The Truth about Monsters

A few astute raiders may have noticed that some original Raiders creatures have been adjusted in expanded material, such as The Raiding Seas. I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the discussion of why I decided to update these creatures.

When I started writing Raiders of the Serpent Sea, I came into it armed with the following experience:

1. Decades of playing Dungeon & Dragons–most of which was spent as the Dungeon Master and often creating my own adventures and campaigns.
2. Over a decade of experience making videogames, several of which included official D&D games (BioWare–Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, for example). I also designed the rule system underlying Dragon Age: Origins.
3. Experience with writing game articles for D&D (published in Dragon Magazine, etc.)
4. 20+ published short stories, including a winning entry in the Writers of the Future Contest
5. Playing 5e for a few years, including running an Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign
6. Work on Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy
7. Lots of advice from the Arcanum Worlds folks!

I was admittedly relatively new to 5e. I read what I could and gained a reasonable grasp on the core mechanics. Additionally when I built the monsters for Raiders I contracted an experienced 5e designer to help with them. Overall I’m happy with what we put together.

But I’m also always open to learning new things! My day job sees me helping out on various subprojects. One of these was Chains of Asmodeus. This title saw itself under the scrutiny of the awesome design team at Wizards of the Coast. While we were free to do our own thing with it, they did provide advice & suggestions. Lots of it! And some of that advice helped clarify (to me) some aspects of the monster design process for 5e. Their feedback helped us improve the creatures provided in Chains and then I ran off and updated the Minsc & Boo creatures too.

In some cases the advice was about making a creature more powerful (or weaker) to better reflect its CR rating. Sometimes I simply adjusted the CR instead. At other times it was simply formatting advice. WOTC continues to advance their stat blocks, capitalizing certain words that weren’t capitalized in earlier material and the like.

Inevitably I wanted to apply some of that knowledge to a few of the Raider creatures. And that’s what I’ve been doing. Mostly just little tweaks here and there to bring the abilities in line better with the CR. Gradually I’ll continue to do so, adding more creatures via this newsletter (and occasionally bundling them with upcoming Raider projects.)

If there are particular creatures any of you want to see adjusted, just let me know!

Happy sailing!
-Brent

Revised Creature: Blemys

This time around, I have an iconic creature from the Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign, updated, matching the guidelines I discussed earlier in this newsletter.

If you’d like to weigh in on whether you’d support a Foundry version for Raiders of the Serpent Sea, please fill in the linked survey.