Monster Creation
Making monsters is hard work. It’s always more complex than you think, and understanding how all the parts fit together requires careful study and arcane expertise. That happens to be true whether you’re a necromancer or that far more evil occupation: a GM.
My first experience making monsters was back in Exalted 2e. I figured that I could just throw together a few health levels, a combo attack, and make up a ridiculous sounding name. When you’re not the most experienced person at the table, however, that fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach doesn’t work out so well.
“Your soulsteel daiklave arcs down towards Forsaken Misery and Blossom Face Princess,” I said, enjoying my first turn as an Exalted ST. “But the moment before it touches her perfect hair, she vanishes from sight.”
Laurel looked at me in baffled silence for a moment. “I thought you said that Forsaken Misery and Blossom Face Princess was a Dragon-Blooded?”
“She is,” I replied. “She just activated her perfect dodge.”
“Um,” said my then-girlfriend. “You do know that Dragon-Blooded don’t have access to perfect defenses?” She then made the customary gesture of superior knowledge. I have since learned my lesson.
These days, when I’m creating an NPC for Pathfinder, you can bet that I’m relying on Hero Lab. When it’s time to populate one of my mini-dungeons, I’m linking straight to the SRD, and even then I only trust certain sources. That’s part of the reason why I appreciate Starfinder’s template system. As a designer, getting the basic stat array down to a formula frees me up worry about the actually-interesting custom abilities. And as for Exalted… Well, there’s a reason I picked up the Storyteller’s Companion a few years back. It’s every bit as clunky and hard to use as the game itself, but Laurel hasn’t complained about my setting-breaking charm choices since.
How about the rest of you guys? When you’re brewing up a custom monster, do you worry about dotting your T’s and crossing your I’s, or do you just give your NPCs power attack and quicken magic, prerequisites be damned? Tell us all about your labor-saving monster building best practices down in the comments!
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Hero Lab!! An amazing program. I used to use it to make a billion different characters that I would never, ever get a chance to play. Now, of course, I use DnD Beyond to make a billion different characters that I will never, ever get a chance to play.
So many concepts, so few people I know who want to run a game…
My only experience as a DM has been running modules, which I haven’t modified too much, given how new I am to being on that side of the screen (or… any side of the screen, really). That said, I tend to stick with established mechanics as much as possible—at least for now, it means there’s less of a chance I accidentally jank up something that makes the monster either unkillable or go down in less than a full round.
Not that I haven’t had area and module bosses that have gone down in less than one round exactly as written. Why does Glasstaff have to be as fragile as… well… glass? He’s even got a staff of defense! Ah, initiative. She is a cruel mistress, indeed.
In my experience, the real trouble is when you try to do “simplified stats.” The moment you skip out on putting the critter’s skills into the stat blocks, somebody inevitably tries to Bluff vs. its Sense Motive or whatever.
THAT at least I have an answer to! Since it’s 5e, there’s bounded accuracy. If I homebrewed it up and for some reason didn’t bother to assign certain stats (which I really should do, because ANY stat can be a saving throw), I would just think, “all right, how easy is this guy to fool?” and to a set DC based on difficulty instead of a skill contest: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30.
NPCs usually only get a couple of proficiencies anyway, so if I do have ability scores, I would probably just use the base ability modifier.
I like when the numbers go up a lot in systems that do that, but I also really appreciate the streamlined skills of 5e sometimes! “Ability Mod + proficiency bonus if applicable” is pretty fast, and you’ll already know it most of the time because it goes into their attack roll.
Warhammer fantasy roleplaying: 1)take a monster from the beastiary. 2)slap some mutations (randomly rolled or pick whatever’s cool). 3)kill the PCs with it.
Also, I once had a dream about goats living in volcanic areas which ate brimstone and vomited sulphurous gas clouds as a defensive mechanism. 5e has stats for goats, add the poison breath attack from the half-dragon template and some PCs are in for a surprise.
Were you ever tempted to create wholly original monsters, or was reskinning the bestiary stats always good enough?
given the sheer number of mutation combinations you can stick on a given critter, I didn’t ever feel the need, no. when you can give a horse spider legs, a mouth on it’s tongue like a xenomorph, an extra head that breathes fire and eyeballs instead of blood, why bother writing up a whole new statblock?
Also, there’re several “monster careers” that you can use to make a given creature better at sneaking, fighting, magic or leading other monsters.
That’s something I really appreciate about Fate – the ease of on-the-fly homebrewing. “They did what?! Oh shit, I guess I need a White Dragon. All right, here goes:
Aspects
HC: Giant Ice Dragon
Trouble: Arrogant to a fault
A1: I HATE THIEVES!
A2: You’re either a servant or a meal
Skills
Stuff White Dragons are good at: +6
Stuff vaguely related to being a White Dragons: +3
Stuff unrelated to being a White Dragon: +0
Anything to do with Fire: -2
Stunts
Breath Attack: Once per Conflict you may make an attack against all characters in a zone without splitting shifts. The zone gains an aspect “Covered In Ice”.
“One minute of work and I’m done. Perfect. They will never know the difference.”
I once tried to streamline Pathfinder’s Simple Monster Creation rules even further in order to allow for similar instant beasties. Suffice to say, I failed miserably. There’s just too much stuff, especially when casters are involved.
I like Dungeon World for much the same reason. Sure it comes with some monsters, but also instructions for making your own, and most of mine are just HP, damage dice, instinct and maybe a special move or two.
How does A2 conceive of fire elementals?
:p
White Dragons aren’t that smart, he didn’t think through all the potential corner cases.
They’re smart once they get old
Man… I need to actually read the rulebook next time I’m invited to a new campaign. I played Fate briefly in one of my group’s Firefly games, but it was only 5 sessions long. We wound up quitting before I could get a sense for the system.
I may have saved myself some time and effort by relying on the quickplay guide and GM assistance, but now I can’t speak with any authority about the system. I remember the aspects for example, but I’ll be damned if I could tell you what “splitting shifts” does.
In Fate (well, at least the modern incarnations, I’m not very familiar with anything that came out before Core) if you wish to attack multiple enemies at once, you have to split the result of your roll between them. So let’s say you’re fighting two mooks, and you wish to attack them using Fight, which is your best skill at +4. You’re a bit lucky on the dice roll getting a +2. That amounts to a total result of 6. You could use that to crush one of the mooks, sure, but that’s a bit of an overkill – they’re total pushovers. Instead you split your result in two (or in any other proportion that you’d like), attacking both with a +3. Now, technically, you’re splitting the result of your roll and not the shifts – the latter are what you get after subtracting the opposition from your result. But even if you say “split the shifts” instead of “split the result”, everyone will probably still understand what you mean.
Also, if you want to check out Fate, but don’t feel like going through 200 pages of rules, about half a year ago Evil Hat released Fate Condensed, which is a slightly streamlined version of Core intended to occupy a minimum number of pages (50-something I believe?).
Let’s just say that I followed the standard Pathfinder entothrope template for giant mantis shrimp and got something that I’m not unleashing on my party for another few levels. Bright side, she makes for an amazing pirate captain.
NPC: “I live in dread of the moon. For under that baleful light, I transform into… A wereshrimp!”
PLAYERS: “BWAHAAAH! That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard!”
NPC: “More specifically, I’m a were-PISTOL-shrimp.”
PLAYERS: “Oh gods, we’re all gonna die!”
The CR system for 5e is determined by some sort of mystical process that i dont have enough levels in wizard to understand, so when i made my homebrew monster, i just said “ok, what will it be a complete pain for them to deal with?” and went from there.
Moderate number of hit points? Check. Immunity to nonmagic weapons? Check. Most importantly, the ability to eat spells targeted within a certain range of them, because im tired of the paladin just smiting everything to death immediately. I dont need 40 of these guys in an encounter to be a threat, just two or three with some regular monsters. Physically they arent even that imposing, its just their ability to play support forces the party to radically adjust their tactics.
What exactly does “eat spells” do? Does it just negate their effects, or does the creature somehow gain magical power from tasty spell noms?
Both! They get to heal 1d6 hit points per level of the spell they eat. Otherwise it works like it was counterspelled. The end goal of the bad guys was to make an army of these guys completely under their control, and if the stakes still werent high enough, their creation was considered creating true life, and was considered such dangerous knowledge that the gods would destroy the continent rather than let the Bad Guys have suck knowledge. They didnt have a more precise unit of energy to work with, so the gods were rather rooting for the PCs, but they couldnt help more directly than giving clerics spells and the like.
As i’ve mentioned, I mostly do WoD so there are no things like “CR” there is just me throwing stuff at the party and seeing how they handled it.
Currently the main one is Promethean but after complaining that making their antagonists was a pain in the butt, a friend sat down with me and made an Excel sheet of all powers, levels, strengths, etc for every single antagonist template we could think of and its been invaluable ever since.
My personal favorite thing I’ve built that way was either a Size 1 pandoran (size of a baseball) that fired projectiles at so quickly you couldn’t dodge them and its cousin which was the same size but was basically a knife throwing itself forward at that speed to just ignore armor (aka DR in that system) or the Sublimati that could cancel out the PC’s buffs while flying above them invisibly. The first is the basic definition of a glass cannon while the second played merry hell with their combat fighting.
That sound simple and easy!
Ah. So not so simple and easy.
I love me some WoD, but it always feels like the system has a massive hate-on for its GMs. There just aren’t a lot of tools to make these beasts easy to run.
I have two primary tools that I use to great effect.
Number 1: The Reskin
Recently I ran an encounter where the enemies were Beastmen from Warhammer Fantasy Battles (in my shared Pathfinder game.) Rather than creating a custom monster type for them, I jumped on over to the Legacy version of the Pathfinder PRD, navigated over to the monster codex, and used the stats for the various levels of orcs they have pre-built there. All I did was change up a few of the weapons, and they were ready to go. They also had some warhound-like creature with a venomous bite, and rather than figuring out how adding poison to a dire wolf would change the CR, I simply used the stats for an Advanced Giant Cobra (and changed their 1 CON poison to a 1 STR and 1 DEX poison) and had another monster ready to go.
Number 2: The Unusual Monster
When I want to make a recognizable monster that doesn’t quite follow the rules that more experienced players are familiar with, I just call out on their Knowledge check that something about it seems unlike other members of the species they might be familiar with. If they don’t roll a knowledge check and just operate on metagaming knowledge, and that screws them over… Well, not my problem. For example, I’ve got a monster I’m currently working on, which is a large-sized dragon with black scales but is not a chromatic black dragon. When it appears, and if anyone rolls to identify or study it, they’ll notice the metallic scraping sound of its scales against each other, and the stink of charcoal from its body, combined with the heat haze every time it exhales. If at that point, they choose to prepare some acid resistance because that’s what black dragons use, I think their impending burns are no one’s fault but their own.
I am familiar with this principle: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/altered-bestiary
Its always fun to mess with expectations like this. And there’s not much the, “My character should have known about these!” guy can do when they make assumptions in lieu of a check.
Minor D&D 4E rant – I was trying to create some NPC adventurers for a fight early in the system, and the setup for trying to adjust numbers broke down after a certain level adjustment the players were beyond.
I think I fudged the whole fight or crossed my fingers and hoped I wouldn’t TPK with GM generated characters, the worst of all offenses.
My groups skipped out on 4e. What level does the math stop working?
