Monster Rules

Monsters are a staple of classic fantasy fiction. They reinforce the idea that the setting is dangerous and test the strength of heroes who oppose them. Large monsters are often physically superior to humanoids and require teamwork to bring down. Normal monsters use the statistics found in the bestiary. They are intended to present a challenge and take the given amount of damage to kill. Monsters are broken into the following categories:

1. 01Beasts

   Non-magical animals. While most are drawn from real life, animals from other worlds also qualify. Primordial forces sometimes cause them to grow huge, creating dire animals.

2. 02Celestials

   Originate from the higher planes. They are benevolent, honest, and progressive. Most celestials have powers related to whatever virtues they embody. As celestials grow in power they develop a stronger sense of self-identity.

3. 03Chimerics

   Magical mutants blending the characteristics of multiple animals. Some breeds can reproduce but are also created when folkloric conditions are met. Such phenomena are a major source of monsters in the world.

4. 04Draconids

   Trace their origins back to dragon kind. While true dragons are rare, degenerate breeds have higher fertility. All draconids are tough, and some possess magical abilities adapted to their native environment.

5. 05Fey

   Originate from the plane of Faerie. They possess supernatural abilities, powerful emotions, and require both food and emotional energy to survive. Evil fey feed on negative emotions and seek to inspire such feelings in their victims.

6. 06Fiends

   Originate from the lower planes (demons, devils, etc). As manifestations of evil, they are selfish, manipulative, and highly destructive. Most possess supernatural abilities related to the vices they embody. As fiends grow in power they develop a stronger sense of self-identity.

7. 07Giants

   Massive humanoids with Titan ancestry. While true titans are rare, their degenerate mortal offshoots have greater fertility. All giants are tough, and their primordial ancestry grants them magical traits adapted to their native environment.

8. 08Humanoids

   The most populous civilized creatures in the cosmos. There are dozens of races out there, but in most fantasy settings only a handful dominate.

9. 09Qlippoth

   Aliens from beyond the scope of the known planes. Most are predatory and possess psychic powers. The more stable breeds are called “Servitor Races” because they were created by godlike entities known as “Old Ones” to do their unfathomable bidding.

10. 10Plants

    Monstrous flora and fungi originating from the realm of Faerie. Most possess limited intellect and are independent, though certain breeds serve the fey. Like chimerics, some form spontaneously when folkloric conditions are met.

11. 11Spirits

    Natives of the astral, ethereal, or elemental planes. They draw their essence from natural creatures or forces and are organized into broods with complex hierarchies. As spirits grow in power they develop a stronger sense of self-identity and innate knowledge of all matters concerning whatever they represent.

12. 12Undead

    Creatures trapped in a state of continued animation after death. Primordial entropy influences the cosmos through them, eroding their surroundings over time and making them prone to acts of destruction. As undead grow in power they develop a stronger sense of self-identity.

Some opponents are designated as minions to reinforce the dynamic that one blow should be sufficient to kill certain types of creatures. A minion can be defeated by any earnest attack. An earnest attack is one that would be lethal under normal circumstances: a successful blow from a sword, a blast of magical energy, a well-shot arrow, being thrown off a balcony, etc.

The minion mechanic is intended to speed combat and allow a party to face weak enemies without unnecessary health tracking. Minions are expected to die easily, but there remains a chance they can land a lucky hit and damage a party member. The rules for bounded health and combat chaos favor minions by restricting the punishment characters can take and increasing the odds of a successful hit regardless of defense.

A boss is a powerful opponent that must be defeated to accomplish a plot objective or obtain a specific reward. In addition to better statistics, every boss can take multiple reactions and has a set of special abilities that can be used as reactions. This allows a boss to mitigate incoming damage, dish out punishment, and counter disabling effects the party might use to trivialize the threat it poses.

To prevent a boss from being mobbed and killed too easily, add minions and/or environmental threats to the combat. Characters must use their actions to address these threats instead of simply piling damage onto the boss.

When minions are insufficient to speed combat against large numbers of opponents, groups can be treated as a horde. The health of a horde is tracked collectively as a single creature, representing the idea that enemies are grouped close enough that multiple individuals can be harmed in close proximity. A horde has statistics just like a monster, with several exceptions:

• It has more health.
• It is resistant to melee/missile damage and vulnerable to area-of-effect damage.
• Combatants apply their actions simultaneously, they don’t roll initiative.
• Hordes don’t roll attacks. Every round they deal a set number of damage dice to every enemy in combat with them, minus their defense+soak (minimum 0).
• As a horde loses health, the damage dice it inflicts per round decrease to reflect losses.
• Hordes also have a variable number of special attacks for the narrator to utilize each round.
• Characters may justify shifting some of the damage dice they receive to other party members.

Example. The Sunset Maulers (a party of 5 characters) are defending a village from a bloodthirsty horde of one hundred and eighty seven abyssal orcs. They tell the narrator they plan to find a choke point, stick together, and battle the oncoming mob with weapons and area-of-effect spells. The narrator builds a stat block for the horde and determines that it deals 8d8 damage per round. He tells the players to make attack rolls, cast spells, and so forth independently while he rolls 8d8 damage for each character (minus their defense+soak). He decides the horde has a few champions and shamans in it, so he sprinkles four “special actions” into each round as individual attacks and low level spells targeting specific characters. Before everyone rolls, the party declares that the wizard and cleric are being sheltered by the other party members. The narrator decides to reduce the damage suffered by these characters to only 4d8, but adds +4d8 to the damage suffered by two of the warriors in the party to account for their added exposure.

