First off, some themed opposition for our player characters. We've decided that the magics from the shadow dimension have sufficiently changed some of the standard creatures in the area that they have additional abilities.
The main opponents in these woods are going to be a large tribe of Hobgoblin that are worshipping an artefact that is causing the shadow influence, so we're going to create a variant of the Hobgoblin.
From the homebrew landing page, click on the CREATE HOMEBREW MONSTER button.
We want to create our new monster based on the existing Hobgoblin template, so on the new page, select the MONSTER TYPE of Humanoid, as this will reduce the number of monsters to scroll through in the MONSTER dropdown. Then select Hobgoblin from the MONSTER drop down.
The page that shows up next is pretty big and has a LOT of fields for all of the various data that we can edit for our monster! To make the page easier to use, it is broken down into a number of sections that can be expanded and collapsed. The first section, and what you are likely looking at currently, looks like this:
Let's make some changes to create our new monster!
Step 1 - MONSTER NAME field currently contains, "COPY_OF_Hobgoblin" so click on that field and change that to the name of our new monster, "Shadow Goblin" or you can call it something different if you prefer.
Step 2 - ALIGNMENT field is currently Lawful Evil, but we've decided that the power of the shadow artefact is aligned with chaos, so it is appropriate for our Shadow Goblins to be Chaotic Evil instead. Go ahead and click on the dropdown box and select the new alignment.
Step 3 - SPECIAL TRAITS. The martial advantage ability that Hobgoblins have remains appropriate for our Shadow Goblins and is part of the reason we used Hobgoblin as a template. We're also going to give them some other special traits. Click in the Special Traits text box and, below the description for Martial Advantage, add a new ability called "Shadow stealth" which we've borrowed and adapted from shadow:
Step 4 - MONSTER CHARACTERISTICS. Here we modify the description of the Hobgoblin from the standard hobgoblin, to a description of our shadow goblin.
Note that we are skipping a number of fields here, that aren't relevant to this monster, such as LEGENDARY ACTIONS and LAIR AND LAIR ACTIONS.
Step 5 - STATISTICS. We want these goblins to be tough, but sneaky, so wearing chain mail doesn't really fit, so we're going to drop them down to Studded Leather and increase their dexterity and hit points. Also, another change also borrowed from the Shadow entry - we want to give our Shadow Goblins a vulnerability to radiant damage. Overall, we make the following changes:
- Decrease ARMOR CLASS from 18 down to 17 (Studded leather, + 3 dex bonus, +2 shield).
- Change the ARMOR CLASS TYPE from chain mail to Studded Leather.
- Increase the PASSIVE PERCEPTION from 10 to 13. They're sneaky, but also more observant.
- Increase the HIT POINTS DIE COUNT from 2 up to 3. This is the number of hit dice the monster has. A standard Hobgoblin has 2d8+2. We're increasing this to 3d8+3.
- Leave the HIT POINTS DIE VALUE unaltered. If we wanted to, we could increase this to d10, but d8 is typical for humanoids.
- Increase the HIT POINTS MODIFIER from 2 up to 3.
- Increase the AVERAGE HIT POINTS from 11 up to 17 (an overall increase of 6 hit points).
- Increase the DEX SCORE from 12 up to 16.
- Click in the DAMAGE ADJUSTMENTS and select RADIANT - VULNERABILITY from the dropdown list. You can start typing the word radiant if you want, to quicker find the entry we are after in the list.
- In the MONSTER ENVIRONMENTS box, click the [ x ] next to each terrain type that we want to remove. In this case, our Shadow Goblins are only found in a specific forest, so we remove all other environments.
Our statistics area should now look like this:
Step 6 - SAVE CHANGES. You should see a bright red SAVE CHANGES button. Time to click that, as we've completed the first section for our monster and don't want to lose any changes we've made.
Step 7 - LARGE AVATAR. We're going to add an image of our Shadow Goblin, that will appear when we look at the entry on D&D Beyond. If you're an artist, go ahead and create some art for your monster, but if you're like me and not very good at art, then Google Advanced Image Search is your friend. Go to the search page and then scroll down to "usage rights" and set that to "Free to use or share" so that we're only going to find images that are free from copyright. Then enter your search terms in the "Find images with" section at the top and start the search. By searching for Shadow Goblin, I found a nice image that someone kindly drew and placed on the internet, free for use. However you arrive at your image, make sure it is smaller than 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, then click on the [ Choose File ] button underneath LARGE AVATAR. Find the image file with the dialog and open it. Make sure to click the red [ SAVE CHANGES ] button and the image will be uploaded.
That's the main section complete - there are a few sections left now: Languages, Senses, Skills & Movement. Let's take a look at each of these.
Step 8 - LANGUAGES. Clicking on the LANGUAGES title, it expands and we can see that our Shadow Goblin has inheited from Hobgoblins, the ability to speak both Common and Goblin. This fits our new Shadow Goblin, so we'll leave this as it is. If we did want to add a new language though, we'd click the blue [ ADD A LANGUAGE ] button and select the new language from the screen that appears. You can click on the LANGUAGES title again to collapse the section.
Step 9 - SENSES. Clicking on the SENSES title, it expands and we can see that our Shadow Goblin already has Darkvision 60ft. We're going to improve this, so click on the Edit link to the right. A new page will appear, allowing us to edit the sense. Go ahead and change the MONSTER SENSE NOTE from 60 ft. to 90 ft. to extend the range of the Darkvision that our Shadow Goblin possesses. Then click the [ Save Changes ] button.
Step 10 - SKILLS. Our Shadow Goblin currently has no skills and there are several that it needs, so click on the blue [ ADD A SKILL ] button.On the page that appears, click on the SKILL dropdown and select Perception from the list. Then enter a value of 3 in the VALUE field. Click the [ Save ] button and return to our main monster page.
Repeat this, adding the Stealth skill with a value of 6.
We should now see both skills on our page.
Step 11 - MOVEMENT. Checking the MOVEMENT section by clicking on it, we can see that the Shadow Goblin has a standard Walking speed of 30 ft, which we'll leave as it is.
Don't forget to save changes before leaving this page!
Step 12 - REVIEW our creature! Go back to the Homebrew Landing page. On the bottom-right of the page, under "Collections & Creations" click on the [ VIEW MY HOMEBREW CREATIONS ] button. This takes us to a page showing all of the homebrew that we have created, where we can see an entry for our Shadow Goblin:
Click on this entry and we can see a preview of our monster. Click on the red [ VIEW DETAILS PAGE ] to see the full information for our Shadow Goblin.
.... and we're done!