July 11, 2025 • 14 mins
Tired of your players memorizing monster stats? This episode is for you. I crack open Dragon Magazine #10 and take a look at the “Random Monsters” article by Paul Crabaugh. We talk about how to roll up completely original creatures on the fly using tables for hit dice, type, limbs, attacks, colors, and even weird traits like “no head” or “commands wolves.” I walk through how to use this tool to surprise your players, mess with expectations, and bring back that old-school mystery every monster used to have.
#ADnD #RandomMonsters #DragonMagazine
Links:
- Solo AP - https://tinyurl.com/SoloAPEvilDM
- Gotham & Beyond - https://tinyurl.com/GothamPodcast
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:18):
Hey, welcome back to the podcastEvil Dungeon Master Podcast AD
and D Universe. That is right.
I keep calling it the wrong namesince I changed it up a little
bit. Since this is going to be an ADD
Focus podcast for the foreseeable future, what
everybody likes, I wanted to change the name up to just that.
Obviously, I have other podcastsout there that I do one for DC
(00:40):
Heroes, the Gotham and Beyond podcast.
I talk about DC Heroes 3rd Edition on that one because I
love that game and I have my other podcast, I haven't put it
up yet, that's going to be just talking about general stuff that
doesn't fit on this particular podcast.
Sphere, Sphere, whatever you want to call it.
(01:01):
Anyway, ask the DM at the evil dm.com is my e-mail address.
theevildm.com is my website. patreon.com/the Evil DM is my
support page. Anyway, it's Friday, so we're
going to talk a little bit aboutcreating random monsters.
And I'm not talking about wandering monsters, I'm talking
(01:22):
about becoming a mad scientist and creating your own unique,
crazy, wacky monster. Yeah, you heard me.
There is an article in Dragon magazine #10 and we're going
back here in the Wayback Machine1977 October.
(01:43):
So this was a couple months before the Advanced the AD and D
Monster Manual was even released.
They wrote an article in the Dragon Magazine by Paul
Montgomery Kraba and he goes over ways to create your own
monster from scratch using all the charts here.
(02:04):
Now the article starts off with talking about one of the major
problems that a lot of Dungeons and Dragon players had
experienced at the table of yourplayers basically knowing too
much or metagaming so to speak, because they knew the weakness
of one of the monsters in the original supplement books.
(02:25):
Yeah, this was kind of designed for the original supplements,
but hear me out. You could use this for Advanced
Dungeons and Dragons very easily.
It we all know that all the editions prior to basically
second or second still works prior to the third edition at
least all kind of interchangeably work with some
(02:48):
minor modifications to it. So this is not going to be too
much off the chart here for you.So he suggests in the article,
well, if you're running into this problem with your group,
well, here's an answer to solve that issue that your players
will not know what monster they're facing because this box
(03:11):
is going to be so unique. They've never going to seen
they've never seen it before, never encountered it.
So they basically can't metagame, which the term I don't
think metagaming term was the thing in 1977 because the game
was still fresh out there in people's minds.
So I don't think they ran into this issue as far as come
(03:31):
labeling it as anything. And there was no like like rule
so to speak of how you shouldn'tknow this and what you should
know. There wasn't too much deep
diving into characters versus player playing and knowledge
wise. So they would have issues like
this. So they talk a little bit about
(03:56):
how this chart is arranged. Basically, you would arrange it
from what level the dungeon is because everything was dungeon
wise. Now there's a bunch of tables
here. It starts with intelligence and
you can roll the intelligence ofthe creature going from highly
intelligent to unintelligent, and obviously you can modify
that how you want. Then it would go to what type of
(04:18):
creature and it was mammal, reptile or undead, and those
were the three major things thatthey had in the original
supplements and how they classified things.
Now you can go through the Monster Manual these days and
you could change that die roll to include all different types
based on what they have there. In the Monster Manual.
You don't have to just use mammal, reptile, or undead.
(04:42):
And then you have another chart that goes over armor class and
it gives you a random armor class for mammals and reptiles
or even just mammals and reptiles for undead.
They did one D 8 + 1 is the armor class for undead.
So you roll your your your dice for that and get that.
(05:04):
And then you would go over to its alignment.
And unless it was undead, it waslaw, neutrality, and chaos.
Obviously for advanced stars andDragons we have the 9 alignment
so you can split that up howeveryou want.
