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.
Weapon |
Minimum Creature Size |
Attack and Damage |
Mounted harpoon crossbow (an oversized heavy crossbow with a long bolt attached to a 60-foot length of rope). This Tiny object is mounted on railings and takes up no space. |
Huge (4 crossbows), Gargantuan (16 crossbows) |
Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 60 ft., one target. Hit: 5 (1d10) piercing damage and the target must succeed on a DC 13 Strength saving throw or be harpooned. A harpooned creature takes 3 (1d6) piercing damage at the start of each of its turns and can’t move more than 60 feet from the war monster. If a creature on the war platform succeeds on a Strength contest against the target as an action, it can move the target up to 30 feet closer to the platform. The creature can repeat this saving throw as an action, ending the effect on a success. |
Ballista (a large siege crossbow). This Large object takes up the space of 1 Large creature or 4 Medium creatures. |
Huge |
Ranged Weapon Attack: +6 to hit, range 120/480 ft., one target. Hit: 16 (3d10) piercing damage. The ballista can be attacked independently of the war carriage. Its stats are found in chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. |
Trebuchet (a massive siege catapult that hurls missiles from incredible range). This Huge object takes up the space of 1 Huge creature, 4 Large Creatures, or 16 Medium creatures. |
Gargantuan |
Ranged Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, range 300/1,200 ft. (can’t hit targets within 60 feet of it), one target. Hit: 44 (8d10) bludgeoning damage. The trebuchet can be attacked independently of the war carriage. Its stats are found in chapter 8 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. |
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.
Will there be more of these? I love them. If there will be, how soon can we expect the next one to be?
*Haradrim army intensifies*
I can make more, even though I did not create them. What do ya want? War T-Rex, War ancient red dragon, rode on by githyanki knights? I can make anything just give me suggestions.
I LOVE FLUMPHS! THAT WOULD BE SO AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!
Aye, you want a war flumph? Ummm I think there to small, although I could make up some huge war aberration that is controlled by flumphs through psionic commands
Why is everyone so obsessed with war tarrasque, I say WAR KRAKEN (Commanded by a ton of sahuagin barons)
Yeah... that would be ridiculously hard.
So...basically Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean
No, although I see where your coming from. I mean like five barons riding on the Kraken. Davy Jones does'nt ride on the Kraken he just commands it.
Any chance of more of these?
Maybe
Neato
true but it would be something that is modified specifically for mounted combat. often times siege weapons were on wheels or carts for transport. you could simply change the material they are made out of or give them a magical wood to enhance the woods strength
remember siege weapons also deal double damage to equipment. siege weapons were rarely used to attack moving targets. eldritch blast of raw cant attack an item like a wall and wouldn't do much damage to it as most walls have a resistance and its a special resistance that either you do at least blank amount of damage or nothing happens to it. As cool as it is to attack players with this because of the cinematic aspect they are best used on castles, wagons and the like. Also Siege weapons can have different damage type based off of their ammo. instead of a rock throw a clay pot full of acid or hot oil or even better black powder. the possibilities of area effects become incredible and they have decent range
I. Love. It. Sounds like fun!
That looks like fun to
There is more then just the strength of the material there is also the direction of the forces involved into the ground to move the projectile.
MDC
I think it might be better to define what we are talking about, I assume you are not talking about hand trebuchet (sling staffs) or the very large one from history (IIRC) that the military scavenged lead to fill its counter weight, a good list is available from Wikipedia.
Even weapons that had wheels to movement often had to be braced before firing or the wheels taken off because of balance issues, (see the French 75 for one of the first if not the first canon that could be repeatedly fired accurately and why that was the case, on the back of a creature they would tend move). Yes you could use wishes to take care of this problem (equipment stability, forces and a wish to control mounts and what ever else I have not thought about) in D&D.
MDC
I think it is also important to again say this, writers have a very tough job often required to continuously come up with new, exciting, innovative, humorous and fun situations in short time frames and then repeatedly do it again the next 1/2 day or day, day in and day out.
MDC