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[bamorrow]

I'd tinkered with modding a little.  My first ambitious attempt was to make Tentacle Demons playable.  After lots of failure, I began stripping out the tags that created problems until I basically had large humans with tentacles and a nasty bite, who didn't sleep or eat.  I'd then made a kind of uber dwarf with extra arms and legs, wings and a third eye, didn't sleep, but all together not really anything all that crazy or cool.

Starting over with vanilla fort mode, I wanted to enhance goblins for a greater fighting experience, and thought about going for the old tentacle demons again as a replacements.

Then I thought about what I really wanted to achieve, and how I could get that done with the least amount of work.

Made goblins bigger, gave them a better bite.  Also Beak Dogs so that they wouldn't be riding around on tiny things.  Hardly epic.  But extra arms and hands would just gift me with more shields.  Flight has its pathing problems.  More eyes so more sustained vision in case of poked out?  Well, actually just more targets to pierce that cause a great deal of pain.  All the exotic improvements basically felt like problems until I just settled on bigger.

Has anybody found something that genuinely wound up feeling like a very special addition to the creatures they modded?

[Johnny Chthonic]

Most creatures in the game appear to exist in order to give your dorfs something to punch or get punched by. Most of the stuff I've made that I felt was truly unique has been in the form of civilizations and items. Custom workshops should help this. Additions to existing critters and the creation of new creatures has, at least in my experience, been to give the world a specific feel or playstyle, not necessarily to re-write the game.

I made a gorgon with snakes on her head, which she could use to perform a poisonous bite. If you cut all these off, she strikes at you. I made a huge "ice ravager" megabeast with horns and tusks, that basically charges at everything and has freezing breath. There is some neat stuff you can do with creatures, but it requires some experience and lots of ingenuity/workarounds.

[Deon]

I've started to mod alot of fancy things, like tweaking tokens and changing prefstrings and specific internal organs, but with time it became obvious that the more you see something, the greater impact it will have while modded:
1) The most noticeable change in creatures is the variety of their attacks, because you directly see them every time you try to brawl them in adventure mode. A bit smaller change but still noticeable is a tweaking of  bodyparts/organs, because you see this change every time you try to attack and succeed.
In case of creature attacks, long and creative descriptions (or just long, like "makes a high swing, hitting", "spits poison and bites", "makes a complex gesture and sends a blast of energy" etc.) make creatures more interesting and adds a nice flavor.
Too bad there's not a lot of "magical"/special ways to improve creature, just: firebreath, dragonfirebreath, webber for long range attacks and specialattacK_inject_extract, specialattack_suck_blood for close combat. Still with various damage types you can make "ice mages" which paralyze you with cold touches and poisonous vampiric creatures. Not a lot of possibilities, but with proper descriptions of attacks and creatures you have some field for creativity.
2) A bit lesser change but still noticeable is a change in entity weapons/armor, mostly weapons. If you give various types of damage and some side properties (like stick chance or crit. boost) to specific weapons, if gives you choice in what you're attacking with. In vanilla DF it's obvious that you don't have to pick a weapon in most cases, you just use the one you're more proficient with. If you make a creature like "treasure chest" which is immobile and drops a powerful random item on death, it makes those cave-divings and random wandering more interesting and makes you to change weapons from time to time. Too bad it's not the case with armor, because you have to make simple "metal chests", "ornate elven wooden chests
 and special "dwarven rune chest" because dwarves are 1 size smaller than humans and elves are "narrow", which requires a special type of chest for every race (because the creature drops the armor with the same size and properties (i.e. stout, narrow) as it is. If you wonder about "random drop" I mentioned, there's a simple workaround: just make a lot of chests with various itemcorpses, but give them the same name. Thus you won't know what is the item inside when you encounter one.
3) There're various tweaks to entity namings (the words they use to describe things) and to entity values (slavery, theft etc. disposition) which do not matter a lot to gameplay (except for entity relations during the worldgen) but they add a nice flavor and allow you to further personalize entities and civilizations to your taste.

I don't remember a creature I haven't done, I mean there're always something new you can create, but I've made so many creature types it's hard to propose something new unless you're following some pre-defined setting. I've made exact versions of aberrations from Faerun, using my DnD books; I've made a complex humanoid body with different arteries, complete set of bones and even 32 teeth. But it's not fun when a single arrow pierces all your arteries in the body.

So the current engine is somewhat limiting. You may think that a creature with 2 hearts would be more durable than with 1, but in DF it's the opposite case. So you have to admit it when you make your creatures, as you told.

P.S. So the current way to make creatures "stronger" is to give them a bigger size (at least 1 bigger than dwarves, it makes the attack formula different) and give them some damblock or more arms so they have more shields to block.

Also NOPAIN and NOSTUN are really great tokens. Usually creatures pass out after 1 or 2 successful strikes in their vital body parts or after someone twists a spear in their tail a few times (this is how dragons die; thus i gave them NOPAIN and they became 10 times stronger).