Creature/Animal creation

[Tigrah2k]

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.

[mlangsdorf]

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.

[Tigrah2k]

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.

[Emerald Cat]

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.

[Tigrah2k]

Thanks Emerald Cat! I'll check that out as soon as I can.

[sjard]

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.

[Refplace]

Check out this site.
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/animalia/animalia.html
Lot of animals built there.

[Tigrah2k]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Check out this site.
http://panoptesv.com/RPGs/animalia/animalia.html
Lot of animals built there.

That is cool! I kind of wish it included size modifier options, but otherwise it rocks!

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Tigrah2k

That is cool! I kind of wish it included size modifier options, but otherwise it rocks!

For some realistic rules for scaling creatures up or down, check out Bio-Tech, "Size Modification", pp. 62-64. Note that those rules are based on the assumptions that a) you're genetically modifying creatures, and b) that it's humans you're modifying. The stat changes, particularly the IQ ones, might not be appropriate for a naturally-evolved or supernaturally-changed creature. But the modifiers to ST and weight will probably be pretty close.

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!).

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Tigrah2k

That is cool! I kind of wish it included size modifier options, but otherwise it rocks!

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.