Very helpful in giving me inspiration for my own templates in my campaign.

If you’re looking for ways to modify creatures, Tome of Templates is 100% the way to go! This supplement takes inspiration from 3e to introduce creature templates that you can use to modify pre-existing monsters, humanoids, aberrations, etc. It comes with 10 different creature templates, including angelic, clockwork, fiendish, formorspawn, and krakenthrall as well as a pre-made NPC for each type.

These templates are highly detailed, accounting for type, alignment, damage resistance, special features, and more. They’re also well laid-out, so you can understand them with only a quick read-through. I absolutely love these templates and all the new opportunities they open up. Want an aasimar party but with minotaurs, centaurs, dragonborn, and more? Use this template! Want a plant-based necromancer with topiary minions? Use this template! Want horrifying inter-planar creatures that appear out of a rift in some forgotten monastery? Use this template! I keep this template printed out in my DM’s binder and occasionally show it to my players, offering them options on how to level up/down or otherwise change their characters. I don’t use it constantly, but when I do, they’re always super excited.

So if you want a fairly easy but extensive way to modify your NPCs and characters to make them better fit your world, seriously, grab this supplement! It’s so good and fairly extensive and well worth the purchase.

For someone who misses templates from 3rd edition and feels 5th could use some more, this book has 10 new templates: Angelic, Clockwork, Fiendish, Formorspawn, Ghostly, Krakenthrall, Riftwarped, Topiary, Vampiric and Zombified.

Additionally, most of the templates come with optional components that let you customize the creatures you create further. For example, Angelic has "Divine Blessing", which lets you pick one of four abilities. Each template comes with a pre-templated creature (the aforementioned Angelic is an Angelic Half-Ogre).

Overall, the templates that made the most sense (Angelic, Fiendish, Ghostly, Vampiric and Zombified) were ok, giving me exactly what I would expect when making such a creature. Clockwork is great, turning a creature into a construct. Formorspawn is ok, focusing on the Formorians and their allies becoming sort horrible monstrosities but we have plenty of those so I can't see using it. Krakenthrall I like in statistics but from a narrative it's odd. I feel like maybe it'd be a good warlock patron but regardless it is still statistically viable. The far realm rules the riftwarped (why not "Cthonic"? I'm not sure) giving you weird lovecraftian nightmares. Finally topiary gives you plant creatures.

Overall, great book and one most DM's can use.

This supplement is fantastic, and almost a must-have for DMs. The only reason I have to take a star off is the constant and mildly frustrating use of hit hice as a means of gauging/scaling power. That's not how monsters work in 5e: hit dice are solely used as a mechanic for recovering health and don't consistently correlate with power (ie the CR 10 Deva and CR 16 Planetar have equal number of hit dice). Things like the Angelic Damage Resistance and Krakenthrall Squid Tentacle should scale off Challenge Rating rather than number of hit dice.

An excellent resource to add simple flavor to your monsters. Makes planning themed dungeons or encounters a lot easier. It's alll well presented, and the writing is pretty good on top of that (I admit I laughed at "clocktopus").

Very much worth 99 cents. A number of monsters you can use directly and clear directions to modify any monster into something... different. Great illustrations and well formatted. I would definitely recommend purchasing this, great value.

This is absolutely worth the $1 asking price.

It's basically a book of ideas for customizing creatures in a consistent but balanced way.

Each template also has some built in options. So if you want to build a dungeon of Clockwork creatures, you would apply the basic template everywhere and then select one of four "bonus" abilities. This means that your Clockwork dungeon could have similar creatures, but each with a twist, keeping things in flavor but interesting.

Only two pieces of feedback for this 5-star book:

• Print-friendly version.
• Weird page borders on my even-numbered pages.