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“Give me an army of goblins over a Sehrabaddian dragon any day. A death by the first option is painful, yes, but you really don’t want the alternative.” Malafin, ranger.

The key to making an interesting stat block is to assign your creature attributes which follow its design. Assigning random damage immunities, actions, and reactions just for the sake of making a hard enemy to beat doesn’t make sense. Put a little work into the enemy that could TPK!

 I’m kidding. Don’t TPK. 

Let’s use the goblin as an example. Maybe it’s part of a goblin tribe that lives in the heart of a volcano. It could have a resistance to fire damage, since its species has become acclimated to living there. That way, if you set a fight with it next to a pool of lava, the party can’t easily dispose of it by chucking it in. Go for the fire damage immunity, too, if you think it’s necessary. It’s all about crafting a well-balanced encounter that’s not too easy, but won’t kill everyone. 

A simple spear or claw attack is a little boring for this goblin, too. What about it is unique enough that you can utilize as an attack? Maybe it has access to a fireball spell, or maybe it has an ability called Simmering Skin, where any creature that comes in contact with its skin takes fire damage. Then you can give the goblin a charge action, where it’ll try to ram itself into a character, so they take damage from Simmering Skin. 

It’s a little goofy. You can lean into the more absurd side of monsters, or aim for the classic low-level realism. Either way works, because it’s a TTRPG, which is an inherently goofy genre. 

This can be applied to any part of the stat block. At the end of the day, what’s most important is that the fight fits that sweet spot, of not too difficult, but not too easy. Scale it based on its placement, too. Is it the final boss? A quick encounter? Keeping this in mind, you’ll be able to easily craft a fun encounter for everyone at your table. 

By Inti Navia

intinavia.com

The Anukharan tomb glittered with the wealth of a dead kingdom. Gold spilled across the room, accompanied by jewels, stones, necklaces, swords, and apples made of diamond. Cade collapsed to the ground. After all they had gone through; trials and tribulations, monsters and magic… they had reached the legendary lost treasure vault. 

After an encounter-packed adventure, the characters will be expecting something to reward them for their efforts. Without a proper reward, the players will quickly lose interest, and lose a sense of accomplishment. It can be tempting to write the encounter with the goblin and have it be over and done with, but adding a chest of loot that the goblin collected is the critical cherry on top for the adventure. 

Don’t overinflate the valuables of the world, either. If you’re on session one of a campaign, give them a taste of what’s to come. Ten gold pieces. A valuable necklace. Don’t dump money on the players, because that erases the worth of all the treasure yet to come, since the GM would inevitably have to either keep making bigger payouts or the treasure to come is less so than the one the characters just got. 

5e has a copper to platinum monetary system, but anyone who’s played a game in their life knows that everyone uses gold. Keep in mind that gold is still valuable, though. Don’t let it completely replace silver in terms of worth. The big treasure hordes of gold traditionally come at the end of the campaign, or sometimes after grueling boss fights. 

Let yourself get more creative than just gold. Spice up the treasure chest with amethysts worth a certain amount of gold. Ancient artifacts. Precious jewels. They all mean pretty much the same thing (lots of gold!) but differentiating the treasure makes it feel special and unique. 

Magic items are a great way to shake up the reward system, too. 5e and other TTRPGS have a lot of magic items in their books that GMs can easily draw from, but it’s  pretty easy to make one yourself. Just think of a traditional weapon or piece of armor in the game and give it a “superpower”. Swords can’t fly. Well, now this one can! Helmets can’t let the wearer see in the dark. Now it can! Your items don’t have to be complicated. Your players will appreciate anything you give them. 

As we make our Goodberry Adventure Zines, one thing Ivo Hoying and I have been trying to keep in mind is where we give the magic items. Giving them at the end of the adventure is an option, if it’s really short, but it also doesn’t let the characters use the item in the fights. Try to find a way to reward your players with an item early on, so they can use the piece of treasure they’ve been given. 

Remember, the real treasure wasn’t the friendships we made along the way. The real treasure was the treasure. 

By Inti Navia

intinavia.com

“A good adventure means a menagerie of monsters, a rewarding quest, and ideally coming home alive.” Malafin, ranger. 

Creating a TTRPG adventure is, at the same time, both easier and more difficult than it sounds. It’s one thing to have a good idea for a story, but another to make it able to fit the genre that it’s in. 5e is unfortunately not a very narrative-driven game. The GM could have an idea of where they want the story to go, but at the end of the day, the players are going to decide what they want to do. That’s why when you’re creating a game, you have to always keep that in mind as you build it. 

