So I've been meaning to do this series for the longest time. And to give you guys a bit of a timeframe on just how long I have been itching to do one of these, I had actually wanted to do a Dungeons and Dragons monster commentary ever since I did Gotta Review 'Em All for Pokemon, which would be around... January 2018? Which is around more than a year in the past. I've got a draft of various iterations of this sitting around in my blog for a while.See, I've been a bit of an on-and-off Dungeons and Dragons player over the years. I have a group of friends I play over with Skype and the amazing Roll20 website, and while the process of just creating your own character and just doing whatever you want (which is what D&D is all about -- role playing, doing anything you want in the setting) is appealing, what I've always loved has always been, first and foremost, the monsters and the creatures. Ever since I discovered what D&D even is, the very first book I gravitated towards was the book with the pictures and descriptions of all the monsters. The first sourcebook I've ever read was the Monster Manual for the 3.5 edition (D&D basically updates their core rules every decade or so), and while I've never been the most avid player, particularly when real life got in the way, I absolutely loved to read these sourcebooks and just enjoy these monsters... and eventually, helping my D&D group's GM to create worlds. I think I enjoy that more than I do the experience of playing D&D -- just creating wacky homebrewed monsters and settings, y'know?
And D&D is such a long-running RPG, being the grandfather of all tabletop games, that it's basically the inspiration of... anything and everything. The Legend of Zelda? Magic: The Gathering? Warhammer? Pathfinder? All those RPG video games? Basically anything fantasy-related that's not Tolkien draws to some extend from D&D. And alongside how the general reception of these monsters have been, it's interesting to see just how the monsters themselves have evolved from the original 1st edition in 1974 to the 5th edition. Hell, as someone who played a fair amount of 5E and 3.5E, as well as dabbling in 4E, Pathfinder and exactly a single session of AD&D, the game has deifinitely evolve a lot. I don't think I'm qualified enough to talk about the games themselves, but I'm definitely going to talk about the actual monsters.
The problem that I had was... where to begin? 1st Edition, just to look at how the monsters (particularly the D&D-originals like the Flumps and Beholders) are originally conceived? 3.5E, which has the largest quantity of weird-ass motherfuckers? 5E, the most recent one? Eventually, I decided that, hey, the 5th edition monster manual basically is kind of a 'best of' collection of the most iconic and popular monsters introduced throughout the previous iterations of the game, and it's better for me to just crack open the 5E Monster Manual on my table and just talk about the monsters, y'know? I'm going to go in alphabetical order and just talk about them -- I'll try to not basically just regurgitate what's inside the Monster Manual and actually just commentate about the design of the creatures, and compare it to some of their previous editions. I'm honestly not 100% sure how this is going to go, but hey, I'm going on anyway!
- Click here for the next part, where we cover Carrion Crawlers through Demiliches, as well as the core player races!
- Click here for the index.
Aarakocra
And let's start with the very first monster in the 5th edition Monster Manual, the Aarakocra! And here we have artworks of the Aarakocra from the 5th edition, the 3rd edition and the 1st edition respectively (whenever possible, I will always try and find artwork for the earliest depiction of the creature in the franchise), and it's interesting to see how things have sort of changed over the years, yeah? Originally, the Aarakocra looks more like a traditional harpy body layout, albeit with a bird head instead of a humanoid one. And I absolutely love just how fucking goofy that 3E Aarakocra looks with how he holds that spear. 5E ends up giving the Aarakocra a more Hawkman-style body layout, basically making the race humanoids with actual proper hands detached from their wings... but still keeping the bird head and legs. It's a pretty neat bird-people race... we're going to encounter a fair bit of these animal-man races. In 5E, the Aarakocra race are characterized as neutral good servitors of the elemental plane of air, hunting down evil elementals, while also basically apparently not having any sort of concept of political borders or property -- and I absolutely in the same breath love and hate to interact with beings with these sort of mentality.
World of Warcraft kinda-sorta adapted the Aarakocra bird-people race as the Arakkoa, which for some reason I've never really made the connection until recently. Overall, I don't really have much to say about the Aarakocra -- I don't think I've ever actually met one in any of the D&D campaigns I've played with my friends, we basically exclusively use the Kenku for all our bird-race needs.
