Fun Monsters for 5E from Flee, Mortals!
Flee, Mortals! is the new monster book for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons by MCDM. The monsters are amazing, super fun to use, but they required me to engage my brain in new ways to use. Which I didn’t do the first times I used them. So learn from my mistakes.
This is a high-crunch book made for tactical combat. Which adds some complexity to the DM’s plate. For me, the increase in fun makes it worth it. I will say 13th Age, which is D&D adjacent, has monsters that are just as fun as those in Flee, Mortals! but are easier to run.
There’s a free preview, I’ll use monsters from the preview so you can follow along if you don’t have the full book.
Note: If you’ve watched Matt Colville play D&D on YouTube, you probably noticed two things: 1. Matt is infectiously gleeful in monster combat and would be a blast to play with. 2. Matt is blissfully unconcerned with the finer points of Fifth Edition D&D and regularly mixes in rules from previous editions and his homebrew inventions.
If the latter had you worried that this book wouldn’t work well with 5th Edition D&D, fear not. Matt has people for 5E compatibility. Like James Introcaso, the lead designer. James and company have given us a real 5E product. This is by far my favorite 5E monster book.
Bonus Actions and Reactions
As a player in 5E, you are probably used to cool bonus actions and reactions for your PC. As a DM, you know that few monsters get bonus actions and almost none get reactions outside of the global attack of opportunity. This book turns that on it’s head. Almost all Flee Mortals! monsters have one of these, and many have both.
What’s cool about this is that monsters aren’t boring piles of hit points. They do things, not just their single attack action.
In this post, I’ll look how deal with this slight bump in complexity.
Bonus Actions
Bonus actions aren’t hard, I just had to train myself to look for them. They are right there on the stat block I’m looking at while I’m running the monster. Some bonus actions are better used before the monster’s attack, others after. Look at the actions and bonus actions together and decide what will happen in what order.
About half the monsters here have bonus actions, so look.
Check out the goblin assassin, they get the bonus action sneak.
Sneak. The assassin takes the hide action.
Other bonus actions in the book are fun things like stay down.
Stay Down. The knave kicks one prone creature within 5 feet of them. The target must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution saving throw or their speed is reduced to 0 until the end of their next turn.
Reactions
Reactions are where I messed up at first. As a DM, I’m used to looking at the monsters defenses and hit points while it’s a PC’s turn. I often ignore the rest of the stat block. No, no, no! Look for reactions. More importantly, monster A might want to use their reaction while a PC attacks monster B.
What I do now is list out the reactions of all the monsters in a battle in one place. Copy and paste from the PDF, and have it there so I have all the reactions for an entire combat encounter.
If you look at the reaction of goblin queen Bargnot, she has No Dying!
No Dying! When a willing creature Queen Bargnot can see within 30 feet of her is reduced to 0 hit points, she can choose to have them reduced to 1 hit point instead.
If the target is a goblin warrior, it doesn’t help to be looking at the warrior’s stat block when they get hit. The reaction you might want is in the queen’s stat block. That’s why I keep my list of reactions for all the monsters in the fight.
Other reactions in the book include the charming reptilian escape.
Reptilian Escape (1/Day). If the scaletooth fails a Strength or Dexterity saving throw, they lose their tail and succeed instead. They regrow their tail when they finish a long rest.
Steal This Hack!
Once you get used to this, letting most monsters have bonus actions and reactions is a lot of fun. It also makes the creature an interesting opponent for the players. So next time you make your own monster, give it a bonus action, a reaction, or both. If you can’t think of great new ones, Flee, Mortals! has a lot to steal.
Next time, I’ll go into minions, a great monster type in Flee, Mortals!
Happy gaming!