Reskin, reskin, reskin. My campaign is set in an alien world, and almost every foe is some sort of homebrew. What’s a DM to do? Take two or three different monsters with the right sort of power level, mash ’em together, change the details and flavour as necessary, and whabam! Brand new beastie! I’ve been called out on my Feat choices a couple of times (“How does the guy in heavy armour have Combat Reflexes?”) but with non-human foes it’s a lot easier to sweep things under the rug.
It’s funny, but given the e-commerce nature of the dungeons I write, the team has made the decision to simply hyperlink to the 5e SRD. For a 1000-word dungeon, there just isn’t space to throw down new monsters stats. And so the reskin strat has a way of moving beyond homebrew and into published adventures as well.
I love creating monsters and villains. Sad to say, I don’t really have any special way of streamlining the process. I just create a big Word document with a list of the options I’m considering, and have a bunch of tabs open to sites like Realms Help (for templates and monsters), D&D Tools (for feats, classes, alternate class features, and spells), and the occasional Google Drive to access an actual PDF of the books when the quick-references won’t cut it or I want to double check them (really, I need to do that more often; it’s bitten me before).
Also, I design for low-stakes internet competitions like Villainous Competition, Iron Chef, and Junkyard Wars over on Giant in the Playground, rather than for actual games, which has a definite impact on my strategy. For all of them but Villainous, the creation has to be legal for a PC to play, and even Villainous Competition favors enemies smart and competent enough to survive to become recurring foes. That means you don’t typically see giant bruisers, mindless slimes, or anything else that can’t taunt the players before making its exit-stage-left.
With all that said, here are my favorite custom villains and monsters!
The Wendigo, aka Paul
You know how horror movie villains only ever seem to do a slow walk, but are always right behind the heroes? I figured out how to replicate that mechanically without teleportation. For the E6 variant rules.
http://bit.ly/2lQQEeL
Futility
Unfortunately, one of the key tricks of this build doesn’t actually work. It’s still one of my favorites for the fluff. Don’t want to spoil exactly what this beasty is for those that want to read the story, but a unique aesthetic combined with being more or less unstoppable guarantee she’ll stick in the minds of the players for the entire campaign.
http://bit.ly/2XGBURC
Jackie the Jinx, and the Joker Up(on) Her Sleeve
Pirate witch!
http://bit.ly/2OhcSnE
Azoth, the Raven’s Shadow
Who doesn’t love ninjas? An assassin that’s extremely hard to pin down. This could be the single best practical optimization character I’ve done as far as combining elegance and effectiveness. Sneak Attack, Skirmish, Iaijutsu Focus, and a whole lotta stealth.
http://bit.ly/2kfZ3rs
Lasciel’s Army of the Dragon
This one’s interesting for being an entire army and its tactics and backstory.
http://bit.ly/2kfZr9o (part 1)
http://bit.ly/2lTPAGO (part 2)
Atriox
One of the best villains from the Halo universe, here reimagined as the power hungry leader of an army of werewolves. Mechanically, it’s all about taking under-used aspects of well known optimization tricks and stringing them together.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23999697&postcount=95
Severus, The Knight of Ghostly Thorns
“You suffer from a misapprehension. You succeeded in killing me when last we crossed. I would have… words… with you about that.”
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24240854&postcount=104
The Littlest Nightmare, Pollyanna
In the realm of dreams, who can say where the lines lie between victim and curse, or predator and prey? I’m very pleased with this one, both story and mechanics. I’m sure her victims are comforted by the fact that she was far more scared of them than they were of her.
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24809459&postcount=45
The format there illustrates one of the aspects of 3.5e that makes character creation tricky. The fact that it makes a difference what order you take your levels in. A character who takes a level of rogue and then a level of fighter will have more skill points that a character who takes the fighter level first and then the rogue level. Which is arguably a game balance problem
I used to obsess and do a lot of hand-wringing over making sure my creatures were properly balanced and followed all of the RAW.
