The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Ready-to-Use Tactics for D&D 5E

Felidar and Archon of the Triumvirate Tactics

January 22, 2026

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Celestials

I would love for the felidar to be more interesting than it is. Unfortunately, from a tactical point of view, it’s just a big celestial lion. Its Pounce trait gives it an incentive to move 20 feet straight toward an opponent before making its first attack, which on a hit knocks the opponent prone on a failed Strength saving throw and grants an extra claw attack as a bonus action. Since the felidar has a 40-foot move and a fairly high Armor Class, it has an incentive to permit an opportunity attack in order to move 20 feet away, then come back and attack with Pounce again. Worst-case scenario, it takes an OA hit and gains nothing, but best-case scenario, it knocks the foe prone and gets to make one Claws attack normally and a follow-up Claws and Bite, both with advantage.

Bonding is a ribbon trait that does nothing for the felidar once initiative has been rolled, while Keen Hearing and Sight helps the felidar and any ally or allies it has from being surprised. A sidebar notes, “Some felidars boast huge, feathered wings,” giving them a flying speed equal to their land speed, which simply means that they pounce from above rather than ahead. That’s pretty much it.

So let’s move on to the archon of the Triumvirate, a likely partner of a felidar according to the latter’s flavor text. Despite its high Challenge Rating, the archon plays a support role first and foremost: Although it has extraordinary Strength, its Wisdom is even greater. For defense, it relies on its superhuman Constitution. Its other three stats are all pretty wowzers as well.

I’ll focus first on the archon’s Wisdom-powered features, the most interesting of which is Pacifying Presence. This ability, with a 120-foot range, forces all targets the archon chooses to make a Wisdom save; on a failure, targets are not only charmed for up to 1 minute but drop their weapons, along with any sustained spells they’re concentrating on. DC 18 is high but not insurmountable, and affected targets get to repeat their saves at the end of each turn, so you can figure that player characters with proficiency in Wisdom saves—which is to say, five classes out of 12—will be affected for a round or two at most. The archon and its allies have to take advantage of the situation quickly.
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Azorius NPC Tactics

January 13, 2026

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Humanoids

The Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica (I’ve been miswriting “Guildmaster” in the title as singular; it’s actually plural) is rich in monster and nonplayer character stat blocks. It’s also divided up by guild, making it unreasonable to go through them by creature type as I usually do these days. Instead, I’m going to look at them guild by guild and consider their tactics not just individually but also in combinations in which they might appear, at tier 1 (first missions and neighborhood-level conflicts), tier 2 (strife engulfing whole districts) and tier 3 (struggles for dominance over the entire known world). As a self-contained setting, Ravnica doesn’t lend itself naturally to the interplanar lunacy of tier 4 play.

Ravnica’s 10 guilds are the Azorius Senate (the formal government of Ravnica), the Boros Legion (zealous warriors devoted to “justice, not merely law enforcement”—emphasis mine), House Dimir (spies and shadowy information brokers), the Golgari Swarm (the decomposers in the world-city’s food chain), the Gruul Clans (a confederation of folks who aren’t on board with the whole “civilization” concept), the Izzet League (buncha mad technomancers), the Orzhov Syndicate (loan sharks in ecclesiastical clothing), the Cult of Rakdos (dionysian nutballs with a wide destructive streak), the Selesnya Conclave (environmentalists seeking “to bring nature and the city into balance,” so basically the Ravnica Park District) and the Simic Combine (another buncha mad technomancers, but doing biology instead of chem-phys).

I’ll start off with the Azorius Senate, which is both first alphabetically and the guild I’m most drawn to personally.
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The Monsters Have Gained Some Clarity

January 5, 2026

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Meta

Hello again! I’d wish you all a happy 2026, except that it seems more like we didn’t do a good enough job of making sure 2025 was properly dead and buried. Get [whack!] back [whack!] in [whack!] there [whack!]

I want to start off by thanking you all for understanding the assignment and leaving your comments about which direction I should take The Monsters Know What They’re Doing in going forward. The leading suggestion was doing more with original monster design, which I have to admit is a tempting option. But there were also two votes for “more of the same, please,” and if I add those to the votes for other sourcebooks for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition, 2014 version, then The Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica and The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount move into the lead, along with Flee, Mortals! by MCDM. Examining these books seems like the path of least resistance, especially since I own Ravnica already. The Book of Many Things was close behind—it might even have been tied with the aforementioned titles, but one of the possible votes for that book was somewhat ambiguous—and who knows, by the time I get through all of these, maybe we’ll have a second printing of Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants after all. Probably not. But maybe.

