The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

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

Coming Oct. 6: Remonstered!

April 13, 2026

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Meta

Times have changed. The old rules no longer apply. Our foes have grown in strength. We must adapt.

Don’t worry. I gotchu.

In Remonstered! The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, every monster’s tactics are updated to reflect the recent changes to their stat blocks in the 2025 Monster Manual and accompanied by brand-new tips to help you prepare the battlefield, choose allies and minions, and take your combat scenes in exciting, unexpected directions. (Not to mention another banger cover by Lio Pressland and all-new interior illustrations by Jen C. Marshall!) This revised edition hits shelves Oct. 6, but you can preorder it now from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indigo or your favorite independent bookstore in the United States or Canada.

And if you’ve decided to stick with the original 2014 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rules, fret not: The original The Monsters Know What They’re Doing will still be available alongside the revised edition.
Nivix Cyclops and Arclight Phoenix Tactics

July 6, 2026

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Elementals, Giants

The Nivix cyclops is a toe-to-toe melee fighter with extraordinary Strength and Constitution, very slightly clumsy, with caveman-grade Intelligence, but it’s attached to the Izzet League because even mad scientists need someone to lift heavy things and guard the stashes of hazardous materials. It acts purely out of instinct and chooses targets indiscriminately, often on the basis of who’s biggest or closest, although it does try to save itself when seriously wounded (reduced to 46 hp or fewer). But there’s very little room (or reason) for sophistication in its tactics: It advances, it engages, it smashes.

With one exception: Its Spell Vitalization reaction. By itself, it’s a no-frills CR 8 brute, and a slightly more breakable than average CR 8 brute at that. But when it’s in the presence of a spellcaster—such as any Izzet blastseeker—its offensive power increases significantly. Anytime an ally casts a spell within 120 feet of it, it can use its reaction to immediately move up to 60 feet without provoking opportunity attacks and deliver a Slam attack. This reaction is instinctive, depending on the spell its ally casts:
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Izzet Weird Tactics

June 25, 2026

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Elementals

Weirds are elemental quasi-constructs created by the Izzet League to … well, to see what they could get away with, it seems. They involve mashing together elemental energies not usually found in combination with each other, giving them sentience and hoping for the best. (I’m observing that very little of Izzet science includes asking—let alone answering—the question, “But what if we’re wrong?”)

The galvanice weird is the simplest of these experiments, binding lightning into a shell of ice. Although they’re often employed as laboratory assistants, their very high Constitution (undoubtedly an asset in an Izzet lab) and high Strength allow them to play a brute melee role in a combat encounter. There’s not much to them, though: They have only one attack action, Slam, plus the Death Burst trait, which delivers electrical shocks to everyone within 10 feet of them when they’re killed. Clearly, then, they’re sent to handle threats by themselves while the humanoid members of the Izzet League take cover beneath their lab tables a safe distance away.

Note that they themselves have only resistance, not immunity, to lightning damage, which means that a galvanice weird reduced to 0 hp deals damage to its own galvanice weird allies if they’re too close. For this reason, multiple galvanice weirds have to play zone defense, spacing themselves at least 15 feet apart from one another. More accurately, they have to be told to play zone defense, because with Intelligence 3, they’re not going to think of it themselves. (Then again, some less empathetic Izzet League members might consider a chain reaction of galvanice weird detonations to be a feature, not a bug.)
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Izzet NPC Tactics

May 27, 2026

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Humanoids
If you’re of the opinion that mad scientists are generally less desirable than your common or garden-variety scientist, then the Izzet League is not for you. Its stable of technomages and arcane engineers is supplemented by the scorchbringer guard and a variety of magic weapon field testers called “blastseekers.” Those names could have used a few more rounds of field testing, honestly. Izzet should encourage its members to take more credits in the humanities.

The scorchbringer guard is a short-range shock attacker with high Dexterity and above-average Strength and Constitution. Its ideal positioning is at least 10 feet from its nearest foe but within 30 feet of at least two of them, in a firing line with its allies spaced 15 feet apart. This formation confers two key benefits:
- A single scorchbringer guard can reliably use their scorchbringer—a flamethrower with a 30-foot range—against two foes at once. Since two points define a line, a scorchbringer guard can always hit two enemies as long as they’re within range, so they focus chiefly on doing that. Three or more is exceptional good fortune; a scorchbringer guard will seize the opportunity, but they aren’t going to go out of their way to make it happen.
- Fifteen-foot spacing means that a scorchbringer guard doesn’t cause a chain reaction if their fuel tank explodes. Being chaotic neutral in alignment, they’re not what you’d call exceptionally disciplined, but they do know what happens when their weapons go boom. When they break formation, which happens often, it’s always to move farther apart, not closer together.
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Sunder Shaman and Wurm Tactics

May 15, 2026

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Giants, Monstrosities

The sunder shaman is a Gruul-affiliated giant that would more logically be considered an NPC if it weren’t a giant but rather a humanoid. Also, despite its name, it’s not a spellcaster, just a giant berserker with extraordinary Strength and Constitution and merely humanoid-average mental abilities.

It’s got good defenses: Armor Class 20 and proficiency in all the “big three” saving throws. It’s proficient in Athletics as well, for whatever that’s worth; few people would ever try to grapple it. However, I can imagine situations in which a sunder shaman gives up its Multiattack to try to grab somebody, and in that case the escape DC would be 20. Additionally, its Multiattack increases its offensive damage output immediately after it takes damage itself.

While it’s not proficient in Stealth, Stone Camouflage gives it advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks in rocky terrain, so it has some ambush potential on its home turf. Most often, though, it’s not going to be encountered on its home turf. The sunder shaman is an offensive weapon, as evidenced by the Siege Monster trait. Yep, it’s another creature that goes after the shelter first and the sheltered afterward. (Which does a lot to explain why a world-spanning city contains so many ruins.)
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Gruul NPC Tactics

April 30, 2026

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Humanoids

What do you do if you’re a wild hunter-gatherer type who abhors sedentary living, dense development, abstruse legal codes and advanced technology, hemmed in by a city that’s grown to fill all the space available to it, including the lands where your people once subsisted? You live your life as best you can, when it lets you. And when it doesn’t, you start busting stuff up.

“A loose affiliation of bands that squat on the fringes of Ravnican society,” according to the Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica, the Gruul Clans bring subgiants, goblinoids, reptilians, centaurs, minotaurs and antisocial humans together under one ragged banner. Most Gruul are already represented in the good ol’ Monster Manual, but chapter 6 of Ravnica lists three nonplayer character archetypes that aren’t—four if you count the sunder shaman, but the book groups that one among monsters rather than NPCs, so I will, too.
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