Designing monsters is not my forte and I am happy about every bit of advice I can get. Luckily, Teos "Alphastream" Abadía, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and Mike "Sly Flourish" Shea are at this moment running a Kickstarter for their Forge of Foes publication, the next installment in the Lazy DM row of publications.

For the Kickstarter, they offer a 30(!)-page sample PDF, which already contains enough useful material to get me started on, well, forging a foe for the new adventure I am writing.

Part of the inspiration for the direction I want to go with my monster comes from the initial description of the Scrael in Patrick Rotfuss' The Name of the Wind:

It was a spider as large as a wagon wheel, black as slate. (...) "It's not a spider" Jake said. "It's got no eyes." "It's got no mouth either." (...) "Its feet are sharp like knives." (...) Moving carefully, the innkeeper took one of the long, smooth legs and tried to break it with both hands like a stick. "Not pottery," he amended. He set it against the edge of the table and leaned his weight against it. It broke with a sharp crack. "More like stone." (...) "There's no blood. No organs. It's just grey inside."

I remember a shiver running down my spine when I read this section for the first time. What a scary monster: "spidery", no eyes, no mouth, not of flesh and blood but made of stone ... the latter fits into the backstory I am currently playing around with in my head. But I want something smaller, less deadly and with a proclivity for attaching itself to its victim.

So, moving from story and dressing to game mechanics, I decided to start with the section Reskinning Monsters of the Forge of Foes:

As powerful as reskinning is, the process always starts with a GM
finding the right stat block to reskin.

That actually was easy enough: The first monster I think of when it
comes to tiny beasts that attach themselves to their victims are of course stirges. These have the added benefit of being published as part of the 5e SRD, so I can use their statblock under the CC-BY license.

So, for starter, we have (removing the ability to fly and making the beast a bit faster on foot):

So, for starter, we have (removing the ability to fly and making the beast a bit faster on foot):

And this is what the little critter looks like:

The artwork based on a photo by Eric Erbe, courtesy of USDA ARS, which is
in the public domain:

Now I have to continue with the next steps, Modifying Features and Adding Features in a way that provides a good basis for creating an engaging encounter -- Teos gives some nice examples in his video on Monster Powers. From the beast's name, you can already infer, that tar will somehow play a role. I have an idea of how to modify the Blood Drain action in a way involving tar in a way that is dangerous for the characters. At the same time, the encounter will use tar in a way that can also help the characters -- not everything regarding tar is black, so to speak. Let's see how things turn out!

The Kickstarter is running until the end of March. I have backed it both because I really value its content (like I said, designing monsters is not my forte) and because I want to have the complete Lazy DM's' series of publications on my shelf: the Return of the Lazy DM was the publication that got me back into DMing after a long, long hiatus...

(The statblock for the tar tick is based on material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC.)