If you want to randomly do it orjust have evil creatures it's up
to you. And then lists here undead are
always chaotic. Well they were always chaotic
back then. So the next chart has a speed
(05:27):
modifier or the speed of the creature which you could just
you could pick or you could justroll your 1D12 and get what you
wanted there. Next we have Hitdice.
Now what they how they did hitdice for this and you can
change it how you want based on your campaign.
They do it level plus and level references the level of the
(05:50):
dungeon on this only on this table only.
And it's possible to get negative hit dice creatures
which they tell you treat that as 1/2 hit dice creature.
So if you roll on just this chart and say you're doing a
level 1 dungeon for your group and you roll A2 out of the 12,
(06:13):
you get a level +2, which means it would be 1/3.
I'm sorry, a three hit dice creature.
Now if you think that's too powerful, you can obviously
change that to what you want, but this chart is based on the
level of the dungeon. Now if you're doing a dungeon,
you could probably follow this process, or you could take it
and change it to something else that you want.
Maybe put random hit dice numbers in there, creatures that
(06:35):
you want up to a certain point. That's probably what I would do.
Then there's hit dice modification.
When you roll AD 6 and it tells you you can do a + 2 + 1 or just
0 or -1 so you can modify the creature that way as well.
Undead are turned by clerics as if they were clerics of level.
(06:58):
Well it doesn't really apply so you just you can ignore that.
Basically they were talking about how you undead or turned
with 1977 rules special characteristics.
So the hit dice of the creature is listed on the left and there
(07:20):
is a chance of a number of special characteristics the
creature would have. So you can roll and if you hit
that number or higher, you wouldhave that many number of special
characteristics. It has 1-2 and three columns.
So you can under hit that creature of zero to two.
(07:41):
There's an 80%, well, only 20% if you look at it that way, that
it'll have one characteristic ortwo characteristic, 90%, three
characteristics. No, because it says 100%.
So no then we do damage done. Damage done by intelligent
monsters is by weapon type, by unintelligent monsters is by a
(08:03):
bite and semi intelligent monsters is a 5050 chance of
either or so. This one goes by hit dice of
creature that goes one to six and then it goes the level of
the monster, which would be whatlevel of the actual level the
(08:26):
dungeon. And then you could just roll on
that and just to see what it is and you get out of very out of
there. You just pick your or just pick
it, it's up to you. Special characteristics #2 These
special characteristics are organized by type mammal,
reptile, undead. If given, if a given number has
several characteristics group thusly like it'll be all like
(08:48):
slashes around it. It means the exact It means that
the exact characteristics is determined by the level of
monster. So if you have like, you know,
breeze fire turns invisible withslashes in between can run
through walls. You know, it would be like hit
dice 1 to 4, then it'd be 5 to 8, then 9:00 to 12:00.
(09:10):
And that determines which characteristic you do.
So it starts with mammals up until no it.
It's a weird number though because it's 1 to 24 So what is
roll? We'd have 24 sided dice.
(09:31):
So I don't understand that at all, but you could change that
up to how you want. It Has things like hostile to
dwarves, hospital paladins, regenerate certain amount of
damage, Only is hit by silver ormagical weapons.
Reptiles have you know, paralyzation, stone gaze, poison
bite, add 1 hittice to the creature, think basic things
(09:55):
like that. Undead only missiles are
ineffective. Well they were pretty much
uneffective through skeletons sowell I mean half but still
destroyed only by fire. Things like that.
Other characteristics. Now this is talking about the
description of how it looks and this is where it gets a little
(10:15):
bit fun. And then you have to roll AD 100
to see how many characteristics are you get between 1:00 and
3:00. And then you roll on the next
chart and you roll AD 8. You could possibly get a no
headed creature or a creature with three eyes, four eyes,
stock eyes, long fangs, long claws, and you can roll however
many times you want or use the chart that they have.
(10:39):
More on the physical description, we talked about the
size of the creature. The larger the hit dice of the
creature, the less a chance it'sgoing to be a small creature and
be a larger creature. Let's see here.
And it goes by hit dice as well.Then we get number of limbs.
Depending how you want to handlethat, you can do as many as 4
(11:01):
limbs by rolling AD eight in a little chart here.
How many arms does it have? It has two what, 2 tentacles?
Oh geez. And then exterior cover if it's
a mammal can have hair, skin or feathers in their reptiles.
Skin, scales, skin or hair really depends coloring which is
mammals and reptiles only. They just assume that skeleton.
(11:23):
There's a note here that let's see where it is.
Undead do not have a physical description.
Just assume a figure under a cloak if you wish.