After tallying the damage dealt by both parties, he reduces the number of damage dice the horde deals the following round to account for losses (including two fireball spells that dealt double damage, due to the horde’s vulnerability to area attacks). The combat continues like this until the party has decimated the horde, one group flees, or they all perish.

Some creatures are simply too large to fight conventionally. If a creature is listed as a Kaiju, it means that players cannot physically challenge it in melee. Such monsters are treated as plot devices rather than opponents. The narrator is REQUIRED to inform players when they are facing a Kaiju. It should be obvious that they cannot defeat such a monster head-on, and any attempt to provide physical statistics for these opponents runs the risk of players figuring out a rule exploit to kill them. This defeats their plot function, so they are not provided.

Mind effects may work on a Kaiju at the narrator’s discretion. Still, because saving throws are influenced by the strength of a creature’s life force it is also justifiable to claim that a Kaiju is spiritually too strong to affect with standard mind magic. Killing a Kaiju should be done narratively by extraordinary means: ramming it with a ship, burying it in a landslide, collapsing a bridge to dump it into a chasm, a mountain of black-powder barrels, hundreds of crossbowmen, etc. The heroism of the party should rest in cleverly arranging these things, not in rolling combat dice.

Monster intelligence can be broken down into five basic categories.

Unintelligent · T1

The monster has no guile. If it is violent the creature moves to attack as soon as it becomes aware of potential victims, fighting to the death or until its morale fails. Some of these monsters have the instinct to lay in wait and ambush prey from hiding, but generally they attack the nearest target.

Animal · T2

The monster understands the area well enough to identify ambush points and paths of escape and uses these to its advantage. It can gauge strength in a simple way and avoids confronting victims if it doesn’t think it can win.

Humanoid · T3

The monster has the capacity to understand language. It can plan for the future and alter the terrain to its advantage. It can also gauge strength and identify who in a group appears most vulnerable. Creatures with this level of intelligence can stage distractions or attempt to lure their prey into dangerous environments to even the odds.

Advanced · T4

The monster has the foresight to alter its environment in sophisticated ways. It keeps multiple plans in mind to deal with different types of threats and can gauge strength and vulnerability well. Monsters with this level of intelligence are able to set traps and lures proficiently, and rarely engage opponents without multiple advantages.

Dangerous · T5

The worst type of intelligence a monster can have. It understands the dynamics of adventurers and what the different classes are capable of, taking advanced steps to counter or neutralize them before they can use their abilities to good effect. The monster also understands humanoid psychology and terror tactics. It can plan multiple steps ahead by predicting how its enemies will react to various stimuli and has extremely sophisticated problem-solving abilities.

The average human has a running speed of 10 kilometers an hour. Compared to animals like wolves, bears, horses, and birds, this is nothing. The hard truth is that most monsters are much faster than adventurers. Creatures with wings, in particular, can achieve speeds normally reserved for automobiles. Dealing with the speed discrepancy comes down to tool use: humanoids have weapons and monsters generally do not. When dealing with big creatures that can easily outrun them a well-prepared party will bristle with missile weapons, polearms, shields, and fire.

In GSS, big monsters are supposed to be scary. Fear of the unknown is important when foreshadowing their appearance, and once they do appear it’s important to give them sensible tactics that play to their strengths. While minions are meant to be cut through in droves, big monsters were never designed to present a “manageable” challenge to heroes: they were designed to reflect the true danger such massive creatures would actually pose. All big monsters have special attacks they can use against creatures smaller than themselves, and their might and endurance scores are far beyond humanoid limits. If they weren’t, the creature wouldn’t even be able to move its own bodyweight. And muscular “people” would be able to do absurd things like wrestle down draft horses, which is not a thing.

Oversized monsters hold a tremendous advantage when attacking smaller humanoids. They are significantly heavier, especially if they move on four legs instead of two. Animals this big normally kill prey by knocking their targets prone and then mauling them to death. Big monsters can use the maneuvers listed below against smaller opponents. These rules add an element of realism and terror that would otherwise be lacking if the creature simply traded blows like a smaller opponent. They also emphasize the value of polearms, missiles, and spells when fighting huge beasts.

Monster puffery is a gaming sin.

Speed and ease of use are paramount when running a tabletop RPG. As soon as the narrator sits down and starts telling a story, every information resource should be as easy to access as possible. This is what gaming screens and dice jars are for. Computers make this somewhat easier, but what about monster stats? What about groups of different monsters? Combat needs to flow gracefully, without pauses or confusion.

This creates a conflict of interest between publishers and gamers. Publishers want complex stat blocks with big impressive illustrations because they take up space. Big books are easy to bind and give the impression of value, so more can be charged for them. But once the wow factor of seeing a cool monster and reading an essay on its culture and mating habits wears off, narrators are left fumbling to use them in an actual game. There is no ease of reference for the gaming table, where it matters the most.

In GSS this is accomplished by converting monster stats into line items and using abbreviations to keep things compact. This requires learning what the abbreviations mean. Doing so may seem like a bother, but once you build a mental lexicon of all the acronyms it saves a ton of time and energy. Here are the big ones:

Every creature has a set of special abilities or traits. Some are supernatural, while others are purely physical. Listing these for every single creature is a huge waste of space, and some abilities work the same way for multiple creatures. So GSS keeps a master list of special traits and what they do in table form. As you reference this table you will begin to memorize what the different traits do and need it less and less.

Heuristics are guidelines that can be used to solve a problem pretty well most of the time. They are policies that allow large groups of people to quickly do the “right thing” in situations where they cannot afford to go running to a manager or look up a rule. Unless a monster has strange or unique abilities requiring a lot of explanation (undesirable), this block of information and a basic description of the creature is enough to work.