Rather than railroad players, make an environment where the decisions they make will align with how you want the story to progress. In our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine, The Encroaching Wood, the setting of a magical forest spreading from ancient ruins is the center of the story. That’s why the characters are in the area, and that’s the clear thing there is to do. It’s not a broad world in which they arrive in town and the NPCs keep mentioning an encroaching wood (A.K.A the GM desperately trying to get the players on track), and the characters aren’t being forced into it, either. 

They arrived in town because they heard rumors of the wood, and the baron can reward them if they go and stop it. The goal is for the characters to play your game not because they feel like it’s what the GM would want, but rather because they actually want to play it. 

Another key to making an adventure is combat. The combat needs to be exciting. It’s one thing to put a guy who does a lot of damage in an empty room, but another to make that fight engaging. If the description mentions the environment, and what kind of natural terrain and potential weaponry the characters can utilize, then one of them will probably use it, and have more fun fighting the BBEG. 

The villain’s job isn’t necessarily to hit hard, either. Take into account its range, vulnerabilities, and unique attacks. There’s a million bite attacks out there, so it doesn’t hurt to go one step further and give the villain a unique trait that enables it to have a more interesting way of dealing damage. 

The key to writing a TTRPG adventure is primarily an engaging setting, and engaging combat. All you need is one idea to blend those two attributes into an awesome encounter for everyone at the table. 

By Inti Navia

intinavia.com

“Aye, been livin’ all my life in the Wöisaen Steppes, I have. Nice enough place, I s’pose. Just don’t go into those ruins at night.” Orda, Wöisaen farmer. 

The Wöisaen Steppes (pronounced woe-shen) is the setting of our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine, The Encroaching Wood. It’s a large region within the wider Reach of Sehrabadd, with the terrain primarily looking like, well, a steppe. Dark green grass, rolling hills, and whipping wind. 

When Ivo Hoying and I sat down to figure out where we wanted our adventure to take place, we picked our relatively under-developed area of the map. Keep in mind, when I say “under-developed”, I don’t mean in terms of infrastructure or anything literal. I mean the idea for the region was under-developed. We knew we had a large grassland area taking up a big chunk of Sehrabadd, but we didn’t know what was in there. 

The name, Wöisaen Steppes, obviously draws inspiration from the real world. Not just from the Mongolian Steppe, but from Irish culture, as well. I remember looking at pictures of the Irish countryside, and thinking “Huh. Some parts of this country look a little like Mongolia.” Then we proceeded to combine the two. 

Setting The Encroaching Wood in The Wöisaen Steppes forced us to think more about the place. Are there cities? Who’s hiring your party? Some kind of ruler? What do the locals think of this emerging threat? 

You don’t always think about things like that when you’re making a fantasy world. You paint the broad strokes and think it’s the finer details, until the time comes in your writing where you have to think about the finer details, and you draw a blank. 

Try to keep that in mind when you make things like this, but also put yourself in a situation where it’s forced out of you. It’s cool to have areas of your world for the sake of having them, but it’s way cooler if your story takes place on that forbidden island full of dragons, rather than the capital kingdom of such and such. The Wöisaen Steppes feel alive, now, rather than just a name on a map, and that’s what a TTRPG world, or any kind of medium, demands. If there’s one section totally developed, and the rest just references, then it feels like a dead world. 

Keep an eye out for The Encroaching Wood, dropping on Goodberry Press’s Patreon for those subscribed to the “adventurer” tier. 

By Inti Navia

The Walcoth Abbey was the center of religious significance for the Aisling Fief, and known further beyond throughout the Wöisaen Steppes. One day, a monk angered their patron god Veridos, and he made known the full fury of his forest. Now only wood and vines pray inside the abbey’s crumbling walls. Author unknown. Writings discovered by “Doc”, adventurous tinkerer. 

Our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine covers the premise of an ever-expanding forest spreading from the ruins of a long-abandoned abbey. When we sat down to write these zines, we didn’t completely start from scratch. There was an older inspiration!

Ivo Hoying, a member of our Goodberry team, had dozens of old adventures he had written for fun. When we decided to start creating monthly one-shots, we started with converting his old adventure into one we could use for the zine. Titled The Encroaching Wood, it’s very similar to how it was when it was originally written. What we did was swap out the names of characters and places to match our setting, tinkered with the stat blocks to update them to the newest version of 5e, and cut out some of the “fluff”. 

When cutting it’s important to find a middle ground: cut too much, and it looks bad, is confusing to the GM, and takes away from the experience of the adventure. Cut too little, and the zine becomes very, very long without needing to be, the content on pages bleed over confusingly, and descriptions go on needlessly for a long time. It took some days of editing and cutting and adding to find that perfect sweet spot, but after enough trial and error, we did find it. 

Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating campaign (or in this case, one-shot) settings. If you’ve been playing the game a while, chances are you have some idea buried in your computer or in a scratched up notebook in the back of your closet. Take a look through that. Even if the language needs work, the idea will be there, and you can use that as the foundation for a great story. Even if you haven’t written anything for a TTRPG, take a look through that old journal of yours, or your sticky notes, or anything you use to jot down whatever’s in your head. More often than not, than can jumpstart an idea for an adventure faster than trying to come up with a brand new one. 

We avoided writing around artwork. Rather than basing an adventure off of artwork we knew we one hundred percent had access to, we decided to create what we wanted to create, and worry about the accompanying art later. Trying to limit yourself based on your perceived ideas of what you do or don’t have access to can quickly suffocate your work, bleeding the creative juices out of it. 

Our upcoming Goodberry Adventure Zine, The Encroaching Wood, is the result of our team’s dedicated effort to provide you with something special to play around the table. See you soon. 

“I looked into that glowing red eye of his and knew, ‘boy, that guy’s crazy.’ And I know crazy! If the Reaper still actually does what Veridos wants him to do, then I’ll eat my shoe! If I had any left to eat, that is. My hat, maybe?” Rabidus, mad sorcerer.

The Reaper of Veridos was created for The Encroaching Wood, the upcoming Adventure Zine for characters at 3rd level. The statblock is attached below. This plant monster is the servant of a nature god, gone a little mad. It was built as the final boss of this zine, because it is the leader of an army of plant monsters inside of this ever-growing forest. 

An excerpt from the zine: Standing before the steps is a being made of vines: black tendrils, writhing together to form a vaguely humanoid shape with a singular red, glowing eye. 

A “contradiction” you may notice within its statblock is that the Reaper is resistant to fire, but the trait Verdant Regeneration is undone if it takes fire damage. We figured that players would eventually conclude that fire is the best method for exterminating plants, and so to stop it from regenerating each turn, they would try setting it on fire. 

The Reaper of Veridos IS a boss, though! It can’t be defeated so easily. In the end, yes, fire is the best way of dealing with this guy, but it’ll chip away at him rather than incinerate him completely. It’s like wearing sunblock. 

You could call the Reaper a melee brute, at first glance, but it does do decent ranged attacks. Using the Tendril action, it can pull its victim close to it. Then, with the Root Eruption attack, it churns out damage to the player. This is its AOE, adding another layer to it rather than just a guy that hits hard and has a lot of XP. 

Its reaction, Protective Tendrils, invoke plant life, too. It literally looks like vines erupting from its body, but its action acts like bark protecting a tree, as well. 

The Reaper of Veridos was a fun statblock to write, because this was for a low level one-shot. We couldn’t go crazy on its abilities and damage, but still had to keep it interesting. To do that, we diversified its abilities, and gave it a cool design, and still made it a tough enough fight for the culminating event in The Encroaching Wood. 

Stay tuned for my posts on Goodberry Press’s Patreon covering behind the scenes info on our zines, lore for the world, and other fun topics. Also keep an eye out for our Goodberry Adventure Zines, which we’ll start rolling out once a month to those subscribed to our “Adventurer” tier. See you soon! 

This work includes material from the System Reference Document 5.2.1 (“SRD 5.2.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC, available at https://www.dndbeyond. com/srd. The SRD 5.2.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

“A goodberry comes very handy in a pinch. Seeing as how we just spotted an army of goblins headed this way, it’d be very nice if we actually HAD some!” Malafin, ranger, confronting his guilty-looking pet dragon. 

What is Goodberry Press? 

Goodberry Press is a publishing company which provides high quality tabletop roleplaying content for aspiring adventurers. Posted regularly and free of charge are these posts, which cover the original 5e statblocks, magic items, and more. Goodberry Press is also rolling out monthly Goodberry Adventure Zines, which feature the statblocks and magic items in digital one-shots. 

For example, our upcoming zine is titled The Encroaching Wood, and is set within our larger world named The Reach of Sehrabadd. Our goal with these zines is to set them within this world, and feature the locations, monsters, and other fantastical elements within it. While we give you our custom statblocks for me, you can receive a compiled version of everything for you to easily play at your table.  

If you follow us on social media, you may see us posting regular Primal Encounters. These are card sets intended for the GM to easily access beasts and their statblocks to use in their game. Accompanying the card sets will be a book, coming this fall. 

Accessing the Goodberry Press Wiki at goodberrypress.com will gain you access to all of our open source statblocks (which is every statblock we make!)

Supporting us will help us create more content down the line! Joining Goodberry’s “Adventurer” tier will gain you access to our Goodberry Adventure Zines. If you’re looking for a one-time payment, the Patreon has tipping options, as well. No matter what, Goodberry press is dedicated to creating interesting and unique TTRPG content for players to enjoy at their table. 

Stay tuned for more posts just like these, coming soon.