Building Creatures

Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide (Second Edition), page 56

Making your own creatures fleshes out your game world and lets you introduce concepts not yet available in published products like the Bestiary volumes. These guidelines help you customize creatures to your specifications and explore your imagination. From strange beasts to canny political rivals, you have the power to design creatures that fit the narrative needs of your story.

Creatures aren’t built the same way PCs are. The rules for building them are more flexible, and their statistics are based on benchmark final numbers rather than combining each individual modifier together. This is called top-down design, in which you consider the design process as a whole and select the details that reflect your intended result, rather than building statistics from the bottom up and hoping the finished creature matches your vision.

This guide provides a step-by-step process to build creatures, but as you get more comfortable with creature creation, you may prefer to use different methods. You could start with one ability you think is cool, or you might look to create a spellcaster of a certain type. There’s no wrong starting place or wrong way to compile and present your creation; some GMs prefer to generate a stat block that is as similar to an official Bestiary entry as possible, while others prefer to compile just a brief set of notes.

In this section

Develop the Concept To begin making a creature, you should first come up with its concept. You likely already have the basic idea. As you add details to the general idea, taking notes can help keep your creature on track.
Understanding and Choosing Statistics Most of the statistics in this section use a scale of extreme, high, moderate, and low—some use terrible values as well.
Level For most creatures you build, their level depends on the level of the party who will encounter it. Look at other creatures you think are similar in power to yours to determine its level.
Alignment, Size, and Traits Fill out the trait line of your creature’s stat block. The alignment can be whatever suits your story, though some types of creatures must be or tend to be certain alignments.
Ability Modifiers Next, figure out your creature’s ability modifiers, since these will suggest what their other statistics should be.
Perception Perception is a fairly straightforward statistic. Use Wisdom as a guide for setting it, and adjust to the high side if your creature has acute senses or extra training.
Languages Think about what languages the creature would need to communicate with other creatures in its home. For instance, many intelligent undead speak Necril, and many creatures from the Darklands speak Undercommon.
Skills You have lots of flexibility in setting your creature’s skills. Pick some skills you think are appropriate, and consider how good the creature is at them.
Items If you gave a creature gear equivalent to a PC, your PCs would gain a huge amount of treasure by defeating a large group of them. Using Table 2–4: Safe Items can help you avoid that.
Armor Class Because AC is one of the most important combat stats, you need to be more careful with setting this number for any creature you expect will end up in a fight.
Saving Throws You can often set saves quickly by assigning one high, one moderate, and one low modifier.
Hit Points Give a creature HP in the moderate range unless its theme strongly suggests it should use another range. Spellcasters, for example, often have low HP.
Immunities, Weaknesses, and Resistances If it’s highly thematic for a creature to have an immunity, weakness, or resistance, consider adding it. Table 2–8 lists the ranges for weaknesses and resistances by level.
Speed Your creature’s Speed should be 25 feet if it moves like a human. Beyond that, you can set the Speed to whatever makes sense.
Strikes When building your creature’s selection of Strikes, use the following sections to set the Strike’s attack bonus and damage.
Spells Your creature might have magical abilities that are best represented by spells. If you’re making a highly spellcasting-themed creature, give it prepared or spontaneous spells.
Design Abilities In this step, you’ll take the ideas for abilities you noted when you developed your concept and design these abilities for your creature.
Review Holistically Now it’s time to look over your completed creature as a whole and make sure it’s living up to your concept. Can it do everything you wanted? Does it fit its intended role?
Trait Abilities Creatures with certain traits tend to have similar abilities to one another. Many of them appear here, to help you make your creatures match the theme of the trait when you build your own creatures.
Designing NPCs Creatures that are meant to cleave closely to character classes or intended to represent people rather than monsters are NPCs.