Jack Guignol has an oft-quoted post, “Just Use Bears,” about using the stats for a bear when the players outpace your prep and end up facing “some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for.” (Part of this points to the pain of creating stat blocks in D&D and D&D-adjacent games.)

Lars, at Dice Goblin, expanded this further, to leveraging animal archetypes in general, “Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders.”

What would this look like for PbtA games?

When I compiled the bestiary for Fantastic Worlds from the Dungeon World Codex (backed up here), I adapted formatting by Ray Otus that boils down monsters to what I found most useful—

Creature Name: tag1, tag2, tag+. Special quality. Instinct: to whatever. Moves: move1, move2, move+. Weapon (damage, tag1, tag2, tag+) n HP, n Armor.

For example:

Animated Armor: solitary, cautious, amorphous. Instinct: stop trespassers. Moves: fight with the strength of long forgotten ages, absorb blows by flying apart, reassemble from scattered parts, halt intruders. Ancient sword (d10+2, close), 19 HP, 7 Armor. [By Juan Manuel Avila.]

This drops any backstory or purple prose and reduces monsters from a half page to a dictionary entry.

In the table below, I’ve streamlined them even further, dropping tags, which I think can be easily improvised and appending damage to relevant moves.

Funnily enough, Dungeon World 1 itself doesn’t have a stat block for bear. But Stonetop has a cave bear. So I thought about creating these entries by reskinning creatures from Stonetop Book II: bull=wisent, elephant=mammoth, tiger=cougar, etc.

d12AnimalArmorHPInstinctMoves
1Bear116To fill its belly, protect its youngTo rend, maul, crush (d10+4); to move with surprising speed and grace; to sniff out food, or trouble
2Boar010To protect their territoryRelentlessly charge their victim, over and over (d8); eat just about anything; ignore pain or injury
3Bull010To protect the
herd		Put itself between a threat and the young; stampede (d8+3); leap a surprising height and distance, even from a standstill
4Crocodile222To lie in wait and ambush preyFloat motionless for hours; explode from water in violent attack (d12); perform the death roll to disorient and drown prey (d12+5)
5Elephant115To suffer no insult
or threat		Trumpet in warning; toss someone or something aside (d6+5); charge, often abruptly (d6+5)
6Hawk, giant06To wait for the
right moment		Cast an ominous shadow on the ground; swoop down like a thunderbolt, snatching up prey (d8+2); drag prey up to 30 or 40 feet with slow, mighty flaps—then drop them (d10+2)
7Horse910To panicSniff trouble on the wind; vault over an obstacle; kick (d6+3); run free!
–Lion08To rule its domainDrive off rivals and threats; patrol its territory; ambush from concealment (d6)
8Rat01To survive at any costSqueeze through tight spaces; gnaw through almost anything (d4-1); flee at the first sign of danger
9Snake, giant26To toy with its
food		Scent prey, track it down; rattle its tail, paralyzing prey with fear; pump them full of venom (d4, ongoing), then retreat; follow, waiting for its prey to collapse
10Spider, giant06To capture prey & slowly consume itLeap on prey and knock it to the ground (d4); inject a paralytic venom (d8); drag helpless prey into the canopy and cocoon it (d4)
11Tiger012To catch prey unawaresTirelessly follow and close in on its prey; pounce on prey, dragging them down (d6); bite down and rake (d10)
12Wolf15To hunt as one
with the pack		Howl to summon or coordinate pack; surround their prey; bite down and pull in one direction while a packmate pulls in the other (d6)

The lion wasn’t in Lars’ original post, and I initially thought the lion should just reskin the wolf, but I added it to be true to my blog title! (Though it’s not included in the results available to the roll.)

Discussion

Barlowe's_Guide_to_Extraterrestrials,_first_editionHow did I get to the above?

My initial thought when writing Planet of the Week was to create a list of iconic aliens. I went back to Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, a prized book from when I was a kid, and started writing up some of those famous monsters.

But then I decided that most of them didn’t really fit the style of game I was after—it’s about strange new worlds, not familiar old worlds. And my players told me they really didn’t want to encounter xenomorphs, Borg, etc. They wanted new creatures.

So my next thought was to create new monsters in the form used by Grimwild:

Grimwild_Gargoyle_and_Gelatinous_Cube

I wrote up three entries like this one:

Ruthil (white ape)

Towering, four-armed primates with thin white fur and razor-sharp tusks. They prowl the ruins of ancient cities, waiting to crush and eat their prey. Pulverize rocks in their grasp.

✱ Four powerful arms
✱ Preternatural strength
✱ Surprising agility

◉ Rip a victim’s limb off
◉ Bear hug with four arms

◉ Howl territorially

Wants to establish dominance
Doesn’t want to be driven off

👁 massive footprints, splintered stone
👂 howls getting closer, knuckles scraping stone
👃 musky sweat, mineral dust

TERRITORIAL MARKINGS
⚀ Bits of white fur on cacti
⚁ Cacti ripped from the earth
⚂ Tops of cacti split off and eaten
⚃ Broken tusk
⚄ Crushed rocks
⚅ Cairn of skulls

But detailed entries like that one turned out to be hard to write. And overkill for a campaign that is not centered on finding and killing monsters. (Monsters are a hazard rather than a focus.)

I thought about adapting some random tables from The Perilous Void (my review) but wow they are involved:

Perilous_Void_Lifeform_Creation_TOC

Then I thought about developing some monster-creation rules. (I don’t recall any monster-creation rules from D&D. The first time I encountered them was in Dungeon World 1.) As a base of such a system, I thought about making a random table derived from Jeremiah Gentry’s list of animal moves for shapeshifted druids (thanks to Jeremy Strandberg for making a backup of this).

Then I remembered Jack Guignol’s post…

I developed the above table (though with Planet of the Week stats for DIFCON, similar in function to Armor, and Health instead of hp). Then I recalled Cairn 2e’s great guidelines. So my Planet of the Week monster creation system is now a fusion of the blogosphere and two great Creative Commons games (Cairn and Stonetop).

See also: