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“Dad, what about a squirrel crossed with a bat?”
“Isn’t that just a flying squirrel or a sugar glider?”
“But what if it had a scorpion’s tail?”
These are daily conversations in my home. My 13-year-old loves to imagine new monsters for D&D by combining aspects of different creatures. I’m not letting her near CRISPR anytime soon, but I love her imagination.
For the article below, I looked at the monster totals in various 5e resources. The numbers, while accurate, lie. It looks like the 2025 Monster Manual has close to the same number of monsters in Free5e, but the bottom number is even more descriptive: templates. The 2014 Monster Manual has three templates: half-dragon, dracolich, and shadow dragon. These can be applied to another monster to create a new monster, multiplying the number of available monsters. But the 2025 Monster Manual eliminated templates and listed each variation as a separate stat block.
In Free5e, combining the work of EN Publishing’s A5E and Sly Flourish’s Forge of Foes, you can turn an existing creature into a zombie or give it elemental abilities. And you can stack them, so I can’t wait until my players encounter the Fiendish Dire Tarrasque Zombie!
You can even apply cultures to your creatures, like a Cosmopolitan Minotaur or a Sahuagin from the Shadow Elf culture, whatever fits your game world.
Not only does this create exponentially more variety, but it also eliminates bioessentialism, that your birth determines your behavior, the root of most racist stereotypes.
But this isn’t surprising. While the values of a culture impact the individuals within it, the more we get to know individuals within a culture, the more variety we experience. But that works the other way, too. As we get to know individuals within a culture, it changes our perception of the culture and helps to shatter stereotypes.
That in turn helps us recognize other internalized prejudices that we may hold and confront them.
That can also help us confront prejudices that we’ve heard about ourselves and accepted on some level.
I’ve often struggled with self-perception. It’s easier to dwell on a single critical assumption than dozens of accolades. But I’ve learned to confront those assumptions by asking, “That person who has something terrible to say about me — is that someone I’d look to as a role model or mentor? If they made a comment like that about my wife, how would I respond?” I’ll choose which templates to apply to myself based on what I know to be true of my values and insight from the people most meaningful to me. Some of those will show me places where I can grow. But all of them tell me that I am loved. Because the more a person cares about me, the more important their opinion is to me.
You need to know that you are loved. I care about you. Many fo you may think, “But you don’t know me. I just read your emails.” If I’ve learned one thing over the past month, it’s that someone can hate people they don’t know. And since that’s true, then I can love people I don’t know.
No matter who you are, I give you Loved as a template that you can apply to yourself and to others.
Tonight, that same 13-year-old said, “Dad, I like Abraham Lincoln. He read a lot of books when he was a kid, and he did the war to help people who were being treated like garbage.” She knows she’s loved, so she loves with passion, like a Blink T-Rex. |