–Then I realized the other DMs in the group were just making up random stuff and throwing it at us: sometimes it worked and we laughed all night, sometimes we were railroaded right into a colossal train wreck.
That’s when I also realized that for my crew, if I could a) create it quickly, b) make it fun, and c) put as little time into creating it as it would take them to kill it, then my friends and family honestly could not care less how the sausage was made. Slap a new coat of paint on an old concept, tell an engaging story with multiple possible outcomes, and –whee!!! –away we go! (So, for 3.5 campaigns, things are usually monster X with a level of this and a couple levels of that, plus a cosmetic change to hide the mechanics.)
what self-respecting necromancer does not have the undead assembly equivalent of an allen wrench in the shop? sheesh, amateur!
for monsters I rely on what is in the bestiaries, monster codices etc.
I might tweak the occasional spell list or slap on a template.
or use one of the multiple character generators for a band of kobolds, goblins etc. to keep them a challenge at any level.
but I‘m definitely not going to touch the Pathfinder Race Builder in Advanced Races or monster builders.
Not even with a 10‘ pole.
confused, if the glasses adjustment is the universal sign of greater intelligence why haven’t they figured out how to get their glasses properly fitted?
Because anime.
Furthermore: https://imgur.com/mnE5Px3
Our DM makes a artisan level work only for us to defeat it and no longer think of that thing again. I like to make lore if people read it or not is something beyond my worries. So i make backstories related to the world and don’t care if the thing dies on the first round 🙂
As for creating life as a player. Legion of Marching Clay is an Invocation of the Throne level Thaumaturgy on Godbound. With it you can create automaton made out of inanimate materials, or if using clay or softer substances utterly loyal but with self will and with individual personalities beings 😀
I think Paizo did a good job of monster/npc creation in Pathfinder 2e by separating the rule/mechanics from PC creation. I remember a thread on the forums where someone said they found the process so quick and easy they thought they’d made a mistake.
Is it similar to Starfinder’s templates? I haven’t played with PF2e too much yet.
I’m not familiar with Sarfinder’s rules but Paizo has a chunk of the GMG free on their site: https://paizo.com/products/btq021ct?Gamemastery-Guide-Monster-and-Hazard-Creation
That sounds like it makes sense if I’m understanding you right.
I always felt it was a bit stupid for hit dice to be tied to attack bonus and skill points. Why should a hit die correspomd to a level?
Because that’s how it works for players, I assume… you gain a level, and your HP and bonuses increase. And D&D 3e tended to use the same mechanics for monsters/NPCs as for characters… to the point where (e.g) an X HD creature was in some ways treated as having X levels in the “monster” class (in terms of skills, feats, hitpoints, etc).
That goes beyond “the same mechanics”. Decoupling hit dice from BAB, base saves, feats, and skills does not in any way interfere with the monster having canonically defined Hit dice, BAB, base saves, feats, and skills.
Plus it’s patently nonsensical to interpret some colossal monster’s 36 hit dice as representing 36 levels in the Fucking Enormous class
And don;t get me wrong. I think 3.5e is arguably the best edition, specifically BECAUSE the monsters have full stat blocks – rather than being cheap standees like in other editions – but generating the stat blocks in an oberly formulaic way is not an essential part of that
I haven’t made any monsters, but I’ve made a couple of homebrew races for Pathfinder. And one homebrew feat to go with one of the races. It was pretty fun to do, though a lot of work to ensure that they weren’t too powerful or too weak.
Compared to my previously discussed fussiness with world building, my approach to creating monsters for my games (and I do it a lot) is pretty fast, loose and haphazard. I come up with the concept, pull together a stat block based on a rough impression of what dnd ability scores represent, and then throw in abilities and attacks with whatever effects I want, with DCs and Damage values appropriate to how difficult I want the fight to be as compared to the party level. I mostly judge appropriate power by taking elements off existing creatures and tweaking them.