Also in contention is the concept of encounter design. I like this idea, too, but it doesn’t exactly sync up with the name of the blog. Still, I appreciate the suggestion, and maybe I’ll incorporate it into One Foot in Fairyland, which I need to send out more often anyway.

As for r/dndnext subredditors’ reactions to my previous post, they ranged from concurrence with my opinions to reasonable differences of opinion and/or taste to nonsense I won’t dignify here with a response … lots of it. For years, Yoast has warned me that I’m not writing at a sixth-grade level like a blogger ought to, and now I can see why. Let’s just say that the munchkins are very happy that the 2024 revision of 5E is catering to their tastes, would like it to do so even more, and neither understand nor appreciate why changes in that direction might not be to everyone else’s liking.

Eh. Whatever. I’ve always known that my tastes are emphatically not the tastes of the D&D-playing community as a whole—and yet my books sell anyway, which has always struck me as something of a minor miracle for which I’ll always be grateful. Thanks for sticking with me, and I’ll see you next week with my first entry into Ravnica.
The Monsters Are Unsure What to Do Next

December 17, 2025

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Meta

At the end of 2025—the latest of several in a string of disorienting years that have included, among other things, the destruction of Twitter, the OGL kerfuffle, the plague of generative AI, the release of the 50th anniversary revision of fifth edition D&D along with several upstart competitors, and a mass migration to video, especially short-form—your sometimes humble, occasionally entertaining, hopefully informative blogger finds himself at a crossroads with respect to what to do with his blog.

But first, the good news: The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Revised Edition for 2025, an update to The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters, is fully written and being edited at this very moment. The original publication date was to be July 21, 2026—in time for Gen Con!—but as a result of some entirely avoidable delays [cough], the pub date is now set at Oct. 6. I’m lobbying as hard as I can to get the pub date reset to July 21, or at least early enough that advance copies will be available for purchase at Gen Con.

If you’ve tried to use The Monsters Know with the 2025 Monster Manual, you know that a number of brand-new monsters have been introduced, and that even for the already existing ones, a lot of my previous tactical suggestions no longer apply. This revised edition contains updated advice for running updated monsters and new advice for running new monsters, along with useful sidebar content boosted from MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing dealing with such topics as dealing with darkness, combining monsters and running hyper-intelligent enemies. But I wanted to give you more than just an update, so for this edition, I’ve also added a special tip or two for each and every monster, regarding modifications, terrain requirements, pairings with other monsters, and the wacky emergent stuff that can happen because of rules interactions, loopholes and unforeseen consequences.

As a preview, here are my tips for the colossus, a divine supergolem:
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Colossus of Akros Tactics

December 8, 2025

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Constructs

From a bunch of cute animated statues to one honking big, not-at-all-cute animated statue: The Colossus of Akros (Theros’s Sparta analogue) is a massive metal golem that defends the polis when its warriors are away picking fights with other city-states. Despite its size, however, its Intelligence is exactly the same as that of those animal constructs. Imagine a giant death robot with the brains of a golden retriever.

This mega-brute, with extraordinary Strength and Constitution, is focused almost entirely on melee. With a 60-foot movement speed and a 15-foot reach, it has little trouble chasing down fleeing foes. Mundane weapons can’t hurt it, nor can poison or psychic damage, and fire has exactly the opposite of the desired effect, softening the Colossus’s substance up just enough for it to magically re-form where it’s been battered out of shape.

The Colossus has a ranged attack in the form of a spear it can throw, but it makes this attack only when it can’t get within reach of a target to make a melee attack or use its Flames of Akros recharge ability against it. The spear magically returns to its hand after the throw, so this is an attack it can make again and again, but since it’s a ranged attack, it can make it only once per turn. In contrast, its Multiattack lets it make two melee attacks per turn, with either its spear or (preferably, since it deals much more damage) its sword.
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Praise for The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters

“I’ve always said, the Dungeon Master is the whole world except for his players, and as a result, I spend countless hours prepping for my home group. What Keith gets is that the monsters are the DM’s characters, and his work has been super helpful in adding logic, flavor, and fun in my quest to slaughter my players’ characters and laugh out the window as they cry in their cars afterward.” —Joe Manganiello

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The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Felidar and Archon of the Triumvirate Tactics

Azorius NPC Tactics

The Monsters Have Gained Some Clarity

The Monsters Are Unsure What to Do Next

Colossus of Akros Tactics

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