Empirate
First Post
If your players have seen all the monsters taken straight from the book, templates provide an easy remedy to make a monster feel new and fresh. Some templates are more complicated than others, some more interesting than others. So which do you like to apply to your monsters? What are your favorite templates when you DM? And in what other ways besides templates do you like to spice up your encounters?
I must admit that most easy-to-use templates are also rather boring. Fiendish/Celestial just provide a few defensive abilities (which can be handy, granted) and don't really alter the way the encounter will play out. The more interesting templates, like Symbiotic Creature, Shade, Feral, Tauric, Monster of Legend etc. are often quite a bit of work to apply. So while shaking up your stock monsters to a large degree, they're almost as much work as just applying a bunch of class levels.
Things I like and have used or will most likely use at some point:
Half-Dragon (used this quite a bit at several times)
Umbral Creature (make anything an undead Shadow)
Ghost (excellent recurring foils for the PCs with their Rejuvenation ability; makes even Commoners interesting opponents)
Tauric (I put a Human on top of a large monstrous scorpion for a memorable NPC Paladin who had fallen under a dire curse)
Dark (used this to great effect, HiPS helps a ton for ambush enemies)
Monster of Legend, Half-Fiend (when the Tiefling PC found out the Half-Fiend Ogre of Legend he had unsuccessfully been trying to kill was actually his long-lost cousin, it made for an interesting moment)
Blightspawned (a pack of Blightspawned Worgs made a really good entourage for an evil Druid NPC)
Pseudonatural (really nice for flavor, if not mechanically interesting)
Spectral Mage (will use this for an upcoming Dread Necromancer boss)
Evolved Undead (for the very same boss)
I notice that I only use most templates once or twice, and mostly only in intended-to-be-memorable NPCs/boss monsters.
What are your experiences?
I must admit that most easy-to-use templates are also rather boring. Fiendish/Celestial just provide a few defensive abilities (which can be handy, granted) and don't really alter the way the encounter will play out. The more interesting templates, like Symbiotic Creature, Shade, Feral, Tauric, Monster of Legend etc. are often quite a bit of work to apply. So while shaking up your stock monsters to a large degree, they're almost as much work as just applying a bunch of class levels.
Things I like and have used or will most likely use at some point:
Half-Dragon (used this quite a bit at several times)
Umbral Creature (make anything an undead Shadow)
Ghost (excellent recurring foils for the PCs with their Rejuvenation ability; makes even Commoners interesting opponents)
Tauric (I put a Human on top of a large monstrous scorpion for a memorable NPC Paladin who had fallen under a dire curse)
Dark (used this to great effect, HiPS helps a ton for ambush enemies)
Monster of Legend, Half-Fiend (when the Tiefling PC found out the Half-Fiend Ogre of Legend he had unsuccessfully been trying to kill was actually his long-lost cousin, it made for an interesting moment)
Blightspawned (a pack of Blightspawned Worgs made a really good entourage for an evil Druid NPC)
Pseudonatural (really nice for flavor, if not mechanically interesting)
Spectral Mage (will use this for an upcoming Dread Necromancer boss)
Evolved Undead (for the very same boss)
I notice that I only use most templates once or twice, and mostly only in intended-to-be-memorable NPCs/boss monsters.
What are your experiences?
