From time to time, we will be publishing quick stat blocks. Some will be original. Others, like this one, are tweaks of existing stat blocks. What you do with them is up to you. Note: The Armored Ogre Brute and Ogre Champion are both designated as Open Game Content. This designation includes statistics and descriptions of the monsters, but not the accompanying image or commentary. (Click here for license.)

Art by Aaron Potter, 2015. Used with permission. All rights reserved. From the Journal of Sutton, an occasional artistic representation of our campaign’s shenanigans.

Armored Ogre Brute

Large Giant
Challenge 3 (700 XP)

Defense & Maneuver
Armor Class 16 (chain and hide hodgepodge)
Hit Points 71 (8d10 +27)
Speed 40 ft.
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 8

Attacks
Ranged Attack (+7 to hit, 13 piercing damage): The armored ogre brute can hurl a large spear with a range of 30/120, inflicting 2d8+5 piercing damage.

Melee Attack (+7 to hit, 15 piercing damage): The armored ogre brute attacks with a 10-foot reach, wielding an ogre-sized greataxe or greatsword inflicting 2d10+5 slashing damage.

Miscellany
Alignment Chaotic Evil
Languages Common, Giant
Ability Modifiers Str +5, Con +4, Int -2, Wis -2, Cha -2

Sometimes a more powerful creature, such as a fire giant, will use ogres as guards and shock troops. Such a leader will provide some rudimentary armor and weapons for his troops and will select only the biggest and strongest members of the ogre tribe into his service. Alternatively, the armored ogre brute could be a particularly strong and resilient member of the tribe who has managed to cobble together some basic armor and find a good weapon cast off from a large size creature with actual weapon forging skills.

Ogre Champion

Large Giant
Challenge 5 (1,800 XP)

Defense & Maneuver
Armor Class 17 (chain and plate hodgepodge)
Hit Points 110 (10d10 +55)
Speed 40 ft.
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 9

Attacks

Multiattack: The ogre champion may make two ranged or two melee attacks.

Ranged Attack (+8 to hit, 13 piercing damage): The armored ogre brute can hurl a large spear with a range of 30/120, inflicting 2d8+5 piercing damage.

Melee Attack (+8 to hit, 15 piercing damage): The armored ogre brute attacks with a 10-foot reach, wielding an ogre-sized greataxe or greatsword inflicting 2d10+5 slashing damage.

Miscellany

Alignment Chaotic Evil
Languages Common, Giant
Ability Modifiers Str +5; Dex +1; Con +5; Int -2; Wis -1; Cha -1

Occasionally, an ogre will live long enough and be tough enough to become a truly skilled combatant, able to make the most out of his innate brute strength and resilience. If such an ogre lives long enough to reach this exalted state of martial proficiency, he will also have cobbled together a suit of rudimentary armor and have acquired a more advanced weapon along the way. Alternately, such a champion could be the favored servant of an even more powerful, and decidedly more intelligent, creature, such as a fire giant.

Monsters Modified: Why I Wanted Enhanced Ogres

After running my 5th edition game for a while now, I’ve realized I really want more monsters. The characters are up to 7th level now, and there are still plenty of wonderful critters in the Monster Manual to throw at them, but I don’t want to just devolve into a “monster of the week” style of gaming. I like having a recurring threat that the players can get really vested in fighting against. I have certain enemies in the campaign, particularly lizard men and ogres, which the players have been struggling against for multiple sessions. I want the players to keep fighting these enemies and not have to switch over to an entirely new threat.

Now, one feature of 5th edition that I like is that “bounded accuracy” really does mean that lower-level monsters can remain significant challenges for PCs who outclass the challenge rating of the critters they face, so long as there are lots of those monsters. That’s fine as far as it goes, and I’ve experimented with it. Notably, I had a horde of about 25 Azer (CR 2) swarm the party at a chokepoint in the dungeon. The party slaughtered the poor Azer handily, but my players also had a few nervous moments as the hail of attacks plinked away at their hit points. It was a great encounter, but I don’t want to just keep throwing larger and larger hordes at them. For one thing, it gets repetitive, and for another it does bog down the game. By the end of the Azer fight, the party was just starting to suffer from die-rolling fatigue.

So, I created a few advanced versions of the creatures the party has been fighting and sicced them on the party. The first experiments were with ogres. I wanted to just slightly buff up my ogres by giving them a few more hit points and a bit better armor. I was shooting for something around a CR of 3, an ogre that was just a bit tougher than the regular sort, so it would last through a couple of rounds and have a chance to get in one of its powerful hits before going down. My campaign rationale for this was that a select group of ogres had been recruited by a fire giant (who was also being served by all those Azer), and the giant had given them some training and forged some armor and decent weapons for them.

That takes me to the second enhanced ogre I wanted to design. I also needed to have some sort of ogre champion. I wanted to have at least one ogre that really felt like a one on one threat to a party of (at that time) mostly level 5 characters. Like the other ogres, he’d have the advantage of Fire Giant crafted armor and be a tough specimen with more hit points. To really make him stand out, I decided to give him two attacks per round. That seemed about right for a CR 5 creature as it’s at level 5 that fighters and the other martial classes get their devastating two attacks. That second attack is really a whole order of magnitude enhancement, especially for a bruiser like an ogre that does some real damage if it manages to land a hit. That was fine by me as I wanted these guys to seem like a real threat.

Reviewing my ogres, I also gave them a 10-foot reach to reflect the fact that they are really big creatures. I justified this by saying that they have real weapons made to take advantage of their height and reach, and then I also gave their weapons a bit more damage, moving from 2d8 to 2d10. I beefed up some stats a bit and called it a day.

Now for the Analysis

The CRs for each of the creatures above were derived according to official guidance. But if you’ve run enough games, you know those CRs don’t always seem right when you use them at the table. So I’ve playtested them.

The CR 5 ogre champions were seriously scary. The party ended up facing two of them at one point as part of a larger encounter  and they did a lot of damage. Still, I think the CR was just about right. One of them got dropped by a clever cleric who cast hold person and then proceeded to beat it to death with his hammer while dropping healing word on the side to keep the others up. The CR 3 armored brutes did last a bit longer than regular ogres, but weren’t honestly that much more of a threat. I think the CR 3 was just about right there as well. A party of 7 characters, ranging in levels between 4 and 6, managed to take down a dozen of them. They did end up with two characters making death saves, but they also make a seriously horrific tactical error at one point (which they are still beating themselves up over) and that certainly contributed to the carnage.

I hope you can find a use for the modified ogres, and I’d love to see any of your own modifications to standard monsters in the comments.†