Critter Creation
Creating a new critter: Where on the food chain does it fit in? Certain creatures are traditionally tied to specific settings and campaign styles. Some creatures are archetypal — a game wouldn’t be a game without a few running around here and there. Some races are more or less multiversal and may be put into almost anywhere.
When you go about creating a new species there is one thing you should know: Where does it fit in on the food chain? The top argument for comparing a fictional species to an Earth equivalent is that this quickly answers these questions: Where does it live? What does it eat? What is its closest competitor? Who are its main foes? What’s its primary food source?
Take a swift predator. This is a pack beast inhabiting an open plainsland in the Southern Hemisphere. The critter sometimes scavenges. It is mammalian, cares for its young and is about as bright as a German Shepherd. You can call it R’xsha and rule that it has six legs and eyes on stalks. Or you can call it a hyena off the African savanna.
In creature design there are a few valuable guidelines. If you can provide the answers to the questions presented here, you already have your creature description almost ready to go. All you need from that point and on are the raw game stats and perhaps a little cosmetic.
What kind of effect are you trying to achieve with this critter?
Keep your motivations straight. Are you creating a new species in order to be able to throw something new and mean at your player characters? Are you trying to portray something the cute red-haired girl being introduced to gaming tonight will like? Or that her character will like? Are you trying out the scientific approach, finding out how many rounds it will take six grown men with battle axes to filet this type of creature?
The chief reason masters want to have creatures at all is that they are part of the setting played in. Meeting them is part of the interaction that makes the difference between walking through a low quality simulation of a bad computer dungeoneering game or a real breathing world. Sometimes creatures exist just because they do. This kind of environment is home to so and so many creatures which form a ‘user surface’ that the players interact with. Sometimes creatures exist because the master wants a special effect from the interaction with them.
The majority of creatures exist because they are part of the setting and they serve no individual purpose in the game. A forest in a tropical region contains so and so many large predators, so and so many herbivores, insects, and weirdoes. These are links on the food chain, and while they should be made consistent with the setting, they require no special interest.
Some creatures exist because the master has a specific purpose in mind. These are typically introduced as part of a scenario and later become a part of the general setting. The master should take the time to do the homework on these, to make them complete and well thought out. This puts something new on the random encounter tables (if you use such! Boo!). It also makes the creature more consistent and believable.
The master’s motivation for creating a new race typically includes curiosity (‘what will happen if I throw this at them?’), scenario hooks (‘this’ll get their attention alright’), or motivation of players (‘they’ll want to rid the countryside of this one for sure’ or ‘just the horns of this thing are worth a billion gold stars, that’ll get them hunting’). When creating a new species, the master should keep his motivations straight as not to overdo the result.
Mystery
If you want to satisfy your curiosity, you have more or less free hands to do what you want. You should be careful not to make the critter too unbelievable. Keep the effects in spec, and if you have too many ideas, make multiple races instead of just one. After all, there is always another game session and another chance to throw it at them.
If you want to create a scenario hook in the form of a creature, keep in mind what purpose the creature serves as an NPC. What does it want? What does it do? Why do the characters take an interest in it? What are they supposed to do about it?
The mystery approach can be tricky. Technically, mystery means that the characters start out clueless as to what this really is, where it came from, and what it will do to them. Portraying a creature as an NPC of whom proverbially zip is known is easy — at first. It walks in, does its thing and exits right. But then the characters begin asking questions, reading books, going places and generally being nosy. At this point you need to come up with the answers to their research. Unless you’re going to maintain that nothing whatsoever is known about these creatures, nothing was ever known, and nothing will ever be known — but in that case, why bother in the first place?
The slow learning process of characters versus nemesis is a classic quest. It should be used with consideration. When the characters reach the point where they should be able to piece together evidence and information to a picture of reasonable detail, the information needs to be consistent. If the creature breathed fire on one occasion, it either has the ability to breathe fire (and a chemical marvel of a digestive system) or possesses a supernatural power. If it has been known to fear salt it probably can’t tolerate that substance. If it eats humans, is that because humans are easy prey, because it has an old grudge, or because the prophets told it to?
Blood and gore everywhere
If you want to create something your high level party can’t whack before breakfast, you will usually require a large, possibly intelligent predator. In the low end it’s your setting’s equivalent to a grizzly bear. In the high end you better save the script and sell it — there will always be more Aliens! movies on the drawing board.
The blood and gore approach is easy to do. Basically it is a matter of giving a creature a few nasty traits such as invisibility, teleportation, or extra damage bonuses.
