D&D 5E Re-imagining classic monsters

Very cool

I too like to keep my D&D monsters recognizably D&Dish, but with my own personal touch. For a few examples, I keep my dragons color-coded, but my metallic dragons are lead, tin, copper, iron, silver, quicksilver, and gold, and my chromatic dragons are black/negro, white/albino, yellow/citrine, and red/ruby in reference to the alchemical metals and stages of the Magnum Opus. My mind flayers are Aboleth larvae introduced to a humanoid’s cerebrospinal fluid before maturity, their ceromiphasis causes their tentacles to burst through the host’s skull without transforming the whole host into a purple octopus-man, and my Elder Brains are the brains of fully-mature Aboleth preserved outside of their original body after its death. And my Beholders, rather than being hatched from eggs barfed out by other Beholders or imagined in other Beholders’ dreams, are much more like the creature inside a Dalek’s armor; genetically-engineered beings, created with the specific intent to be the ultimate life form, and to enslave or exterminate all lesser forms of life.

EDIT: Only tangentially related, but it occurs to me that the Ood from Doctor Who are totally Mind Flayers. WHICH ONE OF THE DR WHO WRITERS IS A D&D NERD???

So right now I'm working on a one-shot set in Greyhawk future, where the city has become similar to 1920s New York. The setting has a huge opportunity for redesigning monsters in a way that match their character while making them seem fresh.

For example, the main villain of this one-shot is a Gnoll Pack Lord. However, he's a gangster (and casino owner), so he and his cronies are all armed with various weaponry like revolvers and tommy-guns.

This is a pretty good example of taking a monster that's well-established in D&D (gnolls), only tweak their mechanics (give them firearms), and suddenly you are dealing with a very different, but still thematically similar, kind of monster.

Very cool. I like the idea and taking an existing campaign and redoing it in a different age of its history or future.

Hey guys, here's the stat block for the monster I created. its not playtested though. https://www.zagoragames.com/post/monster-creation-creating-a-laesuri-1