Aboleth
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| 4E Aboleth |
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| 3E Aboleth |
And going through the various depictions of the Aboleth... I do like the 5th edition one, with the scary, massive maw of tooth and the almost squid-like tentacles, helping to make the Aboleth look far, far more alien than just being a weird fish. But I also do like the Aboleths of previous editions, with the 3rd Edition Aboleth looking just so bizarrely odd with that not-quite-catfish face -- and the lack of an angry maw of tooth does make it look more sinister and calculating. Likewise, the 1st Edition Aboleth just looks utterly and bizarrely alien, as this weird amphibious fish with tentacles. Whatever the case, I am a huge fan of how consistently the three eyes are arranged in all versions of the Aboleth. Definitely one of the monsters original to the D&D setting not taken from any other mythology that I feel is perhaps one of the most memorable ones out there.
Angel: Deva
And here we come into the first monster type with multiple sub-races. And while there are only three main sub-types for angels, wait until we get to devils, demons, dragons and yugoloths! Hoo boy! And for the most part, I don't think you're going to see these dudes much in your campaigns, unless you're specifically running a group of villains. Basically, all angels are formed from the essence of whatever pantheon of gods you want for your campaign, and according to 5E, they're mostly super-robotic yes-men that will slay everything evil in their path and are pretty much paladins on steroids and with very little capacity to negotiate. Which is fine most of the time, since they're on the side of good... but sometimes that inflexibility's going to intersect with some of the goals your character's trying to do, y'know?
The first of the three main angel sub-types are Devas... which basically act as divine messengers that are able to polymorph to whatever appropriate form and basically lend aid and hope as a mysterious stranger with surprisingly amazing powers, able to assume their true, angelic form if needed be... so it's very possible, then, that one of the NPC's in town you've been taking for granted is actually quite literally an angel in disguise. Neat! There are many different sub-types of angels in 3.5E and 4E, but I don't really remember any of them particularly well.
Angel: Planetar
Now while the Devas look a lot more benevolent, the Planetars are the literal "weapons of the gods", the warrior-angels that represent their patron deity's might. The artwork doesn't really show it, but the Devas in their true form are the size of a regular humanoid, but Planetars are large-sized, meaning it's like at minimal 10 feet tall or something. Again, there's really not much to say here -- I think the only times I've ever seen a Planetar in a campaign was part of a cleric's prayer to their god and a miracle happened with a Planetar arriving and rescuing our party from demons or whatever. Just because it has a stat block and shows up in the monster manual doesn't mean you have to throw your players and force them to fight it, after all!
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| Solar (1E) |
Now where Planetars are the soldiers of the Upper Planes, the Solars are the generals. They rarely enter the battlefield, and when they do even the mightiest demons run the shit away. Again, how these D&D monsters function differ from edition to edition and from campaign to campaign, but the 5E versions note that only 24 Solars exist, and even among that number, a lot of them spend their time meditating, awaiting for some truly cosmic threat to arrive that would actually deserve their time. From its massive stat block, the Solar has... a fuck-ton of fancy abilities. They're the 'final boss' of the angels, so to speak. Not much to say from an actual visual standpoint, though, all of the angels do kind of look samey as statuesque bodybuilders with wings, and as the only one who doesn't have a cool rocky skin, the Solar is kind of the most boring. His 1st Edition artwork does make him look like he goes to the same barber that Wolverine goes to, though, and that's kinda funny.
It's a bit of a shame, though, that D&D surprisingly has a very low amount of less "human with wings" angels. I don't want to be that guy, but even the Judeo-Christian depiction of angels are so, so much more varied than just a dude with wings, y'know? Honestly, while certainly having a bunch of impressive stats, the angels always felt more like something that was there mostly for 'flavour'. It's just kind of a shame that every single 'good' celestial ended up being generically angelic. Even the large amount of Archons from 3.5E end up basically being accessorized angels, y'know?
