Monster Reskinning

[Sound of Azure]

Due to relocating for work, this week is going to be my last week DMing for the group I've been in for 3 years now, so I decided to set up a great battle to end the campaign with.

The PCs have been gathering power in preparation for the end of the world, and only the leader of the primordial forces on the world remains:- A fire elemental named Ifrit (yes, ripped off from Final Fantasy, sue me! ).

I've reskinned the Adult Red Dragon for this purpose, and it promises to be a fun encounter with him. If they can get past the last of his henchmen and minions, of course!

So ENWorld, do you ever reskin monsters to create unique and memorable encounters? How did it go?

 

[jensun]

All of the time and very well.

My players much prefer monsters where they dont know whats going to happen. It adds to the suspense.

 

[Whitemouse]

Reskinned kobolds as goombas for one third edition game with my son a while back.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Due to relocating for work, this week is going to be my last week DMing for the group I've been in for 3 years now, so I decided to set up a great battle to end the campaign with.

The PCs have been gathering power in preparation for the end of the world, and only the leader of the primordial forces on the world remains:- A fire elemental named Ifrit (yes, ripped off from Final Fantasy, sue me! ).

You'll be hearing from my lawyer.

I've reskinned the Adult Red Dragon for this purpose, and it promises to be a fun encounter with him. If they can get past the last of his henchmen and minions, of course!

So ENWorld, do you ever reskin monsters to create unique and memorable encounters? How did it go?

I am certain that other EN Worlders do this from time to time, since we had at least one thread about it before.

The recent Dungeoncraft article mentions this, too.

I am eagerly awaiting more examples in this thread. I haven't done much of it myself, I am more likely to pick a monster and advance it or add levels to it.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

At the moment everything is new to my players as we're only just playing 4e for the first time. I don't feel like I need to reskin monsters as almost none of my players have the MM anyway - plus the published adventures tend to have new monsters included, meaning the players can't look them up without buying the adventure.

And I trust them not to buy the adventure.

 

[Subumloc]

I'm planning to run Red Hand of Doom, but since (A) my players are a little higher in level than expected and (B) there are some setting differences, I reskinned hobgoblins from the MM and some kobolds from the mearls' article to goblins, with minor crunch tweaking.

Now that I think about it, I've reskinned almost every single monster in the three adventures I've DMd so far. My homebrew set is inspired by M:tG, so I usually associate stats from the MM to one creature or the other from the CCG.

 

[charlesatan]

I've re-skinned the Naga Primordial as an Aspect of Tiamat. =)

I mean come one, five heads, various types of breath weapons and resistances...

 

[blargney the second]

I love reskinning monsters. With marginally known monsters you can just give it a different description and the players never know. With very well-known monsters, I find all it takes is changing one main ability to throw canny players off the scent.

 

[Nebulous]

This isn't exactly reskinning...

...but i think i'm going to start shaving some hit points off of Solo Monsters and giving them a bonus power. Fights just seem like they'll take too long, and having an unexpected power pop up will be more frightening than a 20 round slug fest.

Although a 20 round fight is pretty frightening in its own way

 

[DeusExMachina]

I reskinned a human mage into an animal controlling horror who would send flights of bats and birds to suicide attack people instead of just blasting them with arcane energy. Quite a lot of fun...

There are still a lot of monsters in the MM we haven't encountered, so I don't need to reskin a lot, but it keeps them on their toes to do so every once in a while...