Welcome, fair traveller and take a seat as we discuss where you’ve come. Byela is a mountain where many monsters prey on people. Where Yaroslav may take over your body, or a Hand Hound might take your hand at a dark crossroads if you’re so unlucky. And yet, even with such horrors, people still try to make a living up here in villages such as Tobuk and Friendovichi, and the mythical village of Kalay.
With such diverse places to visit, how could we not make it possible to do just that? Welcome to the first Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Monster Compendium made entirely and completely in the South Eastern European country of Bosnia and Herzgovina. Monsters you will find on these here pages were dreamt up by the mind of Admir Delic who, having listened to the traditional Slavic bed time stories of horror and terror, decided to use the resulting traumas in a creative way. His writing slowly turned into comic book making, and without knowing it, he prepared the grounds for amazing journeys of not only his own heroes and anti-heroes, but hopefully yours too.
That is where Emir Pasanovic steps in. While playing TTRPGs only since 2010, Emir’s been home-brewing stuff for almost as long, and was trying to find a way to spin D&D the Bosnian way for a long time before seeing what Admir was up to. And when the Village Terrors book came out in Bosnian, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on this perfect monster-making reference material.
Inspired by traditional folk tales, as well as the modern horror stories from around the world, the monsters you have the chance of reading up on and even using in your D&D 5th Edition games, are separated into three large but not exclusive geographic areas:
Of course, the monsters are not rooted to one specific area (unless, of course, they are), but another benefit of separating them like so is, we can make them get worse and worse the higher up your adventurers end up going. And this is where our readers’ and especially players’ help comes in.
This is only step one in our mission of making a proper D&D 5e setting with maps and adventures and who knows what else (sub-classes, magic weapons, special abilities and spells…). While we will continue our hard work on those, we need your help to find out if we’re going in the right direction with these monsters and the world.
Specifically, we’d like to hear your comments on things that we are doing for the first time ourselves:
- How well did we design the monsters and their abilities?
- Are there some balancing issues you’ve noticed when playing with your gaming group and what those might be?
- What other kind of monster would you like to see in this world, and which creature or secret that we mentioned in passing has particularly peaked your interest?
- Miscellaneous stuff that we did not think to ask.
Our huge thanks goes to Giffyglyph, whose Monster Maker (and particularly the addition of Paragon Actions, an inspired move picked up from the AngryGM we think) has taught us so much and hopefully made our monsters that much more interesting. And also made the process that much easier. 🙂
Another huge thanks goes out to Dael Kingsmill, whose #gamowrimo idea compelled Emir to sit down and finally finish the fucking monsters by the deadline of December 1st. The deadline might be the reason why we add more things here in the next two weeks, but we wouldn’t be posting these monsters if we didn’t think they were something worth playing. And we look forward to running games with them ourselves.
Like we mentioned, there is a lot more coming and we hope you like what we put out enough to maybe purchase the materials we put on sale in the future: the adventures, the setting, but also the comics and who knows what else! Thanks for reading all the way to here and have a great December!
Terrors of Kalay 
1 Comment