OOC ITEM'S NAME
A pick-up-and-play d20 item system for WoW RP.
A pick-up-and-play d20 & item system for WoW RP.
creation WALKTHROUGH
This page is a step-by-step guide for creating your own monsters using the Challenge Tier system in the Compendium! If you're ever lost, be sure to check out the pages under the "Creature Collection" tab and review each section!
Bane of pumpkin patches and small business owners everywhere.
So you're ready to DM your first event! Your players have their sheets all set up, a story premise and an adventure planned. Great! Now all you need are enemies to fight.
​
Enemies are easily created using the Challenge Tier system - numerical ranks for each enemy that designate how much HP they have and how much damage they deal.
​
Let's focus on a simple adventure for now - a poor farmer in Duskwood is looking to have some oversized spiders cleared out of his pumpkins, and has hired on your group to do so!
​
You'll need to give your spiders some health and some enemy abilities. Here's how!
MONSTER CREATION
The first question you'll need to ask yourself is, 'in character, how tough are these spiders?' Are they pesky nuisances, squishy-bodied bugs that won't leave the farmers of Duskwood alone? Or are they nightmarish arachnids with beady eyes and slavering jaws, ready to spring on the next unwary adventurer that crosses their path? Challenge Tiers will discern this for you.
Challenge tiers can rank from CT ½ to CT 8. ½ are pipsqueak minions, while 8 is an end-of-the-line, tough as it comes boss.
If you check out the page we've written for a template's sake, we've already got some spiders pulled up for you and ready to go!
But let's say you have something else in mind for these spiders. Maybe you have a plot point you want them to expand on - maybe these are mutated spiders, affected by the Forsaken blight, and they've sprouted appropriate appendages! You can change up their attacks and make them something completely different; we have a metric ton of attacks available on the Monster Talents page.
When you set up your spiders to attack with pre-made talents, be sure to follow the guidelines outlined on the challenge tier page - each enemy has three points that can be allocated; some talents are 1 point, some are 2 and even less will take all 3. Enemies can have up to two bonus points to make them even more powerful, and each bonus point raises their HP by another 7HP.
​
Remember that the HP of each enemy will go up by 7 for each tier they clear. CT ½ will have 3HP, CT 1 will have 7, CT 2 will have 14, etc., etc.! If they get another point in their upgraded talents, they get another round of expanded health.
So - you can have a CT 3 spider with 21HP and the Web and Climb talents. That's a nice looking spider!
It deals damage when you as the DM rolls accordingly:
1 = 1 Damage; 2-7 = 2 Damage; 8-13 = 3 Damage; 14-18 = 4 Damage; 19-20 = 5 Damage​
​
-or-
​
You can have a CT 2 spider with Web, Climb and Poison, giving them an extra round of HP - bringing it to 21HP, the same as a CT 3!
This increases the spider's HP and its number of abilities, but not their damage dice - they still do as much damage as a CT 2.
Which is, if you don't recall:
1 = 0 Damage; 2-7 = 1 Damage; 8-13 = 2 Damage; 14-18 = 3 Damage; 19-20 = 4 Damage
​
A best practice is to have several 'minion' spiders (several CT 2 or 3s) and one big boss spider (maybe a CT 4 or 5, depending on the size of the group that you're DMing for!) You can have a 'boss rush' event, or a gauntlet of obnoxious CT 1s and ½s. It's up to you!