While finishing the layout for Kingdom of Toads, I was able to take a more global look at the monsters I designed for it. I noticed that in a couple of places, I was pretty shameless about "reskinning" existing monsters (that is, taking the stats for an existing monster and simply describing it as something else). When the stats "fit" the way the monster ought to play at the table, this should be fairly seamless.

The two examples I have from Kingdom of Toads are when the heroes are, in essence, shrunk down to miniscule size to fight somewhat ordinary insects and animals (it makes sense within the adventure, I promise). I have an encounter with a group of tree-burrowing plant lice that needed to be tough brute fighters with rending attacks. Having just heard someone complain about advanced gugs, I looked those over and found them to have the perfect stats for my hit-and-run, flesh-tearing plant lice. So the statistics you'll see for my plant lice are just about exactly those for advanced gugs.

In the late stages of writing that same scene, I suddenly needed a tree snake. But this would have to be a truly massive tree snake, as the heroes are teeny. Plus, it needed to have a high Challenge Rating, as the heroes would be fighting it on its own. I happened across the deep sea serpent from Bestiary 3, and it fit the bill nicely. I swapped the aquatic aspects for good climbing abilities, and my gargantuan tree snake was ready to go.

Filing off the serial numbers seems to work out, but I'll be interested to hear if any of the times I've done this it's not been a good fit for the encounter--mostly, so I know how to do it better in the future.