Animated Object
And here we have a bit of a staple enemy in a lot of RPG games. Random objects that become alive and attack you! You can, in theory, adapt any object into an Animated Object monster of your choosing, of course. I remembered a 3.5E campaign where our GM threw what's basically a parody of Disney's Beauty and the Beast cast at my party, throwing animated candelabras and grandfather clocks at our party. The 5E book gives three examples for your perusing: Animated Armor, Flying Sword and Rug of Smothering. And the text notes that these tend to just be the result of an Animate Object spell, meaning that these are completely automatons driven by a single order (although, of course, magic is capricious and sometimes these animated objects might be able to hold a conversation), and once you beat enough damage to it, the magic surrounding the animated object will dissipate.
The Animated Armor is a pretty interesting monster trope, of course, immediately calling to mind things like haunted armor pieces at a castle... but the book specifically notes that, no, these are not haunted. Flying Swords (or indeed any sort of flying weapons in general) gives me video game flashbacks, and is kind of an obvious thing to animate as a minion, yeah? Just animate something that's already designed to hurt people in the first place. The Rug of SMoethering is a pretty hilarious name -- this isn't the magic carpet from Aladdin, this is a rug that will crawl, wrap around you and smoether you to death. It apparently lays in wait, like the obnoxious old Trapper, and the wrap around the unfortunate prey and murder them by smothering. Death by carpet, that has to be the most undignified way to go out!
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| Ankheg (1E) |
Hooray, bug monsters! The Ankheg is a staple D&D monster, appearing in every single edition, and honestly is your archetypal giant monster insect. I do appreciate that the Ankheg doesn't really resemble any specific insect -- there's bits of stag beetle, earwig and mole kricket sort of rolled into one, but ultimately the whole point of the Ankheg is that it's a unique insect monster to the Dungeons & Dragons setting. And despite artists over the years taking liberties at depicting what Ankhegs look ike, they're always these heavily-armoured large bug monstrosities with massive pincer-claws. 5th Edition Ankhegs look particularly awesome and honestly almost crustacean-like, with those massive chunky claws and the cool ridges on its head, and the very cool and disgusting set of mouth parts.
The Ankheg hunt like trapdoor spiders, hiding underground in undeground lairs and waiting for their prey to come along, before bursting out of the ground and attacking with their massive claws and their acid saliva. Despite looking pretty impressive, Ankhegs are actually early game monsters. Sure, it's a bit more impressive than goblins, kobolds or thugs, but they're certainly far from being anywhere in the same ballpark as aboleths and angels. Overall, while not the most complex bug monster out there, I have a soft spot for Ankhegs. They're neat, and definitely a staple monster in D&D.
Azer
Another staple monster of D&D that's shown up in every single edition of the game are the Azers, which, despite what they look like, aren't actually related to dwarves. I remembered mixing up Azers and Duergars for the longest time. Azers are actually inhabitants of the elemental plane of fire, and, yeah, there are a lot of different variations of elementals in D&D, and a lot of them are sentient. Azers are basically a race of fire elementals that craft bronze bodies resembling dwarves, although their head will always be on fire. Like the Ghost Rider without a skull. The Azers stand opposed in civil war against the other major race in the elemental plane of fire, the efreet, which attempted to enslave the Azers and force them to be builders for them. And despite their fearsome appearance, the Azers are actually lawful neutral, and according to the Monster Manual, they're sometimes called to the material plane to help craft things because they're super good at it.
Banshee
Ah, a classic fantasy RPG enemy in basically every video game featuring ghosts of some sort! While borrowing her name from a specific Irish supernatural being, banshees have basically became a catch-all for any sort of lady ghost with the ability to scream really, really loud, something that most cultures have an equivalent of. In 5E D&D, Banshees are specifically spirits of dead female elves (with the artwork featuring a pretty cool one with torn-up flesh around the eyes, and tattoos down her shoulder and arms). The female elves that became banshees were blessed with beauty in their life, but used their beauty to corrupt and control others, and are thus cursed to, well, be banshees in death, cursed to being bound onto the place of her demise, and also feeling distress in the presence of the living as their minds decay. They are obsessed with beauty, still, hoarding beautiful objects while also being angered at the sight of mirrors. And while it's supposed to be a punishment for the would-be banshee... man, it really sucks for any mortal who just wants to pass through the forest and ends up becoming prey to the banshee's angry wails, yeah?