So all undead pretty much are under a cloak in the original.
Whatever. Funny coloring, 1 to 20 sided
dye and you can get anything from like Gray to striped and
(11:45):
spotted reptiles all the way from green to striped and
spotted. And if you get striped and
spotted you got to roll twice ignoring.
You can ignore further striped spotting results unless you
really want to, and then you gotto do a base color and then
becomes a secondary color. And you can get it as many times
(12:08):
as you want or you can. Only you can ignore it or not.
It's really up to you. And that's the end of it.
It's not that big, so it's just two pages on page 9 and page 10.
But this should give you enough inspiration to create your own
creatures and call it whatever you want and throw it at your
(12:30):
party just to see what happens. You can have an excellent time
revamping this. If you're Adm like me, who
really enjoys creating and, you know, tinkering with rules and
just designing up your own crazystuff, This is right up your
alley because this is giving youwhat you need and giving you
(12:53):
the, I guess the tool kit, so tospeak, to modify and create
whatever you want and however you want using whatever rule set
here or whatever book you want. You can modify these charts to
your liking until your heart's content.
And you can have awesome monsters that you can roll up,
(13:14):
spend an entire, I don't know, acouple hours during your prep,
just rolling on these charts, having these wacky monsters
because it's, it's interesting. I, I did a little bit of this
before the podcast because I want to see how it worked.
And it just, it, it really is interesting.
I wish I, I, you know, they had more articles like this.
(13:35):
They probably did and I probablydidn't realize it.
And people were like, yeah, there was like 75 articles, man.
You know, you missed them all. Wow.
OK. I mean, I don't remember
anything like this in PolyhedronMagazine.
That's probably one of the ones I had.
Because they delivered it to your house.
We didn't get Dragon Magazine, but Polyhedron actually snuck
under the radar coming to my house because my parents didn't
(13:57):
know what Polyhedron Magazine was.
They just thought it was a role-playing magazine.
They never looked at it. But when it came to, like,
Dragon or Dungeon Magazine. Oh, absolutely not.
That has the Dungeons and Dragons on it.
So, you know, the dungeons and the Dragons you can't have in
the house. But Polyhedron, Yeah, that's
fine. Yeah, that's just about.
That's just a die, right? You know, a dice or something.
(14:20):
Anyway, tell me what you think about the random monsters here
by Paul from Dragon Magazine, number 10/19/77.
You can grab it off of Internet Archive.
All of them are on their Internet Archive, so feel free
to pick them up. With that said, I'm going to
head out. Keep it original, keep it old
school tonight, and God bless everybody.
Hey, welcome back to the podcastEvil Dungeon Master Podcast AD
and D Universe. That is right.
I keep calling it the wrong namesince I changed it up a little
bit. Since this is going to be an ADD
Focus podcast for the foreseeable future, what
everybody likes, I wanted to change the name up to just that.
Obviously, I have other podcastsout there that I do one for DC
(00:40):
Heroes, the Gotham and Beyond podcast.
I talk about DC Heroes 3rd Edition on that one because I
love that game and I have my other podcast, I haven't put it
up yet, that's going to be just talking about general stuff that
doesn't fit on this particular podcast.
Sphere, Sphere, whatever you want to call it.
(01:01):
Anyway, ask the DM at the evil dm.com is my e-mail address.
theevildm.com is my website. patreon.com/the Evil DM is my
support page. Anyway, it's Friday, so we're
going to talk a little bit aboutcreating random monsters.
And I'm not talking about wandering monsters, I'm talking
(01:22):
about becoming a mad scientist and creating your own unique,
crazy, wacky monster. Yeah, you heard me.
There is an article in Dragon magazine #10 and we're going
back here in the Wayback Machine1977 October.
(01:43):
So this was a couple months before the Advanced the AD and D
Monster Manual was even released.
They wrote an article in the Dragon Magazine by Paul
Montgomery Kraba and he goes over ways to create your own
monster from scratch using all the charts here.
(02:04):
Now the article starts off with talking about one of the major
problems that a lot of Dungeons and Dragon players had
experienced at the table of yourplayers basically knowing too
much or metagaming so to speak, because they knew the weakness
of one of the monsters in the original supplement books.
(02:25):
Yeah, this was kind of designed for the original supplements,
but hear me out. You could use this for Advanced
Dungeons and Dragons very easily.
