Still playing vanilla Descent, but I was wondering...

There is a way to create custom heroes, but has anyone come up with a formula for custom monsters? All this talk of what we'd like to see in expansions has me itching to throw in some original bad guys (and make use of some of my minis that are gathering dust)

I would just copy stats from the monster cards and tweak them, but since I want to add some new abilities or move them around, I thought it would be better to build them from the ground up.

Anything out there? Anybody got a lot of free time and a philanthropic streak and wants to come up with one to share?

While FFG provided a Hero Generator, it can provide some fairly ridiculous results, like heroes with obscene amounts of attacks or armor.

All it takes to build a custom hero is Common Sense .

Heroes with 8 wounds 1 armor and those with 12 W and no armor are usually rated at 2 conquest, those with 12-16 W and 1 A are most often worth 3, and anything with Armor 2 usually is worth 4 Conquest.

As for the abilities, compare them to the existing ones; then think whether you'd pick your new shiny Hero over a similar one from the original set every time. If so, your Hero probably is overpowered.

Things to watch out for and consider thoroughly are abilities providing extra armor, extra actions, large amounts of fatigue, or excessively efficient crowd control. Abilities that deny the OL resources make for a duller game, so watch out.

Also, forum members will be more than happy to point out the flaws of your designs.

As for custom monsters, well, just try making them. There's 4 vaguely defined tiers in this game based on:

Tier 1: Spawn Card in the regular deck summons at least 1 master monster and some extra normal monsters
Tier 2: Spawn Card in the regular deck only summons normal monsters.
Tier 3: Can only be spawned by using a treachery card
Tier 4: Can't be spawned.

it's pretty easy to go through the overlord deck and realize which monsters belong in which tier. After that, it's just a matter of making a new monster that would fit in those tiers and posting it to see what we think.

Ah, I happened to misread. So, let me add.

For ideas, one can search the various mythologies; the greek myth provides us with numerous great examples. Other than that, it's easy to use a game or novel for inspiration.

To make interesting creatures, try to give them abilities that a) give the OL more options b) pose an interesting yet not overwhelming challenge for the heroes. Also, try to avoid creatures that are basically more of the same, being designed for a role that some of the original critters fills well.

Then, to test them, persuade your players to test it on a dungeon of your making, which features some of your new critters in starring roles.

I'd like to see a teleporting monster myself, or monsters that cause an effect when they die.

Imagine if you killed a lava bettle and it created a sqaure of lava?

This game needs a gelatinous cube. The ultimate hall blocker. I haven't given it a lot of thought, but I think he'd need some sort of combo ability between grapple and swallow, yet potentially allowing the heroes to move through him like mud.

Maybe his swallow ability also acts like an acidic version of Frost, potentially destroying equipment.

Big Remy said:

This idea is actually great, and seamlessly integrable into RtL too.

Monsters with Threat-activated powers would be cool too. Such as "Pay 4 Threat: Threat-Gobbler gains +2 Speed and Acrobat until next OverLord turn."

Or even ones the Heroes can influence: "Any Hero with LoS to Big Softy may pay 1 Fatigue to reduce Big Softy's armor by 1 until the next OL turn."