Are you looking for a fresh, monstrous menagerie to test your heroes' mettle? MCDM Productions's Flee, Mortals! is now on D&D Beyond, and its companion book, Where Evil Lives, will be available on May 28. What's better, you can bundle both books together in the D&D Beyond marketplace for a discount!

If you are looking for a way to challenge players who have grown complacent when decapitating mindless zombies, look no further. Let's see what this dynamic duo of books has to offer!

• Flee, Mortals!: 293 Monsters with Unique Mechanics
• Where Evil Lives: 22 Lairs for Deadly Boss Fights
• Supercharge Your Encounters

Flee, Mortals!: 293 Monsters with Unique Mechanics

Fighting monsters is a big part of D&D. When a DM invests the time required to balance encounters, create battlemaps, and prepare villainous monologues, they want their players to have a rewarding experience.

Adding excitement and variety to your encounters is what Flee, Mortals! is all about. It brings 293 monsters to life with beautiful art, lore, and strategies, but that isn't all. Beyond the staggering amount of new monster stat blocks, you'll also find:

New Creature Roles

Flee, Mortals! contains a unique mechanic called creature roles. This mechanic categorizes monsters by their behavior in combat and allows you, as the DM, to craft truly dynamic battles that strategically challenge your players.

There are 12 creature roles, ranging from ambushers, who use the element of surprise against their foes, to brutes, who are hardy creatures that output a ton of damage.

Creature roles are used to provide a variety of stat blocks for monsters, showing how the creature can be used in different capacities.

Take, for instance, the ubiquitous goblin. These little monsters are perfect combatants for low-level heroes (and cannon fodder for high-level heroes). In Flee, Mortals! they are given the MCDM treatment. Seeing as goblins are creatures that congregate into tribes, it makes sense that certain goblins would have certain specialties.

By using the creature roles and stat blocks found in Flee, Mortals!, you could set up the perfect goblin ambush. Place goblin snipers (artillery) on the banks of the ravine, goblin lackeies (minion) to confront the party and keep them away from the snipers, and maybe even a goblin assassin (ambusher) hiding in wait to get the drop on the party if they try to retreat.

The hierarchy of goblin tribes is typically based on strength and cunning, so this plan could have been devised by a goblin underboss (support) who reports to their head honcho, Queen Bargnot (leader).

Speaking of the leader creature role, let's examine my favorite subsection of monsters in the book, action-oriented creatures.

Action-Oriented Creatures

Have you ever tried to have a big, videogame-style boss battle in D&D, but it felt kind of flat? Well, action-oriented monsters are specifically designed to deliver on this type of challenging encounter.

While your party may be able to take down multiple goblin lackeies with a single swing, action-oriented monsters are designed to take an entire party on by themselves, which is why they are given either the leader or solo creature role.

The primary mechanic that makes these bosses unique is their villain actions, which are like legendary actions because they can be taken when it's not their turn in Initiative. However, these vary from legendary actions because each villain action can only be taken once per encounter and is meant to be taken in sequential order to provide a structure to the encounter.

Another unique aspect is most of these action-oriented creatures are one-of-a-kind villains. Instead of just using an adult red dragon as the villain for your campaign, your players could be going head-to-head against Forzaantilirys the Ashen Song—because every dragon encounter should be as legendary as it is deadly.

Villain Parties

Creature roles are used in a unique way in Chapter 3, which provides new mechanics and stat blocks for a variety of villainous groups to antagonize your party. From a group of gruesome necromancers and Undead creatures to an apocalypse-obsessed group of dragon-blood-powered supervillains, you can find an anti-party for every occasion.

Each of the villain parties comes with stat blocks for each member, the group's methods and goals, a magic item unique to the group, and, one of the coolest things about them, villain party actions, which are kind of like a Marvel vs. Capcom-style team-up combo.

Companions and Retainers

Every party needs help sometimes; that's where companions and retainers come in. These new types of creatures are designed to aid your party in their adventuring endeavors.

Companions are creatures with monster stat blocks that your party finds in the wild and tame, thus adding them as an animal ally. These creatures answer to a caregiver in the party and increase their skills alongside their caregiver, but they can slip back into their feral nature if put under too much stress.

Retainers are other adventurers that your party recruits to their cause. Each retainer has a mentor in the party, who they depend on for training. Like companions, they use a traditional monster stat block, with a couple of unique adjustments, to make them easier to run than a full other player character.

Where Evil Lives: 22 Lairs for Deadly Boss Fights

Where Evil Lives is a companion book to Flee, Mortals! It contains 22 lairs packed to the brim with minions, treasure, and, of course, final bosses to top them off.

From a cave full of goblins for level 2 characters to a high mage's tower for level 20 characters, these lairs set the stage for epic encounters and give DMs everything they need to plan and run their session.

Within the lairs featured in this curated collection, DMs will find:

• The hideout of a powerful, action-oriented creature (either a solo or leader creature role).
• Plot hooks to draw the players into the adventure.
• A map to provide a visual aid and help run combat and exploration.
• Ready-to-run encounters with minions and monsters that are associated with the lair's guardian.
• New magic items and loot for the party to plunder.

These 22 lairs are setting agnostic, can be dropped into any campaign, and can challenge parties ranging from level 2 to 20. So, whenever you're in need of a dungeon with a big, bad boss, you can find the lair that suits your needs and run it as is or adjust it as you see fit!

Supercharge Your Encounters

With Flee, Mortals! and Where Evil Lives on D&D Beyond, you'll be able to use MCDM's ingeniously designed monsters and adventures with our digital suite of tools to help prep and run your sessions.

Prepare and Balance Your Encounters

Need to find the right creature for the job? Just fire up the Encounters tool, input your criteria, and grab the monster of your dreams (or your party's nightmares). Then, when it's time to craft your encounter, you can check the encounter challenge rating to make sure your fight isn't too deadly:

Streamline Health and Initiative Tracking

When it's time to fight, use the Initiative tracker in the Encounters tool to roll Initiative, track monster health, and even send attack results directly to players using the Game Log:

Easily Prep Battles With Maps

Master-tier subscribers can use the monsters and lairs from Flee, Mortals! and Where Evil Lives to easily prep their session in Maps! Maps is a VTT that seamlessly integrates with your D&D Beyond library, so you can quickly load up a lair, drop in its creatures (and final boss), and have a fully prepped session in a couple clicks!

Then, you can invite your players and run your session using fog of war, drawing, measurement, and ping features!

Pick Up Your D&D Beyond Digital Copy Today!

Within these books, you'll find more than stat blocks. You'll discover nefarious villains, unique mechanics, and encounter-building advice that can help you run entire campaigns. And, when integrated into D&D Beyond's digital toolset, these books become even easier to incorporate into your games.

So, grab your gateway to monstrous mayhem and epic encounters today! Flee, Mortals! is now available on D&D Beyond, and Where Evil Lives will be available on May 28. If you want to save some gold, you can bundle them together for a discount!

Mike Bernier (@arcane_eye) is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his partner, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.