You don’t need to make homebrew monsters to add creature variety to your game. Making homebrew monsters is time-consuming and can result in pushovers or brutal encounters. There are a lot of reasons people homebrew monsters. Sometimes they can’t find a monster that matches a creature in their fiction, or they have veteran players that they want to surprise. These are both great reasons to make a monster, but DMs have a finite amount of time to prep. If you don’t enjoy making new monsters, there’s a better way. Tweak existing monsters instead!

In the last session of D&D I ran, I used this one page dungeon by Ben Milton, adjusted for 5e play. This module includes a wolf with a sword, a jawbreaker golem, and gummy worms, among other things. Shockingly, the Monster Manual doesn’t have an entry for gummy worms. None of the monster stat blocks I had matched these creatures. As a result, to make the monsters unique, I had to find something vaguely similar and then tweak it.

My Monster Changes

The jawbreaker golem used the stats of a clay golem. I bumped it’s AC up to represent its hardened skin, lowered it’s HP to compensate and gave it a ranged attack to throw its head. Similarly, the wolf was a Githyanki Knight with its spellcasting replaced with a legendary action to bite and grapple enemies. I also gave it advantage on perception checks to represent its wolf sniffer! Lastly, the gummy worm was a giant constrictor snake that I downsized to large and made immune to magic (they were made of magic candy after all).

The changes to these monsters took me less than 15 minutes to make and gave all the monsters a distinct flavor. Making new monsters for all of them would have taken much longer. At the end of the session, my players didn’t know what stat block I was using, or if I had made the monsters up. The effect was the same as making a whole new monster, but with tons of prep time saved.

In this case, the module recommended some of the changes I made. Still, it’s easy to come up with little tweaks when you have a creature concept in mind, and making them work mechanically is straightforward most of the time.

Things to Consider

When you make changes to monsters, it is necessary to consider the effect the change is going to have. For the gummy worms, adding magic immunity is a significant buff to the monster. When making a change like that, think about the characters in your party. Most of my player characters have non-magic options, so I knew the magic immunity wouldn’t be too much of a problem for them. With that in mind, I only considered the encounter slightly harder than usual.

Some changes don’t make for a harder encounter at all. For example, the jawbreaker golem’s most significant change was the addition of a ranged attack. In the room the golem was in, it could use its melee or ranged attacks interchangeably. This meant the encounter was about the same difficulty as a normal clay golem.

Making homebrew monsters can be fun, I do it myself sometimes! If you don’t enjoy it, though, you can add spice to your monsters while spending minimal prep time by making little tweaks instead.