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Tome of Adventure Design Chapter 2: Rolling Up Random Monsters

Once your players have been at it for a while, they know the tricks. Fire stops the troll from regenerating. Constructs don’t care about poison. The surprise is gone. Chapter 2 of the Tome of Adventure Design is about 100 pages of tables for building monsters your players have never seen, and in this video I rolled up five of them.

This is part 2 of 5 in my Tome of Adventure Design series.

How the monster tables work

First you roll a monster type. Each type has its own section with a bit of folklore background, some advice on making it feel different from the usual version, and its own set of tables for appearance, abilities, and behavior. After that, every monster rolls on a shared set of tables for attacks, special defenses, and distinctive traits.

My five rolls came up giant, vermin, elemental, humanoid, and beast.

The giant

My giant willingly guards a magical location. Its skin is stretched tight and it has claws. Since it’s been living next to all that magic, I rolled on the magical abilities table too: it can shrink down to human size whenever it wants, which makes a great way for it to walk into town unnoticed.

For combat it got a spiked headbutt, a constricting body attack, and a spell that drains ability scores until the target dies. That last one could make the encounter brutal or merely nasty, depending on how hard you set the save. For defenses it can turn into an air vortex, it has a signature gem somewhere on its body, and it has some tie to bandits.

The vermin

This was my favorite roll: sleep-inducing roaches. They stalk prey from a distance, waiting for the right moment. And they don’t crawl or fly to get around. They infest other monsters and ride along inside them.

So picture this. The roaches put you to sleep, lay eggs in you, you start feeling sick a few days later, and then the larvae come out. Gross, and very memorable. They also have two small horns, a club-ended tail, the ability to cast illusions to throw off attacks, and they camouflage themselves with whatever’s around them.

The elemental

My elemental comes from the plane of poison. It’s bound into an item, genie-in-a-lamp style, and serves someone else. Whoever wants its help has to make a sacrifice. It’s also plotting against old enemies the whole time, which makes me think it wants to overthrow whoever is holding its leash.

It sprays an ice blast in a cone, can freeze a target in place with a spoken word, can turn incorporeal, flies, and is tied to revenge. That poison elemental comes back in chapter 3, too.

The humanoid

The humanoid tables had me roll on the beast table for a base animal. I got a mammoth, so now I have mammoth men. The next roll said to give it a human head, and I overruled it, because a big mammoth head is way cooler. You can do that. It’s your game.

These mammoth folk are allied with actual mammoths and travel in raiding parties hitting nearby villages. They trample, gore with their tusks, hurl fire with their minds, heal when they take fire damage, can turn into full mammoths, fight in organized units, and have some connection to a particular gem.

The beast

The beast table gave me a baboon. The book suggests rolling a second animal and blending the two, and I got a deer. A baboon with antlers was tempting, but I kept it a plain baboon and let the later tables do the work.

Good call, because it eats luck. Facial tentacles grab a target and drain their luck, which could mean disadvantage on their next few rolls. It carries its young in a pouch, shifts between planes, takes half damage from non-magical weapons, sees through solid objects, and lives in troops with sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. A militarized troop of luck-eating baboons. At low levels, that’s a real problem.

Using random monsters at your table

  • Roll the type first and read that section’s intro. It often gives you the hook before you roll anything else.
  • Let earlier results steer later rolls. My giant guards a magical place, so I rolled on the magic table.
  • Overrule results that fight the idea. I dropped the human head and the antlers.
  • Tie monsters to your adventure. The poison elemental and the gem-linked giant both give me threads to pull later.
  • Stat them for your system afterward. None of this is tied to rules, so it works for Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, Shadowdark, or whatever you play.

Video chapters

Get the book

Tome of Adventure Design (Revised) by Matt Finch is available as a PDF on DriveThruRPG, or in hardcover and PDF straight from Mythmere Games.

The DriveThruRPG link is an affiliate link. If you buy through it, I get a small reward at no extra cost to you.

The rest of the series

Until next time, roll well, my friends.