Long time 5e DM, switched to 2e about 6 months ago and have been running an AP in that time. However I have come to a spot in the adventure with some wiggle room and I want to homebrew a few side quests and such. However, I’m fairly overwhelmed with the sheer amount of monsters, so what are your go-tos for picking the right one for the job? For 5e I had donjon and aidnd.
Also… Treasures? How do you choose for those? Gatewalkers feels fairly sparse on giving money and magic items or trinkets to the characters, so I’d like to look at a few that might work… Do I just hop on AoN and scroll through everything?
Beyond the Bestiary books, I’ve been using Mimic Fight Club to build encounters: https://mimic-fight-club.github.io/ It’s really great for scaling encounters to the party size and level, and it’s useful even if you are just searching and filtering.
I have noticed a lack of normal humanoid enemies though. There have been a lot of battles against Kobold Scouts reskinned as “bandits”.
For treasure, I refer to the Treasure By Level chart (11-1) on page 536 and the Party Treasure By Level chart (10-9) on 509. I try to find something appropriate for the area the treasure would be in, failing that, I start looking at spells to use for scrolls or wands. I tend to use the 10-9 chart as a minimum baseline and add more on top of that, but my group tends to forget the items they have, so your mileage may vary.