There are a lot of undead variants in D&D (and honestly, any self-respecting RPG game), and banshees are kind of a staple type that you expect to see. I've never found them to be super special, but they're definitely an important part of any self-respecting undead-themed area. I've seen some variants of Banshee (I can't remember if it is 3.5E or Pathfinder) that restores some of the Banshee's Irish folklore origins, and makes them tied to a specific family bloodline. Again, it's up to your GM how he or she wants to customize these creatures!
Basilisk
While the original European legends of the basilisk have varied on how the creature is portrayed -- a snake-like being, a multi-legged chicken-reptile, a giant chicken with a snake tail -- D&D basically has consistently used the multi-legged reptile depiction for their basilisk. Which, in turn, has influenced other fantasy settings' depictions of their basilisks. Like World of Warcraft, which also featured six-legged crocodilian basilisks! Over the different editions, the Basilisks have basically evolved from a weird crocodile-dinosaur cross in 1E and 2E into a more thick-set, powerhouse-looking creature from 3E onwards. Which is pretty cool! An eight-legged giant lizard with spikes, and, of course, the basilisk's signature ability of petrifying gaze, turning anything it looks into stone! And if you kill the basilisk, if you're good enough of an alchemist, you could take the fluids from its gullet and reverse the electrification.
The actual basilisk itself isn't actually that large, being more of the size of a stocky crocodile, but it's that ability to turn anything it connects its eyes with into stone that ends up making it pretty deadly. And then it eats the petrified prey, because, hey, basilisks also can eat stone statues! Despite this ability, though, basilisks are actually relatively low on the totem pole of monsters, being not that threatening to most adventuring parties. It's when you have to deal with a basilisk's gaze while dealing with multiple other enemies at the same time that things get a bit complex -- the 5E Monster Manual basically notes that basilisks can actually be domesticated, and are smart enough to avoid meeting the gaze of their trainers, which gave our group's GM an excuse to basically use the basilisks as guard dogs for a people-trafficking ring. Smuggling slaves is illegal, but no one's going to care about stone statues, right? And the basilisks even double as guard dogs, too!
Behir
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| AD&D Behir |
Behirs are noted to create lairs that are inaccessible to other creatures, using their weird centipede-like body structure to find lairs on top of cliffs where mortal creatures would have to make a long, treacherous trek to reach their lair, and then create tunnels with this the Behir can ambush their prey. A Behir also apparently feeds like a snake, something reflected in battle mechanics where a Behir is able to just straight-up swallow a member of your party... but will then basically enter a dormant state while they slowly digest that prey. Kind of like snakes! Behirs are also intelligent enough to be classified as neutral evil, and to know the draconic tongue.
Beholder
And here we arrive on the most iconic monster to come out of Dungeons & Dragons bar none. Well, maybe the Mind Flayer, but honestly, the Beholder is a lot less derivative of something else, y'know? And just look at the Beholder. It's a simple design, for sure, a floating ball of flesh with a huge big eye, a massive fanged maw and a bunch of tentacles with eyeballs floating out of it. We've seen various other depictions of Beholders in other fantasy video games and material, usually renamed into something else ("Evil Eye" in Final Fantasy games, "Observer" in World of Warcraft, "Cacodemon" in Doom, et cetera), because of how simple yet effective the general look of this monster is. Small wonder that they chose a Beholder as the cover image of the Monster Manual!
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| 1E Beholder |
And these Beholders are considered Aberration type monsters, which means that, yes, they appear from some otherworldly domain, which explains just how this biologically-impossible set of features has came to exist. And Beholders are pretty damn terrifying -- as a D&D player, you quickly learn to fear and respect the Beholder, because, well, engaging against one in battle without preparation? In any edition, it's tantamount to suicide. See, the Beholders don't just garner a reputation for looking like a cool monster, no. They're also pretty freaking terrifying in combat, and that's because they can practically do anything -- and even the Dungeon Master has to roll to see what ray the Beholder will unleash upon your party. Charm you into submission? Paralyze your character? Go a step further and petrify them? Slow down your character? Cause fatigue? Fear them and have them run the hell away? Use telekinesis to toss them around? Put them to sleep? Disintegrate them? Beams of instant-death? You don't know. The Beholder himself doesn't even know. All you know that it's going to be a bad time, and that's without the Beholder's own ability to create anti-magic cones or to command its lair to like, create appendages and create eyeballs all around its lair that can shoot Beholder beams!
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| Beholder (4E) |
Man, I love these fuckers. Whether it's a single Beholder who lives in a lair filled with its trophies, or if it's the Eye Tyrant variant who's basically taken despotism as a hobby and rules over an army of enthralled minions, or if you're the subversive sort of GM who have an intelligent Beholder hang out with the good guys as an NPC (they are intelligent, after all...) I really love these guys and their random set of eye-beams they can shoot at people. Pretty awesome dudes, and they became iconic for a reason!
Beholder: Death Tyrant
Over the years and many different editions, we've gotten a lot of variants of Beholders. Death Kisses, Gazers, Spectators, Gauths, Elder Orbs, Eyes of Flame, Eyes of Frost... and those are the ones I can think of from the top of my head! The original concept for these reviewing-D&D-monsters segments was to take a sub-type of creature and then go through every single variant introduced over the years... but that feels like a bit too disorganized, and I felt like it's a lot less directionless to follow the Monster Manual. I'm going in order of the Monster Manual, though, and we're saving the Gazers and Gauths for if/when we ever reach Volo's. The Monster Manual details two specific variants of the Beholder, and our first one is the Death Tyrant here (who first showed up in 2E), and the Death Tyrant is an example of how bizarre the Beholder's reality-warping abilities are.
See, a Death Tyrant is created when a Beholder... dreams and imagines a place where it exists beyond death, and this dream will warp reality and transform the Beholder into a Death Tyrant, an undead beholder that basically can do everything a regular Beholder can... plus doing a bunch of undead-y stuff. The 5E Beholder basically has it be a giant, floating Beholder skull with a bunch of glowing orbs where the tentacle-eyes used to be. And where the Beholders tend to be content to lay in their lairs or let their minions do whatever they want to do, Death Tyrants, true to their name, will actually be more active in becoming a tyrant and will be driven by a hunger for power to take over massive settlements and can "wipe out the population of a city in weeks", in no small part due to its ability to create zombies and whatnot. And, of course, it still has access to regular Beholder powers. Pretty neat little variation! I am just sad that these dudes aren't named the "Beholich". You'd think it's obvious!
Beholder: Spectator
Where the Death Tyrant is a far more powerful version of a Beholder, the Spectator is a far weaker version of it. A not-necessarily evil variant of the Beholder, the Spectator is summoned from wherever these beholder-kin came from by mages using four beholder eyestalks. These Spectators are basically professional security guards, which are bound to a location or treasure and will guard them for exactly 101 years, and will not allow anyone but its summoner to come near it. If the thing it's guarding is destroyed, the Spectator vanishes, but if it fulfills its duty, it's allowed to roam free and basically go nuts. The 5E Monster Manual notes that the Spectator is apparently a quirky soul due to years of isolation, often inventing imaginary enemies, refer to itself in the third person, try to adopt the mannerisms of its summoner... my D&D gaming group's GM is so taken in by this little snippet that he basically characterized a Spectator NPC as basically a crazier version of BEN from Treasure Planet.
In combat, the Spetator is basically a discount version of a Beholder or Death Tyrant. None of the anti-magic cone, and only the most boring rays -- confusion, paralyzing, fear and wounding, and two of those are weaker variants of a regular Beholder's charm and enervation. It is, after all, meant to be a weaker version of a Beholder. Really do love its 5E artwork, though, pretty cool looking, but its original 1E appearance with the mouth taking up its entire lower side of its body is a special kind of creepy.
Blight
The Blights are are the first creature in this page that doesn't come from or is inspired by a 1E monster in any shape or form, but rather by a 3E creature. And Blights honestly do make for a pretty fun low-level first enemy! Tired of kobolds and goblins all the time? The next time you run your adventure, have them fight the Blights! They're these shambling humans made out of plant matter, but have a pretty interesting backstory. The Blight race as a whole is created when an ancient vampire called Gulthias was killed, but a crazy druid picked up the stake used to kill him, used some wacky dark magic, and ended up birthing the Blight race. Any time a tree or plant is contaminated by a figment of an evil power, the Gulthias Tree is able to spread its vines, and use it as a way to corrupt the surrounding forest, killing all of the plants nearby and turning them into Blights and turning entire patches of forests into brambles, toxic weeds and, well, blight! And while certainly a pretty impressive backstory -- an all-encroaching army of corruption in a forest caused by a cursed vampiric tree -- the actual blights themselves aren't the strongest enemies out there, which means that this is an ideal enemy to cause some potentially massive threats in your adventure while also not potentially wiping out your level 2 adventuring party the way dragons and beholders would. All you need to do is find the source of the corruption and burn it, after all!
