Hi everyone, and welcome to the fifth installment of making a critter for Starfinder, and the MONSTER GARAGE!
STATTING UP THE CREATURE (part 4)
This time around it’s time to have a look at the abilities of our particular creature. As I’ve mentioned before, I want it to have an ability to use Resolve Points, preferably using those things we see that look like they contain some sort of life force. One way is to create these abilities from whole cloth, but that tends to leave a chance of it being abusable. So, the first ability we’ll give the creature will be a relatively simple one, one that’s similar to already existing abilities. Before we do that though, we need to give the creature a name, as some abilities reference back to it. So looking at it, it looks metallic, undead, and spider-like, so I’ve come up with the name Necrospider, which sounds fairly sinister.
The creature as mentioned, to me, seems like a terror-weapon so that’s what we’re going to base our first ability on. We’re going to take the ability called Star Shriek from the Cerebric Fungus in Alien Archive 2. Now, this ability does roughly what we want – it sends out a psychic scream that disrupts the minds of creatures nearby. So, with a slight rewrite of the ability, and an increase in range and severity, to match the CR difference, we get:
Mind Shriek (Ex) Three times per day as a full action, a necrospider can unleash a mental scream that disrupts the minds of living creatures nearby. Each non-plant creature within 100 feet must succeed at DC 16 Will save or be frightened for 1d6 rounds. This is a mind-affecting effect.
The second ability is one we’ll create wholesale ourselves. Now, I see the creature using those canisters as storage compartments for lifeforce, so it should use it for that. As usage for its Resolve Points as well, so this is what we’ll give it:
Life Siphon (Ex) Any creature hit by a necrospider’s claws must make a DC 16 Constitution save or take 1d10+10 points of acid damage, as it burns through the creature’s veins. For every 20 points of damage a necrospider causes with this ability, they regain 1 Resolve Point (max 5).
Now we’re going to break the rules for the creature a bit, and add a 3rd ability, one that allows it to USE the Resolve Points, now that it has a way of (potentially infinitely) regaining them: Necrotic Restoration (Ex) As a standard action, a necrospider can spend up to 5 Resolve Points to fill its circuits with the blood and vital fluids siphoned from other creatures, causing it to repair parts of its anatomy. As a standard action necrospider can cast mystic cure on itself, with a level of the spell equal to the amount Resolve Points spent.
Now normally you’d assign Skills and Spells at this point, but we’ve already assigned skills, and this creature will have no spells. That leaves us to fill in the blanks:
Alignment: This is a terror weapon – likely an uncontrollable one, and as it has taken on a rather sinister tone in my creation, we’re going to make it Chaotic Evil.
Initiative is equal to its Dexterity modifier, so we put in +5 here.
Aura: It has not got one, so we’ll remove this line now.
Speed: I want this thing to be reasonably fast, though not excessively so. Fast for its size, but not a speed racer. So, we’ll set that to 40 feet. Enough to run down most humanoids on foot.
Next is the Ranged Attack. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to give it a short-ranged flamethrower weapon. It makes sense to me as a ranged weapon. Since this is a monster though, we’ll treat it as a breath weapon, like that of a dragon or the item called a dragon gland. That means it won’t be in the Ranged Attack section though, but in the Offensive Abilities part instead: Breath weapon (cone 30 feet, 9d6 F, Reflex DC 16 half, usable every 1d4 rounds).
Space and Reach These are indicated on page 256 of the Starfinder Core Rulebook, on Table 8-1: Creature Size. We already know that our creature is Huge from what we determined earlier, so that gives us a space of 15 ft, and a reach of 10 ft. (as it’s tall, rather than long).
Languages: Our creature is intelligent, so can understand languages. My thinking is that it’ll understand Common, and the language of its creator, i.e. whatever the GM fancies.
Other Abilities: I think our creature has enough to hit the highs and serve the function we want it to, so we will leave it there and delete this line.
Finally, we have the ECOLOGY of the creature. Where it lives and how many you can run into. In this case, I’m going to make the creature solitary as organization, as it doesn’t strike me as a weapon you want to deploy too many off; it’s too horrific and uncontrollable with that alignment. And since it can be inserted anywhere, but doesn’t really occur naturally, we’ll put in Any as the environment.
So now our creature looks like this:
NECROSPIDER CR 10 Combatant
CE Huge construct (technological) Init +5; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision; Perception +19
DEFENSE HP 165 RP 5 EAC 23; KAC 25 Fort +10; Ref +10; Will +7 Defensive Abilities construct immunities
OFFENSE Speed 40 ft. Melee claws +23 (1d10+18 S) Multiattack 4 claws +17 (1d10+18 S)) Space 15 ft.; Reach 10 ft. (omit if Small or Medium) Offensive Abilities breath weapon (cone 30 feet, 9d6 F, Reflex DC 16 half, useable every 1d4 rounds)
STATISTICS Str +8; Dex +5; Con —; Int +1; Wis +3; Cha -3 Skills Athletics +19, Engineering +19, Intimidate +24, Languages Common plus one language of the GM’s choice
ECOLOGY Environment any Organization solitary
SPECIAL ABILITIES Life Siphon (Ex) Any creature hit by a necrospider’s claws must make a DC 16 Constitution save or take 1d10+10 points of acid damage, as it burns through the creature’s veins. For every 20 points of damage a necrospider causes with this ability, they regain 1 Resolve Point (max 5). Mind Shriek (Ex) Three times per day as a full action, a necrospider can unleash a mental scream that disrupts the minds of living creatures nearby. Each non-plant creature within 100 feet must succeed at DC 16 Will save or be frightened for 1d6 rounds. This is a mind-affecting effect. Necrotic Restoration (Ex) As a standard action, a necrospider can spend up to 5 Resolve Points to fill it’s circuits with the blood and vital fluids siphoned from other creatures, causing it to repair parts of its anatomy. As a standard action necrospider can cast mystic cure on itself, with a level of the spell equal to the amount Resolve Points spent.
And with that, our creature is done. You should consider adding a bit of a story to it, but I will leave that up to you.
I hope you enjoyed this multi-part series of Monster Garage, and how to create a creature. What’s your process?