Page 5 - Ultimate-Bestiary-Revenge-of-the-Horde-5E

Foreword Instructions

I was 19 when I encountered my rst group of goblins. e party As with all of e Game Master’s Toolbox, this book is here to
entered the barrow and there they were, milling about, doing that make your job a little easier, so you can focus on creating awesome
goblin thing of waiting around in a perfectly square chamber for adventures for your players, and not have to devote time, for
adventurers to kill them and make o with their treasure. When I example, on working out the ner points of bugbear culture.
run a game, thought I, things will be di erent; my monsters will ooze e main body of the book is split up into the main monstrous
character, they will have lives and agendas of their own, each one races (some with subraces), each of which has a rundown of its
will be di erent! cultural details, and a wealth of stat blocks running the gamut from
Sure enough, my time came, and the party faced... a handful of the lowliest kobold to the mighty hill troll.
orcs, milling about in a perfectly square chamber, waiting for At the back of the book, you’ll nd additional stat blocks for beasts
adventurers to kill them and make o with their treasure. Later on, associated with one or more of the monster types, some monster-
our warlord did purchase a goblin from an antiques dealer, only cra ed items we’re sure your players can devise some endish use
to sell him on to another half a world away, but that’s a story for for, rules for playing as monsters, and maps to use in encounters
another day. with these creatures.
My DMing skills improved over time, but it remains true that it As well as all that, there’s a few little time-savers for running the
can be di cult to inject monsters with personality more than a game itself, with loot drop and encounter tables to give a bit of
sack of hit points when one has so many other balls in the air; variety at a moment’s notice, and lair and trinket tables to add
the world’s history, the characters’ motivations, the over-arching some avor to your adventures with minimal prep.
schemes, trying desperately to steer the party, like a herd of cats,
towards the interesting bits. Such is our burden. Acknowledgements
So then, this book was conceptualized as a resource to give some We’d like to say a massive thank you to all of our Kickstarter
of the most commonly encountered monsters a bit more pizazz, backers. Without you veritable horde of gamers, we wouldn’t be
making it easier to answer the question of what the goblins were able to do what we do. We hope you have as much fun using this
doing before the party arrived, how they might have a ected the book as we did making it!
environment, and why they might interact with the characters a
certain way.
At the same time, we also wanted to increase the variety of these
monsters, to keep things fresh and interesting for those players
who might have all of an orc’s hit points, defenses, and attacks
memorized by now, and to bump up the challenge a little if you
wanted to keep those traditionally low-level monsters around for
just a bit longer. To that end, you’ll nd over 100 new monsters
within these pages, each of which I’m sure is dying for the chance
to meet your party.
e goblin was called Dogberry, by the way. Not my decision...

-Ralph Stickley
January 2017

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