D&D 5E Newbie D&D DM

Hi all.

This is my first post here and first time playing/DM'ing D&D proper and was looking for a little help with a couple of npcs that I have in mind for my first solo outing.

I plan on starting the process with the starter set and possibly a couple of other premade adventures before going it alone.

I've got a half prismatic dragon half elf or eladrin sorceress; now a ghost; in mind as the mother of the main npc who is a young draconic cambion.

Are there templates available in 5e that I can slap onto a base creature the create these npcs or any advice on a good way to go about creating them?

Thanks in advance.

Lennaire said:

Hi all.

This is my first post here and first time playing/DM'ing D&D proper and was looking for a little help with a couple of npcs that I have in mind for my first solo outing.

I plan on starting the process with the starter set and possibly a couple of other premade adventures before going it alone.

I've got a half prismatic dragon half elf or eladrin sorceress; now a ghost; in mind as the mother of the main npc who is a young draconic cambion.

Are there templates available in 5e that I can slap onto a base creature the create these npcs or any advice on a good way to go about creating them?

Thanks in advance.

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Welcome Lennaire And congrats on taking your first steps toward DMing!

Templates in 5e are very very rare – there are only two in the Monster Manual: half-dragon and shadow dragon.

What you want to do is best done with a bit of experience under your belt first, but here are the basics...

Ghost half-prismatic dragon half-elf sorceress
1. You don't create monsters like you do PCs in 5e, so read the DMG and know the difference. However, you can give a creature a spellcaster level (often but not always equal to HD) and give it sorcerer spells known.
2. Once you have your half-elf sorceress NPC created, consider what features of a "prismatic dragon" you want her to have...for example, some kind of prismatic breath weapon. Use the half-dragon template as guidance, modifying as needed to model your idea of a "prismatic dragon."
3. Now you want to look at the ghost in the Monster Manual and apply its resistances & traits & possibly Possession ability to your half-dragon half-elf sorceress.
4. That should provide a solid basis for your monster, though I will usually take a final editing pass to eliminate/merge abilities I feel duplicate one another too much, make small edits, and sometimes add a unique power (or feat or magic item) that jumps out at me.
5. Type will probably be Undead. Then comes the tricky part about calculating its CR (also in the DMG), where you really benefit from experience with the system.

Young Draconic Cambion
I think you mean a half-dragon cambion? Half-dragons have no age category, so assuming that's what you mean... Take a cambion from the Monster Manual and apply the Half-Dragon template. Done.

Thanks for the welcome and the reply!

I was definitely expecting to run a few of the pre-made adventures first to get the hang of things and then using one or more of them to introduce a few elements of my own story which is still taking shape.

I wasn't sure if the offspring of all half-dragons are still half-dragons so I erred on the side of caution with the wording.

This characters father is going to be one of my favorite demon lords and he's going to be a very special and important character in this campaign.

I was thinking about the age category only because I'm still not sure how much power or control of his power that I want him to have.... it still needs more fleshing out.

This specific character popped into my head while toying with the idea of DMing a D&D session back in 3.5e days and I've finally got people to play with so I'm really excited for this.

While risking becoming "that guy who just promotes Matt Colville's YouTube channel in his posts all the time", I can't help but think you'll find some inspiration here:

NPCs! Running the Game #22

He does it much more eloquently than I could, and with better hair and beard...

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.