r/StatThisCreature

The Deathmarked Wight is a CR 12 variant of the classic wight, created for campaigns where undeath feels tied to a greater power. Instead of being only a hateful remnant of a former life, this wight has been chosen by a death god, ancient lich, or powerful necromantic order, carrying a mark that gives it purpose, authority, and far more dangerous abilities.

It can place a deathmark on a victim, weaken enemies with necromancy, drain life, raise the creatures it kills into temporary undead servants, and unleash pulses of necrotic power. I wanted it to feel like an undead enforcer or emissary, the kind of creature sent to crush rebellions, retrieve escaped undead, punish enemies of a death cult, or prepare the way for something much worse.

The Wight entry also includes expanded lore and optional traits to customize the base creature, such as memories from life, empowered zombie servants, or extra necrotic damage against untouched victims. Together, the two statblocks give you both a classic undead threat and a much deadlier champion of death for higher-level encounters.

These creatures are from Undead & Undead: The Ultimate Undead Handbook for 5E and the 2024 Edition available on DriveThruRPG!

Undead are more than shambling corpses and skeletal minions. Undead & Undead is your complete guide to raising the dead, commanding their power, and unleashing them in terrifying new forms - from restless spirits and cursed warriors to spectral lords, zombie dragons, and necromantic abominations.

What’s Inside?

• 90+ Undead Statblocks – From crawling hands and soul wisps to deathpriests, banshees, mummy sovereigns, and lich gods. Each entry includes optional traits and variants to customize your encounters.
• Undead Lair System – A scalable, flexible system to turn crypts, cursed cities, and haunted ruins into deadly environments. Includes thematic traps, lair actions, environmental effects, and more.
• 50+ Magic Items – Cursed relics, necrotic weapons, undead-bound artifacts, and forbidden tomes designed to horrify or empower.
• Customizable Templates & Traits – Easily create unique undead with variant traits, thematic abilities, and storytelling tools for every archetype.
• Campaign Tools – Includes undead cult generators, random encounter tables, unholy rituals, haunted visions, and apocalyptic plot hooks to fuel your adventures.
• VTT & Art Resources – 60 art handouts and 45 VTT tokens to bring your undead encounters to life, whether in person or online.

I’m also working on Mythological Items for 5E and 5.5E, an upcoming Kickstarter featuring 300+ magic items inspired by myths and legends from around the world. It includes weapons, armor, relics, artifacts, and scaling items that can grow with the characters over the course of a campaign. You can subscribe to our newsletter to get updates and download a free 30-page PDF preview. We only send emails occasionally, and only when there’s a new release, important news, or exclusive free content and discount codes to share.

You can find more of my creatures and manuals on DriveThruRPG, my Linktree, or by visiting r/JonnyDM!

Here is the Orc Shaman, a CR 4 spellcaster built to add storm magic, ancestral spirits, and battlefield support to orc encounters.

I wanted this creature to feel like more than just an orc with spells. It can support nearby allies with temporary hit points, empower a warband with primal rage, call down lightning through its Rite of the Storm Gods, and use its voice as a supernatural force that carries across the battlefield.

The page also includes optional traits that let you customize the shaman depending on the role you want it to play. It can become more durable against thunder and lightning, deal extra force damage through ancestral spirits, hold concentration more reliably while wounded, perform ritual movement, or unleash one final spell when reduced to 0 hit points.

It works well as a tribal spiritual leader, battlefield caster, cultic storm priest, or dangerous support monster behind a larger orc warband.

This creature is from Orcs & Orcs, available on DriveThruRPG in PDF and hardcover print!

Orcs & Orcs is the ultimate guide to unleashing the full fury and depth of orc-kind in your 5E campaigns, whether you want savage warbands, disciplined armies, cursed berserkers, or iron-willed mercenaries.

What’s Inside?

• Dozens of Orc Statblocks – From the Orc Bannerbearer to the Red Orc Warlord, each entry includes extra traits and variants to help you customize encounters with brutal precision.
• Powerful Orc Factions – Expand your bestiary with Ironpeak Orcs, Oathsister Orcs, Red Orcs, and twisted Mutant Orcs. Each brings unique abilities, lore, and lair ideas.
• Orc Campaign Tools – Warband factions, tactical lairs, encounter suggestions, and more.
• 70 Orc-Themed Magic Items – Tribal relics, cursed axes, brutal armor, spiritual totems, and more.
• VTT & Art Resources – Includes 27 handouts and 17 creature tokens to bring orcs to life in-person or online.

