Isaac Minarik

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January Whirlwind Rewards

Individual Links (Nice, Color-Coded, Has Art)Comically Big Master Doc (Clunky, Artless, Printer-Friendly)pt. 1 and pt. 2

The celestial renewal is upon us! What are we at now, 2026? Too high, start over. New year, new world, you know? Let's get weird this year. Stuff You Should Check Out:The Last City - My hated foe and lifelong nemesis, Rae Elderidge, is turning my D&D setting into a kickass webcomic about a bunch of gay criminals trying to start an apocalypse cult.Lorica Clothing - Want to learn about armor? Of course you do, armor rules. Lorica Clothing does really good dives into the history of armor fashio...

Many Mephits Make More Memorable Mischief

Closing out December's elemental rush, we've got mephits! My old mephits had a lot of character, but not enough attention paid to what it's like to run twenty little guys at once. These new mephits should run smoother in large numbers, and just generally work better in their role as nasty little elemental goons, along with giving you more tools to make them feel distinct and memorably mischievous.Also today, I've got an expansion to Cobramode's mutant bug-people, the Noctuoid...

Ageless Armored Aegis-Bearers

Do you need something guy-shaped in your ancient temple, but it doesn't really make sense for a guy to be there? We got stuff for that! Allow me to introduce you to the relic-knight, a celestial guardian that's more or less a superpowered Grail Knight a la The Last Crusade (and also kind of an Elden Ring Tree Sentinel). Or, if celestials are off-theme for your temple, try out one of these 18 variants of Elemental Myrmidon, which also work delightfully as whatever-benders if you just need...

Forget Monkey, Return to the Sea

Wet genies; lorewise they're some of the most powerful individual warriors of elemental chaos, though they don't do as much warring as the dao and efreets. Marid wishes are all about conforming to a traditional wish-recipe; if yours is wonky, they're gonna mash it up until it fits into one of the old standards that they know.Also got a further spread of Cobramode's birdfolk today, the ducky YuanYang, sparrowlike Yosuzume, and peacocking ShuoYu Zhu, along with a big chicken-dragon...

A Breath of Fresh Air

Continuing on with our elemental/genie theme, we've got a spread of the lampdwelling OGs today. I just ran a few of these djinn in one of my favorite encounters ever, and now your players can beat them up too! In addition to four djinn variants, I've got a CR 30 Wind-Dragon here and some rabbitfolk that have a complicated relationship with it.Falling is the order of the day in the Elemental Plane of Air; with no fixed gravity, however, creatures simply fall in whichever direction feels l...

Hotfolk

Elemental chaos often gets portrayed as basically soup, since it's so hard to actually adventure there, but it's worth remembering that it's a whole place full of stuff and more importantly people; here's a spread of firemen ranging from minions all the way up to CR 24.If you want some of those details, btw, they're squirreled away in the Fire Elementals:The Crematorium, as it is most often known outside the plane, offers little in the way of truly solid ground; the lava rain...

Master List 1.47

Bit by bit, goodness and light are devoured from the world as we approach our yearly nadir, by which of course I mean that getting tabletop groups together this month is always a struggle. I have total faith in our collective ability to defeat the dark forces of holiday cheer, however, and to squeeze at least a bit of game time in before the year passes into memory.Stuff You Should Check Out:Battle Wizard - Look, this movie's got fire-breathing kung-fu laserwizards, terrible crab-men, surpri...

December Whirlwind Rewards

Individual Links (Nice, Color-Coded, Has Art)Comically Big Master Doc (Clunky, Artless, Printer-Friendly)pt. 1 and pt. 2

Horns Up, Goat Gang

Mythic satyrs have some minor troubles adapting to a chill fantasy world (calm down, Priapus), so most of the DNA of these comes from maenads and Greek mystery cults, but I think they still feel properly satyrical. These guys are heralds of madness and excess; they're here to party and there's no telling whether anyone will come out the other side the same, or at all.At the helm of this revel we've got a new archfey; Hyrsam, Prince of Fools and first to laugh. He makes for a solid fe...

Blob Falls, Everybody Dies

The '24 MM introduced some new top-level threats, among them the blob of annihilation, an ooze for the ages: this thing is basically a monsterfied natural disaster with a built in loot-delivery mechanism, absolutely chock full of goodies and they're all going away when it's defeated so grab what you can if you get swallowed up in there.Blob of Annihilation

The Anglerwisp - A collaboration with Elven Tower

Wow, a third original monster in one year! That's gotta be some kind of record for me. This deep-sea hunter represents a symbiotic bond between a sunken spirit and an extradimensional predator, which captures wisps both to anchor it to the prime hunting grounds of the Prime Material and to lure or drag in prey. I did the art for this one too, so forgive the generally amateurish aura.This was something I put together in tandem with Arthur from Elven Tower Adventures, as part of their in-depth...

A Colossus Rises

Check it out, the giantest giant robot I've ever made a stat block for. Too big to be moved by mere magic, the colossus is a piece of monumental architecture that takes decades or centuries to construct basically requires divine intervention to get it moving, acting as a potent deterrent against invasion. Which'll make it really embarrassing when your players roll up and knock this thing on it's ass, but that's how it goes.On the other side of the scale slider, we've got some...

Great googly moogly, its a Genius Loci!

