The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

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

Boros Angel and Skyjek Roc Tactics

February 10, 2026

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Celestials, Monstrosities

Notwithstanding the reckoner’s ability to cast levitate (which I maintain is of limited utility—if melee is your preferred mode, neither floating up away from your foes nor to causing them to float up away from you serves you well), the Boros Legion’s humanoid forces are basically infantry, with some heavy-weapon and artillery capability in the form of their mages.

The Skyjek roc turns a Boros knight into Boros air cavalry. Despite the name, it’s a horse-size avian, not jumbo jet–size like the Monster Manual roc. The flavor text in the Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica indicates that Skyjek rocs are used for reconnaissance, bombardment and dogfighting, each of which comes with its own set of tactics.

But first the basics: Skyjek rocs are strong and fast brutes, with extraordinary Strength, high Constitution and little else to distinguish them ability-wise. Proficiency in Dexterity saving throws makes them better than average at dodging area effects, and proficiency in Wisdom saves gives them a bit of added resistance to confusion, hold monster and the like. They’re proficient in Perception, too, and they have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight (if you’re using 2024 rules, ditch Keen Sight and boost the Skyjek roc’s Perception modifier to +4), but it’s their riders whose eyesight recon missions depend on, because Skyjek rocs lack the ability to communicate their observations.
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Boros NPC Tactics

January 29, 2026

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Humanoids

The Boros Legion consists of zealous warriors devoted to “justice, not merely law enforcement” (emphasis mine), meaning that they’re not going to concern themselves with victimless crimes—and they’re also not going to let themselves be hemmed in by legal constraints when dealing with the real bad ’uns. They’re basically good, and they’re basically lawful … but if there’s a conflict between them, “good” takes precedence over “lawful” every time.

Thus, the Boros soldier, while their stats are identical to those of an Azorius soldier, functions slightly differently. They still carry shields and wield their swords one-handed. They still move in close ranks to take advantage of Formation Tactics. However, they don’t always attack to subdue rather than kill. If they’re merely helping to apprehend someone deemed to have broken the law by the Azorius Senate or the Selesnya Conclave, then sure, Boros will deliver them to the defendant’s box in one piece (in some cases eagerly, in others begrudgingly). But if they’re independently pursuing a foe they consider an incorrigible threat to justice and wholesomeness, one that in their eyes has already established its own guilt in plain sight of everybody—perhaps one affiliated with House Dimir, the Golgari Swarm or, especially, the Cult of Rakdos—they don’t hold back.
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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.