It is a higly imperfect approach, but hasn’t often caused trouble – and I’m not above quietly scaling back elements of a beast mid fight if it turns out to be nastier than I expected (though I don’t do the reverse – players should be made to suffer for my poor preparation).
Occasionally I will playtest a critter for a particularly significant fight, running through a few mock encounters with it to simulate how it will work, but most of the time I just slap the beast together and wing it.
My players haven’t complained, although, now that I think of it – they do “nope out” of more fights than I intend, perhaps on the belief that with my homebrew critters, you never can be sure. Bust seriously, what part of a gargantuan lava-spewing Andean volcano spirit do they think they can’t handle? :p
Ironically, as simple as templates in Starfinder are, I still find myself discouraged from using them as a player – notably as spells like Summon Monster and Polymorph require you to figure the stats of what you’re summoning / modifying allies into on your own.
Necromancer is lucky she didn’t go for the €ronen°Berg monster model.
My GM ‘labor saving’ tip? I do whatever I want.
And when a Player dares to utter the Rules Lawyerly phrase of “But X doesn’t get Y.”
I reply, “Normally, that is true.”
Despite not being a GM and not having it in me to handle such a responsibility, I’ve made the odd homebrew creation or enemy. During a run of a Pathfinder 1e module, I found that the stats for a type of enemy called ‘Purple Jesters’ was… honestly kind of a non-event? They weren’t really novel, and they weren’t anything resembling a threat, so they felt kinda filler-ish. Which is a shame, because they had a relatively neat flavor and appeared in a location that could’ve made for some neat battlegrounds.
I wound up making a Fighter/Rogue that could get flanking by having an enemy between them and a wall, fitting for their brutish nature and the tight alleyways in the area they appeared. They had the Step Up and Following Step feats to follow characters who tried to 5 ft step away from them, and the ability to cause sickened/disable the victim’s AoOs on Sneak Attack.
So basically they were acrobatic, slippery jerks who would nearly always have flanking to Sneak Attack with/the ability to move around freely despite the tight spaces, and liked dragging parties down to their level with a debuff.
I ended up making a few variants for their little faction, like a “Court Magician” (coerced stage hand who used magic for effects in plays and the like, now using it to set up ambushes with illusions/Rope Trick/Feather Fall, or divide and conquer by forming temporary walls via Expeditious Construction) and a “Brute” (circus strongman theme goon that’s all about grab and squeeze).
Aside from that, I also made a homebrew monster statblock based on an early monster in some of the Etrian Odyssey games- the Furyhorn, one of the trademark FOEs of the series. A big deer with odd coloration and an immense territorial streak that can make people go mad with the sound of their yells. It could do an AoE confusion effect on nearby creatures in a cone, then when the victims group up or are otherwise stranded in place, it could either trample groups or gore stragglers with its antlers.
Relevant links:
Purple Jester Thug (CR 4) (Spoilers for Curse of the Crimson Throne)
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1911230
Purple Jester Thug (Unfinished CR 2 version, simpler and lets you have more of the jerks)
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=2211174
Purple Jester Court Magician (CR 4, CotCT spoilers)
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1911271
Purple Jester Court Magician (CR 2, CotCT spoilers, same deal as above)
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1916944
Purple Jester Brute (CR 6 mini-boss, Spoilers for Curse of the Crimson Throne)
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1911406
Furyhorn (no Spoilers)
https://pastebin.com/jXX0StS6
I just try my best to balance it either off existing things of the same CR or I just design monsters however I feel like and then wildly cheat behind the scenes to have the intended result. Admittedly I haven’t had to do so in such a tricky circumstance as “this effect is clearly only a result of X thing, which only Y type creatures can have” like you Exalted Example.
If anything I feel playing a true to type necromancer is actually harder since most systems won’t let you create/control hordes of minions or a few actually strong enough to be worthwhile ones at higher levels. (Actually this probably is a thing you can do in 3.5 but you could do all kinds of insane stuff in that system so it basically doesn’t count.)
