01-14-2018, 06:20 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: Michigan
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Creature/Animal creation
Hello everyone. I have yet another of my endless off the wall questions. This time, is there a book or rules set (preferably one that will work well in a fantasy campaign) that details creating creatures for the campaign? I'm looking to create the major and minor beasts, animals, and vermin that will live within an ecosystem, and I hope to find a good rules set that will help me create them in GURPS with decently balanced stats.
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01-14-2018, 08:10 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
There aren't rule books or really much advice for creating random creatures: just the sample animals in Campaigns.
I'm not sure what you mean by "balanced": are bears, bobcats, lions, and wolves balanced? Creatures are what they are.
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01-14-2018, 08:21 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: Michigan
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
Well... I was hoping for something like creature templates, or "type" lenses that could be used to ensure that each creature within a given biome role was reasonable.
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01-14-2018, 08:29 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: Cincinnati, OH, USA
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
I'd recommend checking out GURPS: Space's chapter on alien life. It has a lot of information about ecologies and the niches creatures fill.
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01-14-2018, 08:50 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: Michigan
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
Thanks Emerald Cat! I'll check that out as soon as I can.
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01-14-2018, 09:03 PM | #6 |
Stick in the Mud
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Rural Utah
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
And the usual caveat, remember that points are for player characters, just assign the stats you need for anything else. You really can't balance things in GURPS the way you can in other systems.
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MIB #1457 |
01-14-2018, 11:08 PM | #7 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Yukon, OK
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
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My GURPS publications GURPS Powers: Totem and Nature Spirits; GURPS Template Toolkit 4: Spirits; Pyramid articles. Buying them lets us know you want more! My GURPS fan contribution and blog: REFPLace GURPS Landing Page My List of GURPS You Tube videos (plus a few other useful items) My GURPS Wiki entries |
01-15-2018, 10:25 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: Michigan
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
Quote:
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01-15-2018, 10:56 AM | #9 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
Quote:
If you want unrealistic size changes, but ones that match most people's expectations a bit better, my rule of thumb is to figure out the base creature's basic lift, multiply that by the change in scale, add 50%, then calculate ST and HP back from that, and give it DR equal to some fraction of its new HP: 1/20th if it's got skin about as resilient as a human, 1/10th if it's thicker or leathery, like most mammalian predators, and 1/5th if it's notably armored, like a crocodile. So, for example, take a wolf. Using the timber wolf stats from the (excellent!) Animalia in GURPS page, it's got ST 9, which gives Basic Lift 16. A wolf scaled up to SM +6, 10 times the size, would have Basic Lift 240 (16 * 10 * 1.5). That works out to ST 35, and the same in HP, and it would have DR 4. I think this matches more closely what people would expect a wolf ten times the size to do, both in how much damage it can take, and how much it can deal out. Using the rules in Bio-Tech, you'd expect a 10X wolf to have ST 99, which would just take forever to take down, and would do damage that would annihilate most PCs (11d thrust!). |
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01-15-2018, 11:05 AM | #10 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Creature/Animal creation
Note that you can use the weight option to scale up and down as much as you want. You can make 10 lb wolves and 20,000 lb wolves.
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