‘Flee, Mortals!’ – Matt Colville’s New Monster Book Brings 4E To Your 5E Monsters
MCDM Productions is back at it again. Matt Colville has launched a Kickstarter for Flee, Mortals! a new manual of monsters.
If you’re at all familiar with Matt Colville and MCDM Productions, you probably know them from Strongholds & Followers or Kingdoms & Warfare. These two books collectively raised millions of dollars on Kickstarter. And, they brought new ways to play 5th Edition to many tabletops.
Matt Colville, who years ago started off with a series of advice videos about how to run D&D, famously loves 4th Edition. He runs a 4th Edition campaign on Twitch. And in the recent Flee, Mortals! he’s bringing 4th Edition design ideas back to 5th Edition D&D. In Flee, Mortals! you’ll find monster roles, monster variety, and then some.
But it’s not just 4E mechanics applied to monsters. MCDM Production makes action-oriented monsters to your table. What does that mean? Monsters who are designed around certain dramatic actions. And, Flee, Mortals! has some pretty dramatic actions. Let’s look at the Kickstarter and see.
Flee, Mortals! – Kickstarting Now
Monsters for your 5th Edition game that are fun to run—and fun to fight! This is the MCDM Monster Book Kickstarter!
Action-Oriented Monsters
If a monster is big enough and bad enough to challenge an entire party on their own, or if it just makes sense for the Queen of the Goblins to be better than a normal Goblin Boss, we make a named, unique, Action-Oriented version of that monster.
This is something we originally developed for the Chain of Acheron. The Black Iron Pact was the first test of this design. It was a success, and we’ve learned a LOT since! Action-Oriented monsters get special Villain Actions that allow them to act when it’s not their turn, and they rely on spells much less.
If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like Legendary Actions, you’d be right. Only there are some important distinctions. Here’s a look at the design from the preview document, linked below:
This is designed to make a fight feel dramatic. It mirrors the logic and flow of an exciting video game fight. And as a result, a monster feels more memorable.
MCDM adds more than just a new spin on legendary monsters though. They also add new rules for player companions. As well as new rules for minions that feel like what 4th Edition wanted.
It’s an evolution of design sensibilities that make the “game” of 5th Edition more visible. And more fun, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Flee Mortals! improves on monster variety in the grand tradition of 4E as well:
More Options
There’s only one goblin in the core rules. So if you decide your 1st-level party is going to explore a tomb with some goblins in (hem hem) you don’t have a lot of options except ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
This book has a LOT of options for all the classic monsters we all rely on. Goblin Assassins! Snipers! Spinecleavers! Goblin Cursespitters! I mean they’re still just goblins, they’re not like superheroes, but presenting you, the GM, with many options when it comes to a given enemy makes building encounters with them more fun because you can make each encounter unique. You could have twelve different Hobgoblin encounters and never use exactly the same combination of Hobgoblin types.
Not Just Bags of Hit Points
A lot (not all! But a lot) of the monsters in the core rules amount to just a bag of hit points, but in my experience that’s not much fun. It’s fun (for both the players and the GM) if the monsters can DO cool stuff!
So our monsters all have special abilities that make them fun to run, fun to fight, and also go a long way towards reinforcing the fantasy of the monster. Monsters shouldn’t just look cool, they should do cool stuff and that stuff should remind you of WHY this monster is the way it is.
Back Flee, Mortals! on Kickstarter today!
Check out a free preview of the new monster rules
Happy Adventuring!
