Challenge Rating 5 to 10 (hard encounters)
_The kongamato is an evolutionary holdover, a large pterodactyl with avian traits, such as emergent feathers and long, beaklike jaws._ **Boat Breaker.** Its name means "breaker of boats," and as that implies, this creature systematically destroy...
Medium Fiend, CR 8. From Tome of Beasts.
_This strange-looking humanoid combines the features of an old crone and some manner of bird. A shawl covers her head but cannot contain her prominent beak and clawed hands. Her skirt reveals bird-like feet._ **Filthy Illusions.** Kikimoras are ...
_A swirling mass of tiny, blue flames dances with the likeness of a skull embedded in each little, flickering fire._ _**Stunted Elementals.**_ Fire dancers are Tiny fire elementals. Speculation varies whether they’re simply immature or somehow s...
Medium Celestial, CR 5. From Tome of Beasts.
_The towering woman rises up from the desert sand. Her pale brown robe almost perfectly matches the gritty terrain, and her roughly textured skin is a rich walnut brown._ Desert giants live in arid wastelands that were once a thriving giant empi...
_Dark, bark-like rust encrusts the trunk of this cold-forged metal tree, and its dull metallic leaves rustle with the sound of sharp metal._ **Cold Iron Trees.** These ferrous constructs are cold-forged in a process taking several years, as bits...
_This blue-skinned creature resembles a stunted dwarf. Its eyes are large and its hair wild, and both are colorless. The expression on its face is a terrible rictus of madness and hate._ All derro are mad, but some devote their very souls to the...
_Taut dead skin, adorned entirely with tattooed fish scales, covers this woman’s face and hands. She wears scaled armor, sea green like verdigris on copper, and wields a strange sword. Her pale eyes stare, unblinking._ **Undead Warlock Slaves.**...
_A darkly foreboding intelligence glows behind this automaton’s eyes, and its joints seep hissing green vapors._ **Wraith Constructs.** Fellforged are the castoffs of gearforged and clockworks production, given foul sentience when the construct ...
_This giant retains a look of daunting power despite its stooped bearing, tattered clothing, and pieces of slapdash armor strapped on wherever it fits._ **Haunt Ruins.** The degenerate descendants of once-noble titans haunt the ruins where their...
_Apart from their taloned hands and blank face, fear smiths appear elven. While its mouth is closed, a fear smith’s face is featureless save for rows of deep wrinkles. Opening the large mouth in the center of its face reveals long needlelike teeth...
_These human-sized parasites resemble ghostly centipedes surrounded in erratic violet radiance. Their flesh is translucent and their jaws are crystalline—they are clearly creatures of strange planes indeed._ **Destiny Destroyers.** Fate eaters i...
_This small demonic idol fade into and out of reality. Its elemental will presses on those near as a near-physical pressure._ **Relics of Dark Gods.** Idolic deities are found in ancient temples and deserted tombs. They are relics of an elder ag...
_Deep Ones With enormous eyes, a wide mouth, and almost no chin, the deep ones are hideous, fishlike folk, often hunched and scaled when encountered in coastal villages._ _**Elder Gods.**_ In their fully grown form, the deep ones are an ocean-dw...
_This alluring beauty has flesh and hair as white as snow and eyes blue as glacial ice._ **Born of the Ice.** Ice maidens are the daughters of powerful creatures of the cold. Some are descendants of Boreas or the Snow Queen (a few having both pa...
_This large, unnerving drake’s glassy black scales have purple undertones. Its features are elongated and almost alien. Black, expressionless eyes stare ahead, and a barbed stinger sits at the end of a long tail._ **Friend to Ghouls.** The deep ...
_A toothless mouth adorns the headless shoulders of this oversized, four-armed, doughy humanoid. Colors and half-formed phantasmal shapes appear and vanish around it, to the creature’s obvious delight._ **Creative Chaos.** Wise yet child-like cr...
_A shadowy figure flickers in and out of view. Its indistinct shape betrays a sylvan ancestry, and its eyes are malevolent blue points of light._ **Unnatural Aura.** Animals do not willingly approach within 30 feet of a deathwisp, unless a maste...
_This gray-skinned dog-like creature seems pathetically eager to please but fantastically skittish, its ears alerting at every nearby sound, and its large oval eyes following anything that passes by._ **Emotional Giant.** A hulking whelp is a ti...
_These enormous black hounds are most commonly seen panting in the moonlight, wisps of steam rising from their muzzles, while they accompany a nocturnal hunting party._ **Fey Bloodhounds.** Hounds of the night are bred by the shadow fey for use ...
Medium Humanoid, CR 8. From Tome of Beasts.
_Resembling a cave cricket the size of a dog, this beast wraps its victim in spiny legs and claws when it attacks. A horakh’s black, chitinous thorax is topped by a translucent digestive sac—often containing half-digested eyeballs of varying sizes...
_Created and favored by Mammon, the arch-devil of greed, crystalline devils masquerade as magic treasures._ **Barefoot, Gem-Coated.** Crystalline devils resemble gem‑coated humanoids with cruel, twisted faces, jagged teeth, and terrible talons l...