Homebrewing monsters for kids, part 1
One huge advantage of homebrewing encounters is that you can pull in things your kids already love. Cultural references never run out—from the Big Bad Wolf to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to creatures from the video games they play.
As long as you’re only using them at your own table and not selling them, you’re generally fine drawing on almost anything familiar.
I suggest a personal monster manual for each campaign. Mine started as a fifteen-cent pocket folder of printed sheets. I also keep homebrew on D&D Beyond. Before that, Giffyglyph’s Monster Maker was my favorite free tool for creating, storing, and printing stat blocks.
Today’s brew
First, decide what the party will meet. In this case they were headed to Jotunheim (the plane of ice) in a Viking-inspired campaign, so I needed cold-environment threats.
I opened with a straight Monster Manual polar bear—to set expectations low before the fun surprises.
I had been watching Adventure Time, and the adventure was a heist in a tower for a powerful magic item. So the tower’s owner became the Ice King, complete with penguin minions. The rest followed easily.
I grabbed a few suitable penguin images, then looked at monsters around the challenge ratings I wanted for each level of the tower. D&D Beyond makes filtering by CR and other criteria easy. I noted average stats and how many resistances or skills similar creatures had, then built penguins to match: immunity to cold and poison, vulnerability to fire, a simple d4-based melee attack—and one memorable trick.
I wanted something fun and a little crude. A penguin bending over to blast icy air—Frost Farts—got laughs and needed a recharge so it wouldn’t dominate every round. Things get boring when the same gag fires constantly.
I built the stat block on D&D Beyond: Penguin.
A lesson learned
If you look at that stat block, you may notice a Death Burst I rarely used. In play, with a gaggle of kids being kids, I never remembered it. Keeping the fight moving mattered more than every option on the sheet.
Keep it simple. You’ll be busy managing the fight and the kids. A few clear, fun abilities beat a cluttered card you forget.
And the final battle with the Ice King? That’s a story for another time.