Three variants exist in the 5E manual: the tiny Twig Blights, which hide as shrubs and mounds of twigs until they need to fight; Needle Blights, which are human-sized and are covered with coniferous needles, and the mightier Vine Blights, which are basically the Swamp Thing and are able to talk -- albeit in a limited fashion. My GM made several extra variants based on different plants, because, hey, that's what you do when you have the creative juices going. Plus, you can kind of make your players' lives hell with things like Poison Ivy Blights, Fungal Spore Blights, Hay Fever Blights...
Bugbear
Neither bugs nor bears, the Bugbear is one of the three main goblin variants in D&D-land, alongside regular goblins and hobgoblins. And the Bugbears are basically musclebound, larger, furrier goblins. Depending on the edition, they're other angry bullies that cause their smaller goblin cousins, or are just the 'muscle' bred to serve a given goblin/hobgoblin tribe. What's consistent is that the Bugbears are basically massive dumb assholes, prone to making battle a priority over everything else. Bugbears are kind of just there, and basically just makes goblin dungeons a lot more interesting by throwing in a couple of extra, non-fragile enemies, but taken on their own, they're just angry hairy, dumber versions of orcs. 4E and 5E tried to give them a bit of a more unique culture by giving them their own god, but eh. Despite being one of the longer-running monsters in D&D, I really don't have much to say here. I'm just not super fond of the Bugbears the way I am goblins and hobgoblins. The original Bugbear of myth was a bit more akin to a boogeyman that scares little children, and I kinda-sorta wished that even if the basic Bugbear enemy doesn't have anything more complex than just goblin-bashy-bash, stronger Bugbear variants would be a bit more interesting.
Bulette
Oh man, I love the Bulette, and that's not just because it kinda looks like a Pokemon. The Bulette, also known as a Landshark, is just this giant four-legged reptile with a massive, goofy mouth that's a cross between a whale and Pac-Man, Since 3E the Bulette has been drawn consistently like a fantasy dinosaur creature, but look at the artworks for 2E and 1E, and it's clear that the intent was a bizarre rock-shark-dinosaur fusion. I absolutely love this, and the fact that apparently the Bulette was made out of some sort of deformed miniature that the original D&D team had lying around in the office just really adds to the charm of this thing.
The Bulette itself is pretty dang impressive, too, basically moving underground and working through their "tremorsense", before bursting out of the ground with its massive jaws open to nom-nom-nom on anything in their way. Apparently, they dislike elf and dwarven flesh, and love halfling flesh the most. These creatures don't make lairs, but forage within its 30-mile-wide territory for anyone foolish enough to pass through. The 5E version gives an interesting origin to Bulettes, theorizing that these is the result of a wizard's attempt to combine armadillos and snapping turtles, with a hefty dose of demonic ichor. Definitely a pretty interesting monster regardless, and a pretty impressive one too even if the modern iterations of the Bulette does admittedly some of the goofiness of its original concept.
Bullywug
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| Bullywug (4E) |
Other than presenting great treasures to their lord, the only way that Bullywugs can advance in society is to secretly murder their rivals... and it's so funny to imagine these stupid frog-men plotting some sort of courtly intrigue. Like, just imagine that dumb-looking face planning on how they could stage an untimely accident to make sure Baron Ribbiton dies in the next raid. Honestly, they could've just had these be "angry frog men that live in a swamp" and call it a day, but by characterizing the Bullywugs as a race that tries to mimic humanoid courtly politics, while also harboring a deep inferior complex... that just easily makes these sorry looking things one of my favourite races ever. I played a couple of campaigns with a homebrewed Bullywug PC, and that was pretty fun!
