Random DnD Monster Generator

What this monster list is

Everything that might be waiting behind the door. Not just the dragons and the goblins, but the deep strange ones, the creatures that exist nowhere except in this game and have no folklore behind them at all.

A sample of what you might draw:

• Beholder
• Aboleth
• Mind Flayer (Illithid)
• Gibbering Mouther
• Rust Monster
• Owlbear
• Cloaker
• Flumph

Two things are true about that list, and both of them are stranger than they look. Several of those monsters exist because somebody bought a bag of cheap toys. And several of them are so strongly tied to D&D rather than general folklore that they are best treated as reference picks for your own table, not names to reuse in a published game without checking the rights first.

Pulling a monster

1. Press Generate for one creature.
2. Ask for several to stock a dungeon level, then work out afterwards why they are all living together, which is where the good ideas come from.
3. Type into Contains to search, so you can pull every dragon or every giant at once.
4. Copy to keep the list.

Where these creatures come from

Creatures gathered by hand from across the game's monster books, from the first bestiary to the current one. The tool draws from that pool in your browser.

The bag of plastic monsters from a dime store

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gary Gygax was playing Chainmail, the miniatures wargame that would grow into Dungeons & Dragons, and he had a practical problem. He needed figures. Monsters, specifically, and there was nothing to buy, because nobody was making fantasy miniatures for a hobby that did not exist yet.

So he went to the dime store, the variety store, the sort of place that sold plastic tat by the bag. And on one visit he found a bag of small plastic creatures labelled as prehistoric animals, which they were not. They had been made in Hong Kong, and they were unlicensed knock-offs of Japanese monster movie creatures, Godzilla and Ultraman and whatever else could be moulded cheaply. The whole bag cost about a dollar.

They were mislabelled, badly moulded, and nothing like dinosaurs. Gygax bought them, took them home, put them on the sand table, and began working out what each one was.

Out of that bag came the owlbear. And the bulette. And the rust monster. Tim Kask, one of the first playtesters, remembered the same bag producing the carrion crawler, the umber hulk and the purple worm.

Six monsters that have terrified players for fifty years, in every edition, in video games and novels and a Hollywood film, and they exist because a man in Wisconsin needed something to put on the table and could not afford anything better.

The lobster with a propeller on its tail

The rust monster deserves its own paragraph, because Gygax explained exactly how it happened.

One of the figures in the bag looked, to him, like a lobster with a propeller on the end of its tail and feelers sticking out of its face. He worked his way through the others and gave them names and abilities. The bulette became a burrowing armoured thing. The owl bear became a bear with a beak. But the lobster defeated him. Nothing frightening suggested itself. It was a silly little object.

Then he had the idea that turned it into one of the most feared creatures in the game. This monster would not want to eat the adventurers. It would want to eat their equipment. Touch a sword and the sword becomes rust. Touch enchanted plate armour and the armour is gone, and the magic with it.

Read the players' reaction in his account and you understand the whole design. They learned very quickly to kill it from a distance with arrows and spells, and when one turned up in a dungeon there was a general and undignified retreat.

That is the joke and the lesson together. The rust monster is completely harmless. It cannot kill you. It has never killed anybody. And players are more afraid of it than of things that can, because it threatens the only thing an adventurer truly loves.

The monsters nobody else is allowed to use

Here is something you notice once and then cannot stop noticing. Other fantasy games have dragons, goblins, trolls, vampires and giants. No other fantasy game has a beholder.

That is not an accident of imagination. It is a legal fact.

When the game's owners opened up their rules for other publishers to build on, they carved out a set of creatures and kept them. The beholder, the mind flayer, the displacer beast, the umber hulk, the yuan-ti, the kuo-toa, the slaad, the githyanki. These are the ones the company considers to be its identity rather than its rules, and they were held back.

The effect is that the game's strangest monsters are also its most exclusive. Anybody can write an adventure with an orc in it. Nobody else can write one with a floating sphere covered in eyestalks, each firing a different kind of ruin. Which is why, when you meet a beholder, you know exactly which game you are in.

And there is a nice irony in it. The monsters that are owned most tightly are the ones that were invented outright, because you cannot own a goblin. Folklore is free. A thing that came out of somebody's head in 1975 is not.

What actually makes a monster memorable

Look back at the ones players remember, decades later, from campaigns that ended before they had children.

Almost none of them are remembered for being difficult. The dragon was hard, and the dragon is a blur. What people remember is the rust monster that ate the paladin's family sword, and the mimic that was a treasure chest, and the gelatinous cube that they walked into because it was invisible and silent and filled the corridor exactly.

The pattern is that the good ones do not threaten your character. They threaten something else. Your possessions. Your assumptions about what a room contains. Your ability to trust the floor. A monster that reduces your hit points is arithmetic. A monster that dissolves your reason for adventuring is a story you will still be telling in twenty years.

So when you draw a monster from this list, do not ask whether it is a fair fight. Ask what it takes away.

Questions people ask

Did the owlbear really come from a toy?

Yes, and Gygax said so himself. The illustration that ended up in the first monster book is a fairly close copy of that plastic figure, which is why for several editions the owlbear's head looked more like an eagle's than an owl's.

Do those toys still exist?

Collectors hunt them. They turn up at auction, and sets very like them have been reissued over the years as generic bags of dinosaurs, still mislabelled, still nothing like dinosaurs.

Which monster is the hardest?

Any of them, at the wrong level, in the wrong room. Difficulty in this game lives in the situation rather than the creature. Four goblins on a rope bridge are more dangerous than a troll in an open field.

Is the flumph a joke?

It began as one, a floating jellyfish that squeaks and is basically friendly, and it has been mocked for forty years. It is also lawful good, telepathic, and knows things, which makes it one of the most useful creatures a clever dungeon master has ever been handed.

References

1. DiTerlizzi, T. Owlbears, Rust Monsters and Bulettes, Oh My!, with photographs of the original toys. https://diterlizzi.com/essay/owlbears-rust-monsters-and-bulettes-oh-my/
2. Owlbear, including Gygax's own account of the dime store bag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owlbear
3. EN World. RPG Evolution: The Plastic Ancestry of the Rust Monster, quoting Gygax in Dragon Magazine #346. https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpg-evolution-the-plastic-ancestry-of-the-rust-monster.672809/