One thing that makes a stat block easier to go back and modify is to actually write down the individual sub-modifiers for every stat in a way similar to how the SRD does for the armor class stat. That way you don’t have to repeatedly keep working backwards to figure out how many actual skill points are in a given skill, then you just have to do it once, when you start modifying. It annoys me that these breakdowns aren’t already shown in the official stat blocks. Doing it even once is a hassle.
The other main thing that’s a hassle is that taking the same number of levels in each class but in a different order isn’t isomorphic; The way choosing intelligence as an ability increase is handled and the level one bonuses put things out of whack. Anyone have a workaround for this?
The only “Custom monsters” I made were PCs that served as antagonists. (In late T2 to T3 it’s less unbalanced than you think) I did make some custom features like having a Monk whose Stunning Strike had additional effects as he piled it onto an already stunned foe, from stunned, to paralyzed, then finally every vein/artery in your body rupturing at once. I also gave the BBEG some legendary actions. The most interesting of which was the ability to burn one to take an extra reaction. Sooooooo many Counterspells. He did also have a custom 9th level spell based on a pun that I’ve previously discussed here.
You hit on one of my major weaknesses. I’m really bad at creating monsters that are tough enough to challenge my players. Traps, curses, social encounters, puzzles, riddles, what-not, that’s all fine and dandy, but the monsters?
Well.
They tend to go through my monsters like an Olympic swimmer through a kiddie pool. “Wait, was that supposed to be an actual fight? We haven’t even gotten through the first round and it’s dead….”
Alright, maybe not quite that bad all the time.
But close.
I might have to try out some of those tools you mentioned.
(My NPC -and rare PC- builds are also notorious for having a lot of flavor and being very squishy. You can use them like quest pinatas if you treat them as social encounters but they’re very fragile if it’s a straight-up physical fight. I swear I don’t mean to, but when my level eight party of three ACCIDENTALLY kills the level 44 NPC that was supposed to be an end-boss-hiding-as-early-red-herring, you know it’s a problem. “Wait, he’s dead? I was doing nonlethal damage! We were just trying to keep him unconscious long enough to move him!” “Nonlethal turns lethal once you accumulate enough to equal maximum hit points” “…Oops?”)
Given the necromantic context, is an “allen wrench” the usual little hex device? Or is it a body part wrenched from Allen?
sorry, I misplaced my reply earlier.
a Witch wrenched a body part of Allen and turned into to a Hex-Device
Heh, that works.
I DM 5e, and while the simplicity makes being a player a bit eh from a mechanical perspective, it does make monster creation really easy. I’ve made wallmasters, half-dragon wrestlers, plague hags, and pumpkin kings, all with just some expected numbers and cool powers. (The Angry Monster Maker is great by the way.)
I think the most creative I’ve gotten with monster creation was a three-headed sea drake. Just take a normal sea drake, give it one turn in initiative and pool of hp for each head, subtract damage from only one head at a time so it can’t be one-shot.
Gave the players a good fright during its intro round as it swooped in and unloaded it’s chain lightning breath into the swarm of giant brine shrimp (rust monsters with the half-brine-dragon template) they were fighting to keep away from the adamantine floodgates that control the flow of the central river in the city. It technically only hit each pc once during those lightning blasts, but it certainly cleared out the stragglers of the first stage of the fight.
Currently working on two separate full bestiaries- or rather, the same bestiary, but over two editions- I’m definitely learning a lot about monster creation. The things I generally stay away from are Save-Or-Dies, because… well, I just don’t like the idea of a character being thrown away on one bad dice roll. If events play out in a way that kills a character? sure. One bad dice roll? Not my thing.
(It’s a Monster Hunter bestiary for reference, in both Pathfinder 1st edition w/ spheres of power / might, and for pathfinder 2nd edition. It’s gonna be a long process finishing both but I enjoy homebrew so it’s something to relax while doing.)
