Welcome to Homebrew Horrors, a series where you get a set of brand-new homebrew monsters, plus lore and worldbuilding details that you can use to anchor them in your own D&D setting.

The time has come for the warriors of your campaign to don armor, unsheathe their weapons, and ride to war upon the backs of hulking monsters. This installment of the Homebrew Horrors series gives you a brand-new template that you can apply to any creature large enough to carry other creatures. Additionally, it provides two new homebrew monsters that you can use in your D&D campaign: the white dragon of war and the war mammoth. These monsters were specifically chosen to enhance your Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, but can be used in any adventure that takes place in an arctic environment.

Templates and Challenge Rating

Just like the templates provided in the Monster Manual, these templates don’t consistently increase a creature’s challenge rating. This article gives rough guidelines on how much each template will increase a creature’s challenge rating, but the increase in power is much more significant for low-CR creatures than it is for high-CR creatures. In order to accurate discover the creature’s new challenge rating, you’ll need to enter the creature’s new statistics into the monster creation guidelines in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

New Template: War Monster

War monsters are domesticated beasts, allied dragons, or tamed monstrosities that have been equipped with back-mounted carriages large enough to carry warriors into battle. Depending on the creature’s size, and the size of their riders, they can carry as many as a full platoon of soldiers. While this template usually only applies to creatures with beast-like anatomy, it can be applied to more alien creatures like aberrations, fiends, or oozes at the Dungeon Master’s discretion.  

Challenge. The challenge rating of a war monster doesn’t change when this template is applied. However, a war monster is frequently accompanied by other creatures on its war carriage. These creatures are its allies, and you can use the D&D Beyond Encounter Builder to see how powerful an encounter with this war band is compared to your party.

War Carriage. This creature carries a custom-made carriage that allows a number of soldiers to fight from, and be transported on, the back of their carrier. This carriage is attached to the creature by a number of leather straps and harnesses which, if severed, cause it to tumble off the creature’s back. Each of the straps of this war carriage are Tiny objects with AC 18 and 10 hp and immunity to poison and psychic damage; most war carriages are attached by four straps connected to the monster’s limbs.

A Huge creature wearing a war carriage can carry up to 4 Medium creatures or 1 Large creature. A Gargantuan creature wearing a war carriage can carry up to 16 Medium creatures or 4 Large creatures, or 1 Huge creature. The platform also has space for 1 additional Medium creature to drive the monster, or use its weaponry if the monster is intelligent and needs no driver.

Mounted Weaponry. Creatures that are Huge or larger can have a number of weapons mounted upon its saddle or carriage. Choose one of the following options.

Other siege equipment from chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide can be mounted on a war carriage, at your discretion.

New Monster: Adult White War Dragon

White dragons are the most bestial and instinct-driven of the true dragons, making them easy to press into servitude. They are, however, still intelligent creatures—only evil beings would enslave another sapient being. Frost giants, frost druids, devotees of the icy archdevil Levistus, or worshipers of Auril the Frostmaiden, are the perfect perpetrators of such an evil act. Other creatures may beseech a white dragon for its service, knowing full well that the dragon may decide that its service is complete if it suffers ill treatment, an insufficient cut of the spoils, or whenever a fickle mood strikes it—especially in the heat of an uncertain battle.

An adult white dragon can carry four Medium creatures on its back, and often works to ferry a unit of elite soldiers into battle. It may also swoop over a battlefield, annihilating enemy combatants with icy blasts while a ballistician on its back rains deadly ballista bolts upon enemy defenses.

The adult white war dragon is a fearsome CR 13 monster often found manned by a single veteran ballistician who aims the ballista mounted on its back at fortifications or swathes of enemy soldiers. See its full statistics and add this monster to your game using the D&D Monster Homebrew tool!

New Monster: War Mammoth

Herds of wooly mammoths plod across the icy fields of Icewind Dale. The people of the Reghed tribes hunt them for meat, fat, bones, and warm fur, and some frost giants even tame them and use them as mounts. Straddling the line between humankind and giantkind, some exceptional goliath clans have learned the secrets of domesticating these mastodons, and have constructed carriages that sit upon their backs so that goliath war parties may ride them into battle.

The war mammoth is a CR 6 monster typically mounted by a crew of four goliath berserkers and driven by one goliath tribal warrior. See its full statistics and add this monster to your game using the D&D Monster Homebrew tool!

What kind of homebrew monsters have you made for you game? Learn how to make homebrew horrors of your own in the D&D Monster Homebrew tool with Design Workshop: Monsters!

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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.