It we all know that all the editions prior to basically
second or second still works prior to the third edition at
least all kind of interchangeably work with some
(02:48):
minor modifications to it. So this is not going to be too
much off the chart here for you.So he suggests in the article,
well, if you're running into this problem with your group,
well, here's an answer to solve that issue that your players
will not know what monster they're facing because this box
(03:11):
is going to be so unique. They've never going to seen
they've never seen it before, never encountered it.
So they basically can't metagame, which the term I don't
think metagaming term was the thing in 1977 because the game
was still fresh out there in people's minds.
So I don't think they ran into this issue as far as come
(03:31):
labeling it as anything. And there was no like like rule
so to speak of how you shouldn'tknow this and what you should
know. There wasn't too much deep
diving into characters versus player playing and knowledge
wise. So they would have issues like
this. So they talk a little bit about
(03:56):
how this chart is arranged. Basically, you would arrange it
from what level the dungeon is because everything was dungeon
wise. Now there's a bunch of tables
here. It starts with intelligence and
you can roll the intelligence ofthe creature going from highly
intelligent to unintelligent, and obviously you can modify
that how you want. Then it would go to what type of
(04:18):
creature and it was mammal, reptile or undead, and those
were the three major things thatthey had in the original
supplements and how they classified things.
Now you can go through the Monster Manual these days and
you could change that die roll to include all different types
based on what they have there. In the Monster Manual.
You don't have to just use mammal, reptile, or undead.
(04:42):
And then you have another chart that goes over armor class and
it gives you a random armor class for mammals and reptiles
or even just mammals and reptiles for undead.
They did one D 8 + 1 is the armor class for undead.
So you roll your your your dice for that and get that.
(05:04):
And then you would go over to its alignment.
And unless it was undead, it waslaw, neutrality, and chaos.
Obviously for advanced stars andDragons we have the 9 alignment
so you can split that up howeveryou want.
If you want to randomly do it orjust have evil creatures it's up
to you. And then lists here undead are
always chaotic. Well they were always chaotic
back then. So the next chart has a speed
(05:27):
modifier or the speed of the creature which you could just
you could pick or you could justroll your 1D12 and get what you
wanted there. Next we have Hitdice.
Now what they how they did hitdice for this and you can
change it how you want based on your campaign.
They do it level plus and level references the level of the
(05:50):
dungeon on this only on this table only.
And it's possible to get negative hit dice creatures
which they tell you treat that as 1/2 hit dice creature.
So if you roll on just this chart and say you're doing a
level 1 dungeon for your group and you roll A2 out of the 12,
(06:13):
you get a level +2, which means it would be 1/3.
I'm sorry, a three hit dice creature.
Now if you think that's too powerful, you can obviously
change that to what you want, but this chart is based on the
level of the dungeon. Now if you're doing a dungeon,
you could probably follow this process, or you could take it
and change it to something else that you want.
Maybe put random hit dice numbers in there, creatures that
(06:35):
you want up to a certain point. That's probably what I would do.
Then there's hit dice modification.
When you roll AD 6 and it tells you you can do a + 2 + 1 or just
0 or -1 so you can modify the creature that way as well.
Undead are turned by clerics as if they were clerics of level.
(06:58):
Well it doesn't really apply so you just you can ignore that.
Basically they were talking about how you undead or turned
with 1977 rules special characteristics.
So the hit dice of the creature is listed on the left and there
(07:20):
is a chance of a number of special characteristics the
creature would have. So you can roll and if you hit
that number or higher, you wouldhave that many number of special
characteristics. It has 1-2 and three columns.
So you can under hit that creature of zero to two.
(07:41):
There's an 80%, well, only 20% if you look at it that way, that
it'll have one characteristic ortwo characteristic, 90%, three
characteristics. No, because it says 100%.
So no then we do damage done. Damage done by intelligent
monsters is by weapon type, by unintelligent monsters is by a
(08:03):
bite and semi intelligent monsters is a 5050 chance of
either or so. This one goes by hit dice of
creature that goes one to six and then it goes the level of
the monster, which would be whatlevel of the actual level the
(08:26):
dungeon. And then you could just roll on
that and just to see what it is and you get out of very out of
there. You just pick your or just pick
it, it's up to you. Special characteristics #2 These
special characteristics are organized by type mammal,
reptile, undead. If given, if a given number has
several characteristics group thusly like it'll be all like
(08:48):
slashes around it. It means the exact It means that
the exact characteristics is determined by the level of
monster. So if you have like, you know,
breeze fire turns invisible withslashes in between can run
through walls. You know, it would be like hit
dice 1 to 4, then it'd be 5 to 8, then 9:00 to 12:00.
