"Yes, We're All Individuals!" - Reskinning and Reequipping Monsters So They Don't Get Boring

"Hey, remember that time we fought those skeletons?"
"Yeah, I almost died.  It was bloody ridiculous."
"No, you're thinking of the skeletons we fought back in Derdinn's Keep.  I'm talking about when we fought the skeletons in those crypts back when we were second level."
"You mean third level.  There were three skeletons and two zombies."
"No, second level.  The ones with rusty scimitars."
"They've all had rusty scimitars."

We can't all work our way though the Monster Manual from cover to cover; sometimes in our campaigns we have to throw the same kind of monsters at the party that they have already fought.  But that doesn't mean they have to feel the same.  Too often as GMs we become satisfied with presenting monsters just as they are presented to us in the Monster Manual or Bestiary.  But no matter how good a dish is, eating it over and over is going to get bland.

Take a look at these skeletons.  We've got your typical shambling skeleton in tattered scraps of armour:

Duty-Bound Dead, by Johannes Voss (c) Wizards of the Coast

A saintly skeleton decked out in the finest gilded plate:

St. Pancratius - Dr. Paul Koudounaris, via Cartwheel Art

And glowing-eyed skeletons (okay, probably liches) wielding staves and wearing crowns and mighty robes:

Keith Parkinson

In your game, if you pitted your party against any of these three types of skeletons - even if behind the screen they were all just your basic CR 1/3 skeletons - I guarantee they wouldn't remember it as just "that skeleton fight."

The two simplest and best ways to make your monsters unique are reskinning and reequipping.

Reskinning
Reskinning consists of changing the appearance of the monster to make it seem different, without actually changing its stats.  It's a real time-saver for a busy and creative GM.

Reskinning at its most basic level is essentially just giving the monster a new paint job.  It consists of changing superficial details so that the monster is still recognizable for what it is, but noticeably different from the basic version found in the Monster Manual.

Going back to the skeleton example, there are many many simple things you can do to make unique skeletons (I should know; I freaking love skeletons): glowing eyes, gem eyes, charred completely black, etched with ancient runes, heads replaced with animal skulls... I got a million of 'em.

It can be as simple as putting some distinctive clothes on them.  This works very well with zombies: zombie butcher, zombie aristocrat, zombie jester, etc.  (Ooh, zombie jester is a good one.  I've gotta use that sometime)

If your party is encountering many orcs (or other brutish humanoids) from various bands or tribes, give each tribe a distinctive marking: blue warpaint, eyebrow piercings, jaguar-skin cloaks, ritual scarification, mohawks, gold teeth, kilts...

Other examples abound: scarecrows with cow skulls for heads, iron golems crafted in the shape of dwarves, wood golems carved like totem poles, giant scorpions that live in caves and have transparent white carapaces, etc.  There are quite literally infinite minor tweaks and superficial additions you can make to monsters to give them that unique and memorable touch.  In one game, my players fought an ancient queen whose ashes had been preserved within a wax double of her body - it was just a wax golem reskinned to be all Ancient Egyptian-y.

More extreme re-skinning can turn a monster into a completely different one.  For this, you basically strip a monster down to its bare stat-block and build a new one on top of that.  The monsters do the exact same thing, but look and feel very different.

For instance, say you are running a campaign set in the Far East.  Your typical dryad of Greek mythology might feel out of place, but a cherry tree dryad with a flowing kimono of bark and hair full of cherry blossoms could fit right in.

Amber ooze is a mean little critter that disguises itself as ale or mead, but who's to say that there couldn't be a variant that disguises itself as a warm, hearty stew?

Adventuring underground is no reason to omit Plant monsters - reskin an assassin vine as strangling assassin roots.

My girlfriend has recently started GMing, and in one of the first encounters she planned, she reskinned several zombies and a hanged man as ancient bog mummies (since actual bog mummies would have been far too powerful).

Re-skinning monsters is a powerful weapon in any GM's arsenal.  It lets you create new monsters on the fly and keep your game fresh and interesting with a minimum of effort.  It even helps to keep that mystery alive, preventing your players from guessing what the monster is and instantly knowing its strengths and weaknesses.

Reequipping
This is slightly more in-depth than reskinning, but it only requires you to tweak a couple numbers (damage and AC, generally).  Reequipping monsters is simply giving them different armour and weapons than the basic stat block in the Monster Manual does.  It's so easy to just run with the stats the book gives you, but fighting loads of monsters with the same weapons gets old fast.  The default orc in both D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder wields a falchion - many a low-level adventurer has met their end on an orc's falchion thanks to their immense strength and the weapon's brutal 18-20 crit range.  Why not have orcs with clubs, spears, short swords, longbows, warhammers, or any other given weapon?  Change things up, and your players will thank you.

Reequipping monsters seriously makes a huge difference in how an encounter feels.  Let's dredge up the old skeleton example again.  Assume the party is about to enter a room full of ten skeletons.  Now, you could go with the default skeleton armed with a broken scimitar and wearing a broken chain shirt, and the battle will get tedious and repetitive pretty quickly.  But give four of those skeletons shortbows, two of them rusty full-plate and greatswords, and the other four chainmail and halberds, and suddenly you have a completely different fight on your hands.

Reequipping also lets you tell the players more about your monsters, your dungeon, or your world.  Are these skeletons particularly ancient?  Perhaps they would be wearing bronze breastplates or wielding bronze shortswords and spears.  Or are the skeletons more recent additions to the dungeon, perhaps a lost platoon of royal guards armed with fine chainmail and longswords?  Are these hobgoblins poor bandits, armed with crude hide armour and wooden clubs?  Or are they mercenaries from beyond the Circle Sea, armed with splint mail and katanas?

Heck, even throwing armour on something that doesn't usually have armour can make for a memorable experience:

Royal Armouries - Leeds

I probably do reequipping more often than reskinning.  I just make notes of the changed attacks and ACs on a scratch paper, and if I'm mapping the battle out I'm sure to use different dice to represent the differently armed monsters.
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Reskinning and reequipping are just the two easiest and most common ways of tweaking monsters to work for you and your setting.  Applying a template is a bit more time consuming but can have great results (if you're in need of some less dexterous, more hardy skeletons, try my stout skeleton template).  Adding class levels is even more complex but equally rewarding.  And of course you can just make up new monsters.

-your gem-eyed d20 despot