Welcome back to Angry’s Practical Adventure Design series. I’ve been making this adventure wherein an evil dragonborn sends kobolds to steal a thing from a town and the PCs have to follow the kobolds back to their lair and get the thing back. It’s an example of how to use my Awesome Adventure Building Checklist – which I call the AABCs of Adventure Building. The adventure has three parts – which I call scenes for reasons I’m just kind of sick of explaining and defending. In the first scene, the heroes defend the town from marauding kobolds and defeat the kobolds’ rampaging pet drake. In the second scene, the heroes travel through the rugged hills and make a dangerous descent into a gorge to reach the abandoned mine where the kobolds have made their lair. In the third scene, the heroes infiltrate the mine and try to locate the evil dragonborn before he just yells, “peace out, b$&%es” and flees into the wilderness.

Holy crap, my recap skills are on point today.

In the article immediately preceding this one, I predesigned the third scene. I figured out how it’d play out and what I’d need to put the scene together. In this article, I’m doing a different kind of predesign. A crunchier kind. I’m building a roster of foes for my adventure.

And that’s it. That’s the Long, Rambling Introduction™ done. It’s over. PEACE OUT, B$&%ES!

The Pre-Adventure Draft

Before I start planning the encounters for an adventure I’m designing – which is what I’m doing today; I’m continuing my Practical Adventure Design series – before I start planning the encounters for an adventure, I almost always make a shortlist of baddies with which to build those encounters. I’m sure I’ve explained this before and I don’t feel like explaining it again. So just accept it’s a thing I do. I call that shortlist a roster. Or sometimes rosters. Plural. Because adventures can have more than one. Once I’ve got my roster, building combat encounters is just a matter of mixing and matching the different beasties and designing a battlefield for them to fight on.

Building rosters is a pretty easy process. I start by skimming through the various sourcebooks looking for monsters that are thematically appropriate for the adventure and whose CR falls into the right range and whose traits and abilities will work well together to make strategically and mechanically interesting fights. When I find a creature that might fit the bill, I write its name and CR down. And after I do that for a little while, I realize how little variation there actually is in the official D&D monster design and how it’s impossible to build anything other than kitchen sink dungeons and keep them interesting. And that’s when I decide to just make my own f$&%ing monsters.

For brevity’s sake, I’ll skip the first few steps and jump ahead to creating a roster of custom monsters for my adventure. At least, I’ll start creating it. Because I usually don’t build the whole roster at once. Especially not when I’ve got a long adventure with several different scenes. Those adventures usually need different rosters for the different scenes and sometimes need multiple rosters to cover multiple factions. I also usually hold off building the foes for the big, setpiece encounters and climaxes until I’m actually building those encounters. Those include the boss fights, obviously, but also major encounters with unique creatures or NPCs that I might end up sprinkling in for extra variety.

This adventure only has one major force of antagonists – the kobolds – and they feature in two of the adventure’s three scenes. Well, the kobolds and their pet drakes. In the first scene, the kobolds and their pals attack the town. In the third scene, they defend their lair. To build those scenes, then, I need a good mix of kobolds and drakes.

I want each of those two scenes to fill one or two sessions of play. And the third scene should lean closer to two scenes than one. As a general rule, when I’m trying to get a session or two out of a single scene, I include a climax, two major encounters, and two to four minor encounters. That leads to an average of about six encounters which is pretty close to what the DMG says you can expect out of an adventuring day. And – assuming your minor encounters are actually MINOR – a focused party can usually get through that kind of thing in about three hours. If you assume another two hours – maybe three – of exploring the spaces between encounters and assume some of the encounters are more optional than others and assume a complication or two will arise, that’s one session of really focused play or two sessions of normal play. And that’s why I use those numbers.

Remember, though, that planning an adventure isn’t an exact f$&%ing science and you shouldn’t try to make it one. Fast parties might burn through an entire scene in four hours. Slow parties might drag out the scene for an extra session. It doesn’t f$&%ing matter and you can’t control that s$&%. But the structure I laid out FEELS well-paced regardless of how long it ACTUALLY takes.

Of course, I break my own rules a lot when I design my own adventures. I have a tendency to overbuild and end up with very long adventures. But, look, nobody is f$&%ing perfect. Do as I say, not as I do. I ain’t ashamed to admit that these days, I’m better at designing and explaining that I am at doing. And you, personally, might adjust the strategy to suit your own party’s habits and desired play experience. I shouldn’t have to say this s$&%, but I have a lot of nimrods reading my site these days that think this is an exact f$&%ing science and should be treated as such. They’re mostly the same nimrods who hate being told to make judgment calls and do subjective things. Because they wish they’d been born Vulcan computers.

