Creature Design Philosophy

Uncle_Jimbo is helping me with my Mutant Future critters and wrote some I find humorous and spot on for any rpg with a similar vibe:

And that is something I plan on keeping in mind when I create more critters for MF/GW.

Another is intelligence. Anything can become sapient- look at psychic soil where fungi and bacteria have hive minds and the pistol in 6e that leads its little village to victory with its amazing tactical knowledge.

The only problem isn't whining players but ecologies being upturned because now prey species may be more intelligent than the predators. The plants may be smarter than the predators. The nanite infected rocks may be more intelligent....

Another is the power level of the setting. GW should be less Star*Drive and more Conan. Creating characters based on 66 or 72 ability points allows them to be tough enough to deal with serious threats at eariler levels. Which allows for tougher creatures as well.

When developing a setting where life abounds, there are 4 lists of creatures a GM should have on hand to help with location description- creepers, floaters, swimmers and lumps. In GW, these can be plants, animals, fungi, macrobes, robots and others.

Creepers are creatures that walk. They can be on the ground, walls, ceiling and some can walk on water.

Floaters are creatures that fly or float in the air. In GW they can be jellyfish, human ears, wingseeds (as mentioned elsewhere) or whatever else the GM can think of.

Swimmers are found in and near water.

Lumps can not move. Animals of this type are usually found in water, but with certain mutations, they can live just about anywhere.

Obviously these are in addition to whatever charts, if any, the GM uses to come up with sensory information for the players.

Whenever I read someone saying that they bought a monster book but could never use all of the creatures, it makes me wonder how small their setting is. I own ~40 and can place all the nonovert supernatural creatures plus thousands more on a planet sized setting (not to mention a system or multisystem setting).

Regionality is very important to GW's creatures. 2 valleys next to each other may have some different plant or small animal life. There will be mixing of large animals and those plants with seeds that are spread by wind or animals. A large river or lake could seperate 2 very different guilds of organisms. And even those places that don't have a barrier will have clines of species or seperate species that fill the niche just because they evolved or mutated in that spot.

A related ecological concept is sources and sinks (which are specific to individual species). Source locations produce more organisms than the habitat can support. For animals, this means migration out of the area (and obviously I don't mean fish walking on land or bears taking to the sea). Sinks are the opposite- reproductive success is so low that the only reason the species if found in such a place is a nearby source.

A simple example is a village set near some ruins with a mutagen. The heroes must constantly defend against the new mutant monsters that are constantly travelling out from the ruins looking for food and water. Many pass the village without attacking but the number of monstrous creatures is too much to ignore.

That would make a nifty, short campaign, where the heros have to move the village or destroy the mutagen.

Part of the issue with the use of the creatures in a monster book is that there's a limit to how much info you can include in a game. And most players want even less detail than that.

As I mentioned in the using mutants for other settings thread, the same stock species with the same mutations may be very different if they were mutated at different times (and possibly different places).

The stat blocks would be the same but the descriptions (physical and behavioral) may be different.

There isn't any mention of it in GW as far as I can tell, but extinction is important. A good GM could design 4 different creatures in the same niche and use all of them simply because species rise and fall easily on Gamma Terra. Most mutants are individuals, not species and most species are not wide spread. Only those few that are true generalists (like obbs) can be found over very large regions.

Taken from a thread about Dark Sun on rpg.net

Funny and very applicable to GW.

Monsters need one-liner descriptions that don't miss obvious and unique aspects of their physical appearance, smell, sound, movement and 'feeling'..

I hated Monstrous manual entries with lengthy confusing descriptions and also the monsters which were well described but looked nothing like their picture.

It's an RPG, it uses words - they should be good words.

And pronunciation guides! geeze. It is a "Vase" monster.. "vaaz or vace"? how do you pronounce vaaz? or vace even? Spelling alone is futile, in New Zealand they pronounce "six" and "sex" (much to our amusement in Australia).