Recently I started my blog-series about the Crebba, where I tell about my campaign and GM-ing those adventures. We use the Fantasy-AGE rulesystem in that campaign. The main reason we do that is because I have the books and we wanted to try something different.
It turns out it is a fun system to play with, but it has a pro-and-con in one: There are not a lot of rules.
The core rules for both the gamemaster and the players fit in one book. This is great, because that means not a lot of reading and memorizing before you can start playing. It also means there is more work for the gamemaster. Because not a lot is described in the rules it leaves a lot of room for homebrewing. There al
Also when it comes to the creatures that are 'pre-defined'.
F-AGE does have a beastiary, but that is not a big, fat book. It is compact and contains not as much creatures as other monster-books I have. Since F-AGE is not a huge rulesystem like D&D, there are no additional books from lots of publishers with more-more-more creatures.
There are the Campaign Builders Guide and the Liars book dat add creatures. There are also some online-available publications from (I guess) other homebrewing gm's. But I have found that I need more creatures, other creatures: my own creatures.
So: homebrewing time!
I have found that making my own creatures for F-AGE was challenging for me. I have gm'd D&D5e for some years now and I am well acquainted with those stats and how they turn out at the table. With F-AGE, not so much. Not at all, actually.
We have played quit a lot of sessions in the Crebba, but as I will describe in my next blog-post about that campaign, there are not a lot of monster in there. Well, at least not yet, and that is not a spoiler because hitting scare monsters is a lot of fun in tabletop-rpg's and there will be more hittable monsters.
Which is why I decided to take on the challenge of creating my own creatures, and make them better.
The Campaign Builders Guide has a chapter on making your own creatures, which is rather helpful. I did not want to start 'designing' my own monsters, I thought I would learn a lot from converting 5e creatures I know (and love) to F-AGE and try to make them kind-of the same. Compare & learn, in a sense.
I found some online conversion aids, but the results were challenging. When I use the conversion tables provided there, I end up with creatures that will fall over and die when a rat coughs in their general direction. I needed help! The Green Roning discord folks provided that help, and I think I now have a workable creature to use in my session next sunday.
There are 2 other creatures I am going to convert before sunday, and if they work out at the table I will publish them here.
Now the only thing is... my drawing skills are not very good and I refuse to steal artwork from others. So I will leave the looks of my creatures to the theatre-of-mind, which (in my experience) makes for the most scary kinds of monsters. Either that, or add stick-figure-monster art.