Turning Monsters into Molehills er, Minions

[aco175]

Anyone done work on taking a normal monster and making it into a minion? I was thinking that there would be some sort of formula for taking say, a 3rd level drake and making it a minion of like 8 or 9. It kind of seem that a level+5 or L+6 would work out, but I have not realy looked into this.

This seems mostly for believability and partly for a plot devise on my part. I have 2 parties of levels 13 and 8 working in the same area and want to have some sort of overlap around some locations. I'm lazy and want to use the same maps and thems for some of the monsters. I was going to have a set of ruins where spriggans are and they would be a threat to the level 8 party on their own, but not to the level 13 party. To add a bit of realism to the area I was going to change the spriggans to minions for the level 13 party and have some big basement monsters for a real challenge. The first party was going there to investigate a lost sword and the free the trapped sphinx, while the other party responds to the area because the sphinx was guarding a fey portal or such.

Back to the original thought, would a monsters like a gnoll who was a tough fight at level6 make a good minion at level 12?

 

[Reydragk]

Just use the WOTC monster builder. Select the monster you want, click "edit a copy", and change his role to "minion". Level it up or down as needed using the drop-down menus. Done.

 

[Saeviomagy]

To make a level 12 minion, you can pretty much take a level 12 monster, drop its hitpoints to 1 and write down the average damage it does with an attack as its damage value. Quarter the XP it's worth too.

So no, taking a level 6 gnoll and minionizing it won't make it a good level 12 minion. You'd need to take a level 12 gnoll (or up-level the gnoll to level 12) first.