Long story short, I’ve got somewhere around twelve encounters to fill with kobolds and drakes. If I want to build a good, solid roster, I’m going to need about six to nine different monsters. Allowing for the evil dragonborn adventure boss and the enraged super drake at the end of the first scene and maybe a unique kobold or two for the lair – all of which I’ll build when I need them later – that means I need a roster of five generic baddies to make up the brunt of my encounters.

Factional Thinking

I mentioned above that I build my rosters around the different factions and forces that’ll feature in the adventure I’m building. If I had an adventure in which demons and devils were fighting for control of a holy site and the heroes were trying to prevent either from claiming it, I’d build two rosters. One for the demons and one for the devils. The point of building rosters, after all, is that I’ve got a bunch of building blocks for encounters that are thematically contiguous and mechanically interesting. The baddies should fit together well and they should work together in interesting ways.

Of course, some adventures don’t really lend themselves to this sort of factional thinking. If the party is exploring a ruined temple that’s mostly just filled with random bugs and slimes and creepy crawly dungeon vermin – we call that a kitchen sink dungeon in the business – then the roster is just a list of monsters I can throw wherever. And for those adventures, I usually just use the crappy monsters from the Monster Manual. But that’s a story for another time.

I only need one factional roster for the first and third scenes of this adventure: the kobolds and their drake pals. The second scene will need its own roster, but it’ll be a kitchen sink thing.

In the Angryverse, kobolds are an evil, slave race. They were created by Tiamat – the evil goddess of chromatic dragons – to worship and serve her dragon children. Mostly to slake their avarice. The kobolds gather treasure and food and offer them as tribute to their dragon masters. And they keep the dragon’s lair safe from most minor threats. As a result, they’re greedy, thieving little lizards who care nothing for any creatures other than themselves and their dragon masters. While they were created from the blood of chromatic dragons, Tiamat didn’t imbue them with any great power or great will so that her dragons would never fear a slave uprising. Thus, kobolds are weak and easily cowed, but they are nonetheless dangerous to other humanoids when they have numbers on their side.

Kobolds have draconic blood. They need some kind of thematic and mechanical connection to dragons. So, in the Angryverse, they come in the same five colors that chromatic dragons do and have elemental resistances appropriate to their color. And, like dragons, they tend to be cunning and clever. Some kobolds manifest their draconic blood in other ways too. Some are more physically powerful due to their bloodline. Some rare kobolds even have sorcerous abilities due to their draconic bloodline. Those kobolds are afforded great respect because of their magical abilities. Maybe the dragonborn is a sorcerer. Maybe that’s why the kobolds accepted him so readily.

Drakes, meanwhile, are natural reptiles. Basically big ole fantasy lizard creatures. Because there are many different varieties and because some have natural, elemental affinities and abilities, people call them drakes and assume they’re related to dragons. They aren’t. But that hasn’t stopped kobolds from using them as mounts, beasts of burden, hunting creatures, and guards.

My roster represents a single tribe of kobolds. So I need to pick a color and an elemental affinity for them. They live in the hills, so red and blue would be most appropriate. But everyone does red kobolds with fire affinity and lightning affinity is kind of boring. It’s just a ranged, single-target zap most of the time. I want something splashier and flashier – for reasons I’ll reveal below – so I’m going to dub this the Black Talon tribe and play with acid.

Racial Thinking

I like to follow the D&D 4E approach to monster design. I like to make several different varieties of the same creature that I can mix and match. With humanoids, the varieties usually represent different combat roles or different kinds of training or even different castes. But the different varieties still have to feel like they’re members of the same race. That means I figure out how the race – as a whole – fights. I figure out some kind of strategic theme that I can express in one or more racial traits or abilities. And then, I figure out how each specific variety contributes to or changes or even subverts that strategic theme.

The Black Talon Kobolds have acid resistance. But that’s not a defining trait or strategy. It’s just a thing. What really defines kobolds is the fact that they’re clever, cunning, and dangerous in large numbers. In the Monster Manual, that’s reflected in the Pack Tactics trait.

Pack Tactics. The kobold has advantage on an attack roll against a creature if at least one of the kobold’s allies is within 5 feet of the creature and the ally isn’t incapacitated.

There’s nothing WRONG with that ability. But, strategically, it’s kind of bland. It only encourages one type of behavior in the kobolds – gang up. And there’s only one thing players can do about it once they understand it – don’t get ganged up on. Kobolds mob; don’t get mobbed.