(09:10):
And that determines which characteristic you do.
So it starts with mammals up until no it.
It's a weird number though because it's 1 to 24 So what is
roll? We'd have 24 sided dice.
(09:31):
So I don't understand that at all, but you could change that
up to how you want. It Has things like hostile to
dwarves, hospital paladins, regenerate certain amount of
damage, Only is hit by silver ormagical weapons.
Reptiles have you know, paralyzation, stone gaze, poison
bite, add 1 hittice to the creature, think basic things
(09:55):
like that. Undead only missiles are
ineffective. Well they were pretty much
uneffective through skeletons sowell I mean half but still
destroyed only by fire. Things like that.
Other characteristics. Now this is talking about the
description of how it looks and this is where it gets a little
(10:15):
bit fun. And then you have to roll AD 100
to see how many characteristics are you get between 1:00 and
3:00. And then you roll on the next
chart and you roll AD 8. You could possibly get a no
headed creature or a creature with three eyes, four eyes,
stock eyes, long fangs, long claws, and you can roll however
many times you want or use the chart that they have.
(10:39):
More on the physical description, we talked about the
size of the creature. The larger the hit dice of the
creature, the less a chance it'sgoing to be a small creature and
be a larger creature. Let's see here.
And it goes by hit dice as well.Then we get number of limbs.
Depending how you want to handlethat, you can do as many as 4
(11:01):
limbs by rolling AD eight in a little chart here.
How many arms does it have? It has two what, 2 tentacles?
Oh geez. And then exterior cover if it's
a mammal can have hair, skin or feathers in their reptiles.
Skin, scales, skin or hair really depends coloring which is
mammals and reptiles only. They just assume that skeleton.
(11:23):
There's a note here that let's see where it is.
Undead do not have a physical description.
Just assume a figure under a cloak if you wish.
So all undead pretty much are under a cloak in the original.
Whatever. Funny coloring, 1 to 20 sided
dye and you can get anything from like Gray to striped and
(11:45):
spotted reptiles all the way from green to striped and
spotted. And if you get striped and
spotted you got to roll twice ignoring.
You can ignore further striped spotting results unless you
really want to, and then you gotto do a base color and then
becomes a secondary color. And you can get it as many times
(12:08):
as you want or you can. Only you can ignore it or not.
It's really up to you. And that's the end of it.
It's not that big, so it's just two pages on page 9 and page 10.
But this should give you enough inspiration to create your own
creatures and call it whatever you want and throw it at your
(12:30):
party just to see what happens. You can have an excellent time
revamping this. If you're Adm like me, who
really enjoys creating and, you know, tinkering with rules and
just designing up your own crazystuff, This is right up your
alley because this is giving youwhat you need and giving you
(12:53):
the, I guess the tool kit, so tospeak, to modify and create
whatever you want and however you want using whatever rule set
here or whatever book you want. You can modify these charts to
your liking until your heart's content.
And you can have awesome monsters that you can roll up,
(13:14):
spend an entire, I don't know, acouple hours during your prep,
just rolling on these charts, having these wacky monsters
because it's, it's interesting. I, I did a little bit of this
before the podcast because I want to see how it worked.
And it just, it, it really is interesting.
I wish I, I, you know, they had more articles like this.
(13:35):
They probably did and I probablydidn't realize it.
And people were like, yeah, there was like 75 articles, man.
You know, you missed them all. Wow.
OK. I mean, I don't remember
anything like this in PolyhedronMagazine.
That's probably one of the ones I had.
Because they delivered it to your house.
We didn't get Dragon Magazine, but Polyhedron actually snuck
under the radar coming to my house because my parents didn't
(13:57):
know what Polyhedron Magazine was.
They just thought it was a role-playing magazine.
They never looked at it. But when it came to, like,
Dragon or Dungeon Magazine. Oh, absolutely not.
That has the Dungeons and Dragons on it.
So, you know, the dungeons and the Dragons you can't have in
the house. But Polyhedron, Yeah, that's
fine. Yeah, that's just about.
That's just a die, right? You know, a dice or something.
(14:20):
Anyway, tell me what you think about the random monsters here
by Paul from Dragon Magazine, number 10/19/77.
You can grab it off of Internet Archive.
All of them are on their Internet Archive, so feel free
to pick them up. With that said, I'm going to
head out. Keep it original, keep it old
school tonight, and God bless everybody.
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