If you want short-distance sprinters with too many teeth, do a cheetah with a twist. Through using an Earth equivalent you convenient skip past deeper considerations of what this creature is all about because you can find all the data in a textbook. This approach fails, though, when you try to introduce a truly sophisticated alien to your campaign.
Can I do this?
The what-if method comprises a wild idea or notion put into play. While it’s almost as demanding homework-wise as the mystery method it often produces more unpredictable and hence more challenging results. Unpredictability is the master’s second-most valuable asset, the first being able to tell a good story.
When a master says what-if, it is usually a matter of having some wild idea such as what if there were winged men with plasma rifles or what if the Earth was indeed flat and you could fall off? These ideas are then worked through, and that usually brings about detail. Where do the winged men come from? What do they do here? Why? These questions comprise at the very least a settlement and a cultural background. Lots of scenario options there.
The main benefit of the what-if method is that it produces not only a species but also the context in which the species belongs.
What role does this critter play in the ecosystem?
This is simple. You make a note of what the creature does and what other creatures do in response. Where on the food chain does it belong? How much does it eat? How large a territory does it require? This in turn answers such questions as what does it eat? How much food needs to be present for it not to attack anything in sight? How many of them will be found in a given region? Practical details, but nonetheless important. These details help you avoid the classic player-having-caught-master-in-goof question: ‘Say, just HOW many ancient dragons can this desolate mountain support???’
What are the creature’s habits, diets, and defenses?
This is where you sit down and describe the creature in detail. What does it eat? What does it prefer to eat? Where can it be encountered? You need to know how the creature hunts, assuming that it does, and how it defends itself and its litter. All animals essentially exist to eat, sleep and procreate. The chances are pretty good that your critter does too.
Hunting methods may not need special attention unless the creature uses an unusual approach. Spiders use sticky webs to trap insects. Electric eel paralyze their victims. Here you can flip out and add acidic spittle, claws used as ballistic missiles (new claws being grown to replace those thrown), funny breath weapons, etc. But keep in mind: Whatever means the beast uses, its prey must be killed in a way that allows the predator to prey. Acid and fire breath are all very good, but they waste too much perfectly good protein.
Nesting and mating habits are interesting too, particularly if you plan to use this critter on a regular basis. Are there hives to be found? Nests? Caves? Holes in the ground? Does the creature get particularly aggressive during mating season? Does it, like the pike, lay dormant during procreation, easy to pick up and grill (really! they don’t move if you poke them with a stick).
What bonuses does the critter offer?
This is where you make a note of practical little things that player characters love to find out. The hide of the creature may be highly valuable, or its claws could be powerful components in some spell or other (which means that even if none of the characters are mages themselves, they can sell it off for good cash). Creature bodies can be valuable outside the fantasy world too. The creature’s body may contain some genetic code valuable in science fiction medicine, or drug making, or may be a step towards finding a cure for cancer. It may hold curiosity value: Trophies can be sold to directors who want something out of the ordinary to adorn office walls, or it may be sold as souvenirs to tourists.
Can the characters make cash? How? How much?
What nasty backdraws does the critter offer?
This is the fun part. Here you make notes of everything that doesn’t immediately show as the creature comes rampaging through the rain forest but which the characters are bound to find out later, with the appropriate amount of grief and frustration.
The most obvious surprises include those that take place right after the creature is engaged in combat. These can be unexpected vulnerabilities or offensive powers. These are fairly standard off-the-book surprises, but they do have an appeal, particularly where over-confident players are concerned.
The more subtle surprises are not noticed right away. Preferably not until it’s too late to do much about them. Even then they may not even appear linked to the creature. If the creature is on top of its region’s food chain, what will happen when it’s gone? Will another like it emerge, causing the characters to start all over? Will some other species of predator rush in to take over? Is that better or worse?
Consider this one, too. The dead creature was host to a parasitic, microscopic life form which never really bothered it in life. Now the host is dead and the microbes hurry to move to another creature nearby — the characters. They are suddenly subjected to rashes, itches, and general discomfort for weeks until the microbes die off (because they can’t reproduce on the foreign host) or a cure is found. The affliction may even be lethal, placing the characters in a race against time to find a cure. They also have to avoid spreading the infection to other humans.
Putting the critter together
When creating a species, regardless of how you go about it, you wind up with a pile of numbers and notes. Jot down a quick note on what you want to end up with, then consider the requirements to go there. This should end you up with a stack of notes more or less in context with your original idea. Compile it. Eradicate those ideas that were too far out, made the critter too powerful, or did not hold with the ecology. Then grab a creature sheet from the system you play and fill it in! It’s not always easy to produce a good, believable monster – but once done, it’s far more satisfying to use than just another offhand orc encounter (I like orcs! Just not every day!).
