Have you ever created a new monster?
I’ve been DMing for more than 20 years, and it’s something I wince a bit at having to do. I almost always avoid it.
Usually, I just reskin an existing monster. Gnolls become goatmen. Vine blights become mudmen. Or I tweak a stat block to suit my purposes. The other day I wanted to run mooncalves from the 3rd edition adventure Heart of Nightfang Spire and found that chuuls with a fly speed did what I needed, in a pinch.
You can get quite far with this. But actual stat blocks? Ugh. So. Much. Effort. I’ve made a few—gas serpents, mutants, Zargon (before Quests from the Infinite Staircase came out)—but if I’m honest, I’ve never felt completely happy with my creations.
But, I’m excited to say, there’s a new book on the subject—and if anyone knows about monsters, it’s Keith Ammann, the ENnie-award winning author of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, a blog and now a book in its own right. Making Enemies is due to be released tomorrow, and I was grateful to receive a review copy to read through. (If you haven’t read any of his other books—Live to Tell the Tale, How to Defend Your Lair, and MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing—they are all well worth diving into.)
Ammann writes with a scholar’s rigour and has clearly done a great deal of deep thinking about what a monster needs to be—what makes them tick. The bibliography alone is impressive, with references to Beowulf, American horror films, Frankenstein, and Icelandic sagas, among others. Throughout, Ammann’s prose is rigorous yet always accessible. Some books are a pleasure to read in long stretches, and some are the kind of thing you dip in and out of. Somehow, Making Enemies is very much both.
It’s also (pun incoming) a monster: well over 500 pages. As such, it would be completely impossible to cover every chapter in depth. Hopefully, though, I’ll give enough of a summary in this review to help you decide whether you should pick it up.
The introduction engages with the question of what exactly a monster is, almost at an academic level: what differentiates a monster from a hazard or a beast, what defines a good monster, how every monster is a story, and the best monsters are not just dangerous and unfamiliar, but memorable. Chapter 1, ‘Monster Parameters,’ takes us through different types of monster—size, motivations, challenge, habitats—and Chapter 2 zooms in on the specifics of a monster’s anatomy, like wings, eyes, mouths, but also alternative senses, parasitism, and a particularly cool section on speculative biology in the form of a conversation with Mike McHargue, a full-time world-builder and creative producer for film, TV, and gaming. Each chapter also ends with a case study in design (‘Let’s Make a Monster’) where Ammann takes us through an example to apply the ideas he’s exploring. In total, there are 20 new monsters scattered throughout the book, and they’re very fun.
At this point, I should probably mention an interesting design decision Ammann has taken, and an explanation for the large page count. Unlike his other work, this book is not solely for players of 5th edition D&D; in fact, for every section with notes on D&D, there are also tools for Pathfinder, Shadowdark, Call of Cthulhu, and the Cypher System. This is impressive: partly because he manages to pack in all five systems without it feeling bloated, but also because of the confidence with which the book navigates such disparate systems. Game systems are kind of like languages; you might speak 5e fluently and have a smattering of Pathfinder, but how many of us could write so knowledgeably about five different games?
Now, an argument could be made that this is wasted space, if you are only coming to the book with one system in mind. However, if you’re reading this sort of book, you’re probably already interested in game design more generally, and probably proficient in more than one system, especially after the OGL debacle pushed many people to try new RPGs. Plus, even if one or more of these systems is unfamiliar to you, it’s still fun to see how different rules help to render monsters in their own way. Put it this way: I’ve never played Call of Cthulhu (I KNOW, don’t look at me like that), but I’m still very happy to see how it handles monsters. Ammann is a good guide at the side for the uninitiated.
Anyway. Back to the book. Chapter 3 looks at monsters as metaphors, a topic I am a huge fan of at the moment. ‘Every monster is a product of its place and time,’ Ammann writes, ‘a figurative representation of a real or perceived threat to society.’ They arouse ‘not only fear but also disgust, and that not only repel but also in some way attract […] They give form to memories of unpleasantness dredged up out of our past, or our subconscious, that we’d prefer to leave buried there.’ We see a ton of examples like the dragon of Beowulf, the draugar of Norse mythology, Frankenstein, zombies … I get to teach about this stuff as part of my day job, and it’s a delight to see Ammann pick it apart. There’s a section I particularly like where he examines different 5e damage types, spell schools, special attacks, and other monster features, and considers what each might represent. This is gold.
If Chapter 3 is literary and philosophical, Chapters 4 and 5 take us right back to thinking about game mechanics: monster stunts (eg, conditions in D&D) and phased monsters (the kind of multi-stage boss monsters you might encounter in a Final Fantasy game). All good stuff. There’s another nice design interview, this one with Chris S Sims. Chapter 6 looks at magic (spellcasting, innate magic, even ESP abilities like psionics), and Chapter 7 takes a look at ‘quirks and weaknesses’: fairies and cold iron, Smaug’s missing scale, that kind of thing. There’s another design interview with Willy Abeel, a senior game designer at MCDM.
By this point, you’re probably starting to see what I mean about the book being a beast. I think even if you made it just about 5e D&D, you would still be looking at well over 400 pages.
Three more chapters. Chapter 8—perhaps surprisingly for a writer who has now written four books largely focused on D&D combat tactics—focuses on non-combat approaches for dealing with monsters, like exploration-based approaches and social interaction. I’m delighted to see a conversation with Kelsey Dionne here, the designer behind Shadowdark and always worth listening to. Chapter 9 looks at how to customize monsters for your campaign—specifically, how to counter class abilities, and how to let them shine—and the final chapter offers stat blocks and lore for eleven new monsters. They’re really fun. The archfey, Prince Nimblestep, might be my favourite (‘a vain, imperious dandy’), but I also love the scamble, an eight-legged monkey, and the tylosaur, which was a real-life sea lizard and just NOPE, NOPE, NOPE. The appendix is kind of like a glossary for how stat blocks work in the five different systems, and, usefully, it includes the recommended monster stats by challenge rating from the Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes. (Incidentally, does this book compete with Forge of Foes? Not at all. I have both, and I think they’re both great. They just fill slightly different roles.)
Once more: it’s a beast. A monster. A behemoth. But it’s a behemoth of the very best kind. It’s a CR 30 epic boss of a book with a treasure hoard of inspiration. I don’t know what you expected from Keith Ammann, but it was probably this.
★★★★★
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