I want a more interesting alternative. But, I’m conscious of the fact that there’s going to be a lot of kobolds on the battlefield. I mean, they win with their overwhelming numbers, right? So whatever I come up with can’t involve keeping track of a lot of things or making a bunch of decisions. It’s got to be binary. Something that’s either on or off. And it’s got to be easy to tell whether it’s on or off. Here’s my idea. The wording needs some work, but it’s at least understandable:

Pack Tactics. Kobolds gain advantage on attacks when there are more of the kobold’s allies adjacent to the target than the target’s own allies.

Yeah, it’s similar to the original Pack Tactics trait, but it has a neat numbers game that gives the players a few different ways to counter it. First, they can try to avoid getting mobbed. Second, they can mob the kobolds. If the players’ characters clump up such that the kobolds can’t outnumber them in any single engagement, they can prevent the kobolds from gaining their tactical advantage. Third, they can use forced-movement spells, abilities, and combat actions – like thunderwave and the shove attack – to force kobolds out of the engagement and deny them a tactical advantage. And, obviously, the kobolds – if they have the right abilities – can play similar games. Which means we have some things to build variations around.

Variations on a Theme

I’ve given up using the custom monster creation rules in the DMG. And, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that already. I have my own system for creating custom monsters. And I’m going to use it to build three different kinds of Black Talon Kobolds.

The kobolds are journeyman tier monsters because this is a journeyman tier adventure. And the Black Talon Kobold warriors generally organize themselves into gangs. They usually outnumber the PCs two-to-one. So they’ll show up in groups of six to ten in major encounters because I build my adventures for three to five heroes.

Kobolds present a low-to-average threat. They aren’t particularly hardy, so they won’t be packing a lot of hit points. And their attacks probably won’t be very accurate as they’ll be relying on their Pack Tactics to balance the equation. Their other stats – damage and AC – will be average for their level. They live in a mine and they’ve been digging up ore and making their own equipment and they’re industrious and clever. No skins and spears for the Black Talons. And giving them decent weapons will let me bring their damage up to an acceptable range without relying on multiattack which will greatly amplify the effects of Pack Tactics. Particularly because, during the first round or two – before the PCs reduce the kobolds’ numbers – the kobolds will probably be able to mob the players effectively.

The Black Talon Kobold Warrior represents the standard kobold combatant. Just an attack and Pack Tactics. But what about variations on the theme? I’ve got two ideas. Which is good because I need two ideas.

First, D&D 4E had these neat kobold alchemists that lobbed pots of alchemical crap at the PCs. Now, I’m not a fan of the mad-bomber alchemist bulls$&% that infests Pathfinder and Eberron and Word of Warcraft. That steampunk or spellpunk or whatever-bulls$&%-punk-you-want-to-call-it wackiness can f$&% right off. But I like the idea of kobold alchemists with staff-slings lobbing pots of sticky goo and acid and other alchemical concoctions at their foes.

The reason I specifically bring up acid and glue is that both of those options work well with the basic mob-and-outnumber strategy. Assuming the acid bombs do splash damage to adjacent creatures, they work very well against PCs who clump up to outnumber the kobolds. And because the kobolds are themselves resistant to acid damage, they’ll take some damage from that strategy, but not much. Glue pots can be used to pin PCs down, preventing them from joining engagements or keeping them isolated or preventing them from engaging with the Slinger in melee.

Apart from that, the Slingers are interesting partners for the Warriors just because they used ranged attacks. Ranged attackers stay on the edges of the fight and try to take up protected positions behind obstacles and barricades. They require melee PCs to move to attack them and ranged PCs to move to get a clear line of sight. That encourages the PCs to isolate themselves to deal with the Slingers, which means they’re vulnerable to mobs of Warriors.

I could throw in a sorcerer-type for the third variation, but, in the Angryverse, those are super rare. A tribe of kobolds almost never has more than one, single sorcerer. And the dragonborn already fills that role. Instead, I want a hardier, tougher kobold melee combatant. Especially something that can play with battlefield positioning to help – and subvert – the pack tactics thing.

Do you know what a mancatcher is? It’s a polearm made specifically to lasso and trap a target so you can pull them around. Or pull them off a horse. Here’s a picture:

Neat, right?

If the kobolds have trained drakes, they’d need a way to lasso and drag the drakes around while they’re breaking them. Reptiles are not particularly domesticable and kobolds probably aren’t the gentlest of masters. And the kobold drake trainers can use their catchpoles to drag humans around too.