Cambion
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| 3E Cambion |
Whatever the case, Cambions have had pretty cool artwork associated to them. I guess they're basically the traditional bat-wings, red-skinned, horned devils, which is pretty cool, I suppose. I really don't have a whole ton to say here, I'll probably have a lot more to say when we reach the actual demons or if/when I cover Tieflings and the other player races.
Which is to say... see you guys next time! I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the big, massive dump of dragons, demons and devils that's to come, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.
A bit of a quick glossary for the terms that the game uses, basically a brief summary of some of the more technical terms on how the D&D game classifies creatures.
A monster's type refers to its basic nature, and for the most part, D&D divides them into the following, and like any game system, some items and abilities affect certain types and not others. Mostly, it's to give the players reading the stat block of the creature a rough idea of what the creature is:
- Humanoids: The main sentient races of any D&D setting, mostly sentient with culture and language, and, well, mostly involving player races or anything relatively equivalent. Humans, elves, tieflings, dwarves, orcs, gnolls, goblins, lizardfolk, et cetera.
- Beasts: As the name implies, basically animals that are a natural part of the ecology. Most are unintelligent and has no society or language, and also includes things like dinosaurs and giant versions of real-life animals.
- Plants: Again, as the name implies, plant-based monsters. Tend to be creatures that are far, far more destructive compared to their real life counterparts. Fungal-based monsters also fall in this category.
- Monstrosities: Creatures that aren't quite natural. In 3.5E, it's known as 'magical beast'. Could be caused by magical experiments (like owlbears), or the product of curses (like minotaurs and yuan-ti), and basically is a catch-all category for creatures that don't fit any type.
- Constructs: Creatures that are made, not born, created with a certain purpose. Could be automatons or sentient, depending on the specifics of the creature. Basically machines, but also includes the likes of golems.
- Dragons: It's part of the name of the game! Dragons are, well, dragons. Giant reptilian creatures with immense power.
- Giants: They're like humanoids, but far, far larger. In addition to true giants, other creatures like ogres and trolls are also considered giant-types.
- Oozes: Gelatinous blobs that don't have a fixed shape. They're blobby slimy ooze monsters!
- Undead: Any once-living creature brought back to unlife through necromantic and unholy magic. Could be solid like skeletons and vampires, or could be spirits like ghosts and specters.
- Elementals: Creatures that hail from the elemental planes, sort of an alternate parallel dimension. They represent a certain element, and could range from just being animated masses of an element, to more intelligent forms infused with elemental energy. In previous editions, all creatures hailing from other planes tend to be grouped into a large 'outsider' supergroup.
- Celestials: Creatures that hail from the Upper Planes, the D&D setting's equivalent to heavens. Celestials are servants of deities and include the likes of angels, couatls and pegasi.
- Fiends: Spooky evil creatures from the Lower Planes. Divided into three types, the demons, the devils and the yugoloths (or daemons). They all tend to be evil to some degree.
- Fey: The fair folk that live in mystical forests, and sometimes are tied to their own realm, the Feywild. They're basically the likes of pixies, dryads, satyrs and all sorts of fairies.
- Aberrations: Utterly alien beings that come from another plane not listed above, and are basically the Cthulhu-esque equivalents in these setting, creatures whose actual bodies and magic aren't natural. Among these are the likes of the mind-flayers, beholders and aboleths.
Oh, yeah, and while you don't have to use the actual settings that the D&D sourcebooks give you, the general D&D setting tends to take place in a 'material' plane with a couple of neighbouring planes. Mostly the names are pretty obvious -- Lower Planes, Upper Planes, Feywild, Elemental Plane, Shadowfel -- plus there's the Underdark, a massive subterranean system of underground tunnels and whatnot that's filled with all sorts of spooky monsters that has never seen the light of day. Literally!
Challenge Rating, or CR, is how powerful a monster is, sort of equivalent to the "Level" in MMORPG and other Western RPGs. basically, a party of four adventurers of a certain level should be able to defeat a monster with the same challenge rating. Of course... DM's/GM's tend to never just throw a single monster at your party unless if it's a boss fight, and things like NPC allies and whatnot's going to come into play. To put some of the monsters we cover on this page to perspective, the 5E versions of the Bugbear has a CR of 1, an Ankheg has a CR of 2, a Basilisk has a CR of 3, a Beholder has a CR of 13, and a Solar Angel has a CR of 21. Meanwhile, weaker enemies like Aarakocras or the Bullywug has a CR of 1/4.
Challenge Rating, or CR, is how powerful a monster is, sort of equivalent to the "Level" in MMORPG and other Western RPGs. basically, a party of four adventurers of a certain level should be able to defeat a monster with the same challenge rating. Of course... DM's/GM's tend to never just throw a single monster at your party unless if it's a boss fight, and things like NPC allies and whatnot's going to come into play. To put some of the monsters we cover on this page to perspective, the 5E versions of the Bugbear has a CR of 1, an Ankheg has a CR of 2, a Basilisk has a CR of 3, a Beholder has a CR of 13, and a Solar Angel has a CR of 21. Meanwhile, weaker enemies like Aarakocras or the Bullywug has a CR of 1/4.
A creature's size in D&D falls into one out of six size categories. The monster manual provides specific measurements, but honestly, it's all in the theater of the mind anyway, and it's easier to use a bit of a comparison to real-life creatures.
- Tiny: These are super-small, enough to ride on the shoulder of your average human. Includes sprites and imps.
- Small: Around the size of a dog to a smallchild, I suppose? We get creatures like goblins and giant rats .
- Medium: You are a medium creature. Most humanoids, and creatures that are slightly taller than humanoids like orcs and werewolves.
- Large: Comparable to horses or bears, I suppose. You can ride these, and examples include griffons and ogres.
- Huge: A lot larger than humans. Basically creatures that are tree-sized. Includes dinosaurs, giants and treants.
- Gargantuan: Straight-up Godzilla size, these are the krakens and purple worms and tarrasques of the world.
Alignment is something that most monsters in these monster manuals tend to have a certain type sort of assigned to, although whatever alignment your specific NPC has is honestly going to depend on your GM. Alignment is based on two axes: lawful to chaotic, and good to evil, leading to one out of nine possible alignments: lawful good, neutral good, chaotic good, lawful neutral, true neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful evil, neutral evil and chaotic evil. Click here for a more thorough explanation. And some creatures that don't have intelligence tend to just be unaligned.
A quick list of the creatures that are covered in the 5E Monster Manual so far, for those of you who are curious about what the official alignment and challenge rating of these creatures. Some of them might be surprising, actually!
A quick list of the creatures that are covered in the 5E Monster Manual so far, for those of you who are curious about what the official alignment and challenge rating of these creatures. Some of them might be surprising, actually!
- Aarakocra: Medium humanoid - aarakocra; neutral good; CR 1/4
- Aboleth: Large aberration; lawful evil; CR 10
- Deva: Medium celestial; lawful good; CR 10
- Planetar: Large celestial; lawful good; CR 16
- Solar: Large celestial; lawful good; CR 21
- Animated Armor: Medium construct; unaligned; CR 1
- Flying Sword: Small construct; unaligned; CR 1/4
- Rug of Smothering: Large construct; unaligned; CR 2
- Ankheg: Large monstrosity; unaligned; CR 2
- Azer: Medium elemental; lawful neutral; CR 2
- Banshee: Medium undead; chaotic evil; CR 4
- Basilisk: Medium monstrosity; unaligned; CR 3
- Behir: Huge monstrosity; neutral evil; CR 11
- Beholder: Large aberration; lawful evil; CR 13
- Death Tyrant: Large undead; lawful evil; CR 14
- Spectator: Medium aberration; lawful neutral; CR 3
- Needle Blight: Medium plant; neutral evil; CR 1/4
- Twig Blight: Small plant; neutral evil; CR 1/8
- Vine Blight: Medium plant; neutral evil; CR 1/2
- Bugbear: Medium humanoid - goblinoid; chaotic evil; CR 1
- Bugbear Chief: Medium humanoid - goblinoid; chaotic evil; CR 3
- Bulette: Large monstrosity; unaligned; CR 5
- Bullywug: Medium humanoid - bullywug; neutral evil; CR 1/4
- Cambion: Medium fiend; any evil alignment; CR 5
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