Generating original creatures?

By Blefuscu, in Star Wars: Age of Rebellion RPG

Are guidelines for generating your own creatures provided anywhere in the rulebooks or supplements for either Edge of the Empire or Age of Rebellion?

My take away from the lack of this in the rules provided is that we aren't meant to feel welcome to add to the universe.

Anyway, what are folks doing about this? Do you go about it the way you would generating a non-critter adversary? And if there's already a thread somewhere that folks could point me toward, I'll head over that way.

Thanks ahead for the help.

MTFBWY! (May the Force be with you!)

It's actually very easy to do in this game. You are *absolutely* meant to feel welcome to add to the universe.

A creature or adversary is just a collection of stats, and the stats are pretty straightforward.

Start them with a 2 in each characteristic. Take whatever they're supposed to be good at and bump it up to 3. If they're supposed to be great at it, bump it to 4. If they're bad at something, bump that down to 1.

Give them a rank or two in a couple of skills that would make sense. No need to go overboard, especially with most creatures or adversaries who will only appear in a single encounter.

So if you want to create a creature which uses its fists or claws, maybe give it a 3 or 4 Brawn with a 2 in everything else. If it's a brutish creature, maybe an Intellect of 1.

Pick a Soak value and a Wound and Strain Threshold. 5 is a good Wound Threshold for minions, make it higher if you want them tougher. Same for soak.

Give it a Brawl skill of 1 or 2 and you're done!

If you're making an adversary that needs a weapon, either pick one from the book or make one up. All you really need in that case is a Damage rating, a Crit rating, a skill to use with it, and a maximum range.

One of the joys of this system is how easy it is to create enemies, even making them up on the fly if your players go somewhere you don't expect.

Edited by progressions

Thanks! That is pretty darn simple.

You can also re-skin existing beasts. I wanted droch for a recent game, and for the small ones I basically just used the Green Bug Swarm from Beyond the Rim. The larger ones were basically Gundarks with a Resilience check if you got hit by them.

You can easily do the same for most creatures, and adjust the stats and qualities if the monsters differ--although I think you'll be surprised at how little you need to change beyond the name and description.

If you're trying to get a feel for doing this, try the adversary editor in the GM Tools of my app (links at bottom). You can import pretty much all existing adversaries and take a look at them (they come included), copy some and modify them to your liking, or just start a brand new one and go through prog's process. If you want to add a stat block to one of your documents, it'll create a stat block image for you as well.

Thanks! I'll check out your gm tools.