It took me four false starts over five years, but I think I've finally figured out how to make a monster feel big well enough to do 3.5's genius loci justice. The core concept is you're fighting the whole landscape in multiple escalating phases, transitioning between combat and dangerous exploration as part of the process. It's flexible too; the Biome Cores lets you scale the difficulty or change the theming fairly easily.Genius LociI've also got these Ciorcal Druids here fro...

Master List 1.46

Hope everyone had a properly spooky Halloween; I've got some too-late spookygame recommendations for you in case you haven't had your fill yet. Also in the broad games department, I played through most of Silksong and Hades 2 this month and both are bangers; big recommend for both of them.Stuff You Should Check Out:The Ghost Game - I ran this lightweight game by Amanda Lee Franck for Halloween this year and it was properly spooky; you play as your teenage self doing some scary minor crim...

November Whirlwind Rewards

Individual Links (Nice, Color-coded, Has Art)Comically Big Master Doc (Clunky, Artless, Printer Friendly)pt. 1 and pt. 2

Loot Drop

I HAVE DONE A NUMBER OF THINGS. BEHOLD.I went through the 2024 DMG and priced every item based on its relative usefulness to player characters. Included in here is a set of index prices for establishing the value of gold, and a quick-and-easy table for treasure rewards by tier of play. I also flagged potentially disruptive items where you ought to take a moment to consider their impact before introducing them to your game. Everything is marked with its source and hyperlinked to its rules text.I&...

Can't keep a good knight down

First off, if any of y'all are on the California Central Coast and interested in armored combat, get at me. It's the off-season for knight-fighting and I'd love to have more people to whack. I've got a number of knight stat blocks for y'all today, each of which is based on someone specific who has knocked me on my ass. Except for The Knight of the Black Rose, that is; so far Lord Soth has rudely ignored all my challenges.KnightsLord Soth

Fell Omens

I feel like my older death knight wasn't awful, but it's an important monster and deserved to be as good as it could be, so here's a refinement and expansion of what we had before; also, I needed to get these polished up so I could riff on them with a certain named knight of the deathly persuasion.Also, corvids! I can't believe I didn't have these quintessential familiar buddies and edgelord wingsteeds ready yet, but the misdeed has been redressed! No magpies or jays yet, but...

Eldritch terrors, low and high

John Tedrick making grimlocks look cool was not on my 2025 bingo card, but it definitely deserved some proper stat blocks to go along with it, along with some new big-ol-brain-boys to boss them around.GrimlocksBrainstealer Dragons

Master List 1.45

Spooky season done snuck up on me this year; I full forgot to save up any Halloween monsters for release, but I've contacted an Etsy witch so hopefully the spirits will manifest a Samhain miracle.Stuff You Should Check Out:Tiger Wizard - Probably my favorite patreon I'm subbed to right now, Tiger Wizard makes postcard-sized one page adventures that he mails me once a month and it's awesome. Incidentally, he also does nerd rap with Epic Levels. His art rules. He designed Dungeon Cats....

October Whirlwind Rewards

Individual Links (Nice, Color-coded, Has Art)Comically Big Master Doc (Clunky, Artless, Printer Friendly)pt. 1 and pt. 2

Library Monsters!

Arcane libraries come up a bunch, and it's often hard to populate them with things that fit in comfortably; here we got a Tome Golem, which can just be a stack of books when not in use, and an archivist grim, a librarian-ghost that can turn the library's books against you.Archivist GrimTome Golem

A new contender appears!

Miska the Wolf Spider is an interesting Prince of Demons, in that he doesn't really have a gimmick or a plan; he's just the best demon, and other demons know that the party is wherever he happens to be. He doesn't have to bully other demons into following them, and in fact doesn't really care if they do. He's just gonna go do off and some demon stuff, and incidentally is gonna have an army of buddies trying to get in on the action.He's been rotting offscreen for almost al...

Bloodsuckers of the Northern Kingdoms

Got some shapeshifting vampiric bat-monsters for your viewing pleasure today; they're emphatically not undead, which can make for some fun uncertainty and investigation potential when something is getting exsanguinated.They're sort of tribal extensions of the same sort of monsters; alps are a strain specced into speed and trickiness, while bruxae are ones that focus on magic and singing.AlpsBruxae

Chardalyn - It's what's for dinner

Evil ice-metal is a hell of a drug, as evidenced by this handsome Xardorok Sunblight fella and his frosty robo-dragon. I've included two phase stat blocks for king grump representing his aspects as a warlock of Asmodeus and as a dwarven super-mutant; you should be good to use just one of them if your players hit Sunblight at the recommended level, but if you've got a large party or they get overleveled, you've got this phase 2 to pull out of your back pocket.For the chardalyn dragons...

Live, Vecna! Live!

All right, folks have been asking for this for years and years now and I finally got this punk together with two stat blocks; one for presenting a mild challenge to a level 20 party and one for if you actually want to make them sweat a bit.Vecna

Master List 1.44

The devil-cults are complete! Finally, I can rest, and by rest I mean making things that aren't cultists. All that remains on the devil book is art now! I've been working on a set of maps for each layer, and just need to do some thumbnailing for the cover; it's been a lot of fun getting to stretch some different creative muscles for this.Stuff You Should Check Out:The Monster Hunter Monster Manual - from Amellwind just got a big update; if you want several hundred big stompy bois to ...