Genesys Creature Catalogue (formerly Bestiary)

By Direach, in Genesys

I thought folks might like having a few more critters to play with, so I started a bestiary. I plan to add more to this as I add more creatures. Nothing here is very mechanically complex, but I'll get around to those eventually! Most creatures are adapted from creatures in the SW rules, but some were created from scratch.

EDIT: I added a number of new creatures, and added some short descriptive text to each entry. Also cleaned up some minor mistakes. I deliberately chose to make these kobolds like EverQuest/JRPG type kobolds, rather than reptilian.

EDIT: I won't update this first post anymore, because it's getting too big. Here is the link to the open folder where the most current version of the Bestiary will be: Creature Catalogue and Other Resources

EDIT: I removed the creatures from the OP because the entire document has been extensively modified from the original post, to the point where the original post no longer accurately reflects the current content. The most current version of the Bestiary (now called the Creature Catalogue) is available from the link above.

Edited by Direach

Very useful! Please post more as you stat them out.

hmm an elephant is only as strong as a human?

34 minutes ago, widomknight said:

hmm an elephant is only as strong as a human?

Well, the scale only goes to 5, so yes, a truly exceptional human is comparably strong as a completely average elephant. :)

Edited by Direach

Im starting to see a lot of flaws with Genesys as a "generic system"

14 minutes ago, widomknight said:

Im starting to see a lot of flaws with Genesys as a "generic system"

Well, to give a less flip answer: characteristics have one function in Genesys: to set the parameters of the dice pool. Limiting the upper number of dice in a pool is a way of making sure nobody has to roll a ridiculously huge pool of dice round after round. Obviously, an elephant is stronger than any human who has ever lived, but for the purposes of the game, their Brawn characteristic is set at five. If you want to reflect the enormous strength of an elephant, you do it in other ways, such as giving it the ability to carry vast amounts of encumbrance, or by making the base damage of its attacks very high. No unarmed human, even with Brawn 5, is going to hit you for 12 damage! Plus you can certainly tweak those numbers upward or downward, as you see fit.

Very rarely, you may want to give an adversary a characteristic of six. This is appropriate for something truly extraordinary, like the ancient wurm with Brawn 6, or a mind flayer magus with Intellect 6. But personally, I would never go higher than six on any characteristic, and only for one characteristic on such a being's profile.

I actually question the basic premise here, pound per pound, an elephant is not that strong. It is just big.

1 minute ago, Nohwear said:

I actually question the basic premise here, pound per pound, an elephant is not that strong. It is just big.

so should an ant have a Brawn of 5 or 6 too?

Pound for pound one of the strongest living things on earth

@widomknight , you seem to be in a very argumentative mood.

5 is the upper cieling for PCs, not for NPCs. NPCs can theoretically have whatever you want. I think you could definitely make the case for some bigger creatures being 6 or 7.

23 minutes ago, Nohwear said:

I actually question the basic premise here, pound per pound, an elephant is not that strong. It is just big.

Bingo. I think Brawn 4 with some additions elsewhere is sufficient.

11 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

5 is the upper cieling for PCs, not for NPCs. NPCs can theoretically have whatever you want. I think you could definitely make the case for some bigger creatures being 6 or 7.

But the problem there is that a creature with a Brawn of 8 or 9 is going to be rolling 8 or 9 Ability dice when making a close combat check. There are better ways to define a big creature as "strong" without jacking up their Brawn characteristic. Increase their Soak and Wound Thresholds independent of their Brawn characteristic. Give their melee attacks more damage, but not more skill. The Beast of Burden "ability" is a great way to convey how much an elephant can carry without making his gore attack roll 3-4 more dice than any PC ever could.

13 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

5 is the upper cieling for PCs, not for NPCs. NPCs can theoretically have whatever you want. I think you could definitely make the case for some bigger creatures being 6 or 7.

You certainly can. The the OPs interpretation is consistent with the recommendations in the book, however.

I agree with both of you, OP's interpretations are pretty fine, you don't really need to give any real life creature a strength higher than 5.

I do think it's worth remembering that the 5 cap can be broken though, for certain exceptional cases. The dice math holds up alright at 6 and 7 based on Star Wars experience, but I'd definitely never go higher than that.

Worth keeping in mind that Brawn 5 is legendary ability. Conan or Heracles level strength.

If Conan got into a tug of war with an Indian elephant (I note that the OPs stats specify a riding elephant) would it, dramatically speaking, be a contest?

Edited by Forgottenlore

The elephant stats were based on FFG's bantha, which is just an elephant in cosplay. :) But it's easy to tune the stats if you want to make changes.

I'm working on a bunch more creatures right now, will update the original post when I have them done. Please let me know if you see anything really out of whack, there could be some copy-paste errors I missed.

EDIT: New creatures have been added, including Humanoids.

Edited by Direach

How about just borrow suggestions from the super hero section for how stats and results can be skewed. An elephant need not have a 20 Brawn if they double their damage and it's scaled as vehicle damage.

need to make this as a pdf, so people will not have to keep coming back and can print this out. Great write up though.

8 minutes ago, gilbur said:

need to make this as a pdf, so people will not have to keep coming back and can print this out. Great write up though.

Thanks! It's a long way from being done, but I'll see about getting it added to the stickied post for resources. Don't count on a PDF, though... that technology is beyond my ability. Maybe a Word document. :)

6 minutes ago, Direach said:

Thanks! It's a long way from being done, but I'll see about getting it added to the stickied post for resources. Don't count on a PDF, though... that technology is beyond my ability. Maybe a Word document. :)

word document is fine, at least we could download one file instead of having to keep on coming back.

Eventually I'll put everything related to this campaign setting in a Google Drive folder that people can access. Right now it's all work in progress, and I definitely need the feedback!

By the way, if anyone has a request for a monster, send me a message or reply here. Right now I'm just adding stuff that occurs to me, and tweaking the existing creatures as I notice stuff. Dragons are on the list of things to do, but they are quite complex, so I'm taking my time with those. The behold- I mean, dreadgazer was pretty time-consuming, dragons are taking longer.

Edited by Direach

just in case you are interested, I am actually in the middle of two different conversions myself, One is on a Battletech conversion which is Mechs mostly, the other one is a Dragonstar conversion and I have 2 forums up, one is Races and the other one is everything else with the setting, you should check all of them out could be useful and I got pretty good feedback. unfortunately, I right now am running a star wars game and slowly introducing my stuff to my game, like the group just came across an old Star League cache of Mechs and they will get to play around with the stuff in the coming weeks.

Probably the best place to ask this; is there some place to reference "balance" in terms of how difficult a Minion/Rival/Nemesis is for players? Like is there an easy chart for "Players have this much XP so this is the expected Skill/Defense/Soak/Wound of enemies they face"?

3 hours ago, Cyvaris said:

Probably the best place to ask this; is there some place to reference "balance" in terms of how difficult a Minion/Rival/Nemesis is for players? Like is there an easy chart for "Players have this much XP so this is the expected Skill/Defense/Soak/Wound of enemies they face"?

Yes, in the chapter about threats (I forget what it's called), they talk about balancing enemies to the party.

starting Genesys PCs are worth around 300XP (skills, attributes, talents, etc)

since there is the skill dice vs attribute dice upgrade mechanic, they edge out at 3-4 dice (in an additive system they would edge out at 4-6 dice)

hmm ... me thinks that "Build XP" would be the only number to compare, but this has not been given in the adversaries stat block as of yet.