Remonstered! Out Today!

Keith Ammann

Keith Ammann

— 3 min read
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Remonstered! Out Today!

The day has finally arrived: Remonstered! The Monsters Know What They’re Doing is available in bookstores and game stores across North America, continental Europe and Australia. (My agent is shopping around for a U.K. publisher, and I hope to have good news about that in the near future.

If you’re a Chicagoland resident, I hope you’ll drop by my release-day signing at the Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Ave. in Lincoln Square, tonight at 7 PM. You can also catch me at:

And if you plan to attend Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, March 4–7, please visit this page and tell the organizers you’d like to see me there as a special guest.

Your Party’s Worst Nightmare

A few weeks ago, Francesco Cacciatore of Polygon reached out and suggested a way to spice up coverage of the release of Remonstered! With Making Enemies having just received the 2026 Gold ENnie Award for Best Writing, he asked whether I’d design an original monster to give his players a challenge they wouldn’t forget. How could I say no?

Here are the specs he gave me:

First, some details about the ecology of the campaign world:
The peculiarity of this world is that light is scarce. The Sun and Moon are locked in a constant Sun eclipse state, so while there is a night/day cycle, the most light the world gets is the equivalent of a full Sun eclipse.
This phenomenon has both natural and supernatural consequences: nature is constantly shifting (usually in dangerous ways). Intelligent species are locked in a constant struggle against the wilderness: paths that are open during the day, disappear overnight or are twisted to become irrecognizable. Wild creatures sometimes become equally twisted. Monsters in this world are usually mutations or present unsettling, horror-like traits.
The party's homebase is in a "frontier town" surrounded by basically every biome: deep forests/jungle, swampland, river, mountains, plains.
This is the party composition (all characters are lvl 5):
- Elf barbarian (Path of the World Tree)
- Tiefling bard (college is home-brewed and based on tarots, think of it as a support/buff)
- Warforged monk (Way of Shadow)
- Dwarf fighter (Battle Master)
The party doesn't have particularly powerful magic items, or at least nothing that would warrant specific countermeasures.
Not the strongest lineup, no dedicated healer or wizard, so the bard has to do most of the heavy lifting spellcasting-wise. They're very powerful in close combat tho, the barbarian has a massive damage output due to Great Weapon Master, Rage, and a high STR stat (20). Plus Cleave to get even more attacks.

My family and I traveled out to the Indiana Dunes for the last solar eclipse, and one thing I remembered from it is how chilly it got when the sun was occluded, so that’s an element I wanted to work in somehow. The shifting of nature and wild creatures made my thoughts run in a few different directions with respect to creature type, but the top three (in no particular order except the order in which I thought of them) were Fey, Aberration and Monstrosity; I ended up going with Monstrosity.

I decided to tie the monster to one of the five terrain types surrounding the hometown and randomly chose grassland. Grassland monsters are typified by either high ground speed, a Pounce attack and natural camouflage or flight paired with keen eyesight—represented in 5.5E by double proficiency in Perception.

When I looked at the class list—barbarian, bard, fighter and monk—two things leapt out immediately. One was that this group would lean heavily on attack rolls, especially melee attacks, rather than spellcasting. The other was that it was likely that every PC in the party had dumped Intelligence. As a result, I decided it needed to have a high Armor Class and should be able to create illusions. Also, being able to cast bane would cause trouble for all of them except the bard. And, of course, I wanted to work in chill as a thematic element.

Read the article to see what horrid little beastie eventually emerged from my thought process.

Hear Me Blather

Finally, I’ve been making the podcast circuit of late, and two of the interviews I’ve done are already live.

The first, on Advanced Old School Revival’s That RPG Podcast, was part conventional interview, part adventure-writing exercise. The prompt-driven adventure began as a very silly story about a sylvan mafia but evolved into a fairly epic tale of feuding factions, forbidden love and an act of jealousy so dire and unforgivable that it laid a permanent curse on a patch of enchanted forest.

The other was a conversation with Jason Campbell of Shadomain. No wild flights of creativity in this one, but Jason is a friend who helped playtest the Cypher System versions of the monsters in Making Enemies.

More interviews to come, including with ClassicSamNYGM, Dice in Mind, Dungeon Master’s Block and Mastering Dungeons.

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