If you need guidelines for stats for CR monsters, check the Monster Statistics By CR table in the Bestiary (page 291).
If you're wondering what constitutes a "Golarion monster," stick to things that (1) fit with the Golarion setting, (2) have a reasonable expectation that it could be found on Golarion, regardless if its home is elsewhere.
A phase spider is a "Golarion monster" even though its home is on the Ethereal plane.
A flumph is a "Golarion monster" even though its home is the Dark Tapestry.
An akata is a "Golarion monster" even though it comes from another planet (it flies through space and lands on other worlds).
Golarion is an inclusive setting--it has guns, vikings, genies, ninjas, mothmen, dragons, and all sorts of crazy stuff... but it's still a fantasy campaign setting. But it doesn't really have steampunk, post-apocalyptic, or other nonstandard fantasy genres (ignore Numeria for the purpose of this discussion). If your monster idea is something that's only found on the Plane of Fire, or on planet Castrovel, or in the future, and never found elsewhere/elsewhen, those aren't really "Golarion monsters" and you should rethink your concept.
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Question: the template says to list special abilities like this:
Poison (Ex) Bite or spit—injury or contact; save Fort DC 24; frequency 1/round for 2 rounds; effect 1d6 Dex and paralyzed 1d4 hours; cure 1 save. The save DC is Constitution-based.
...yet monsters in the Bestiary list them like this:
Poison (Ex)
Bite or spit—injury or contact; save Fort DC 24; frequency 1/round for 2 rounds; effect 1d6 Dex and paralyzed 1d4 hours; cure 1 save. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Which is correct?
(examples lifted from the vorin, not my monster)
I assume you're talking about the line break between "Poison (Ex)" and the rest of the poison info. If the vorin looks like that, the vorin is wrong. Check the following Bestiary monsters to see how they match the provided format: venomous snake, naga (any), quasit, phase spider...
You should also be aware that the "headers" to the sub-elements of a poison ability's miniature "stat-block" always need to be italicized. For example:
Poison (Ex) Bite or spit—injury or contact; save Fort DC 24; frequency 1/round for 2 rounds; effect 1d6 Dex and paralyzed 1d4 hours; cure 1 save. The save DC is Constitution-based.
Nit-picky? Yes, it is. It's also the correct presentation. So, take note of it.
Hope that helps,
--Neil
I've got one:
LIMITATION: Entry cannot be or use a monster template (fiendish, lich, and so on).
Since Bestiary 3, fey is now both a creature type and a template. And if I wanted to make a fey creature, my natural instinct would be to look at the elements in the template and see what i could use. How do we distinguish and avoid getting disqualified?
I think a safe bet would be to avoid calling it "Fey XXX" and instead just making its creature type fey. ;)
The limitation seems to be there to keep people from, say, submitting a half-dragon tarrasque as their "new monster" - no matter how cool that may be.
For everyone's benefit, I sort of want to clarify this. Creature types don't necessarily follow real-world scientific classifications. I'm pretty clear on what's what, but the edges of certain groups are blurry.
What I'm asking specifically, is where do you draw the lines between:
Oozes - Plants (algae goes where?)
Oozes - Vermin (somewhere between sponges and jellyfish?)
Vermin - Animal (I get that cephalopods are animals. What about sea urchins, starfish, etc...?)
Aberration - Everything else
Here's my take:
Easy to Classify:
Dragon (banned): It's a dragon! (But several dragon-like creatures seem to be Magical Beasts instead. Only a slightly blurry line.)
Outsider (banned): It's from another plane of existence. Easy!
Construct (banned): Something constructed from non-living (or no longer living) material. (Only slightly blurry line for things like the Retriever (a spider-like thing from the abyss) and certain golems that look undead-ish.)
Undead: It's either: a) something alive that died and was brought back in whole or in part with negative energy; b) something that was born undead; or c) something that is comprised of compressed entropy / negative energy
Harder to Classify:
Oozes (banned): Comprised of microbes, amoeba, and mobile molds (and possibly algae?) (also, possibly non-symmetrical animals such as sponges?)
Plants: All plants (except maybe blob-ish, mobile algae?), plus mushrooms (or other fungi with definite forms)
Vermin: Jellyfish, worm-like creatures, molluscs (other than cephalopods), and all arthropods, (and also, I assume, echinoderms?)
Animal: Some molluscs (squids and octopi, presumably nautili), fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals
Humanoid: basically human in shape, generally with no/few special abiities, no extra limbs, and near-human intellect. Usually almost exactly like a human or with only slightly animalistic characteristics
Fey: Pretty much exclusively humanoid in shape (though often much smaller in size). They either have a very close tie to nature (in that they are nature spirits, in some way), or they originally hailed from The First World. Elves, Gnomes, and a few others straddle the line between fey and humanoids. I often muse about why goblinoids and Orcs aren't fey, but that's more of a lore thing.
Hardest to Classify
Magical Beast: Some large/intelligent animals, beasts that combine animal features (griffons, chimerae, extra heads), normal animals with special abilities, animals with extra body parts (horns, wings, more than 4 limbs), and other animal-like things that don't exist in the real world. Blurry lines with Vermin, Animals, and Monstrous Humanoids.
Monstrous Humanoid: There seems to be a blurry line with normal humanoids and magical beasts (think of the difference between a sphinx and a lamia), but it generally has at least a human-like upper torso (especially hands and a face/head), and features that can be connected to an animal of some sort. It most often has powerful special abilities above that of a human, which raises its CR.
Aberration: A catch-all for things that don't fit in the other categories. They are typically: a) creatures from another planet; b) related to an elder god; c) horrifically mutated results of spells, science, a god's wrath, or other unnatural circumstances; d) something that would otherwise be a magical beast or monstrous humanoid that isn't for some reason (good indicators are that it lives underground, has tentacles, or combines the features of animals, vermin, oozes, and/or plants in some weird way)
Have you looked at the creature type definitions in the Bestiary?
Yep, of course! I was just wondering what to do when certain things were borderline. I guess if it's that close to two different categories, I won't be called out for going one way or the other. :)
As it is getting close to submission time and I've got one question here...
Do monsters worry about prereqs on feats?
My submission doesn't have the dex for a feat, and I'm totally unclear if that has to be supported in the text!
If I don't get an answer I'll have to submit as is, and cross my fingers that it won't be disqualified for inaccurate sourcing.
==Bob Drouin
Yes, they do. However, you can give it as a bonus feat to bypass the requirement if necessary.
What he said.
Meh. For word count, I'm better off just changing the stat. Bleh. Oh, well.
==BOb D.
Yeah, but I don't really want to give it a bonus extra feat...I just want it to ignore the pre-reqs! heh.
Thank you, though.
==Bob D.
You can always just ignore the pre-reqs and hope the voters don't care when you get called out for it (though I definitely wouldn't recommend that approach). : )
No, I put in a flurry of last minute changes. Raised the dex...and then the Int...and made it a bonus feat...and changed Flight to Fly...and added a semi-colon I'd missed...and changed modifiers...and altered some minor language so as not to repeat adjectives so much...chewed my nails down over word count...hoped the mechanic I used works...altered movement rate again...and nat armor...changed the skills...changed them again...
meh! So MUCH bloody fine-tuning.
I might have an extra space in my special attack. Heh.
oh, well, here's hoping! My Submission is IN.
==Bob Drouin
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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I might have an extra space in my special attack. Heh.
oh, well, here's hoping! My Submission is IN.
==Bob Drouin
You know some one's gonna call you out on that space now...visible or not, just to be funny.
Auto-DQ?