So, there's nothing saying you couldn't make Goblins that the party fights at level 18. Ultimately, monster stats shift with level and CR, and you could make a bunch of Goblins who deal massive amounts of damage with their special goblin weapons or cast truly mighty "booyahg" that could rupture the surface of the planet.
But generally speaking, monster cohorts usually come in an expected range of toughness. Goblins and Kobolds are, famously, often the first monsters a party faces (of course, they've also been made popular playable races, and their role as "always bad guys but usually kind of silly because you face them when you're low level" has gotten some nuance and depth) and as such, a lot of their stat blocks exist in the ranges that you can throw at a tier 1 party. There are plenty of these creatures at CRs lower than 1, which more or less means you can throw more than one of these at a party that is level 1 (though for such a low-level party, you probably want to avoid outnumbering them by too much in a single fight).
Now, CR is a tricky thing: the way that basically all encounter-building advice works is that a CR 2 monster could be a serious threat in tier 1, a significant obstacle in tier 2, or a minor nuisance in tier 3, and basically fodder in tier 4. Creatures don't come with a label saying "use this as a boss in tier 1 with a few lower-CR minions, but not as a lackey in a later fight." And the idea is that, well, you can use them for both.
Here, I think, FM's creature categories become important. Some monsters, like Controllers or Support, they advise against using more than one of in a fight. Controllers, for example, tend to have a lot of complexity and ongoing effects to lock down foes, and limiting yourself to one per encounter first makes it easier to keep track of things, but also gives players a tactical question to answer: do we focus-fire the Controller to make fighting all these other things easier when it's dead, or do we need to burn through its minions first?
But you can toss in whatever monsters you want into a fight. If your sole controller is CR 1/2 in a fight for level 7 players, though, the impact that monster will have is probably going to be minimal - they get diminishing returns past tier 1.
Still, if we take FM's encouter-building math, or the math out of Xanathar's, you can always just add monsters to make a fight harder. A fight for 9th level players could, in theory, be made into a fight for 15th level players by just doubling every monster in it (well, at easy difficulty).
So, my rule (one that is pretty new, to be clear) is that I'll generally try to avoid having more than two monsters per player character in a fight (counting a cohort of Minions as a single monster). If you want swarms of bad guys, that's what Minions are for, but it's a little drudgerous (if that's a word) for a party to have to churn their way through CR 1/2 mooks with 14 hit points apiece when their attacks are landing for an average of 24.
So, then, let's define Tiers of Monster. The idea here is that creatures of these CR are ideal for players to face within the tiers we show.
Obviously, there's overlap - a CR 3 monster could be nice and scary for a level 4 party (if the monster has some help,) while 3 would be a good CR for a rank-and-file bad guy in a level 10 fight. But we're going to broadly sort things here, using FM's encounter math.
The idea, I think, will be that a tier range will be from two-per-character at the tier's lowest level to the lowest CR of the next tier. Let's see how that works.
Tier 1 (Levels 1-4) Of course, here, we're obviously starting at CR 0 - the top range is what we're more curious about.
Tier 2 (Levels 5-10) FM lists the amount of CR a level 10 player adds to the budget as 3.5. Rounding down, this means that we could use two CR 1 monsters for every 10th-level player character.
So, already, this feels a little conservative. We can for sure use CR 1 monsters in a tier 1 fight. Perhaps, though, we should just not worry much about the tiers overlapping.
In this case, we can simply use the tier's highest level's CR cap to define the top range of the tier.
In this case, Tier 1 becomes 0-6. The toughest monster, FM says, that a tier 1 party should ever consider facing, is CR 6.
And yeah, 6 is pretty high - but I think a good party could handle it. Probably only as a solo monster. There's a reason that this is the absolute cap in FM.
So, revising that, we get our new tier ranges:
Tier 1: 0-6
Tier 2: 1/2-15
Tier 3: 2-24
Tier 4: 3-30
In other words, the key here is that we should be considering these level ranges as the far extent of what you should be throwing at a party of this tier.
With that settled... erm, what about our Taheen? What tier do we expect to see our parties face them?
Well, if we look at tiers of play, the general vibe, in simple terms, is this:
Tier 1, you're local heroes. You fight the day-to-day dangers that a small town or village faces. The enemies you're fighting don't have a lot of profound magic at their disposal, but they're still unambiguous dangers to the common folk. But in most cases, they're "normal" threats. Goblin bandits, orcish raiders, maybe the odd ghost in a haunted house.
Well, our Taheen are, of course, Punch-Clock Villains, and might, in a lot of cases, really just be kind of amoral office workers. But they're also supernatural beings - these are monstrosities of the Shadowfell who cannot die (meaning that they've been alive... an arbitrarily long time). And given the source material we're taking them from - in which they're some of the most elite minions of a cosmos-destroying evil overlord/eldritch abomination - maybe these guys aren't something a low-level party can mow down.
I can imagine that the role of the Taheen in tier 1 would be as an occasional presence amidst more mundane threats. Maybe the party is fighting a group of bandits or raiders, and... what's this? There's some weird thing with an animal head who is... paying them? And what's that strange musket that it's aiming at me? What is this thing? What are they doing here? They introduce a mystery that can lead us onward in our adventure.
Tier 2, you become a hero of the larger country - the kingdom, or the republic, or whatever nation-state or city-state. Here, you can start to become a force in something as wide-ranging as a war. Whereas a tier 1 party might be a bit more elite than the local militia, our tier 2 group is an elite force that can take the fight to enemy generals. They start to have things like Fireball, and martials are now attacking twice, making them much more powerful on the battlefield. Spellcasters are no longer forced to be so conservative with spell slots. Basically, at this point you're a veteran adventurer who might have a real name to yourself.
I think we're looking at a closer fit. The Taheen, with their modern technology and their extraplanar nature mean that they require a more significant response. When the Taheen show up and blast into the royal palace with a bunch of assault rifles, you need people who have proven themselves to take them out.
Tier 3, the idea is that your party has some of the most powerful adventurers on the world. A threat that might have been climactic in tier 2, like an assault on the royal palace, is something you can handle swiftly and with relative ease. If the villain wants to take you down, they need a plan, and powerful monsters. And if they want to evade you, they need to take special care to avoid powerful spells and prevent you from just teleporting into their lairs (the old "Scry & Fry.")
Here, I think we might still fit, but we're starting to stray outside of the Taheen's power level. The Taheen, after all, are typically working for some other villain, and at this point, that villain might need to step up and use their own forces to oppose us. I don't think you won't see Taheen at this point, but they're likely to be acting as auxiliary forces to our main villain's elites.
Tier 4, you become a hero of the multiverse - obviously, not every campaign goes to other planes, but at this level, you can consider your party legendary in power and status, and people who aren't even from your world might know of you. At this stage, the battles you fight are things that will go down in history as some of the most epic clashes in the history of your world.
Now that we're multiversal champions, the fact that the Taheen are otherworldly isn't really impressive anymore. So, again, we might see them on occasion, but we're probably frying bigger fish at this stage.
Ok, so with that broken down, I think we can aim to have our Taheen show up in tier 2 through early tier 3. They should probably feel like major threats in tier 2, but wind up as more disposable in tier 3. So, I think we should look at CR 2 as the minimum we shoot for, and capping out at around 7 (which is the CR budget for a single character at level 16 in a standard encounter - in other words, our toughest Taheen can go one-to-one with a party at the end of tier 3, but won't individually overwhelm more than one player character).
So, that allows us to toss in a weaker Taheen into a tier 1 combat with some less-than-1 CR backup, but if we start using them in tier 4, they've got to come in heavy numbers.
Next, we're going to look at what monster roles we want to cover, and start coming up with a concept for our Taheen Villain!
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