Extremely high CR monster (examples please)

[Pinjata]

Hey, guys,

I'd like to take a peek at the most powerful, 5e has to offer these days. Homebrew included. I only know of Tiamat's statblock (https://chisaipete.github.io/bestiary/creature/tiamat) and I wonder if you guys can link me here some other monsters of similar CR? (basically high above CR 20 and not in MM) for me to familiarize myself a bit with how these entities are created?

Official and homebrew appreciated.

thanks

[Ninja_Prawn]

In my opinion, writing high CR monsters is always a dicey proposition. At medium and high CRs, you can't just write a sack of hit points with a big melee attack; that's boring and high level PCs have too many ways to neutralise something like that. This means that you need to start giving the monster interesting abilities and actions, which can then be hard to rate in terms of their impact on CR. And then, what assumptions do you make about legendary actions? How many PCs are caught in AoEs of different sizes? How do you rate the impact of non-damaging spells? Etc. Etc.

For what it's worth, I've written* plenty of high CR monsters. There's an incomplete index of monsters I've published on tumblr here (https://nailsofvecna.tumblr.com/stat_block_index) (warning, I don't think the link works on mobile), and other examples here (https://mfov.magehandpress.com/2019/06/the-rose-court-into-wilds.html), here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hfsKvejZDTTt44c5S2P9dqAtVGS4v8Zy/preview) and in my sig (those are generally older and probably not as good). Make of them what you will. :smallsmile:

In terms of official monsters, I think there are a bunch of demon prince stat blocks in Out of the Abyss. You may want to look into those.

*My works are always intended to be in line with WotC's design guidelines. If you don't like the way WotC does CR, you'll find the same issues with my homebrew.

[Wizard_Lizard]

i mean, there's always the tarrasque....

[PhoenixPhyre]

Your source for this should be Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. It has

* Demon Princes
* Arch Devils
* Major planar baddies.

A total of 20 CR 20+ creatures.

In general, there's a breakpoint between CR 20 and CR 21: the damage, HP, etc. required to move up a CR basically double. These should mostly be legendary creatures, and should be significant creatures.

[Bjarkmundur]

Does this (https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Q_RBb9pbre3be9wo3b3_h8xRIobqb28/view) help?