Curious….
Is anyone else here going to try out this?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/connoralexander/coyote-and-crow/description
I have to admit to being super curious about that worldbuilding and how the system will actually play.
I’m more interested as an academic than a gamer. I tried out Ehdrigohr in Fate a few years back…
https://council-of-fools.com/blog/ehdrigohr-rpg/
…It was presented part of a Native American art exhibition at my local museum. It was an interesting cultural experience, but for me the point of the experience was the culture more than the game. Having a native GM on hand was a big part of the appeal.
I ad lib, hack, fabricate, and cheese my way through monster creation, and it works because I lie.
Last time I ran a campaign, the two most memorable boss fights were, respectively, a fell beast of shadow, torn from the pits and bound to the will of a priest of Set, and a wreck of a beast, twisted by foul magics into a thing out of nightmare, bent on inflicting as much suffering on the world as it itself was forced to endure with every waking moment.
They were both ogres with spooky descriptions and a lot of extra HP.
Consider this:
“That is correct. Dragon-Blooded do not have access to perfect defenses. Forsaken Misery and Blossom Face Princess used it anyways. How….. interesting.” [Evil smile, dramatic reverb noises]
And then you never address it again. PCs either forget it in five minutes or obsess over it for months.
Back in my early days as a player-turned-GM, all my bosses and other major encounters were ludicrous but player-legal builds like Yukesia, the frigid salt ghost who was actually a convoluted Boreal Sorcerer/Waves Oracle/Scaled Fist Monk build that let her blind the party with fog and blast them with AoE spells that caused the Slowed effect if you failed your save (in addition to damage). Still really proud of that one, actually.
Nowadays, I’m more likely to use reskinning and pre-built NPCs from Archives of Nethys (with some gear and/or race changes), though I occasionally unleash one of my crazy-but-impractical builds upon a party, like the Warpriest who can do four things per turn (standard action attack, move action summon a mirror image with Trickery Blessing, swift action heal/buff spell on self via Fervor, five-foot-step). That one actually DID get called out by the players, so it was helpful to have the receipts to justify it. Ditto with the Magus/Ninja (Spell Combat with Bladed Dash + regular attacks with reach weapon, swift action Vanishing Trick, five-foot-step). I also look forward to the day my players face the Barbarian/Antipaladin who can Spell Sunder whenever he wants and shrug off any fatigue effect with the Insinuator’s fatigue-canceling Lay on Hands power.
Yeah, you can screw over the players by making up any rule or ability you want, but it’s SO much more satisfying to screw them over using a ruleset identical to their own characters’.
Lies! Slander! Dragon-Blooded have access to Perfect Defenses via the capstone charm of their Dodge tree, but each Elemental version of it has a particular weakness and it costs willpower. (They also have a perfect soak available in Water Dragon Style, but that’s a CMA.)
That’s a fair cop. But I was using seven shadows evasion.
Oog. Yet another tale from my brief foray into GMing in Shadowrun.
I had an idea for a recurring baddie, a Cyberzombie that would hassle the players through their adventures. Statted him up, gave him a few nifty abilities, and he ambushed the party as they were travelling.
Now, I tend to go with the idea of ‘sure, you can have whatever hideously overpowered thing you happen to want, just be warned that having it will most likely lead to you needing it’. So my players had an insanely-tricked-out semi complete with gigantic hidden laser cannon.
So when the electric boogeyman attacked, they figured they’d lure him into the right spot and light him up like a roman candle.
Dice were rolled, and I was left staring at my monster sheet realizing something. Somewhere along the line, I’d inadvertently made my recurring baddie too tough to be damaged by battleship-scale weaponry.
Oops?
A hasty ruling of cyberpsychosis causing the techno-revenant to become fascinated by the glowing light long enough for the players to get away, and the recurring enemy… didn’t >.<