Orcs fit into any fantasy campaign as enemies, allies, or complex factions. Wherever your world needs strength, rage, and scars earned in battle, orcs are ready.

I’m also working on Mythological Items for 5E and 5.5E, an upcoming Kickstarter featuring 300+ magic items inspired by myths and legends from around the world. It includes weapons, armor, relics, artifacts, and scaling items that can grow with the characters over the course of a campaign. You can subscribe to our newsletter to get updates and download a free 30-page PDF preview. We only send emails occasionally, and only when there’s a new release, important news, or exclusive free content and discount codes to share.

You can find more of my creatures and manuals on DriveThruRPG, my Linktree, or by visiting r/JonnyDM!

The Winged Lynx is a CR 6 flying predator built for mountain passes, remote forests, sacred peaks, and isolated wilderness encounters. It is fast, intelligent enough to feel unsettling, and dangerous enough to become the center of local legends, whether as a feared monster, a false deity, or a misunderstood guardian.

I wanted it to feel more interesting than just “a lynx with wings”, so the page includes lore, encounter ideas, and multiple plot hooks. It can stalk travelers from above, terrorize a village, become the focus of a dangerous cult, or guard an ancient mountain secret that the party needs to uncover.

Mechanically, it is a mobile ambush predator with stealth, aerial movement, a diving attack, a fear-based roar, and bonus action mobility, making it useful as either a solo wilderness threat or part of a larger mountain encounter.

This creature appears in The Aberrant Codex: Mutations and Aberrations, available on DriveThruRPG! You can also check it out there for a more extensive preview. Delve into the warped world of aberrations, mutations, and cosmic horror in your 5E campaigns.

What’s Inside:

• Mutation Rules & Zones – Mechanics for wild magic areas, arcane corruption, and the strange transformations they cause.
• Character Options – 12 subclasses, 10 backgrounds, 4 new races, and 30 feats themed around mutation, aberration, and forbidden evolution.
• Spells & Items – 33 spells and 80+ magic items warped by planar influence or unstable energies.
• Monsters & Templates – Over 150 monster statblocks, from psionic predators to mutated horrors, plus variant rules for custom mutations.
• VTT Resources – Includes 100+ creature tokens and 125+ art handouts to bring your sessions to life.

Whether you want eldritch creatures, strange player options, or full rules for reality-warping regions, The Aberrant Codex has it all. The Hardcover edition of The Aberrant Codex is also available here: https://buy.stripe.com/8x24gyfNNegY75qgwI6c005

You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on upcoming projects, including a Kickstarter launching in the coming months: Mythological Items for 5E and 5.5E, inspired by myths from around the world. By joining the newsletter, you can download a free 30-page PDF preview of the upcoming Kickstarter. We only send emails occasionally, and only when there’s a new release, important news, or exclusive free content and discount codes to share.

For more of my creatures, items, and manuals visit DriveThruRPG, my Linktree, or r/JonnyDM!

I'm looking for ideas on how to stat a monster I'm making for a one shot. The monster is visually based off of the Jöttun, the monster in the 2017 film The Ritual. The monster is connected to one of my PC's (Gloom Stalker Ranger) backstory and is a source of fear for them that they (and the rest of the party) will have to face in a dark forest.

I'm not so much looking for a direct one to one conversion of the monster from the movie into D&D 5E, just using the monster (and Mini) as a base for the main boss monster of my one shot.

The monster's origins are going to be related to a curse inflicted on it for committing cannibalism and it's curse causes it to have an insatiable bloodthirst. I wanted to ask for some ideas around building a monster that utilized the Frightened condition heavily and possibly inflict some kind of bloodthirst or confusion onto the party. I want it to act as a solo boss monster for an encounter, against a party of 5, 10th level PC's with a decent amount of magic weapons/items. I was looking for pretty deadly encounter to challenge the party and also wanted to throw a few minions at them before the actual boss encounter, unsure of what monsters I could use for minions (leaning on undead or possibly monstosities), and also wanted some ideas on what minions it might surround itself with.

Apologies for not knowing the artist for the specific image, but I believe Keith Thompson was the original designer for the monster in The Ritual. I'll link his website (with more design art of the Jöttun) in a comment below. The monster does not necessarily need to be exactly CR 14 but my estimate is that is the highest CR I'll want for a solo boss encounter. Any help, ideas, or full stat blocks would help alot.