Creature Catalog - Still Under Development

My Thursday Creature Catalog is taking a bit more work than I anticipated.  I'm just about done fiddling with the format and need to verify the one I have transfers over to Blogger as it contains a rather large table of creature stats.  I normally copy-paste from Word to NotePad to strip out all the hidden formatting before cutting-and-pasting into Blogger, but with a table I really can't do that.  I'm fairly certain I've pasted a small table or two previously, but that was before Blogger started "updating" their interface, so no telling at this point.  I should get the entry finished this weekend.

Confession time: I don't actually fully point-cost most of the monsters for my game.  I have an idea of what they should do and how strong their attacks should be and any weaknesses they might have, but I tend to just jot those things down and modify if necessary during a fight.  This works out for my more improvisational style, once I have a good grasp of how well the PCs perform in combat.  Before then, I can have problems with the monsters being too easy to defeat or way more deadly than I anticipated.  For the Desiccated Gelatinous Cube, I went to low and the PCs whacked it before it could be a danger.  For the Effigies, I went way too high and the first one nearly incinerated the party by itself before the other two go into the fight.

This is a drawback with the Hero System when creating your own monsters or borrowing from other game systems.  The Hero System Bestiary has enough generic monsters to get you started, but eventually you need to start building your own to tie in with your campaign - which is the strength of the Hero System.  I've tracked down monster listing other folks have created and posted online, which provides much more depth, but I still need to sit down and learn them.

So, long story short, what will appear in the Creature Catalog blog entries will be creatures that I've used, but modified with my in-game experience.  So the Desiccated Gelatinous Cube will be a bit tougher than what my PCs faced, and the Effigy won't be walking solo TPKs.  I hope you enjoy them and possibly find the useful.

Later!