The Black Talon Kobold Drakemasters are stronger, hardier kobolds wielding mancatchers. Their primary tactical contribution is to snare PCs and drag them out of engagements, isolating them. They can break up clumps of PCs and, meanwhile, while they control the PC with one hand on the mancatcher, they can draw their sharp, hooked goads and stab the PC with their other hand. Because they’re mechanically tougher and they tend to appear with drakes as often as with other kobolds – and to provide some numerical variation – I’m going to promote them to party organization. They show up in similar numbers to the PCs.

And that gives me three variations of kobolds I can mix and match to create some interesting combats and keep the players on their strategic toes. Now I need to breed me some different kinds of drakes.

Lizard Breeding – At Least It’s Not Watching Ostrich’s F$&%

Hopefully, you’ve noticed that I loved – I f$&%ing LOVED – D&D 4E’s monster design. 4E had a lot of neat, evocative, and strategically interesting creatures. And its drakes were a lot of fun. I bought a crap-ton of drake miniatures back in the day and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of them. The most common types of 4E drakes were little velociraptor-type monsters. Two-legged lizard-beasts with sharp claws and teeth. Fun stuff. And I’m shamelessly ripping that s$&% off here.

Unlike kobolds, the different drake varieties aren’t all members of the same race. Each kind of drake is a unique creature. So I don’t need a unifying theme. But mechanically, they have to work together with the kobolds. At least, they have to have some synergy. And because they’re just dumb lizards, they need to be less complex. Well, not too much less.

I’ll start with a small, simple drake. It’s just a clawing, biting little dinosaur monster. It needs to work well on its own and it needs to enhance the kobolds’ pack tactics. What I’ll do is make it really mobile.

The Leaping Drake can pounce, first of all. It has scythe-like rear talons like a deinonychus or a velociraptor, but it can only use them if it can leap at a foe. In other words, it has to move to use them. We’ll also allow it to disengage or dash as a bonus action. That’ll let it quickly ping-pong around the battlefield. And that will also let it disengage from targets and join engagements at the kobolds’ commands to give them a numerical edge.

Since the kobold slinger is more of a battlefield controller than a true ranged combatant, we’ll use the second drake to fill the role of a pure ranged attacker. The Acidspitter Drake spits globs of acid. Hence the name. It’s dangerous on its own, but the splash damage is especially dangerous when the party clumps up.

The Acidspitter Drakes are pretty powerful and tend to fight in smaller numbers than the kobolds, so I’m going to build them as party critters. And to differentiate them from the kobolds further, I’ll give all the drakes a lower AC but more hit points. They’re hardy, but they don’t wear armor.

I am a little concerned that the Black Talon Kobold Drakemasters don’t really have much to connect them to the drakes. When I think back to 4E, I remember that the kobold slinger-alchemists had a third kind of alchemy bomb. It was this sickeningly stinky goo that imposed a penalty on a target. I don’t want something like that, precisely, and I don’t think the slingers need another option, but what if the Drakemasters had pots of goo they could use to enhance the drakes. Basically, a pot of barbecue sauce that would attract a drake to a specific target and give them some sort of frenzied damage boost. That seems like fun. Maybe the party can loot some from the corpses of the Drakemasters and use them to drive the drakes to attack the kobolds. Wouldn’t that be cool?

The Black Talon Kobold Roster

With that, I have a nice roster of basic monsters I can use to populate two out of the three scenes in my adventure. I know I didn’t talk about every attack and every stat. I didn’t go through the design in detail. But I’ll show you the final stat blocks. Final-ish anyway. I’m not entirely, 100% happy with some of the wordings. But frankly, the wording in 5E drives me f$&%ing bonkers anyway. The official content is unnecessarily precise and unnatural and legalistic. Especially given the noises Crawford et al are always making about purposely keeping everything vague to respect GMs’ freedoms. I like to keep my descriptions brief and natural and trust GMs to make the call when weird things happen.

Usually, I don’t have to worry about that f$&%ing issue because I’m the only one running the adventures I write, but this case is different, isn’t it? That said, it’s not like I’m going to end up doing a final write-up on this s$&%y little adventure and publishing it. As far as I know.

Anyway, here’s the stat blocks. Such as they are. See you next time for more adventure design “fun”.

The Black Talon Kobold Roster

By the way, you can probably tell that I’ve been working on my own monster stat block format that takes into account my various house rules and special ways of doing things. Nice, right? But if you want an easy way to design monsters using my system, you can check out this stat block generator made by Angry Patron Hokieboat. It uses my stats and terminology. Not only that, it also incorporates some awesome ideas developed by Angry Patron AndruC about assigning specific roles to different variations of monsters which you can see detailed in this Google Doc he made. They’re both amazingly useful tools and I recommend them both. And I’m really grateful to Hokieboat and AndruC for building them.