On the Making of Monsters

So you want to play Frankenstein, get your lightning on, maybe unleash a monstrosity on your players? We can help with this. In fact, we'd love to. Most monsters in Legend are made exactly the same way you would make a player character, unless they are Mooks. Simply follow the rules for making characters higher than level one, if needed, and the additional rules in this section:

• GMs are allowed unlimited track substitutions.
• GMs are allowed to assign whatever creature type they see fit to monsters.
• GMs may pick the key offensive and defensive attributes of monsters as they see fit.
• Monsters should not have consumables unless they are recurring villains or loot on legs.
• Most monsters are Full Buy-In.

Building a Monster

As an example, let's make a dire wolf. First, we're going to use the Utter Brute track as our racial track. This gives us a great layout, and fits with the idea we're trying to convey mechanically. We don't even need to change the key modifiers. Next, we decide that we'd like to make this critter a 4th level character. We'll have a progression from one to twenty, so that if we need to adjust its power we can just bump it up or down a level later. Next, let's pick our other tracks. Dire wolves are pretty mundane in nature, so we'd like to avoid magical offensive abilities. This limits our access to some of the more interesting melee options. Let's use two barbarian tracks, Path of Destruction and Path of the Ancestors. We're going to go with Full Buy-In as well. For the final track, let's use Battle's Tempering.

Next, we have to figure out what our progression looks like. We definitely want the second ability from Utter Brute, so Utter Brute is our fast progression track. We also want the second ability from Battle's Tempering, to make our wolf more difficult to take down easily. So it turns out that we want to have Path of the Ancestors as our Full Buy-In track and Path of Destruction in our slow progression.

For added effectiveness, consider pairing your monsters up with allies that can take advantage of their strengths, and shore up their weaknesses.