MONSTROUS is the GM's go-to reference for telling better TTRPG stories through monsters. As an "oops, all flavor" book, there are no stat blocks. In it, Kyle "Map Crow" Latino’s lavish illustrations bring to life dozens of classic monsters from myth, legend, and high-fantasy RPGs.
The bad guys in this book have been remixed by the designers at Cloud Curio so their rich backstories tie directly into their motivations and actions. With our book’s robust system agnostic tools, you can build a campaign around them or drop them into an existing one.
Additionally, each type of monster will have a workbook page that Game Managers can use to design their own versions of these flavorful monsters for their homebrew games. MONSTROUS focuses on flavor and narrative impact and is compatible with any fantasy roleplaying game.
Day 4 till Melbourne Showgrounds Supanova
The very classic dnd monster: the Beholder! This little guy was hiding in one of my order boxes and only found him two days ago but now they are ready to go and to be sold at the con which is SO CLOSE now!!
Can’t forget the moment when I accidentally met hooked horrors… I wanted to pass them by unseen, but who knew that there were four of them and a wizard???
Hello there views, just wanted to make a post of some project I have been working on. Savage Cannibals. These people have been marked with a darkness and seem to carry a form of corruption called The Hunger.
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Hello, here is a more refined version of this idea from a while ago. Just formatted in a little print-out-style page. It could definitely still use some tlc, but I love the idea of the Brain in a Jar NPC.
Alright thanks to everyone for your infinite patience 😭 and apologies for lying and saying this would be in March. This one’s going to have a lot of new and returning critters, the first round of year of the dragon figurines and lots of Baldur’s gate mugs including new tumblers!
Really excited and will be sure to post up pics of all the other new stuff coming as well!
Want to tell better ttrpg stories using monsters? Check out MONSTROUS, an "oops, all flavor" book with no statblocks, lavish art, and robust system-agnostic tools that help you craft rich backstories that tie directly into the bad guys' motivations and actions.
Cloud Curio is a 4 person collective designing tabletop roleplaying game supplements both whimsical and strange. Part of that collective is Kyle Latino aka Map Crow. MONSTROUS was an idea that was born from his Building Better Monsters Playlist!
I've seen a lot of people doing their own takes on revised and simplified D&D statblocks, so decided to try my own take
Here's the Golem statblock from the monster manual
And here's my revision:
The stats are nearly basically the same, but the main changes are to the formatting to make it nicer to read.
So, what did I change?
Colours
The monster manual's colour formatting is honestly just a bit ugly, I personally find the browns and reds all meld together a little bit. Sure it's thematic and makes it look older, but I'd personally rather it be just that little bit cleaner.
Damage..... Restorations?
Damage resistance makes you take half damage, damage immunities makes you take no damage, and damage restorations heal you for the amount of damage you would take. Basically this single line with the other damage modifications (so it's easier to reference) replaces the three line Acid Absorbtion trait from the original.
Conditions, Conditions, Conditions
You might notice three new conditions on this statblock: Hasted, Bloodied, and Beserk. More conditions cuts down a lot of unneeded lines in monster statblocks and gives more room to play around with things. Hasted is the most obvious of these new conditions, giving the creature the exact same effects as the haste spell (for this revision, the hast spell would be changed to something along the lines of 'you become Hasted for the duration of the spell). Beserk is also fairly obvious given what it's replacing, I imagine there could be plenty new spells or features built around this condition. And finally Bloodied, coming from older editions, Bloodied is a condition that all creatures get when they get below half health, it doesn't do anything on its own, other features or effects can trigger off of it, as seen here.
Force Damage!
In line with a lot of changes from Monsters of the Multiverse, the magical bludgeoning damage from the original statblock has been replaced with force damage.
Drone??
The statblock's name has also been changed to 'clay drone' rather than 'clay golem' for sensitivity reasons
There's a few other changed I'd probably make that I can't as easily showcase with this statblock, but if people are interested, I can do some more