Monster Warehouse

There's a good chance you've played through a video game dungeon at one point or another in your life. A common thread among these dungeons is that you start with some kind of "basic" enemy or puzzle, and then elements are added as you progress, allowing you to learn as you go. Once you have learned different iterations of enemies or puzzles, the game combines them in new and challenging ways. Through all of this, though, you typically only run across 3-5 different enemy mechanics. This allows you to hone your strategies and learn about enemies without combat getting stale. Monster Warehouse seeks to implement this strategy into combat building. As an added bonus, a Dungeon Master will only have to reference a few statblocks and can learn to play this handful of monsters in effective and interesting ways.

Getting Started

As mentioned above, a Monster Warehouse needs to start with a basic creature that can have features added to it as the players progress through the dungeon. This guide will start by walking through the creation of a monster warehouse step-by-step, and will then provide some other examples for you to use in your games, but you'll also be equipped with the necessary skills to build your own.

Step 1: Basic Monster

This basic monster will hold a lot of the mechanics for the dungeon. It's CR will also set the pace for the dungeon, as it is the lowest level creature the players will fight. Don't overload this one with mechanics, as you don't want it to feel bloated once you start upping the complexity.

Example Warehouse

For this example, I am going to build a literal warehouse. Maybe the PCs need to sneak in a steal something. Maybe they are trying to interogate the warehouse boss for imformation. Regardless, a warehouse probably has some thugs guarding it. I'm thinking this will be an adventure for 4 level 3 PCs. I can scale this, but it's an important starting point to adjust difficulty.

The basic monster for this example dungeon will be a thug/guard hired by the warehouse operator. Since thug and guard already have stat blocks in the monster manual, a new name will be necessary. Another note before the statblock: a Monster Warehouse is designed to scale as the characters progress towards their goal, giving them multiple encounters, meaning the first few may be easy, but difficulty is expected to increase alongside monster complexity. Therefore, the base example mosnter will start at CR 1/4, giving plenty of room for increased power. innable final showndown.